Azure skies and inhuman horrors: Titian's Poesie

Beneath the ground-lapis blue, a man catches a goddess at her toilet and will be transformed into a stag, to be ripped apart by his own hounds, while women are penetrated by a shower of gold (some think that's lovely, I'd still call it rape), chained to a rock to be devoured by a sea-monster until a hero arrives, carried off in a 'rape' by Jupiter/Zeus in bull form.  There's still such sensuousnss and beauty in some of Titian's richest canvases for Philip II, who clearly wanted quite a lot of female flesh. The series is a counterpart to the earlier canvases Titian painted for Alfonso d'Este's Camerino. Back in 2003, we doubted if the National Gallery could ever excel itself in its reuniting of the three canvases Bacchus and Ariadne - of course one of the glories of the NG's collection - The Andrians and The Worship of Venus from the Prado; plus Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods with additions by Titian, courtesy of Washington's National Gallery of Art). But it just has, in another once-in-a-lifetime (or once-ever). All six paintings which may never have graced a single palace room of Philip's are in one splendid gallery, with the earlier masterpiece plus others visible beyond.

Actually there are seven, and I'm a bit confused as to which is the odd one out: the late Death of Actaeon with its very free brushwork, another National Gallery fixture, or Danae from Apsley House? There's also a lot of confusion around whether this is the most 'real' of the many versions, but I'll take it from my great pal Claudia Pritchard, writing in The New European with splendid reproductions gracing her article, that it is, since she's read the catalogue and I haven't. Certainly looks much better for the clean, though apparently it's not the full canvas.

My own pics will have told you that I did get to see the miracle - in fact, on the last day before the National Gallery closed indefinitely, 18 March. I cycled into town and out; J took the tube.Most rooms were empty and we weren't expecting many folk in the exhibition, but there were. Not so many as to make it impossible to avoid the two-metre distancing which we were already taking on board then. I nearly forgot in the thrill (unanticipated, because I hadn't done my homewortk) of seeing the one I'd never encountered 'live' before, The Rape of Europa (1560-2), normally to be seen in the neo-Renaissance setting of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

The eye first hits on the best azure sky of the lot - valuable crushed lapis lazuli the pigment, of course - and then to the pink drape that Europe clutches as the bull spirits her away from the shore. I didn't know this when I visited, but the painting had a major restoration in Boston; our friend Jill, picture restorer at the NG, spent three blissful days at the Museum where she was able to see work in progress (for her own most remarkable recent work, see the post on the Mantegna-Bellini exhibition). The sea-life along the bottom part of the picture is wonderful when you get up close, too. It couldn't be more of a contras to the sombre hues of The Death of Actaeon.

I like it that the picture, given one of the two widest unbroken walls to itself, is complemented by the most damaged work of the seven, the earlier (1554-60) Perseus and Andromeda, always a welcome site in the sumptuously revamped long gallery of the Wallace Collection.

We did have an earlier chance to see the two great mythologies with obvious symmetries markig them out to be hung alongside each other, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, before they were rotated between the National Galleries of Scotland and London, but there was fresh cause to wonder here.

And finally, the original Venus and Adonis (on the right below and up top) is, of course, infinitely superior to the National Gallery copy, which can be seen next door.

We've seen the perspective down to the top Titians with Parmigianinos to the left; here's another great masterpiece, The Vedramin Family venerating a Relic of the True Cross (1540-5, possibly reworked in 1555), hanging on the wall the other side of the exhibition room next to the late Tribute Money.

We also wanted to pay homage to Holbein as J had read, and I had just embarked on, the final instalment of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. In which Master Hans appears again to work on the quadruple full-length portrait mural for Whitehall Palace; destroyed, but here was half of it in cartoon form (Henrys VIII and VII), on loan from the National Portrait Gallery while it undergoes renovation.

