Critic's choice: Top 5 exhibitions

Over 150 David Hockney portraits are on show, an illuminating V&A exhibition peers beyond Italy's lavish Renaissance edifices and Velazquez is revealed to have had a very modern appetite for naturalism....

David Hockney Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, WC2

Made up of over 150 works spanning five decades, this mammoth survey more than confirms David Hockney's status as a national treasure. It's also a reminder of just how daring his early career was.

Back when Pop and Minimalism ruled, he devoted himself to realist painting, creating a solid body of full-figure portraits at once intimate and iconic, glamorous and poetic, and often incorporating openly gay themes.

Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is among the famous highlights here, but images of Hockney's parents or Andy Warhol are equally striking. Though some of the later work doesn't quite live up to his own exacting standards, it's a bravura show. (020 7306 0055). Until Sun 21 Jan.

At Home in Renaissance Italy
Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7

This illuminating exhibition peers beyond Italy's lavish Renaissance edifices to suggest what the period might have meant to contemporaries wealthy enough to make the most of it. Focusing on the main rooms of an averagely affluent home, it brings together works by the likes Titian and Botticelli, together with an extraordinary selection of artefacts beautiful and sometimes bizarre.

Among the textiles, furniture and crockery are a steel corset, an ear cleaner and assorted gambling games. By repositioning these objects in their original domestic setting, this rich show offers a through-the-keyhole glimpse of Renaissance marriage, childhood and dining. (020 7942 2000). Until Sun 7 Jan.

Velazquez
National Gallery, W1

Born in 1599, the great Spanish artist Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez had a very modern appetite for naturalism. After becoming Philip IV's court painter in his early 20s, he lived surrounded by glamour and pomp, yet he continued to seek out tragedy and suffering, and his subjects number not only kings and courtiers, but also the crippled and the cripplingly poor.

His quest for physical and psychological realism led him to develop an economical style that would later inspire the Impressionists and Picasso. It's all revealed in this rich, career-spanning exhibition that charts Velazquez's development from his Seville beginnings to his move to Madrid and important trips to Italy, where he studied with the masters.

The National Gallery's own impressive holdings are enhanced by loans from the Museo del Prado, enabling almost half of his surviving paintings to be shown at once. (020 7747 2885). Until Sun 21 Jan.

Power and Taboo: Sacred Objects from the Eastern Pacific
British Museum, WC1

The word taboo made its way into the OED via Captain Cook, who borrowed it from the Polynesians. In English, it means forbidden, but in its original it stands for something far more nuanced, as this intriguing exhibition reveals. British Museum curators have raided their collection of Polynesian artefacts dating back to the 18th and 19th century, before the arrival of missionaries spelt the end of indigenous gods.

Wrapping sacred objects in barkcloth, feathers or coconut fibre was a trusted way of containing their capricious might, resulting in works that are as beautiful as they were once deemed potent. Unsurprisingly, they caught the eyes of modernists like Picasso and Henry Moore, and continue to inspire Polynesian artists today. (020 7323 8181). Until Sun 7 Jan.