Caroline Campbell

‘St Jerome in His Study’ (1474-75) by Antonello da Messina.

Last March​, in response to the pandemic and the confinement of daily life to the walls of my home, one of the pictures in my care as a curator at the National Gallery assumed a new significance: Antonello da Messina’s St Jerome in His Study. Here, a Sicilian artist working in Venice in the mid-1470s...

‘The Chess Game’ (1555)

In​ July 1624, two artists met in Palermo during an outbreak of plague which killed thousands of people, including the city’s ruler. The younger artist, Anthony Van Dyck, made a quick pen and ink drawing and wrote down his impressions of Sofonisba Anguissola, then apparently 96 years old and almost blind. He was struck by her intellectual...