Well, all galleries are shut now; who knows when they might reopen? But imagination and a good collection of art books at home are sustaing us now. As for Mantel's crowning glory, what a masterpiece, and praise be to this period for the time to take over savouring it. I'm glad The Arts Desk was patient with my slow reading of it; this is the result.

Outside the Gallery, central London felt all wrong. Some have rejoiced in the empty spaces, and Trafalgar Square as a landscape with few figures is certainly unusual,

but the West End is made to teem with life; never again will I curse those crowded narrow pavements of St Martin's Lane and Charing Cross Road. There were still a few tourists about - the Chinese were the first we saw to wear facemasks -

and 'pavement artists' had chalked in expectation of offerings - not great art, of course, yet topical - but were nowhere to be seen.

We quickly gave up; I had a coffee and a bun in Ole & Steen - handwash at the door and on the counters, all cakes carefully covered - and then cycled home. Haven't been into the centre of town since then, and not been on anything more than two wheels for seven weeks. Oddly, I don't mind for now. And the distancing must be maintained for a good while yet, though our disastrous government has once sent out weak signals which will up the death count again.

A Leonardo dozen, Mantegna, Bellini, Lotto

We, as in the British, have been well served by the Royal Collection's holding of more than 500 sheets of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci; I well remember a Hayward Gallery exhibition of 88 back in 1979. 2019 is the Big Year, five centuries after Leonardo's death, so the big show at the Queen's Gallery in the summer will include nearly 200.

Before that, the more interesting idea to display 12 drawings in each of 12 regional galleries and museums, and for free, has been realised with a great deal of care to lend each institution a representative selection of Leonardo's work in the study of human figures, anatomy, animals, topography, inventions across a lifetime. In later years he foresook painting, and who can be that sorry? I know his canvases are masterpieces in the art of chiaroscuro, but - and this is my blind spot - I find the shadowing and the colours we now have make many of his figures look waxy. The only one I personally love is the Lady with an Ermine in Cracow's Czartoryski Museum.

Whereas my Birmingham experience last month, when I travelled up to catch Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conduct the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Lithuanian composer Čiurlionis's The Sea and some of Grieg's incidental music for Ibsen's Peer Gynt, struck me with the force of revelation. I decided to take a lunchtime train and see if I could get to see the 12 drawings on display in the city Museum and Art Gallery (which I already know fairly well, and now like the Pre-Raphaelites much less than I did in my callow youth). That meant queueing for about half an hour, in lively company, before being admitted in to a single room where the admissions control meant you could get to see everything in close-up (especially useful for me when I took my thick-lensed specs off). I'm not going to illustrate them all, but want to select a few that especially struck me.

Birmingham was especially lucky to get Leonardo's most beautifully-executed large-scale map, of the area around the long marshy lake that used to occupy the Valdichiana in southern Tuscany. The reason for this highly finished work isn't clear; it may have something to do with Leonardo's plans for the Arno canal (the Canale Maestro along the length of the Valdichiana did not begin until 50 years later). But the area covered is much larger, and includes Siena in the lower centre, nicely detailed.

Two earlier works from the previous decade, the 1490s, show Leonardo's habit of including diverse studies on the same sheet of paper. The one illustrated up top started with geometrical shapes before going on to include a rearing horse and rider, an old man in profile, a standing warrior, a study for a screw press and nature studies including a blade of grass and a cumulus cloud. Below is a study for the head of St James in the Last Supper (which I still have to go and see; on various occasions when I was in Milan it wasn't viewable) in red chalk and architectural sketches, in pen and ink, for modifications to the Castello Sforzesco.

The red chalk studies I love the best include this magical stand of trees

with a single tree illustrated on the other side of the sheet (Birmingham have made sure you can see both sides; only the group is illustrated in the splendid and very cheap catalogue for the 200, excellently annotated by Martin Clayton).

In later years Leonardo's understanding of anatomy was enriched by human dissections. Birmingham's specimen shows the bones, muscles and tendons of the hand.

