Collection highlights tour

'Three studies from the Temeraire' is an oil on canvas triptych, painted between 1998-99. The history is of special interest, unusual yet evolutionary. In 1998 Twombly was working on three related but at the time independent canvases on three adjacent walls of his Gaeta studio. The theme was these ancient vessels and all the senses of myth and history they inferred - there was originally neither particular thought of Turner, an artist who he had always especially admired, nor of the three panels as a single work. Gradually they coalesced into a single epic event and were shown in the National Gallery in London in the exhibition "Encounters: new art from old" in the year 2000 alongside Turner's famed 'The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838', which was painted in 1839. The theme of this exhibition was 'great artists of our time converse with the greatest artists of all time'... and of course Twombly's pictures assumed their role as contemporary evocations of Turner's 'The Fighting Temeraire'. Looking at the three canvases together, as a single panorama, there is a potent sense of passage as the ships drift, float and sail into the warm, sensuous but slightly ominous embrace of infinity. There is a strong sense of procession, with the flag-ship bringing up the rear, or maybe they are all images of the same ship, passing into history. This 'dissolving' fleet is a poignant echo of Turner's 'Temeraire' as she is towed by a tugboat to her last resting place in the cooling glows of a fast descending sunset. Both Twombly's and Turner's paintings are dominated by sky and water, indistinguishable in Twombly, but both elements in which things can float. There is too a wonderful correspondence between the emotive reflections in Turner's 'Temeraire' and the dripping lines that that flow from Twombly's apparently doomed ships. The qualities and sensibilities which echo from Twombly's 'Three studies from the Temeraire' are manifold: the imagery suggests the passage of time, the inevitable end to any voyage, the passage from the present to the past and vice versa. These works imply that continuity of human, cultural and aesthetic experience in which the past is always available, as Twombly so believes. His passing, disappearing fleet may indeed also symbolise that unbroken chord which links classical antiquity with the present. Twombly's 'Three studies' would never have been inspired as they were, or painted as they were, without Turner's 'Fighting Temeraire', even though they were initiated without any such specific association. Certainly they are far from slavish copies or shallow contemporary imitations. It is likely that Twombly's modern interpretation would confuse a latter-day Turner, however he would have recognised certain qualities - the fascination with the aura of the heroic, the melancholy and beauty of passage, the magic of profound light, the evocation of depth, profundity and mystery. Cy Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia. In 1948-49 he trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; he then won a Fellowship to the Art Students League in New York where he forged a close association with fellow student, Robert Rauschenberg. They subsequently attended the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina where they studied under Robert Motherwell. In 1952 Twombly won a grant to visit Europe and, with Rauschenberg in tow, they travelled extensively returning to New York in 1953. In 1957 Twombly left New York for Rome, virtually for good, although he still returns every year to Lexington for a few months. By 1960 Twombly was established and much recognised, especially in his new home Italy, but also in New York where his classically-inspired, highly individual and seemingly subjective marks, doodles and lines - moments of experience set against moody rich and absorbent creamy white grounds - were the very antithesis to the then current vogue for Pop Art and Minimalism. If there was any relationship with New York it was his certain affinity with Abstract Expressionism. These often gently convulsive works gradually calmed into the more austere but nervous, and highly distinctive, 'blackboard' pictures distinguished by the 'scribbles' which became an absolute hallmark of Twombly's work. During the late 1970s and the 1980s Twombly's paintings had a less frenetic sense of pace and energy, and assumed an even more mysterious and contemplative nature. There is a noticeable maturity about these works and an admission of a debt to artists who he particularly admired including Monet and Turner in their mysterious tones and contemplative attitude. He also moved out of Rome to where he presently lives, in the old port town of Gaeta, roughly half way between Rome and Naples.

As one of the founding artists of 'Die Brücke' group in 1905, Kirchner is essential to the history of German expressionism, a movement he virtually personifies. Trained in Munich and Dresden, he was attracted to neo-impressionism, van Gogh and tribal artefacts, combining influences from all three in his searingly emotional paintings, drawings and prints. His woodcuts and woodcarvings combine traditional German folk forms with more primitive instincts. His oil paintings, ranging from ambitiously large to intimate in scale, equally show the effects of ethnographic research. The nudes in 'Three bathers' resemble the artist's painted carvings, echoing in turn the sculpted Eves of medieval art as well as African and Pacific statuary. Wearing lipstick and a look of enervation, these Berlin day-trippers huddle defensively in the Baltic waves. Uncannily presaging the coming blitzkrieg, the figures also predict the artist's own deteriorating health. Conscripted in 1915, Kirchner was discharged six months later with tuberculosis. AGNSW Handbook, 1999.

Guilio Paolini came to international note as a leading member of the arte povera group in Italy in 1967. Like the others, he uses found materials and often introduces historical and literary references into his imagery. Works such as this have a poetic quality that is common with arte povera and yet there is a strong conceptual and critical streak that is not normally associated with the group. Many of his installations directly critique assumptions about art history and play with the rules of perspective to disclose their paradoxical illusionism. ‘L’altra figura’ (the other figure) is a deceptively simple play on the classical theme. The two heads raised on plinths to the height of a modestly sized viewer are identical plaster casts of a Roman copy of an earlier Hellenistic bust. The busts show the heads slightly at an angle to the body, their faces turned to reflect each other precisely. This slightly sideways glance lends a degree of animation to what would otherwise be a static mirroring. It is as if they have both just turned to catch the other's gaze; perhaps it is the dramatic incident that has just occurred between them. On the floor surrounding the two plinths is the manifest evidence of a minor disaster. Another bust that seems to have crashed to the floor, shattering into multiple pieces of plaster, is just barely recognisable as the third of a kind. The twins may be thought of as a related pair or a mirroring of one but three is the beginning of an indefinite number, suggesting infinite reproducibility or endless cloning. A common theme of Paolini’s work investigates representational strategies in art since the Renaissance, including modernist aspirations to find the essence of things. Mirroring is the most immediate form of mimetic representation so it is reasonable to begin to see this as a work that follows this line. The Greco-Roman heads also incline us to suspect narratives from antiquity. Could the smashed figure lying on the ground, in a more-or-less circular arrangement, be the rippled effect of the reflection in a pool disturbed by Narcissus reaching out to caress his own loved image? This would certainly be a poetic take on the impossibility of possessing the desired object in representation. The degree of fragmentation of the third head also suggests a fall from a great height; could this be the mythical Icarus, who ignored his father’s warning not to fly too close to the sun? This pragmatic warning masks a greater peril since the sun is Apollo riding across the sky in his chariot. Apollo for Plato was the ultimate source of pure form, something representation could never capture, although neo-Platonists and modernists dreamt of doing so. Poor Icarus got carried away and soared towards this great source but was struck down by the jealous god for his presumption. © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

