Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514-15, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris The sitter for this portrait, Baldassare Castiglione, was not only a diplomat, polymath and humanist but he was also a friend of the artist. They shared a philosophy, an outlook on their respective writerly and artistic practices that was given expression through their work. Castiglione became famous for his book, Il Cortegiano, a highly influential manual in the form of a series of dial

J.M.W.Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art This is one of two depictions in oil of the same event that Turner painted – the other is in The Cleveland Museum of Art – but I have chosen this one, now housed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to write about. Both are great works, but I prefer this version for the sense of immediacy in its composition. It is a painting of high drama and elemental ener

We both really enjoyed the Francisco de Zurbarán exhibition which we saw together at The National Gallery in London this summer (it will move on to Paris later in the year and Chicago early next year). Its organisers deserve recognition for what is a really well-focused representation of the artist’s oeuvre with just over forty works on display, including a few by his son Juan, so unlike some of the worthy but overwhelming and exhausting blockbuster shows dedicated to other a

This is a powerful and disturbing piece of art by one of the foremost anti-patriarchal artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Paula Rego. Like others from the same series, it was inspired by a novel, The Crime of Father Amaro by Eça de Queirós, first published in 1875 and which became a major succès de scandale in Portugal. Although it was not widely read outside the Lusophone world at the time, a much later film adaptation renewed the controversy with its relea

We were fortunate enough to see this painting back in 2018 while visiting the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna where it was on loan for a Bruegel exhibition that celebrated the 450th anniversary of the Flemish artist’s death. Amidst all the tumult of his Wimmelbilder (teeming) multi-figural works on show, this work stood out for its small size and relative simplicity. According to the caption card next to the artwork, art historians have offered competing interpretations of