Titian masterpiece breaks auction record

A 450-year-old work by Italian artist Titian which sold recently in New York broke the auction record for the Renaissance master by a full $5 million.

A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria was sold at Sotheby’s to a European telephone bidder for $16.9 million.

It beat the previous Titian auction record of $11.9 million paid at Christie’s in London in December 1991 for Venus and Adonis, according to the BBC.

A spokeswoman for Sotheby’s said A Sacra Conversazione was “one of only a handful of multi-figured compositions by Titian that remain in private hands,” according to the BBC, adding the work was “the most important to appear at auction in decades.”

US education failings rest partly with parents

There’s a constant complaint heard nationwide about how American students trail their peers in other industrialized nations in terms of educational achievement.

US kids as a whole rank nowhere near the top worldwide in math or science, for example.

According to a recent study sponsored by the journal Education Next and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, most US states rank closer to developing countries than to developed countries.

Thirteen developed countries have more than twice the percentage of advanced students as does the U.S., including Germany, Canada, the Czech Republic, Japan, Finland and Austria, according to the study, which compared the percentage of US students in the graduating class of 2009 who have advanced skills in math with the percentages of similar high achievers in 56 other countries.