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...
There's one image that dominates Charles II: Art & Power at the Queen's Gallery in London, and it's the King himself. After years of Civil War and a puritanical decade of republican rule, the monarchy has been restored. And so here is Charles, channelling Henry VIII in sumptuous scarlet and with glittering new regalia: The portrait, painted by John Michael Wright in about 1676, 16 years after the Restoration, vividly demonstrates the style of the man who had to rebuild the monarchy, and the royal art collection accumulated by his father (the subject of a separate exhibition now at the Royal Academy) that had been sold off under the Commonwealth. How Charles II did that is the story of this show, which starts with the final portrait of Charles I, painted a month before his execution in 1649. As is often the case at the Queen's Gallery, there's a fair amount of exposition in the form of prints and archive material before you get to the more exciti...