Features

Features
The Pink Room at Palazzo Butera

The grand restoration of Palazzo Butera

Fresh connections between contemporary art and Old Masters come to the fore in this 400-year-old palace, which has been transformed into a museum and home

30 Aug 2022
Features
Jean-François de Troy’s

The saucy legends of the champagne coupe

The distinctive saucer-shaped glass might have fallen out of fashion, but the tales of its origins still make for titillating table talk

30 Aug 2022
Features

How gastronomic maps paved the way for regional French cooking

The first gastronomic map of France may have been created to serve the appetites of greedy Parisians, but it also opened up new ways of eating

30 Aug 2022
Features
Pope's Villa

Will Alexander Pope’s underground grotto finally come to light?

The poet’s bejewelled lair on the banks of the Thames was his pride and joy – and its restoration shines new light into the shadowy depths of his mind

26 Aug 2022
Features
Helen Frankenthaler studio visit

What artists are really doing when they take up residencies

Recent initiatives are expanding on the traditional model of patronage through community engagement, cross-disciplinary collaboration and mentorship schemes

9 Aug 2022
Features

Acquisitions of the Month: July 2022

Two significant works by Renaissance masters to the National Gallery in London are among this month’s highlights

5 Aug 2022
Features
Vernon Lee (1881), John Singer Sargent. Tate collection

How Vernon Lee kept her finger on the pulse of gallery-goers

Long before the invention of the visitor-response survey, the writer was curious about how works of art affected their viewers

31 Jul 2022
Features
Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel (late 1470s–mid 1480s), Sandro Botticelli. Private collection

The blingy side of Botticelli

The painter’s use of gold in his works suggests a debt to earlier artists – and reveals a more antiquarian side of 15th-century Florence

17 Jul 2022
Features
glassblowing on the island of Murano

Playing with fire – how rising fuel prices are endangering Murano’s glass industry

As the cost of gas continues to increase across Europe, the Venetian island’s glassmakers are fighting to preserve a centuries-old tradition

8 Jul 2022
Features
Covered box with scene from The Tale of Genji (c. 1895), Ota Jinnoeimon. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem. Photo: © 2022 John Bigelow Taylor

Acquisitions of the Month: June 2022

An outstanding collection of some 900 Japanese cloisonné enamels is among this month’s highlights

30 Jun 2022
Features
Wolf's Cove miniature village

The architect whose greatest achievement was the world’s first miniature village

Wolf’s Cove, the model village in Gloucestershire designed by Charles Paget Wade, is proof of the architect’s commitment to creating ideal communities

27 Jun 2022
Features
A Jewish family home in Baghdad

A culinary education – Claudia Roden’s ode to Jewish cuisine

Twenty-five years after it was first published, ‘The Book of Jewish Food’ remains an invaluable record of the Jewish diaspora and its manifold culinary traditions

27 Jun 2022
Features
Exterior view of the ‘Borderlands’ exhibition, including Enrique Martínez Celaya’s There-bound (2021), at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

Progress report – the Huntington reckons with its past and looks to the future

The Gilded Age institution renowned for its Eurocentric holdings is re-evaluating its history and winning over a wider audience

27 Jun 2022
Features

Why was the Royal Academy so willing to let one of its most treasured pieces go?

Sixty years ago the Royal Academy announced the sale of a cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci to fund its activities, but did it make the right decision?

27 Jun 2022
Features

The restoration of the ruins of York Castle is a towering achievement

All that remains of the city’s two medieval castles is the empty shell of a single tower, now imaginatively restored by Hugh Broughton Architects

27 Jun 2022
Features

Making a stand – the Russian artists saying no to war

Judging where to draw the line between maintaining a safe silence and tacitly endorsing the war in Ukraine has become a pressing matter

27 Jun 2022
Features
Joan Miró

Assassination attempts – how Joan Miró set out to destroy painting

The artist produced some of his most innovative and political works at the age of 80 by burning and torturing his canvases and also turning to textiles

23 Jun 2022
Features
Equestrian shrine figure (ojubo elesin) depicting a priestess of Oya, (1920–40), Moshood Olusomo Bamigboye. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

Shrine of the times – a Yoruba masterpiece in focus

Curator James Green takes a close look at a carving by Bamigboye, a sculptor who represented the beating heart of his community in the early 20th century

21 Jun 2022
Features
Château Mouton Rothschild

The perfect blend – art and wine at Château Mouton Rothschild

The graphic designer Jean Carlu was the first artist to create a label for the historic wine estate in 1924, marking the beginning of a long-standing tradition

16 Jun 2022
Features

Acquisitions of the Month: May 2022

This month’s highlights include a silver casket that may have played a part in the downfall of Mary, Queen of Scots

2 Jun 2022
Features
Central Park Tower and the Steinway Tower on Billionaires’ Row in New York City.

Why are New York’s new skyscrapers so bad?

As the Manhattan skyline keeps getting higher, the quality of the skyscrapers crowding the horizon seems to be getting lower and lower

30 May 2022
Features
Page from the Chronique de Saint Nicholas de Reims (13th century).

What medieval Christians thought about climate change

Christians in the Middle Ages believed that there was no bad weather in paradise after the Creation and before the Fall of Man

30 May 2022
Features
Detail of Trafalgar Square by Piet Mondrian

Off the grid – the side of Mondrian you’ve never seen before

A completely overlooked painting, left out of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, makes the case for an unexpectedly messier and much more interesting career

30 May 2022
Features

Grand designs – how Gio Ponti transformed Palazzo Bo

The University of Padua may be 800 years old, but this ancient institution is also home to masterpieces of 20th-century design

30 May 2022
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Apollo December 2024

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Masterpiece [Re]discovery 2022. Photo: Ben Fisher Photography, courtesy of Masterpiece London

The Masterpiece podcast: episode three

This episode explores an ancient funeral stele, Marie Antoinette’s breast bowl, and how digital technologies are helping to preserve Egyptian heritage sites

Art news daily

Slovak National Gallery’s department heads resign – with 177 staff threatening to follow

Magritte painting sells for $121m – highest sum ever for a Surrealist work

Frank Auerbach has died at the age of 93

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What painters and anatomists have in common

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