She has one of the world's greatest art collections, an unrivalled set of hundreds of Leonardo drawings, almost 30 Canalettos and paintings by most of western art's greatest figures including Tintoretto, Vermeer, Holbein and Dürer.

Yesterday the Queen acquired her first Caravaggio, worth £50 million or more if she could ever sell it.

The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, owned by the Royal Family for almost 400 years, has lain unloved and seldom seen in a storeroom at Hampton Court for decades. Misattributed as a copy of a Caravaggio by an unknown hand, it was valued in thousands rather than millions.

The Royal Collection, whose experts have cleaned, restored and studied the picture for six years, declared yesterday that it is authentic and one of only around 50 surviving canvases by the Italian master. "I am convinced it is by Caravaggio," Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, said. "We are extremely excited, it's the most important discovery in the collection in the last decade."

Walt Disney warped my mind. It was the first time I visited a cinema, to see Sleeping Beauty. That forest of thorns enveloping the castle has haunted me ever since; in my dreams for years, a great chasm opened up before the prince, an impossible yawning space full of spikes and twisting briars. Last night, I watched it with my daughter. What will it become in her mind? It felt like passing on a folk tale by the fire, and yet some people are wary of exposing their children to the genius of Disney.

I don't need to labour the vilification of the man, who died 40 years ago this Christmas. No other artist's signature appears on the products of an industry that is the cultural equivalent of Coca-Cola or McDonald's, and to many people, buying a toy Pinocchio is as bad as feeding your child burgers. Marc Eliot's 1993 biography branded Disney an FBI informant union-basher, and hints at worse. In a classic episode of The Simpsons broadcast shortly after Eliot's book came out, Bart and Lisa watch a corporate propaganda film at Itchy and Scratchy Land that says animation pioneer Roger Meyers Sr "loved almost all the peoples of the world" - an apparent swipe at Disney's alleged anti-semitism. Hating Disney has become a cliche. A few months ago, the over-rated guerrilla artist Banksy left a figure of a Guantanamo prisoner at Disneyland - where else? - as if Walt, who died in 1966, was directing the war on terror from his cryogenic vault.

When a long dead cartoonist and film-maker is reviled for the crimes of the present administration, something is out of whack. Walt Disney was one of the great American artists of the 20th century. This needs to be recognised. So here I am, Walt, coming to the rescue, aided by an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris that celebrates Disney's films as visual art.

Yes, I know: to call Walt Disney a great artist begs a couple of questions. Even his authorship of the mouse he drew in 1928 in his career-making cartoon, Steamboat Willie, has been questioned. As soon as Disney started making money, he hired teams of designers and animators. Obviously he wasn't Nick Park, doing it all himself. He never claimed to be. He was a modern artist, an American artist - and far from ignorant about the avant-garde. Salvador Dali's original paintings for an unfinished collaboration with Disney, a film called Destino, are on view at the Grand Palais. They point to a film that would have been as remarkable a meeting of Hollywood and the avant-garde as Dali's sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound.

This is not in the least surprising. Disney's films abound in stupendously imaginative metamorphoses, sublime fantasies to rival any surrealist painting. Disney anticipated - and surely influenced - Andy Warhol in turning his studio into a collective enterprise, a factory. He ruled over his cartoonists with an iron fist. Yet when it comes to authorship, the analogies with Warhol, or Marcel Duchamp, are not really necessary. You only have to watch a few Disney films, widely separated across the decades of his career, to recognise the consistent obsessions that can only have been the product of one man's mind.

In 1929, only a year after Steamboat Willie made Mickey Mouse a star, Disney created a cartoon that could not be more different. Skeleton Dance is American, deeply so, in the vein of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe - a jazz-age honk of American gothic that brilliantly uses black and white silhouettes to create an archetypal midnight churchyard where the skeletons get out of their graves and dance. When Tim Burton does this sort of thing, it's hailed as a gothic subversion of the homeliness of Disney, but Disney subverted himself first. When later he came to make Fantasia, the skeleton dance was echoed in the march of the mops carrying their buckets of water until Mickey chops, chops, chops them up.

Walt Disney's imagination is macabre, as well as delighting in innocence. You could even say that far, from providing generations of children with innocent escape, he filled their minds with darkness - which somehow, in the hands of critics, becomes a fault. In fact, it proves that, beneath the all-American facade, Walt Disney had a terrible secret: he was a true artist.
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A year after putting an American museum curator on trial on charges of acquiring antiquities illegally, the Italian government has had some impressive results. Relying on court evidence and aggressive public diplomacy, it has persuaded the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to surrender some of their finest artifacts. And ancient artworks at other museums are now firmly in Italy’s sights.

