Morris was not the sole originator of this trend, but she was its most explicit voice. Her campaign has been effective and in the last few years single shows of female artists have become the norm. In 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe received top billing at Tate Modern. Last year it was Joan Jonas and Anni Albers, while elsewhere, Jenny Saville, Frida Kahlo and Tacita Dean were among other women honoured. This year, beside the Tate shows of Dorothea Tanning, Natalia Goncharova and Dora Maar, there are major exhibitions featuring Lee Krasner—the Abstract Expressionist who is better known as Mrs Jackson Pollock (Barbican); the role-playing photographer Cindy Sherman (National Portrait Gallery); the Op Art doyenne Bridget Riley (Hayward Gallery); and the sinister tableaux of Paula Rego (Milton Keynes). Next year, one of the highlight London exhibitions will be the National Gallery’s Artemesia Gentileschi show.

A readjustment was overdue. For obvious reasons, the numbers of significant pre-19th-century female painters is vanishingly small: there were early practitioners such as Plautina Nelli (1524-1588), who had a major show at the Ufizzi in 2017, Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625), and Clara Peeters (1594-c1657), subject of the first solo exhibition of a female artist at the Prado in 2016, but they hardly represent the Renaissance’s finest flowering. Despite the 20th-century upswing in both numbers and quality, female artists are still far from achieving parity in the national collections. Even with Morris’s advocacy, only 37 per cent of the works on show at Tate Modern are by women. The National Gallery owns  2,300 pictures, of which only 24 are by women, while at the National Gallery of Scotland, women represent a little over 4 per cent of the total number shown. Across Europe and the United States as a whole, women artists account for just 3-5 per cent of important permanent collections. This comes some 50 years after the pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin stirred up the whole debate about gender representation with her essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

What ultimately stands in the way of wider acceptance of women artists is not the art institutions that have long been aware of the problem, but the market. Morris wishes the link between art and the market undone: “We really have to stop celebrating creativity depending on how it’s monetised.” A laudable aim, but an entirely unrealistic one. And it just so happens that the market values female artists at only a fraction of the men. A 2017 report by the University of Luxembourg found that works by women fetched an average of 47.6 per cent of those by men. Using the data compiled from 1.5 million auction transactions between 1970 and 2013 for 62,442 artists in 45 countries, it discovered the average transaction price for men was $48,212 while for women it was only $25,262.

There are 22 artists whose work has sold for more than $100 million and all are male. The most expensive work by a female artist doesn’t even get within touching distance—Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1 by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) which sold for $44.4 million in 2014. This price in turn is way ahead of the next most expensive work by a female artist, $32 million for one of Louise Bourgeois’s Spider sculptures. Indeed, the combined total for the 10 most expensive female works is $165.7 million: in 2013 one of Picasso’s 1932 pictures of his young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter sleeping, Le Rêve, sold for $166.7 million and 14 other individual works by men have sold for more.

To put this gap in a museum context, last year’s Tate Modern exhibition Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy, which featured Le Rêve, attracted 521,080 visitors while a concurrent exhibition of the American artist Joan Jonas brought in just 47,876. This discrepancy was obviously only partly to do with gender, but women barely registed in the 2018’s most popular exhibitions worldwide. Frida Kahlo’s clothes and knick-knacks at the V&A was London’s most popular female (and sole ranking) show, coming in fourth among ticketed exhibitions with 284,000 visitors, but no women appeared among the top 10 exhibitions in either New York or Paris. Indeed, the only major category of show that featured more than one woman was photography, where Lizzie Sadin at the Saatchi Gallery was the seventh most visited photography show (250,000 visitors) and Susan Meiselas at San Francisco MoMA was fifth-ranked (283,000 visitors).

It is often posited that because male buyers drive the art market and because they instinctively prefer male artists, women artists therefore underperform in sales terms. It is a supposition given weight by a recent survey which presented 2,000 respondents with computer-generated artworks that had been assigned a male or female creator: those “made” by women were ranked lower than those by men. The same gender bias does not apply, however, to gallery-goers.

Frances Morris has stated: “We’re interested in art whose value lies in excellence and provocation and fascination for the public. And, more often than not, that art is made by women.” That “more often than” should be changed to “as often as” since, as things stand, the public’s fascination remains heavily on the side of the men.

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The French government placed a 30-month export ban on the picture on the grounds that it was “a very important Caravaggio marker, whose history and attribution are to be fully investigated”. Neither the Louvre nor any French museum took up the offer to buy the work for €100 million and last December the export ban was lifted. The picture, cleaned, restored, rechristened the Toulouse Caravaggio and dated to 1607, will now go on sale at the Toulouse auction house of the finder, Marc Lebarbe, on June 27. There is no reserve, but bidding will start at some €30 million, and it is estimated to fetch between €100-150 million. Should the picture hit that level, it will become the second most expensive Old Master painting ever sold, after the $450 million Salvator Mundi ascribed to Leonardo. The Toulouse Caravaggio is currently on a world tour, part of a marketing drive to drum up interest, taking in London, Paris and New York.

