So the question to ask about the Michaelina Wautier exhibition at the Royal Academy in London must be: Is the hype about this recently rediscovered 17th-century woman painter justified? The answer: Yes, absolutely. She really does merit acknowledgement -- and not just because we recognise a woman working in a man's world. Her art shows she was extremely talented, producing superb canvases covering a diverse range of subject matter. What's more, she painted very large pictures featuring male nudes, such as Bacchus, despite her contemporaries thinking that was not the sort of thing a female artist could do. And her portraits are wonderfully lively and lifelike. This is Martino Martini, an Italian Jesuit missionary who travelled to China in the 1640s. It was painted in 1654, when Michaelina was around 40. Martini, who was staying at the Jesuit College in Brussels, is depicted wearing traditional Chinese silk court attire and a hat of fur and feathers. A rather substantial...
We start off in London this month with two new exhibitions at the British Museum. The first, opening on May 4, takes us back to the ancient history of the region round the eastern Mediterranean and an examination of Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece . It aims to uncover how the Persian Empire spread ideas of elegance and craftsmanship across neighbouring lands around 500 BC. Featuring items from the museum's own collection as well as international loans, the show runs until August 13. We head further east for the second exhibition, exploring China's Hidden Century . On from May 18 to October 8, this show looks at life in 19th-century China through art, fashion and everyday objects, seeking to show how decades of violence and turmoil that ended with the deposing of the emperor in 1912 were also a period of significant creativity. The National Gallery is staging the first ever exhibition in the UK to be devoted to Saint Francis of Assisi . Looking at how the saint's com...