James Angus’s sculptures usually find their subject in things that already exist in the world. His works can be divided into two main spheres, natural creatures and man-made, often architectural structures or manufactured forms. Living things are realised in versions that emphasise their sculptural nature, and inanimate objects are shifted through a series of propositions about physics, gravity and geometry. In ‘Manta Ray’ 2002, the horizontal mass and undulating curves of the creature are eerily still and perfectly hydrodynamic. In ‘Seagram Building’ 2000, a slightly arching version of the modernist icon lies displaced on the floor. Its curving profile is a subtle distortion that is mathematically correct, but physically improbable and visually disorienting. For ‘Bugatti Type 35’ Angus has taken one of the most iconic racing cars of the 20th century, replicated it, but also distorted it through a gravitational shift 30 degrees to the right. While Angus’s art is not minimal, it shares minimalism’s interest in primary structures and physical presence, and suggests that their source may be found in much earlier developments in modernist architecture and design such as the use of serial repeated forms, manufactured units, structuring grids and highly finished surfaces. The physical and perceptual disorientation of the sculptures, achieved through a mathematically correct displacement of rational geometry, bends our experience of these familiar iconic objects. This immaculate car from the 1920s designed for speed, an ultimate symbol of the modern age and mechanical progress, can no longer support itself upright and tips over, strangely drawn out, its circular wheels becoming ellipses. It seems the real manifestation of the famous early 20th century image by French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue of a car speeding past, the limitations of photography’s technology seemingly making its wheels stretch. Bugatti’s car was exceptional because of the visionary solutions he devised for engineering problems. In part the originality of Bugatti’s vision can be attributed to his art school training and artistic talent before he entered into car design. Angus retrieves this immaculately engineered machine and returns it to being art, through both replication and intervention. Angus proposes alternate perceptual models that are inherent in geometry’s rigorous spatial logic and mathematical precision, suggesting other ways, at least in sculptural form, in which we may view the world.

By the time he painted this faceless female figure, Picasso was a towering legend of modern art. Yet to say she is faceless is not entirely accurate: across her torso, breasts, belly and pudenda the painter has inscribed the disconcerting semblance of his own features. Her nipples are the tell-tale black pupils of his eyes, her serrated vagina is his equally aggressive mouth. Having thus invaded her body, his own erupts in the manner of a physiological mutation. It is not an easy image, but it is wholly truthful to Picasso's deepest intuitions and experience. Anger belies the innocuousness of the subject matter. Fear underscores the anger. It is only very marginally a work of art about appearances. Instead, Picasso enacts a form of black magic, an exorcising ritual of bodily destruction and psychic derangement that plays fast and loose with reality - all within the conventions of the seated portrait. That he did this through the agency of his last great love, Jacqueline Rogue, setting her violated form in the serenity of his new villa at Cannes, is admirable and repulsive in equal measure. The gesticulating palm tree may well allude to Matisse, whose recent death reminded Picasso of the inescapability of mortality. Art Gallery Handbook, 1999.

This finely crafted regal figure of the Buddha is depicted in a strong frontal stance wearing long, flowing monastic robes, scalloped at the hems and gathered in front with a jewelled girdle. While the smooth and naturalistic modelling of the torso gives the appearance of a bare upper body, the Buddha's robes are in fact draped over both shoulders where an elaborate necklace or collar disguises the neckline of the garment. In addition, the Buddha is depicted wearing elaborate jewellery: heavy earrings, armbands and a distinctive conical crown, the practice of depicting the Buddha as adorned with a crown having developed in Pala India where the crown represented the complete attainment of Buddhahood. Nevertheless, dressed in the regalia of a king, this majestic figure of the Buddha embodies the concept of the Devaraja (literally god-king), as an incarnation of the Divine on earth and as the means by which the Khmer kings legitimised their sovereignty. In an interesting variation, the hands of this Buddha are held in the gesture of 'vitarka mudra', the gesture of philosophical debate and discussion, reminiscent of Thai Buddha images of the preceding Mon-Dvaravati period. Thus although the distinctive facial features, powerful frontal and hieratic stance, and ornate formalism of this skilfully executed image of the Buddha has its stylistic origins with the Khmer culture, this appropriation and adaptation of Mon-Dvaravati elements attest to the dynamic evolution of Southeast Asian Buddhist sculpture. Asian Art Dept., AGNSW, 29 May 2002.

Purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales Foundation in 1994, 'Woman of Venice VII' is the first sculpture by Alberto Giacometti to enter a public art collection in Australia. It is one of nine bronze figures that were created as 'states' of a single figure modelled in clay on a single armature over a period of about three weeks and cast in plaster by the artist's brother, Diego. The hands held at the side of the figure's broad body emphasise the corporeality of the figure and recall Giacometti's early experiments with female spoon-like forms. As in other works in this series the tension created between the heavy wedge-shaped pedestal and the figure's tiny head endows the piece with a sense of the visionary that the artist favoured. The heavily textured quality of this work and original patination make this one of Giacometti's most distinctive and successful female figures. This work perfectly embodies Giacometti's ambivalent attitude towards women whom he idolised but whom he also found suffocating and incomprehensible. 'Woman of Venice VII' encourages the viewer to engage imaginatively with its mysterious subject. Whether we interpret her as a goddess or prostitute, Egyptian cult figure or decomposing corpse, one cannot remain unmoved by Giacometti's powerful interpretation of humanity. No.5 in an edition of 6.