It is a painting that has split opinion. Keith Christiansen, of the Met in New York, and Nicola Spinosa, former Director of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, are among the scholars who claim it is a genuine work. But many other experts dispute this (including two leading British specialists I spoke to and Mina Gregori, the grande dame of Caravaggio studies). When the Louvre examined the painting, it did not rule either way on attribution (though its failure to buy has been taken as some sort of judgment) and a gathering of Caravaggio scholars at a study day for the picture at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan in 2016 failed to reach a consensus regarding the hand of the artist.

Attributions of old paintings are a curiously imprecise business. Technical examination has shown several factors that place the image at least very close to Caravaggio: it is painted on the same type of canvas used for other paintings he made in Naples while on the run from a murder charge in Rome; the paint contains substantial amounts of calcium carbonate, again characteristic of his work at the time, as were the incised lines along the limbs, again present. Importantly, the picture has pentimenti, signs of modifications overpainted by the artist, that are traditionally held to show the painter changing his mind and that therefore can’t be the work of a copyist (though even the most proficient copyist might need to make adjustments).

The clinching evidence for the Caravaggio believers, however, is documentary. On September 25, 1607, the Flemish painter Frans Pourbus wrote to the Duke of Mantua from Naples describing two “bellissimi” works by Caravaggio for sale, one of which was a Judith and Holofernes. The pictures may have been for sale in the workshop of the artists and dealers Louis Finson from Bruges and Abraham Vinck from Antwerp, who knew Caravaggio. The Duke didn’t buy the pictures because they are mentioned in Finson’s will dated 10 years later in Amsterdam in which he bequeathed his half share of them to Vinck. The first of the paintings, the Madonna of the Rosary, was bought by a consortium of artists including Rubens and Brueghel and is now in Vienna. The fate of the Judith and Holofernes is, from this point on, unknown. To complicate matters further, there is another version of the Toulouse painting made by Finson and now in Naples.

The sellers have commissioned a handsome website devoted to their picture ahead of the auction. On it they state: “The authenticity of the rediscovered work . . . is well documented.” But this is not the case. There is plenty of suggestion, but simply no indisputable evidence to prove that their picture is the one seen by Pourbus in 1607. That line in Pourbus’s letter is the key to the painting’s success at auction.

The same suggestibility was at play too during the sale of the Salvator Mundi. A vital part of the pre-sale promotion stressed that it was a painting with a royal heritage. When, after Charles I’s execution in 1649, an inventory of his goods was drawn up for sale, one item, number 49, was a “Peece of Christ done by Leonard”. From this imprecise tag a link was made to the Salvator Mundi, despite it not carrying the branded mark of the Royal Collection (a “CR”—Charles Rex—surmounted by a crown) on the back. There is, though, a painting of Christ as the saviour of the world by one of Leonardo’s followers,  Giampietrino, now in the Pushkin in Moscow, that does bear Charles’s mark. Nevertheless, when Christie’s sold the Salvator Mundi in 2017 the catalogue essay dealing with its provenance was entitled “A peece of Christ done by Leonardo” and a possible link had become a near-certainty.

Of course, the documentary links in both cases, although far from copper-bottomed, could be correct: the paintings have enough about them to suggest they might be by Leonardo and Caravaggio. Indeed, a major art historical journal apparently has a piece ready to run after the Toulouse sale explaining why its writer believes the Caravaggio to be an autograph work. There are, however, more than enough stylistic doubts about the picture and gaps in its provenance that those suggestive scrawled lines can’t bridge for the sale to be a test of the faith—as well as the purses—of would-be purchasers.

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In her imagining, while rabbits may have been embedded in British culture — starring in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, in Watership Down and Alice in Wonderland — that is no defence in a Britain where nationalism, retrenchment and polarisation hold sway. She tells the story of the rabbit exile through a variety of delicate and witty artefacts — embroideries, airline safety cards for the departing creatures, specially-minted coins — that ask both what Britishness has come to mean and shows something of how we appear to the outside world. No more afternoon tea for her creatures, no more friendly words of greeting — they don’t even qualify for a full English breakfast any more.

Although her message is straightforward enough, clumsy even, Shih does not labour the point. Social comment and high art have usually made for an uncomfortable fit and her methods tie in to folk art and the old traditions of homely rough-and-ready crafts — quilting, whittling and collage. Her nod to this vernacular strain is another gentle prod to John Bull’s ribs.

