By T.J. McNamara
The Master's Eye, Five Centuries of European Painting, at the Auckland Art Gallery.
Art history is one of Prince William's chosen fields of study, so it must mean it is "in."
His first course at Edinburgh University will be a foundation study of European art from the Renaissance to the present.
Though he has access to his grandmother's huge collection, the National Gallery of Victoria's cleverly selected paintings, on loan to the Auckland City Gallery, would get him through almost as well.
The show, called The Master's Eye, boasts splendid examples of easel painting in every century from the early Renaissance.
And Will would find a bonus in that the Auckland City Gallery has called on its own collections to set some works in a context and that would be helpful when answering the sort of questions with which art history classes deal.
Coincidentally, Andrew Lloyd Webber, composer of Phantom of the Operaand an avid art collector, has just paid 6.5 million ($21 million) for a painting by John Waterhouse, the highest price paid for an English Victorian painting.
There is a fine Waterhouse in this exhibition. It is a storytelling painting titled Ulysses and the Sirens. The Sirens were those beguiling sea-nymphs whose singing lured mariners to their doom.
The wily Ulysses evaded them by blocking his crew's ears with wax and having himself tied to the mast so that he could not yield to their seductive song.
The work combines Pre-Raphaelite concern for detail with very rich use of paint.
This painting is just one masterpiece in a splendid show that is much more than an academic exercise in art history. The exhibition offers an abundance of delight in colour, atmosphere and detail and a variety of interest in character.
It offers travel through Europe without the visual indigestion that is said to afflict travellers in Europe's vast museums.
The great Flemish towns of Bruges and Ghent are evoked by a tiny 14th-century painting by a follower of Jan van Eyck.
This painting was once thought to be by van Eyck himself, the man who was credited with the invention of oil painting.
Now it is considered to be a work from his studio. Its colour shows the lasting quality that the guild system produced and the astonishing command of detail that was the essence of Flemish paintings.
It is the same detail that creates the fascinating background of Marmion's Virgin and Child, painted in the style of van Eyck.
The greatest city of the Italian Renaissance is evoked by an anonymous portrait of a 15th-century Florentine woman.
Her sharp profile and curious horned headdress remind us of the severity as well as the dignity of the city and the time.
Great Rome is very much a baroque city and at the heart of Rome is the church of St Peter. The man who designed the enfolding arms in front of St Peters, as well as the astonishing baldachino inside, was Gian Lorenzo Bernini. His fame is as a sculptor, but he was also a painter, musician, librettist, set designer and superb architect.
His paintings are rare, but a confident yet thoughtful youthful self-portrait with wild, disordered hair that was then the symbol of inspiration is included in The Master's Eye.
From Rome to Venice, with the Grand Canal and the Customs House exactly pictured by Canaletto and - more magnificently, from an earlier time - a portrait of the Doge of Venice, the elected ruler who was once one of the most powerful men in Europe.
Tintoretto's portrait is of one of the doges who came from the famous Loredan family. His stately presence also suggests the weight of time and responsibility.
Paris gives us the famous names of Monet and Manet, plus a lovely view of a 19th-century boulevard painted by Pissarro as seen from his apartment window. Such realism was revolutionary in its time.
From earlier in the Paris scene are two 18th-century works by Boucher, whose paintings are the ancestors of all the pastoral porcelain figurines of shepherds and shepherdesses. His colour schemes are dainty and wonderfully decorative.
More than a hint of Parisian chic marks the origin of Robert Delaunay's Nude Woman Reading, painted with enormous verve at the beginning of modern art in the 20th century.
London in the 18th century yields two Gainsborough portraits. They have much of the manner of van Dyke's painting of the Earl of Pembroke, also in the exhibition, but they have that special drawling and languorous style special to Gainsborough and the aristocracy of his time.
Modern London and modern painting hit hard with Francis Bacon's grim figure that tries to hide its guilt and neurosis behind a grey curtain.
It is a massive figure painted with extraordinary directness and grim solemnity. Look at the lump on its neck and spine to see handling that is both startling paint and emotive symbol.
There are other cities and other artists that must be visited. Rembrandt, greatest of all 17th-century painters, working in Amsterdam near the end of his long life, painted an old man who makes one of the most moving images in the show.
The white hair of the sitter complements the broad black shape of his robe. And the compassion that records unsparingly, but sympathetically, the ageing face extends to the hand.
High on the hill where the ancient city of Toledo stands, El Greco, the Greek who became more Spanish than the Spanish, painted a cardinal whose eyes reflect his deep intelligence as well as his profound melancholy.
The great collection at Melbourne was formed before the price of Old Master paintings went to astronomical heights and drove all but a handful of galleries out of the market.
We are hugely fortunate that we can see part of that collection here.
Art lesson for a prince
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