'Von den Verlorenen gerührt, die der Glaube nicht trug, erwachen die Trommeln im Fluss' is the title of each of two works, one painting and one floor installation. It is not uncommon for Kiefer to use the same titles again and again. This is because of his sustained commitment to certain themes that he pursues over many years. These two works represent two such themes in Kiefer's development and although they look very different as objects they are two sides of one key idea in his mature work. The horizon in Kiefer's work is always more than a landscape feature, it is highly charged symbolically. 'Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe' 1984-86 in the Gallery's collection includes a propeller which has the potential to fly over the horizon transcending the boundary between heaven and earth. In many of Kiefer's paintings and sculptures there are ladders, wings, rockets, Ziggurats, snakes and rainbows that all in some way suggest the idea of transcendence. The broken stairs in this work correspond to the broken propeller suggesting the dream of climbing above the horizon and yet it is a dream that is doomed to fail. This ambivalence towards transcendental aspiration is common to much art of the late twentieth century. For example Ken Unsworth's sculpture 'Rapture' 1994 in the Gallery's collection takes the form of a stairway to heaven frustrated when the stairs made of the keyboards of a grand piano arrive at the body of the piano which is stuffed with straw and will never sound the music of the spheres. The floor installation belongs to a body of works that reverse the passage between heaven and the earth. This is often represented by emanations from above sometimes in the form of poured lead attached to a painting or hanging in space like the finger of God. Many of Kiefer's recent works have more to do with the stars which according to the 16th century philosopher Robert Fludd each have their equivalent in a flower on the earth. Here we see a pile of glass plates that have fallen as a shower over piles of human hair (material human presence). Inscribed with one of 9000 star numbers, each piece of glass represents a heavenly intervention or emanation. Human hair is woven throughout the glass in a reference to the Egyptian Queen Berenice, who often appears in Kiefer’s works in the form of long locks of hair. Berenice was famous for her beauty and as an offering to the gods to bring her husband safely back from war, she cut her tresses and placed them on the temple altar. The Gods were so pleased with the offering that they took the hair into the sky where it became the constellation Coma Berenices (Berenice’s hair). The constellation of Coma Berenices is centred between Canes Venatici to the north, Virgo to the south, Bootes on the east and Leo on the west border. The following text is taken from the 2005 exhibition literature when these works were first shown in London: Kiefer's elegiac oeuvre is based on a vast system of themes and references relating to the human condition, explored through a highly emotive use of material and medium. In his muscular artistic language, physical materiality and visual complexity are equal to the content itself, which ranges over sources as diverse as Teutonic mythology and history, alchemy, apocalypse, and belief. As corollary to this breadth of content, Kiefer employs an almost bewildering variety of materials including - in addition to the thick oil paint that is the base of all his large-scale works - dirt, lead, models, photographs, woodcuts, sand, straw and all manner of organic material. By adding 'real' materials to the illusionistic painted surface of his gigantic tableaux, he has invented a compelling 'third space' between painting and sculpture. Few contemporary artists match Kiefer's epic reach; the provocative and paradoxical nature of his work suggests that he embraces the notion of the modern artist who stands resolutely outside society, flaunting its histories, its taboos and its myths. By assimilating and utilizing the conventions and traditions of history painting, he goes beyond them, mingling viewpoints and presenting contradictory interpretations while emulating the genre's grandiloquence. Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen. As a young artist in a Germany reeling from the after-shocks of the Second World War, he opted for a thoroughly and obviously indigenous art, of native subjects, values and symbols that contended with the fraught territory of German history and identity. In the late 1970s he started to make large, highly worked books that began with photographs staged in his studio, gradually gaining body through the application of lead, paint and other collage elements. These impressive objects indicated the way to the complex, process-oriented works of his mature period. In 1991 Kiefer left Germany, eventually settling in the south of France. In the same year he made an exhibition of paintings stacked randomly on top of each other as if discarded. This led to a hiatus in his art production that lasted more than three years. After this he began making new work with a wholly new subject matter, themes and references, dealing with central spiritual and philosophical concerns of our time. Over the past four decades, Kiefer has exhibited his work extensively throughout the world and is included in the world's most prestigious public and private collections.

Bill Henson's first solo exhibition, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975 when he was 19 years old, heralded the beginnings of a unique photographic vision of the Australian landscape. Known for his brooding imagery and exacting artistic process, Henson alludes to the darkness of Caravaggio, the lightness of Purcell and the drama of Wagner. The intensity and intimacy of his images broach the boundary of the painterly and the cinematic, combining both surface and depth to reflect a space between the mystical and the real. Like Francesco Clemente, his photographs may begin with a fleeting vision or impression, a piece of music or line of writing, that echoes subconsciously before manifesting in his work. Henson's 'Untitled 1994/95' shows naked youths, cars and the darkened landscape that constantly fluctuates between space and time. It is a layered work, interspersed and fragmented by jagged reversed photographic paper that is pinned almost savagely to the surface. The glaring voids are not only temporarily blinding but create a shift akin to a screen obscuring the darkness and its content. The fracturing of the surface develops a provocative tension, splintering the image and adding to its intensity, further charging the displaced subjects with a brutal, baroque sensuality. The figural 'tableau vivant' is, as critic John Forbes suggested, an approximation of Renaissance art. There is also something medieval about the imagery and figures, which recall the rich and fractured spaces of Dieric Bouts' 'Hell' and 'Paradise' of 1450. The evocative portrait series 'Paris Opera Project' brings a strangely discontinuous space to the viewer. Part of a much larger series, the portraits play out the drama of opera as if in five acts. Moving from a moody landscape in half-light to a young girl who lifts her hand to grasp the darkness, the inky blackness of the theatre leads us through the other portraits of opera viewers deep in concentration. The final image, like the first, is a fuzzy landscape, where a barely discernible hill of trees is mirrored by trailing clouds, the space between reflecting the shimmering night sky. Like video artist Bill Viola, Henson chooses not to show the action of the stage but rather the audience in full devotional contemplation. Often likened to painting, Henson's artistic process is not unlike the painter's struggle: 'just as you can scrape back areas of painting and go over them, you do follow something along over maybe several weeks and change things until it slips past its best point and you lose it. And then there's a long, often a very long, period when the work is turning into something else - you can't wind it back to whatever it was'.1 1. Sebastian Smee in conversation with Bill Henson (1994) in Bill Henson, 'Mnemosyne', AGNSW, Sydney/Scalo, Zurich 2005, p 440 © Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Benign but fearsome, this pair of unusually large and meticulously detailed figures exemplifies ceramic technique in Tang China. The facial features and elaborate costumes of these tomb guardians are realised with a convincing naturalism combined with iconographic stylisation. Their dynamic and dramatic poses are characteristic of figures that were placed in the four corners of the tomb to ward off evil spirits. Guardian figures such as these, termed 'lokapalas' or guardian kings, became assimilated into the popular concept of the Four Heavenly Kings of Buddhism, or 'tian wang'. The demonic appearance of this pair is heightened by their flamboyant armour with its flaring epaulettes and prominent breastplates. Also typical is their heroic pose: by standing on or trampling a demon or animal the guardians demonstrate their power over natural elements and evil forces. Art Gallery Handbook, 1999. pg. 250.

