Let’s try to be positive. Nobody can pretend that 2022 ended in an entirely rosy fashion for the world’s museums. Still in recovery mode after the pandemic, with visitor numbers in most cases not yet back to pre-2020 levels, and having to cope like everybody else with resurgent inflation and soaring energy costs, they are facing challenges caused on the one side by political activism, as Stop Oil protestors have targeted art as way of promoting their environmental message, and on the other by governments seeking to use museums as tools for social engineering.

Of Henry Fuseli’s many ‘shockingly indelicate’ drawings, as John Flaxman described them, none is more shocking or more indelicate than his study of a dominatrix using an elaborate strap-on dildo on a figure bent over a chair (Museo Horne, Florence). And although that sketch, which he made in Rome in the 1770s, is not included in this riveting exhibition of Fuseli’s drawings of the ‘modern woman’ (organised with the Kunsthaus Zürich), there are enough kindred works to give the visitor a bracing sense of what the eccentric and visionary painter was attempting in his moments of greatest graphic liberty.

An exhibition held in Forlì in 2022 explored in a comprehensive fashion the way that the complex figure of Mary Magdalene has been depicted in art from the early Middle Ages to the present day – as Christ’s leading female disciple, as witness of the Crucifixion and the risen Christ at Easter, as apostle to the apostles, as an embodiment of repentant female sexuality and as an object of erotic fascination.