A close-up shows the meticulous mirror-writing developed for practical reasons by the left-handed artist.

It's especially fascinating that in his final years Leonardo turned to objective studies of a cataclysmic deluge. Clayton writes eloquently about this:

It is surely not fanciful to see this obsession with death and destruction as the deeply personal expression of an artist nearing his end - an artist who had seen some of his greatest creations unfinished or destroyed before his eyes, and who had a profound sense of the impermanence of all things, even of the earth itself.

These studies seem light years away from the paintings in the first rooms of the National Gallery's stupendous Mantegna and Bellini exhibition, In fact the difference is about six decades: the 'deluge' series dates from Leonardo's last years in France, while Mantegna's Presentation of Christ in the Temple was executed around 1455.

In the first of many instructive direct comparisons, the NG exhibition showed us how close Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini were in the 1450s and early 1460s (Mantegna was Bellini the younger's brother-in-law), Only the central four figures in Bellini's obvious homage are the same (I see Rona Goffen in the big Yale monograph I have thinks this is 'studio of' and possibly even a copy, don't know if that's been discredited since or not).

My favourite gallery in the world was already well equipped to provide the backbone of this show; it even has both artists' treatment of The Agony in the Garden. There was a special fascination for us in that our good friend Jill Dunkerton took us round on a 'friends and family' preview afternoon.  She'd been working on the restoration of Bellini's Death of St Peter Martyr for the past three years, and the difference she'd made was on display for the first time. This is what it looked like before

 and now; you can already see the softer light, the blue sky that's edging towards Titian (the date is about 1509, shortly before Bellini's death).

It's a strange and in many ways horrible picture, though as Jill pointed out, we shouldn't feel too sorry for Peter of Verona's death at the hands of the Cathars he had persecuted as Inquisitor in Lombardy. The tension is between the foreground action and the scenes of everyday rural activity (even though it's more chopping that's going on). The rows of trees that fill the picture height  in all but the top left hand corner, adding to the claustrophobia, are in themselves beautifully painted, though Jill had some work to do here. A help in gauging some of the original colours was the Bellini workshop's treatment of the same theme in the Courtauld Gallery.

A restorer's background knowledge is always immense, and when I asked if the canvas had been cut off on the left, where we see only the rear and the back two legs of a donkey, Jill was able to tell me that Bellini, always inquisitive about his fellow artists, had met with Dürer and been intrigued that he had done exactly the same kind of 'life goes on beyond the picture' effect. Not sure exactly which work she was referring to, but I found this, Dürer's drawing of light horsemen fighting, from 1489, which fits the bill.

I was astonished to find several critics complaining that the exhibition was 'too academic'; is anyone too stupid to appreciate the similarities and differences between Mantegna and Bellini? I do also wonder if anyone departs from the feeling myself and many others have of love for Bellini and immense respect for the more meticulous, spatially conscious Mantegna? So many of Bellini's angels and putti have exquisite faces and wings; the mastery even of a severely damaged painting like the so-called Rimini Pietà is obvious.

And no reproduction can do justice to the lit-from-within quality in possibly my favourite of all Madonna and Childs, with saints Catherine and Mary Magdalen equally exquisite.

It seemed like an embarras de richesse that at more or less the same time, relatively unheralded, the National Gallery had another stunning exhibition, relatively small but with nearly as high a quotient of great paintings, of Lorenzo Lotto. This one was free, the thinking being that visitors wouldn't want to pay twice, but it would have been worth a substantial admission price. Again at Jill's instigation, we were very lucky to see many of these paintings, and to be introduced to a genius I feel a personal stake in, when Bergamo held a big Lotto exhibition back in 1998. There we saw the big altarpieces in town, the intarsie of the Santa Maria Maggiore choirstalls and the frescoes in Trescore Balneario as well as the 50 paintings in the show. A couple of years later we took a Lotto itinerary around the Marche before a walking weekend in the fabulous Sibillini mountains (alas, Castelluccio at the head of the Piano Grande was destroyed in the recent earthquake). The great glory here was the richly-coloured Crucifixion in the pretty but very much working village of Monte San Giusto.

