Baroque

In the winter of 1861, visitors to the Louvre might have seen a young artist painstakingly copying one of the museum’s 39 paintings by Poussin. The subject was ‘The Abduction of the Sabine Women’ and the artist was the 27-year-old Edgar Degas, then at work on his own classical battle of the sexes, ‘Young Spartans’. Although lumped with the impressionists, Degas was a classicist at heart. ‘The masters must be copied over and over again,’ he believed, ‘and it is only after proving yourself a good copyist that you should reasonably be permitted to draw a radish from nature.’ A dedicated copyist himself, Poussin would have approved. The paintings in

Philippe V was a Bourbon prince who secured the throne of Spain using his family connections. Claire van Kampen is a writer who relied on the same method to secure a West End opening for her play about Philippe. It stars Mark van Kampen (aka Mark Rylance) as the charmingly dotty Frenchman. Philippe was a manic depressive who regarded his Spanish subjects as a puzzling inconvenience. He had no interest in governing them and preferred to laze around the countryside, looking at stars, listening to music and indulging his eccentricities. We first meet him in bed trying to hook a fish supper from a goldfish bowl. Courtiers secretly plot to

It’s a comfort that the creation of a new ballet inspired by French court entertainment can still happen in the amnesiac ballet country that Britain has become. The idea of making a modern-day meditation on the first ballet — Louis XIV’s 12-hour epic Le Ballet de la nuit (1653) — is as intellectual as Wayne McGregor’s roping in of cognitive science as source material. It faces many of the same traps when it comes to capturing that elusive necessity: theatricality. Only David Bintley could do this, deploying his artistic authority as the 20-year director of Birmingham Royal Ballet as any French despot would. The scheme’s theatricality is innate. Le Ballet

Before the jukebox musical, back when Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys and Viva Forever! were still dollar-shaped glints in an as-yet-unborn producer’s eye, there was the pasticcio opera. Literally a musical ‘pastry’ or ‘pie’, these brought together arias from different operas, often by different composers, in a single work, designed as a way of feeding an 18th-century public whose appetite for opera was greater than composers’ ability to sate it with new music. Everyone did it — Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn, and of course that ultimate musical pragmatist Handel — but that didn’t make the practice any the more respectable, as one satirist’s pasticcio ‘recipe’ makes clear. Pick out about an hundred

What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s weapon might be a lyre rather than a pen, but the metaphor is silhouetted clearly against the monochrome backdrop of the Royal Opera’s new production of Monteverdi’s opera. Director Michael Boyd, former artistic director of the RSC, has taken a world of nymphs and shepherds and stripped it for conceptual parts. A battle between Gods and men is reinvented as a struggle between individual creative autonomy and faceless obedience to church and state. In Tom Piper’s designs, meadows and bucolic loveliness are out and 24-style metal walkways and gantries are

Talking of Rembrandt’s ‘The Jewish Bride’ to a friend, Vincent van Gogh went — characteristically — over the top. ‘I should be happy to give ten years of my life,’ he exclaimed, ‘if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food.’ Without undergoing such rigours, visitors to Rembrandt: the Late Works at the National Gallery next month will be able to see the picture that drove Vincent to such a paroxysm of enthusiasm, along with many other masterpieces from the artist’s last years. It may be that in recent decades other 17th-century masters — Caravaggio