The difficulty rises when you ask whether Severs has created something antithetical to the heritage industry or subsumed a part of it. The sensation of smells from the tea and the heat from a gas lamp are acute, but it’s difficult not to be reminded of the similar ambitions of somewhere like Yorvik or to compare the taped conversations played in the background with some of the more dubious multimedia experiments of various historical buildings. There is a sense of escapism in the Severs House that is present but perhaps curtailed in the National Trust’s properties. It’s also difficult not to feel irritated by the various notes from Severs that are littered around the house with helpful hints on how to interpret it in the absence of an official historical narrative.

Walking round London, I visit a sphinx on Shaftesbury Avenue and Dorothy Annan’s murals on the old Fleet building, before spending sometime in the Tate looking at the William Morris wallpaper and stained glass designs, Canova’s sleeping nymph sculptures and Della Robbia ceramics.

Given the Sutherland exhibition I’d previously attended in Oxford, I decided the following weekened to visit the Tate’s exhibition on the influence of Picasso on various British artists, Sutherland included. In some senses, the idea of the exhibition represnts a contradiction in terms; even where there are stylistic affinities evinced by the likes of Sutherland and Bacon, both of them have an distinct of concrete themes that is largely absent in Picasso’s work. The parallels between Picasso’s cubism and that of Duncan Grant and Ben Nicholson are a lot clearer while Henry Moore emerges somewhat diminished by the exhibition, given the parallels between his work and that of Picasso’s classical period. The closest parallel demonstrated by the exhibition is Hockney, whose protean artistic experimentation essentially matches Picasso’s while having the least obvious influence.

The following week sees me travelling up to the Midlands and stopping off at Dorchester for their exhibition of John Piper’s work. Some of his drawings for stained glass I’ve seen in Lichfield and Farnborough are hung on the walls of the Abbey, along with various tapestries, vestements and paintings. The affinities with Romanesque design is clear in a lot of his work, with the tendency to step back to that period being analogous to TS Eliot’s rejection of modern poetry. Back in the Midlands, I visit Rock in Worcestershire and Leominster in Herefordshire; the former a somewhat cavernous affair in a rather remote windswept position with elaborate Romanesque carvings of centaurs and sheela-na-gigs on its arches, while the former intricate carvings of birds and serpents, as well as Kempe stained glass. I also visit Dale Abbey, one of the smallest churches in the country, with a single medieval fresco and Georgian painted box pews.

After several years of midwinters filled with snow and ice, it comes as something of a relief to find that this one is composed of more stereotypically British ingredients, namely rain and high winds. Christmas is accordingly something of a low-key affair, but I do find some time to visit some places. St Mary’s church in Blymhill was renovated by GE Street and accordingly features an elaborate rood screen, a gargoyle in the shape of a lion and a stained glass window depicting the tree of Jesse. The nearby church of St Andrew at Weston Park is rather more nondescript with several monuments, some medieval Flemish stained glass and some rather unpleasant Victorian stained glass. St Lawrence at Gnosall proves rather unusual, with a a large Norman arch and various Romanesque dragon carvings on the capitals. St Matthew at Hopwas is also rather unusual, with part of the building being half timbered in an Arts and Crafts style. I recognise some stained glass by Harry Stammers in the interior. Finally, Holy Trinity at Eccleshall proves a disappointment. It’s getting rather dark by this point and there’s little light to illuminate the interior, so only the Kempe stained glass stands out.

The following day, I visit St Mary at Checkley. A building characterised by medieval stained glass, a pair of monuments, stained glass and decoration by Comper, Saxon cross shafts, a Norman font and some fantastical carving on the stall ends (ranging from dragons to Red Indians). The church guide book has a somewhat amusing spat with Pevsner’s not overly flattering description of the church. More impressive is St Oswald at Ashbourne, its interior filled with tomb monuments, green man carvings, another Tree of Jesse stained glass (this time by Kempe) and a bizarre set of church gates with pyramids supported on skulls.

Back down south, I visit St Mary at Hamstead Marshall, with its ruined gates from the burned down manor house and angel statue in the churchyard and St Mary at Welford, a mixture of Norman and Victorian gothic with a range of carved heads, a Norman font and ornate baroque monuments. Finally, I visit St Thomas at East Shefford, a small medieval church surrounded by wetlands where Canada Geese flock. The interior retains medieval frescos, tiling and tomb monuments.

A few weeks later, I go to Modern Art Oxford, which as an exhibition of Graham Sutherland paintings. These range from paintings of Blitz damage to paintings of the Welsh hills, although the recurrence of twisted girders versus blasted tree branches acquires a certain similarity. There’s also something rather industrial about his vision of black hills with gold paths like molten metal and in some of them mines form an integral part of the landscape. Although Piper and Nash painted the landscape as much as Sutherland, the exhibition of Hockney’s landscapes at the Royal Academy, which I visit the following week, must surely count as the largest exhibition of landscape in England for decades. A lot of it reminds me of French painting; Seurat’s pointillism replaced with the narrow lines in Hockney’s iPad drawings or Monet’s impressionism substituted with thicker daubings of paint. Unlike the French though, Hockney is at pains to depict the same landscape in different seasons; his winter scenes are accordingly ablaze with blues, pinks, oranges and purples. If colour is accentuated, so too is perspective, as vistas of far off hills are collapsed into the foreground. The exhibition also showcases Hockney’s various experiments with technology; polaroid collages, split perspectives in video and iPad drawings. These come out halfway between painting and drawing, looking identical to paint until proximity reveals the absence of perspective. One oddity around this is the absence of modernity in the paintings themselves; a telegraph pole, a red telephone box or a view of the Saltaire mills is as modern as it gets in scenes that could otherwise come out of Rousseau.