The technical and artistic excellence of Ming dynasty porcelain is without parallel. Although a tremendous variety of wares was produced, the great tradition of blue and white porcelains most confidently expresses the imperial style. The Yongle period at the beginning of the fifteenth century was one of the most glorious and productive eras in the history of Chinese art. Under the inspired patronage of the Yongle emperor all the arts flourished; none more so than the ceramic arts centred on the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province. There the characteristics of the local clay had been mastered in the production of translucent high-fired white-bodied porcelain. The technique of painting on the body of the ceramic vessel with cobalt blue had been introduced to China during the preceding Yuan dynasty, probably from Persia. By the late Yuan dynasty (in the second half of the fourteenth century), blue and white porcelain was the hallmark product of Chinese kilns, paving the way for massive expansion and artistic fulfilment in the Ming. This large dish is a classic example of the Ming potters' art. Perfectly shaped, it is covered with a glaze rich in texture, and painted with a flourishing design of a bouquet of lotus and water plantain, with a continuous scroll of lotus blooms around the rim. Characteristic of Ming imperial wares, the shape of the vessel is in perfect harmony with the rhythms of the decoration. Art Gallery Handbook, 1999. pg. 252.

Noh robes are the ultimate statement in quality, luxury and skilful weaving. This one is an 'atsuita', a robe used as an outer robe primarily for male roles. It is boldly decorated with alternating squares of eddy or whirlpool ('uzumoyo') motifs, and dragon roundels. In addition the backgrounds within the squares are enriched with trellis and 'Bishamon' diaper pattern; and the ikat dyed warps are arranged to form blocks of colour. The result is a superbly vibrant and impressive design. Asian Art Department, AGNSW, August 2006.

The 'golden age' of Japanese screen painting occurred in the 1600s in Kyoto, when these brilliantly realised screens were painted by Kano Eino, third generation head of the Kyoto Kano school. The style had emerged in the confidently flamboyant Momoyama period (1568-1615) as the brash and newly emergent samurai elite sought an ostentatious display of their own power and wealth. It was their patronage that created for the first time lavish screens of gold background decorated with symbols of power such as bamboo and cypress. The new style, expressed most beautifully by artists of the Kano school in the late 1500s and 1600s, was an intuitive distillation of the dialectic that has driven Japanese culture: its accepting/rejecting relationship with China. The dialectic (which the Japanese call 'wakan', 'China/Japan') was based on a series of opposites: monochrome/colour, emotion/restraint, abstraction/nationalism. The dialectic is epitomised in these screens: the bold, vigorous and rich brushstrokes of Chinese painting displayed in the rhythmic sweep of the lichen-covered cypress trunks and the sharp lines of the rock faces, combined with the clear, bright colours and attentive recording of nature that is the native inheritance of the Japanese artist. The delicate, elegant handling of the dandelions and lilies on the top screen exemplifies the native Japanese sensitivity to nature. The screens also realise this dialectic symbolically: the cypress was a favoured symbol of the samurai to express their dominance and power, while the pierced rock formation on the bottom screen is a classic Chinese Daoist interpretation of the 'yin' and 'yang', void and form. The pampas grass with its trimming of autumnal frost (in reality a movingly beautiful sight) is a favourite Japanese subject for painters and poets. The combination of the pine, bamboo and plum blossom on the extreme left originated in 13th century China and became one of the most popular depictions of Chinese art. Termed the 'Three Friends of the Cold Season', the trio is laden with symbolism: the pine exemplifies steadfastness and courage, the bamboo uprightness and the plum blossom, purity. The pheasant, often synonymous with the phoenix, is a Chinese emblem of beauty and good fortune, while in Japan the pheasant was the prey in the samurai's beloved sport of falconry. The strong interest in plants such as camellias that arose in the mid 1600s is also reflected in this work. The Asian Collections, AGNSW, 2003, pg.218.

In a seeming contradiction of its substance as an object, this unusual jar carries inscriptions from a Buddhist text on nothingness. The potter, a Buddhist who lives in the mountains of Kwangju, believes that dedication and painstaking effort are an essential part of the creative process. His work is praised for its individuality and for its imaginative embrace of antiquity, particularly the austere but beautiful aesthetic of the uniquely Korean 'punch'ong' (literally 'powder green') ceramics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this engaging object the artist has employed the 'sgraffito' technique in which the vessel, made in this case by the coiling method, is then beaten and its surface scoured in an instant 'maturing' process before being covered with a white slip. The characters have then been scratched through the thin slip. This rich combination of contemporary individuality with a spirit of antiquity expresses the ideals of purity, honesty and humble sparseness so admired by the connoisseurs and tea masters of modern Japan. Art Gallery Handbook, 1999. pg. 267.

This monumental stone image of the seated Buddha Amitabha, the Buddha of the West, sits with his hands held in the meditation gesture (in Sanskrit known as 'dhyana mudra'), his feet in the 'vajrasana' position of both soles upwards, and wearing the thin diaphanous robe of a monk. Deeply immersed in meditation, the Buddha emanates the serenity, wisdom and spirituality expected of the central icon of Buddhism. It is likely that originally this Buddha was part of a specific grouping. For example, Amitabha, together with Shakyamuni, the Historical Buddha, and Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, constitutes the powerful triumvirate of Past, Present and Future Buddhas. As well, Amitabha as the Buddha of the West, appears in mandalas on the western quarter. The concept of the mandala, a diagrammatic representation of the invisible forces that govern the cosmos, was brought to Indonesia with Vajrayana Buddhism. Vajrayana mandalas commonly have five Buddhas: the Buddhas of the Four Directions, presided over by Vairochana, the Buddha of the Centre. The largest three-dimensional mandala, and a site of world cultural significance, is at Borobudur, an astounding 9th century monument that contains nearly 500 Buddhist statues. Stylistically this Buddha is close to those at Borobudur, and presumably belonged to such a set that once constituted a temple mandala, with Amitabha Buddhas presiding over the west. The Asian Collections, AGNSW, 2003, pg.339.

