Technician, 51, who hung his own picture in an exhibition about art world glitches, has been sacked and given a three-year ban

The first picture that greeted visitors to the first-floor exhibition space in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne gallery on 23 February may not have immediately grabbed their attention.

The 60cm by 120cm artwork was a retro-looking photograph of a family of four, with the background and parts of the faces and bodies roughly painted over in white. It was unassuming compared with the video- and photo-based artworks in the adjacent rooms, but only on closer inspection might visitors have wondered why there was no label giving the artist or the work’s title.

Expressionism, sculpture, video: the art world is so vast and varied it can be difficult to know where to start, even with its biggest names. Our writers suggest the one piece that can help you understand masters old and new

On 26 April 1937 the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and the Italian Legionary Air Force. Picasso, a Spanish artist settled in Paris, paid homage to the killed with this cubist history painting. Moments of revelation punch through the jagged mayhem to hit your heart. The baby cradled in a screaming mother’s arms hangs its head upside down, eyes blankly open, mouth obliviously gaping: it is dead, you realise as if for the first time. Picasso asks in each line of this figure what a child’s death means. He poses similarly agonising questions across the canvas: what does it feel like to be the woman in the burning house, arms outstretched to a God who is not showing any mercy today? And how does the universe permit the pain of that screaming horse, its newspaper body pierced and eviscerated? So long as this painting exists the bombing of Guernica will never end but will always be this infinite moment of wrong. Jonathan Jones
See it at: Museo Reina Sofía , Madrid

A killer himself, Caravaggio died at 38 – desperate, disfigured and on the run from the Knights of St John. His greatest works – with which he bargained for his life – cast light on one of art’s darkest mysteries

The National Gallery’s haunting new exhibition The Last Caravaggio has at its heart a sepulchrally toned painting called The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula . Caravaggio includes himself in it as a witness to a brutal murder – a pale, bleak farewell of a self-portrait set against Stygian darkness. An extravagantly armoured man, the chief of the Huns, has been rejected by the beautiful young Ursula. His response is to shoot her with an arrow at point blank range. She contemplates the shaft between her breasts as if she can’t believe what she is seeing: her own death.

Soon after painting this, Caravaggio too would be dead. Sailing north from the Naples area to Rome in the heat of summer in a triangular-sailed felucca, he was arrested at a coastal stop and by the time he was released his luggage, including new paintings, had left without him. He seems to have run or hitched a ride along the coast to catch up with it and probably caught malaria. He was 38 when he died at Porto Ercole in southern Tuscany on 18 July 1610.

Caravaggio proves haunting, Yinka Shonibare brings colonial figures down to size and Monica Sjöö photographs the goddess feminism – all in your weekly dispatch

The Last Caravaggio
The despair and darkness of Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula will hold you transfixed.
• National Gallery, London, 18 April-21 July

Staff member put work on display at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne ‘in hope of achieving his breakthrough’

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One of Europe’s largest museums for contemporary and modern art has fired a member of its technical services team after he was found to have hung one of his own paintings in the gallery.

The 51-year-old man had smuggled his work into the display at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne “in the hope of achieving his artistic breakthrough”, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported , citing police sources.

Amateur artists join the pros in Gateshead, Old Master pastiches go on show in London, and a bursary for young photographers is launched in memory of the Guardian’s Eamonn McCabe – all in your weekly dispatch

Jerwood Survey III
Well-known artists have each nominated their favourite beginner for this glimpse of the future of art, featuring Philippa Brown, Alliyah Enyo, Paul Nataraj and more.
• Southwark Park Galleries, London , 6 April to 23 June

Greenham Common inspires a new generation, designer Enzo Mari gets playful and Perth Museum dedicates its first exhibition to a mythical beast prized since antiquity – all in your weekly dispatch

Unicorn
Medieval bestiaries, Renaissance art and narwhal horns make for a fascinating first exhibition in this impressive new Scottish museum .
• Perth Museum, Perth , 30 March to 22 September

Immersive tour at Musée d’Orsay takes visitors back to 15 April 1874 – the moment that marked the movement’s birth

In a lush red-and-gold carpeted photographer’s studio in northern Paris, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas are adding the final touches to the hanging of their paintings, while fellow artists Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro lament the lack of recognition for their work and Claude Monet bemoans being mistaken for Édouard Manet.

Outside, Parisian gentlemen in top hats and ladies in bustles are admiring the newly completed Opera House or enjoying an early evening drink on the café terraces while horse-drawn carriages clatter down Baron Haussmann’s new grands boulevards.

A wealth of northern Renaissance drawings; photographers Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman, and recognition for gallerist Betty Parsons – all in your weekly dispatch

Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings
Absorbing trip from Flanders to Rome and back with northern Renaissance artists whose drawings have a buttery richness.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford , 23 March until 23 June.