I’ve recently read Bogdanov’s Red Star and Engineer Menni, a pair of communist utopias that opposes the likes of Zamyatin’s We. Both novels are concerned with the transition of consciousness from feudalism to capitalism and thence to communism. Nonetheless, although Bogdanov refers to this evolution as a matter of historical necessity many of the details of the novel point in the opposite direction. For example, his depiction of the school system shows a teacher wondering "our communism seems to be complete… where could a sense of private ownership possibly come from?" The answer that each individual must evolve in consciousness through the same stages as society at large conflicts with Netti’s later view that consciousness is forged by the class that one originates from; the novel accordingly repeatedly shows individuals unable to transcend the consciousness of their class. Bogdanov’s account of the evolution of communism is also problematic in several other respects; Sterni’s argument in favour of eradicating humanity hinges in part on the assumption that even if socialism were to evolve on Earth, it would nonetheless be corrupted by nationalistic tendencies; at the same time, his arguments about eradicating humanity as a means of solving issues of resource scarcity seem an unpalatable foretaste of what was to come with Stalin.

Like many historical novels of the nineteenth century Manzoni’s The Betrothed is concerned to a large extent with tyranny with the Spanish occupation of Milan serving as a proxy for Austria. The novel is also extensively concerned with religion, presumably due to a sense of the middle ages as a perfect christian community (a common enough assumption for the nineteenth century) but is also contains a rather more relativistic account of religion that is more recognisably congruent with that of, say, George Eliot. The novel often depicts religion as something that is divorced from everyday life; "while his observation would have been sound, excellent and weighty if he had uttered it from the pulpit, it is with all due respect, quite valueless as a contribution to a discussion on points of chivalry." The novel often sees its characters undertaking bad deeds in the interests of good causes, such as Agnese’s suggestion to fool Don Abbondio into marrying them although she knows Father Christoforo would not approve ("Renzo… had all the look of a persecutor, yet he was really the persecuted party"). In other cases, it depicts goodness and truth as uncertain quantities in contrast to the certainty of many of its more saintly characters; "a great inclination towards doing good… an occupation in which it is possible to take a wrong turning like any other." The veracity of statements like these is contested through the various characters that are present in a novel that is structured in a much more picaresque fashion than would have been the case for a British or French novel of the period. On the one hand, as with Dinah in Adam Bede the novel contains several examples of religious self-sacrifice such as Fathers Christoforo and Borromeo. The repentence of the Unnamed equally serves to illustrate the ideals of contrition ("even the most brutal and furious of his enemies was restrained and controlled by the public veneration for that repentant and kindly figure"). On the other, it contains examples of individuals like the Signora for whom religion has deformed her life. The release of Lucia from her vow to the Virgin serves markedly to weaken the novel’s stress on sacrifice in this respect. Some events, such as the plague illustrate both sides evenly, with Father Christoforo’s sacrifice being counterbalanced by the superstition that religion gives rise to in the suspicious of poisoned oils being smeared within the cathedral ("the absurd beliefs which had previously dominated men’s hearts to a greater or lesser degree now acquired extraordinary power.").

I’d also read Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin. The novel is essentially a secularised version of the Faust myth and as is often the case with Balzac it substitutes religious morality for his own theory of how dissipation drains the vital energies of life away. As such, Balzac’s version of the myth differs markedly from the original; Raphael’s use of the skin for even charitable purposes drains his life as much as its use for debauchery. Repentance brings no reward here. The novel equally draws into question the value of morality, as with the antique dealer’s statement that "I am now as happy as a young man. My values were all topsy-turvy. A while lifetime can be contained in an hour of love," repenting his earlier advocacy of stoic austerity.

Food cooked: Bigos, Irish pork belly with chutney, Devilled chicken, Chicken Paprika, Basque seafood stew, Greek roast chicken with lemon and honey, Norwegian fish pie, Seafood chowder, Beer cheese and spiced tomato soup, Biksemad, Chicken and chorizo stew, Georgian guinea fowl with cranberries and walnuts.

Birds seen: Redwing, Green woodpecker, Red Kites, Boston beans, Harvard Beets, Great spotted woodpecker Goldfinch, Greenfinch, Tree Sparrows, Wagtails.

I then spend some time in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, concentrating on the European and Ancient collections. The European galleries range from Weyden, Crivelli, Titian and El Greco before progressing onwards to Zurbaran, Rembrandt, Turner, Blake, Goya, Velasquez, Ruisadael and a really rather distressing amount of Watteau and Constable. The Museum also has an unusually large number of Millets in its collection as well as the occasional Burne Jones. The modern galleries predictably dwell on the French; Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Signac, Tissot, Cezanne and Gauguin, as well as Munch and some portraits by Van Gogh. The ancient section is equally impressive, including a surprisingly naturalistic bust of Prince Ankhaaf, a series of sculptures of Menkaure, Assyrian friezes, a Babylonian lion as well as busts of Augustus and Septimus Severus. I don’t really have a great deal of time for the American collection, save for some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s interiors and Tiffany stained glass.

The next day finds me travelling to Washington. My previous visit had been rather overcast so it’s nice to see the place lit up by the sun. The first thing I look at is the Corcoran gallery; for a building opposite from the Whitehuse this is perhaps not especially impressive. It too has more Gainsborough and Reynolds paintings than can possibly be considered advisable. The positive aspect are a good collections of Dutch works by Dou, Goyen, Steen & Borch, and a modern collection by Corot, Renoir, Degas and Monet. Sculptures by Manship and David French line the staircases and corridors. The name of many of the American artists are new to me, but I rather like works like Bierstadt’s Last of the Buffalo, Remington’s wild west sculptures and Metcalf’s May Night, as well as an unexpected painting of the House of Representatives by Samuel Morse. I have a chance to compare this to the original later, when I go round Congress, viewing the rotunda with its painting of the apotheosis of Washington and sculptures of Lincoln, Jefferson, Hamilton, Ford, Reagan and Eisnhower. The later hall of sculptures proves rather more bemusing with an inclusion of also-ran figures (like the inventor of air conditioning). Statues to figures like the last Hawaiian king also seem somewhat incongruous. Finally, I have a look at the library of Congress, with its elaborate painting ceilings, most of whicb seem rather reminiscent of Florence.

