The Forgotten Cathedral: Byzantium comes to Westminster

"To paraphrase John Lennon, Westminster Cathedral isn't the most famous church in the world, it's not even the most famous church in Westminster. While millions of tourists a year flood through the ticket office of Westminster Abbey, keying numbers in the inexplicably sicky audio guides and gawping through the railings at ancient Kings and Queens, only five minutes down the road stands a neighbour who is seldom included on a pre-planned itinerary. Westminster Cathedral is halfway between Victoria Station and Parliament Square but it might as well be halfway between Venice and Istanbul."

A Man of Sorrows: Botticelli under the influence of Savonarola

'...That religious seriousness, and slight neuroticism, present in Botticelli’s religious painting made him a prime candidate to fall under the apocalyptic spell of Savonarola. His biographer, Vasari, tells us that Botticelli was so utterly convinced by the rhetoric that he stopped painting altogether and later sources have even put forward that he threw many of his own more pagan paintings onto the great bonfire of the vanities that Savonoarola erected in the Palazzo della Signoria for the destruction of objects of conspicuous wealth; mirrors, jewellery, and any art works of a secular theme...'

Ashes to Ashes: Fires, Cathedrals, and Resurrections

On the 11th June 1144 Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St Denis, Paris, gathered the bishops of France for the dedication of his newly built choir and east end. This marked a sea-change in architecture, gone was the heavy solidarity of the Romanesque and in came the lightness and delicacy of the Gothic. In the years after the meeting of the bishops, many of their home cathedrals would burn down only to rise from the ashes in the new gothic style of Suger’s St Denis.

Nicolas Poussin: The Unresolved Cadence

Artists fall in and out of fashion all the time, that is the way of the canon, an artist who has been admired in equal measure from their own time to the present day is a rare thing indeed. Nicolas Poussin (1594 - 1665) is one such artist. Lorded by his contemporary Bernini as the only French artist who who really mattered, he won posthumous favour with both Ingres and Delacroix (possibly the only thing on which those two agreed), as well as Cezanne who said he only truly understood himself after spending time with a Poussin. Even the wunderkind of Modernism, Pablo Picasso, was known to copy Poussin’s works.

The Image of a King: The Wilton Diptych and Richard II

The Wilton Diptych is one of the oldest and most luxurious works in the National Gallery’s collection. This gold covered diptych was made some time between 1395 and 1399 by English or French craftsmen for King Richard II of England, it is laden with symbolic imagery connected with Richard and his divine right to rule, not just in its subject matter but also in the materials and techniques involved in its making.