A Marvel saint, spiky sculptures and banana drama – the week in art

Saint Francis and his 800-year-old robes come to the rescue, AI collides with craft and Japanese tradition meets pop art – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Saint Francis of Assisi
This fascinating, unexpected exhibition shows what connects the Arte Povera movement with the 800-year-old rough robes of Saint Francis and what Marvel has in common with Caravaggio. Read our review here.
• National Gallery, London, 6 May to 30 July.

Also showing

Titanosaur
A colossal dinosaur skeleton that makes diplodocus look diddy is the star of this show.
• Natural History Museum, London, until 7 January.

Marguerite Humeau
Last week to see this installation of sprawling, spiky sculptures in which artificial intelligence collides with craft.
White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 14 May.

Laura Wilson
Installations that tease historical and social meaning from everyday materials.
• CCA Derry-Londonderry, until 3 June.

Takahashi Hiromitsu
Kabuki theatre scenes that mix traditional printmaking with pop art.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 4 February.

Image of the week

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s piece Comedian, valued at around $120,000 (£95,500), was being exhibited in a Seoul museum when it was brazenly removed and eaten by a student who said that he was hungry after skipping breakfast. Read the full story here.

What we learned

The Mona Lisa has been doxed

A curvy mermaid statue is ‘too provocative’

Not every artist is downbeat about AI

Prince Charles’s crown-maker stuck a gold-covered ping pong ball on it

A John Lavery portrait has come out of its 100-year hiding

Pakistani artist Misha Japanwala is shameless

An Airbnb bandit pinched artwork – and replaced it

We need to take a fresh look at Gwen John

The royal family’s art collection is not for the likes of you

80s art collective the Blk Art Group have reunited for a fresh look at race

Masterpiece of the week

Equestrian Portrait of Charles I by Anthony van Dyck, c.1637-8

Royal pride comes before a very big fall in this portrait of the first King Charles. Van Dyck channels a rich and regal artistic tradition to depict his employer on horseback. Those softly dappled bronze and green leaves against a blue and white sky evoke the Renaissance painter Titian, whose portrait of the Habsburg Charles V on Horseback this painting echoes. Charles Stuart would have enjoyed the allusion: he had seen Titian’s equestrian masterpiece in Madrid and he himself owned a whole room of canvases by Titian. Van Dyck uses ripe and referential artistic splendour to overcome the stiffness of his subject: he strives to make Charles I’s frozen quality an image of discipline and control amid the sensual colours. But that uncommunicative personality, among other things, would by 1642 plunge Charles into a civil war with his own parliament that led to his execution and the first English republic.
• National Gallery, London.

Don’t forget

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