The actual exhibition is small but interesting enough, ranging from large tapestries, tiling of fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella as well as a series of folk depictions of the seasons (except a woman burning a set of Valentine’s letters in February and a Janus figure in January), stained glass of Arthurian scenes and printings from their edition of the Icelandic sagas.

A few weeks later, I’m back in London for early Soviet architecture exhibition at the Royal Academy. Dense fog lingers as I ride on the train and is then dispelled by bright sunshine in London; only for the fog to return when I leave later. A large model of Tatlin’s Tower takes up the courtyard, rather resembling the scaffolding for a helter-skelter. Inside the exhibition features from works by Rodchenko and Popova that were intended to highlight overlaps between painting and architecture but it mostly concentrates on photographs of constructivist architecture. It’s an odd mixture of a revolutionary intent to build a new Soviet man with, as Stalin recognised, a sense of elitism. These buildings were modelled on European modernism (or built by Europeans like Le Corbusier and Mendelssohn) and built by peasant workforces with relatively primitive materials. Although intended for use as housing and worker’s clubs, they must have been utterly mystifying to its intended occupants, hence one factory facing towards Moscow with a Palladian exterior and another facing away with a modernist exterior. To a large extent, the exhibition plays off these tensions, contrasting pictures of the buildings in their original incarnations as emblems of a gleaming future with recent photos of their present dilapidation. In this sense, urban decay is this dominant theme, as if we were looking at Battersea Power Station of the ruins of Detroit.

The following week and I’m back again at the Tate, for its exhibition on John Martin. As an artist, Martin is as much defined by idiosyncrasy as Gandy or Dadd, or if we compare him to someone like Chris Foss, he emerges as a specialist in special effects more than a conventional artist (the exhibition includes a Glenn Brown painting that hybridises Martin with a Martian setting). Actually, many of the paintings are conventional enough and reminiscent of Constable more than anyone else, as with his paintings of Richmond and Twickenham; in spite of his paintings of ruined castles, his choices don’t suggest the romantic sensibility denoted by his more famous works. The brushwork is also at odds with the detail in Constable; looking at the panoramas it becomes difficult to discern whether one thickly applied daub of oil represents branches or rock formations. Martin’s most famous works are all impressionistic in character, but he can never bring himself to abandon realism in the way Turner could; the destroyed cities in his paintings are always shown with immaculate attention to historical and architectural detail; the exhibition even displays the keys he gave out to accompany them. Onto his most famous works then. They essentially represent variations on a single theme of the apocalypse; irrespective of whether the subject is historical (Pompei), sometimes mythical (Ovid and Syrinx, in one odd set of paintings that show Claude style landscapes with a brutal interlude in the form of two small figures; Auden probably would have liked that touch) or Biblical, as with his scores of drawings of Belshazzar’s Feast or the last Judgement. His Biblical themes seem a little odd; the interest in the architecture suggests a somewhat pagan mentality (not to mention his Iguanodon illustrations for a geology book) but the depiction of the Last Judgement recalls Blake or Dadd more than any conventional religious painter. One does wonder if Martin’s metier should not have been set design or special effects for Hollywood films.

Finally, the Tate are also running a retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s work. I often wonder about whether my tastes aren’t too antediluvian, as I haven’t been to many exhibitions from living artists (David Hockney is the only other that comes to mind). As my knowledge of Richter is relatively slight the exhibition comes as something of a pleasant surprise. If an artist like Rothko counts as a fox, then Richter is something unusual in the visual arts; a hedgehog. His work encapsulates a set of techniques that revolve around different methods of de familiarisation. The early work draws on the realism of photographs, only to disturb that realism by blurring the paint. Some of the later paintings initially looks like nineteenth century paintings of country scenes, but you realise upon close examination that they, or the portraits that show a debt to Vermeer, wouldn’t have been possible with photography in the way it shows the distribution of light rather than the nineteenth century tendency towards hyper-realism. Conversely, although the abstract works often recall Rothko or Malevich, the artist that perhaps should be named here is Hammershoi, simply for the recurrent dwelling on subtle shades of grey. In some, colour is completely replaced by texture as the theme of the painting, with lines of the brushwork being the only distinct feature. In others, scenes of bombed cites or mountain ranges become realist when viewed from a distance but dissolve into abstraction when one steps up close to them. Some subjects are deliberately chosen to blur the line between realism and abstraction, like the choice of clouds. When colour is included, it is plotted in the manner of a Pantone palette or emerges in an uncontrollable burst that resembles Kandinsky or Pollock, while the use of a squeegee to scrape away at the surface of the oil recalls Miro. The chosen subject matter of his works is as variable as its style; German bombers and Baader Meinhof gang on the one hand, versus symbols like skulls or simple objects like chairs and toilet rolls. Portraits and landscapes both appear that recall both Corot and Friedrich.

The Tate is also playing a host to Tacita Dean’s Film, a screening that casts the turbine hall into cinematic darkness. It’s odd watching people standing in front of the screen and becoming silhouettes that form part of the work. It amounts to a series of images rather than a narrative, that echoes Dali in places (images like eggs and eyes) and Tarkovsky in its dwelling on photographic detail, like trees.

