Lebanon’s national museum on Friday unveiled five ancient sculptures, including a Phoenician bull’s head returned by the United States, that were looted during the civil war. The life-size 4th century BC white marble bull’s head, the star artefact among the works that were all looted in 1981, had been loaned to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met). The five pieces were discovered on the Phoenician site of Eshmun, near the southern port city of Sidon, during excavations carried out in the 1960s and 1970s. “We are committed, as much as we can, to repatriating pieces stolen during the war,” Lebanese Culture Minister Ghattas Khoury said during a ceremony at the National Museum of Beirut. Lebanon’s civil war lasted 15 years from 1975 to 1990.

Experts using an aerial high-tech laser scanner have discovered thousands of ancient Maya structures hidden under the thick jungle of northern Guatemala, officials said Thursday. Some 60,000 structures were found over the past two years in a scan of a region in the northern department of El Peten, which borders Mexico and Belize, said Marcello Canuto, one of the project’s top investigators. These findings are a “revolution in Maya archeology,” Canuto said. The new discoveries in this Central American country include urban centers with sidewalks, homes, terraces, ceremonial centers, irrigation canals and fortifications, said Canuto, an archaeologist at Tulane University in the United States. Among the finds was a 30-meter high pyramid that had been earlier identified as a natural hill in Tikal, Guatemala’s premier archaeological site. Also discovered in Tikal: a series of pits and a 14 kilometer-long wall.

The Fairfield University Art Museum is presenting a major international loan exhibition—The Holy Name. Art of the Gesù: Bernini and his Age, which is on view in the museum’s Bellarmine Hall Galleries from February 1 through May 19, 2018. Its focus is the Church of the Gesù (Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù all’Argentina) in Rome. The principal or mother church of the Society of Jesus, which was founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540 in the charged religious and political climate of the Counter-Reformation, the Gesù is a testament to the power and prestige of the new religious order, its edifice a formidable symbol of the militant Church reborn. The long and at times fraught campaign to erect the church and embellish its interior, the imperative to formulate an imagery celebrating the order and its newly canonized saints, the competing visions of the Jesuits and their strong-willed patrons, and the boundless cr

On occasion of his eightieth birthday, the Kunstmuseum Basel honors Georg Baselitz (b. Jan 23, 1938), one of the most distinguished figures in German postwar art. Concurrent with a focused retrospective of his oeuvre at the Fondation Beyeler, this exhibition showcases a representative survey of his drawings and colored graphic art from the museum’s Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings). Baselitz was trained as a painter at the Academies of Arts in East and West Berlin. In the context of German postwar art’s stern emphasis on abstraction, his insistence on a highly expressive and realistic figuration could not but be perceived as a provocation. Baselitz’s meteoric career took off in the mid-1960s, when he painted pictures that scandalized critics and audiences and published hallucinatory “Pandemonic Manifestos.” He cultivated his public image and featured “new heroes” in h