Monday, November 29, 2010

A guide to Edinburgh's art treasures

Art is the ideal way to recover your equilibrium between festival shows. There are plenty of exhibitions, but don't forget the permanent collections

Indelible gaze ... Titian's The Three Ages of Man. Photograph: Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh/PR

If you are in Edinburgh and you want to catch some art between comedy acts – it is the perfect hangover cure, the ideal chilled moment amid the hubbub of live performance – there are good exhibitions on, to be sure, but don't forget also to visit the free, permanent collection of the National Gallery between the old and new towns. Edinburgh has a world-class museum of European painting with masterpieces of the highest order.

Visiting to review festival art shows, I popped in for a quiet half-hour. As I had just been in Venice on holiday I naturally gravitated to the Titians. There are more Titian nudes in Edinburgh than in Venice itself, but the painting that peculiarly attracted me on this visit was his great work The Three Ages of Man. I can't get the face of the young woman in this picture, gazing with deep sensitivity at her lover, out of my mind.

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