New York is a city that is in most respects best viewed from outside rather than from inside it; down in the artificial canyons between the skyscrapers there’s little to be seen. Walking back into Manhattan from across the Brooklyn bridge is a case in point. The symmetry of the bridge’s cabling seems almost contrived to create the perfect framing for the skyscrapers beyond. From here, the financial district is a dense jungle of towers from Gehry’s Beekman Tower and the merging stump of the Freedom Tower to the art deco of the Woolworth and Municipal Buildings with Liberty Island off in the far distance. Once I’ve crossed over the bridge and am beneath the towers, you notice how many of the smaller buildings they dwarf are cast permanently into shadow by them, as with churches like Holy Trinity and St Paul’s. Of all the buildings in New York, these two are the only ones that remind me of London, one a gothic revival building the other resembling St Martin in the Fields. Unlike London, both retain their original churchyards. New York’s Financial District does resemble London in other ways; the city’s rational grid dissolves into a winding morass of sidestreets with the spaces around Battery Park and Clinton Castle that look out over to Liberty Island being the only open area. I walk past Zuccotti Park where the Occupy Wall Street protest is in force; odd that a country whose culture is almost predicated on a denial of inequality as a social issue should end up being more successful than Spain or Britain in protesting against it; probably for the same reason that a country that has remained far more conservative and religiose than anywhere in Western Europe gave rise to the Stonewall riots.

I then take the subway back up to Central Park. The New York subway is a mass of adverts for pawnbrokers, college educations, public sector training programmes, apartments and Broadway shows; it does at least spare you the lapdancing club adverts that appear ubiquitous on new York cabs. Having arrived, I walk through the park to the Guggenheim, most of which disappointingly turns out to be shut for renovation. What is open is a set of Kandinsky paintings from his Bauhaus period, a set of pop art paintings (including an especially spectral green self portrait by Warhol) and a collection of works by Picasso, Cezanne, Manet, Pissarro and Gauguin. It doesn’t take too long to get round these three rooms, so I walk down to the Frick Collection. Still presented as Henry Clay Frick’s personal collection in his former mansion, the Frick eschews chronology in favour of his eclectic tastes. Frick seems to have liked Watteau, Gainsborough and Constable rather more than I do, but it’s easy to forgive someone whose walls were lined by Vermeer, Whistler, Veronese, Monet, Titian, El Greco, Turner and Holbein.

The following day I walk to the Museum of Modern Art, noticing that Johnson’s postmodern ‘lipstick’ building is just a few blocks away from Rohe’s Seagram Building. I briefly have a look around the sculpture garden with its Giacometti and Miro sculptures before going up to the upper floors. The uppermost floor is a wonderful whirl of works by Seurat, Picasso, Popova, Rodchenko, Mondrian, Nagy, Brancusi, Duchamp, Picabia, Arp, Ernst, Schwitters, Gauguin, Derain, Matisse, Dali, Tanguy, Chagall, Kahlo, Rivera, O’Keefe, Leger, Boccioni, Malevich, Severini, Braque, Munch, Bacon, Rousseau and Cezanne with Van Gogh’s The Starry Night being my clear favourite. Monet’s cloud reflections on water lilies takes up an entire wall of the gallery; looking up close as its details it almost resembles some of the Pollock paintings nearby. Some works by Hopper and Wyeth are stuck out of the way near the lifts. The next floor down concentrates on American art, with works by Barnett Newman, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Johns and Cy Twombly. The last section I visit is photography, with works by Atget, Brassai, Evans, Fox Talbot and Weegee.

Looking round Piazza Signoria makes much of this contrast obvious; the space is relatively small when compared to the Piazza San Marco, with the crenellated bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio seeming to intrude into square like an unwelcome guest. The equestrian statue of Cosimo stands firmly at the centre of the square. The other sculptures are equally testaments to violence; Donatello’s Judith with the head of Holofernes, Cellini’s Perseus with the head of Medusa, Giambologna’s rape of the Sabine women, Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus and, of course, Michaelangelo’s David. Ammannati’s statue of Neptune emerges as something of an exception. Equally though, it’s even more plausible to read the Cellini and Michaelangelo sculptures as frank celebrations of gay sexuality, with no attempt at modesty in either case. Certainly, Ammannati later came to regard his nude statues as sinful celebrations of the flesh.

The Palazzo Vecchio itself proves rather more graceful on the interior than its martial exterior might suggest, beginning with Michaelozzo’s frescoed courtyard. Much of the interior walls were frescoed by Vasari and Ghirlandaio, sometimes depicting pergolas with birds perching within them on the ceiling, sometimes depicting grotesques similar in style to Nero’s golden house and sometimes showing mythological like Penelope and Esther. The most elegant room is clearly Eleonora’s chapel, its walls and ceiling covered in Bronzino’s frescos, whose colour almost seems luminescent in the dark. An interesting comparison is afforded by the earlier Palazzo Medici, whose showpiece is the Gozzoli Chapel, whose walls are frescoed with an entire landscape showing the journey of the Magi. The effect is rather like that of walking into a Brueghel painting. The baroque Giordano frescos in the nearby gallery form a rather unfavourable comparison to it. I also visit the much smaller Palazzo Davanzati, a more typical example of how the Florentine nobility lived, with thick shutters to block out the cold and bright frescos of red and green patterns on the walls.

The next thing I want to see are the two major churches in Florence; Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce. The exterior of Santa Maria, with its white and green marble arches, looks as if it should be in Cordoba. The interior is quite different with frescos by Filippo Lippi, Masaccio, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio appearing behind a cross by Giotto. Its cloisters contain a rather faded Ucello fresco and a considerably better preserved Buonaiuto fresco in the chapter house. Santa Croce rather reminds me of Venice’s Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in that it forms a pantheon of Florentine society; the walls are lined with monuments for Michaelangelo, Rossini, Galileo and Dante. The cloisters similar contain an underground corridor lined with funerary monuments and gravestones. A Cimabue crucifix and Giotto frescoes compete the picture of a gothic church that reached its apex during the renaissance but the most interesting part of the church may be the Pazzi Chapel, a dome built by Bruneschelli. The interior is austere, its symmetry uninterrupted by functional requirements (like Michaelangelo’s Medici chapel) with fake doors and windows inserted where necessary. The only decoration or colour comes from a set of Della Robbia ceramics. All of which leads us on to Bruneschelli’s own churches.

