Arts Reviews

Michael Boyd’s Complete Works festival may not have over-garlanded Stratford with bunting and flags, but it’s made the town a much more buzzy place. Boyd is not only bringing back some of the best Shakespeareans of the older generation — including Patrick Stewart as Antony and Prospero, and Ian McKellen as Lear — but also nurturing a wonderfully talented younger generation. Tamsin Greig and Joseph Millson light up the stage as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado, both starring also in King John alongside Richard McCabe’s arresting performance in the title role. For Much Ado, director Marianne Elliott goes to the pre-Castro Cuba of the 1950s, opening the way for

‘All gilt and beshit’. That was Hogarth’s crisp verdict on French interiors when he visited Paris in 1748. As an image it is hard to fault, conjuring up gilded boiseries and the bird-droppings of rococo plasterwork. ‘In the streets [of Paris],’ the eye-witness report continued, ‘he was often clamorously rude.’ Hogarth sounds like a modern-day football fan. And he characterised the French in his pictures, if not as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, then as scrawny frog- and fish-fed skeletons, victims alike of a tyrannical monarchy and a grasping Roman Catholic Church. In contrast, as a proud member of the Society of Beef Steaks (motto, ‘Beef and Liberty!’; song, ‘O The Roast

Alasdair Palmer talks to the French artist who has discovered the secret of the Master’s technique How did he do it? Among the many great unanswered questions about Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’, that has long been one of the most puzzling. Part of the perennial appeal of the ‘Mona Lisa’, and one reason why, today, there is a perpetual crowd in front of it in the gallery in the Louvre where it sits, protected by thick glass, is that it does not seem possible that the ‘Mona Lisa’ was executed by a human hand. The amazingly fine gradations from dark to light, the completely smooth flesh tones imperceptibly changing so as to create the impression of

The best-known exchange between artist and royalty must be George VI’s celebrated remark to John Piper, who had been painting the castle and surrounding parkland at Windsor: ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather.’ It was the early 1940s, and Piper had invested his watercolours with a brooding quality he no doubt thought appropriate to the mood of the times, and which also echoed his own essentially Romantic vision. The project was a commission from Queen Elizabeth, and extended to 26 views, a rare feat of modern topography that also turned out to be good art. But even the Queen thought Piper’s lowering skies a little