"I repaint other people's paintings. See that there? That's 'Bailed up'. You know, Tom Roberts. I've just taken the figures out and repainted the background." - Fred Williams 1969 One of Williams' greatest works, 'My garden' was painted in direct response to Tom Roberts' 'Bailed up', underlining Williams' strong allegiance to the Heidelberg School and especially to Tom Roberts, the Australian painter he loved most of all. In a singularly profound homage from one artist to another, Williams transmuted the golden glare of a relatively gentle New England landscape into his own painterly expression of the hot red heart of the continent; acting out his long-held declaration that 'Bailed up' was the most important landscape painting in this country. Australian Art Department, AGNSW, 2000

This painting by Jeffrey Smart, perhaps the finest masterpiece of his later years, is a perfect example of his habit of finding motifs delivered without warning. For, given the calculation and precision typifying his long career as an artist, Smart has never quite known what is in store to appeal to his compositional interests driving around the industrial estates of Arezzo, or walking through a flea market in Rome, or a back street in Sydney. His process has a curious connection with a 19th-century method inculcated by French artist Lecoq de Boisbaudran as a kind of competition with the seduction of photography. Students were encouraged to look at a motif for a few seconds, turn their backs on it, commit it to memory, and let imagination go to work. Whistler adopted this practice in France and England; and in Australia half a century later Nolan developed his own instinctive version of it to spectacular effect. Smart differed from those two however in his slow, deliberate construction of a scaffolding to hold fast a taken-by-surprise glimpse of a subject that to ordinary eyes may have had little significance. Indeed, often it is almost as if he has been the hunted and the motif the hunter, snaring him through the most unprepossessing effect; a slant of light on a garage door; a pattern of peeling posters on a corrugated fence; a red post box against a yellow wall. And always there have been moments of despair between these effects – moments of visual bankruptcy as he puts it – when he can find nothing to paint at all. Such was his state before the idea of 'Matisse at Ashford' made its first impact on him. At Posticcia Nuova his easel was bare, and there were only older sketches in the studio racks, nothing fresh coming at him for a new composition. Heavy with a cold in the late winter of 2005 he went to London for a business meeting, then on to Paris to meet up with Margaret Olley at the Louvre. He had to go back to London to finish his business talks, contemplating the ultimate return to a barren studio. The train pulled out of the tunnel in darkening afternoon light and 'Goddie came good' he later wrote to a friend, as it paused at the first English station, Ashford. The platforms at Ashford were dominated by a series of posters advertising a Matisse exhibition at the Royal Academy – one of the blue cut-out nudes – seen in progression across the width of the station like echoing cadences of a modernist cliché. Smart didn't know quite why the motif was so imperative – why its visual irony was so eloquent – he just knew it had to be painted. Before the train moved off he quickly sketched what he saw with a black pen inside the end papers of a paperback novel and the masterpiece was in embryo, teased out and developed in the ensuing months through a succession of studies to its final bold, golden-section structure of verticals and horizontals. Its tight geometry and cool palette, true to the mood of season and time of day of its original inspiration, conspire to hold captive one of Matisse's most famous works as a magnificent specimen of that influence which helped set so many of the next generation of modernists free to roam the picture plane.

Five bells was my first commission to paint in situ to cover a wall … I didn’t hesitate. I brushed a line around the core theme, the seed-burst, the life-burst, the sea-harbour, the source of life. Inside and around this core, I painted images drawn from metaphors and similes in [Kenneth] Slessor’s poem of our harbour city, and from my own emotional and physical involvement with the harbour, and with my young family in Watsons Bay … I wanted to show the Harbour as a movement, a sea suck, and the sound of the water as though I am part of the sea ... The painting says directly what I wanted to say: ‘I am in the sea-harbour, and the sea-harbour is in me’. John Olsen, 1999

Freddie Timms was born at Ngarrmaliny (after which he takes his name). He worked as a stockman on various East Kimberley cattle stations for most of his life and he helped paint the boards and danced for the Gurirr Gurirr ceremony devised by Rover Thomas. Subsequently when canvas and paints were supplied to some of the more senior artists, including his father-in-law George Mung Mung, Timms asked for painting materials and he has continued to paint ever since. His style conforms to the East Kimberley archetype originated by Rover Thomas but is recognizably his own with discrete areas of colour outlined in double rows of dots. Timms usually takes an aerial perspective on country and his paintings represent intimate and personal maps of the East Kimberley landscape. Jack Yard is a place on Bow River Station where Freddie Timms lived as a boy. The pastoral lease is now owned by family members. In the painting 'Jack Yard' 2004, the road is shown entering the country of the painting near a spring (near the pink section at the bottom centre), coming from the station and present day community settlement at Bow River. It passes through the picture and goes to Greenvale, to Foal Creek, where the artist was born, back to Violet Valley and back around to the highway. The Wilson River with the large permanent waterhole at Jack Yard, runs across the painting from left to right. The two black shapes on either side of the main living waterhole are the hills around it. Moat Creek runs down from the top of the left-hand panel to join the Wilson River. Moat Creek Hill is in the top left-hand corner. Another creek running from Cargo Spring begins at the bottom of the left-hand panel, joining the Wilson River in the lower part of the right-hand panel. Another tributary of the Wilson River, Thirsty Creek, is shown running down from the top of the right-hand panel. It has another 'living water' or permanent waterhole with lots of bream. Another waterhole on the Wilson near Gorge Yard is shown on the far right of the picture. The yellow area shows part of a hill near Gorge Yard that runs down to Crocodile Hole. The pink at the top shows a hill that goes back towards Clara Spring. The artist knows the country well from time spent working there as a stockman. © Australian Art Department, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2005

Yorta Yorta painter, sculptor and activist, Lin Onus developed a distinctive visual language from a combination of traditional and contemporary Aboriginal imagery. Lin Onus was unjustly expelled from school on racist grounds at the age of 14, yet later attended university. He worked as a mechanic and spray painter, before managing his father's boomerang workshop in Melbourne. A self-taught artist, Onus forged a brilliant career and held exhibitions throughout the world. Onus's political commitment was inherent in his work. His Scottish mother was a member of the Communist Party, while his Aboriginal father, Bill, and uncle Eric were leading lights in the Aboriginal rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. After a visit to Maningrida in 1986, Onus began his long and close association with the late Djinang artist, Djiwut 'Jack' Wunuwun and other central Arnhem Land artists, including John Bulunbulun. Onus then developed his signature style of incorporating photorealism with Indigenous imagery. It is a virtuoso effect, in which the landscape is overlaid with traditional Indigenous iconography, reflecting his strong ties with his father's community at Cummergunja Mission, on the Murray River. Onus's works from this period often have a riddling, Magritte-like quality. A memorable motif in his work is the breaking up of a seamless surface into jigsaw puzzle pieces – a metaphor for the sense of dislocation he felt, caught between black and white, urban and rural, worlds. In Onus's sculptures, irony, wit and whimsy are the predominant features. 'Fruit bats', 1991, is made up of a flock of fibreglass sculptures of bats decorated with rarrk (crosshatching), hanging on a Hills Hoist clothes line. Beneath this icon of Australian suburbia are wooden discs with flower-like motifs, representing the bat droppings. In this powerful installation, the sacred and the mundane combine. The work was inspired by Murrungun-Djinang imagery, which Onus was given permission to use. In 'Fruit bats', the artist shows a head-on collision between two contrasting sets of values, and throws in a few inversions of his own. The backyard – suburban Australia's haven of privacy – becomes spooked by the formidable presence of these noisy animals. The pre-colonial bats seem to have taken over and reclaimed their place, in a story worthy of Alfred Hitchcock. George Alexander in 'Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia', Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004 © Art Gallery of New South Wales