It comes as a surprise when walking into Florence’s cathedral to see Arnolfo’s original Gothic construction, which is belied by the presence of a dome and not hinted at from the white, green and pink marble on the exterior. The result comes over as something resembling the Gibbs design of St Martin in the Fields. Where the exterior is unusually colourful for Florence, the interior is decidedly plain, with a pair of trompe l’oeil monuments by Ucello and Castegna and Ucello’s clock as the main items of note inside a rather empty interior. The dome is the exception with its Vasari frescos and stained glass roundels by Ucello and Donatello. The Baptistery is something quite different again; entering through Pisano and Ghiberti’s doors leads to the glimmering and gleam of the ceiling’s gold mosaics, the only ones I encounter in Florence. The church of San Lorenzo shares Bruneschelli’s preference for domes with Santa Maria del Fiore, but is purely classical, its smaller scale seeming to work rather better with the austerity of its interior. By contrast, the interior of the Chapel of Princes is heavily frescoed, its walls lined with layers of different marbles and with statues of the deceased Medici. Michaelangelo’s New Sacristy is more in keeping with Bruneschelli’s spartan design, but gains the claustrophobic air of a room with no doors, as each wall is lined with fake windows and doors, each wall facing a set of symbolic opposites as if they were facing a mirror; action and introspection, night and day, dawn and dusk, life and death. The Spedale degli Innocenti is another Bruneschelli designed building, with sets of labyrinthine cloisters that lead to a well hidden museum with a collection of Della Robbia ceramics, some especially grisly relics and a Ghirlandaio painting. The nearby church of Santissima Annunziata rather impresses me for for the slightest of reasons; an anteroom to the main building, lined with fake windows out of which painted faces peer. The last church of note in central Florence is Orsanmichele, a guild church with sculptures by the likes of Donatello on its blank exterior and whose dark exterior requires electric lighting to illuminate the ceiling frescos.

The following day I brave crossing the Ponte Vecchio and its legions of expensive jewellery and leather shops over to Oltrarno, which plays the part of Richmond to Florence’s London. Bruneschelli’s church of Santo Spirito is one of the simpler buildings on the outside, with its yellow plaster facade and tiled dome, but the interior is the equal of San Lorenzo, with a trompe l’oeil ceiling and paintings by Allori and Filippino Lippi in the side chapels. Some of the wooden predella designs are as striking as the paintings. I don;’t get to see that much of the interior of Santa Maria Del Carmine but the Masolino frescos inside the Brancacci chapel are probably the best preserved that I see in the course of my visit to Italy. The nearby church of San Felicita is comparatively nondescript save for a jarringly coloured Pontormo painting; mannerism as a form of renaissance postmodernism. I walk up to the Pitti palace, with its unprepossessing, if not openly brutalist, exterior. The central courtyard is relieved somewhat by the inclusion of a grotto and a range of grotesques that offset the repeated statues of Hercules (surely the Medici equivalent of Stalinist sculpture or the works of Arno Breker). The Boboli garden continues this theme, with its combination of classical statues along long ornamental avenues and grotesque gargoyles or bizarre images of naked dwarves riding turtles. The presence of modern sculptures by the likes of Mitoraj rather tends to tip the scales in favour of the bizarre and arcane. The absence of flowers in favour of a set of green shades serves to throw the sculptures into greater relief, remaking the garden into a form of theatre. The garden seems rather popular with cats, to judge by the number who decide to take a mid afternoon siesta in its shade. I walk back up the hill where the church of San Miniato perches at its summit. Its marbled facade looks out over the city, while the light filters into the dark gothic interior to illuminate the Gaddi frescos. Beneath it, the Piazza Michaelangelo offers even better views of the city, albeit with a verdigris coated replica of David surrounded by legions of souvenir stalls at its centre.

The silverworks gallery at the Pitti Palace compares rather favourably to similar wunderkammers I’ve seen in Germany and Denmark, with its customary display of amber, coral, rock crystal and ivory carved into impossible and surreal forms, something enhanced by a set of jade Aztec artefacts. As one might well expect the main strength of the Palatine gallery here is portraiture, with good examples from Raphael, Veronese, Titian, Botticelli, Tintoretto and Perugino. Beyond that some of Salvator Rosa’s landscapes, Gentilleschi’s Judith, Reni’s Cleopatra, Rachel Ruysch’s still lives, and various Madonna and Child interpretations by Raphael and Botticelli. If the Palatine Gallery seems somewhat like a storage area for the Uffizi with the addition of a more ecclectic list of artists like Van Dyck, Rubens and Murillo, the Modern Art Gallery seems more like an exercise in representing the precise artworks that led to Marinetti’s furious denunciation of nineteenth century and the advent of futurism, which also happens to be the point the Modern Art gallery stops just short of. Much of the earlier works inevitably tend towards the historicist, offering some interest from showing artists like Fattori representing Italian history rather than having it interpreted for them by Northern European artists; conversely there’s also a section for works by those artists like Lensbach as well as paintings by Elizabeth Chaplin. The most successful works tend to be those concentrating on contemporary depictions of the Risorgimento, although some of Galileo Chini’s proto-futurist paintings of Thailand tend to leap out.

