Arts feature

Lucian Freud almost had a second career in the cinema. He acted as an extra in a couple of films during the early 1940s; the only one in which he made the final cut was a farce starring the ukulele-playing comedian George Formby in which his 19-year-old face can be seen peering out of the background in one scene. Years later, Lucian claimed, John Huston asked him if he’d like to play the part of his grandfather Sigmund in a biographical screen drama from 1962 entitled Freud: The Secret Passion (which had, at one point, a script by Jean-Paul Sartre). Eventually Montgomery Clift was cast instead, which was just as well because Freud was definitely an observer rather than a performer.

Multisensory exhibitions are old hat, but in the case of In Bloom – How Plants Changed Our World at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, it feels just right to sit in a space given over to flowers with the sound of gurgling water in the background, mingled with the cries and chirrups of birds. At intervals there are scent stations where you can smell damask rose or green and black tea from flower-shaped chalices. From the ceiling hang swaths of green muslin. I could have stayed here all afternoon. Right in front of me were also two delicious studies of tulips to illustrate the Dutch craze of the 1630s. Frankly, if it came to a choice of two-tone tulips or bitcoin as a way of squandering money, I know which I’d prefer. There is a print of a sultan’s seraglio in this tulip section.

A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent to Caravaggio – a Caravaggio without the bad temper, brutal vices or criminal record. But it seems difficult to argue that Caravaggio had any direct influence on his work. After all, he died when Zurbarán was 11 years old. Since Zurbarán never left Spain, he could not have seen any of Caravaggio’s paintings with his own eyes. Indeed, he might never even have heard the artist’s name. Still, there are unavoidable similarities between the two men’s work. Zurbarán shared Caravaggio’s sense of drama and his love of shadows broken up by patches of strong light.

It’s a crisp afternoon, and in a darkened room in central Amsterdam a woman is being smothered in snakes. Projected on to three walls is a massive video close-up of her face. She is young and beautiful and remarkably composed: just a nose twitch here, an eyelid flutter there, as a python wriggles across her mouth or languidly caresses her cheekbone with its tail. In the room behind me, another woman stares fiercely back. Her shoulders are bunched with muscle, arms stiff at her sides, like a nightclub brawler about to nut someone. But it’s the bull’s horns sprouting from her forehead, and the mane of matted fur marching down her back, that make it hard to meet her gaze.

More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first. “These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s All-Bran breakfast cereal. “One has driving power – energy – the will to succeed. The other is listless – tired all the time – it is an effort for him to plod through each day’s work.” The point being that aging is, to a not inconsiderable degree, something we do to ourselves, and something we do to each other. It is a process, not an event.

By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is in freefall. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan is a confident protagonist; a world-builder. In Die Walküre, we’ve seen him discover the limits of power, and felt his heart break. Now, in Siegfried, he’s a haunted figure; the solitary Wanderer, searching the world for answers that his all-powerful wisdom can no longer supply. He confronts the young hero Siegfried, and his law-giving spear shatters on the sword of a reckless, clueless boy. "All he can say is, 'Go, then. I can’t hold you any more,'" says Christopher Maltman, who has sung the role of Wotan throughout the Royal Opera’s current Ring cycle, and brings it to completion when Siegfried opens later this month.

Ann Lee was a sharp-tongued woman from the back streets of 18th-­century Manchester who joined a maverick Protestant sect that became known as the Shakers, or “Shaking Quakers.” In fact their shaking was the least of it: they howled, gurned and gibbered while flirting with the notion that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman. All sexual activity, even between man and wife, was forbidden. Ann then had a series of visions that, according to subsequent Shaker accounts, identified her as the “woman clothed with the sun” whose appearance in the Book of Revelation heralds the end of the world. In 1774, “Mother Ann” and a small band of faithful emigrated to America.