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"The Queen: Art and Image", now on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London, makes a lot of claims for itself. The blurb on the gallery web-site tells one that by “exploring the startling range of artistic creativity that the Queen has inspired, the exhibition also reveals the radical changes in portraiture and profound developments since the 1950s.” It goes on to list some of the supposedly distinguished painters and photographers who have, during her long reign, produced likenesses of Elizabeth II.

The first thing to be said about the new exhibition at the British Museum, Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art, is that it is genuinely spectacular and deserves the hosannas it has already been greeted with in the press. The second thing is that it is highly political. It is political in all sorts of ways. The most obvious of these can be found in the fact that it plucks a number of the so-called "Elgin marbles".

Renoir’s reputation has long been in decline with intellectuals. He is seen as sugary and self-indulgent, to the point where his work gives the whole of the Impressionist Movement a bad name. The thing that has contributed to this fall from grace is, of course, the late work, with its bloated nudes and curiously hot colors. Yet even the work of Renoirís best period tends to seem uneven, despite the continuing popularity of undoubted masterpiece such as La Loge [1874].

Of all the British poets of my generation, Ted Hughes, now nearly 20 years dead, left behind him both the grandest and most sulfurous reputation. The controversies he aroused rumble on, and the hurts, in certain quarters, are still keenly felt. Any life story that comprises not just two but actually three suicides, plus a murder, does wrap a cloak of darkness about itself.

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close (born July 5, 1940) is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photo-realist. He developed his own highly resolved heads (his preferred term to portraits), which were worked on a massive scale. Despite suffering a disabling spinal aneurysm in 1988, the artist has continued to forge a monumental body of work in a variety of media: paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs, of potent and original effect.

John Millais is the most paradoxical of Britain’s major Victorian artists. Already recognized in his teens as prodigiously gifted, he chose to risk everything by becoming a founder-member of the Pre-Raphaelites, a revolutionary group of neo-primitive painters who, despite the support offered to them by John Ruskin, the most influential critic of the day, risked being treated as outcasts by the ruling artistic establishment.

Maybe it’s time for attention to turn back to the Russians. In the 1980s, as some of us still remember, so-called perestroika art was pretty big in the West, with enthusiasm from leading Western curators and critics, and some support from the big international auction rooms. In fact, the pattern was pretty much the same as what happened with contemporary Chinese art just a little later on.

"Citizens and Kings", the new blockbuster show at the Royal Academy in London, contains an almost overwhelming number of celebrated paintings and sculptures, even if one or two of them, such as Jacques-Louis David’s Marat Assassiné, turn out to be studio versions rather than the real thing. The show aims to trace the shift in attitudes towards the human personality that was set in motion by the American and French Revolutions and the wars associated with these great political and social upheavals.

Andrea Palladio is the most influential architect who ever lived - much more so than those heroes of the Modern Movement - Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It is significant that buildings we call "Palladian" are still being built today - for example, by the British architect Quinlan Terry. Palladio’s ideas were disseminated not only by his buildings, but also, even more effectively, by his writings, most notably by his didactic masterpiece, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), published in 1570.

The new exhibition at Tate Britain celebrates one of the best loved of all British artists, the landscape painter, John Constable. In his own lifetime, Constable was constantly struggling to catch up with his great rival, J. M. W. Turner, whose astonishing fluency he could never match. Turner has maintained his fame, but, among the British at least, Constable is now more intimately loved.

London is now a major centre for the international art world. The only other European city that houses as many studios is not Paris but Berlin. And Berlin does not have nearly as many galleries, public or commercial, which feature the latest developments in contemporary art.

This is not an exhibition about ‘Realist’ art, as will be immediately apparent from some of the works included. Instead, it is an exhibition that invites the spectator to consider what his, or her, vision of reality truly is. The philosophical debate about the nature of realism in art began in earnest quite late in the history of Western painting and sculpture. The trigger was the invention of photography. When Louis Daguerre announced his new process in 1839 there were many people who thought that it might, in due course, make the visual artist superfluous.

The British Museum has two quite different archaeological exhibitions on view at the moment. In some ways, they echo one another. In other ways, they are quite strongly contrasted. The strongest link, of course is that they are about the archaeology of the Mediterranean, and that in addition, they both have ties to the classical Greek and Roman world that is still the main taproot of Western civilization.

Exhibition organizers at the Royal Academy are expressing bewilderment and mild outrage, at least in public, because the people who run advertising for the London Underground have decided to ban a poster featuring a nude Venus by the German 16th-century artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder. In private, they must be hugging themselves. At the time of writing, three major newspapers have picked up the story.

Byzantine art has a slightly odd reputation. It is regarded, on the one hand, as something remote, hieratic, and difficult. On the other hand, the word Byzantium has a very romantic ring - it lives in our minds as the name of a citadel of civilization, a place that preserved for posterity both intellectual and material treasures that would otherwise have vanished forever. The remarkable exhibition now at the Royal Academy in London touches on both of these aspects.

Charming Baker is a phenomenon. Right now, a much bigger phenomenon in the British art scene than the much touted, but now rather tired and fading YBAs. The YBAs, after suitably Bohemian, in-your-face beginnings, are now the official face of British art. You will find most of them (though not quite all) represented in the closing galleries of the new hang at Tate Britain, which aims to tell the complete story of British art, from the Tudors until now.

Very seldom in London can a major show of modern and contemporary art at a highly respected national institution have received such universally negative reviews. As I write this, not all the verdicts on the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Modern British Sculpture have been delivered. However, it is already clear that the majority will be hostile. Paradoxically, it is this, more than any other factor, which makes it seem like an important event - a turning point if you like.

The creation of a masterpiece needs more than simply determination on the part of a single individual - though this, of course, is a myth that has continuously gained in strength since the time of Michelangelo. As Michelangelo himself well knew, masterpieces grow from a will to see them made on the part of patrons, who often play nearly as important a part in the process as the man who holds the brush or wields the chisel. The Sistine ceiling would never have come into existence had it not been for Pope Julius II.

As a working critic, I find the most difficult exhibitions to write about are those that combine an evidently important subject with a faintly dispiriting result. The new Edvard Munch show at Tate Modern is a case in point. Munch is undoubtedly a major Modernist artist, a Norwegian cultural icon who was the precursor and to some extent the inventor of what came to be known as Expressionism. One version of his composition, The Scream, very recently made a record price.

Thank God I wasn’t in Venice for the opening of this year’s Biennale, even though I had a number of artist friends who were exhibiting there. The crowds to get into the main shows are fierce, with queues at all the main national pavilions. So is the social competition. “Have you been invited to this?” “Have you got a ticket for that?” Elbows out. Armour-plated ego at the ready.