The Art Exhibitions Blog

It's a great story. Two brothers-in-law, with two competing visions of art: one from Venice's greatest family of painters, the other the son of a carpenter. In their early years they found inspiration in each other's work; while Andrea Mantegna's is full of invention, theatre and painterly tricks, Giovanni Bellini's is less intricate but more emotionally charged. For decades afterwards, they worked apart, in different cities; then Giovanni was called on to complete Andrea's final commission, one he was unable to finish before he died. As you make your way through Mantegna and Bellini at London's National Gallery, you find yourself weighing up the respective merits of these early Renaissance painters. Mantegna perhaps shades it in the first few rooms, but Bellini puts in a strong finish. This is, it has to be said, quite an intense exhibition, not one in which you can drift through easy-on-the-eye landscapes, wonder at the realism of still lives or admir...

October sees the start of a series of exhibitions that promise to be exceptional, bringing together works of art that may never again be viewable in the same place at the same time. Museums and galleries across Europe aren't stinting on the superlatives. Two of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance come together at London's National Gallery for a show its director describes as "unprecedented and probably unrepeatable". Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were brothers-in-law, and Mantegna's compositional innovations and Bellini's natural landscapes play a pivotal role in art history. With pictures loaned from around Europe and beyond, it runs from October 1 to January 27. Mantegna inspired Edward  Burne-Jones ,   and Tate Britain is giving   the late Pre-Raphaelite  his first major retrospective in London for more than 40 years. Over 150 works aim to show how Burne-Jones developed into one of the leading European, and not just British, artists...

We all know what Charles I looked like, don't we? It was just how Anthony Van Dyck painted him: Van Dyck's triple portrait is the first image that catches your eye as you enter Charles I: King and Collector  at the Royal Academy in London, a terrific exhibition that's chock-full of great works of art. This show has at its centre two rooms of aggrandising pictures of Charles by his Flemish court painter, on horseback, with his family, in his robes of state. So it comes as somewhat of a surprise to find one or two portraits of the King by other artists that make him appear a little different. There's something slightly wrong with them, you feel, because you're so used to the Van Dyck look. Gerrit van Honthorst's Charles  seems somehow more boyish, less certain of himself, while a full-length view by Daniel Mytens captures some splendid tailoring but doesn't quite give us the self-confidence of a man who believed himself endowed with the divine righ...