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Michael Prodger is associate editor at the New Statesman. He is an art historian, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham, and a former literary editor.
The price for being the most famous painting in the world was that it also became the most stolen. During its long history, the altarpiece has been the victim of 13 different crimes.
This year’s exhibition calendar sees a return for some of the biggest names of the Renaissance – and Andy Warhol.
How a journey into the Arctic Circle left the painter Peder Balke with ice in his soul.
Reassessing the surrealist artworks of a woman dismissed as a footnote to the Picasso story.
How George Stubbs got under the skin of his subjects, animal and human, before he started painting.
As their portraits show, two of art’s supposed “great loners” were deeply social painters.
Flaxman developed a style that both caught and defined the classical revival at its peak.
Thanks to a familiar, domestic material unburdened by artistic tradition, the linocut birthed fresh and colourful depictions of the everyday.
Why the little-known artist of the Spanish Renaissance deserves wider recognition.
