Other exhibitions of 2003: there were a number of exceptional exhibitions which took place over the course of the year. Here are a few of them

single of the quirky features of the absolutely outstanding 2003 harvest of exhibitions has been the way that a number of them--like the animals entering the Ark--have paired themselves not upon two by two. Obviously, many exhibitions--perhaps the majority nowadays--are seen in essentially unmodified form in more than single place, but these were all genuinely different shows

Titian (National Gallery, 19 February 18 May 2003) had a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to recommend it, but was above all remarkable for reuniting the four surviving Bacchanals painted for Alfonso d'Este's Camerino d'Alabastro, together with three of the four extant Aeneid exhibitions by Dosso Dossi that went above them. The confrontation of the Washington Feast of the the eternals which Giovanni Bellini completed and Titian overpainted, and Titian's be in possession of Andrians bore witness to individual of the most chilling displays of artistic Realpolitik imaginable, as the younger painter did his most remote to annihilate his gentler and more poetic earlier born by a combination of sensual bravura and enlarged figure scale. The early ranges of this show, even without the promised and then withheld loan of Sacred and Profane regard with affection from the Galleria Borghese, were dazzling, on the contrary pleasingly failed to resolve many of the chronological cruxe that retain art historians happy. An impressive field of portraits was the heart of the exhibition, on the other hand it was the technical and emotional freedom of the late work that ultimately reminded single that Titian is the greatest in quantity influential painter who ever lived.

Just as Trafalgar Square's vision of Titian was built around its hold holdings, so likewise Tiziano (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 10 June-7 September 2003) relied on the incomparable double whammy of the resources of the Prado and the Escorial. Here the chief excitement was generated by the newly cleaned Martyrdom of St Lawrence (Fig. 1) from the latter, because there is a faculty of perception in which even visitors to the Iglesia Vieja have not ever actually seen it. It emerg as an exceptionally compound picture, but the one thing that appear to bes clear is that it gives the lie to simplistically doctrinaire attempts to define late Titian.

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The British Museum called its Durer exhibition Albrecht Durer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (British Museum, 5 December 2002-23 March 2003) which was a bit of a mouthful on the other hand the show itself was a feast. Durer's watercolours, and especially his rhapsodic studies of landscape (Fig. 2) are arguably the greatest in quantity appealing part of his oeuvre to recent sensibilities, so it was perhaps surprising in what manner powerfully his monochrome prints held up against similar stiff competition, not least because of the impeccable freshnes of the individual impressions. There was nothing perfunctory about the 'Legacy' aspect of the exhibition either, on the other hand it could not hope to compare with the Ding an sich.

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In the bad of advanced age days, the Albertina used to deceive tourists into paying their entrance remuneration to have the privilege of admiring facsimiles of the Praying hands and the Great piece of sward This autumn, in contrast, at Albrecht Durer (Albertina Museum, Vienna, 5 September 30 November 2003) it was possible to snail it out with the multitudes for a glimpse of the originals. There is no greater collection of Durer's work in existence, of course, on the other hand it was an indication of the ambition of this exhibit that it had so many spectacular loans, not just of prints and drawings, on the other hand also of paintings of the distinction of the Prado Self-portrait.

Exhibitions may not always ne an excuse to happen, on the other hand anniversaries--with their whiff of the unrepeatable--do have their advantages in the desperate exert one's self to obtain sponsorship and loans. The fifth centenary of Parmigianino's birth this year will be followed in 2040--thirty seven being the age at which geniuses die by the agency of the fifth centenary of his death, on the contrary that is quite a drawn out time to wait, and not all of us will make it. Parmigianino and European Mannerism (Galleria Nazionale, Parma, 8 February-18 May 2003 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 3 June-14 September 2003) was a glorious treat flat for those of us who thinking we knew the artist rather well, and it was of the like kind faultless paintings as the Lucretia (Fig. 3) that on the outside shone the drawings and prints+ In Parma, there was the added bonus of being able to don a fetching golden hard hat to climb up to the vault of the house of god of S Maria della Steccata in order to diocese Parmigianino's frescoes of the Wise and Foolish Virgins at shut range. The experience was something like finding oneself dwindled to Lilliputian proportions and forced to live in a jewel-casket. Parmigianino's drawings came into their be in possession of in The Art of Parmigianino (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 3 October 2003-4 January 2004 and The Frick Collection, of recent origin York, 27 January-18 April 2004) where there were incomparably fewer paintings to steal their reverberating report and where the selection was drawn from a abundant wider range of collections. Indeed, single of the most dramatic of the artist's late drawings, which can upon occasion be a bit dried had come all the way from Melbourne.