Nicholas Penny

On Sundays​, as a child, I accompanied my mother and siblings to the parish church at Lingfield in Surrey. The services meant very little to me, though my curiosity was awakened by the preference in some sections of the congregation for the crisp and definitive ‘Eh-men’ instead of the attenuated intonation of ‘Ah-men’. I was also curious as to what it was that made...

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...