Shih is not the first to adopt this approach. Grayson Perry, for example, has been at it for some time, weaving tapestries that celebrate ordinary if fictional lives and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and where we come from. It was Perry who selected one of Shih’s rabbit embroideries for inclusion in last year’s RA summer exhibition. Shih, though, has a lighter touch than the often ponderous Perry and, although a satirist, she also shows a profound understanding of protest art. Amid the skits in her work — rabbits sliding off the Mad Hatter’s tea party table or being struck off the character list of the Hundred Acre Wood — are echoes of the Jarrow marchers’ banners and the coins struck to commemorate the Corn Laws protests or the struggle for the repeal of slavery. 

In her hands, what could so easily be either ponderous or, worse, twee, ends up both fresh and affecting. What distinguishes Shih’s jeu d’esprit is its charm and wit, qualities that have been in vanishingly small supply during the whole Brexit imbroglio. That itself is quite a rabbit to pull out of the hat.

“Rabbrexit Means Rabbrexit” is at the House of Illustration, Granary Square, King’s Cross, London, until July 14.

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The painting has already been restored or titivated some 25 times in its history and has suffered the indignity of being cut down in 1715 to fit a new setting, attacked with knives in 1911 and 1975, and sprayed with acid in 1990. This time the restoration has been prompted by age-related changes in the painting’s condition. The museum is still smarting from the criticism it received when it closed for 10 years (five more than intended and some $500 million over budget), only reopening in 2013, so it is in no position to remove The Night Watch for a process that will, says the museum’s director Taco Dibbets, take “years”. Its solution is a form of performance art that has become increasingly popular: the painting will not be moved but will be encased in a seven metre-square glass chamber designed by the French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte and the whole process will be on view to the public in person and via a live internet stream.

It is not the first time the solution has been used. In 2010 the Brera in Milan encased Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà and its restorers in a ramshackle clear plastic tent in the middle of the gallery, while the Van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece, one of the foundation works of Western art, started a similar public restoration programme in 2012 and the first phase was completed in 2016. The project to clean the altarpiece’s 12 panels is ongoing and still attracts innumerable visitors as fascinated by the process as by the painting itself.

The National Gallery in London took a slightly different approach with its recent acquisition of Artemesia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as St Catherine of Alexandria, 1615-16, unveiled late last year. The chief restorer, Larry Keith, was filmed at work and his processes could be followed on YouTube, each swab and brush stroke set to music so that the restoration, carried out behind closed doors, nevertheless became an event.

The necessity for such transparency has become ever greater. What most gallery-
goers forget is that there is not a single old master painting in a public gallery in the West that has not, at some time in the ensuing centuries, been touched by a brush other than the original artist’s. The fragility of paintings has made this a necessity while changes in taste have sometimes made it a choice. What is often less than clear is how much of an intervention has taken place.

One of the reasons why the world’s most expensive painting, the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo that sold in 2017 for $450 million, has proved so contentious is that it has undergone two recent bouts of restoration that were not documented to the standards practised by major art institutions and that bordered less on conservation than on reinvention. Not only was the walnut panel of the picture itself in a parlous state and separated into five pieces during the restoration, but the two most important areas of the picture, Christ’s face and the crystal orb that represents the world that he holds, were the places that had suffered the greatest paint loss — down to the wood in some places. Diane Modestini, the New York restorer hired to get the picture back first to a presentable state and later to a saleable one, had to interpret what might have originally been there from other bona fide Leonardos and from intuition. Images of the stripped painting that have emerged on the internet are shocking.

Another reason for the recent trend towards openness is the sheer cost involved. For example, the restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling that took place between 1979 and 1994 was funded by Japan’s Nippon Television Network Corporation in exchange for filming rights. Indeed, the Vatican has proved no slouch when it comes to getting others to pay for preserving its art works: its latest wheeze is an app called Patrum that, when downloaded, demands a minimum donation of $10 towards ongoing projects. The Holy  See is not alone though; the Musée D’Orsay’s restoration of Gustave Courbet’s masterwork The Artist’s Studio, which took place between 2014-15, was also crowd-funded. If you are going to pay towards a restoration project it is good to be able to see how your money is being spent.

When I spoke to the Rijksmuseum’s head of conservation Petria Noble about The Night Watch project, she professed to being unconcerned about working on the painting under public scrutiny. She admitted, though, that once the initial 70-day high-resolution imaging process had taken place, touching the surface of the picture for the first time would be nerve-jangling. It is a moment that will be witnessed by the museum’s 15-strong conservation team and a host of other restorers and scholars from Holland and beyond who have been invited to collaborate on the project. It will also be viewed just as intently by thousands of amateurs keen to get closer to Rembrandt’s semi-mystical paint surface than is possible in front of the picture itself. But what they might in fact get close to could just be the paint applied by a previous restorer.

