old master

"A glorious painting by an old master would be too striking," she said.

Developing country finance ministers were making the same half-joke about Britain, the old master, now being the crisis economy.

But we can celebrate now what Bellocchio, a driven old master, has achieved: a heartfelt thriller of intensity and intimacy in which getting saved looks an awful lot like being lost.

This is a bit of a switch for Tefaf, the grand old art fair started in Maastricht, the Netherlands, which started off as a place to buy deaccessioned museum pieces and bona fide old masters.

Jonathan Swill, a 27-year old master's student from New Jersey, told the BBC he was moving to Israel after graduation, having turned down a place in a doctoral programme at Columbia.