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The portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the 16-year-old mistress of Ludovico Sforza (also known as Ludovico il Moro), Duke of Milan from 1489 until his death in 1508, is not only captivating—popularly known as "Lady with an Ermine" (pictured)—but the most valuable work of art in Poland. Painted by Leonardo da Vinci, it hardly ever leaves the country. But the Bode Museum in Berlin has been able to include it in a fascinating show, "Masterpieces of Renaissance Portraiture". This despite the painting’s fragile state and the fact that German Nazis stole it when they invaded Poland in 1939. The American Allies returned it to the Krakow Czartoryski Museum in May 1945.

This exhibition is sensational. More than 150 portraits, sculptures and medals from the early Italian Renaissance are on view. Thanks to its curators, Stefan Weppelmann from Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) and Keith Christiansen from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, we can now admire all at once outstanding centuries-old works by Sandro Botticelli, Leon Battista Alberti, Desiderio da Settignano, Filippo Lippi, Pisanello, Gentile Bellini, da Vinci and others. The list of lenders includes Britain's Royal Collection, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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Can one really define the “birthday” of a street? In the case of Berlin’s famous Kurfürstendamm, May 5th 1886 was when the first steam-powered tram trundled down the avenue, although its history goes back a little further. Built as a corduroy road between a hunting palace in the Grunewald forest and the Berlin City Palace, the “Churfürstendamm” was first mentioned on a map in 1685. But it was Otto von Bismarck who ordered the promotion of the Kurfürstendamm in 1873. He was so impressed by the Champs-Elysées that he wanted his own version of the distinguished Parisian boulevard in Berlin. With the tram line attracting more people to the expensive “New West”, the street enjoyed a rapid expansion. At 53 metres, the Ku’damm (as nicknamed by Berliners) is only half the size of its prototype in Paris, but it remains Germany’s grandest boulevard.
 
The 1920s marked the Ku’damm’s golden age, when it was a top address for shopping and littered with cafés, restaurants, jazz bars, art galleries, theatres and cabarets. George Grosz, Max Slevogt, Bertold Brecht and Albert Einstein were among the frequent visitors of the former Romanisches Café, a favourite haunt of intellectuals. The rise of the Nazis in 1933 brought an end to all this, and ultimately left the boulevard in ruins. With its distinctively damaged silhouette, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on Breitscheidtplatz square is a poignant reminder of this dark period in German history.
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When I say they were beauties, I don’t mean the tall, super-slim, super-cool models on the catwalk at Frieda Weyer’s fashion show at Berlin Fashion Week last Wednesday. Weyer’s bridal and evening dresses were indeed superb, and a pleasant change from the usual casual street clothing Berliners’ wear on all occasions (even to the opera). But my fascination is for “Sibylle – Modefotografien 1962-1994”, a new book of fashion photography from the former East Germany, released with an accompanying Berlin exhibition just in time for fashion week. The women in these photographs captured a vision of the country that allowed for independent, emancipated, self-possessed and, yes, beautiful women (many of them models plucked from the street). It was a magazine that hinted at a world of possibility beyond the one that we knew.

Named for the prophetess in Greek mythology, Sibylle was an up-market magazine of art and fashion, published six times a year for decades. It was a trend-setter, the "Vogue of the East", despite its modest circulation of 200,000. Copies were limited in part because of the country’s shortage of raw materials, including paper, and the fact that its contents were considered somewhat provocative and avant garde, and so were politically suppressed. But the magazine's rarity had the effect of making it more precious. My mother managed to get a subscription, and I would proudly brandish copies of Sibylle on my train journeys from home to East Berlin, where I was a student in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  read more »

Few moments in modern history are more cinematic than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Start with the disbelieving expressions on the faces of East Berliners, having just cleared a barrier they could have been shot for approaching moments prior. Then you have the images of all Berliners celebrating astride the graffitied divide, joyfully destroying what kept them apart.

It’s fitting then that two decades on we look to the cinema this event inspired. To mark the 20-year anniversary of the wall's toppling, London’s Barbican Centre put together “Behind the Wall”, a two-weekend film programme that examined the Wall’s lasting political and cultural implications.

The series included Michael Ballhaus and Ciro Cappellari’s 2009 documentary "In Berlin". Instead of looking back, this film paints a picture of Berlin today. The cast solidifies the city's stereotype as a breeding ground for the arts, full of actors, authors, musicians, fashion designers, artists and architects. The only exceptions on screen are a personable Turkish shopkeeper and Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit (who, in one scene, must fend off a woman who is angry about the economic climate). Eclectic though they may be, these characters fail to elicit as much interest as the city itself. This seems to be the intent, as we get only glimpses of these lives as they unfold amid the streets of the German capital.   read more »

When German friends saw Mel Brooks’s famous slapstick musical some years ago in London, they found it extremely amusing but rued that it would never come to Germany. “The Germans came off so badly,” they explained.

The German version of "The Producers" has just opened in Berlin, and the location could not be better. The Admiralspalast, a newly reconstructed and refurbished variety theatre near Friedrichstrasse station, was once an operetta theatre that Hitler himself liked to visit.  read more »

“BEAU spectacle!” reports France’s Le Monde of a new production at Paris’s Bastille Opera. The choreographer inspiring this plaudit is called Waltz. Yes, that’s her real family name.

Sasha Waltz has been the toast-of-town in Berlin's dance world for a decade. Many of her shows, including perhaps her most famous, “Körper” (Bodies), have toured the world. Breaching the formidable walls of the Bastille is the 44-year-old German’s version of Berlioz’s “Romeo and Juliet”. It opened on October 5^th to extravagant applause, with another Paris daily, Libération, citing its “superb, fluid, aerial pas de deux”, performed by the Paris ballet’s stars, Aurélie Dupont and Hervé Dupont, as the star-crossed lovers.  read more »