Alone with Charles I's treasures

It hardly seems now that it happened, but for the last quarter of an hour of Tuesday's Private View of Charles I: King and Collector at the Royal Academy of Arts, some of the greatest paintings in the world were available to see with no-one else in the rooms. The above, of course, is Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar, shipped to England from the Gonzaga Collection in 1630, which you could usually see in Hampton Court Palace, but not, of course, like this. Even when I first walked round, there was still plenty of opportunity to get close to the pictures - the clusters of mostly suited gentlemen weren't exactly crowding them out.

But maybe I'm being a bit childish in my delight. The main thing to say is that this must currently be the greatest collection of paintings, sculptures and miniatures on display in the UK apart from the one in the National Gallery, even if it only takes us, for the most part, from the Renaissance up to the 1640s. It has been not entirely jokingly suggested that there should be a portrait of Cromwell here too, without whose intervention and breaking-up of the collection - a Titian Cromwell gave to a plumber is going on show in Sotheby's New York prior to sale - a good many of these masterpieces would have been lost in the Whitehall Palace fire.

Even Room I, 'Artists and Agents', has one gasping. The agents are on the left wall, the court artists on the right in three magnificent self portraits by Rubens, Van Dyck - the adorable one with the sunflower - and Daniel Mytens (also good in this one, by the way).

The bust of Charles dead-centre is thought to be a copy of the one by Bernini lost in the Whitehall fire. It allows for what I hope is interesting composition among the few photos I took (I asked a warden if I was allowed to photograph without flash, and he genially replied  'you can photograph any way you wish, for this one night only'). For I'm assuming that the usual rendering of Van Dyck's Carolingian Trinity will normally be seen, as it is in the exhibition's keynote image, by itself. Fascinatingly, it was sent by Van Dyck to Bernini in Rome in 1636.

The straightforward photos of the paintings here, of course, are not mine - I wanted to show the Van Dyck at closer quarters.

Room II has the National Gallery's Correggio Venus, Cupid and Mercury alongside the National Gallery of Scotland's Veronese Mars, Venus and Cupid side by side, plus the grand Rubens of Venus protecting Pax from Mars (also National Gallery) dead centre.

Then come the Mantegnas in the biggest room and a stunning line-up of Holbein portraits in Room IV including one of my favourites, of Robert Cheseman with a falcon, from the Mauritshuis.

A miniature gem from the Frick, Bruegel the Elder's Three Soldiers, hangs on the opposite wall.

The three Titians side by side in Room V are, for me, the most staggering in the exhibition. Here are the two I'd take if I had a big enough palace to hang them in, the Prado painting of Alfonso d'Avalos, Marchese del Vasto, Francesco d'Avalos, addressing his troops, which has to be seen in the flesh for its grandeur and brilliance, and the Louvre Supper at Emmaus, usually overlooked in Paris because it shares a room with the Mona Lisa.

The compassionate risen Christ here is one of the most moving imaginings I've seen, if not the most moving. And the fabric colours, the general gentle hue, also amaze. The superabundance of Royal portraits in the next room are very fabric-, as in silk-, conscious, too. I remember the portrait of Henrietta Maria always took my childish fancy in the PG Tips card series Costumes through the Ages. The 'Greate Peece' of 1632 hung prominently in Whitehall Palace is the grandest of the set.

To balance the Titians, at not so much lower a level of quality, Tintoretto's Esther before Ahasuerus is flanked by two very fine Bassanos in Room VII.

Room VIII is fascinating if a little odd - those Orazio Gentileschis with their waxy but modern-looking figures - and Cristofano Allori's Judith with the Head of Holofernes leaps out.

Then we're in the Whitehall Palace cabinet of smaller paintings, with more Holbein paintings and some of those extraordinary portraits in black and coloured chalks, bronzes, Hilliard miniatures and the Roman glass-backed sardonyx portrait of Claudius.

From small to great, and tapestries of the Raphael Acts of the Apostles, woven at Mortlake from seven of the cartoons purchased in 1623 from Genoa by Sir Francis Crane. These ones from Paris  complement the ones in the V&A.

The Central Hall has a brilliant assemblage of Charles on horseback - one Van Dyck with which we're very familiar as National Gallery visitors, others less so - while the final room, where the curator was being filmed when I saw it, takes us to later achievements of Van Dyck and Rubens in England; the former's Cupid and Psyche offers a last fling.

There. I feel breathless just going superficially through it. And as a nice coda, I got to press the flesh and feel the feathery dress of Grayson Perry. Brexit, he said, is the gift that keeps on giving for artists railing against it (I wish I hadn't known that two of our artistic national treasures are in favour of it). I told him how tickled I'd been by the display of his costumes, Making Himself Claire, in the Walker Art Gallery on my visit to Liverpool back in November (just before I went off to the afternoon performance of Verdi's Falstaff with Bryn Terfel and Vasily Petrenko conducting at the Liverpool Philharmonic).

He hadn't been. I mentioned the Post-It notes pictured here

and he said that if only one child became an artist as a result of having been to a gallery, it had to be worth it, didn't it?

