LOOK HERE UPON THIS PICTURE, THEN ON THIS Shakespeare, Art & Music

Hamlet’s demand to his mother, that she hold his dead father’s picture in one hand, and new husband Claudio’s in the other, becomes our cue: Look Here Upon This Picture, Then On This is a weekly opportunity to compare works of art from the world’s great gallery of homage to Shakespeare’s plays. Here, in painting after painting, artists have felt driven to recreate the enduring charisma of the Bard’s most famous characters and so celebrate the dramatic turning-points in the plays which changed lives then and have done so ever since for theatre-goers and readers alike. Opera and music will be featured each week too.
 

THE BARGE SHE SAT IN, LIKE A BURNISH’D THRONE (Antony & Cleopatra)

Is that barge moment the one every painter will go for? Some have, but the historical record of this most beautiful of women inspires other options - the marriage to Mark Antony, the pearl in the goblet, the Battle of Actium, and the little matter of the asp. Tiepolo and Alma-Tadema star.