Who is your favourite artist and why?
I am a hopeless romantic and tend to think of the great Italians like Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Titian. An author of ours, Joanna Moorhead, has discovered the work of Plautilla Nelli, a renaissance woman painting in Italy during the 16th century, which has opened up a whole new area of female painters of that period to discover and explore. I also love the great Romantics — the pre-Raphaelites like John Singer Sargent, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais. Nevertheless, how can one ignore those formative years of Pablo Picasso when visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona?
Do you have a favourite artwork and why is it meaningful to you?
One of the great treasures of the Vatican City, The Sistine Chapel. It was the iconic image of Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show, which combined high art and popular culture for everybody. Every week for as long as I can remember, Michelangelo’s hand of God would appear across the television to Julian Lloyd Webber’s variation of Paganini’s ’24th Caprice’ and it would mark the beginning of the week with such a rush and burst of culture, knowledge, and passion.
Any exhibitions you have seen recently that you really enjoyed?
The Cezanne exhibition at the Tate Modern. It is a reminder that we are just so lucky to have the galleries we have. And it is unmissable because it showcases some paintings that have never been seen before in Britain.
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