The next day is, inevitably, taken up with the Uffizi and the Accademia. The Uffizi is perhaps unusual amongst Europe’s galleries in that its building has almost as much pride of place as the paintings. To enter the gallery, you walk past rows of niches filled with the likes of Giotto to Leonardo and then into long corridors filled with Roman busts and sculptures at floor level, Vasari frescos on the ceiling and paintings of the European nobility immediately beneath them. I’m slightly taken aback to see Henry the Eighth or Elizabeth the First here, and even more so by the Ottoman sultans or the Ethiopian king. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the galleries are initially ordered in the same chronological order as Vasari’s lives of the artists, beginning with Giotto and Cimabue. With works like Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi, this iconographic style begins to give way to something more like individual portraiture in a setting that recognisably anticipates landscape painting. It’s a progression that’s continued in Filippo Lippi’s work but while works like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Pallas and the Centaur and Primavera may be the stuff of cliche now at the time as sensuous and profane a painting as that must have seemed every bit as revolutionary as Picasso. From that point onwards even religious paintings like Leonardo’s Annunciation were cast in the vein Botticelli had established, while portraiture by the likes of Mantegna, Perugino, Bellini, Della Francesca, Raphael and Bottecelli himself begins to emerge with the stress on the depiction of individuals rather than idealisations. The two most noteworthy Italian artists after Botticelli are Venetian, with Titian and Tintoretto, where the same sensuality as seen in Botticelli is supplemented by a sense of texture and surface lacking in Florentine art, followed by Caravaggio where the gallery houses his extraordinary Medusa, placed alongside works influenced by Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro technique, such as Gentileschi. The Uffizi does diverge from Vasari’s grand narrative in the galleries given up to Northern European art he would have seen as barbarous, with series of works by Memling, Weyden, Durer, Cranach and Holbein. I still feel that Northern European art was the superior of the two, with Memling and Weyden bringing the same sense of individuality to religious paintings as Cranach and Holbein did to portraiture. By contrast, Del Sarto’s paintings gain from small incidental details, as in Madonna of the Harpies rather than in the depiction of the personae themselves.

After the Uffizi, it’s perhaps inevitable that the Accademia is something of a disappointment. It does have excellent paintings by Ghirlandaio, Lippi, Bartholemo and Perugino, but it is ultimately of note for only one thing: Michaelangelo’s David. It is quite an odd experience seeing the original having seen replicas and images of it so many times, particularly given that the scale of the original does seem to diminish many of the sculpture’s flaws, like the lack of proportion to the hands and face. The Accademia is also running an exhibition of Bartolini’s works, ranging from a copper bust of Napoleon to a plaster bust of Liszt. The collection of his plaster casts, many of them for works I’d seen at Pisa, is also rather striking, albeit rather perversely for presenting the imperfect in a city more renowned for the opposite. In contrast to the Accademia, the Bargello’s collection is rather less reliant on a single piece, with its central courtyard being filled with pieces by Ammannati before one passes into a gallery dominated by Michaleangelo’s Bacchus and Cellini’s coquettish Ganymede. Again, the rather blatant gay sexuality is rather surprising. Inevitably, the highlight is David once again, this time in Donatello’s rendition. Where Michaelangelo emphasises the masculine, Donatello’s interpretation with its feathered hat is more androgynous, something that must have seemed rather more apparent with the original gilding. Other things that leap out include Giambologna’s bird sculptures, Ghiberti’s Baptistery panels and Limoges reliquaries.

Florence’s smaller museums and galleries offer more idiosyncratic views onto its history, like the San Marco monastery with its series of Fra Angelico frescos in each monk’s cell (very frequently of the same scene, with the crucifixion being the most common; a form of renaissance mass production). The church of the same name is striking for its Byzantine mosaic, one of the few in evidence in Florence. The Archaeological Museum proves to have an exceptional collection of Etruscan and Roman artefacts, from sarcophaguses that retain their original paint, the wonderfully fantastic Chimera of Arezzo to the Idolino of Pesaro. The Egyptian section is housed in Victorian galleries painted in an Egyptianate style from lotus columns to stars on the ceiling. The Egyptian collection is also rather impressive, from a relief of the Goddess Mut to a large collection of sarcophagi.

The Botanical garden in Florence is rather small but it does afford some welcome relief on an oppressively hot and humid day. Water lilies bloom in the pond near the Lotus reeds, while a Wollemi pine and a Medlar tree grow nearby. Walking round periodically leads indignant cats to emerge from beneath the undergrowth with their sleep interrupted; a set of kennels at the back of the garden suggests they are on the staff. Nearby is the Scalzi cloister, with its monochrome Del Sarto frescos and skull motifs on the columns. The Synagogue is one of the striking buildings on the Florentine skyline, with its copper dome and pink marble facade and proves to be having an open day that afternoon. The interior presents a trompe l’oeil set of Moorish designs.

Pisa forms as much of a contrast to Florence as Venice does. The enormous plain of the field of Miracles is unlike anything in Florence’s cramped streets. Two colours, the white of the stone and the green of the grass starkly dominate the entire scene, while the architecture itself forms a synthesis of the Romanesque and Moorish, with the occasional element of early Gothic decoration. The first building I visit is the Baptistery whose cavernous interior forms something of a contrast to the cathedral, where Cimabue’s apse mosaics compete with Pisano’s pulpit sculptures, Del Sarto’s paintings and Galileo’s lamp hanging down from the panelled ceiling. I find myself agreeing with Ruskin that the cemetery is the outstanding building; a Gothic cloister containing sarcophagi from the Roman, Etruscan and Medieval periods through to the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, so that tombs by Ammannati and Pisano appear next to work by Bartolini, Dupre and Thorvaldsen in front of frescos depicting hell, Genesis, the last judgement and the triumph of death. The cemetery is in many respects a self contained history of how the universe has been mythologised, from Mithras slaying the demon bull, through to medieval memento mori through to weeping angels. Inevitably, once I’ve finished with the cemetery, this leaves the tower, which is perhaps the least interesting building on the Field of Miracles, although I do find myself somewhat surprised by the extent of its lean. Last but not last, the museum contains a number of items like the original Hispano-Islamic griffin that sat atop the cathedral roof and sinopie drawings of the Campo Santo frescos. I then walk back past the ruins of the old fortress and across the Arno to one of Pisa’s smaller but underrated buildings; the church of Santa Maria del Spina, a tiny gothic chapel by the side of the river. I then walk past the old cathedral of St Paul on the Arno (closed for renovation) and the somewhat dilapidated Chapel of St Agatha, which has weeds growing out of its roof.

