The first daffodils in my garden spread their petals last week. Yesterday I spent a couple of hours writing out there among them. I had my coat on, yes. But the sun was bright and I felt like a bear waking up from a long winter sleeping in a hollow tree. The winters get harder every year. But this one is almost over. I feel like doing things again.
Specifically, I feel like looking at beautiful things. Art. Medieval and Early Modern art - the best kind. The list of shows I want to visit gets longer each week. In fact, I can’t think of a time when there have been so many promising exhibitions out there, one or two of them once-in-a-lifetime deals.
Here are the five shows at the top of my list right now, ranging from Renaissance sculptors and Old Masters to Spanish glassblowers and mysterious Tudor portraitists. I don’t think I’ll get to see all of them. But you might. When you do, let me know how they are.
Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance
(V&A Gallery, London, February 11th - )
The Florentine sculptor Donatello was backed by Cosimo de’ Medici in the late fifteenth century. Besides lending his name to a Ninja Turtle, his greatest claim to historical fame was as the sculptor of the first freestanding male nude since classical antiquity. Actually, his David isn’t completely nude: he wears a jaunty hat and some fine sandals, which give him purchase on Goliath’s severed head. Details, details. Speaking of which, the David on show in London’s V&A is their copy of the original. But many of his other bronze and marble originals have made their way to Kensington, in what is likely to be the greatest show of his work ever to be assembled in the UK.
Vermeer
(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, February 4th - )
Before there was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, there was her much classier cousin, the Girl With A Pearl Earring. The world-famous painting by Johannes Vermeer dates from 1665, the year of the great plague. By that stage the Middle Ages were over, but the revolution in portraiture that had occurred in the Netherlands and Italy two centuries earlier still underpinned works like Vermeer’s.
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