Here is a tip for visitors to houses owned by the National Trust: look on top of the wardrobes. In this issue, Jeremy Warren publishes a reliquary bust of St Agnes from the workshop of one of the greatest late Gothic sculptors, Niclaus Gerhaert von Leyden. Warren identified the bust after it had been taken down from the top of a wardrobe in a dark corner of a bedroom of Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire. Anyone familiar with the history of the
Few subjects in the history of art seem as universal and venerable as war. From ancient monuments commemorating military victories and celebrating soldiers to modern condemnations of its brutality (with Picasso’s Guernica still serving as the decisive archetype), war has provided the sort of epic subject-matter and grand scale that has conventionally