One small place still on the list to visit was Asolo, where an Assumption of the Virgin with Saints Anthony Abbot and Louis of Toulouse (1506) hangs in the Duomo. Now not necessary, because here it was in the second room of the National Gallery exhibition. News to me that the Virgin has the face of Caterina Cornaro, former Queen of Cyprus made Lady of Asolo in the last years of her life.

That apart, the great glory, as in Bergamo (where the painting is normally in the Accademia Carrara), was the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine, with Niccolo Bonghi (1523). It's a shame the picture was damaged not long after painting, allegedly by a French soldier; there should be a landscape through a window in the upper part.

But that still doesn't detract from the tenderness and intimacy of the hands in the central group.

Once again, the Royal Collection comes into play with its famous portrait of Andrea Odoni; the exhibition had done a good job in assembling similar antiquities either side of the painting. But I'm sorry if I whet your appetite; both exhibitions closed some weeks back, and I kick myself for not returning to the Lotto.

Ten years of the 12 Star Gallery

Andrew Logan celebrated the anniversary on 8 December 2015  with mirror portraits, watercolours and, yes, an installation of 12 gold stars, cutting the ribbon above with Head of the European Commission in London Jacqueline Minor and Fenella Fielding, just turned 88 at the time, a name which will mean most to my generation who saw her in Carry on Screaming and other camporama. One person you won't see in any of these photos - mostly taken by Jamie Smith for the Commission, I'll mark mine with a 'DN' - is spouse J, founder and doyen of the 12 Star since its inception, as he prefers to be an unseen eminence grise. He's not even mentioned in the splendid book accompanying the anniversary, and when prised from the back of the crowd during the speechifying said not much more than Albert Herring's 'Thank you....very much' (though of course he could have drummed up a splendid speech had he wanted to put himself forward).

Even so, the gallery was his idea and has hosted exhibitions not just from all the European countries but also, occasionally, further afield, one on average every fortnight. Alternate Tuesdays are fixtures for art-lovers, diplomats and others: all the world is here. My personal favourite of recent months - not, I blush to say, that I've seen them all - was Thomas Ganter and his portraits, rich on every level. First exhibitor back in December 2005 was our Sophie Sarin with a collection of smashed plates, a splendid commentary on the olde worlde wooden cabinets of the original space - actually a former entrance hall - in Storey's Gate. My invitation is rather scrumpled now, but it still sits on a home shelf.

Et voilà la reine de Djenne on the right below with the equally creative Lucy Hannah and Spectator Books Editor Clare Asquith.

No evening is complete without a minor event, and Sophie provided one for me in the pub afterwards. But since she remembers nothing about it, I'll quickly draw a veil over that entertainment and pass on to megastar Maggi Hambling, also a friend now along with her gracious partner Tory Lawrence, who exhibited back in Storey's Gate days. Maggi marked the move to Europe House in Smith Square exactly five years before the present show opened. An exact mid-point, in other words, and a link with Andrew Logan for obvious reasons.

A series of her magnificent North Sea paintings was the theme in 2010.

Alas, by the time I arrived at Europe House on 8 December, Maggi and Tory had left, but this photo opportunity was too good a one for Jamie to miss.

Another friendship we owe to the 12 Star is that of top sculptor and painter Deborah van der Beek, who appeared on the scene with her Ned Kellys and Don Quixotes we now love so much. That launched the warmest of relationships with Deborah, her husband Andrew the serpent-player/chorus master and two of their three fine children (only Bertie, gourmet pizza king of Brighton, we haven't met). J's 50th birthday party in their Lacock house and garden was one of the happiest days of our lives. We spent a very floody but delightful Christmas with them and one of their two sons, Henry, a couple of years back, and we know Theodora (T D) quite well too. Here are mother and daughter with very authentic spirto gentil and fighter for good causes Thierry Alexandre (my pic, so not so sharp, and Deborah's eyes are shut, but it'll do).

