Frescoes

Where did the Renaissance begin? There has been an official answer to that question since 1550, the date that Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists was first published. According to this version, it all began in Florence and the first painter in the long line that ended with Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo was named Cimabue. But here’s another suggestion: you could just as well try looking in the rolling hills of Serbia. My wife and I went travelling there earlier this year. For a couple of nights we stayed in the town of Novi Pazar in the south-east of the country. From the religious point of view this town is

‘The World’s Most Lavish Art Book’ is a pretty big claim, but when two men lugged it through my front door I conceded that The Sistine Chapel is one monster tome. Three, actually. Three hardback volumes, each two feet-tall, each weighing nearly two stone, each in its own calico bag, comprising of digitally perfect photographic recreations of the artwork in the 15th-century chapel. The first volume deals with the masterpieces along the walls, while volumes two and three are a quasi-Greatest Hits, one covering the Sistine ceiling and one the ‘Last Judgment’, both of course by Michelangelo and one of the most famous art sequences on the planet. Lavish, yes,