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...
John Ruskin: a very Victorian figure in the history of art, but in many ways also a remarkably modern individual. A conservationist, a social commentator, a campaigner for the workers and the poor, and an early believer in the idea of gross national happiness. For Ruskin, a country's wealth was measured by the happiness of its people. It's the 200th anniversary of Ruskin's birth this year, and that's the spur for an exhibition at Two Temple Place in central London exploring his legacy. John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing gives us the flavour of a remarkable but contradictory man, in a show that draws strongly on the collection of the museum he founded with the aim of improving the wellbeing of the metalworkers of Sheffield, educating them and helping them escape the smoke of the industrial city. There's a Portrait of John Ruskin by Charles Fairfax Murray, painted in 1875, around the time the museum opened, that's one of the first things you see as you ente...