Here also, social-diary style, are Thierry with David Souden and Ross Alley (also DN),

our dear old friend Edward Mendelson, retired architect and  very active artist, in front of Derek Jarman - two who were 'out' long before it became easy to be so -

Cressida Bell, on the left with art historian and editor Caroline Bugler

and Cressida's other half Paul Beecham, a work of vintage art in his own right, sharing a quiff with artist Duggie Fields.

The seasonal adornments in front of giant Maria (DN) will have gone down last (Twelfth) night

and soon to leave the building - in this case the National Gallery, possibly my favourite in the world in terms of contents - will be the astounding assemblage of portraits by Goya. Yes, it's every inch as miraculous as people say. How much you can tell both about the person and the artist's attitude to him or her, though some background knowledge is sometimes necessary. Not least is the man himself, represented here with uncomfortable frankness in Self-portrait with Dr Arrieta.

The inscription at the bottom explains all: 'Goya thankful to his friend Arrieta: for the skill and care with which he saved his life during his short and dangerous illness, endured at the end of 1819, at 73 years of age'. Goya lived on for another nine years, and one of the many wonders of this curation is that the last painting happens to be of Goya's grandson, healthy representation of faith in a future beyond his own life.

It's true to say that every portrait is of compelling, if not always supreme artistic, interest. I especially wanted to show the vital pair Bartolomé Sureda y Miserol, who coached Goya in the art of aquatint, and his wife Thérèse Louse, but they're not online. So let's settle for an aristo, the Marquis of Villefranca and Duke of Alba, holding a score of four songs composed by a 'client', Haydn, and leaning on his violin.

Goya's range of subjects and styles is extraordinary; less so in another exhibition I'd been looking forward to so much, a relatively small one devoted to Jean-Etienne Liotard at the Royal Academy. Yes, his portraits, especially in pastel, have a realistic quality at odds with so much in 18th century painting. But I tired of all those stiff nobs in well-executed silks - a feeling of satiety at the costume-parade I also got with the Moroni exhibition, where I'd have given all the noble portaits up for the final image of a humble tailor. Here, for me, the best was first - the self- and family portraits - the gap-toothed grinner of 1770 from Geneva,

the wife and eldest son in black and red chalk with watercolour washes

and the pastel of daughter Marianne holding a doll.

Among the rest, another child stands out: frail Princess Louisa Anne, short-lived daughter of Augusta and Frederick Lewis, Princess and Prince of Wales, in a dress too big for her. And then the still lives, and the virtuosity in trompe-l'oeil is somewhat. But the whole, perhaps, not quite enough.

I visited the Liotard with Edinburgh friend and artist Ruth while she was here for the 12 Star bash

and on that occasion we didn't have time for Ai Weiwei, but I'm glad I saw that show with J on the penultimate day. A price to pay: rooms absolutely jam-packed, young folk photographing everything so that one always felt in the way. But I'm glad Ai's conceptual art is so easily grasped, as the messages are essential ones about China today, using materials embedded in that country's tradition to make strong political points. Ai is a very great man, and an artist with a sometimes deadly sense of humour; that, and the good use of the huge white RA rooms filled with large-scale constructions, made this well worth seeing. The eight 'dead' trees which meet you as you go through the Royal Academy arch on Piccadilly are joined and bolted pieces of the real things brought down from the mountains of southern China and sold in the markets of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province: perhaps the most impressive so far of the many successful courtyard installations.

Among monumental shows, though, it seemed to me that the Anselm Kiefer exhibition - my absolute favourite at the RA along with the 'Citizens and Kings' portraits - had deeper things to say, at least in purely artistic terms.