Throughout its construction, which was completed in 1932, the Sydney Harbour Bridge inspired many artists to redefine their visions of the city and the harbour by incorporating this new industrial structure. This painting shows the massive frame-work in mid-construction, emerging from the shores of North Sydney. It reveals Grace Cossington Smith’s view of the bridge as a dynamic work-in-progress. In a powerful translation of forms through colour and light, the painting radiates optimism and energy in a celebration of modern engineering and, more broadly, the modern age. The artist made many pencil studies onsite, which she inscribed with notes on colour, took back to her studio and transformed into an iconic expression of Sydney’s most enduring urban monument.

Following his Sigean abstractions, Whiteley's increasing preoccupation with the female torso led to his bathroom series which preserved the warm colours of his abstractions while constrasting them with the bathroom's acid blues and greens. The series signalled his breakthrough as a figure draughtsman and his desire to make eroticism more explicit: 'All the paintings I have made in the last four years have been concerned one way or another with sex and the desire to record sensual behaviour.' - Brett Whiteley 1964 Focusing on the naked form of his wife Wendy in the bath, Whiteley's Woman in bath series, captured the tactility and tones of her flesh with a profound intimacy, rarely equalled in later paintings on this subject.

'Central Australia' is among the most majestic paintings of the series that emerged out of Nolan's visit to Central Australia during 1949. Nolan himself stated to Professor Ford, who purchased this painting from Nolan's 1950 solo exhibition at David Jones' Art Gallery, that 'in many ways it was, I think, the most complete statement I was able to make on Central Australia'. Like other paintings of this series, it arose out of Nolan's experience of flying over inland Australia, accompanying mail runs to remote settlements. Using an aerial viewpoint to increase the sense of vastness, his painting celebrates the extraordinary beauty of desert colour, form and light.

‘The flood in the Darling 1890’ is one of several ambitious canvases painted by WC Piguenit in response to the devastating rains that inundated the western region of New South Wales in 1890. It reflects his respect for the terrifying yet sublime power of nature so admired by exponents of 19th-century German Romantic painting. The largest flood recorded since 1864, waters broke the embankment and submerged the remote township of Bourke – an event Piguenit witnessed first hand. However, rather than depicting the destroyed buildings and railway lines, and the loss of livestock and human life, he has rendered the calm after the deluge. A vast expanse of sky, land and water is rendered as a symphonic celebration, with billowing purplish-hued clouds reflected across a vast glistening expanse reaching towards the viewer – ibises the only living creatures populating the tranquil landscape. Son of a convict transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1830, William Charles Piguenit is often credited as the first Australian-born professional artist. Raised and schooled in Hobart, he spent 22 years working in the Department of Lands survey office as a draughtsman. Although he received rudimentary instruction in painting, he was largely self taught. After leaving the survey office in 1872, he began making sketching and photography trips to remote and spectacular regions in the Tasmanian wilderness. He achieved early success through public patronage when he exhibited his works in the annual Sydney and Melbourne academy shows. His striking ‘Mount Olympus, Lake St Clair, Tasmania, source of the Derwent’ was the first work by an Australian-born artist to be acquired, in 1875, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. That same year, Piguenit joined an artists and photographers camp in the Grose Valley in the Blue Mountains. By 1880 Piguenit had settled in Sydney with his family. Continued patronage by the Gallery enabled him to tour New South Wales and Tasmania, providing fresh inspiration for his grand, sweeping landscapes and measured studies of the natural environment. Piguenit continued his successful career well into the 20th century, including the completion, in 1903, of the commanding ‘Mount Kosciusko’ which was commissioned by the trustees of this Gallery; the majestic depiction of the continent’s highest peak marking the enormity of the Federation of Australia in 1901.

Salon painting as a precept and as a practice had no more loyal adherent than Rupert Bunny. Born and educated in Melbourne, Bunny began a lifetime of European travel and residence in 1884. The success of his academic and essentially escapist project in Paris and London was real, complicit though it proved to be with the self-delusion of an age on the edge of war. Bunny's dedication to the good life resulted in some of the most sumptuous paintings in Australian art history, and the most admired. The artist's wife, kittenish herself, plays with a lapful of cats. Her companion accepts a basin of milk from a meaningfully shadowed maid. As upholstered in privilege as they are in their lacy day-gowns, Bunny's women are the late-picked fruit of a century whose heyday had passed. Despite his stylistic conservatism, the painter kept a finger on the pulse of taste. He responded to post-impressionism and fauvism, albeit belatedly, in a series of brilliantly coloured compositions on classical themes in the 1920s. During that decade, Bunny returned twice to Australia, settling permanently in 1933. Music, in which he had always had a parallel interest, became increasingly important to him: even so palpable a painting as A summer morning, with its plump depictions of fabric and flesh, has a musical ethereality. Art Gallery Handbook 1999

E Phillips Fox, one of a generation of late 19th-century Australian expatriates in Europe, is renowned for his cosmopolitan and superbly coloured images painted in Paris. 'The ferry' is the artist’s masterpiece. It was developed from rapid sketches that Fox painted outdoors at Trouville, a favourite beach resort in the north of France, and was completed in his Paris studio the following winter. Fox positions the viewer as if peering down to the elegant boating party and immerses us in a sumptuous, genteel world of vibrant colours, luscious fabric textures and warm summer atmosphere. Originally exhibited in Paris and London, 'The ferry' also influenced a younger generation of Australian modernist artists when it was exhibited in Sydney in 1913.