In Siena, the hill winds its way to the central Campo and from thence to the elaborate gothic cathedral. The interior is rather more elaborate than either Florence or Pisa, with a star pattern on the ceiling, marbled striping on the pillars, sculpture by Pisano, Della Quercia and Becafumi and an allegorical mosaic pavement on the floor. Side chapels act as hosts to Bernini and Donatello sculptures, but the most striking parts of the building are the Piccolomini library with its Pinturicchio frescos and the Baptistery with its Pietro frescos and Donatello sculptures. The hospital of Santa Maria della Scala opposite the cathedral proves rather labyrinthine on the inside, with a set of frescos above ground giving way to an apparently endless series of corridors and rooms that form the city’s archaeological museum, comprising a series of reliquaries, Etruscan funerary monuments and a cart formerly used in religious processions. Outside again, the city’s campo by virtue of amphitheatre shape invites comparison with a stage in the way it frames the Palazzo Pubblico, the only interruption being a Della Quercia fountain. The interior of the Palazzo certainly does bear comparison to Doge’s Palace in Venice with Simone Martini’s allegories of justice, good government and the Virgin as the city’s patron in its central chamber, frescos by Beccafumi through to Sala del Risorgimento, with its nineteenth century continuation of the palace’s historical themes. The palace museum holds a gold rose tree crown, a gift to the city from the Papacy.

Open House this year took me first to the Guildhall, a building whose large queues had put me off in the past. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s great hall strikes an odd note, as a sort of exercise in modernist gothic, sitting oddly next to the ostentatious monuments to Pitt, Wellington, Churchill and Nelson. The crypt is perhaps more striking, lined with vivid stained glass windows to the city’s livery companies from Airpilots to Fletchers, with adjoining room’s windows being dedicated to Chaucer, Caxton, Wren, More and Pepys. Next is the Custom House, a somewhat disappointing Georgian affair by Smirke. Exiting the building by the river, I’m somewhat overwhelmed by the presence of the Shared towering above from the opposite bank of the Thames. I then go to Holborn and visit the former Prudential building. Waterhouse’s redbrick exterior gives way to a yellow ceramic interior where vines wrap around columns and flowers the walls. The ceiling is lined with gothic vaults, albeit ceramic ones.

The next building I want to see is 19 Princelet Street. Getting onto the Tube, I notice that there are now adverts for pawnbrokers alongside the more usual business school and theatre flotsam. Princelet street itself is divided between smartly done up properties and the semi-derelict. The building is presented as a palimpsest of Huguenot, Irish and Jewish immigration (as well as the Bangladeshis) with these historical striations represented in the un-restored texture of the building. The synagogue rather reminds me of the Amstelkring in Amsterdam, with its narrow length and occluded aspect. The glass ceiling is covered in grime and the walls are cracked, while scaffolding supports the walls in the basement. One thing that isn’t represented is Rodinsky’s room, which remains shut off, as something that rather competes with the narrative of immigration established elsewhere.

The train from Charing Cross reminds me how quickly one passes from a view of the city’s towers into suburbia and from thence into a liminal area that isn’t high density enough to count as inner city housing but which is equally remote from leafy suburbia, mixing allotments with gas cylinders. The train station at Abbey Wood has a set of large adverts for a new shopping centre and a bank advert about setting up a small business. I am inclined to doubt that the residents will be especially receptive in either case. I walk by the waterside at Thamesmead South, where the grey high rise towers cast reflections in the still water, sitting incongruously alongside the swans and yachts on the water. I only realise later that this was one of the filming locations for A Clockwork Orange.

After a while, I finally reach my destination: Crossness Engine House. Albeit serving a less than glamorous purpose, this is nonetheless one of the finest elements of Bazalgette’s sewer network and one that eloquently demonstrates how the Victorians lavished care and attention on even the humblest of structures. The exterior is a harmonious blend of red and white bricks arranged in a neo-romanesque style, while the interior is arranged around a central Octagon whose red, white and green ironwork is designed to resemble flowers, leaves and trees. The comparison with contemporary engineering is a rather depressing one, even when decades of technological advance are allowed for. A large part of the interior has been restored, with one of the original engines working again (as evidenced by the periodic eruptions of steam), while the other three remain silent, coated in rust, grime and cobwebs. It’s a somewhat unsettling combination; the vision of it as decayed and ruined is in many respects easy to conceive than the one of the engines gleaming and the interior bright with paint.

After visiting the cathedral, I pass onwards to Hanbury Hall in Worcestershire. It’s a somewhat odd structure, a newer version of the Carolean Sudbury Hall, down to the elaborate wood carvings and plaster work decorating the ceiling, but the interior almost groans under its attempts at splendour. The main hall features a staircase decorated with frescos by Thornhill, the sort of things normally reserved for a much larger structure like Chatsworth or Greenwich Palace. Some of the more unusual features are the ‘Gothick’ corridor, lined with wallpaper replicating tracery designs, the neo-Moorish gazebos and the long gallery being detached from the house and standing apart in the garden. Afterwards, I visit the nearby church, perched high up on a hill. Storm clouds are gathering in the sky by this point and the church takes on a rather sinister aspect, particularly as the churchyard proves to be full of rather ancient and large tombstones and one rather bizarre tomb depicting a railway accident. The church interior was renovated by Street and is accordingly rather dark, with monuments by Chantrey and Roubillac clustered in the shadows.

