Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Through the mysteries of corporate theatredom, a Donmar Warehouse production is broadcast as part of National Theatre Live. Confusing, but no matter. Whoever produced and digitally beamed it, this was strong production of Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Laclos's epistolary novel. I remembered some lines of the script vividly from the 1988 film with John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer. Tonight's Valmont was Dominic West, opposite Jane Mcteer's Marquise de Merteuil. Two voices one certainly did not tire of over the two and a half hours of this production. They were as silkily smooth as any executives planning a takeover, as they planned a young girl's destruction merely as a petty act of vengeance (her prospective husband had dumped Madame de M) and a sexy teasing game. West's Valmont was all genial charm at the outset, in the second half increasingly out of his depth as he found himself in a new emotional universe. The scene when the single word 'unprecedented' triggers the fatal chain of events that leads the characters into hell was briliantly played, the smallest tilt of McTeer's regal head communicating the most violent feelings. Hampton's script offers marvellous female parts, and both Morfydd Clark (Cécilie) and Elaine Cassidy (Madame de Tourvel) charted affecting journeys from demure propriety to what another era would have called debauchery. Ed Holcroft was the naive Chevalier Danceny, drawn into a battle he could not understand. The play did not take in Merteuil's smallpox or the public humiliation at the opera, but the production communicated an air of pre-revolutionary doom in the flickering, shadowy light cast by chandeliers and Tom Scutt's set of steadily denuded, fading walls, stripped of paintings and revealing stonework beneath. I loved the stylish scene changes, balletic movement over gorgeous vocal music.

Tragedy is meant to be inevitable, but in this one one had an aching sense of how things might have played out therwise. It was clear that beneath the cynicism love's embers still glowed between the lead characters. With just a modicum of moral decency Valmont and Madame de Merteuil could even have found a warm gossipy happiness together. How self-destructive vanity and social sophistication can be. I suppose that is what Laclos intended us to think. In the interval tallk we learned the interesting fact that Josie Rourke first directed this when she was nineteen, by which age she had had sex about four times. And Christopher Hampton observed that to feel the play's modernity you actually have to do it in period eighteenth-century dress and interiors. When you take the historical period away, the contemporary buzz is lost. A terrific evening and I'm grateful to my French friend C, who invited me to take up a spare ticket.

Ashmolean, Titian to Canaletto

The Ashmolean's latest exhibition follows their recent Great British Drawings, and can be seen as a continuation of the British Museum's Italian Renaissance Drawings (2010). All serve as reminders of the fundamental importance of drawing in art, and of drawing's many purposes - drawings may be executed as studies of light, texture and form; or as experiments, or educational tools for a workshop; they may be intended as finished works to be bought by collectors, or made as studies for paintings (we see several squared up for transfer onto a larger surface). In this exhibition, the Ashmolean seeks to refute the assertion of Vasari in his Lives (1568) that the Venetians neglected drawing and started work directly with paint on canvas. This opinion was followed by other Florentine writers (despite the fact that the Uffizi housed an important collection of Venetian works on paper) and by later authorities, including Sir Joshua Reynolds. The notion perhaps has a particular attractiveness: while Vasari had an interest in contrasting the undisciplined Venetians - as he saw them - with the Florentines and their meticulous attention to disegno, there is also an undeniable appeal in the idea of Titian, Bellini and Tintoretto spontaneously creating work without painstaking mathematical preparation - it fits the picture of instinctive art, such as we associate with Shakespeare and Mozart.

Yet, as this exhibition make clear, the Venetian masters produced wonderful drawings, generally using chalk and charcoal rather than silverpoint. The first masters on display are Giovanni Bellini (active 1459 - d.1516) and Vittore Carpaccio (1460/6 - c.1525/6). Bellini's 'Portrait of a Man' (on loan from Christ Church) uses subtle tonal effects to create a finely modelled head with a real sense of character: the creases and folds in the face give it a 'lived-in' look, and the textures of hair and soft cap are superbly rendered. Carpaccio's studies of female heads are more ethereal - as befits sketches for angels in the altarpiece of the Glory of St Ursula - and use shimmering white highlights to convey the sense of streaming light. I was particualrly taken by the sadly vulnerable-looking dragon in the centre of Carpaccio's townscape with figures, 'The Triumph of St George'. This work also made clear the Venetians' profound sense of drama, with a variety of expressive and theatrical attitudes among the bystanders. Titian picked up on the sculptural and luminous qualities of these artists, using drawing to explore contour, volume, and the effects of transient light. Above all is the idea of public theatre. Everything, from the knotted muscles of an executioner's legs to the fall of cloth, is a source of drama: the 'Drapery study for the figure of St Bernardino' is a study in the expressive qualities of a garment's folds, as we look at the saint from behind. There is a free and creative use of materials: charcoal is dampened and rubbed to create subtle shading, blurring the transitions beneath a chiaroscuro effect and creating a hypnotic, flowing pattern. We see Bellini, Carpaccio and Titian using blue paper to bring out the range of tones in their subjects. Alongside these premier league names, it is instructive to learn about other Venetian artists, such as Domenico Campagnola, a specialist in Veneto landscapes where rustic fortifications and pastoral figures appear against distant hills; or Andrea Meldolla (Schiavone, c.1510-63), whose sinuous figures and sense of vivid composition are illustrated by 'Presentation in the Temple' and an unidentified female figure. Lorenzo Lotto (c.480-1556/7) creates in 'Head of a bearded man' one of the most memorable pictures in the show - a mass of soft, refined touches coalesce into a wonderfully characterful face, the textures of beard and skin immediately registering on our imagination.