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When that report was published last year it was unequivocal in its recommendations. The authors, the Senegalese writer and economist Felwine Sarr and the French historian Bénédicte Savoy, called for tens of thousands of works gathered during the colonial period and now in French museums to be returned. Indeed, they said, everything that couldn’t be proven to have been legitimately acquired should be sent back. Macron announced that he wanted the restitutions to begin within five years. The first items earmarked are 26 statues and other items from Benin currently in Paris’s ethnographic Musée du Quai Branly that were looted by French troops in 1892. They will be housed in a new museum due to open in Benin City, Nigeria, in 2021.

Before this can happen, however, a new law changing France’s code of patrimony needs to be passed and the African countries themselves would then have to request the specific returns. The scale of the task, should it come into effect, is daunting. It has been estimated that as much as 90 per cent of Africa’s cultural heritage is no longer on the continent. And when the report authors examined inventories at the Musée du Quai Branly they found that some 46,000 of its 90,000 African works were colonial period acquisitions, collected between 1885 and 1960.

The report has reverberated beyond France. The German government has allocated €1.9 million to research the provenance of objects that entered its museums during the colonial era. The money will be administered by the German Lost Art Foundation, which usually deals with claims around art looted by the Nazis.

The issue has also intensified restitution claims from elsewhere. The perennial rumbling surrounding the Elgin Marbles periodically breaks out into something more shrill. Last autumn the governor of Easter Island, which belongs to Chile, broke down in tears at the British Museum when pleading for the return of Hoa Hakananai’a, an ancestor statue taken in 1868 and given to Queen Victoria. The museum’s policy is not to dismiss such requests but talk in terms of loans rather than restitution.

Restitutions proper do happen. One of the odder examples was the National Army Museum’s decision to return a lock of hair cut from the head of the Ethiopian emperor Tewodros shortly after he committed suicide following defeat at the battle of Maqdala in 1868. Hair does not count as “human remains” (which government guidance says can be restituted) so the museum’s decision was one of goodwill. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library both hold artefacts taken from Maqdala but, unlike the National Army Museum, are bound by deaccession regulations. Meanwhile, earlier this year, the Metropolitan Museum in New York said it would be returning to Egypt a first-century BC gilded coffin of a priest named Nedjemankh, after it emerged it had been looted in 2011. Extraordinarily, the museum bought the coffin for $3.5 million on the back of a fake provenance and a forged export licence.

The Macron report chimes with the binary tenor of the times. It assumes that colonialism was an undiluted ill — an act of criminal subjugation — ignoring the fact that it was uneven and that centuries of cultural intermingling also went on. It also assumes that the great majority of the artefacts were acquired coercively. While looting undoubtedly occurred, it is ahistorical to ignore the fact that at certain periods the spoils of war were traditional booty, or that trade, gifts and legitimate purchases also took place. Items that are defined as cultural heritage now were, in many instances, merely material goods then.

As well as its oversimplification of hundreds of years of history, the report also had little to say about either the ongoing and long-established links between museum professionals in Western institutions and their peers elsewhere (the British Museum, for example, had already agreed to loan some of its pieces when the new Benin museum opens and other institutions have partnership programmes with non-Western museums) or about the fate of the artefacts once they had been returned. The report acknowledged that Africa does not have a similar museum infrastructure to the West, but assumed it would follow — as would a culture of museum going — in due course. The time-worn, if uncomfortable to discuss, issues of security, corruption and underinvestment were not a major consideration.

Although the Macron report has concentrated thought, resistance to it is based on the fact that, rather than considering viable options, it is absolutist. As Eckart Köhne, director of the German museums association, put it: “If that means museum collections should be packed wholesale into a lorry and shipped abroad, then we do not consider that the right way.” Two right ways, for example, were already under way. One is research into provenance to ascertain the ethical and legal circumstances under which items entered Western collections. The other is greater co-curation and the circulation of exhibitions beyond their usual geographical remit. The Macron report calls for “dialogue, polyphony and exchange” but doesn’t acknowledge that it has been happening for years.

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If he was rich beyond imagining during his life, his posthumous wealth is of an altogether higher level. Since 1998, the cumulative yearly sales of his work have consistently topped the $100 million mark (indeed since 2004 they have only twice dropped below $200 million), with peaks in 2014 of $445.7 million and in 2015 of $655.2 million. For the best part of 20 years he has been the most valuable artist at auction, with clear blue water between him and Andy Warhol (the next most consistently high performer) and everyone else in the history of art.

Along the way, he has set various auction records and sold more works in the $100 million-plus band — the commercial art world’s elite measure — than any other artist: five to Modigliani’s three and Pollock and De Kooning’s two each. Only last year, his Young Girl with a Flower Basket, an unsettling and enigmatic 1905 Rose Period nude from the David and Peggy Rockefeller collection, fetched $115 million. Indeed, while that picture was being auctioned in New York, 16 further paintings dating from 1908 to 1970 appeared at the major spring sales in London, where they collectively raised some £164 million.

