Here be wonderful images, in an anthology of two score of paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the mid-Nineties by 10 artists whose shared interests only sharpen their individuality. Francis Bacon is the autodidact in the group, which includes two Berliners – Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud – who came to England as children. David Hockney is the witty, adventurous northerner who has now returned, mostly, to Yorkshire from a life lived between London and Los Angeles.

In the 1450s in Florence, Alberti was working on the facade of Santa Maria Novella, Donatello and Fra Filippo Lippi were active, while Leonardo was born in nearby village of Vinci. And the English established a diplomatic presence. It has continued almost uninterrupted, pausing only in times of direct conflict. This month, it ends as the British consulate closes its doors for the last time. Cuts to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget and global geopolitical shifts mean that the United Kingdom no longer needs a man in Florence to tend to the needs of tourists and expats.

How can you review LS Lowry? The Salford rent-collector-cum-painter simply did what he did: sending his bendy, pipe-cleaner people through white-floored industrial streets, in scenes that seemed hardly to change in decades. While Lowry fully qualifies for that currently fashionable status "outsider artist", there’s nothing remotely edgy about him. He’s as cuddly and quintessentially English as Thora Hird. Anyone likely to have an opinion on him will long since have formed it. Everyone else will simply be indifferent.

In his catalogue essay, Peter Osborne discusses the meaning of epithets such as “new” and “contemporary” when applied to current art, yet no one in this year’s New Contemporaries seems to be striving to make work that is “new”, “different”, “radical”, “challenging”, “avant-garde” or even “eye-catching” – to name just a few of the attributes supposed to make an artwork significant, relevant or desirable.

For dull reasons to do with a dodgy digital box and a very old analogue telly, I can’t tune in to BBC Four during live transmissions, so I either catch up on iPlayer, or (lucky me as a journalist) get to see programmes early. But I’m very glad I can get it at all, for when the BBC cuts come to pass and its premier arts channel starts broadcasting archive-only material, as it proposes to do, then I think I might just stop watching telly altogether.

Leonardo da Vinci was not a prolific artist. In a career that lasted nearly half a century, he probably painted no more than 20 pictures, and only 15 surviving paintings are currently agreed to be entirely his. Of these, four are incomplete. Indeed one painting, abandoned by the artist but currently hanging in the National Gallery, is so far from being finished that the two figures in it, that of Saint Jerome and the lion in the wilderness (c 1488-90, Pinacoteca Vaticana, pictured below), have been barely touched by paint.

The Nikolai Ge retrospective at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery marks the 180^th anniversary of the artist’s birth – not the kind of round centenary or bicentenary landmark that often brings such projects to fruition. But the show is literally a revelation – at its centre are the religious works from the last years of his life, many of which returned only this year to Russia from abroad. A series of pencil drawings based on the Crucifixion show the artist working in a style that seems astonishingly ahead of his time.

What a curious curate’s egg Tate Liverpool has pulled out of its hat with Alice in Wonderland. And what a complete rag-bag of minor, uninteresting artists.

What is it that makes an exhibition special, keeps you looking longer than you expected, ensures you think about it long after you’ve left? Obviously, the art, or in a history show, the subject, is the first thing. The installation sometimes (although a good show is more usually damaged by poor installation than a poor one is rescued by good). Then there are the juxtapositions, the unexpected nuggets of information, novelty, rarity.

The easiest mistake to make in appreciating George Condo would be to assume that his manic style reflects a manic creation or a manic practice. Some of Condo's paintings and drawings, with their childlike loops and gurning, disfigured faces, look like he made them in a fit of violence or some hysterical trance, but the real surprise of two new shows at the Hayward Gallery and at Sprüth Magers in Mayfair is the care and the calmness that lies behind them.