Nicholas Penny is a former director of the National Gallery. He is cataloguing the earlier Italian paintings at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, with Imogen Tedbury.
The triumphalism of the great auction houses tends to conceal the fact that certain categories of chattel have crashed in value over the last quarter of a century, and none more so than ‘brown furniture’. Changes in lifestyle have played a part. An indoor pool or family cinema is now a higher priority than a library among those who can afford such things; dining is less formal...
When the London Tube emerges into daylight, the walls beside the tracks are laced with dark, dirty and dangerous-looking cables, but at intervals we may glimpse clusters of bold letters sprayed in brilliant colours on the side of a derelict building or a metal shed. And where the high banks of brambles give way to old brick beside the Overground there are long sequences of competitive...
For most students of art history today, the most exciting development in Italy – indeed in all of Europe – around 1600 was the revolutionary realism of Caravaggio. He established his reputation in Rome as a painter of still life and made a point of painting directly from nature: from fruit held by a studio lad, from his own facial expressions in a mirror, from a bird’s...
Halfway around the Donatello exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (until 11 June) we encounter two bronze roundels of much the same size, both representing the Virgin and Child with angels: the Chellini roundel from the museum’s own collection and one lent by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In the first, the drapery has countless small, wriggling folds resembling a...
Nicholas Penny looks through the letters of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, who visited England in the late 1820s.
Nicholas Penny, former director of the National Gallery, explains how Kenneth Clark transformed the National Gallery as director from 1934 to 1945, with a look at the Myra Hess concerts and Clark's wide-ranging...
There are two forces at work in sculpture. One pushes it towards the waxwork, where materials suggest something quite contrary to their native qualities – marble flesh, wooden flowers,...
When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...
Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he...
Here, at last, is a book of which we can sincerely say in the old phrase that it meets a long-felt want. It offers, in the modest words of the Preface, ‘a series of illustrations (which are...
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