Newsletters

Newsletter 33 (13 November 2016) Sometimes I can see a picture in a gallery and make a successful guess as to who painted it. It’s not always a top-flight artist who is instantly recognisable. They often develop and change in relation to new movements and styles. The B-team are liable to be more repetitious, and […]

Newsletter 32 (20 July 2016) I started re-reading Robert Graves’s Count Belisarius before the June trip to Ravenna, but only finished it recently. The following sentence from the Introduction (by John Julius Norwich) intrigued me: ‘The narrative is a perfect blend of scholarship and imagination, its effect rather like that produced by a brilliant portrait

Newsletter 30 (21 February 2016) On a dull but dry December afternoon in Venice a group of us were thwarted in our desire to visit just one part of the Ducal Palace, and so we jumped onto Vaporetto 1 direzione Lido, quite away from our usual beaten track, with the vague intention of seeing the

Newsletter 29 (9 October 2015) I haven’t left myself room for one of my self-indulgent lucubrations, which is in a way fortunate, as I haven’t found two ideas to rub together that might have made enough heat to fill up a page. I thought I might write about the exacting indignities of old age, perhaps

June 2015 In mid-May I sprained my ankle (something I’ve done many times before) and a couple of weeks later it gave way again, thanks to a missing Montalcino cobble. So I’ve spent a couple of weeks in our village house in Tuscany walking only with great care, and not very far. Tottering slowly along

April 2015 The following extract, about a statue of a Greek warrior in the archaeological museum of Agrigento in Sicily, is taken from Mediterranean Winter by Robert D. Kaplan: ‘All that remains of this statue is a helmeted head and torso. The arms are missing, and, except for part of a thigh, so are the

December 2014 On a recent visit to Le Marche we visited Urbino. In the Ducal Palace we looked very carefully at two paintings by Piero della Francesca that many of us had seen before, the ‘Flagellation’ and the ‘Madonna di Senigallia’. The first is a celebrated mystery. Who are the three figures in the foreground

September 2014 Returning from a short stay in Vienna, where there is tons of it — Gothic, baroque, Hapsburg imperial — I have been thinking about my attitude to architecture. At the city’s centre in Michaelerplatz is the so-called Looshaus, a plain, modern office block, built in 1911; rumour has it that Emperor Franz Joseph

June 2014 Perhaps thirty years ago during one of the many summers in this house in Camigliano where I am now, I was supposed to be working on a book, and the family had gone to the beach or somewhere, leaving me on my own for the day so I could get on with it.

March 2014 There are some wonderful Italian pictures in the Barber Institute at the University of Birmingham, a short train journey from New Street Station. Most brilliant perhaps are a St John by Simone Martini, and a busy nativity by Jacopo Bassano (including his trade-mark piebald dog). But on a recent trip, what caught my