Charles Hope

Successful artists are usually attracted to major cities, where reputations are most easily made and commissions most abundant. Barocci was a conspicuous exception. Born in the 1530s in the provincial backwater of Urbino, the birthplace also of Raphael, he completed his training in Rome, but then, probably in 1563, returned to his native town, where he remained for almost the whole of his...

Henry VI had an unusually long reign, but on most counts a singularly unfortunate one. He lost the lands gained in France by his father Henry V, he became embroiled in the Wars of the Roses, his son was killed and he himself died in mysterious circumstances as a prisoner in the Tower of London. Although lacking the qualities required in an effective monarch, he proved to be an outstanding...

There used to be a widespread practice in Italy, particularly in the 1960s and in Tuscany, of removing baroque additions of all kinds from old churches, in a usually implausible attempt to restore them to something resembling their medieval appearance. This led to the destruction or dispersal of many fine works of art, and often gave the restored buildings an empty appearance they had...

The small exhibition at the National Gallery entitled Titian’s First Masterpiece: ‘The Flight into Egypt’, open until 19 August, is centred on a large canvas from the Hermitage. The picture has not been much discussed by scholars. This is partly because it has just emerged from a lengthy restoration, partly because it is known to most specialists mainly or only through...

As visitors to the recent exhibition of Dutch art at the Royal Academy will know, emblems, once the province of antiquarians, are now of great interest to historians of art. For more than a decade scholars have argued that these combinations of a motto, a picture and an explanatory poem, pointing a simple moral lesson, provide a key to the understanding of Dutch painting of the 17th century. This is not just because in many cases emblems include imagery drawn from everyday life which is strikingly similar to that employed by the painters, but also because they supposedly indicate that the public of the period was accustomed to looking for moral meanings in such imagery, wherever it might appear. In much the same way it is now often believed that the Italian counterpart of the emblem, the impresa, provides evidence about the ways in which Italian art was interpreted, especially in the later 15th and the 16th century. Unlike emblems, imprese consisted only of an image and a motto, and by convention the image was non-human. Their function, too, was rather different. Instead of providing moral instruction, they were personal devices, akin to coats-of-arms, illustrating, in a veiled manner, the aspirations or character of their owner. In Renaissance Italy the ability to interpret an impresa was an essential courtly skill, requiring something of the gifts needed for a Times crossword – a wide knowledge of out-of-the-way literary texts and a taste for the playful association of ideas.