And so, I finally come to write of Anselm Kiefer, and with something of a heavy heart, as heavy, I’d vouch, as one of his load-bearing canvases. 

“The minute I touched New York,” wrote Berenice Abbott, “I had a burning desire to photograph the city of incredible contrasts, the city of stone needles and skyscrapers, the city that is never the same but always changing.” 

When did Big Ideas make a comeback at the Turner Prize? Did they ever go away? In its 30-year history it seems that everything that wasn’t painting has been labelled “conceptual art”. But we know that labels can be very misleading, and the “conceptual” in “conceptual art” obviously need not apply. 

Here be dragons, and plum blossoms in moonlight, model chariots, 15th-century paper money, weaponry and armour, embroidered robes, blue and white porcelain, vivid portraits of the court eunuchs, obese emperors and impassive empresses. There is many an unexpected subject, too: the most tenderly rendered depiction of a giraffe, a gift from the ruler of Bengal for the Imperial menagerie, with the animal dwarfing his devoted attendant. 

As a town of 70,000 or so people, Bamberg boxes dazzlingly above its weight in at least two spheres. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, risen to giddy heights under its chief conductor of the last 14 years Jonathan Nott, is decisively among Germany’s top five, and acknowledged as such in its substantial state funding (to the enviable tune of 80 percent, a figure known elsewhere, I believe, only in Norway). And a galaxy of great buildings has won the place UNESCO World Heritage status.

This revelatory exhibition goes in search of the revolutionary magnificence which infused Constable’s compelling landscapes through an unusual prism. The narrative spine is clear. It follows Constable’s intense work playing upon as profound a knowledge of the Old Masters as was possible at the time, and reconciling it with, as he phrased it, the greatness of nature from which all originality must spring.  We see nothing, he said, until we fully understand it. 

So, Exhibit B, the controversial “human zoo” using black actors to re-enact the role of ethnographic exhibits – semi-naked, chained, silenced by metal masks and degraded in metal collars ­– has been cancelled, due to the presence of protesters. 

Late Titian, Late Rembrandt, Late Picasso, Late Matisse…. What is it with Late that seems to give some artists a Golden Age irradiated by a kind of sublime carelessness, a genuine sense of anything goes? A life spent learning means that in the end it might be worn lightly and the imagination set free. Of course, such a sublime coda is not given to all, as many an artist descends into self-parody, rather than ascending into a kind of upward free-fall. 

In 1959, the walk to Salvador Dalí’s house in Portlligat seemed very long. I was on holiday with my parents in Cadaqués, staying in our friends’ house high on a hillside with a view of the blue bay and the white houses surrounding it. Not that I cared about views. What I wanted to do was swim, poke sea urchins, watch the fishermen unload their nets, and have a Coke at the Meliton bar.

For all the political hurly burly, social change and religious upheaval of the Tudor period and the intriguing personal histories of its monarchs, it is surely the portraits of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I that have done most to secure the Tudors in popular imagination.