Martin Gayford

A 19th-century London artists’ supplier named Charles Roberson offered imitation human beings for sale or rent, with papier-mâché heads, soft leather skin and flexible, jointed limbs. The top-of-the-range article — described in Roberson’s catalogue as ‘Parisian stuffed’ — was pricey. Nonetheless, painters often felt they just had to have one whatever the cost. Many such creatures inhabit Silent Partners: Artist & Mannequin from Function to Fetish, a pioneering exhibition at the Fitz-william Museum, Cambridge. There are also distinguished paintings on view. But it is the figures themselves — slightly comic, a touch eerie, hard to classify — that are the real stars of the show.

At the opening of Rembrandt: The Late Works at the National Gallery (until 18 January), I met a painter friend of mine in the final room. This was, he said, one of the most magnificent exhibitions he had seen in his entire life, which — considering he is perhaps 70 and a frequent visitor of galleries — was praise indeed (and entirely deserved). Mischievously, I mentioned that he had also been highly enthusiastic about Veronese at the National Gallery a few months ago. ‘Ah, but there is a huge difference between Veronese and Rembrandt,’ he vehemently responded. ‘When you look at a Madonna by Veronese, you see a glamorous model wearing expensive clothes, with Rembrandt’s “Bathsheba” [pointing at the picture in front of us] you can read her thoughts.’ He got it in one.

Talking of Rembrandt’s ‘The Jewish Bride’ to a friend, Vincent van Gogh went — characteristically — over the top. ‘I should be happy to give ten years of my life,’ he exclaimed, ‘if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food.’ Without undergoing such rigours, visitors to Rembrandt: the Late Works at the National Gallery next month will be able to see the picture that drove Vincent to such a paroxysm of enthusiasm, along with many other masterpieces from the artist’s last years.

At the entrance to Anselm Kiefer’s forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy visitors will encounter a typically paradoxical Kiefer object: a giant pile of lead books, sprouting wings. When I asked Kiefer to explain this strange object, he immediately — and characteristically — began talking about alchemy. Lead, of course, was the material from which alchemists hoped to make gold. ‘But at the beginning,’ Kiefer explained, ‘it wasn’t just a materialistic idea, it was a spiritual one: to transform matter into a higher spiritual state.’ So, I suggested, in a way all art is alchemy: transforming one substance — paint and canvas, for example — into something else entirely. ‘Yes, certainly,’ Kiefer replied.

At the end of his performance at the Barbican with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Wynton Marsalis made a little speech. The next piece, he announced, was a number that Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers used to play. Marsalis then recalled how he himself had played with the Jazz Messengers as an 18-year-old trumpet prodigy. He described how much he had learned from the drummer, who was then approaching 60, and especially about ‘the sacrifices you have to make to play this music’. Then the band roared into ‘Free for All’ by Wayne Shorter. A couple of days before, I had met Marsalis for a chat — it wasn’t precisely an interview because I’ve interviewed him so many times over the years we’ve turned into friends.

In many respects the average art-lover remains a Victorian, and the Florentine Renaissance is one area in which that is decidedly so. Most of us, like Ruskin, love the works of 15th-century artists of that city — Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Ghiberti — and are much less enthusiastic about those of the 16th. But a superb exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism, might change some minds. It contains pictures that are intense in emotion, eccentric, mysterious, sometimes bizarre and — to a 21st-century eye — appealingly neurotic. Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo were almost exact contemporaries, born within a few months of each other in 1494.

It seems suitable that just round the corner from the Zurbarán exhibition at the Palais des Beaux Arts is the Musée Magritte. Surrealism was in the air of 20th-century Belgium, just as much as it was in the atmosphere of Spain. And of course in many cases its leading figures — Buñuel, Dalí, René Magritte — were lapsed Catholics. Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), in contrast, was one of the most striking examples in art history of the unlapsed Catholic. His paintings express the faith of the Spanish counter-reformation at full strength, but the results are often as disconcerting in their way as a painting of baguettes raining down from the sky.