Portraits were used to further friendships – and as networking opportunities – in Enlightenment France
Two new books offer complementary perspectives – the macro and the micro – on the modern museum
An exhibition examining Black experience in America is powerful if piecemeal – and is necessarily exhausting
The Gardner Museum heist hasn’t been solved in 30 years – and it’s perfect fodder for a true crime documentary
As a new documentary reveals, the Scottish painter braved wind, rain and Arctic ice in search of his 'rough truth'
Francis Lee’s film plays fast and loose with Mary Anning’s life – but at least it digs the great geologist out of historical obscurity
Ralph Beyer’s idiosyncratic letter-cutting isn’t to everyone’s taste but there’s no denying its power
Paintings from the north-west Indian city of Udaipur present life at court as a royal playground
With human contact all but banned, an exhibition about touch was always going to provoke mixed feelings
A new graphic novel offers a fresh take on the museum heist genre – if you can bear its regressive sexual politics, that is
The knavery and folly of the rarefied art world are writ large in a documentary that picks over the Knoedler forgery scandal
Photographers and film-makers have long added colour to their images – but does the current craze for colourisation create a false impression of olden times?
A display of interwar posters is a reminder of that utopian moment when artists believed they could invent a new world
European paintings still occupy prime real estate on Fifth Avenue – but a redisplay offers fresh insight into the Met’s hallowed holdings
For millennia, marble was taken to be a gleaming reflection of the heavens – and, in Fabio Barry’s new book, it regains its divine mysteries
An ambitious new book scrutinises the production of ‘white gold’ in Europe – from its early alchemical mysteries to your everyday crockery
Warburg brought together Greek gods and golfers, antiquities and airships – and in reconstruction, his puzzling arrangements of images are as suggestive as ever
A new biography of Goya puts paid to the romantic fiction that the Spanish master ended his days isolated and insane
The Torlonia marbles make for the greatest private collection of Roman antiquities in existence – and they're finally on view to the public
Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan shine in the story of the Sutton Hoo discovery
Federico Zuccari’s illustrations of the Divine Comedy have seldom been shown. But the Uffizi has put them online – and Dante’s poem has never looked better
The crotchety cult legend is giving art lessons on TV – and it’s all surprisingly charming
Giovanni Morelli was a complex character, as attentive to the state of the Italian nation as he was to its art
Without Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion models, science-fiction films wouldn't look like they do today