Yet negotiations have stalled with the very institution that has been Italy’s biggest target: the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, whose former curator, Marion True, is being tried in Rome. (The proceedings resume on Friday.)

Negotiations with the Getty have been “disappointing,” the Italian culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I don’t think they understand the gravity of the situation,” he said. “You have a major museum, and it is exhibiting dozens of stolen artifacts.”

At issue are 52 works in the Getty’s collection that Italy says were illegally excavated and spirited out of the country. People close to the negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity out of concern that their remarks could arouse personal antagonism and jeopardize the talks, say the Getty has made it clear that it is prepared to return about two dozen objects on the list. They add that the Italian government has struck 6 more from the original list of 52 because the evidence does not point definitively to an Italian provenance.

The Greek capital hardly springs immediately to mind as the home for a shrine to the 19th century Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel. But letters from Victor Hugo, Russian oil field maps and explosives factory share certificates will be among the items going on display next year in Athens in a new museum dedicated to Nobel, the museum's founder announced this week.

Greek historian Giorgos Marcou's family donated the funds for the project, and bought documents and other materials from all five continents, hauled them to Greece, and conceived and built the facility to house them.

[Louis P. Masur is director of the American-studies program at Trinity College, in Connecticut.]

Photographs hold us in their spell. We stare and study and think, So this is what happened. But we know full well that a picture represents only an instant, and that it can misrepresent the event it captures, sometimes even become the event itself. Photographs not only tell stories, but they also have stories. And behind those stories, as Clint Eastwood reminds us in the latest film he has directed, there are other stories. Making and remaking memories is a continuing process.

The story of Joe Rosenthal's picture of six Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi, as the battle for Iwo Jima and World War II raged, has been frequently told, most notably by the scholars Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall in Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (Harvard University Press, 1991), the historians Parker Bishop Albee and Keller Cushing Freeman in Shadow of Suribachi: Raising the Flags on Iwo Jima (Praeger, 1995), and in Flags of Our Fathers, by James Bradley, the son of one of the flag raisers, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ron Powers (Bantam Books, 2000). Rosenthal's snap of time is the most recognizable and widely reproduced photograph in history.

It is also a visual masterpiece. The six faceless men work in unison, raising a pole that splits the sky as the flag unfurls, their bodies arrayed in near-classical form, bending with effort, maintaining the touch of connection as the last one strains toward the pole, his reach, at that instant, forever exceeding his grasp. The image defined heroism, for Americans fighting the war and ever since. The Pulitzer Prize committee suspended its rules and gave Rosenthal its award that same year, calling it "a frozen flash of history."

In narrating the story of Iwo Jima, the photograph, and the lives and deaths of the six men in the picture, Eastwood's newly released Flags of Our Fathers seeks to demythologize the image. The movie's screenplay, written by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, hews closely to its source, Bradley's book, which had been rejected by more than 20 publishers before it shot to the top of best-seller lists. Steven Spielberg bought the rights and is credited as a co-producer of the film.

The battle scenes in Flags are every bit as jarring as those in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), perhaps even more so because Eastwood presents many of them as flashbacks. We are deposited into the chaos of war again and again, just as veterans carry memories of battle their entire lives. However inured we have become to severed limbs and eviscerated bodies in war movies, Flags shocks us anew with the juxtaposition of the horror of battle and the courage of men to keep going. The assault on Iwo Jima left more than 6,000 Americans dead and 19,000 wounded. Easy Company, the flag raisers' unit, suffered 84 percent casualties.

Rosenthal took his photograph on February 23, 1945, five days into the battle that would rage for another month. The film depicts the deaths of three of the men in the picture — Mike Strank, Franklin Sousley, and Harlon Block — who were killed at Iwo Jima and the later lives of John Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who, in the photograph, is the last man in line.

As with the book, the movie explains what Rosenthal's picture was — and what it was not. It was a photograph of the second flag raising that morning (Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal wanted the flag from the first one). But it was not posed, and had Rosenthal not gotten the one shot he did, the event would have been largely unnoticed and certainly forgotten. As Eastwood shows, the photograph had a profound impact, offering hope to a nation at war, but shadowing the lives of the three surviving Marines it depicted. Brought home to be feted in a continuing rally of patriotism, they never wanted to be celebrated as heroes.

