Sotheby’s announced that the most important work of French Academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s celebrated career, La Jeunesse de Bacchus, will highlight its Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York on 14 May. Equally impressive in both scale and technical artistry, the monumental canvas stands an astounding 20 feet in length and 11 feet in height. The work has hung in Bouguereau’s studio in Paris since it was completed in 1884 – the culmination of two years of work – and has previously left only three times in its 135-year history: when initially presented at the Salon in 1884, followed by exhibitions in London and Antwerp through 1885, for the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889, and as part of a retrospective touring the Musée du Petit-Palais in Paris, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford in 1984-85. On offer this spring by the direct descendants of the artist, L

An Albert Einstein “puzzle” has been solved thanks to a missing page of manuscript emerging in a collection of his writings acquired by Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, officials announced Wednesday. The handwritten page, part of an appendix to a 1930 paper on the Nobel winner’s efforts towards a unified field theory, was discovered among the 110-page trove the university’s Albert Einstein archives received some two weeks ago. Most of the documents constitute handwritten mathematical calculations behind Einstein’s scientific writings in the late 1940s. There are also letters that Einstein, born in Germany in 1879, wrote to collaborators which deal with a range of scientific and personal issues, including one to his son, Hans Albert. The 1935 lette

Archaeologists have discovered a cave filled with hundreds of artifacts beneath the ruins of the Mayan city of Chichen Itza in Mexico, the lead researcher on the project said Monday, calling the find “incredible.” The massive cave is a “scientific treasure,” Mexican archaeologist Guillermo de Anda told a news conference. He said it could help scientists better understand the origins, lives and beliefs of the residents of Chichen Itza, a stunning city of stone in the Yucatan peninsula that was founded sometime around 750 AD. The cave was found about two kilometers (1.2 miles) from the Temple of Kukulcan, the giant stepped pyramid that dominates the center of Chichen Itza. It sits about 24 meters (80 feet) underground, and contains multiple chambers connected by narrow passages — often so narrow that researchers had to crawl or drag themselves

At the upcoming edition of TEFAF Maastricht, Amsterdam based dealer Aronson Antiquairs will bring to market one of the best Delftware collections of the past decades. The collection, which was in a large part assembled by private Dutch collectors over a period of approximately thirty years, comprises many highlights. Although it has its center of gravity in the eighteenth century, it also contains several wonderful early objects. “What we can bring to an art fair like TEFAF, really depends on what we can source in the year, or sometimes years, running up to an event like this” says Robert Aronson. “Although we work year round to find the best Delftware objects, good objects are so incredibly rare, that sometimes we cannot even get a hold of them” Aronson continues. The collection to be seen at TEFAF this year can rival with ancients collections such as those of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Gemeentemuseu