Traditional in subject matter and experimental in style, the paintings of Ginger Riley Munduwalawala are impressive pictorial presences, not least because of their scale and dramatic colour schemes. As an elder of his community, the artist is entrusted with the preservation of aspects of the stories of his mother's people at Four Arches, 45 kilometres inland from Limmen Bight in the Gulf of Carpentaria.Limmen Bight country is the landscape depicted in this stately retelling of the story of the first being, a kangaroo, shown in solitary grandeur at the bottom of Riley's successively layered composition. In order to populate the world, it was the task of this being to find himself a mate. Garimala, an ancestral snake, recommended he seek out a young girl, a quest which leads the kangaroo into many deprivations and dangers. The near-fatal spearing shown in the second register was probably in punishment for his trespass on the territory of another clan. The hump-like landforms which characterise the work, and Limmen Bight itself, are believed to have resulted from the writhings of the great serpents whose appearance in this painting, and elsewhere in Aboriginal art, is significantly hieratic. [AGNSW Handbook 1999]

Rusty Peters, like many East Kimberley painters, spent his youth working as a stockman on cattle stations throughout the Kimberley, and earned a reputation as an accomplished horse breaker. Along with other Gija community elders, Peters was influential in establishing the Ngalangangpum bicultural school – the first school at the main Gija community Warmun (Turkey Creek) – ensuring that instruction in Gija law and culture was prominent in the curriculum. In 1989, Peters moved to Kununurra, where he worked as an assistant at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, a community owned Aboriginal art cooperative. He often worked closely with Rover Thomas, the East Kimberley's most renowned painter and a co-founder of the regional contemporary painting movement. Although Peters occasionally produced small canvases during this period, he did not begin painting in earnest until 1998, after he had left Waringarri to join the newly founded Jirrawun Aboriginal Arts. Since then he has had a series of successful group and solo exhibitions, including the 2000-02 travelling exhibition 'Two Laws ... One Big Spirit', in which he collaborated with artist Peter Adsett. In his most ambitious canvas to date, the immense, twelve-metre long 'Waterbrain', 2002, Peters departs from the specific themes of country and Ngarrangkarni that normally form the focus of East Kimberley painting. Instead, he chooses to explore the cycle of life and learning that is universal to all peoples. Read from left to right, the canvas presents a chronology of the process of birth, growth and learning from conception to adulthood. At the lower left are waterweeds among which, according to Gija belief, the spirits of unborn children reside before entering the mothers womb to become the spirits of human beings. The next panels deal with birth and infancy, when a child moves from crawling, to walking, to running, although his or her brain has yet to begin to absorb the teachings of his or her culture. The large circular motif at the centre shows the adult brain – the child has grown up and is beginning to have his or her own ideas. The next panels deal with the education that transforms a child into a full member of adult society. As a symbol of the culmination of the individual's education. in the final panels Peters depicts the artefacts his elders taught him to make and which, before the coming of European settlers, all Gija men needed to know how to create in order to survive. Eric Kjellgren in 'Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia', Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004 © Art Gallery of New South Wales

Arthur Streeton's visions of the landscape have defined an image of Australia. 'Fire’s on' in particular is considered his greatest evocation of the country's heat and sunlight. Painted a year after the artist left Melbourne for Sydney, it constitutes a radical new type of landscape in his oeuvre. Its vertical composition and the high horizon line bring focus to the steep terrain with precarious rocks and dead tree-trunks. The painting captures a critical moment during the construction of a railway line across the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney: the death of a railway worker in an explosion. 'Fire's on' was the warning call before the blast, as the gang dynamited the Lapstone Tunnel through the hillside. The human drama of the painting, however, is overshadowed by the heroism of the landscape itself.

Though never officially a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, this colleague of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris was, by inclination and practice, sympathetic to the realist ambitions of the movement. Born in Calais, Madox Brown studied in Belgium and was influenced by the German Nazarene painters in Rome before his first liaison with Pre-Raphaelitism. Working with pure colours and clear contours on a dazzling white ground, and carefully composing his subjects from well-lit life, Brown achieved a sense of pageantry in this tableau. Its lower portions are especially immediate, an extensive cleaning having revealed the glorious condition of the original paintwork. Though Brown began his original composition in Rome, the final canvas was begun in London in 1847, and completed in 1851. Rosetti modelled for Chaucer, while others of the Pre-Raphaelite circle appear as supernumeraries. It was Brown's desire in this, surely one of the greatest modern British paintings in Australia, to encapsulate an historical moment: the birth of the English language in the person of Chaucer. The Tate Gallery in London possesses a study for the work, exact in detail but much reduced in scale. AGNSW Handbook, 1999.

Between 1884 and 1888 Pissarro experimented with the pointillist method of the younger Seurat. For an avowed anarchist it was perhaps no great step, but in art-historical terms Pissarro's stylistic shift, however momentary, coincided with the end of impressionism's avant-garde ascendancy. 'Peasants' houses, Eragny' was painted during this fascinating interlude. Pissarro has fully absorbed the tenets and techniques of the distinctive style. Form is constructed by discrete juxtaposition of individual strokes, or 'dots', of pigment. Atmosphere is suggested by chromatic scintillation. Surface is treated as a single unity. The mechanical effect which can deaden pointillist painting is obviated by Pissarro's acute sense of the internal dynamics of design. The cast shadows intruding from the right are deliberately naive; this was to be an important innovation for the younger generation of post-impressionists such as Gauguin and Cezanne. AGNSW Handbook, 1999.