What is curious about Picasso is that two of the greatest determinants of price — rarity and a signature style — don’t apply to him. Picassos arrive on the market in huge numbers, and there are plenty to go round: one estimate puts his lifetime output at some 50,000 works, comprising 1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 12,000 drawings, and multiple thousands of prints and innumerable ceramics. And while his work falls into distinct periods — Blue, Rose, Cubist, classical, etc — no one style dominates as does, say, a Warhol screenprint of the early 1960s or a Modigliani nude c 1917.

Among the most expensive of Picasso’s works are one of the 15 variations he painted as a homage to Delacroix, Les Femmes d’Alger (“Version O”), made in 1955 and which went in 2015 for a then world record price of $179 million; Le Rêve, a portrait of his sensually sleeping new lover Marie-Thérèse Walter (he was 50, she was 22), painted in 1932 which made $155 million in 2013; and Garçon à la Pipe, a portrait of a garlanded boy smoking against a floral backdrop of 1905 that made $104 million in 2004.

Picasso’s patron Gertrude Stein once wrote of his work: “This one was always having something that was coming out . . . that was a solid thing, a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellent thing, a very pretty thing.” She knew, in other words, that there was a Picasso for everyone.

If his auction life is lively, so too is his exhibition life. Last year saw, as usual, any number of shows — large and small — around the world, with Picasso: Blue and Rose at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy at Tate Modern being the most high-profile. Visitor numbers for 2018 have yet to be released but a 2017 exhibition, Pity and Terror: Picasso’s Path to Guernica at the Reina Sofía Gallery in Madrid, attracted a staggering 681,127 viewers.

“Give me a museum and I’ll fill it,” Picasso once said, and it is clear he wasn’t boasting. There are already four Picasso museums — in Paris, Antibes, Barcelona and Málaga — and Catherine Hutin-Blay, the daughter of the artist’s second wife, Jacqueline Roque, was recently given the go-ahead to open a fifth, in Aix-en-Provence (due in 2021), to show 1,000 of the more than 2,000 Picassos she owns.

In one of his more reflective moods, Picasso stated: “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” While fashion undoubtedly plays a part in his appeal, others clearly find that his art washes whiter than most. Many collectors are drawn by a combination of the two. As Jeremiah Evarts, the former head of Sotheby’s New York Impressionist and Modern department, recently put it pragmatically: “You’re dealing with one of the most recognisable names in art history . . . I can’t imagine an artist I’d rather have my money in than Picasso.”

Picasso also said: “I begin with an idea, and then it becomes something else.” He meant his art, of course, and regardless of whether his work appeals to you personally, he was one of the most transformative artists of all: an indefatigable dreamer-upper of an endless stream of novel forms in paint, clay and plaster and on paper. He himself became something else too; from just one of a great number of talented figures jostling for space in early 20th-century Paris, he muscled his way to top dog status — a celebrity, the focal point of debates on modern art and, along the way, an industry that is so robust that it continues to prosper and self-perpetuate nearly 50 years after the appearance of the last work from its CEO’s hand.

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Where to start with John Ruskin? The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Arts & Crafts movement, the National Trust, garden cities, the Labour Party, the reputation of J.M.W. Turner, working mens’ colleges, the environmentalist movement, the Ashmolean Museum, the discipline of art history . . . all, and more, bear the stamp of the most eminent Victorian of them all.

The extraordinary breadth of Ruskin’s concerns and influences are characterised by his most celebrated mantra:  “truth to nature”, which, he explained, meant “moral as well as material truth”. What’s more, he believed that truth encompassed both beauty and religion. The most obvious dwelling place for these concerns was art and therefore: “The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues.” Because he found so little virtue in the modern, industrialised world, his role was to be a sage, since “the teaching of Art, as I understand it, is the teaching of all things.”

It was this conviction in particular that lay behind his founding in 1875 of the St George’s Museum for the working people of Sheffield. He gifted not just paintings and drawings, but medieval manuscripts, geological specimens, botanical and ornithological illustrations and architectural plans and casts. By giving the cutlery workers of Sheffield access to the cultural hinterland of the rich, he could provide them with the moral fortification and dignity to improve society as a whole.

Opal minerals from John Ruskin’s collection

Now, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, many of the museum’s original items, plus some of his own paintings and those of his circle are gathered in John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing (until 22 April) at Two Temple Place, a Gothic Revival fantasy building by the Thames, that, although delightful, is a bit too whimsical to have met with Ruskin’s approval.

