Possession

Portraiture: A History

Court, civic, donor and group likeness from Roman Egypt to oil’s golden centuries, and how painters answered the camera

Portraiture is the craft of making a specific person recognisable and useful to the living: as ancestor, donor, ruler, spouse or citizen. This guide follows those paid jobs through panel, fresco and oil, then the decades when photography cheapened the face without ending the painted court and civic commission.

Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

The Universal Museum, Rebuilt on Arab Soil

How Abu Dhabi took one of the West's most contested ideas — the museum that claims to hold all of humanity — and moved the question of who gets to frame the world

A portolan chart in the floor, three ewers without a hierarchy, and a $450-million Leonardo no one has seen since it was bought. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a French–Emirati experiment in what the universal museum becomes when it is rebuilt from a different centre — and whether that moves the centre, or merely moves the Louvre, is the question the building leaves open.