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...
Wouldn't it be nice to get away for a while, to spend some time in a really exotic environment? Well, you can. Just book a ticket to Peru: a Journey in Time at the British Museum, where the past, the present and the future merge into an other-worldly experience. And this is another world, a very strange different world, where the inhabitants make curious but stunning artefacts, where they sacrifice humans to appease the gods, where great civilisations develop, but without the invention of the wheel, or the invention of writing. If you have no script, images play a huge part in everyday life. And in this absorbing show we're confronted by a succession of arresting objects made by the peoples who lived in Peru over the course of several thousand years. Such items were used in ceremonies to seek the assistance of higher powers for the living and to prepare the dead for the afterlife. And these were not merely inanimate objects; they were seen as living beings themselves. The f...