The heart of Flags is its meditation on the meaning of heroism — how heroes are created and exploited, and how they make sense of their experiences. Eastwood not only brings to life the struggles of Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes, but he also plumbs the ways the government used and misused them (in, for example, the seventh war-bond drive that put them front and center and raised billions of dollars). The film also quietly and effectively addresses such issues as racism, the mendacity of politicians, and the impact of war on the parents of soldiers.

Hayes had the worst struggle. He despised the bond tour, drank heavily, and died at age 32 in 1955, just months after attending the dedication of the Iwo Jima memorial. Gagnon, who died at age 54, was not yet 20 when he helped raise the flag. He is depicted in the film as someone who initially enjoyed the celebrity, hoped to profit from it, but learned soon enough that yesterday's heroes quickly become today's relics. Bradley, who passed away in 1994, is portrayed in the film, as in his son's book, as the one survivor who managed to have a successful career after the war.

But that is not to say that he did not suffer. It is Bradley's story that frames the opening and closing of the film. After Iwo Jima and the bond tour, Bradley refused to talk about the war — he had his children tell reporters who called that he was away fishing in Canada. Following his death, his son James discovered personal letters written by his father and the Navy Cross awarded for heroism, and he set out to learn all that he could about the flag raisers....

LOS ANGELES — Breakaway bottles used as props in fake saloon fights, posters for grade-B movies, a Hopalong Cassidy board game, Annie Oakley’s pistols, Gary Cooper’s toupee and a diorama of the O.K. Corral shootout: this is what you might expect to find in a museum founded by America’s Favorite Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry.

And here, at the Museum of the American West (formerly the Autry Museum of Western Heritage) in Griffith Park, nostalgic film buffs and aficionados of cowboy culture will find it all, much of it associated with an entertainer whose reputation was made with a guitar and a saddle, but whose greatest hit was a 1949 rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that sold more than 30 million copies.

That is why it seemed so bizarre when, in 2003, the Autry Museum, with its $100 million endowment, absorbed the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, with its neglected world-class collection of 250,000 objects associated with once-flourishing tribes. This takeover caused much consternation. It wasn’t just the old cowboy-versus-Indian battle recurring in modern commercial form. It was the triumph of the phony cinematic West over its authentic past, with Hollywood’s stage sets winning out over relics so neglected through the decades that many had been assaulted by mold, mildew and insect infestation.

A soldier, all alone, climbs the top of a mountain on Iwo Jima. The summit is wide terrain scarred by battle. The field is deserted. The soldier is bewildered. Then we see the same man years later, now white-haired, waking from a nightmare, comforted by his wife beside him. Thus two elements of this film are fixed at once: the time planes and the haunting.

These are the first minutes of Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's new film about the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. When word came of an Eastwood film on this subject, the blood didn't exactly freeze, but it did become tepid. Did the twenty-first century really need another gung-ho tale of World War II? Eastwood's reply is no. His film is crammed with physical horror and courage in crisis, but the intent is not mere replication of battle. Under the carnage, Eastwood is searching for something deeper than details.

What is collaterally almost as interesting as the film itself is the fact that this searching is going on. This picture about the effects of war, short and long range, comes from an actor-director who earned a large part of his reputation by killing. Yes, he made The Bridges of Madison County and Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby and other exceptions, but the Eastwood persona grew through those Westerns in which his quasi-mystic figure settled people's hashes, as well as through the Dirty Harry series. The man who fixed his Magnum on a crook as he incised the phrase "Make my day" on American fantasy is the man who directed Flags of Our Fathers.

The battle for the island of Iwo Jima is a prime site for Eastwood's concern. One island after another--including Midway and the Solomon Islands--had been secured as stepping-stones toward the invasion of Japan. By February 1945, the United States Army Air Forces argued that Iwo Jima, only eight square miles in size but situated just 760 miles from Tokyo, was essential as a refueling station for bombers. Well aware of this, the Japanese forces fought even more fiercely. There were 22,000 Japanese soldiers on this little patch of ground--which, as the film says, was considered part of Japan itself and therefore holy--and they had been ordered to die rather than surrender. In a month of intense fighting, 18,000 Japanese and 6,000 Americans were killed. Out of this massive slaughter arose an incident that Eastwood uses as a speculum for moral inquiry. But before he gets to it, he gives us the invasion itself. ...

During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America’s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams.

But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lange have been unearthed in the National Archives....