Throughout the year, Artemis Gallery presents both specialty and comprehensive one-day auctions that attract a global audience of antiquities and ethnographic art collectors, and institutional buyers. But the excitement level leading up to an Artemis Gallery sale is never greater than when the Colorado-based company hosts its two-day Exceptional Auction, whose format features antiquities and fine Asian art in the opening session and ethnographic art and fossils on Day 2. The next highly anticipated event of this type is slated for June 20-21, with absentee and Internet live bidding available through LiveAuctioneers. As is the case with every Artemis sale, all pieces offered are pre-vetted by a research team led by gallery co-owners and renowned industry experts Bob and Teresa Dodge. All convey with an Artemis Gallery COA and are unconditionally guaranteed to be aut

The Museo del Prado is presenting the first major monographic exhibition on Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits. Lorenzo Lotto (Venice, 1480 – Loreto, 1557) was one of the most unique and fascinating artists of the Italian Cinquecento. His reputation has consistently grown among scholars and art lovers since Bernard Berenson devoted the first monograph to him, Lorenzo Lotto. An Essay in Constructive Criticism, published in 1895. Writing at the time of the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis, Berenson saw Lotto as the first portraitist to be interested in reflecting his sitters’ states of mind, and as such the first modern one. Although interest in the artist has been particularly notable since the 1980s, until now no exhibition has focused exclusively on the portraits, making this project a pioneering one. The exhibition focuses on already known aspects of Lotto’s portraiture such as their varied typology, psych

A two-cornered military dress hat said to belong to Napoleon and purportedly picked off the battlefield after his defeat at Waterloo will go under the hammer Monday at an auction in France. It is the latest sale looking to capitalise on the seemingly insatiable appetite for items belonging to the former French emperor, who remains a source of fascination nearly two hundred years after his death. Napoleon insisted on wearing the hats sideways — rather than with points at the front and back — so he could easily be spotted on the battlefield. During his 15 years in power he reportedly went through about 120 of the black felted beaver fur “bicorne” hats, most of them made by French hatmakers Poupard, though only a handful of confirmed examples still exist. “They must correspond in terms of dates, and the size of his head,” Etienne De Baecque, the auctioneer leading the sale in the eastern city of Lyon, told AFP. While the hat’s provenance cannot

After years of searching, the United States has returned to Spain a rare copy of a 1493 letter from Christopher Columbus, which had been stolen from a national archive in Barcelona. The letter, addressed to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain and describing the explorer’s discoveries in the New World, was one of 16 copies made at the time of the original missive on Columbus’s orders. Stolen from the National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona in 2004 or 2005, the document was handed over late Wednesday to the Spanish ambassador to Washington, US officials said. The thieves who took the letter had replaced it with a forgery, and the switch was only discovered by experts in 2012 after a tip from an informant that several other copies had been stolen from archive