The new Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, which opened late in 2015, is a masterpiece of content, planning and design, which succeeds triumphantly in being visually attractive and accessible, but also intellectually rigorous and coherent. It will surely come to be seen as one of the most important and successful museum projects of the early twenty-first century. The need to improve the Museum was made more urgent because of the decision to conserve and then house indoors several enormous works from the Baptistery, the three great doors by Andrea Pisano and Lorenzo Ghiberti, and the large-scale figure groups that surmount them by Andrea Sansovino, Giovan Francesco Rustici and Vincenzo Danti, all now replaced with copies.

THE IDEA OF Pop art has burst its old boundaries, and 2015 saw two important exhibitions testifying to this fact: International Pop is currently showing at Philadelphia Museum of Art (to 15th May);1 The World Goes Pop was an exclusive autumn offering at Tate Modern, London (closed 24th January). Together the two shows have done much to lend Pop fresh currency, their largely retrospective checklists countered by the novelty of so many works that are rarely, if ever, seen beyond their places of origin.

John Christian, who died on 10th March 2016 at the age of seventy-three, was a leading authority on nineteenth-century British art with an unrivalled knowledge of the life and work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. As an independent scholar he moved easily between the worlds of academe and the art trade. His slim, elegant figure, enlivened by the sartorial touch of a lemon or lilac jumper was a familiar and welcome sight at private views. He was held in great affection and respect by a wide range of scholars and friends from galleries and auction houses, who recognized the keen eye and underlying curiosity and enthusiasm that lay behind his somewhat diffident and courteously old-world manners.