Exhibition of the week
Silk Roads
This camel journey through China, Tibet, Byzantium and more, seeing endless marvels until you reach Anglo-Saxon England, is like a complex, absorbing holiday board game.
• British Museum, London, until 23 February
Also showing
Pirates
Kids of all ages will find this a Christmas treat. It covers everything from Treasure Island and Captain Pugwash to the real life pirates of the 1600s and 1700s.
• National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Falmouth, until 6 January
Drawing the Italian Renaissance
A box of delights including masterpieces by Raphael and Michelangelo, and a lovely selection of Leonardo da Vinci’s polymathic designs.
• King’s Gallery, London, until 9 March
Francis Bacon
Nursing a hangover? Sick of goodwill? Spend a morning among Bacon’s horrors then head to nearby Soho for a hair of the dog.
• National Portrait Gallery, London until 19 January
Turner in January
This annual unveiling of JMW Turner’s watercolours fills the gallery with bracing winter air.
• Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh from 1 January until 31 January
Image of the week
The refined elite of 18th-century France did not shy from biological truth. Louis XV commissioned the midwife Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to improve male surgeons as well as female midwives. So she invented La Machine, a working model of a torso from which you could pull the baby. Made from stuffed fabric, it looks like an artwork by Louise Bourgeois and is part of the exhibition Versailles: Science and Splendour at the Science Museum, London.
What we learned
It’s official – consuming arts and culture is good for you
Hamad Butt was the most dangerous YBA
Yayoi Kusama is dazzling Melbourne
A 300-year-old tomb in Essex was linked to Tintin illustrator Hergé
The grandson of a collector whose art was stolen by the Nazis still awaits restitution
Masterpiece of the week
Nativity With the Shepherds by Jacopo di Cione, 1370-1
One of the sweetest parts of the Christmas story is depicted in this panel from an altarpiece made in medieval Florence. At the top, an angel appears to shepherds guarding their sheep on a hillside. The shepherds and their dog look up in wonder. Below, they kneel at the stable, adoring Mary and her new born alongside Joseph, an ox and ass, and a choir of angels. It’s a painting with the clarity and simplicity of a Christmas carol. And the emphasis on the humble shepherds addresses the working class of 14th century Florence, at a time when this precociously capitalist city was torn by class conflict: at the end of the 1370s, the decade when this was painted, the Ciompi revolt, a medieval workers’ rising, would overturn the social order of Florence. In the 1400s, under the Medici, the rich ruled comfortably and the shepherds faded from Nativity scenes to be replaced by the wealthy Magi. God rest ye merry gentlefolk.
• National Gallery, London
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