Les Journaux

Peter Greenaway is going to make a series of films animating famous paintings, according to The Guardian (article by Peter Booth on February 15), beginning with Leonardo's Last Supper, using "dramatic lighting, projections and recordings of actors' voices to transform the depiction of the moment Christ announced that one apostle would betray him into something close to a film." Undoubtedly hoping to get some controversy points, Greenaway said it will be "an act of some significance that some people might regard as blasphemous."

Perugia's National Gallery of Umbria is showing an important Pinturicchio exhibit through June 29. Bernardino di Betto, known by the nickname meaning Little Painter, has been, since Vasari, largely seen as second fiddle to Perugino, but this year is the 550th anniversary of Pinturicchio's birth. All of Umbria is getting in on the event, with lots of little museums and churches around the region inviting visitors to follow the painters footsteps around the countryside. Here is what an article by Jean-Jacques Bozonnet (A la poursuite de Pintoricchio, February 21) in Le Monde has to say (my translation):

After Perugia the visitor is invited to go out to Spello, a little town nearby where the exhibit has a second site. The church of Santa Maria contains a chapel sumptuously decorated with frescoes. The scenes with a thousand details, on the walls and ceiling, give a perspective on the the modernity with which Pintoricchio treated colors and light. Fewer than 100 meters away, the church of Sant'Andrea offers another Pinturicchio. The organizers of the exhibit have thus devised a whole itinerary to discover Pinturicchio, from Spoleto to Città di Castello to Trevi. A walk through these undulating and serene landscapes that you can make out in the background of the painter's frescoes.

If you cross over into Tuscany, to make a trip to Siena, Pinturricchio's frescoes in the Piccolomini library (pictured) in Siena Cathedral are memorable.

The Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris is showing a retrospective of the work of Dresden-born artist A. R. Penck (born 1939), through May 12. Le Monde has a slide show of some of his colorful, primitivist paintings, well worth a look.