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.
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...
The upper part of Room 16 in the British Museum, entered by a short staircase from the main circuit of Greek and Roman galleries, was devised half a century ago (before the needs of the disabled were properly considered) to exhibit the frieze of the cella (inner chamber) of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius (‘the Healer’) at Bassae in Phigaleia.
Concept art for ‘Beauty and the Beast’ (c.1990)
The exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney, now in the dark belly of the Wallace Collection (until 16 October), may seem like a clever way to lure enthusiasts for the popular entertainment of their childhood – together with their own children – into a museum, much of which is dedicated to the decorative art created for...
It takes about ten minutes to walk from Birmingham New Street Station to the Ikon Gallery, which occupies one of the few Victorian buildings to have survived the redevelopment of the city centre. Above the excellent café and a shop, the white walls of the first floor, where contemporary art is normally displayed, are at present devoted to Carlo Crivelli (until 29 May). Most of the...
When the Courtauld Institute of Art moved in 1989 from a house designed by Robert Adam in Portman Square to a wing of Somerset House, William Chambers’s masterpiece, it seemed a very satisfactory solution, especially because it provided an opportunity for the Courtauld Gallery to join the institute in its new premises. But whether the paintings could be happily accommodated in the...
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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