Its first great painter, Duccio di Buoninsegna (c.1255-1319), would have witnessed the emergence of the Nine: a civic democracy in which Siena, a rich merchant city-state, was ruled by nine elected citizens (aristocrats and lawyers were barred from standing for election).

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In the 1960s, influenced by his great friend and fellow painter Francis Bacon, Freud began using heftier brushes and thick paint.

ECONOMIST: Decades of portraits in the flesh

One of the best known fileteado artists is Alfredo Genovese, whose Italian great grandfather was a decorative painter of public buildings and burial vaults in Buenos Aires.

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But the painter's great masterpieces are not in Leuven.

ECONOMIST: Rogier van der Weyden

Manet: Portraying Life will feature the 19th-Century French painter's "great works" alongside lesser known pieces.

BBC: Manet portraits head for London's Royal Academy

Made around the time Rembrandt turned sixty, in 1666, the view of the painter at work complements the great 1658 self-portrait at the Frick, in which he seems a grand but old and discouraged lion.

NEWYORKER: Art

Artist Samir Aich said that his death "was a great loss for the entire cultural fraternity" of India, while painter Jogen Choudhury said that he had left a huge void both at home and abroad.

BBC: Ganesh Pyne

"It's a great business model and that's the problem, " said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and now a law professor at the University of Minnesota.

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He was lucky, after finishing his doctoral thesis, (on Giulio Romano, a Mannerist painter), to be invited to London to edit the papers of a great German art historian, Aby Warburg.

ECONOMIST: Look and learn