There is a growing trend in cultural institutions to re-name problematic titles of artworks; a phenomenon which is not without controversy.
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The National Gallery’s long-awaited Raphael exhibition, which opened in April, has garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews for its deep-dive into one of history’s greatest artists – and with good reason.
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Contemporary Polish-Roma artist and activist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas draws on the cyclicity, allegories, and cross-cultural symbolism in The Hall of the Months, creating a ‘manifesto on Roma identity and art’.
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What can pre-20th-century images of war tell us about the nuances between critical and idealising depictions of violence?
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There are around 40 surviving works in which Pierre Louis Alexandre is the model, dating from between 1878 to 1903 in Stockholm, which probably makes him the Black sitter about whom we have the most images in pre-20th-century art.
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Donatello is often considered one of the artists who paved the way for the Italian Renaissance. His extensive knowledge of ancient Roman and Greek sculptures, combined with his technical abilities in both bronze and marble, allowed him to bring a vivid expressivity to his works.
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A selection of six highlighted artworks from this exhibition, which aims ‘to show how far the Hispanic Society’s collection extends beyond the art of Spain, for which it has traditionally been known.’
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Delicate, natural, beautiful; flowers embody the qualities which have historically been seen as feminine virtues and thus the cultivation, study and depiction of this subject was permitted by a patriarchal society which prohibited women from so many other pursuits in life.
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To mark the celebration of Women’s History Month, we are reflecting on the remarkable life of Italian Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, with two exclusive extracts from Sheila Barker’s new book for Lund Humphries’ Illuminating Women Artists series.
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Gandharan art is just one of countless examples of the cultural richness and diversity which characterises Afghanistan’s history - in sharp and poignant contrast to the country’s current state of turmoil.
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Female nudes are consistently framed as acceptable forms of representing female bodies, and yet naked female bodies outside of art galleries continue to be seen as inappropriate, offensive or sexualised.
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This sprawling exhibition lays out the evolution of an artist who recognised and, crucially, vocalised the marvel of the age in which he lived; each piece of art on display develops a sense of the wanderings (and wonderings) of a sharp artistic mind.
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We celebrated LGBT+ History Month by asking six art historians from the LGBT+ community to choose one of their favourite pre-20th-century artistic representations of queer love and experience.
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A new exhibition in The National Gallery, London, marks the contemporary American artist Kehinde Wiley’s first collaboration with a major British gallery.
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When we treat the arts as a multifaceted tool for environmental awareness, we not only open up space for more voices and minds to engage with the climate crisis, we also confront uncomfortable nuances within the art world.
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George Fountain writes about an understanding of how young men were represented, idealised, and sometimes memorialised in pre-modern art is a powerful way to enrich modern discussions about manhood.
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These portraits invite us to question cultural concepts of masculinity, and the ways in which sixteenth-century men wanted to present themselves to society through art.
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Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, like many regional and national collections, holds a number of copies in its collection. In fact, the majority of our small holding of Dutch paintings are copies, works painted by a different hand, either contemporaneously with or sometime after ‘the original’.
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It may come as a surprise that the Mona Lisa at the Musée du Louvre - the best known, most visited, and probably most photographed painting in the world - is only one of several versions painted in Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop around the same time.
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Ladi Kwali (1925-1984) was one of the first Nigerian potters to achieve international recognition as a coil pottery artist, and her works engage with both indigenous pre-20th century traditions and twentieth century Nigerian modernism.
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