In the second room, the Master is Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19-1594), for whose practice figure drawing was of great importance. He drew from models, wax sculptures (some small models as would have existed in a workshop have been specially created), statues and as many copies of Michelangelo as he could acquire. Twisting and rippling torsos are displayed alongside vigorous copies of busts, where the emphasis is on volume and dramatic tension of light and shade. But these are not simply figurative exercises. There is, too, a strong feeling for character: the study of a bust of Vitellius evokes a stern and gloomy Roman personality.

After the brilliance of the earlier masters, the third room feels relatively flat. Later generations worked under the influence of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Bellini, and the Baroque drawings do not seem to add much to the vocabulary, apart from taking it to even more spectacular operatic heights.  Yet it is valuable to learn about the teaching practice of Palma Giovane and to come upon artists such as Bernardo Strozzi and Francesco Maffei. Moving into the eighteenth century, two of the most striking images were the 'Head of a Youth' (used as the poster for the exhibition) and 'Standing Youth Seen from Behind' , both by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682-1754), where the broad touches, melting forms, psychological acuity and delight in light are applied to real-life figures. Giambattista Tiepolo's 'Study of a foreshortened head' achieves an intense drama through the orientation and lighting of the subject that we saw earlier in Tintoretto. One senses in these later artists the tools of the Old Masters being exploited with delight and fresh vision.

The exhibition ends with drawings by Canaletto among other scenes of Venice, as the fading republic becomes a consumable tourist experience. It is followed by a room of visual responses by Jenny Saville, an important contemporary artist who I last saw in Oxford's Museum of Modern Art a few years ago. I found I didn't have much energy left to take in this room, though a quick survey made clear how Saville had responded to the free and confident handling of Titian, the array of postures and the dramatic potentalities of the figure on display in the Venetian works. There's an improvisatory quality, too - palimpsests of forms and lines - that convey an energy and attack which connects Saville with the rest of the show. These days we are perhaps happier to see drawing as an end in itself, and prefer the sense of being in front of a performance on paper than a polished masterpiece in paint. A drawing does not call for the same reverence as an altarpiece does; looking at a sketch with various subject, or several goes at the same subject, is rather like listening to a pianist practise before a concert - in some ways, a more intimate and rewarding experience than the final performance. I found 'Studies for the Coronation of the Virgin' by Paolo Veronese (1528-88) particularly engaging in this respect, as you see him work his way down the paper, varying the configurations of the central group and trying out gestures and attitudes of the surrounding figures. This work, too, was lent by Christ Church; many other works were lent by the Uffizi. With the Ashmolean's own holdings, this allowed an exhibition which triumphantly disproved Vasari's assertion and allowed us to enjoy, in a different light, the achievement of Venetian art. a footnote: the descriptive panels for each work were extremely well written, and an object lesson in how the terms of art, when accurately applied, can enhance our appreciation of an image.

Goya, The Portraits (National Gallery)

My last engagement with Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) was the remarkable exhibition of his drawings of witches at the Courtauld last year. Scarcely less vivid was a showing of the Disasters of War prints in Barcelona I came upon some years ago. Where shock in art is concerned this is the real thing, making the efforts of contemporary provocatieurs seem tepid at best. This familiarity (to a degree) with the dark side of this painter's universe makes me a typically modern Goya viewer, more clued up on, and responsive to, his private nightmarish word than the official commissions that earned him a living - religious paintings, tapestry design and portraits. The last of these is the subject of the latest Sainsbury Wing exhibition. The prospect of seeing room after room of portraits of the Great and the Good does not set the pulse pounding; but this exhibition maintains and rewards attention throughout with what it reveals of a remarkable time in Spanish history, and of the relentless interests of its visual record-keeper.

