Arts & Culture

The interior of the Church of Orsanmichele.

A Madonna in the Market

Anna McGee

24 July 2025

Marie D’Aguanno Ito compares Orsanmichele market to Wall Street. It had many features of the pre-electronic exchange model, with its standardised measures and pricing, set hours and regulatory oversight, and the beginning and end of trading each day was even marked by the ringing of a bell. But the New York Stock Exchange doesn’t have an image of the Virgin Mary painted on the wall. The painting in Orsanmichele appeared overnight, out of nowhere, shortly after construction finished in 1290.

Read more about In Florence: A Madonna in the Market

Amy Sherald’s Subjects

Eleanor Nairne

24 July 2025

At his final​ White House Correspondents’ dinner, Barack Obama joked that he had been grizzled by the presidency while Michelle had barely aged a day. ‘She looks so happy to be here … That’s . . .

On the Golf Space

David Trotter

24 July 2025

In the summer​ of 2024, Donald Trump played a round of golf at Bedminster, a course he owns in New Jersey, in the company of Bryson DeChambeau, twice winner of the US Open. The ostensible aim was to . . .

Tulips, Fritillaries and Auriculas

Rosemary Hill

10 July 2025

In the early​ 1970s, the Scottish artist Rory McEwen painted several pieces he called True Facts from Nature. Like most of his work they are botanical subjects, sharply painted in watercolour on vellum . . .

What happens at Cannes

Daniella Shreir

10 July 2025

Le Festival de Cannes​ was inaugurated in 1939 to coincide with – and compete with – the Venice Film Festival. The previous year, Leni Riefenstahl had been awarded the Mussolini Cup for Olympia . . .

Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind

Anne Carson, 6 March 2025

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me.

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Picasso and Tragedy

T.J. Clark, 17 August 2017

Perhaps, then – though the thought is a grim one – we turn to Guernica with a kind of nostalgia. Suffering and horror were once this large. They were dreadful, but they had a tragic dimension.

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Swoonatra

Ian Penman, 2 July 2015

Sinatra’s sexual charge was like his song: underplayed, tinged with unflappable cool picked up second-hand in the shady cloisters of jazz.

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Is Wagner bad for us?

Nicholas Spice, 11 April 2013

Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.

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At the End of My Pencil

Bridget Riley, 8 October 2009

As I drew, things began to change. Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated. I continued, I went on drawing; I pushed ahead, both intuitively and consciously. The squares began to lose their original form.

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It’s a playground: Kiarostami et Compagnie

Gilberto Perez, 27 June 2002

A photograph of Abbas Kiarostami in Hamid Dabashi’s book shows him crouching over a frying pan that has two eggs in it. Beside him, and like him focused on the eggs, is the original movie camera invented by Lumière.

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Noovs’ hoovs in the trough

Angela Carter, 24 January 1985

The true foodie knows there is something not quite ... about a coconut kirsch roulade as a concept. It is just a bit ... just a bit Streatham. Its vowels are subtly wrong. It is probably related to a Black Forest gâteau.

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The Raphael Question

Lawrence Gowing, 15 March 1984

When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...

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Dressing and Undressing

Anita Brookner, 15 April 1982

Fashion,​ according to Baudelaire, is a moral affair. It is, more specifically, the obligation laid upon a woman to transform herself, outwardly and visibly, into a work of art, or, at the very...

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Sinnermen

Niela Orr, 26 June 2025

Ryan Coogler’s​ horror movie Sinners was conceived and filmed before Trump’s re-election, but part of its premise – that the club, a sign of progress in a deeply violent place, can only exist for...

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At White Cube: On Richard Hunt

Gazelle Mba, 26 June 2025

Metal was the material of the age, and Richard Hunt animated it. Now his sculptures speak not to the possibilities and contradictions of industrial expansion but to its decline, not to freedom as movement...

Read more about At White Cube: On Richard Hunt

At the Pompidou: ‘Paris Noir’

Adam Shatz, 26 June 2025

Richard Wright considered Paris a ‘city of refuge’. The city served as both sanctuary and training ground for some of America’s most important post-war black visual artists – artists whose auction...

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In​ her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene was one of the best-paid women in New York City. As J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she criss-crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of rare manuscripts to add to...

Read more about Why waste time hot airing? The Best-Paid Woman in NYC

Ranting Cassandras: Refugee Artists

Jonathan Meades, 26 June 2025

During the 1930s and into the war years, the Mail’s readers regarded refugees as ‘a series of ranting Cassandras dropped in English suburbia, warning of imminent catastrophes that were impossible to...

Read more about Ranting Cassandras: Refugee Artists

The Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo became the Royal Museum of Central Africa after Brussels choked back its fury and granted independence to Congo in 1960. Whatever it was called, it was a place where...

Read more about Paths to Restitution: Leopold’s Legacy

Pinstriped Tycoon: Siege Art

Hal Foster, 5 June 2025

To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the circumstances of its creation, its ‘historicity’, and to what extent does its significance...

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At the Movies: ‘Riefenstahl’

Michael Wood, 5 June 2025

‘I wanted to understand the figure of Riefenstahl in her development,’ Andres Veiel says, ‘without exculpating her in the process. Wanting to understand a person is not the same as looking at them...

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Sienese painters adopted forms so distinct from those of their better-known Florentine neighbours that their work was not always appreciated for its idiosyncratic qualities. There is no single-point perspective,...

Read more about At the National Gallery: Painting in Siena

At the Miho Museum: Habits of Seeing

Rosemary Hill, 22 May 2025

A visit to the Miho Museum has none of the razzmatazz of the Met or the Louvre. There are no queues or crowds. From the museum’s entrance hall, the original sanctuary and the bell tower, which chimes...

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Terrence Malick​ is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival appearances; he doesn’t feed us stories of what he was doing and why. He has perplexed...

Read more about Cool Tricking: Terrence Malick melts away

Victor Hugo​ was excessive, in life as in literature. Cocteau said that ‘Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ The critic and gardener Alphonse Karr wondered: ‘What was the...

Read more about At the Royal Academy: Victor Hugo’s Drawings

Often thoughtless about other people, Mondrian was also thoughtless about – or uninterested in – himself. His ego was as stripped back as his style. He wore a business suit in public and disliked artists...

Read more about R-r-r-r-r-uh-h. Huh! Pang: Mondrian goes dancing

At Crufts

Rosa Lyster, 22 May 2025

Here, in an arena where the Sugababes recently performed, is a crowd bursting into applause as a spaniel steadfastly ignores a rabbit decoy streaking across the astroturf. Here are the genial announcers...

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At the Barbican: On Noah Davis

Emily LaBarge, 8 May 2025

Noah Davis’s work is distinguished by a revelry and a commitment to the figures he brings into his image world. There are few non-Black subjects here. That in itself was a political choice, as well as...

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At the Movies: ‘La Haine’

Michael Wood, 8 May 2025

‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in the...

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Diary: Whitney lives!

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 May 2025

I had come along in the course of my duties as a hopeless necromantic. I don’t think I have ever believed that pop stars and movie stars actually die – death becomes them, and true legends have a tendency...

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We are so used to being photographed, at all times of day, in every stage and aspect of life, that it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have your picture taken for the first time.  The apparent...

Read more about The Face You Put On: Victorian Snapshots

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