In the Hand of Dante review – Gerard Butler is jaw-dropping in bizarre Renaissance mafia reverie

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Julian Schnabel’s combustible mix of lowlife cynicism and high art – along with cameos from Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino – powers this outrageous black comedy revolving around Dante’s Divine Comedy The worlds of Renaissance manuscript scholarship and organised crime come together like a mix of Umberto Eco and George V Higgins in this flawed but fascinating reverie from director and co-writer Julian Schnabel. Switching between monochrome and colour, and freely adapted from the Nick Tosches novel of the same name, it is hilarious and shocking, at least at first, with a quite extraordinary tough-guy role for Gerard Butler. It is a mysterious, scabrous and bizarre adventure in violent larceny and spiritual crisis which unfortunately unwinds in the end into sentimental fantasy. In the Hand of Dante amounts to an epic and self-aware jeu d’ésprit with amazing cameos from Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino and Franco Nero, beckoning its audience over to peep into the fathomless abyss of heaven and ...
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Sofonisba’s Chess Game review – pioneering female Renaissance artist gets her due

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Documentary analysis of benchmark 16th-century painting is absorbing but focus on a single work misses the chance to reveal an extraordinary life

Like its predecessors from the Ideas Roadshow series, this essay film looks like a high-grade PowerPoint presentation but shines because of its exceptional subject: the pioneering female Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola and her psychologically luminous portraiture. The film is centred on this queen’s gambit: her c 1555 portrait of her three sisters and housemaid playing chess, which clocked up numerous firsts. Apart from being the first Renaissance all-female group painting and the first to juxtapose women of different classes, its most groundbreaking accomplishment was depicting real-life – rather than symbolic or idealised – women.

Narrated by Elizabeth van Sebelle, the film sticks to basic summaries to relay the context. Born around 1532 into a lapsed aristocratic family from Cremona, as the eldest child Anguissola got a fancy Carthaginian first name (her father was Amilcare) and artistic training a cut above the average woman of the time. Initially schooled by distinguished local painters, she impressed Michelangelo in her early 20s when he challenged her to draw a weeping boy. Her artistic apprenticeship was meant in part to bolster her marriage chances rather than to give her a career in her own right – a career she had, nevertheless, becoming court painter to Philip II of Spain, and subtly influencing her peers.

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