The man who created ‘dictator chic’
Charles Percier may not be a household name, but his Empire style sums up the Napoleonic era – and has had imitators ever since
It’s time to look again at the golden age of sleaze and splendour
Was the French Second Empire as morally and artistically bankrupt as its critics made it out to be?
Cavorting amid the ruins with Hubert Robert
The Louvre's Hubert Robert exhibition was a revelation
Diary: on Francis Haskell
The enduring intellectual influence of Francis Haskell, the ‘historian’s art historian’ who reshaped the whole discipline.