Copernicus! Tony Soprano! The inventor of the semicolon! The heroic obsessions of artist Isabel Nolan

Ireland’s artist at the Venice Biennale steals religious imagery for her secular celebrations of scientists and humanists, including an Italian punctuation master – and even TV’s famous mobster It’s a long way to the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. First, you pass through the biennale’s colossal central exhibition, housed in a sequence of cavernous medieval warehouses. After that, the route takes in a suite of national pavilions (the Philippines, Latvia, Timor-Leste, Morocco, Malta, Om...

By Hettie Judah