The day in question complied totally with the weather forecast: Thursday December 16th 2011 was cold and rainy. On top of that darkness did set in at the end of the afternoon – just as you might expect at this time of year – and even earlier than you might think.

Wet snow coming from low and heavy clouds and triggered by merciless gusts of wind pounded onto the city centre of Rotterdam and its surroundings.

This particular setting was not exactly in contrast with part of the work of Jan van Goyen – the undisputed master of the Dutch landscape in the 17th century – yet it failed to express his desire for light and atmospheric space in a most dramatic way.

Op de zolder van een boerderij in de Achterhoek lag jarenlang een kostbare schat verborgen. Meer dan tweehonderd tekeningen bevonden zich daar. De jonge architect Anthony van Dam maakte ze vanaf 1837 tijdens een studiereis naar het zuiden van Europa. De Rijksdienst ontving de tekeningen negen jaar geleden van een nazaat van Van Dam, die ze in 2008 definitief aan de dienst legateerde. Onlangs verscheen een wetenschappelijke studie waarin Van Dams reis en zijn tekeningen een belangrijke rol spelen.

Vincent van Gogh schilderde De watermolen in Gennep over een eerder werk heen. Dat wijst onderzoek uit. Hiermee is dit het vroegste schilderij waarvan bekend is dat hij er een reeds gebruikt doek voor benutte.

Vijf wandvullende schilderijen van Ferdinand Bol zijn al decennialang omgeven door raadsels. Vormen ze een samenhangend geheel of niet? Nieuw onderzoek geeft ze hun betekenis terug. Hoe een rijke weduwe haar ambities liet verbeelden.

Betty Chucher loves Rembrandt 's art. Now 81, long  Australia's most respected art writer and presenter and also a former Director of the National Gallery of Australia, she  includes  in her latest book “Notebooks” (2011) Rembrandt's Woman Bathing in a Stream (1655). After explaining that Rembrandt, like Shakespeare she compares, can bring us face to face with human nature's enduring aspects she phantasises that if I could pick any one painting from the whole of history of art to have myself, I would choose this little picture that has so much to give, but is no bigger than a tea towel. An unrealistic phantasy of course, as she cannot have it, and  the sensuously wading Hendrikje Stoffels  will stay firmly in the National Gallery in London. Yet it was a phantasy that resulted in a telling conclusion after a lifetime of studying and evaluating the art of the world.

For the ill-starred heroes of Greek tragedy, the life of the individual was a study in alienation: the self, whether Oedipus or Antigone, forever caught in the meaningless machinations of quibbling deities or subdued by the incomprehensible decrees of Fate. So too for one of Georgia's greatest modernists, Petre Otskheli (1907-37), the theatrical wunderkind whose creative partnership with Kote Marjanishvili, director of the avant-garde Marjanishvili Theatre, was cut short by the terrors of Stalin’s Great Purges. Otskheli’s phantasmagoric collection of stage sets and costume designs, currently on display through September 7 at Tbilisi's National Gallery, suggest an equally grim picture of the plight of man. Trapped in increasingly geometric worlds of sharp angles and collapsing shapes, dwarfed by swaths of fabric that grotesque distort the body's silhouette, Otshkheli's characters, from the battered Othello to the imperious Beatrice Cenci, contend with a surreal landscape that is at once profoundly Classical and, in its nods to Art Deco and expressionism, thoroughly twentieth-century.

Much has been made, in recent decades, of Picasso's perceived misogyny. His grotesque abstractions of the female body – the tragic implosion of his 1937 Femme en Pleurs, for example, which treads the boundary line between distortion and revelation – have all too often been read as evidence of an easy dichotomy: the relationship between the powerful, disengaged, and often disembodied (male) artist and the objectified female flesh he kneads like dough until it resembles the creations of his own consciousness. But in the British Museum's revelatory new display of Picasso's Vollard Suite, a series of one hundred etchings commissioned by avant-garde art dealer Ambroise Vollard between 1930 and 1936, we find a far more multifaceted examination of the politics of gender and creation than many of Picasso's critics would allege.

This unique portrait shows a bearded black man who has assumed a powerful pose, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword while he gazes out of the picture. He is dressed quite soberly, in a Flemish cap, doublet, shirt, tabard and hose. More luxurious items are the white kid gloves, the pouch decorated with a fleur de lis and the sword. The man’s pose, clothing and attributes indicate that the subject of this portrait is a soldier.

Op dit unieke portret is een bebaarde zwarte man te zien, die een krachtige houding heeft aangenomen. Hij laat zijn hand op het handvat van zijn zwaard rusten en kijkt het beeld uit. De man is vrij sober gekleed met een klapmuts, wambuis, hemd en broek. Kostbaarder zijn de witte geitenleren handschoenen, de buidel die versierd is met een fleur de lis en het zwaard.

The two biblical scenes most commonly depicted in art come from the New Testament, from the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke. They are The Nativity of Jesus (Matthew 1:18-25 and Luke 2: 1-7) and The Adoration of the Magi (Matthew 2:1-12).

Although the Bible only speaks of magi, or wise men, who present Christ with gold, frankincense and myrrh, Christian literature and art transformed these into three kings, one of whom was subsequently represented as a Black African or Arab (Moor).The arrival of these secular sovereigns bringing gifts to the Christ Child is regarded as an acknowledgement of Jesus’ task in the world. The New Covenant was concluded between Christ, God’s son incarnate, and all other peoples and individuals.’