New archeological research has shed fresh light on China’s first emperor — creator of the world-famous terracotta army — and his quest for eternal life, state media reported. A set of wooden slips found in the central province of Hunan contain an executive order from emperor Qin Shihuang for a nationwide search for the elixir of life, along with replies from local governments, according to Xinhua news agency on Sunday. It cited Zhang Chunlong, a researcher at the provincial institute of archaeology, as saying the emperor’s decree reached even frontier regions and remote villages. Qin Shihuang’s obsession with eternal life was well-known: he was responsible for the massive underground mausoleum in the northern province of Shaanxi filled with nearly 8,000 terracotta soldiers built to protect him in the afterlife. By studying the 36,000 wooden slips — found in 2002 at the bottom of a well in Hunan — archaeologists have uncovered not only the imperial order to find an “elixir of life”

The Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung is presenting a special exhibition revolving around a work of key significance to the history of European art: the so-called Crucified Thief by the “Master of Flémalle”, one of the most enigmatic figures of Early Netherlandish painting. Comprehensive examination and restoration of the fragment got underway at the Städel Museum in October 2014. Painted on both sides, it is the only surviving section of a large-scale triptych of the Deposition that was among the most prominent and influential works of Netherlandish painting at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Now that the conservation and restoration measures have reached completion, the precious work literally shines with new splendour. The exhibition sheds light on the procedure and spectacular outcome of the technological examination and the restoration. It also features thirteen selected comparanda in the mediums of sculpture,

The Centre Pompidou is presenting « André Derain 1904 – 1914. La décennie radicale » (The Radical decade), which takes a fresh look at the work of this major 20th century artist, tracing the various stages of his career before the First world war, when he was involved in the most radical avant-garde movements. Some remarkable groups of work have been brought together for the exhibition: his 1905 summer pieces painted in Collioure; a series of London scenes, and his very large dance and bather compositions. The art of André Derain has not been the focus of any major monographic exhibitions since the 1994 retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – in other words, for over twenty years. This French painter played a crucial intellectual role in the emergence of two major avant-garde movements in the early 20th century: Fauvism and Cubism. Early on, he made a solitary return to realism, foreshadowing

For decades, a confessional in a church in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius kept a precious secret: a trove of documents offering an unprecedented glimpse into Jewish life in Eastern Europe before and during the Holocaust. The cache, with documents dating back to the mid-18th century, includes religious texts, Yiddish literature and poetry, testimonies about pogroms as well as autobiographies and photographs. “The diversity of material is breathtaking,” David Fishman, professor of Jewish History at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, told AFP via telephone, describing the discovery as a “total surprise”. “It’s almost like you could reconstruct Jewish life before the Holocaust based on these materials because there is no aspect and no region and no period that is missing,” he added. The trove was discovered earlier this year during a cleanout of the church that was used as a book repository during Soviet times.