It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months. "Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly. It's su...
Few painters have inspired as many other artists as Jean-François Millet. For the German Impressionist Max Liebermann, Millet was "the most groundbreaking artist in modern painting", while for Vincent van Gogh, the Frenchman was "that essential modern painter who opened the horizon to many." What made Millet so thoroughly modern? It was his rough brushwork, his simplified forms with strong contours. These were radically new compositions featuring high horizons and empty expanses. And yet in his own time, Millet's warts-and-all depictions of the harsh reality of rural life were just too avant-garde, too controversial for many. Take Man with a Hoe from the start of the 1860s. The critics attacked the ugliness of the man leaning on his hoe, taking a brief breather from his back-breaking work. They decried the style as caricatured. For Millet, though, this was an image full of compassion for the peasant's lot, full of detail like the purple thist...