'Sydney Heads', the only known Sydney subject by the artist, is a product of von Guérard's first and only excursion into New South Wales in November 1859, when he visited Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra region. The painting was worked up in his studio in Melbourne six years later, most likely on the basis of a preparatory drawing now in the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Von Guérard's atmospheric rendering of this light-filled scene, together with his sensitive and precise depiction of topographical detail and human activity within a tightly controlled composition, makes 'Sydney Heads' one of his finest paintings. Von Guérard reverted to the composition of the drawing in his 1865 painting of the view - flattening the foreground slope and decreasing the North/South breadth of the Harbour and scale of the hills beyond Manly to increase a sense of space and grandeur. Addition of a tree to the left of Vaucluse Bay provided a picturesque framing device, whilst he also transformed the rough heathland of his 1860 painting to elegantly grassed slopes - perhaps to appeal to a contemporary preference for countryside of a more tamed, European appearance. Details such as the group of figures around a fire at right, added foreground interest - improving the overall balance of the composition. He bathed the scene with the rose-tinted light of late afternoon, clearly intending an altogether more luminous and poetic impression than in his painting of 1860. Von Guérard's painting, 'Sydney Heads' 1865, with its combination of elevated sentiment and remote and wild, yet partly civilised subject, relates to both homestead portraits and wilderness views in his oeuvre. As such the work takes its place within a wider international context of European artistic engagement with newly colonised lands, finding particular parallels for example with the contemporaneous work of the 'Hudson River School' artists in America. As Joan Kerr, Australian colonial art historian, comments in the catalogue to The Artist and the patron exhibition (1988), picturing the harbour 'was an almost obligatory subject for amateur and professional alike…This was not only "the most beautiful harbour in the world" it was the first sight of the new land for many arrivals and the first step towards regaining the ancestral home for many departures'. In Eugene von Guérard's 'Australian Landscapes', containing twenty four colour lithographs of landscape views (published by Hamal and Ferguson, c.1867 - 68), plate XXII 'Sydney Heads, New South Wales' is described thus; 'From the summit of a knoll on the roadside from Sydney to the narrow promontory known as the South Head, is visible the lovely prospect depicted by our artist ... The road to the South Head is deservedly a favourite drive with the inhabitants of Sydney, and the stranger passing over it for the first time experiences a succession of demands upon his admiration, as each bend in the road discloses to him some new combination of sea and shore and sky, each lovelier than the last'. The various extant versions of the painting and the lithograph which was the last work to be completed of the subject by von Guérard, offer a number of interpretations of the pencil drawing. Focusing on what has been described as one of several classic views encompassing Sydney Harbour's quintessential qualities, and painted by innumerable artists, von Guérard's 'Sydney Heads' depicts a broad sweep of landscape from Vaucluse Bay on the left to Watson's Bay and Sydney Heads at the right, with the road to the South Head in the foreground. Despite partial screening by vegetation and buildings, the accuracy of his transcription of the view may be confirmed today from the vicinity of 'Johnston's Lookout' in Vaucluse, the probable viewpoint for the artist's preparatory drawing. However, whilst clearly concerned with accurately and informatively depicting a view already well known for its 'picturesque' synthesis of grandeur and beauty, von Guérard also aimed to transcend mere topography. Von Guérard scholar Candice Bruce suggests that during the artist's training at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf (c.1839 - c.1846) he probably saw the work of the principal German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose style and mood his work later evoked, and became familiar with treatises by the main exponents of German Romanticism, Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) and 'Novalis' [dates]. The influence of von Guérard's earlier teacher in Rome, Giovannibattista Bassi - who taught in the traditions of Salvator Rosa, Poussin and Claude - also encouraged an interest in concepts of 'the sublime' and 'the picturesque' in art. In the newly established landscape class at the Academy, von Guérard was encouraged to go on long sketching trips in pursuit of the new naturalism or 'Naturegetreue wiedergabe' (a response true to nature). For the German Romantic landscape painter, each painting was an 'Erdlebensbildnis' or painting of the life of the earth, in which a focus on the microcosmic details of nature led to an awareness of the macrocosmic presence of the soul of the world. No detail was inessential. Hence von Guérard's attention to detail, visible particularly in the painting of the foreground trees and shrubs, which was typical of his practice, and demonstrated the specific influence of the German 'Nazarene' painters with whom he had also enjoyed some contact in Rome. A key belief of the German Romantic painters was that painting should be an expression of personal insight into the divine qualities perceived in nature. In 'Sydney Heads', von Guérard celebrated with semi-religious reverence, the sublime beauty of the scene. Selecting an elevated viewpoint affording a panorama of the harbour and its surrounds, the artist aimed to inspire a sense of awe and wonder in the viewer by accentuating the vastness of the sky and by implication, suggesting the great expanses of the world beyond. [Helen Campbell, 'Eugene von Guérard - Sydney Heads 1865', Australian Collection Focus Series, AGNSW, 1999]

When contemplating this picture it is useful to bear in mind that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period remarkable for archaeological researches and discoveries, especially by English expeditions. The British Museum was a treasure house of antiquities increasingly valued by artists as a reference library. Egypt and the Middle East replaced Greece and Italy as the focus of curiosity. 'The visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon' can be contextualised against a craze for orientalist narratives in literature, music and visual art. The wildly composite architectural system of Solomon's temple is reprised in the frame, which bridges the temporal and spatial distance between viewer and subject. The artist has been so obsessed with the accuracy of his details, however, that the figures seem somewhat doll-like. Trained in Paris under Gleyre, Poynter was at heart a Salonist for whom artistry resided in weight of detail rather than dramatic synthesis. AGNSW Handbook, 1999.

Though a sense of surface frigidity characterises everything Bronzino produced, emotional heat underwrites his style. As a pupil and adopted son of perhaps the greatest and strangest of mannerist painters, Jacopo Pontormo, Bronzino graduated to artistic maturity with impeccable credentials in that consciously artificial style. That he asserted his own artistic personality, albeit through a steely formality of technique, testifies to the originality of Bronzino's vision. In this magnificent portrait of his principal patron - a work that exists in many replicas and copies - the painter displays a perfectionism it is hard not to think obsessive. Riven with reflections, highlights and shadows, Cosimo's armour alone is an article of transfixing interest: almost reason enough for the painting. It was Bronzino's habit to concentrate on details of costume, jewellery and decoration, to the extent of conceiving the faces of his ducal sitters as polished stones. Apart from this authoritative example, another celebrated version of the work is found in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. AGNSW Handbook, 1999.

Architectonic in construction and architectural in content, this magnificent 'venduta', or view, sparkles with the very light of Venice. This was subject matter tackled time and time again by Canaletto, probably with the aid of a 'camera obscura'; yet despite the artist's concern for accuracy, this painting is nowhere dull or perfunctory in its attention to detail. Having worked as a scenographic artist in the Italian perspectival tradition, and as the son of such an artist, Canaletto was ideally placed to become the greatest recorder of the physical glories of the city-state called 'La Serenissima'. This is not to say that the human glory of Venice is ignored. Canaletto, here as elsewhere, populated the Piazza with a dizzying and deliciously executed array of merchants, friars, wigged officials, masked revellers, mysterious women, children and dogs. If the majority of such views were intended for consumption by English and other tourists, this has not been to the detriment of their remarkable artistic quality. AGNSW Handbook, 1999.