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...
The year is 1843. And the theme of this hard-hitting painting is slavery, in all its gory detail, as practised in France's West Indian colonies. Slavery, you say? What about liberté, égalité, fraternité? Ah yes, slavery was abolished in 1794, after the French Revolution. But, and this takes a bit of getting your head round, it was reestablished by Napoleon eight years later. By the 1840s there was a strong abolitionist movement going in France, and an effective way to spread the message was to shock the public with the visual truth of what slavery actually meant. This painting by Marcel Verdier, Beating at Four Stakes in the Colonies , is perhaps the most searing image in a sprawling exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse , focusing on the way black people have been depicted in French art over the past 200 years or so and taking in broader themes of black history along the way. In Verdier's picture, a black slave is stretched...