‘The year 2012 was a very busy and exciting one for the Ashmolean,” said the museum’s director, Professor Christopher Brown. The museum had almost 900,000visitors, half of them schoolchildren on school visits – and to put those figures into perspective, Oxford city itself has just under 165,000 inhabitants. Oxford’s university museum, the oldest public museum in the UK, has become a magnet for visitors, as much for its temporary exhibitions, latterly the hugely popular Edward Lear and Japanese Meiji textiles, as for the breadth and depth of its permanent collections. Add in headline-making acquisitions such as Manet’s portrait of Fanny Claus saved from export last year by a £7.83m appeal, including a “remarkable” public response — and it is clear the Ashmolean has made for itself a hard act to follow.

So, what have they in store for 2013? The year starts with an unusual exhibition: Xu Bing: Landscape Landscript, open on February 28 until May 19. Unusual because it’s the first major exhibition the Ashmolean has dedicated to contemporary art, and because Xu Bing, one of China’s most renowned artists, has never before put together an exhibition of his landscapes. Born in 1955, growing up in Beijing, Xu Bing is known for works that exploit the pictorial character of Chinese script. He made his name with Tianshu or Book From The Sky, 1991, a four-volume a classical printed text. In that seminal work and in certain landscapes Xu Bing plays with words, with Chinese characters, real or invented; he employs Chinese characters to create landscape features, for example, those for ‘stone’ make up an image of rocks, ‘tree’ makes up trees, and so on.

Providing a beautiful counterpart until July, a free exhibition of traditional Chinese landscapes is in the museum’s Chinese Paintings gallery.

The biggest single drawings show the museum has ever put on, Master Drawings, running from May to August to coincide with the museum’s 330th birthday celebrations, has “the crème de la crème, the rarest and the most beautiful” of the prints collection on view, says the museum’s Jon Whiteley. Sixty-nine drawings from some of the greatest names in western art — Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Michelangelo, Durer, Turner, Degas, Gwen John among them, Antony Gormley and David Hockney bringing it up to date — displaying, says Whiteley, “not only the sheer quality but the extraordinary range of the collection.” Only two weeks after that, another very special show opens for summer: Stradivarius. Centred on the museum’s famous ‘Messiah’ violin made by Stradivarius in Cremona in 1716, the team are gathering 20 of the world’s greatest musical instruments, and working closely with Cremona on a recreation of Stradivarius’s workshop. Having dual appeal, it’s about beauty as well as how they were made; what’s more, there is a gala concert at the Sheldonian.

The Ashmolean closes the year with a formidable display of two heavyweights of 20th-century art. Applying an exciting mix of intriguing argument and compelling painting and sculpture, Francis Bacon/Henry Moore, September to January 2014, shows 20 works from each artist. The argument goes that different as the two were, having a “wary respect for each other,” there was a significant relationship between the two. Both were dealing with the human body, both with the figure in space, and interestingly both were exhibited together from the 1940s to the 1960s. And that’s not all. Late May sees the opening of The Ashmolean in Broadway (the Cotswolds, not New York!), a 17th- century merchant’s home filled with period items from the museum’s stores, ceramics, pewter, silver and so forth, plus arts and craft pieces. Even that’s not all. Hitting the headlines recently was the major bequest to the museum of the Michael Wellby collection of Renaissance and Baroque silver objects — 480 rare objects worth in excess of £20m. It is “one of the most important acquisitions that have ever been made in the very long history of the Ashmolean,” says the director. Several of these spectacularly OTT items — “explosions of panache” Professor Tim Wilson calls them — will go on view in the museum from February 19. The collection will in time have its own gallery. Busy and exciting 2012 may have been, but 2013 sounds stupendous.