Art and Eye

  Despite its lack of colour, this woodcut overloads the eye with detail. The art of woodcuts has long been dismissed as a 'primitive' technique yielding limited results, but the work of Sandys and his fellow Victorian artists suggests otherwise. This was a cheap method of reproducing art compared to engraving and etching, that produced very similar results. This particular version of the woodcut by Sandys (now in the RA collection) shows his woodcut reproduced by the engraver Joseph Swain. These delicate, emotive and sensory works were available to the general public, connecting them to this versatile medium for the first time.  The importance of the print culture cannot be underestimated in disseminating works like the one by Sandys. Victorian illustration was a booming method of mass production. The years 1855-75 have been referred to as the 'golden decades' of illustration by key critics in this field, from Harold Hartley to Sarah Phelps. Sandys himself is known to

  My eye is overwhelmed by the monumentality of this sculpture. Although it could simply be dismissed as another equestrian statue, an unknown horse and rider, the title given highlights the chosen message conveyed, backed up by the scale of the piece. Known primarily as a painter and with his sculptural works mostly forgotten, it is perhaps surprising to attribute such a piece to painter George Frederic Watts. However, his figures in his paintings often have a sculptural feel to them, and he did model some before translating their forms onto canvas. Furthermore an interest in texture has always been prominent in his works, shown here by his modelling in gesso which produces a puckered effect while the gesso is still wet. The emphasises the movement of the piece, the feel of dynamism, almost prefiguring Futurism, as the muscles of the horse contract and the male figure's body contorts and elongates to control the animal beneath him.  The statue is not without its complicated histor

  For a painting that seems to the eye so rooted in the Byzantine traditions of icon painting, it is altogether surprising that the date comes from the mid to late sixteenth century. Here, the artist Michael Damaskinos is conflating style and iconography. He was extremely well travelled - born in Crete he learnt the ways of icon painting, before travelling to Venice and subsequently all across Italy, where his style became infused with Italian naturalism. Despite this, he retained his alla Grecia manner, and highlighted his Greek roots in his decoration of San Giorgio dei Greci in Venice, literally the church of the Greeks. Twenty-five of the artist's major works are in Venice and twenty located in this church alone. Having apparently trained El Greco, Damaskinos was the master of the Cretan school of icon painting, and the Venetians recognised his importance.  Given the rather vague dating of the Stoning of Saint Stephen, one can presume Damaskinos created the work when he was in