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The first public exhibition of Italian art in the royal collection for over 40 years brings together 90 paintings and 85 drawings from palaces and residences across Britain, including two previously unseen paintings by Italian master Caravaggio. The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque is at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace from March 30 until January 20 2008. See some of the show’s highlights here.

This exhibition is a major retrospective of the work of the distinguished Irish artist Tony O’Malley, who died in 2003. O’Malley was one of the major figures in Irish contemporary art and this exhibition is a survey of his life’s work. Nature and history form the basic themes in O’Malley’s highly distinctive paintings.

Working intuitively over 40 years, he recorded the moods, movement and bird song of the countryside, usually of Ireland but also of the warmer, more exotic islands where he spent the winter. His paintings, on everything from scraps of recycled paper and canvas to the discarded hoops of an old Guinness barrel, also celebrate the medieval and Gaelic associations of such places as Callan, Jerpoint, and Kells, as well as his ancestral roots in Clare Island on the west coast of Co Mayo. Tony O’Malley is now recognised as one of the leading Irish painters of his time. In 1999 he was the recipient of the Glen Dimplex Award for a Sustained Contribution to the Visual Arts in Ireland, while a year later his work formed the central, visual focus for the Festival of Irish Culture, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, USA.

An exhibition celebrating the British landscape opens at Tate Britain later this month with an accompanying series starting on BBC 1 tomorrow. Lisa Allardice asks five modern artists about the places that have fired their imaginations.

The Academy is collaborating with TRIARC, Trinity’s new center for the study of Irish art to present a two part exhibition examining the significance of the West Coast of Ireland in Irish Art from the late nineteenth century up to contemporary practice.

One of pop music’s most famous album covers has finally gone on permanent public display after years of negotiations. An artist’s proof of the album cover for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles, is the centrepiece of a collection of Sir Peter Blake’s work at the University of Leeds.