Since I now realise I didn't get to blog about my afternoon in Liverpool, it's worth noting that the Walker has some very fine British paintings as the core of its collection. Stubbs, of course

and  Gainsborough,

all handsomely hung in the recent revamp. Not so sure, much as I admire her in principle, about Turner Prize Winner Lubaina Himid's cut out slaves, part of the installation Naming the Money, hogging some of the limelight from Hogarth's swagger portrait of Garrick as Richard III.

but the parallel between wealthy patrons and slaves is well made. Anyway, I feel that old art-hunger coming on. Sophie has proposed that we go and look at the Dante-quoting frame for Ari Scheffer's Francesca and Paolo at the Wallace, and I have to catch the Kabakov installations at Tate Modern before the show closes on Sunday.

Serpottiana

Giacomo Serpotta (1662-1732), stuccatoro eccellentissimo, is the pretext for my last and long overdue excursion into a Palermitan old-town quarter. I'm not even sure if two of the oratories on which he worked his stucco magic are even strictly within the bounds of La Vucciria, once celebrated for its market (less so now, I was told by our masterchef hostess Nicoletta Lanza Tomasi, who prefers to shop in the Capo and the Ballarò). A third, which tells a sorry tale, certainly isn't. The Oratory of San Lorenzo sits alongside the monuments-rich church of San Francesco near the Piazza Marina.

In that atmospheric quarter, the Antica Focacceria San Francesco faces the church in a little square. Sadly neither that nor its nearby gelateria were  open for business, but may have been so by the time Easter arrived, to judge from the preparations within.

The church has splendid Romanesque decoration in the arch beneath its rose window

and has been mostly de-Baroqued within,

one chapel to the right of the presbytery excepted.

Among its side chapels is elaborate early Renaissance work - not so common in this city - by Francesco Laurana. I liked the air of modest piety, with plenty of Easter week worshippers at prayer. But the greater treasures, or what's left of them, are within the oratory next door, approached by an attractively planted courtyard.

The only major Caravaggio in town, a Nativity with Saints Lawrence and Francis above the altar, was stolen in 1969 along with many of the figures in the fascinating little stucco theatres which seem to have been a speciality of Serpotta, his brother and his son. No doubt the painting sits in the house, or vault, of some Palermitan mafioso.

The restoration took place in 2003, funded like work on the other oratories by the baroque expert who loved his Serpotta, Anglo-American Donald Garstang. He did more than anyone to make sure that Palermo honoured its finest artist since the Normans. I'm reliant on a wiki-image for the interior shot, since this is the only oratory where photography isn't permitted, and the details that follow come from the only postcard on sale.

Fortunately the stucco masterpiece of the building, Serpotta's amazing depiction of St Lawrence on the gridiron, remains intact on the west wall, and repays close study.

The Serpotta trail in La Vucciria begins behind the grandiose, mafia-favoured church of San Domenico - closed all day on our visit - in the church's lavish Oratorio del Rosario. Here the altarpiece Meisterwerk, Van Dyck's Assumption, remains intact

and is decked around, in Serpotta's work of 1710-17, with statues of the allegorical Virtues supposedly modelled on society ladies, like Justice with raised sword

The Virtues are interspersed with the Mysteries of the Rosary (not being a good Catholic boy, I'm largely ignorant of those). Some of the paintings come close to the Van Dyck in quality.

I'm not a great fan of rococo excess, but Serpotta's putti who assist the noble dames certainly have character. This one is bizarrely tonsured as a monk

while another carries a lamb aloft to Purity

and in the presbytery another plays a bassoon.

Nearby Santa Maria in Valverde was covered in the kind of baroque marbles we'd admired in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in the Capo, but as a service was being conducted for the small Romanian community, we carried on along the street to the Oratory of Santa Cita (Zita). The church, reached by a small connecting cloister with another specimen of the Brazilian Chorisia I'd admired in the botanical gardens,

seems to have been as badly damaged in the Second World War as the neighbouring Palazzo Lampedusa, our friend Giuseppe Tomasi's pride and joy which he was forced to abandon for Via Butera 28. The piano nobile passageway still has some very beautiful floral Sicilian tiling

but the oratory's the thing, Serpotta's most imposing achievement, dating from 1685-90: the whole of the west wall is covered in theatres (see up top), at the centre of which is a depiction of the Battle of Lepanto. The Oratory was dedicated to the Virgin in the 16th century for her 'intervention' in said battle.

The theatre scenes around it here include the road to Calvary

and a well-composed Flagellation

while the flanking figures are just as remarkable, including the boys below the battle scene

and a fine figure of a man.

Again, the putti are remarkable, if you care for that sort of thing (J decidedly didn't, and I'd have preferred more of the above). These two struggle manfully, if that's the right word, with a lion in the presbytery.

The rain of our only squally day, that ultima colpa della coda dell'inverno, as the paper put it, which made travelling on to our agriturismo outside Castelbuono that afternoon somewhat fraught, was intensifying. So we took a quick walk around the scaffolded Palazzo Lampedusa, passed the Vincenzo Bellini Conservatory of Music, popped in to the well restored renaissance church of San Giorgio dei Genovesi to see a fine Giordano of the Madonna of the Rosary, and headed up to the main drag to buy provisions for our trip outside Palermo. Here, my debt to an unforgettable week isn't quite paid: Monreale, Cefalù and Castelbuono have yet to be honoured. Meanwhile, I continue to disturb myself post-Wozzeck with John Dickie's indignation-fuelled study of the Sicilian mafia, Cosa Nostra.