Now or Never: Opening in October

October sees the start of a series of exhibitions that promise to be exceptional, bringing together works of art that may never again be viewable in the same place at the same time. Museums and galleries across Europe aren't stinting on the superlatives.

Two of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance come together at London's National Gallery for a show its director describes as "unprecedented and probably unrepeatable". Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were brothers-in-law, and Mantegna's compositional innovations and Bellini's natural landscapes play a pivotal role in art history. With pictures loaned from around Europe and beyond, it runs from October 1 to January 27.

Mantegna inspired Edward Burne-Jones, and Tate Britain is giving the late Pre-Raphaelite his first major retrospective in London for more than 40 years. Over 150 works aim to show how Burne-Jones developed into one of the leading European, and not just British, artists of the end of the 19th century. The exhibition begins on October 24 and runs through to February 24.

Over at the Barbican, Modern Couples explores creative relationships across the arts, featuring pairs such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz and Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. From October 10 to January 27.

The British Library promises a spectacular "once-in-a-generation exhibition" in the shape of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, with treasured early manuscripts on show alongside finds from Sutton Hoo and the Staffordshire Hoard. It runs from October 19 to February 19. Any advance on once in a generation? How about the Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill, a "once-in-a-lifetime exhibition" bringing some of the masterpieces of Horace Walpole's collection -- one of the greatest of the 18th century -- back to his neo-Gothic Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham, to be displayed in their original positions. It's on from October 20 to February 24.

Up at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, you can take a trip back to the fleshpots of late 19th-century Paris for Pin-Ups: Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity. The show focuses on the posters by Toulouse-Lautrec, such as of the dancer Jane Avril, that heralded a revolution in design, alongside work by French and British contemporaries like Bonnard and Sickert. From October 6 to January 20.

More celebrities on show at the Holburne in Bath in Gainsborough and the Theatre, centred on 15 oil portraits by Gainsborough of some of the leading actors, managers and playwrights of the late 18th century. Curtain up on October 5; last performance is January 20.

"Ma maman, c'est ma muse,'' said Edouard Vuillard, and he painted his mother more than 500 times. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, Vuillard and Madame Vuillard at the Barber Institute in Birmingham focuses on the first decade of his career, with paintings and pastels lent from around Britain and Europe. October 19 to January 20, and there's no admission charge.

At the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, the new show from October 6 to February 10 marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Julian Trevelyan, with more than 100 paintings and prints covering a range of styles from surrealism to realism and abstraction, and asking why he isn't better known. Also on at the Pallant from October 3 to February 24 is a free show of etchings of Britain's wildest landscapes by Norman Ackroyd, a student of Trevelyan. Meanwhile, the show that was on in Chichester, Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by her Writings, moves to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from October 2 to December 9 (and there's no entry charge).

And now to Vienna, for a genuine blockbuster. For the 450th anniversary of the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which has the world's largest Bruegel collection, has assembled three-quarters of his extant 40 or so paintings for the first ever major exhibition devoted to the man widely regarded as the greatest Netherlandish painter of the 16th century. "The overview of Bruegel’s entire oeuvre is set to be nothing short of sensational," the museum says. It starts on October 2 and runs until January 13 -- a perfect day to encounter the Hunters in the Snow.

There's an attractive-looking exhibition on at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich on Florence and its Painters: From Giotto to Leonardo da Vinci, with numerous international loans among more than 100 works showing how the city was home to groundbreaking artistic innovation in the 15th century. October 18 to January 27.

Two big shows opening in Paris take us into the 20th century. At the Grand Palais, a big Miró retrospective from October 3 to February 4 looks at the evolution of his style over 70 years, while the Pompidou Centre has an exhaustive overview of Cubism, with 300 works by Picasso, Braque, Gris and lots of others, running from October 17 to February 25.

One of the Old Masters most admired by modern artists was Hals, and that admiration is the theme of the new exhibition at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem: Frans Hals and the Moderns. Paintings by the 17th-century master are on show alongside works they inspired by the likes of Manet, Singer Sargent and Van Gogh. October 13 to February 24.

If you want to make a day of it in Haarlem, the historic Teylers Museum is presenting a major exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci drawings, the first ever in the Netherlands, to mark the 500th anniversary of his death. This show runs from October 5 to January 6. Meanwhile, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam's new exhibition tells the story of Paul Gauguin and his friend and fellow artist Charles Laval's trip to the French Caribbean island of Martinique in 1887 and the colourful artworks they made there. Gauguin & Laval in Martinique is on from October 5 to January 13.

And finally to Belgium, where the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts is devoting a show to Ladies of the Baroque. From October 20 to January 20, it's assembling about 50 paintings by Italian women artists dating from 1550 to 1680, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola and Elisabetta Sirani, to show how they tackled the restrictions of the age in inventive ways. Many of the works have rarely been on public display.

Still time to see...

The crumbling empires of Thomas Cole and Ed Ruscha can be viewed until October 7 at the National Gallery in London; the Ruscha display is both stunning and free. At the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, Rembrandt: Britain's Discovery of the Master, one of the best exhibitions we've seen this year, finishes on October 14, while the conflicted Expressionism of Emil Nolde closes on October 21. You have until October 28 to get down to the Museum of London Docklands for Roman Dead, an excellent free exhibition that exhumes the secrets of the multi-ethnic metropolis of 2000 years ago, revealing a city stalked by disease, violence and inequality.

Images

Andrea Mantegna, The Holy Family, about 1490–1500, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. © bpk / Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden/Elke Estel/Hans-Peter Klut
Edward Burne-Jones, Phyllis and Demophoön, 1870. © Birmingham Museums Trust
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. © KHM-Museumsverband
Filippino Lippi, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1480/85, National Gallery of Art, Washington. © Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, Andrew W. Mellon Collection
Frans Hals, Portrait of Pieter Jacobsz Olycan, 1629/30, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, on loan from a private collection. Photo: Margareta Svensson