Glamping at the Vatican

Plus: the National Gallery's great reveal

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Mary Hollingsworth on past strategies for surviving the conclave

The arcane rites of a papal conclave may have remained largely unchanged over the centuries but the living conditions of the cardinals soon to be locked inside the Vatican have altered beyond recognition. Those taking part in the 2025 conclave will sleep in comfortable, if spartan, bedrooms, eat in a communal refectory and vote in the solemn surroundings of the Sistine Chapel. Built by Sixtus IV (1471–84), the chapel was initially used to house cells for the cardinals during the conclave until the challenging events of 1559. The conclave that year opened in the sweltering heat of early September and it was not until 26 December that the outside world heard the news of the election that had finally occurred very late the previous evening to make Giovanni Medici Pope Pius IV. During those four months the living conditions in the Vatican had deteriorated dramatically: one cardinal died, many were ill (some of them dying subsequently), and the stench in the Sistine Chapel, where 21 of them had their cells, was so bad that the area had to be fumigated.

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William Dunbar on the outsize legacy of Zurab Tsereteli (1934–2015)

Almost none of Tsereteli's best work is known outside the former Soviet Union. For better or worse, his reputation is as the designer of megastructures, often featuring giant men standing on the prows of stylised boats, such as Birth of the New World (1992) and the statue of Peter the Great in Moscow (1997). The symbolism in these works is extremely clunky. In Good Defeats Evil (1990) at the UN building in New York, Saint George defeats a dragon made of two dismantled intercontinental ballistic missiles. A giant teardrop memorial commemorates the attacks of 11 September in New Jersey. The sculptures are pure kitsch, but kitsch blown to such pharaonic proportions is worth a second look.

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Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen on the feeling art of Medardo Rosso

The milk of human kindness has been running pretty dry in recent years. 'Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture', which I saw at Mumok in Vienna before it travelled to the Kunstmuseum Basel, is right for these mean times. It should be required viewing for anyone feeling a waning of their aptitude for humane attention and empathy.

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Philippa Conlon hails two heroines of Irish modernism

Their companionship in art and life is the subject of the exhibition 'Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship' at the National Gallery of Ireland. The women met in London, as students of Walter Sickert, in 1917, but the exhibition begins with their time in France in the 1920s. In 1921, the pair travelled to Paris to study under the Cubist André Lhote but soon found themselves attracted to the more outlandish forms of abstraction pioneered by Albert Gleizes. Jellett and Hone, then in their twenties, arrived unexpectedly at Gleizes's apartment near the Bois de Boulogne. He was surprised, even rather alarmed, by their request for his tuition. It was only the obduracy of their ambition, and the gentleness that gilded it, that convinced him to take them on.

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Kirsten Tambling on the art of long-distance communication

Mating snails are said to retain a lifelong sympathetic bond. It is a dubious fact, but one Jules Allix thought he could use. In 1850, this eccentric political activist and future communard proposed 'escargotic commotion' as the key to a new form of human communication – a snail telegraph. Unsurprisingly, it was unsuccessful. But the story exemplifies what Richard Taws describes in Time Machines as the 'universalising, mystical, and socially generative' quality attributed to technologies of long-distance communication in the period from the French Revolution to the late 19th century. Relentlessly, even obsessively, exploring methods to collapse time and space, French inventors and experimenters hoped to clarify and accelerate knowledge in a fractured post-Revolutionary world.

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In the current issue…

As London's National Gallery enters a new era, Michael Prodger takes an early tour

This month, at the tail end of the National Gallery's bicentenary year, a redesigned Sainsbury Wing will be unveiled, along with a rehang of the entire gallery's permanent collection. The new design by Annabelle Selldorf was envisaged as the highlight of the NG200 celebrations. Her aim was to lighten the Sainsbury Wing at ground level, remove columns, smooth out angles, offer better sightlines into Trafalgar Square and reconfigure its shop and cloakroom to present the visitor with a more straightforward and indeed uplifting experience. Initially, normal business was supposed to carry on as best as possible throughout the disruption of the remodelling process. But the gallery then realised that here was an opportunity to go further and the idea of a complete rethink of the National's 66 galleries took shape. As Christine Riding, director of collections and research and the lead figure in the rehang project, puts it, what better way is there to 'celebrate a great collection'? This celebration also meant finding a way somehow to display a further 250 works alongside the 750 paintings already on the walls.

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