This solid gold exhibition celebrates the astonishing period 1300-1350 in the Italian city of Siena, which matched opulence, spirituality and extravagance

Politics

Before the Black Death devastated Siena, the city thrummed with energy, expressed in art and architecture designed to dazzle its audience – and which still astonishes 800 years laterIf you want to know the moment of a medieval Italian city’s greatest prosperity, look at the year it began work on its cathedral. In Siena, the magic year was 1226, the start of some 85 years of construction of the duomo, a remarkable gothic structure with an intricately complex, creamy pink facade and stripy, black-and-white campanile. “The scale of ambition is difficult to put into words,” says Laura Llewellyn, one of the curators of The Rise of Painting, the National Gallery’s new exhibition of Sienese art. “The extravagance of it: to appreciate it you need to unknow and unlearn later buildings like the duomos in Florence and St Peter’s in Rome.”But by the 1350s, Siena’s most glorious years in the raging Tuscan sun would be as good as over. After decades of rapid artistic transformation – a half centu...

Politics

Exclusive: Art historian points to ‘bad craftsmanship’ in 17th-century work entitled Samson and Delilah Doubts about whether Peter Paul Rubens painted the Samson and Delilah picture in the National Gallery have been revived by new evidence.Forty-five years after it was bought for a then record price, it is being dismissed as a 20th-century copy of a long-lost painting by the 17th-century Flemish master. Continue reading...

Politics

National Portrait Gallery, LondonThe style monthly was loud, left-field and unabashedly British. The 200 images from 50 photographers on show reflect its furious energy and explosive creative couplings SPEED SEX GORE AGGRO promised a 1998 cover of the Face. The cover star was Alexander McQueen, looking like a revenant with blanched white skin and blood-red eyes. “He wanted to express the idea of the burning rage felt by Joan of Arc being burned at the stake,” the photographer Nick Knight recalls.In its initial run between 1980 and 2004, the cult style magazine served this kind of madness every month to its avid young readers. The Face even managed to make David Beckham dirty, with soy sauce and coffee dribbling down his abs. This exhibition is suitably splashy, and with more than 200 photographs by 80 photographers it convincingly demonstrates the publication’s influence and audacity. It is a riotous romp through two decades of British fashion, from New Romantics to Gothic Romantics...

Culture

This collection from Courtauld contemporary Oskar Reinhart complements the gallery perfectly

Events

Sidney Nolan’s paintings of a notorious bushranger are national treasures. Great art should spark debateDespite the perceived outrage at Khaled Sabsabi’s depiction of Hassan Nasrallah in his 2007 work You, Australian art has long made subjects of outlaws and questionable figures. And it is all the richer for it.On Thursday the shadow arts minister and self-described defender of free speech Claire Chandler asked Senator Penny Wong:Why is the Albanese government allowing a person who highlights a terrorist leader in his artwork to represent Australia on the international stage at the Venice Biennale?I agree with you that any glorification of the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah is inappropriate. Continue reading...

Politics