The great and the good have never been less stiff or more exposed. Goya's approach as a portrait artist was precisely to put aside the expectations of pomp and circumstance. He took a strong interest in the personalities of his subjects. 'The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón' (1783-4) is the product not of a formal sitting but of the artist's close familiarity with the exiled prince and his entourage. Although the composition is matching itself against the great forebear Velázquez, there is something Hogarthian in the vivid sense of character and animation in the scene. The same relaxed depiction of the person behind the title comes at us again and again, never more surprisingly than in 'Charles III in Hunting Dress' (1986-8), in which the dazzlingly ugly monarch grins at us, rifle in hand - a different image altogether from the usual portrayal of a king as soldier or wrapped in the robes of state. There was a wider cultural and political point to this: Spain was catching on to the enlightened stirrings going on over the Pyrenees, and Goya was part of this brief liberalising movement in Iberian government and high society. Thus we see young aristocrats enjoying the benefits of a modern education, the Duke of Alba nonchalantly leaning on a fortepiano while leafing through a new score, and family groups where children play, relaxed mothers display fashionable frizzed hairdos and a Rousseauian contentment prevails. The brushwork is correspondingly free and bravura, lovingly capturing the folds and textures of fashionable costumes and a range of expressions in his subjects (if the self-portrait drawing is anything to go by, sitting for Goya must have been a fairly unnerving experience).

The exposure to liberalism was to be a brief one. War with France, the Revolution, a short but profound Spanish Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Empire, Wellington's defeat of Napoleon and eventualy the restoration of the Spanish throne in the figure of the ghastly autocratic Ferdinand VII provide a narrative that gives the steady flow of portraits a compelling underlying dynamic. Certain qualities in Goya transcend the warp and woof chronicle time, such as the naturalism which makes the famous portrait of the Duchess of Alba and the double portrait of Charles IV and María Luisa such a fascinating, Shakespearean examination of human character in its many layers, pomp masking vulnerability, fancy lace mantillas at once ravishingly desirable and pathetically impotent in the face of encroaching age and illness. Friends are depicted with a total commitment to honesty: the architect Juan de Villanueva is shown with uneven eyes and crooked nose, the glint in his eyes an assurance by sitter and artist alike that friendship goes beyond surface errata, and even takes cheer in the natural deformities that nature and history bestow upon us all. In their deep sense of human character, the paintings seem out of their age, most strikingly perhaps in female subjects. Gainsborough could get nowhere near the range of feelings in the portraits of women here: 'Thérèse Louise de Sureda' (1804-6) or 'The Countess of Fernán Nuñez' (1803) are examples of the directness and autonomy of Goya's lady subjects which make orthodoxies of 'the male gaze' seem quite beside the point.

Goya's in-the-headlights frankness seems not to recognise any frontier. The pompous regalia of Fernado VII's portrait succeeds in bringing out the King's dangerous and malevolent stupidity (did Fernado see this? Goya was put through exhausting tests of his loyalty to the regime, and humiliatingly paired with an inferior as official painter to the court). The extraordinary 'Self Portrait with Doctor Arrieta', showing a Goya brought back from somewhere close to the dead, and surrounded by shadowy figures - the phantasms of the black paintings, perhaps - take this unflinching honesty into the realm of self-depiction. It is this capacity for looking at faces and recording them as they really are, for seeing the person whole, that makes the exhibition more than a collection of portraits, and turns it into a vision of life that we can take as a moral lesson. Those who knew Goya in his exile in Bordeaux - old, ill, profoundly deaf - remarked on his boundless curiosity in the world around him. There's a a black crayon self-portrait, with flowing white beard as he moves on two sticks, with the simple heading 'Aun aprendo' (I'm still learning). There was certainly much to be learned - about Goya, Spain, and looking - in this exhibition curated by Xavier Bray. I found the Spanish version of the audioguide extremely helpful. Bray and other experts warn us not to 'read in' the Goya of the Black Paintings into the portrait work, much of which was produced earlier; T J Clark in the LRB isn't so sure, noting points of tension in the background and composition that suggest inner dramas at work. I'm still at the much more basic stage of feeling I've met Spanish nobles and royals of over two centuries ago and listened in on their thoughts and conversations, seen them across the grave through the alchemy of art. How much truth, how much fiction in this vision? How much faith in the eyes and hand of the Master? Aun aprendo.