Hockney scrolls through Bayeux, Brideshead gets revisited and Stubbs leads the field – the week in art

Exhibition of the week

Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse
George Stubbs’s emotional, sublime equine portrait Whistlejacket is rightly one of the best loved paintings in the National Gallery. This exhibition takes a closer look at what makes his paintings of horses unforgettable.
National Gallery, London, from 12 March to 31 May

Also showing

David Hockney
Pictures from his time living in Normandy, reflecting on the Bayeux tapestry and more.
Serpentine North Gallery, London, from 12 March to 23 August

Sarah Morris: Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers
Abstract art that comes more from the brain than the heart, marking Morris’s three decades with this gallery.
White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, from 11 March to 9 May

Image of the week

Photograph: © Catherine Opie/Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong

Famed for having a child’s drawing of a family carved into her back, the US photographer Catherine Opie has devoted her life to queer America, from endurance swimmers to drag artists to her son in a tutu. As a major retrospective opens in the UK, she told the Guardian why she’s “dying for the day heterosexuals have to come out”. Read the full article

What we learned

The 19th-century painter Félicien Rops’ wild demimondaines still shock

Gordon Parks used his camera as a “weapon” to fight for US civil rights

Disabled creatives channelled their frustrations into a bracingly bad-tempered show

Ramses II was like the Donald Trump of ancient Egypt, our critic says

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has unveiled a newly authenticated Rembrandt

Beyond that heist, the Louvre is wrangling strikes, a €1bn renovation and water leaks

The Adelaide Biennial showcases Australian art that takes in both politics and piss

The pathbreaking Hungarian avant-gardist Dóra Maurer has died aged 88

Masterpiece of the week

The Procession of the Trojan Horse Into Troy by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, about 1760

Photograph: © The National Gallery, London

To end their epic war with Troy, says Virgil in the Aeneid, the ancient Greeks built a horse out of wood and hid some of their mightiest warriors in its hollow body. They left the horse as a gift – but that night, after it was taken into the walls, the Greek warriors emerged to massacre the Trojans. The magical touch in Tiepolo’s painting is that he makes the horse appear real: the Greeks have not only made an accurate equine model but one that seems to be alive. How did they create the flowing tail and mane? How did they get such expression in its face and such an uncanny sculptural illusion of movement? In fact this giant horse resembles the equine colossus Leonardo da Vinci spent years trying to create in 15th-century Milan. The crowd pulling it with their softly sketched bodies also look as if they come from a Leonardo drawing. This Leonardesque painting turns the Trojan horse into a fairytale image of dream becoming reality.
National Gallery, London

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