Life in the shadow of Vesuvius

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Sophie Barling watches a film that turns life in Naples into pure cinema

Gianfranco Rosi's new film, Pompei: Below the Clouds, could just as easily have been given the title Fire at Sea – if that hadn't already been taken by his last Italy-based documentary a decade ago. Vesuvius looms over the Bay of Naples, a dozing dragon. Somewhere on the city's outskirts, teenage boys have turned arsonists. Meanwhile, along the coast to the west of Naples, the Campi Flegrei – literally 'burning fields' – spew up hot gases. Not for nothing was this area believed to be the home of Vulcan, god of fire.

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Meet one of the crowning glories of the Gilbert Collection at the V&A

'We don't know exactly where this Torah crown was made, but its quality suggests that it was crafted in Vienna, one of Europe's leading centres for goldsmithing. It would have been a team effort, with perhaps five to ten people involved: the shaping, engraving, chasing, filigree work, soldering and jewel-setting would have been contracted out to different craftspeople by the goldsmith who ran and owned the workshop.'

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Anna Brady on a strong showing for modern British art in March

You would have thought that 4–7 March would be a pretty terrible time for London auction 'week'. With a war in the Middle East still raging, who would be thinking about buying art? Quite a lot of people, it turns out.

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Todd McEwen reads a history of big-budget films about big-name artists

In 1961, no middle-class coffee table was without the gigantic yellow novel The Agony and the Ecstasy. Incredibly, 20th Century Fox decided to make a movie of it, even in the middle of its financial collapse caused by Cleopatra. As Irving Stone's over-researched, plotless book was unadaptable, the screenwriter Philip Dunne decided to ignore it completely and base the story on one episode in Michelangelo's life: his battle with the Pope over the Sistine Chapel, as told by Giorgio Vasari in 1550. As Groucho Marx said, it would have been cheaper to paint the floor.

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Robert Barry on conceptual art that provides food for thought

Christine Kozlov's breakfast on 20 February 1969 consisted of eggs, bacon and toast (with butter and jam), polished off with a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee. I know this because she recorded it – along with everything else she ate, from that morning up until 12 June – on 12 typewritten pages, titling the resulting work Eating Piece (2/20/1969–6/12/1969), Figurative Work No. 1 (1969).

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In the current issue…

Michael Prodger on how Ovid changed the history of art

Ovid's Metamorphoses has been a transformational text for 2,000 years. The epic, a compendium of some 250 myths, was hugely popular in antiquity, while no fewer than 400 manuscript versions survive from the Middle Ages. Artists and writers in particular have always found it an inexhaustibly rich fund of material; no other text from antiquity has spawned as many visual representations. In 1604, the painter and art historian Karel van Mander noted that there was only one source that could compare: the Metamorphoses, he wrote, was 'a Bible for artists'.

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Life in the shadow of Vesuvius

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