The exhibition title comes from his dictum that “the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way.” Among the best examples of what he meant are his own watercolours of the natural world. He was a significant artist in his own right and his studies of moss on a riverbank rock, a peacock’s breast feather, or curling autumn oak leaves are images of total concentration that, artful in their seeming artlessness, give the lie to his gloomy belief that men “wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty”.

“Study of Moss, Fern and Wood-Sorrel, upon a Rocky River Bank”, 1875-79, by John Ruskin

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A look at the major galleries’ exhibition schedules for 2019 confirms what the auction world has known for several years now: the Old Masters are old hat and all the attention is on modern and contemporary art. Two shows mark big death anniversaries: Rembrandt’s 350th at the Rijksmuseum and Leonardo’s 500th at the Louvre. The National Gallery, meanwhile, has just one proper Old Master exhibition — examining the little-known 15th-century Spanish painter Bartolomé Bermejo. The Royal Academy yokes Michelangelo to the American video artist Bill Viola and has a show of Renaissance nudes — a reliable draw — but no monographic exhibition. Tate Britain reaches back only as far as William Blake.

Unless you are talking the very biggest of names,  the Old Masters are a difficult proposition. This is not just because of their expense and fragility, but for conceptual reasons, too. For centuries, they were the ne plus ultra of art; but today they are often seen as too difficult. For example, the advertising material for last year’s superb National Gallery joint exhibition of Mantegna and Bellini showed a close-up of the face of a beautiful girl and a hand clutching some drapery against a brilliant blue sky. The first was, in fact, Mary Magdalene from a Bellini Virgin and Child and the second one of the angels supporting the dead Christ by Mantegna. The reason that the whole paintings, or even larger details, weren’t used was, a National Gallery curator told me, that religion simply doesn’t sell. In this instance, God isn’t in the details and neither is  that other off-putting theme: classical antiquity.  Hence for its first contact with the public, the gallery felt it had to divorce the painters from their spiritual and intellectual context (though once viewers had been enticed in, this pretence was swiftly dropped).

A great chunk of the gallery-going public, the curator continued, no longer has the grounding in religion, the classics or Renaissance and courtly culture that makes the Old Masters rewarding. And so they have fallen out of fashion. According the latest annual art market report by Art Basel/UBS, global art sales reached $63.7 billion in 2017, a rise of 12 per cent from the previous year. The largest sectors by value were postwar and contemporary art (46 per cent) and modern art (27 per cent). In fact, the year saw an increase in value across all sectors, including European Old Masters, which rose an impressive 64 per cent to $977 million. Surely then, the auction houses and dealers are wrong to be pessimistic about the Old Master market? No so: $450 million of that total was down to Leonardo’s record-pulverising Salvator Mundi — a sale that was a one-off aberration. Without it, sales of Old Masters would have fallen no less than 11 per cent. The year before, the fall was 33 per cent.

The Leonardo is, in fact, the only Old Master painting ever to have topped the blue riband $100 million mark. Behind it come works by Willem de Kooning (about $417 million in adjusted prices), Cézanne ($278 million), Gauguin ($222 million), Pollock ($211 million), Klimt and Rothko (both $197 million), Picasso ($190 million) and Modigliani ($180 million). No Raphael, no Rubens, no Caravaggio, no Velázquez. So dominant is the taste for 19th- and 20th-century work that only nine pre-1875 pictures feature in the top 90 most expensive paintings sold. Before 1987, the record had always been held by an Old Master. However,  when Van Gogh’s Vase With Fifteen Sunflowers sold that year for £24.75 million (about $64 million today),  the rule of art’s founding fathers was effectively over.

Of course, the lack of supply is a major issue. Incontestably great Old Masters rarely come on the market. But even when good examples appear, they fetch relatively modest sums — which suggests the taste for modern works is a matter of  fashion. Last year, for example, a Rembrandt study of a young man as Christ, which hadn’t been seen on the market since 1956, fetched £9.5 million; a pair of Canaletto Venetian views made just over $4 million; a Van Dyck portrait of Charles II as Prince of Wales realised £2.6 million (in 1906 Van Dyck was the most expensive painter in the world when his portrait of the Marchesa Grimaldi Cattaneo sold for $500,000). For these sums a collector would struggle to get a decent Picasso or Warhol.

Another factor is that the overwhelming majority of Old Masters were white men, which does not sit well with today’s mores. Perhaps that’s why one female painter, Artremisia Gentileschi (1593-1654), might be thought to buck the trend.  Her fame rests not just on her rarity as a professional female painter, but also because she was a woman raped by a fellow artist who took her assailant to court — an act of courage that has seen her adopted as a proto-feminist heroine and prompted her rediscovery. When, last year, her c.1640 painting of Lucretia stabbing herself to death after her own rape came up for sale in an Austrian auction house, it caused some excitement. Here was a dramatic nude with inescapable autobiographical overtones by one of the Baroque’s big names. It  sold for just $2,149,500. The National Gallery’s recently acquired Artemisia self portrait as St Catherine cost £3.6 million.

