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How do you clean an icon such as Michelangelo’s David? Carefully, of course. But it turns out that the restorer hired to do the job was maybe too careful. When her bosses insisted on a more invasive cleaning process, she quit. “I hated to do that, because the David is the best job a restorer could have. But I simply could not be party to diminishing Michelangelo’s masterpiece.” Will the alternative method destroy David? “Unlikely. Short of taking a hammer to it like Piero Cannata, or blowing it up, it is, as Ms Parronchi insists, pretty hard to do that.”

One critic laments the crowded Venice Biennale: “I don’t mean to be philistine, but art in quantity – black box, video, car-boot-sale installation art – is not a pretty sight. Nor, come to that, are we in such numbers. Too much of now about us, too much dogma of the hour. And too much perspiration. We don’t sweat well in the art world. Here we all are, anyway, come for the vernissage, which literally means varnishing but now denotes the two or three days set aside for professionals to make their judgments while the paint dries. Since there is precious little in contemporary art that needs varnishing, a better translation of vernissage might be The Shining – every critic and curator on the planet, and not a few artists to boot, thrown together in a confined space and left to go berserk.”