I was sad to read today of the death of the art historian Michael Baxandall. One of the most memorable courses I took as an undergraduate was the Italian Renaissance at the Warburg Institute, taught, among others, by Sir Ernst Gombrich and Mr Baxandall. A lugubrious man with the manner of a bloodhound, Baxandall wrote such pioneering works as Giotto and the Orators; Painting and Social Experience in 15th century Italy; and The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. He has had his imitators (and plagiarists) but they lacked his culture, poise and restraint. The book on Social Experience made the most waves since he revealed the ways in which the skills of craftsmen and merchants leached into those of painters when it came to deciding how much gold or lapis lazulae to use. My own favourite, however is the book about the exquisite limewood sculptors, notably Tilman Riemenschneider and Veit Stoss. Apparently Mr Baxandall had been suffering from Parkinsons Disease for a long time. I will always remember the courtly way in which he and Gombrich and a couple of others gave me an hour long personal tutorial when the rest of the seminar got the date and time wrong and I was the only one to turn up. They could have walked out at the start, but they didn't, and I had a really fascinating afternoon. Gombrich was amused at what the managers of higher education would have thought of the staff:student ratio.

We were in Manchester Square on Sunday just to check out how much Standpoint spends on offices at Nr 11. No seriously, we went to the small Chardin and Boucher exhibition at the Wallace Collection to see Chardin's Man with House of Cards and Lady Drinking Tea. There are bits and pieces too about how tea drinking went from being medicinal (Mrs Chardin looks unwell in that picture) to being social. Well worth a detour if you have the misfortune to walk along Oxford Street.