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...
It's not just about the art, it's about the event, the occasion. Seeing, yes, but being seen is perhaps for some just as important. That's clear right from the start of The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. There are lots of reasons for visiting this show: It's an enlightening history of a great British institution; it offers a potted run-through of 2 1/2 centuries of British art (admittedly, minus a couple of big names); and astonishingly, while the 250th Summer Exhibition itself elsewhere in the RA was drawing big crowds, this 10-room display was surprisingly empty, at least when we went, giving plenty of space for contemplation and enjoyment. And what you see first is the Summer Exhibition summed up by William Powell Frith, that great Victorian painter of crowd scenes, in A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 . What a line-up of distinguished gallery-goers: William Gladstone, Anthony Trollope, Lillie Langtry, Ellen ...