The following day is taken up with a visit to All Saints at Claverley. The church interior is a mishmash of Gothic and Romanesque, as well as being lined with allegorical frescos of battling knights, consecration marks, lions and dragons as well as Early English carvings of faces being eaten by strange beasts that rather remind me of Kilpeck. The interior also contains a fine alabaster tomb, medieval tiles and a dual set of Norman and Saxon fonts. On my way back, I call in at St Mary in Adderbury, with its extraordinarily well preserved misericords.

A few weeks later, I go to a Temenid dynasty exhibition at the Ashmolean. The gold retrieved from the burial mounds at Aegae proves the most interesting items; oak and myrtle leaf wreathes, an image of Medusa from a cuirass, as well as a silver jug carved with an image of Silenus. Other items include ceramic clay heads and red figure ceramics. There are a couple of newly opened galleries in the Ashmolean; Maoist propaganda posters (suspiciously looking like advertisements for musicals) and Indian paintings.

Tarr by Wyndham Lewis offers a refreshing counterpoint to some of the author’s later works and the didacticism of novels like Lawrence’s Women in Love, instead suggesting a plurality of views that rejects both bourgeois conformism and romantic individualism alike. Instead, Lewis sees the self as a set of masks; "The closest friend of my Dr Jekyll would not recognise my Mr Hyde and vice versa; this rudimentary self I am giving you." Conversely, at the same time, it has an essentialist view of character; "humour may be exactly described as the most feminine attribute of man – and it is the only one of which women show hardly a trace." At other points, these two are opposed; "in the interests of his animalism he was about to betray the artist in him." In Tarr, the two sets of masks represent philosophical opposites, just as the opening declaration of Blast contains the same set of opposed concepts that it both blasts and blesses. For Lewis at this point, dichotomies are never something stable but rather something that tends to collapse in on themselves, hence many of Tarr’s orations seem an attempt to formulate a somewhat convoluted via media between Kreisler and himself; "an attempt to get out of art and back into life again… the sex instinct of the average sensual man had become perverted into a false channel." Much of this can be attributed to the anxiety of influence Lewis seems to have felt towards figures like Stirner, Nietzsche and Marinetti. In the case of the latter, much of Blast’s stance is derived from Marinetti and the text describes itself as futurist at various points. However, it also condemns Marinetti for his romantic ‘automobilism’ and goes out of its way to praise Da Vinci as a Futurist, taking a diametrically opposed view of the art of the past out of what looks like contrarianism. Picasso and Kandinsky receive far more praise in Blast than Marinetti but it is the latter’s language that it is used to codify the attack on him; not an unusual scenario, as many manifestos of that period aped Marinetti’s tropes whilst articulating Kandinsky’s thoughts. By the same token, in Blast’s self contained monodrama Enemy of the Stars (in many ways a parallel rendition of Tarr stripped of the novel’s realist veneer but retaining its carnivalesque parody of the Promethean hero), a copy of Stirner is thrown out of the window but the opposition of Hanp’s bourgeois predilections (Tarr) and Arghol’s romantic individualism (Kreisler) again proves far from stable; "He had wished to clean up.. accumulations of self… this man has been masquerading as me… Arghol has preached a certain life, and now insolently set an example of the opposite." To Lewis, romantic individualism is essentially a risible product of the bourgeoisie. Later on, Lewis further knocks down the opposition he has set up "in the old style, two distinct, heroic figures were confronted and one ninepin tried to knock the other ninepin over. We all today… are in each other’s vitals – overlap and intersect and are Siamese."

Reading Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is somewhat odd experience; in his afterword, Pullman notes that he normally supports plurality in interpretation but that in this instance he feels more obliged to offer a context for the novel. Certainly, the title leaves little room for plurality in interpretation but the novel still seems more more ambiguous than the title or afterword might suggest. For example, the novel assigns naturalistic explanations to many of its events but many still retain a certain degree of unexplained supernaturalism; even if the mysterious puppet master is stripped of being angel or demon by the end of the novel, his ability to foresee and manipulate events remains as unexplained as Christ’s miracles at the start of the novel. Equally, the moral dichotomy established between Christ and Jesus gets routinely undermined by some of Christ’s criticisms of the nascent theology; "if it were true that only children could be admitted to the kingdom, what was the value of such adult qualities as responsibility, forethought and wisdom… God surely created the Gentiles too and there are surely good men and women among them." Equally, Christ’s complaint that the stories Jesus tells manipulate the emotions while unfairly introducing extra-legal elements into his replies, has some force to it. When Christ observes that "to him, the kingdom of God is coming very soon and it makes no sense to be cautious and prudent" it reminds me of AC Grayling’s observation that New Testament Christianity was a millenarian cult that made no concessions to practicality in its belief in the apocalypse; in reality, the meek will not inherit the earth and turning the other cheek is not necessarily a sensible thing to do.

I’ve always been inclined to regard Plato as a great historical villain, turning Western culture away from empiricism and towards the transcendental. Reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics goes a long way towards reinforcing that prejudice; lacking any real interest in the mind body problem or the moral dilemmas of later philosophers, Aristotle’s notion of virtue is situational, grounded in social practice; "it is not easy to see how knowing that ideal good will help a weaver or a carpenter in the practice of their own craft… it does not appear that the physician studies even health in the abstract." At times, Aristotle sounds like Rorty in his dismissal of metaphysical preoccupations; "the virtues we acquire by first having practised them, just as we do the arts."

Going to the Proms this year, I’ve listened to Britten, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Debussy, De Falla (which came out rather better than either Debussy or Ravel who perhaps lack the necessary force needed for a venue like the Royal Albert Hall), Tchaikovsky, Verdi (a wonderful performance of the Requiem) and Handel. In the case of Rinaldo, the performance wisely decides to resist a historical Crusaders versus Saracens interpretation that would impart considerably more weight to the libretto than it could reasonably be expected to bear. Nonetheless, their camp St Trinians versus Monty Python and the Holy Grail interpretation goes to the other extreme, seeming to mock a text that gives a female character a remarkable degree of prominence and sway.