WRITER & HISTORIAN
By the end of the 11th century, Muslim Europe was in retreat. In Spain, Christian kingdoms were slowly pushing south, while in Sicily over 200 years of Islamic rule had been ended by the Norman conquest of the island. One unexpected result of this intermingling of peoples was an unparalleled assimilation of Islamic knowledge and... Continue Reading →
The young girl in the painting is running towards us through an overgrown spring garden, its trees heavy with dazzling white blossom. Behind her is a bombsite – this is London in March 1950 – also overgrown. Other children are crouching among the bushes and the long grass, hunkered down behind the low garden walls,... Continue Reading →
If the purpose of imperial art is to inspire deference and awe, there is abundant evidence of its effect at The Great Mughals, the ravishingly beautiful new show at London’s V&A. The exhibition, which is a prelude to a major redesign of the museum’s South Asia gallery, covers the golden age of the Mughal Empire,... Continue Reading →
Three women are toiling in the field, gathering in the harvest barley. Or rather, two are bent double, scything through the stalks with short-handled sickles while behind a third pauses to stretch her back. It looks excruciating work. No doubt it was. England in the first half of the 14th century was in large part... Continue Reading →
When the connoisseur Gerrit Braancamp died in 1771, the auction of his collection was one of Amsterdam’s events of the year. Some twenty thousand people saw it; two thousand copies of the catalogue were sold. The two most valuable paintings – a triptych by Gerard Dou known as ‘The Nursery’ and ‘Large Drove of Oxen’... Continue Reading →
The six wives of Henry VIII occupy a curious place in the public mind. We all know who they are; but how many of us know who they were? Unlike most of their contemporaries, it’s not oblivion they need rescuing from, it’s caricature. A new exhibition about them at London’s National Portrait Gallery is pointedly... Continue Reading →
On 3 April 1897, nineteen painters and sculptors met in a Viennese coffee house. Out of the meeting came a new arts movement, the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs, better known as the Viennese Secession. At its head was a young Gustav Klimt. Art in Vienna was controlled by the Künstlerhaus, the artists’ professional body. The... Continue Reading →
Was it true, as Giorgio Vasari wrote in The Lives of the Artists, that oil painting was invented in the 15th century by Jan van Eyck – he calls him Giovanni da Bruggia – and brought to Italy by Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who traveled to Flanders to learn the secret of its making?... Continue Reading →
I didn’t recognise the book on my shelf. I barely noticed it, scanning the titles quickly for a different one I had mislaid. But somehow the thin tattered spine of its dusty, crumbling dust jacket caught my eye as it rested in the dark, shadowed end of the book case. It was one of my... Continue Reading →
Locals called the area ‘La Cività’; a clue, perhaps. Antiquarian Lucas Holstenius proposed it as the site of Pompeii as early as 1637. But formal excavations didn’t begin until 1748. The site wasn’t regarded as interesting or valuable in itself, but merely a sources of decorative antiquities for Charles VII, king of Naples. This wasn’t... Continue Reading →
Walkelin, the Norman bishop of Winchester, had a problem. He needed more wood for his new cathedral, being built on unpromisingly marshy ground a little way from the city’s two existing Saxon minsters. He went to the man who had appointed him, William the Conqueror. William offered him as many trees from a nearby royal... Continue Reading →
Artist José Guadalupe Posada was born on 2 February 1852 in the city of Aguascalientes in central Mexico. Biographical details are scant. He produced over 20,000 engravings across his career, first using lithography, then wood- and metal-cuts, and finally relief etching, a technique most associated with William Blake. But when he died in January 1913,... Continue Reading →
Charles Dickens, visiting Rome early in 1845, found himself haunted by a painting he saw. It was, he said, “almost impossible to be forgotten”. It was of a young woman in white, with a white turban; she is looking back over her left shoulder towards the artist. Dickens saw in her eyes “celestial hope, and... Continue Reading →
The numbers are extraordinary. Charles M Schulz, whose centenary falls on 26 November 2022, spent nearly fifty years of his life producing daily comic strips for Peanuts. Between 2 October 1950 and his death in February 2000, he drew a staggering 17,897 of them. He retired in December 1999 after a series of strokes and... Continue Reading →
“In my own village,” the filmmaker Luis Buñuel said of his birthplace in rural Spain, “the Middle Ages lasted until World War I.” Buñuel would escape the dead hand of the past through surrealism. But the Italian writer FT Marinetti went one better: he invented futurism, launched like a political movement through a manifesto on... Continue Reading →
The visions began when Hildegard of Bingen was young – perhaps as young as three. But unlike many mystical religious experiences, the visions did not come in dreams or ecstatic states; ecstasy, she thought, was a defect. They came like a cloud of light inside her on which forms and shadows moved while her eyes... Continue Reading →
In Augsburg’s Staatsgalerie Altdeutsche Meister there is a three-paneled painting illustrating the life of St Paul, painted by local artist Hans Holbein the Elder in 1504. Commissioned for the city’s Dominican convent of St Katherine, it includes, in its left panel, a self-portrait of the artist with his two sons, Hans and Ambrosius – nicknamed,... Continue Reading →
It is July 1571, and Elizabeth I is sitting for a portrait in “the open ally of a goodly garden”, almost certainly at Hampton Court. The portrait is “in little” – what we would now call a watercolour miniature, although the latter term didn’t enter the English language until Sir Philip Sidney introduced it from... Continue Reading →
MGM, at its zenith in the 1940s, used to boast that it had more stars than there are in heaven on its roster. It’s a phrase that came back to me walking round the current, jaw-droppingly good exhibition at the British Library, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War. By the time I was half way through... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 