In Caravaggio’s “St Matthew and the Angel” (1602), the Bible seems to arrive as a shock to those who wrote it. Matthew, bare-armed and dirty-toed, is a fisherman stranded on dry land. Everything about

There’s no shortage of great picks at this year’s TEFAF Maastricht, the Netherlands, including a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, a pastel portrait by Dora Maar and two sections of 4th-century Roman mosaics

John Piper was a modernist who rejected Modernism, a versatile artist who defied categories, but one who remained true to the spirit and detail of the places he painted

Melanie McDonagh Converts From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, why so many became Catholic in the 20th century 368pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $38). Nobody likes a convert. For believers, the word

It’s a sunny summer afternoon in a verdant corner of the Essex countryside. A pretty pastoral landscape lies before us, with cattle sheltering in the shade of oak trees, rolling green fields, and a gr

So Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in October 1876, charting the latest instalment of the Holbein cult. He was renting a room in Isleworth, west London, still hoping for a religious career