Bronze coins, the last remnants of a four-year Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire were found near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. These bronze coins were discovered by Hebrew University archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar during renewed excavations at the Ophel, located below the Temple Mount’s southern wall. These 1.5cm bronze coins were left behind by Jewish residents who hid in a large cave (7×14 meters) for four years (66-70 C.E.)—from the Roman siege of Jerusalem, up until the destruction of the Second Temple and the city of Jerusalem. While several of the coins date to the early years of the revolt, the great majority are from its final year, otherwise known as, “Year Four” (69-70 CE). Significantly, during the final year, the Hebrew inscription on the coins was changed from “For the Freedom of Zion” to “For the Redemption of Zion”, a shift which reflects the changing mood of the rebels during this period of horror and famine.

What happens when an artist who devoted most of his career to painting landscapes and still lifes turns to the people he knows best? That is the central premise of an international show of 59 portraits by France’s Paul Cezanne on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the first ever dedicated to this aspect of his oeuvre. Of the 1,000 paintings the 19th century Provencal painter created during his lifetime, only about 160 are portraits, mostly of his close friends, family and domestic servants. But it is perhaps in that collection that the evolution of Cezanne’s individualistic, revolutionary vision is clearest, as he deconstructs space by boldly painting his wife with vanishing lips or applying layer upon layer of thick paint with a palette knife. He may have studied Old Master works, but Cezanne “exploded” traditional ways of representing space and volume on a picture plane, said Mary Morton, co-curator of the show and head of the National Gallery’s department of French p

Seven hundred years of sculptural practice—from 14th-century Europe to the global present—are being examined anew in the groundbreaking exhibition Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now). On view at The Met Breuer from March 21 through July 22, 2018, the exhibition explores expanded narratives of sculpture through works in which artists have sought to replicate the literal, living presence of the human body. A major international loan exhibition of approximately 120 works, Like Life draws on The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rich collection of European sculpture and modern and contemporary art, while also featuring a selection of important works from national and international museums and private collections. Just how perfectly should figurative sculpture resemble the human body? Histories and theories of Western sculpture have typically favored idealized representations, as exemplified by the auster