From French can-can dresses to plumed headdresses, an auction of extravagant costumes by the long-time owner of the Folies Bergere cabaret beat expectations at the weekend.

Nicknamed the "empress of the night", Helene Martini ran the Folies Bergere -- Paris's biggest music hall, founded in 1869 -- from 1974 until last year, when it was acquired by the Lagardere group.

Madrid's Museo del Prado has joined with Paris' Musee du Louvre to stage a major exhibition of the late works of Italian Renaissance master Raphael.

"Late Raphael", to be shown from June 12-September 16 in the Spanish capital's Prado, is devoted to final years' production of the artist and his studio.

Japanese-born artist Masami Teraoka remembers the bombing of Hiroshima as the day when he saw two suns rising -- one in the east as usual, the other an orb burning eerily in the west.

"Two suns, that's for sure. That's my memory," he explained from a Sydney gallery where his confrontational images of geishas ripping condom packets open with their teeth and naked women frolicking with priests are being exhibited.

Denmark's National Museum has announced on Thursday a major treasure trove of 16th century coins on the small island of Moen in the southeast of the country.

"This is a find of exciting proportions," National Museum Numismatist Michael Maercher said in a video interview posted on the museum website from the Moen site.

The Renaissance bronze and gold doors of the Florence Baptistry -- a masterpiece known as the "Gates of Paradise" -- will be unveiled in September after a 27-year restoration, officials said on Thursday.

Culture Minister Lorenzo Ornaghi made the long-awaited announcement, saying the priceless doors now restored to their former glory will be displayed in the Florence Cathedral museum and not hang in their former place in the baptistery.

A doctor's account of his frantic efforts to save the life of a fatally wounded president Abraham Lincoln has been rediscovered in the United States, after being lost to history for 150 years.

On April 14, 1865, Charles Leale happened to be in the same Washington theater as the U.S. president, watching the play "My American Cousin," when he heard a gunshot and saw a man leap onto the stage.

Once a haunt of the greats from Ernest Hemingway to Salvador Dali and Hollywood beauty Eva Gardner, Madrid's famous Cafe Gijon may be nearing the end of its 120-year history.

Shaded under the tall trees of the Spanish capital's Paseo de Recoletos Boulevard, the cafe's outside tables have lured artists, writers and actors since 1888.

The National Stadium in Poland, built for the 2012 European Championship, rises in the shape of a wicker basket over one of Warsaw's most popular neighborhoods: Saska Kepa, an enclave of towering trees and architectural gems dating back to the 1920s.

To some, the colossal stadium — with a retractable fiberglass roof and a shimmery red-and-white facade in the colors of the national flag — is a source of pride, a symbol of a capitalist surge that has remade the country since it threw off communism in 1989.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp where some 1.3 million people were killed, will undergo major maintenance work paid for by donors from nearly 20 countries, museum officials said Wednesday.

"Created three years ago as the first of its kind worldwide, the funding instrument for maintenance work is beginning to bear fruit," Piotr Cywinski, director of the museum located in Oswiecim, southern Poland, said in a statement.

The niece of legendary Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca could not contain her tears as she traced the steps of Lorca's brief, but influential New York stay on the 114th anniversary of his birth.

"It's very emotional. In some ways this closes a circle," Laura Garcia Lorca told Agence France Presse late Tuesday as she paid homage to her famous uncle, a trailblazing poet who lived in New York between 1929 and 1930, before returning to Spain, where he was killed in the first days of the civil war in August 1936.