Reviews
Fossil hunting and forbidden love – ‘Ammonite’ reviewed
Francis Lee’s film plays fast and loose with Mary Anning’s life – but at least it digs the great geologist out of historical obscurity
The stonecutter who gave life to letters
Ralph Beyer’s idiosyncratic letter-cutting isn’t to everyone’s taste but there’s no denying its power
The court painters who magnified the princely pleasures of a Rajput dynasty
Paintings from the north-west Indian city of Udaipur present life at court as a royal playground
Art is all about human touch – and right now that’s more disturbing than it sounds
With human contact all but banned, an exhibition about touch was always going to provoke mixed feelings
The Grande Odalisque – a graphic novel that flunks its art heists
A new graphic novel offers a fresh take on the museum heist genre – if you can bear its regressive sexual politics, that is
Made You Look – a true crime doc that should terrify art collectors
The knavery and folly of the rarefied art world are writ large in a documentary that picks over the Knoedler forgery scandal
Does the past look better in black and white?
Photographers and film-makers have long added colour to their images – but does the current craze for colourisation create a false impression of olden times?
The avant-garde artists who sold a vision of the future
A display of interwar posters is a reminder of that utopian moment when artists believed they could invent a new world
The Met’s Old Masters, seen in a new light
European paintings still occupy prime real estate on Fifth Avenue – but a redisplay offers fresh insight into the Met’s hallowed holdings
Vein glorious: an epic history of marble, reviewed
For millennia, marble was taken to be a gleaming reflection of the heavens – and, in Fabio Barry’s new book, it regains its divine mysteries
Of Meissen men – the brittle business of porcelain
An ambitious new book scrutinises the production of ‘white gold’ in Europe – from its early alchemical mysteries to your everyday crockery
With his cryptic clusters of images, Aby Warburg remapped the art of the past
Warburg brought together Greek gods and golfers, antiquities and airships – and in reconstruction, his puzzling arrangements of images are as suggestive as ever
Are Goya’s Black Paintings really the work of a madman?
A new biography of Goya puts paid to the romantic fiction that the Spanish master ended his days isolated and insane
A famously private Roman collection finally gets a public outing
The Torlonia marbles make for the greatest private collection of Roman antiquities in existence – and they’re finally on view to the public
The Dig is a film to treasure
Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan shine in the story of the Sutton Hoo discovery
Dante has stumped many an artist – but these delicate drawings are truly divine
Federico Zuccari’s illustrations of the Divine Comedy have seldom been shown. But the Uffizi has put them online – and Dante’s poem has never looked better
John Lurie’s grumpy painting is a joy to behold
The crotchety cult legend is giving art lessons on TV – and it’s all surprisingly charming
The Italian statesman who redefined Renaissance art
Giovanni Morelli was a complex character, as attentive to the state of the Italian nation as he was to its art
The man who brought Hollywood’s fantasies to life
Without Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion models, science-fiction films wouldn’t look like they do today
Fran Lebowitz loves New York more than you do
The city’s most devoted citizen explains urban life to Martin Scorsese
Ralph Steadman fully deserves his place in the history of art
In his skewering of authority figures, Ralph Steadman bears comparison with some of the great artists of modern times
Gordon Parks’s photographs bear powerful witness to Black lives in America
The photographer’s images of the struggle for civil rights are as relevant as when they were first made
In 18th-century Europe, bizarre oranges and lemons were collector’s items
Weird and wonderful citrus fruit were once highly prized possessions – and one German fanatic made prints of the hundreds of varieties he laid his hands on
The real secret London? It’s down in the river mud
The muddy foreshore of the Thames has been an unlikely treasure trove for amateur archaeologists
The many faces of Mary Magdalene