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...
We went to the British Museum in London recently with high hopes of Inspired by the East , a show intended to explore how the Islamic world influenced Western art. We'd seen a very enlightening exhibition in Paris earlier in the year called Oriental Visions that looked at how painters gave an often thoroughly mendacious interpretation of the Middle East, and then we were intrigued by the successful 19th-century English artist John Frederick Lewis , who liked to reimagine himself as a Arab merchant or chieftain. And the British Museum show starts off strongly, with an arresting image from the Victorian heyday of Orientalism: The Prayer by the American artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman. A splendidly dressed man and another wearing a patched garment are worshipping inside a mosque. The details are splendid; Bridgman brought many props back from trips to the Orient, including the lamp and carpet so meticulously rendered here. "My impressi...