Piero and Hockney eye to eye, Holzer logs in and Rothko heads to the beach – the week in art

A Renaissance master shows with a modern one, pioneering digital art and an abstract expressionist megalith arrives in St Ives – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals
The greatest abstract paintings in Britain, commissioned for a New York restaurant but given by Rothko to the Tate, cast their dark spell all over again.
• Tate St Ives, Cornwall, until 5 January

Also showing

Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look
Intimate encounter between the renowned British painter and Renaissance genius Piero della Francesca, whose masterpiece The Baptism of Christ is owned by the National Gallery.
• National Gallery, London from 8 August until 27 October

El Anatsui
Survey of this magic realist whose redemptive art creates beauty from the discarded and unloved.
• Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until 29 September

Royal Portraits
Photographs of the Windsors, from Cecil Beaton to Andy Warhol whose portrait of Elizabeth II is based on a photo by Peter Grugeon, and sprinkled with diamond dust.
• King’s Gallery, London, until 6 October

Jenny Holzer
Pioneering art of the information age in one of the excellent shows from the Artist Rooms collection that spread top-class modern art around Britain.
• Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester, until 29 September

Image of the week

A vibrant portrait of the LGBTQ+ and human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, by Sarah Jane Moon, has been hung in the National Portrait Gallery’s History Makers gallery as part of a drive to better reflect the diversity of the UK. The 72-year-old activist’s rainbow tie celebrates almost six decades of fighting for LGBTQ+ rights. Tatchell, who has experienced more than 300 violent assaults and has been arrested or detained by police more than 100 times, said he was “delighted and honoured” to see it “alongside so many esteemed public figures … I love the bold, expressive, joyful style, which reflects the spirit of my campaigns,” he said. Read the full story

What we learned

Retrospective of Peter Kennard’s furious protest art is also a work in progress

Artist David Medalla took photos in defiance of a stroke that left him paralysed

Bernini’s violence to a sculpture of his lover Costanza reveals a lot about patriarchy

Paris marks the centenary of Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism with a major show

Wrexham, the city where our art critic grew up, has become a culture hub since he left

The Olympics’ controversial Last Supper was actually depicting Greek gods

A London school is reviving the world’s endangered sacred arts

Tony Shiels, painter and creator of the ‘Loch Ness muppet’, has died aged 86

Masterpiece of the week

Anna and the Blind Tobit by Rembrandt, circa 1630

Why would a painter try to depict the experience of blindness? For Rembrandt, the sightless Tobit, whose story is told in the Book of Tobit in the Old Testament Apocrypha, may have access to a mystery beyond the visible. This painting lures us towards that enigma. The white, harshly bright daylight framed by the window seems empty and dead. By contrast, the shadowy interior of Tobit’s room in its deepening darkness is an image of the inner sanctum of consciousness. Rembrandt searches in these shadows for what cannot be pictured – and anticipates the abstract expressionism of Rothko.
• National Gallery, London

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