Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer: Parallel visions is an exhibition that encourages visitors to not only appreciate the quality and importance of the 72 works on display, some by the most admired painters of 17th-century Europe, but also to establish points of comparison between them. The traditional and long-standing idea of the art produced in different parts of Europe is that it is notably different: that Velázquez, for example, is “very Spanish” and Rembrandt “very Dutch”. This viewpoint is based on the excessive influence that 19th- and 20th-century nationalist mindsets and ideologies have had on our way of understanding art. Studies from that period placed enormous importance on the idea that every nation had a different national character, as a result of which the notion that these differences were manifested in the art of each country became widespread. This perspective functioned to minimise the traits shared by European artists. The case of 17th-century Spa

Cindy Sherman’s groundbreaking series, Untitled Film Stills, 1977-80, has gone on public display for the first time in the UK in a major new retrospective of the artist’s work at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Opening on Thursday 27 June, Cindy Sherman explores the development of the artist’s work from the mid-1970s to the present day, including rarely exhibited photographs and films created while Sherman was an art student at the State University College at Buffalo from 1972 to 1976, and a new work Untitled #602 created in 2019 from a collaboration with Stella McCartney. The exhibition features over 190 works from international public and private collections, as well as a recreation of Sherman’s studio in New York, providing an unprecedented insight into the artist’s working processes. Widely regarded as one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, Cindy Sherman, (b. 1954), first gained wide

A painting thought to be a “lost masterpiece” by Italian painter Caravaggio has been bought two days before it was due to go under the hammer in France. “Judith and Holofernes”, which was found under an old mattress in the attic of a house in the French city of Toulouse, was snapped up by a foreign buyer, the auction house selling it said on Tuesday. Art expert Eric Turquin — who authenticated the painting — said it was worth between 100 and 150 million euros (up to $170 million), although several Italian specialists have doubts about the canvas. But Turquin, France’s leading authority on Old Masters paintings, had staked his reputation on the work being the fiery artist’s lost “Judith and Holofernes”. The painting depicting a grisly biblical scene of the beautiful

The first major show of Berthe Morisot’s paintings in France in nearly 80 years puts the forgotten woman of Impressionism back at the centre of the movement she helped found. One damning review of the first exhibition by the group that would revolutionise art blasted that it was no more than “five or six lunatics of which one is a woman …[whose] feminine grace is maintained amid the outpourings of a delirious mind.” That 1874 show included such soon-to-be art giants as Monet and Manet, whose brother Eugene later married Morisot. But after her early death at 54, when she caught pneumonia after nursing their daughter through the illness, Morisot slipped into the shadow of her more famous male peers like Renoir and Degas. Now a new show at the Musee d’Orsay, the first dedicated to her work by a major Paris institution since 1941, puts Morisot back in the rightful place as one of the most startling and innovative artists of her time.