In an interview, Edward Dolman, the head of Phillips auction house, described the shift away from the Old Masters in the bluntest of terms: “The new client base at the auction houses — and the collecting tastes of those clients — have moved away from this veneration of the past . . . They want to be associated with the new and the now.” It is not the job of auction houses and dealers to have a care for global cultural heritage, that’s the task of the world’s great museums. Outside their doors, that heritage is rapidly losing its cachet.

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Among those who followed Picasso and Braque’s lead were Juan Gris, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, Alexander Archipenko and Jacques Lipchitz, but the artist who did most to wrench this style of intellectual enquiry into something more colourful and approachable was Fernand Léger (1881-1955). His version of Cubism was based on pattern, simplified forms and, above all, primary colours: “Man needs colour to live,” he said. “It’s just as necessary an element as fire and water.”

Some 50 of the artist’s works are on display in Fernand Léger: New Times, New Pleasures  (until March 17, 2019) at Tate Liverpool. They show how he moved on from his early Cubist paintings and their tendency towards abstraction, with both landscapes and figures being broken into patterns of discs and random shapes to something more distinctive. It was his experience of war, where he served at the front for two years and was invalided out following a mustard gas attack, that changed his art: “I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimetre in the sunlight. It was the magic of light on the white metal. That’s all it took for me to forget the abstract art of 1912–1913.” He now wanted, he said, “to paint in slang with all its colour and mobility”.

Echoes of that gun would appear in the tubes and mechanical components that appeared in his art through the 1920s (indeed he was known for a time as a “tubist”). However, the other revelation of Léger’s war years was coming into prolonged contact with working men and he consequently aimed at making art that would both reflect and be accessible to all.

He expanded his range beyond easel paintings to include murals, stained glass, tapestries and film and became an influential teacher. His pictures, meanwhile, took on a crisp monumentality — figures and backgrounds outlined in black with large areas of unmodulated colour: there is more than a hint of Mondrian’s De Stijl grids in Léger’s work. And many of his subjects came from popular entertainments — cyclists, musicians, acrobats — and from working life.

Among his most ambitious works were images of dock workers (The Big Black Divers, 1944, showing a knot of intertwined figures in bright colours) and builders (The Constructors, 1950). This latter subject, represented in the exhibition by a study showing a group of builders taking a break from putting up a steel-frame building, is an example of his socialism in action (he joined the French Communist Party on his post-war return from exile in America). The working man, however, was less keen on Léger than he was on them, and when the finished painting was installed in the café of the Renault motor factory, the artist was disappointed that the workers paid so little attention to it.

Léger was always an independent artist and in his work he found a way to combine many of the competing strands of early 20th-century art — colour, dynamism, abstraction, the figurative, the city, the machine age, and three-dimensionality. “Let us gaze wide-eyed at present-day life, which rolls, moves, and overflows alongside us,” he said. And, having done so, “Let us endeavour to dam it up, canalise it, organise it plastically.” People were among the things to be organised plastically too, which is why he never painted portraits. What he did do though was strike a balance, often a joyous one, between real life and formal experimentation.

Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1557) had the ill- fortune to be born in Venice with Titian and Giorgione as peers and with Giovanni Bellini in his pomp. Although he had great talent it was not as great as theirs and it was his fate always to work in the shadow of others, something that was reflected in the trajectory of his career. He left Venice to set himself up on the Veneto in less glamorous locations such as Treviso, Bergamo and Ancona — although there was a foray to Rome to work on the papal apartments where, needless to say, he came up against the young Raphael.

As a result — and as the National Gallery’s lovely exhibition of his portraits (until February 10, 2019) shows — he tended not to work for the Renaissance’s grandees but rather for its merchant and intellectual class. This though did not stop him from being an innovator. Lotto specialised in double portraits, such as his 1523 marriage portrait of Marsilio Cassotti and Faustina Assonica; in subject paintings that contained portraits (the deposed Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus stands in for the Virgin in his 1506 The Virgin in Glory between Saints Anthony Abbot and Louis of Toulouse); and in unusually wide-format portraits, such as his 1527 depiction of Andrea Odoni, which consequently has space not just for the collector of antiquities but for his collection too.

Nevertheless, Lotto’s career was a struggle — “Art did not earn me what I spent,” he wrote — and in 1552 he gave up and retreated from the world to become a lay brother at the Holy House of Loreto. Whatever consolations his faith gave him, his wonderful portraits show that he deserved much better from the world at large.

