People love Canaletto, and the title of this exhibition - which puts the setting of the paintings above the artist who did them - gives a good idea why. Venice as a place and an idea is perennially popular, and Canaletto gives us the big views – the Doge’s Palace, the Grand Canal, the Rialto – in painstakingly literal detail.

One of theartsdesk's founder-writers, Mark Hudson, has been shortlisted in the biography category of the annual Spear’s Book Awards, for his book Titian, the Last Days. Hudson did not intend to write a conventional biography of the Venetian artist, but took Titian’s mysterious final paintings as its starting point – works so baffling in their subject matter and background that they involved him in far more factual research than he had originally anticipated when he began work in 2005.

The backlash begins here with the first of Flavia Rittner's three documentaries: not an operatic wannabe or a gushing celebrity outsider to present, only a conductor who knows and loves his job inside out and a parade of gorgeous, energetic singers all at the very top of their hard-working game in state-of-the-art productions.

This superb exhibition of Italian Renaissance drawings, featuring 100 works and chosen from the outstanding graphic collections of the Uffizi and the British Museum, explores the evolution of the preparatory sketch in the 15th century. We learn how artists began to experiment with the medium in order to create finished paintings that were far more compositionally and stylistically ambitious, far more dramatic and full of movement, than anything that had come before. And though the drawings themselves were never meant to be seen outside the artist’s studio, we learn that by the early part of the 16th century, drawing had gained great importance as a medium in its own right.

The battleground: beauty. What’s at stake: our souls. At least on these two things philosophy don Roger Scruton (presenter of Why Beauty Matters) and art critic Waldemar Januszczak (presenter of Ugly Beauty) were agreed in the Modern Beauty season. For despite very different ideas of beauty, they both reached the same conclusion: it is there to nourish the soul.