If you are in Edinburgh and you want to catch some art between comedy acts – it is the perfect hangover cure, the ideal chilled moment amid the hubbub of live performance – there are good exhibitions on, to be sure, but don't forget also to visit the free, permanent collection of the National Gallery between the old and new towns. Edinburgh has a world-class museum of European painting with masterpieces of the highest order.
Visiting to review festival art shows, I popped in for a quiet half-hour. As I had just been in Venice on holiday I naturally gravitated to the Titians. There are more Titian nudes in Edinburgh than in Venice itself, but the painting that peculiarly attracted me on this visit was his great work The Three Ages of Man. I can't get the face of the young woman in this picture, gazing with deep sensitivity at her lover, out of my mind.
In this museum you can also see masterpieces by Raphael and Veronese, in lovely rooms with a serious mood. The perfect escape from the rush, it will send you refreshed to the next play or, indeed, exhibition. But if you do pop in today or tomorrow, don't be surprised if I am there, because I am back in town to speak at the Edinburgh international book festival, in conversation (as it happens) with the director of the Scottish National Galleries about my book The Lost Battles. Not that any of the above is an attempt to curry favour with my interlocutor, I hasten to add: apart from anything else, he sounds as if he may actually know something about the Renaissance. Perhaps it'll turn into the comedy hit of the festival.