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Exhibitions are regularly and hyperbolically touted as being a “once in a lifetime” show, but the Pieter Bruegel exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (until January 13) is the real thing. It is an exhibition that could only happen in Vienna because it owns 12 of the 40 paintings generally accepted as being by Bruegel’s hand (Belgium is the next best endowed with four) and because he painted largely on panels — and exceptionally thin ones at that — the pictures are particularly delicate.

Bruegel the elder, the paterfamilias of a clan that would number some 15 significant artists over the course of 150 years, was born in Breda in what is now the Netherlands in 1525, and spent much of his working life in nearby Antwerp. He seems to us a one-off, standing outside the artistic currents of the time, but when he visited Italy and Sicily in the early 1550s Michelangelo and Titian were still at work and Tintoretto and Veronese were forging careers, as he was. Nevertheless, Bruegel was not a Renaissance artist in the accepted sense.

He was a religious artist who didn’t paint for churches, a painter of people who gave equal precedence to landscapes, an artist who treated the comic as well as the grave, someone who painted both life and death — carnival and apocalypse — with the same intensity. He was friends with and worked for a sophisticated humanist circle but he painted peasants rather than his milieu (even if the idea put about by his earliest biographer, Karel Van Mander, that he dressed up as a peasant to attend rural feasts is merely a picaresque piece of invention).

Each of his paintings contains multitudes. To walk round the galleries of the Kunsthistorisches is not so much to enter Bruegel’s world but his worlds. They remain ours too: here are vanity and insignificance in his two different and equally mesmeric versions of The Tower of Babel (both c.1563); gluttony and conviviality in The Peasant Wedding (1556-59); innocence in Children’s Games (1560) with some 80 pastimes crammed in; avarice in The Peasant and the Nest Robber (1568); fear as the mad-eyed woman Dulle Griet (1562) stalks a monstrous and devastated land; religion in the dramatic The Conversion of Saul (1567); and work and passing time in the Seasons series (1565).

In all of them Bruegel makes the subject subservient to the action. He may be interested in moral questions but he is even more interested in people. He was known as the artist of “busy pictures” that are alive with detail and he didn’t like the idea that the viewer’s eye — or perhaps his own — could be still, so he nudged it endlessly around each painting. In the Procession to Calvary a blustery autumn landscape overlooked by a windmill on a crag is less the backdrop for a moment of religious high drama than the setting for sheer human abundance. Christ, a tiny figure brought to his knees by the weight of the cross he is carrying, is almost lost in the throng of onlookers, farmers, squabblers, peddlers, children and animals that make his last moments ones of noise and bustle. There are swathes of the painting that are not religious at all but Bruegel’s message, hidden though it is, is nevertheless profound: if Christ died to save mankind, here is that mankind in all its variety, unruliness and indifference.

Even in some of his most contemplative paintings such as The Seasons, Bruegel always offers extra. There were initially six in the series but one was lost in the 17th century and the Met’s The Harvesters is not robust enough to travel; the remaining four are in the exhibition. In them Bruegel shows off his tricks: figures seen from the back — such as the Hunters in the Snow — lead the eye deep into the picture as tiny incidents litter the landscapes — a man pulling shut a rabbit trap, distant ships tossed in a winter squall, a harvester quietly sharpening his scythe.

The series was painted for Nicolaes Jongelink, an Antwerp banker who once owned 16 of his friend Bruegel’s pictures, and were hung in his dining room. Their precise purpose and meaning, like much of Bruegel’s work, remains enigmatic but it seems likely that they were intended to spark discussion at a “convivium” — a gathering of intellectuals. Among the topics disputed might have been what lessons can be taken from the great cycle of life on display and perhaps whether the simple country life was preferable to that of Jongelink and his guests. They might have discussed too how Bruegel changed the focus so that middle-ground figures are more minutely painted than those in the foreground, how he forces the viewer to zoom in and out of the paintings rather like a peasant dance, and whether he had ingeniously given a new and monumental twist to the medieval book of hours.

What even the most meteorologically-minded couldn’t have known is that the severe winter of The Hunters in the Snow marked the beginning of Europe’s “Little Ice Age” and that the abundant harvests of the other paintings were about to become a thing of the past. Bruegel, though, was a painter with keen antennae and his horrific The Triumph of Death, c.1562, from the Prado, in which an army of skeletons slaughters the last remnants of mankind, is not just a reprise of the Hieronymus Bosch paintings he initially learned from but a presentiment of the outrages that were to come in a matter of years with the Dutch Revolt. Bruegel had sniffed the air.

For those who can’t get to Vienna to view this wondrous gathering of paintings, drawings and engravings by art’s great original, the accompanying book, Bruegel: The Master (Thames & Hudson, £42) offers an exemplary overview. It is, however, no substitute for standing and staring and then staring again and again. 

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