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...
As you might expect, there's a fair bit of both Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon in All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain in London. But we've had quite a lot of both these big names on show recently, so you might get more out of it discovering something different from other artists in this exhibition. The premise, according to the Tate, is that the show "celebrates the painters in Britain who strove to represent human figures, their relationships and surroundings in the most intimate of ways." There's a certain feeling, though, that this show is made up of a number of disparate bits that don't quite hang together. And you wonder how David Hockney doesn't get a look-in in a survey of the last century of British figurative painting. The period before 1945 gets fairly short shrift as well, knocked off quickly in the first of 11 rooms. There are two Stanley Spencers on each side of the entrance door, both of his second ...