You were right but actually quite kind about the Madonna Litta. If there is one thing Leonardo knew about more than anyone else it was anatomy and the anatomy in this picture is all skew-whiff. It is also painted in tempera: whenever you hear or see the words 'unusual for this date' (actually unique for this date and L had not used the medium for a decade or more…) the alarm bells ought to ring. Not a chance. 

I also agree about the NG Virgin of the Rocks. Again and again I found myself reflecting how powerful the Louvre version is in comparison (accepting that the Virgin's head, notably, is largely gone over), and also noted the strange finish to such areas as the Christ Child's hand in the National Gallery version: you can see the same thing in his foot, where the blocking-in is visible and the painting over it unresolved, and similar areas in, for example, the right hand of the Virgin which is a complete muddle. I thought that these things, and the final effect, were not Leonardo being 'painterly' but someone else winging it, even though the conception must be his and, for example, much of the angel actually painted and finished by him (and not 'painterly' to anything like the same degree).

La Belle Ferronière has been fiddled with, by the way, quite extensively in the area over her right eye but the odd craquelure on most of her face seemed coherent and the paint convincing especially in the wonderful area around her mouth. The famous reflected light beneath her chin to her left seems entirely repaint, which is a sad thought. But it is a great painting. 

Cecilia Galleriani is in the best condition of any of the Leonardo paintings on view and made complete sense in relation to La B F. The far more delicate reflected light on the jawline here is a miracle – and of course earlier, which makes it even more extraordinary. 

I thought the Musician (which I recently saw in Rome: a sadly well-travelled panel…) more abraded than I had been able to see before, notably in the lower half of the whole. 

One of the great things about this show is being able to get so close to the surfaces. And the drawings are worth it alone.

And I agree about Boltraffio: it was a great treat to be able to see so many works by him and he could not half draw…

One or two  things about the item on the National Gallery's lack of a de la Tour.

When it was offered to them in the 30s it was owned by the English dealer Percy Moore Turner, who subsequently gave it to the Louvre [see their website]. 

So if you want to see one in this country you have to go to Hampton Court, Leicester and, most importantly, Stockton-on-Tees.  Rather as with Schaufelein you have to go to Gateshead - who have another panel from the same source as the Met's recent acquisition.

... Turner biographer James Hamilton has uncovered compelling evidence that the artist was far more interested in cutting-edge scientific theories than has been thought.

One painting in particular – The Festival of the Opening of the Vintage at Mâcon [Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield] – holds, Hamilton believes, a fascinating secret. The painting, executed in 1803 after Turner travelled through France, is dominated by a ferocious sun, and Hamilton argues that it is painted in an entirely new and revolutionary way, based on scientific theories expounded by the astronomer Sir William Herschel.

Herschel gave a groundbreaking lecture to the Royal Society in 1801, in which he revealed his discovery that the sun had a surface with "openings, shallows, ridges, nodules, corrugations, indentations and pores". [...] Hamilton said Herschel examined the sun through his telescope near Slough, passing the light through watered ink, "and he saw the sun, for the first time, as an object. He saw it had a surface".

Not long after the discovery, Turner was painting the Mâcon festivities and appears to have painted the sun as Herschel had described.

"In a sense you can't really see it, you can't focus on it, but if you look very, very closely there is a tiny little disc which is in three distinct parts," said Hamilton. "They are painted in different ways – there's a dab and a wipe and sort of flick of the brush. He is making it into something, he is giving it a surface and coming so close to Herschel's lecture and his naming of parts, one has to see them as connected events."

I think these are my best paintings yet.

The picture undeniably displays a number of the painter’s characteristic devices and mannerisms, but there are other aspects of it that seem foreign to Leonardo himself.

He was prized by his contemporaries as one of the most innovative and forceful painters of emotion, yet the face of this Christ seems peculiarly inert. Taken individually, its elements are convincing enough, but viewed as a whole its expression seems to lack a certain subtle Leonardo magic: the spark of inner life and feeling.

The second questionable “Leonardo” on display is the Virgin and Child from the Hermitage in St Petersburg, long attributed to Leonardo and popularly known as The Madonna Litta. Close by hangs a drawing of The Head of a Woman, owned by the Louvre, which is most definitely by Leonardo and has often been regarded as a preparatory study for The Madonna Litta.

But both the features and the handling set it apart from the far clumsier head of the Virgin in the painting, who looks down at her greedily breastfeeding infant.

Yet more incriminatingly, the display also includes a close study for the head of that same suckling child by the hand of Leonardo’s follower, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. Here the drawing and the painting seem virtually identical to one another. This would seem to be an open-and-shut case: the painting owned by the Hermitage was painted by Boltraffio, not by Leonardo.

...honour him with a life peerage; his impending departure for New York is a loss to the nation.

In what is essentially a scholarly and didactic exhibition that encourages the visitor to make comparisons and study the relationship of paintings with preliminary drawings, I am not entirely happy to see included and supported the newly rediscovered and identified Salvator Mundi. The cracking of the panel with associated losses of paint, aggressive over-cleaning and abrasion over the whole surface are all acknowledged, and I must ask at what point does a ruined painting heavily restored cease to be original? This is a wreck now so ill-defined, so smudged and fudged that glutinous gravy seems to have been the medium of its restoration. The hand raised in blessing, the associated drapery and some residuary details of hair and clothing, all suggest that this may once have been by Leonardo, but what we see now was formerly subcutaneous. That there is no revision or reinvention of the iconography also rouses my suspicion.

Can this ghostly, ghastly and blind-eyed face really be the invention of the same aesthetic mind as the melancholy Christ of the Last Supper? It would have been extremely useful to have had at hand a severe technical examination of this panel so that we know precisely the extent of past damage and present restoration; without this, its gushing acceptance as genuine must seem gullible.

Reading Art History News and the Tribune de l'Art posts about the Louvre's acquisition of a painter, hitherto unrepresented in that museum, Jean Le Clerc, got me thinking about a glaring 17th century French omission in our own National Gallery. This is a painter who may have influenced Le Clerc, Georges de La Tour. Though the gallery has a good collection of the French school, Poussin, Claude, Mignard, Le Sueur, the Le Nain, Champaigne, Vouet, it doesn’t posses a La Tour, though it had the chance when one was offered to the gallery for a low price under Kenneth Clark’s directorship. However, Clark with typical patrician scorn dismissed La Tour’s wonderful Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop [above] as too vulgar, even when Anthony Blunt and an influential aristocrat tried to sway Clark. It isn’t always the acquisition budget that counts in these matters.

The $315,837,000 total including commissions easily beat the presale estimate of $192 million to $270 million.

"It was one of the best auctions I've ever seen in my life," said Nicolai Frahm, a leading London-based contemporary art adviser. "And in the middle of a recession," he added.

Sotheby's scored a coup by landing a group of four Stills [Clyfford Still, two works above], whose works virtually never come to market and which were being sold by the city of Denver to benefit a new Still museum opening there this month.

Led by "1949-A-No. 1," which soared to $61,682,500 against an estimate of $30 million and smashed the record for the artist, the group of abstracts took in $114 million, nearly twice the pre-sale estimate.

Earlier this year, the Weiss gallery offered the Tournier for sale for €675,000. "That would have been a fair price to a private buyer," Mr Weiss said yesterday. "But we were ready to sell it to the Toulouse museum for less than that."