The Art Exhibitions Blog

We're starting in London this month with a double helping of Renaissance Italy: From November 9, the Royal Academy has Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504 , when the three briefly crossed paths in the Tuscan city. While sculpture and painting feature in this display of more than 40 works, the emphasis appears to be very much on creations on paper, as it is in Drawing   the Italian Renaissance at the King's Gallery, which opens on November 1. This show, which also includes Titian, promises the widest range of drawings dating from around 1450 to 1600 ever to be displayed in the UK, with about 160 by more than 80 artists. The RA exhibition closes February 16, that in the King's Gallery on March 9.  As the Renaissance in southern Europe was coming to an end, a new Golden Age was starting in India, that of the Mughal Emperors. The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence at the Victoria and Albert Museum will display paintings, jewellery, clothing and more ...

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is reviving Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings & Watercolours , a show that closed after just five weeks last year due to the Covid pandemic. On from July 15 to November 27, this exhibition features more than 100 works from the museum's own outstanding Pre-Raphaelite collection; Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt and Millais are the big names.  There are two new exhibitions coming to the Lightbox in Woking, a venue we always enjoy visiting. Starting on July 9, Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden are the stars of a collaboration with the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden that looks at the story of the artists' colony at Great Bardfield in Essex; more than 30 paintings and drawings will be on display.  The Ingram Collection & the Fry Art Gallery: 'Bawden, Ravilious and the Art of Great Bardfield'  runs until October 9. The second show, beginning on July 16, sets 20 paintings, prints and drawings of Venice and England by Canaletto alongside ...

Raphael was only 37 when he died in Rome in 1520; "Here no one is speaking of anything other than the death of this good man," a Mantuan envoy reported back home in a letter the following day. "But his second life, that of his Fame, which is not subject to time or death, will be eternal."  Pandolfo Pico's prediction to Isabella d'Este was not wrong. Five centuries on, the National Gallery in London has put together a varied and impressive collection of works, reproductions and video to illustrate that  Raphael  was not just a great painter of oils and frescoes, but a multi-talented architect, archaeologist, draughtsman, designer of tapestries, prints and mosaics as well. A real Renaissance man, in fact, up there with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci .  This is not quite a blockbuster exhibition; not surprisingly, you won't be seeing The Sistine Madonna from Dresden, for example, with possibly the two most commercialised cherubs in art history. But it ...

Raphael died before he was 40, and yet he's still reckoned among the very greatest of Italian Renaissance artists. A new Raphael  exhibition at London's National Gallery aims to show him as an all-round giant -- in painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture and more -- exploring why he can be regarded on a level with Michelangelo and Leonardo. More than 90 examples of his work include loans from the Uffizi, the Vatican, the Louvre and the Prado. The show is on from April 9 to July 31, and standard tickets are an initially eye-catching £24 (more with Gift Aid). As we've noted before, prices for the biggest exhibitions in the capital have been steadily creeping upwards, but then £24 is relatively cheap compared with, say, the cost of tickets to a Premier League football match or a West End theatre performance. At the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, tickets are a reasonable-sounding £10 for Canaletto's Venice Revisited , which opens on April 1. This show features Can...

We're on the cusp of 2022, but the New Year has a 2021 ring to it as some galleries play catch-up, putting on Covid-cancelled exhibitions that we had already highlighted as this year's ones to look forward to. And a couple of shows mentioned below were also on the schedule for 2020. This round-up of some of what's caught our eye among the displays planned by museums and galleries around Europe for the next 12 months may not be definitive, but it is in chronological order as we publish. Watch out for our monthly What's On for precise dates nearer the time. Here goes, with fingers crossed now that museums in various countries are closed again....   February The Courtauld Gallery in London has just reopened after renovation, and its first big exhibition since then starts on February 3: Van Gogh Self-Portraits . It will bring together more than 15 pictures, around half of Vincent van Gogh's total output of self-portraits across his career, and is the first devoted to hi...

In 2019 it was all Leonardo and Rembrandt. In 2020 it's the 500th anniversary of the death of Raphael, so he's one of the really big names on the exhibition calendar for the new year, along with Jan van Eyck. Here's a look at some of the key shows across Britain and Europe for your diary, in more or less chronological order.  January Edward Hopper 's landscapes and cityscapes are at the fore of an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler near Basel starting on January 26. It's organised in conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which has the largest collection of Hopper's often enigmatic, mysterious works. Until May 17. The Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf is presenting a big show, running from January 30 to May 24, devoted to Angelica Kauffman , a rare exception in being a successful and respected woman artist in the late 18th century. The Swiss-born artist was one of only two women founder members of the Royal Academy in London, where th...

Renaissance nudes.... let's see what springs to mind. Well, there's Titian's Venus of Urbino , obviously, or maybe the Sleeping Venus started by Giorgione and finished by Titian. How about Botticelli's Birth of Venus , or Velázquez's Rokeby Venus , or one of those many Cranachs with Venus and Cupid ? And that's just the one Roman goddess, off the top of our heads. So, for an exhibition on the Renaissance Nude , at London's Royal Academy, organised in conjunction with the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, you might be expecting a bit of a blockbuster. But this show is a lot more low-key. There are some fine works of art, to be sure, with Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo and Leonardo represented, but it just all feels a wee bit flat. You see, as we left, we were thinking about what pictures might have given a bit of oomph to this exhibition, and one of the first we came up with was Jean Fouquet's Virgin and Child from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts ...