173 – Illuminating

Eadfrith, Chi-Rho page, The Lindisfarne Gospels (Cotton MS Nero DIV, f. 29r), c. 700. British Library London.

Today I’m going to look at one page of one book. It is, surely, one of the most spectacular pages of what is – according to every account you read – one of the most spectacular survivals from Anglo-Saxon England. However, England is not an accurate geographical designation, as the manuscript was the product of the kingdom of Northumberland, the largest kingdom in the British Isles at the time. Spreading North from the River Humber (how had I never realised that before?) it reached well into what is now undoubtedly Scotland. On Monday 10 October at 6pm I will flick through the whole book – or rather, turn the pages carefully (and virtually, in virtual white gloves) in a talk entitled The Lindisfarne Gospels. I will focus on the book itself before putting it into the context of the exhibition mounted by the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, but will discuss the Gospels as thoroughly as I can (given the time available) as, whenever you get to see it, you only ever see one opening, so it is hard to understand how everything fits together. For that matter, it is not entirely obvious exactly what is in it: it’s not just the Gospels! In the following weeks I will turn to Lucian Freud, Paul Cézanne (or Cezanne, as Tate would have it) and Eva Gonzalès (with a French accent, rather than a Spanish one…). Details can be found via these links, or as ever (together with details of an in-person repeat of the Freud), in the diary.

I suspect that, for most of us, the initial impact of this page is pretty much the same experienced by much of the congregation who may have had a distant view of it during religious ceremonies when it was first produced: bright, colourful, intricate – magical even – but ultimately, incomprehensible. And even if they had a chance to get closer, for the illiterate it would not have revealed its secrets. There are no pictures here to explain what is going on, but rather a celebration of the word itself, and, in this case, of the word made flesh: it is a celebration of the birth of Jesus himself, even if, to the uninitiated, that is by no means clear. However, the richness of the decoration, its elaborate sophistication and vibrant colours, not to mention the space it occupies on a single page, tell us how important the initiated knew this was. They also knew that the image, not to mentions the devotion, skill and time required to make it, would be one way to impress the illiterate with its significance: sometimes words are not enough.

The inscription at the top of the page says ‘incipit evangelium secundum mattheus‘ – which literally translates as ‘begins the gospel according to Matthew’. Almost all the letters are there, although in evangelium the ‘l’ and ‘i’ are combined and similarly, in secundum, so are the ‘u’ and ‘m’. However, the illumination seems to have got in the way of mattheus, so a small squiggle is added over the ‘u’, to imply an abbreviation, and there are also a couple of dots: the ‘s’ is implied. Above this inscription more words are written in smaller, darker letters. The first two read onginneð godspell – ‘begins the gospel’, in Old English, rather than Latin. A truly remarkable thing about the Lindisfarne Gospels is that, centuries after the book was first created, somebody wrote all over it. It isn’t the only manuscript this happened to. The entire volume (well, almost the entire volume) was translated into Old English, and the translation was added to the pages. I may have suggested that sometimes words are not enough, but sometimes words that people understand are valuable. In this case, they are also significant: this is the very first surviving version of the bible in English (even if it is Old). So – the book has been defaced, but we know a lot more about it as a result (more about that on Monday). The word onginneð is not so very far from ‘beginneth’ (‘ð‘ is effectively ‘th’) nor is godspell that far from ‘gospel’. Back in 1971 it was even used as the name for a musical based – albeit loosely – on the evangelium secundum mattheus. The ‘spell‘ is related to magic (the other ‘spell’, as in spelling a word, has a different etymology), and also to ‘spiel’, which is now slang parlance for a glib recitation, apparently recited often, showing a practiced stance or belief. The incantations of priests were often likened to magic spells, given that they were related to raising the dead, turning water into wine and the like. However, the curious thing about this inscription – which is not even the most visually striking element on the page – is that it is wrong. This is not the beginning of the gospel according to Matthew. It is chapter 1, admittedly, but verse 18: ‘Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.’ As the text was written in Latin, though, it would be as well to quote the Vulgate (St Jerome’s translation of the bible), of which this happens to be one of the purest versions:

Christi autem generatio sic erat: cum esset desponsata mater ejus Maria Joseph, antequam convenirent inventa est in utero habens de Spiritu Sancto.

Notice that ‘Christ’ comes first, as, for Christians, Christ surely should. And now look at this.

What we see, on the largest scale, is the word ‘Christ’ written in Greek, but represented with only the first three letters, chi, rho, and iota – or Χρι (the full word ‘Christos’ would be Χριστός). This abbreviation was effectively standard practice, and the combination of just the first two letters, chi and rho, was one of the earliest symbols of Christianity. It was adopted even before the cross, which was such a humiliating form of execution that, in the early days, it was deemed unsuitable for celebration. Like mattheus, therefore, this is an abbreviation, and, in the same way, I think there is a hint about that: you could read the elaboration of forms at the top right of the chi and above the rho as equivalent to the ‘squiggle’ above the ‘u’ in mattheu – a sign for an elision, or abbreviation, which would be used for centuries.

It is, therefore, the word Christ which is the most important thing on this page, vibrant with colour and apparently moving forms, wheels within wheels, stylised, elongated birds, writhing and threaded together, and knotwork. The whole form is surrounded by a series of small red dots, as if it were glowing. This is not, maybe, the beginning of the gospel of Matthew, but it is the first time in the bible, after the list of his ancestors, that Jesus appears. It is where he is born, the first mention of the incarnation – god made flesh. As such, as well as being called the Chi rho page, this is also sometimes referred to as the Incarnation page, and it was a fairly common feature of the most elaborately illuminated manuscripts. According to the gospel according to John, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Here, in the gospel according to Matthew, we see the Word for the first time, and we see it as a word. It was clear to the early Christians that the Light of the World came into the world at this point, and that this was worth celebrating: let Salvation begin!

The letters underneath Χριστός make up the following one and a half words of the Vulgate: ‘autem gene’(‘ratio’is on the following line). The ‘u’ and ‘t’ are combined, as are the ‘e’ and ‘m’. After this, the ‘g’ is looped round the ‘e’, and the ‘n’ and ‘e’ also combined. This abbreviation may simply help to fit the words in, although it also adds to the almost magical nature of the text – as if this were an incantation to summon the birth of Jesus, the words transformed beyond their mundane import. The way in which they have been written shows what a brilliant visual sense Eadfrith, believed to be both scribe and illuminator of the gospels, had. Like most of the work, they were sketched out in lead point (a bit like starting with a light drawing using a modern-day pencil), and then outlined with red dots. They have an obvious presence on the page, but interrupt the background tone and colour of the vellum as little as possible. This allows Χριστός to ring out loud and clear at the top of the page: when shown to the congregation (or even, when opened in front of the officiating priest) the impact would be clear: Christ is here, visible, among us, the most important thing.

Without considering their impact on the whole page, these (partial) words, ‘autem gene’ might seem incomplete, as all the others here are filled in with black, and heightened with yellow, pink and green infills. The whole text is contained by the elaborate tail of the chi to the left, and a green-bordered frame which comes down from the top right of the page, wraps along the bottom and continues up on the left.

The second line of text continues after the ‘gene’with ‘ratio sic erat cum’. In the King James Version, this would be the end of the word ‘birth’, followed by ‘…in this wise. When…’. Although I said that all of the letters (after the first line) were filled in black, the letter ‘c’ of ‘cum’ is not. It’s not clear why – it might just be a mistake! Eadfrith, scribe and illuminator, was Bishop of Lindisfarne from around 698 until his death in 721, and some people think that his work on the volume was not complete at his death. The British Library wisely refuses to be too specific. Between the text and the illumination the gospels would have taken at least five years to complete, and possibly as much as ten – so the given date of the manuscript as ‘c. 700’ can only really be counted as the date it might have been started.

The final lines on this page are ‘esset desponsata mater ejus Maria Joseph’, or ‘…as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph’, leaving the second half of the verse to the next page – or rather, the next side. Manuscripts, have ‘leaves’ rather than ‘pages’. This is leaf 29, or folio 29, and we are looking at the ‘front’ side of it, the recto (so this is f. 29r). The rest of the verse is on the ‘back’ of this folio, or folio 29 verso (f. 29v). Despite the technicalities, I think the amount of the verse that is included might explain why Eadfrith went to the pains of abbreviating the ‘autem gene’. It was, I think, quite simply, to get this much onto this one page. As a result we have all of the Holy Family present at Jesus’s birth: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And notice that Joseph only just makes it – the green frame has had to be thinned, and even broken, to accommodate the letter ‘h’. Or he might have done that to emphasize Joseph’s name, or even to imply a continuation of the verse onto the verso. But I suspect it is, practically, to fit it all in. Poor Joseph: always squashed into corners. But at least he’s there. Above the word ‘mater‘ is written ‘moder’ – the Old English form of ‘mother’ – but the rest of the translation has been squashed into the margin.

We’ve got to the end of the page, but before we go, let’s have a look back at the top – and get a little bit closer. You can all do this, in the comfort of you own homes, which is just as well, as the British Library doesn’t lend to private individuals. However, part of their remit, as a national institution, is to make their collection available as widely as possible, and they are attempting to digitize as much of their collection as they can. The Lindisfarne Gospels can be accessed if you click on this link. I’ll leave you to read it all cover to cover before the talk on Monday! But not before this:

It is truly astonishing.  The intricacy, the complexity and the sheer attention to detail – the time taken to write just one word – speaks of a faith and devotion so profound that it is hard to measure. And within this one detail we also have all of the common decorative techniques. On the left are the red dots, an influence from Ireland, and in the cross of the chi, we see a writhing mass of birds, biting their own elongated necks which are looped around and threaded through the equally elongated tails and the knotted legs of their fellows. Between the chi and the edge of the rho on the right are spiralling circular forms, often described as pin wheels, which would seem to derive from the La Tène culture, one branch of the broader Celtic tradition, as is the knotwork in the rho itself. It is open to debate as to whether these forms of decoration have symbolic significance within a Christian context. Most obviously, many of the pin wheels have threefold symmetry, and, at the heart of the word ‘Christ’, this must surely be an allusion to the Holy Trinity, with God present in Christ and Christ as a part of God. The knotwork could be interpreted as a reference to eternity – each is an endless loop – but also to the journey of the soul on a defined, if complex path. In some way this imagery must also function in like a mandala, encouraging contemplation and meditation. This is perhaps clearer with the manuscript’s glorious carpet pages, each a variation on the shape of the cross, but I will look at them – and, indeed, at all of the fully illuminated leaves – on Monday. All that, and many more remarkable details, too, not to mention the overriding structure. And, despite what I said above, you really don’t need to read it all before then!

172 – Incisive

Winslow Homer, The Army of the Potomac – A Sharp-Shooter On Picket Duty, 1862. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Today I want to look at an engraving as a way of introducing the work of a great painter: Winslow Homer. This is, of course, by way of an introduction my talk this Monday, 3 October, which is in itself an introduction to the exhibition at the National Gallery, Winslow Homer: Force of Nature. There follows a series of talks related to exhibitions which are mainly in London, and which are dedicated to The Lindisfarne Gospels (in Newcastle, 10 October), Lucian Freud (National Gallery, 17 October), Cezanne (Tate Modern, 24 October) and Edouard Manet and Eva Gonzalès (National Gallery again, 31 October). The blue links will take you to the relevant Tixoom page for information and booking, and they are also all listed in the diary.

Winslow Homer has been a revelation to me, as there is not a single painting by him in a British public collection. I haven’t been to the United States for well over a decade, but in the days when I went regularly I tended to focus on the Italian Renaissance, or on American works from the second half of the 20th Century. Having discovered his paintings, I now want to know more about Winslow Homer’s prints, even though, as far as I can see, he doesn’t seem to be classed as a printmaker as such, for reasons which may become clear. In 1855, at the age of 19, he became an apprentice at John H Bufford and Co., a lithographic printing shop in Boston. Two years later, his apprenticeship complete, he entered the profession which he was to follow for the next two decades at least: an illustrator for popular magazines and periodicals. However, the majority of his work was not in lithography but wood engraving. The technique is different from engraving on a metal plate. For the latter the design is gouged out of the plate using a tool called a buren, and when the plate is inked the ink fills the resulting grooves. This is what is known as intaglio printing (tagliare is Italian for ‘to cut’), which is different to Japanese wood blocks or linocuts (see, for example, Sybil Andrews’ Via Dolorosa in 161 – Negative Spaces), which are relief prints. In a relief print the lines are the result of ink sitting on the ridges between the carved out gaps. Wood engraving is a form of relief printing, so everything white has been cut out of the block, and everything black is printed from thin ridges which sit proudly at the top, on the original surface.

We see a man in uniform – a soldier – sitting in a tree, with his rifle trained on a target to our right. His position is precarious, perched on a diagonal branch growing from the trunk of a conifer growing on the right of the image. His left foot is in the crook of the branch, where it joins the trunk, and his left leg is slightly bent, leaving a gap between the branch and his knee. His right leg is more bent, and the foot hangs freely, offering neither support nor security. He grasps a small branch with his fully stretched left arm, which forms the only real horizontal in the image, affording him, and the composition, some degree of stability. The rifle rests on the same branch, next to his hand, tilted at a slight angle downwards, implying that the soldier is aiming at something on the ground at a considerable distance – although we cannot be sure how high in the tree he is. The marksman leans forward with his torso at roughly 45˚to the vertical, showing how intent and focussed he is on his activity, while the precarious position, and the fact that he is surrounded by foliage and branches – which stretch downwards almost more than up – creates a real sense of tension, which is only enhanced by the view of the sky we see through the branches and needles of the conifer in which he is sitting, some way above our heads.

A water bottle hangs from an offshoot of the branch the soldier is holding, knotted around it to keep it secure. The attention to detail is supreme, from the precise definition of the sole of the shoe, to the exact arrangement of the laces, threaded through holes and tied, defined by spaced, diagonal lines, suggesting that the laces are formed from strands of thread which are twisted together. The ends of the trousers are tucked into socks, or puttees, both garments depicted using regular parallel lines. The branches are created with shorter, curved lines, dashes and dots, which convey the rough, varied flakiness of the bark. Clouds in the sky are blank paper, with the clear blue, slightly darker than the clouds, is indicated by thin, horizontal lines. There is some sort of bird hovering high up, visible to the left of the soldier’s right foot, its distant presence adding a somewhat vertiginous feel to the danger inherent in the situation.

The sky under the left arm is one of the brightest parts of the print. It helps to emphasize the stability of this gesture, and to enhance the drive of the focus from left to right, towards the unseen target. The right hand, holding the rifle, and about to pull the trigger, is almost equally bright, only a few lines having been left on the surface of the wood to create the shape of the fingers and define the tendons on the back of the hand. Against the darker carving of the rifle, and emerging from the mid-tones of the sleeve, this hand and its imminent action become the main focus of the image. Near to this is the white of an eye, flashing from the dark socket, in shadow thanks to the soldier’s cap. We are looking at a sharp-eyed sharpshooter intent on his enemy. On top of his cap the letter ‘A’ tells us the company with which he served. The intricacy of detail and subtle variety in tone and texture which Homer has been able to achieve, creating the appearances of different materials, and defining the forms and positions in space simply by varying the length, density, and direction of the lines, show him to be a printmaker of the highest order. However, unlike, say, Dürer or Rembrandt, he is not necessarily celebrated as such. But why not? Well, the pictures I have shown you so far are from a print which has been cut out of its original context – so let’s put that back. This is another example of the image, also in the collection of the Met in New York.

The print was published as a page-sized illustration. Indeed, the detail below shows us that it was page 724 of Harper’s Weekly, published on November 15, 1862 (that was volume VII, in case you wanted to know).

Homer had worked for Harper’s more-or-less since its inception in 1857, and four years later, in October 1861, the periodical sent him to Washington D.C., where he was to become an artist-correspondent during the American Civil War. He joined the Union Army, representing the Northern States which were fighting to maintain the Union (as the name suggests), against the Southern Confederates, who had seceded. By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, the New York Tribune called Homer ‘the best chronicler of the war’, and this image, The Army of the Potomac – A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty, became one of his most celebrated works from that period.

The wood block was not necessarily carved by Homer himself . The hard-wood block was both polished and whitened, and Homer would draw his designs directly onto this pristine surface in pencil. Highly skilled craftsmen would then cut away all of the remaining white surfaces – effectively removing what would be left white in the print. This is equivalent to the way in which Dürer created his relief wood-block prints, such as the Small Passion series, although Dürer drew his designs onto paper, which was then attached to the block and cut through. As a result, although some of the blocks survive, Dürer’s original drawings do not. I suspect that Homer’s skills as a printmaker are accorded a lower status because he worked as an illustrator: it was only when he turned to painting that he would be called an artist. As it happens, it was with this very image that he made this step. Have a look at the caption of the image as it was originally published.

After the title, there is a parenthetical statement, ‘[FROM A PAINTING BY W. HOMER, ESQ.]’. In this detail, we can also see his signature, inscribed among the whorls of the bark, at the bottom right corner. At this point Homer was already known as an illustrator, but now his status as a painter has been revealed – even advertised – to an already eager public. The painting itself, quite possibly the earliest he completed, and certainly the first significant oil of his career, is the first on view in the National Gallery’s current exhibition.

Winslow Homer, Sharpshooter, 1863. Portland Museum of Art, Maine.

Its title is slightly different, reduced, simply, to Sharpshooter. However, the composition is fundamentally the same. The foliage is denser in the painting, so there is less open sky, but this is probably because the clarity needed for a monochrome print becomes less important when colour can be used to distinguish forms as well. However, details are omitted. There is no bird (too fiddly?), nor is there a water bottle hanging from the tree. The company letter ‘A’ has been replaced by a red lozenge. However, there is something about this painting which, at first glance, could appear oddly inconsistent with the evidence so far provided. It is dated 1863, and yet the wood engraving was published in 1862, claiming to be ‘from a painting by W. Homer’. However, this is by no means impossible, and his first painting could also be the first example of the artist changing his mind. In the following decades Homer would regularly complete a painting and exhibit it, only to rework it later, often to simplify, and so clarify, the image. He may well have decided that the water bottle didn’t read well enough in the painting, and although it was ideal for an engraving, the company letter could well have proved too intricate in paint: presumably he replaced it for reasons of clarity. Have a look at these two Union Army hats which I found on Pinterest. The first is a ‘Union Model 1858 Forage cap, circa 1861, with company letter “C”’, while the second is described as a ‘Civil War Bummers Cap’ (another name for a Forage Cap), with the ‘Original insignia of the 3rd Corps 1st Division, 3rd brigade, Army of the Potomac’. The brigade number here is not unlike the company letter in the print.

According to one war insignia website I have just found, from which you can buy a reproduction red badge of the Third Corps, Army of the Potomac, for a mere $4.95, the lozenge was adopted on 21 March, 1863 – so in time for the painting, but not the wood engraving. I imagine that it was adopted for the same reason that Homer included it in the painting: it is far easier to see from a distance than it would be to read a brass letter. This is one of the reasons that I love the History of Art. Some people mistakenly think it is about looking at pretty pictures, but in reality it can cover every human discipline, from religion to war (and let’s face it, often there hasn’t been much difference between these two). Whatever the subject, I always end up learning so much about the world by learning about the art it produces… In later years Homer showed that he was all too aware of the inhumanity of the action in this particular painting. We are looking intently at a single man, himself intent on seeking out and killing a single opponent. In 1896 Homer wrote to his friend George Briggs, saying, ‘I looked through one of their rifles once when they were in a peach orchard in front of Yorktown in April, 1862’. He included a sketch of this, and went on to write, ‘The above impression struck me as being as near to murder as anything I could think of in connection with the army & I always had a horror of that branch of the service’. The print I have been looking at today illustrated a report on the sharpshooters of the Army of the Potomac, which explained that, from 600 feet, the men were expected to be able to hit a target no more than 5 inches from the bullseye with ten consecutive shots. You can find some more information in a short article about the painting which was published in the Washington Post last year.

Conflict was to be a constant theme in Homer’s work, but although the Civil War was to be important for his development, and brought his name to a broad public, it did not remain a subject to be revisited for long. However, the repercussions of it did, particularly in regard to the Abolition of Slavery, which the victory of the Union Army helped to bring about. One of the things I will be exploring on Monday is the ways in which these repercussions played out, but I will also be looking at other manifestations of conflict which were essential to his work, especially in regard to the natural environment – just one of his concerns which make the paintings entirely relevant to us today, more than a century after his death.

171 – All together now…!

Attributed to Michelangelo, Study for one of the Medici tombs at San Lorenzo, 1524. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Gesamtkunstwerk. It’s the word that Wagner used in 1849 to describe his ideal art form, with all genres of art working together through theatre. Of course it applies specifically to opera, which involves music, drama, and visual design, which in itself includes painting, sculpture and architecture. But gesamtkunstwerke have existed ever since… well, ever since anybody ever built any environment in which people would gather. A church, for example, has architecture, sculpture, painting and music. And, of course, drama. Birth, death, and resurrection – what could be more dramatic than that? And then, of course, there’s the liturgy. However, there are relatively few artists who were talented enough to create ‘a’ Gesamtkunstwerk on their own, although some, like Michelangelo, were nearly there. He was only really held up by external circumstances. Throughout much of his life he wanted to be known as a sculptor, but he is equally well known for his painting. And as you will know by now – especially if you joined me for the talk this week (thank you!) – he also wrote some rich and complex poetry, and was a great correspondent. As he became more successful, he also became an architect – the subject of the fourth and final talk in my series Almost All of Michelangelo. But of course, being Michelangelo, it’s so much more than just putting up walls. He sculpts with light and space, he creates theatres of public drama, and he even manipulates the way in which we move through the environment. No time to talk about all of that today, so I do hope you can join me on Monday 26 September from 5.30-7.30pm. Today, I just want to talk about one drawing of one element of one of his Gesamtkunstwerke, the Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo.

Buonarroti, Michelangelo dit Michel-Ange, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, INV 838, Recto – https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl020001376 – https://collections.louvre.fr/CGU

This is one of the drawings I didn’t include in the talk this week, having deliberately omitted anything architectural as otherwise there would have been too much to look at. It should be said that not everyone believes this drawing to be by Michelangelo himself, although Carmen Bambach, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and curator and author of the catalogue of the exhibition Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer, which I mentioned, does. And that’s good enough for me. For those of you familiar with Florence, or Michelangelo, you will instantly recognise one of the Medici tombs from the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, although this is not how the tomb was finally executed. As work progressed on the chapel Michelangelo gradually simplified his ideas, in part because, stylistically, he was moving towards a greater simplicity, and in part because it was proving impossible to get everything done. As executed, we have the architectural structure from this drawing, including the sarcophagus, plus three sculptures: the figure seated in the central bay (a ‘unit’ of architecture) and the two figures reclining on the casket.

If we start with the top half of the drawing, we can see that it is a highly refined image, drawn in black chalk with a brown wash to give the forms volume and to create a sense of ‘atmosphere’ that is more than diagrammatic. It is clearly a highly finished drawing, with few pentimenti (changes). The only hints of ‘planning’ are the vertical and horizontal lines which are ruled in different places across the image, as well as a very faint circle which would define the lunette of the wall above the monument – although that is all but cut off at the top (the circle is most visible on the right). This is clearly a drawing by someone who has made up their mind exactly what they want, and wants to communicate that to someone else: the patron or his agent, in this case Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, who by this time was Pope Clement VII. I will tell you more about the chapel itself, and its history – both as planned and as executed – on Monday. Today I just want to look at this drawing.

The architectural structure of the tomb is three bays wide, two narrow bays flanking a wider, central bay. The bays are separated by paired pilasters, with slightly taller and simpler pilasters at far left and right. The rhythm of the tomb – narrow, wide, narrow – is not unlike that of a triumphal arch, and inevitably the implication would be that the soul of the deceased will triumph over death because of their Christian faith. The two outer bays contain niches framed by tabernacles – like a temple front but with only one ‘opening’ – topped by segmental pediments (i.e. a segment of a circle). In each we see the top half of a standing figure. The central bay is less shadowy, which implies that it is further forward, and also that it doesn’t have any sculptural framing elements, like the two tabernacles, to contain the seated figure, of which here we can only see the head and shoulders.

The four pilasters support a cornice, which itself supports elaborate decoration, none which was executed (with the exception, perhaps, of one of the crouching figures – I’ll show you that on Monday). Above the outer bays are pairs of seated figures – their legs dangling over the cornice to the left, and tucked up on the right. The paired pilasters support narrow balustrades, the balusters being placed further apart than the combined width of the pilasters, making these units look a bit top heavy, almost like a sense of growth as we go upwards. There is a herm – a flaring column which develops into the torso of a person – standing on each of the balusters, and each pair of herms holds a scallop shell. Garlands hang from the outer herms, looping up again towards the edges of the monument, where each is supported by a candelabrum. In the centre are trophies of war – an empty suit of armour, topped by shields, with a helmet at the very top.

It is the lower part of the monument with which we are more familiar. Not only does it have the most identifiable sculptures – and ones which were actually executed – but also, when we are in the chapel, this is the section at eye-level. Certainly in this detail we can ‘recognise’ the two figures slumped across the sarcophagus, even though there were not finished in exactly this form. But they do have the extreme articulation which is typical of Michelangelo’s ‘early mature’ style, an extreme exaggeration of contrapposto whereby one leg is as bent as it can be, while the other, if not exactly straight – and certainly not ‘weight bearing’ in this context – is at least stretched out. Both figures also twist through the torso, with one arm bent, and the other more elongated. A clue to their identities is given by details sketched around the heads. On the left, the bearded figure has at least four wavy forms radiating around his hair, while the figure on the right has two curving horns. These represent the sun and a crescent moon – unusually diagrammatic elements of symbolism for Michelangelo, which is probably why he simplified the figures and carved Day and Night without them. These figures refer to the passing of time, which is, in itself, a memento mori – a reminder of death – an idea made explicit by the two skulls carved on the capitals of the pilasters which support the sarcophagus.

Seen in the context of the lower half of the tomb, the figures of Day and Night still look familiar – but you’ll know if you’ve seen them in person that there is nothing lying on the floor. Reclining on one arm with both legs stretched out, these characters have circular objects tucked under their arms. These are jugs, and the reclining pair represent river gods – we saw the river Eridanus, who ‘received’ Phaeton as he plummeted to his death, in last week’s blog. Michelangelo did get as far as planning these sculptures. There are drawings of them, and he even made a full-sized model for one of them which is now in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.

Modelled in terracotta, Michelangelo could have handed this over to an assistant to carve, but chose not to, preferring the bold simplicity which the chapel has now. It’s a remarkable sculpture, but not the most flattering image of a god. Rather than the bold, broadly muscular classical figures he arranged on the Capitoline Hill – one of his great architectural projects which is effectively small-scale town planning – this figure looks somewhat emaciated, with admittedly muscular, but wiry legs, and too much skin, but not enough muscle, around the midriff. It has to be said that the current ‘simplicity’ of the chapel was not just an artistic choice. He left Florence in 1534 never to return, and the chapel was put together by assistants following Michelangelo’s instructions which were posted from Rome, a correspondence course in architecture.

Had the River Gods been included there would have been a strong pyramidal structure, with the seated figure – a portrayal, though not a portrait, of Giuliano de Medici, Duke of Nemours – at the top centre. Notice how the feet of the river gods lie in front of the base of the tomb. Not only would they have been further out to the left and right, but they would also have been further forward, encroaching onto the floor space of the chapel (another potential reason why they were omitted). Day and Night are further back and further in, with Giuliano further back again. The sculpture recedes in space towards the middle of the wall. So although the architecture seems to push forward, the sculpture pulls back, a tension typical in Michelangelo’s work as a whole. This also creates areas of light and shade, with the side niches, the rivers, and the sarcophagus creating the darkest shadows, leaving Giuliano in the light – so as well as being at the apex of the pyramid he is also the most brilliantly illuminated. This is what I mean by sculpting in light – and I’ll talk more about this, and other ways in which Michelangelo achieved it, on Monday.

When I was talking about Michelangelo’s drawings this week, I started with the earliest, which were drawn from frescoes by Giotto and Masaccio. As a young man he learnt from the Masters, and the most sculptural painters at that. Inevitably later artists learnt from him in the same way. How do we know that? Well, apart from the obvious visual influence in their art, there are other drawings which suggest as much. As well as today’s drawing of Giuliano’s tomb by Michelangelo himself, the Louvre also has a drawing by Federico Zuccaro of the opposite tomb – of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino – as it was executed. If you thought it was busy the last time you visited, that’s not entirely new. Look at what it was like in 1580. These are all artists drawing (plus a dog). I don’t think you’d get away with clambering over the architecture nowadays.

Zuccaro, Federico, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, INV 4554, Recto – https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl020101809 – https://collections.louvre.fr/CGU

170 – Drawing to an end

Michelangelo, The Fall of Phaethon, 1533. The Royal Collection/HM King Charles III.

This week, a drawing from the Royal Collection – it seems apt. And, although Monday sees the funeral of its former owner, Queen Elizabeth (she held it in trust for the nation), I have decided to go ahead with my talk, Michelangelo 3: The Works on Paper. Between those who believe that we should stop our normal activities as a sign of respect, and those who wish to carry on to honour our late Queen’s memory and celebrate a steadfast life, I have decided to leave the choice to you: feel free to join me from 5:30-7:30pm, or to take some quiet time for yourselves. Future plans, including a talk on the National Gallery’s revelatory exhibition Winslow Homer: Force of Nature, are listed in the diary.

The talk on Monday will cover different forms of ‘work on paper’. Drawings, yes, but also letters and poetry. And of course there were many different types of drawing – preliminary sketches, compositional studies, detailed analyses of form, cartoons, and architectural plans to name the most important. But this – this is something else. All the other types of drawing listed are preparatory works, made to enable the completion of a painting, sculpture or building. This is not preparatory, it is a work of art in its own right, to be presented to someone as a completed project in and of itself, and this gives it its title: a presentation drawing. The composition, on a sheet of paper in portrait format, is clearly divided into three main sections structured as a pyramid, with two elements – man and bird – at the apex, six in the centre, and seven or more at the base. We’ll start by looking at the central section, as it is this which gives the drawing its title.

We see a chariot – reduced to a simple box-like element with a wheel on either side – a male nude, and four horses in free fall. Given the small scale (the drawing is 23.4 cm wide) the detail is remarkable. The nude is Phaeton, and he is almost upside down, his left arm curled round his head, the right arm extended. There is a bend in his torso, stretching the skin over his left ribs, and creating folds to the right of his abdomen. The right leg is strongly bent at the knee, with the sole of the right foot just appearing behind the left knee, which is less bent. The right foot, more stretched out, can be seen in front of one of the wheels of the chariot. The horse seem to collide with one another, curling forward, or bending back, their legs flailing as they try to find some form of foothold, vainly seeking security. Each figure has a firm, but soft outline, and the shading is delicate, as if stippled. Individual details are sketched in with the greatest delicacy – tails, manes, facial features. And surrounding them all, there is an atmospheric haze, indicating the horses’ trappings and clouds in the sky.

What can have happened? Well, if you’ve ever given your children driving lessons, look away now.  The story is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which all shapes change: the poet’s message is that the world we live in, and everything in it, is in a state of flux. Phaeton was the son of Phoebus, God of the Sun (we tend to call him Apollo now) – although he grew up in ignorance of the fact. Long story short: he finds out, seeks out his father, and, to prove his paternity Phoebus offers his son anything he wants. Phaeton asks for the use of the chariot of the sun for a day, which would be a bit like driving a Ferrari at full speed over a revolving race track with no breaks, with the combined engine and steering wheel headstrong and out of control. Of course, despite his father’s warnings, Phaeton never had control, shot far too high, and then plummeted towards the earth, causing forests to burn and oceans to boil. Short story shorter: Jupiter was summoned, and solved the problem the only way possible, by blasting chariot and driver out of the sky with a thunderbolt.

At the very top we see the Jupiter, unusually beardless, seated astride his familiar bird amidst the vaporous clouds. The eagle looks round to its master, its legs fully extended on either side – spread-eagled! – and firmly planted on a cloud as if it has slammed on the breaks having arrived at precisely the right point. Jupiter raises his right hand high, twisted 90˚at the waist – so that his shoulders are at right angles to his hips – the torsion giving him the full force necessary to fling the thunderbolt, which is shown as a suitably indistinct, but jagged, blur.

Down below, on the ground, we see distressed, lamenting figures. On the left is a river god, implacably and impossibly pouring the flowing water from a jug, as classical river gods always do. This is Erídanus, which Ovid describes as ‘the longest of rivers’, and which is now a southern constellation, one of the 48 listed by Ptolemy in the 2nd century. According to Ovid, the river ‘received [Phaeton] and washed the smoke from his charred face’. That is where he was buried, and where his three sisters, the Héliades, mourned him. They spent four months in hopeless lamentation, wishing that the earth would just swallow them up, only to realise that they were indeed setting root. They were metamorphosed into poplar trees, and through it all their tears continued, now falling as drops of amber. Also present was Cycnus. ‘He was related to Phaeton through his mother, but feelings of friendship were stronger than kinship,’ Ovid tells us. A later writer, Servius, makes this more explicit – rather than ‘friend’ he uses the word ‘amator’, or lover. Basically, Phaeton’s boyfriend also mourned his death, and was transformed into a swan – Cygnus – another constellation. The quotations are from the Penguin Classics edition of Metamorphoses, but for something meatier, though not as detailed, Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid is more exciting.

The inclusion of Cycnus gives us a hint about the origins of this drawing, and about the person to whom this drawing was presented. In 1532, at the age of 57, Michelangelo met the young nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, who was probably less than half his age, although his birthdate is unknown. The artist seems to have fallen hopelessly in love. We don’t really know what this meant for Michelangelo, as we know nothing of his relationships in physical terms, or even if there ever were ‘physical terms’ with anyone. However, a correspondence ensued, a number of remarkable poems were written, and several astonishing drawings ‘presented’. They remained friends for life, and Tommaso was one of the few people present at the artist’s death. This is just one of the drawings – I will talk about the others, and how they relate to this one, on Monday. Unlike the other drawings made for Cavalieri, preparatory sketches for this one survive.

The Accademia in Venice has what is probably an initial idea, although the precise ordering of the drawings is not certain. Michelangelo may be rethinking the composition after initially sketching it all out. He is thinking about a more ordered composition here, with Jupiter dead centre, though in a very similar position to the drawing we have seen, at the top of an axis which passes vertically through Phaeton. The main focus is on the horses, though – they are the most highly finished. There are two on either side of a centrally-plummeting Phaeton, with the right-hand pair almost grabbing each other from fear. Phaeton falls headlong, his arms stretching out below him, legs bent above, with the carriage behind. I suspect this idea was rejected as being too neatly arranged given the apocalyptic events of the story. At the bottom the sisters, and possibly also the river, are just sketched in, apparently based, as so often, on male models.

This example is in the collection of the British Museum, and is closer to ours, though less highly finished. It is not so obviously pyramidal, even though Jupiter is still at the top, with the horses below in a different state of disarray, and Phaeton in a similar position. The major difference is down below. Erídanus and the Héliades are in more-or-less the same arrangement, with Cycnus wandering among them. But the sisters are already in a state of transformation, being or becoming trees, their hands close to their faces, or thrown out as branches, with shoots sprouting from their fingers. Unlike the other examples, there is writing on this particular page, probably using the same piece of black chalk with which the image was drawn. It is quite legible, and can be translated. The name referred to is not the city, but Michelangelo’s assistant, and friend, Pietro Urbino. It was he who took the Risen Christ to Rome, installed it, and even carved its final details. This is what it says:

Mr Tommaso, if you don’t like this sketch, tell Urbino so that I have time to do another tomorrow evening as I promised, and if you like it, and would like me to finish it, send it back to me.

What did Tommaso think? We can’t be sure, but the Royal Collection version must be the final, finished work. Either the young man didn’t like it, and what we see is an ‘improvement’, or he did, and rather than finishing the BM’s drawing on the same sheet, Michelangelo made a fine copy, altering his ideas in the process. Both are superb, and I for one would be happy with either. It didn’t end there, though. The drawings Michelangelo sent to Tommaso were highly sought after among the cognoscenti in Rome, to the extent that a highly skilled craftsman, Giovanni Berardi, was commissioned to cut replicas of them in rock crystal. We know this, because Cavalieri wrote to Michelangelo to tell him about it, and I’ll read some of that letter on Monday – as well as suggesting why Michelangelo might have chosen to draw this particular subject. For now, though, I’ll finish by showing you one of the surviving examples in rock crystal, from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The composition is different though (compare and contrast for yourselves) – maybe there was yet another version of the drawing which has subsequently been lost.

169 – Michelangelo’s Lost Love

Alessandro Algardi, Sleep, 1635-6. Museo Borghese, Rome.

Yes, you’re right, this is not a sculpture by Michelangelo. Nor is it, for that matter, ‘Love’. You might have realised that already from the photograph – or for that matter, simply by reading the caption. But I do love this work – and after Bernini’s flashy showpieces on the ground floor of the Museo Borghese I love the calm of this glowing gem which you can find upstairs: Algardi may have been outranked, but he was never outclassed. As I can’t show you Michelangelo’s lost ‘Love’ (for the simple reason that it’s lost), I’m showing you the Algardi instead. However, I wanted to tell you about the renaissance equivalent today, as I won’t feature it in my talk on Monday, 12 September (Michelangelo 2: The Sculptures). There are enough sculptures I can show you without taking time for things we can no longer see. After that, weeks three and four of the series Almost All of Michelangelo will look at The Works on Paper and The Architecture – click on those links or check out the diary for more information. And if you missed the first talk, don’t worry – each one is effectively a free-standing entity. Meanwhile, back to Michelangelo, albeit Michelangelo via Algardi. Look first, think later.

This is, in a way, one of my secret pleasures, something I always look forward to seeing, especially as it is something I see relatively rarely. The Museo Borghese in Rome is a hugely frustrating place, you have to book in advance and even then you only get a two hour slot. At one point you had to check in to the ground floor, check out again, and then check into the first floor, but I think they gave up on that complication fairly early on. When I take groups I find I can spend all two hours on the ground floor looking at the Canova, the Berninis and the Caravaggios: five sculptures and five paintings are more than enough for one visit. But if I can get upstairs (where most of the paintings are) then I will make sure I catch at least a glimpse of this sleeping marvel. However, I will rarely say anything about it, short of ‘look at that – isn’t that wonderful’, which, despite my usual verbosity, should be all that anything really needs. What do I like about it? The richness of the colour, the perfection of the forms, their apparent softness (yes, it’s hard stone) and the roundness of most elements, which adds to the sense of repose created by the total relaxation of this child, helplessly abandoned to a deep sleep.

The child is lying on a sloping ground. The latter is differentiated from the rest of the stone by its rough, unpolished surface, created by small, regular chisel marks which make the black stone look grey. Spread over the ground is a cloth, which, like the infant, is highly polished, the sharper, more angular folds of the fabric contrasting with the rounder forms of the body. The child’s left knee is raised, the sole of the foot resting flat on the ground, with the right foot stretched further out. The left arm, slightly bent, lies by its side, resting on some rounded forms, while the right arm is wrapped around its head – you can just see the right hand resting on top of the hair at the far right. The shoulders are turned slightly towards us, and the chubby face lolls, allowing us to see it from this angle – which is presumably why almost every photograph I can find of the sculpture is taken from this side. As ever, with sculpture, this is so frustrating: it is a three-dimensional art form, this is only a partial view! The eyes are closed, and the mouth downturned – looking a little grumpy, perhaps, but really showing the release of sleep. There is also a creature with a long bushy tail curled up on the rough ground (rather than on the cloth), presumably also fast asleep.

This is not a great photograph, I know, but it is one of very few that does not show the ‘predominant viewpoint’ seen above. It’s surprising there are not more, as this side reveals some new information, and helps us to understand what is going on. This is a boy, for one thing, and he has wings, although they look more like butterfly wings than the usual feathered forms you expect to see on amoretti and angels alike. The subtle twist through the body is more evident from this point of view, with the shoulders turned a little to our right, the knees to our left, a movement that is indeed a common feature of works by Michelangelo. However, there is none of the tension inherent in his output, and the cloth lying on the ground is more fulsome, maybe even more generous – look at the rich, unnecessary folds going down the right side in this photograph. It has all the sensuality of the Baroque – which it is, of course, being by Algardi –  and a dramatic naturalism (at least, I think that if sleep can be dramatic, this is how it would look), which is what separates it from the contrived etiolation of Mannerism.

Without a close up – again, the best that I can find – it is hard to see what the rounded forms under the winged boy’s hand are – but they also form a garland around his head. Even here I suspect it’s not obvious, unless you are an avid, and slightly imaginative, gardener. They are the seed pods of a poppy, the source of opium, and a symbol of Sleep. The butterfly wings, too, belong to this pint-sized personification, as, unlike Cupid’s flapping bird wings, which presumably would wake you up, these would flutter noiselessly as you drift away. The small creature we saw before is a dormouse (I would never have recognised it) – just think of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and you’ll realise they have always symbolised sleep, because they really do sleep for up to seven months a year. The choice of a black material is, of course, not coincidental, as most sleep takes place at night.

The sculpture was carved in what is called Belgian black marble, although it is not, truly speaking, marble (a metamorphic rock, transformed by high temperature and huge pressure), but a very fine-grained carboniferous limestone – a sedimentary rock. It was commissioned in 1635 by Marcantonio Borghese, nephew and heir of Cardinal Scipio Borghese who had built a phenomenal collection of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ art, and who had died just two years before. We don’t know why, exactly, Marcantonio wanted a personification of Sleep, but it was an image derived from antique prototypes which were popular not only in classical times but also in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Here is another embodiment of a similar idea, and another of my ‘secret pleasures’.

Well, not so much a secret, as a treat I look forward to seeing on the way to talk about something else – usually, in this case, the portraits by Raphael or the ceiling paintings of Pietro da Cortona in the Galleria Palatina in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. It is Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid, painted while he was in Malta in 1608. Photography doesn’t always cope well with Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, and here, if anything, the image is lighter than when the painting is seen in the flesh, when it appears more subtle and evocative, at the same time as allowing the boy greater dignity: the shadows function as a loin cloth, and grant him a deeper repose. He rests on a plank on the stone floor, bow and arrow by his side, his head resting on his quiver. The left wing lies on the ground, the right is just traced across the darkness of the background, both framing the figure and protecting it. Like Algardi’s Sleep, his left arm lies beside him, although the right does not curl round his head. Again there is a Michelangelesque twist through the body, although going the other way – the knees fall towards us, the shoulders are flatter to the floor. But there is still the utter calm of undisturbed slumber.

This is one of the classical prototypes, a Sleeping Cupid in the Uffizi dating from the 2nd Century CE. The idea goes back (as so many Roman ideas do) to the Greeks, and there is a wonderful Greek bronze Sleeping Eros, which was restored by the Romans, in the Met in New York – click on that link if you’d like to see photos, and read a very detailed analysis. I’m showing you this one because it was once – like most things in the Uffizi – part of the Medici collection, and so could easily have been known to Michelangelo. More of that in a moment. Like Algardi’s Sleep, this little chap (he’s only 69 cm long) lies on a cloth on the ground holding poppy seed-heads. This is definitely cupid, though – look at the wings – although there is a butterfly (perhaps not the most naturalistic) lying next to the poppies. His legs are spread, and flat out, while his right arm falls over his chest onto the floor. His left arm curves round his head, and holds onto some sort of bag or cushion to make himself more comfortable.

The Ancient Greek for ‘butterfly’ is Ψυχή – or ‘Psyche’ – which also means ‘soul’, while poppies, as well as referring to sleep, can also imply death, the sleep from which we do not wake. Sad as it is, one of the reasons why this particular genre of sculpture was popular in classical times was its suitability as a marker for the graves of dead children. This was not the motivation behind Algardi’s Sleep, though. Instead it was, like many other of the ‘modern’ sculptures in the Borghese collection, made ‘in competition’ with the classical prototypes – an idea which had been essential for the development of the Renaissance a good two centuries before Algardi turned up in Rome from his native Bologna. Sometimes, though, the admiration and emulation which inspired great art could descend into forgery, with even the greatest falling foul to temptation.

As I discussed last Monday when talking about Michelangelo’s paintings, the young genius was an apprentice in the workshop of painter Domenico Ghirlandaio from the age of 12, in 1487, until he was about 15. Then, from roughly 1490-92, he seems to have studied informally at the Medici sculpture garden. Nobody is really sure how it worked, or who taught him to carve, but I’ll talk a bit more about it on Monday anyway. What is certain is that the garden was home to some of the Medici collection of classical sculpture, potentially including the Sleeping Cupid in the Uffizi (above), and another example, in bigio morato (a different type of black limestone), which might be the ‘cupido nero’ which was a gift to Lorenzo the Magnificent from the King of Naples. After Lorenzo’s death in 1492, and just before the Medici were exiled in 1494, Michelangelo fled – the first of several times he did this – heading first to Venice and then back to Bologna, where he carved a number of figures on the Arca of St Dominic (see 159 – Michelangelo, holding a candle). On his return to Florence in the autumn of 1495 he worked for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who was from a different branch of the family to the previous (unofficial) rulers. It was then that Michelangelo carved his own Sleeping Cupid in emulation of the antique. Vasari mentions it the first edition of his Lives in 1550, and in his biography, three years later, Condivi gives us more information, describing it as ‘a god of love, aged six or seven years old and asleep’. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco approved, and also suggested to Michelangelo that he if he sold it in Rome as an antique, he would get a better price than if it was marketed as his own work. Indeed, a dealer managed to sell it to Cardinal Raffaele Riario, one of the nephews of Pope Sixtus IV, for 200 ducats – although he told Michelangelo that he’d got 30, which is what a ‘modern’ sculpture might have fetched. However, Riario found out it was modern and sent for the young upstart who had deceived him. The Cardinal returned the Cupid to the dealer, but commissioned another work from Michelangelo – which he then also rejected (more of that on Monday, too). In later life Michelangelo claimed that Riario had never bothered to commission anything from him, covering his back, no doubt, for the double rejection.

So what happened to the Cupid? It went back on the market, and initially Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, showed an interest in it – until she found out that it was modern. At this point nobody really knew who Michelangelo was. It’s not clear what happened to it next, but somehow it ended up in Urbino, where it was seized by Cesare Borgia (son of the Pope) when he sacked the city. In 1502 he gave it to none other than Isabella d’Este, who, by this time, would probably have heard of the young sculptor who had carved a Bacchus and a Pietà in Rome. She exhibited it alongside a genuine, classical cupid (with an unlikely attribution to Praxiteles) which she acquired a few years later. Both remained in the Gonzaga Collection in Mantua until the 17th Century, when the family’s fortunes had waned, and much of the remains of their collection were sold to King Charles I of England. There are references to it in inventories of the Royal Collection, and even, potentially, a drawing, but sadly it seems that the sculpture could well have been destroyed along with almost all of the Palace of Whitehall in the fire of 1698. But what did it look like? Condivi’s description gives us few clues, nor do any of the descriptions in the Gonazaga or Royal Collection inventories – apart from the fact that, unlike other versions (Isabella’s classical Cupid, for example) it was not lying on a lion skin. However, we might get an idea from a painting in the National Gallery.

Workshop of Giulio Romano The Infancy of Jupiter mid 1530s Oil on wood, 106.4 x 175.5 cm Bought, 1859 NG624 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG624

This is The Infancy of Jupiter from the workshop of Giulio Romano, painted in the mid-1530s. Giulio, you may remember from the recent Raphael exhibition, was probably the great master’s ablest associate, and ran what remained of the workshop after his death. However, with the Sack of Rome in 1527 he fled the Eternal City and headed north, where he did great work for the Gonzaga family, effectively taking over from Mantegna as Court Artist (at 21 years remove). The painting shows the infant Jupiter, who was saved from the fate of his siblings by his mother, Ops. His father, Saturn, did not want to be overthrown, so had eaten his other children at birth. When Jupiter was born, Ops gave Saturn a stone to eat in place of her new-born, and placed the baby in the care of the Corybantes. This was a good choice, it seems, as they were a holy heavy metal group, dancers dedicated to the Goddess Cybele, who played loud music and clashing cymbals to cover the sound of the baby crying (see far left and right) so that Saturn would not discover him.

Jupiter lies on a white sheet in a wickerwork cradle, his legs apart, with his his left arm lying by his side, and the right arm wrapped around his head. The legs are not dissimilar to those of the classical Cupid from the Uffizi, whereas the arms are more similar to Algardi’s Sleep (which is actually the same arrangement as in the Medici bigio morato Cupid).  It is assumed that Giulio’s model was none other than Michelangelo’s fake, which he would have seen as part of the Gonzaga collection. There is a version of it in Corsham Court in Wiltshire – go and have a look if any of you are in the area: I can’t find a good photograph of it. Some people have suggested that it is indeed Michelangelo’s original, but very few have ever been convinced. We’ll just have to imagine a small figure in white marble with legs like the first of following, and arms like the second… and then console ourselves for its loss by enjoying the multitude of Michelangelo’s surviving sculptures which I will talk about on Monday.

168 – Michelangelo: Leaning back, looking forward

Michelangelo, Jonah, c. 1511-12. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.

I’m just about to start a new series of lectures, Almost All of Michelangelo, and we kick off this Monday 5 September with The Paintings. Unlike my previous online talks, these will be two hour sessions, and will last from 5.30-7.30pm – with a ten minute gap in the middle. So far only this and the second talk, The Sculptures (Monday 12 September) are on sale, but the following two (The Works on Paper and The Architecture) will be released after the talk on Monday evening. As ever, for other in-person and online talks, not to mention overseas tours, please check out the diary. Today, as an introduction (as if any were needed) to the work of this extraordinary genius, I want to talk about my favourite figure in the Sistine Chapel. It’s a hard choice, given that there are so many, and, if I’m honest, I keep changing my mind anyway. But here we go.

This is Jonah. Like the other prophets and sibyls his name is painted on a plaque underneath his feet (as we will see when I show you another detail), but unlike the others, there is enough narrative detail here that we don’t actually need the label. More of that later. He sits on an imposing stone throne, which here, perhaps more than in the other examples, looks profoundly uncomfortable. A massive slab of stone forms the seat, with two square, cylindrical ‘legs’ stretching down to the footrest – not that his feet reach that far. Precisely how these ‘legs’ are attached to the seat is not clear, as they are covered by some red/green drapery, presumably a shot silk, which, together with some folds of his white loin cloth, is the only padding between prophet and stone. Another featureless slab of stone forms the back of the throne, with two ‘arms’ made of square columns, into each of which have been carved a pair of putti. Jonah leans back, away from us and to our left, while looking up to our right and pointing down in the opposite direction. He is looking up towards God, no doubt, and pointing to some aspect of his story, but precisely which aspect is not defined. As well as the loin cloth, short enough to reveal the full length of his legs, he wears a tight, pale bodice clinging to the underlying anatomy. Emerging from this is an undershirt – although what we can see of it is remarkably untidy.  As the closest part of his body to us, the legs benefit from Michelangelo’s full attention, with precise details of musculature and skeletal structure clearly defined subcutaneously thanks to the fall of light from top right to bottom left. Leaning back as he is, his feet do not reach the ‘ground’ – his right foot hovers above it, while the toe of the left, which is slightly less flexed, almost touches the marble footrest. This proximity is also conveyed by the shadow, visible close to the left foot, below and a little to our left. The shadow of the right foot is further from its origin, and only the toe of the shadow lands on the horizontal surface.

The two figures who are not Jonah are presumably agents of God – angels – involved in the miraculous events of the prophet’s narrative, which of course involve an enormous fish. Everyone thinks it was a whale, but no, that was Pinocchio. This is what it says in Jonah 1:17,

Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

So yes, it is a great fish, although it is still in some way symbolic, as, however big, I can’t quite believe that you could get all of Jonah inside it. Of course, if it were big enough, there would be no space for Jonah on the throne. More than one angler has identified the fish as an Atlantic tarpon, while also wondering how the artist could possibly have seen one – but as I’m not a fish person, I’ll just give you links to the articles posted in 2012 and 2015 and leave you to think about it. What is clearer is that, at the end of the story, Jonah is sitting in the shade of a gourd tree, and we can see that growing up over his left shoulder. And the story itself? Well, there are only four chapters, so why not read it here? Or, short story shorter, Jonah was sent, by God, to tell the people of Nineveh that they were bad, and that He would kill them. Jonah didn’t want to do this, so ran away on a ship, so God sent a storm. Jonah told the sailors to throw him overboard, as it must be his fault. They didn’t want to, but when they couldn’t get the ship to shore, decided that this was, in fact, their best option – at which point God sent the fish. At the end of verse nine of chapter two Jonah states, ‘Salvation is of the Lord’ (remember the idea of Salvation), and this is followed by,

And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

If we are at this stage of the story, it is hardly surprising that his clothes are in disarray… but there is more. He goes to Nineveh finally, preaches to the people, and they repent. God does not kill them. For some reason this really angers Jonah, and he storms out of the city and sulks, sitting in the shade of a tent and waiting for the city to be destroyed. God causes a gourd tree to grow up and shade Jonah further, ‘So Jonah was exceedingly glad of the gourd’ (Jonah 4:6)– until the next day (4:7):

But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered.  

By this stage Jonah had really lost the will to live. God just chides him gently, saying (roughly speaking) ‘You seem to be more concerned about the gourd than the people of Nineveh. I made the gourd, and I can make another. I also made all the people of Nineveh, so don’t you think I can do what I like and show mercy to whom I please?’ At which point the story ends. But what is the point of the story in the context of the chapel? Well, we’ll come back to that when we’ve seen where Jonah sits.

He is in the most prominent position, dead centre, above the altar, not far above Christ at the Last Judgement (which wasn’t there, of course, when he was painted – but more about that on Monday). Like his fellow prophets and sibyls he sits on the curving section of the vault, a transition between walls and ceiling. If we were to enter through the Ecclesiastical West Door (geographically it’s actually the other way round, but never mind), he would be one of the first things we saw. However, tourists enter through the door at the bottom right of the Last Judgement. Suspiciously this is directly underneath the depiction of the mouth of hell – are the directors of the Vatican Museums trying to tell us something? It is as if we, unlike the other damned, are escaping everlasting torment only to endure the purgatory that visits to the Sistine tend to be these days. And what are the little yellow squares at the bottom of this image? Well, it comes from my new favourite website, a high-resolution virtual model of the whole chapel hosted by the Vatican itself. Click on the link, and I’ll see you in a couple of months when you’ve finished looking round.

The four corners of the chapel are filled by four fan-shaped areas often called pendentives, like the triangular units which help support a circular dome above a square space beneath. The stories depicted here are important to understand the relevance of Jonah in this prime position. To our left we see the Crucifixion of Haman, from the Book of Esther (ten chapters…). Haman had secretly plotted to have all the Jews killed. Esther was both Jewish, and Queen, and went to her husband Ahasuerus (the King) to tell him about the plot, even though no one – not even his wife – was admitted to his presence without his express permission. However, he pointed towards her, thus granting her the right to speak (and also to live). Michelangelo has imagined him reclining in bed on the right of the pendentive. Eventually Esther, Haman and the King dine together – the scene in the background on the left – and Esther reveals the plot, which leads to Haman’s execution on the gallows he had previously prepared for Mordecai, Esther’s adoptive father. Now, Haman was hung on the gallows, not crucified, as Michelangelo shows here (in the most tortured foreshortening), but Michelangelo knew his Dante, and Dante said that Haman was crucified. It is the story of Esther which is celebrated by Jews during the feast of Purim. For early Christian theologians, though, Esther was seen as the ‘type’ of Mary. The word ‘type’ comes from printing – the typeface letter ‘M’ will print an ‘M’ on the page, for example – and Esther is the ‘type’ of Mary as she is the idea periods which models the realisation: both are virtuous women whose action results in the salvation of their people. This symbolism was used throughout the medieval and renaissance and well beyond. In this particular instance it is worthwhile remembering that the Sistine Chapel was actually dedicated to the Mary, and specifically to the Assumption of the Virgin, and so this story is especially important. At the other end of the chapel we find Judith and Holofernes, who, like Esther, saves her people through her actions – she is another type of the Virgin.

The story in the other pendentive is perhaps more familiar. It comes from the Book of Numbers, Chapter 21: 4-9. The people of Israel were travelling from Egypt towards the promised land, and were complaining about the lack of food and water. God sent a plague of serpents to punish them, they realised their mistake, asked Moses to intervene, and God told Moses what to do – make a serpent of brass. You can see it erected on a pole in the middle of the image. Numbers 21:9 says,

And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.

In the same way that Esther was the type of Mary, the Brazen Serpent (as it became known) was the type of Jesus on the Cross. It even says as much in the bible.  According to John 3:14-15, Jesus himself said,

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

Salvation is relevant to the story of Esther, to the story of Moses and the Brazen serpent, and to the story of Jonah. According to Matthew 12:40 Jesus said

For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

So the story of Jonah and the whale (yes, it does say whale) is the type of the death and resurrection of Jesus, which is precisely why Michelangelo has given it such an important position in the chapel, directly above the altar. It could even be that, rather than leaning back, Jonah is in the process of sitting up, a physical action expressive of resurrection, having been ‘vomited… upon the dry land’. In terms of his position in the chapel, he is looking up towards God the Father dividing night and day on the ceiling, and appears to be pointing down to the forgiving Ahasuerus – so we have death, resurrection and forgiveness, night and day. This is just as well, as you would be hard pressed to find an image of the Crucifixion in the Sistine Chapel. Rather oddly it is hidden away in the background of one of the scenes on the walls, visible through the one of the windows in Cosimo Rosselli’s Last Supper at the far end of the chapel. Michelangelo uses this figure of Jonah leaning back to look forward to the Crucifixion, to Christ’s death and resurrection, thus making it symbolically more present. However, this theological complexity doesn’t really go all the way towards explaining why he is my favourite figure.

It is, quite simply, the technical brilliance of it all. To unify the ceiling and its many disparate elements Michelangelo has created an underlying architectonic structure. There are seven prophets and five sibyls all seated on these enormous, unforgiving thrones, one at either end, and five atop each wall. Sitting on the arms of the thrones along the sides of the chapel are the twenty ignudi, ten pairs of naked men. You can just see bits of them in this detail, but there is no space for them above Jonah’s throne, as the others are in the way. Behind the ignudi are pilaster strips which link one side of the chapel to the other, and also frame the old testament stories on the ceiling. But just above Jonah’s throne is a detail that is very often missed, partly because it is so plain. Above the cornice which goes round the top of the throne and ties the whole ceiling together – just as, by Michelangelo’s design, there is a cornice that is continuous around the tops of the walls inside St Peter’s – there is a thin strip of pale blue. It is the sky, seen through the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. You can only see it here, and at the other end of the ceiling, because elsewhere there are pictures in the way – the stories of the creation and fall. The prophets and sibyls are sat where they are to console us. They are intermediaries, letting us know, whatever is painted above them on the ceiling, that, thanks to what is painted below them on the walls, we, at the very bottom of the chapel, will be redeemed.

The continuous cornice implies that the walls of the chapel end above the heads of the prophets and sibyls, and that their thrones are the vertical continuation of those walls. We can buy into that illusion because they appear to be flat in front of our eyes, because this is the part of the vault which curves from vertical to horizontal. As we look up they are effectively on a curving diagonal at right angles to our direction of vision: we could equally well be looking at right angles to the vertical wall. But what that means for Jonah is that he is leaning back on a piece of vaulting which is actually curving forward – and as a feat of foreshortening this is unparalleled. I think Condivi, who wrote his biography of Michelangelo in 1553, put it better. When praising the prophets and sibyls he said,

But marvellous beyond all of them is the Prophet Jonah, placed at the head of the vault. This is for the reason that against the plane of this vault and through the power of light and shadow, the torso, which is foreshortened to recede inwards, is in the part which is nearer to the eye, and the legs which project forwards are in the part farther away. A stupendous work , and one which makes clear how much knowledge this man had of principles and the use of line in creating foreshortenings and perspectives.

Not only that – but Jonah is a true giant, but one so far away that you can’t possibly measure how big he really is. Gianluigi Collalucci can help us. He was a paintings conservator most famed for his work on the Sistine Chapel between 1980 and 1994. This is photograph of him next to Jonah. Enough said. Just as well, you say, but sadly I won’t have time to go into every figure with this much detail on Monday!

167 – Looking back, moving on

Tom Hunter, Woman Reading a Possession Order, 1997. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

I don’t think I’ve written about a photograph before (correct me if I’m wrong), but this one is rather beautiful, and featured in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition Reframed: The Woman in the Window to which I will be returning this Monday, 29 September to finish my talk from a few weeks back. It turned out that there is just too much there to talk about in one session. The exhibition is a rich and endlessly rewarding investigation of a ubiquitous motif, and this week I will be focussing on the photographic and ‘modern’ works which are on display. The following week I will start my four-part series Almost All of Michelangelo – as ever, each part will be an independent talk, so you don’t have to sign up for all four! You can find details on the diary page, together with information about two in-person talks for Art History Abroad at the National Gallery on 23 September and 20 October. And for anyone who missed my series on sculpture, I am condensing it into two 90-minute online talks for the Watts Gallery at 11am on 5 and 12 September – again, details are in the diary. But today, a photograph from the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum which I have seen not only in the current exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery but previously at the National Gallery and the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden: you’ll see why very quickly. I did talk about it briefly in Part 1 of Women Seeing… but I’ve learnt a lot more about it since.

A woman stands in a shabby room looking down at a piece of folded paper held between her hands. In front of her is a dirty sash window, which sheds light on her, and on a baby lying on a blue cloth on a table in the foreground of the photograph. This table would block our access to her if we were physically present. Under the blue cloth is what appears to be a rug, rucked up like the broad folds of the blue cloth. The baby, wearing blue trousers and a red top with matching socks, lies on its back with its arms spread out. The top of its head is brilliantly illuminated, the light also catching its right cheek, which tells us that its gaze is turned, deliberately or by chance, towards the woman, who is, by implication, its mother. The walls of the room are painted off-white at the bottom, and a dull orangey-yellow above. The join is at the level of the cross-bar of the sash window. If the woman were to lift her head from the paper, it would be at her eye-level. Two brackets support a simple shelf, which is attached to the back wall with three undefined objects resting on it, two at the left, and one, almost ‘off screen’, at the right. There appear to be nails in the wall, and something, possible a picture, hanging to the far right.

I find the quality of the light really beautiful – it creates an atmosphere of profound calm. A surprising number of people used to doubt photography’s status as art, and perhaps some still do, their attitude based on the misunderstanding that it is ‘merely reproduction’ and that ‘anyone can do it’. But then anyone can paint with oils on canvas. However, in this case, I think the way in which the model has been posed to catch a very specific fall of light is just one of the aspects of the work which reveal Tom Hunter’s artistry. Notice how the light falls directly onto the model’s face and hands, which, as a result, are the brightest elements here, meaning that we focus on them. It falls tangentially across the paper, ensuring that the paper stsand out, but does not pull focus from the hands and face. The dull green top also catches direct light, though interrupted in places by the window frame, and models the form from a light, olive green on the left to deep shadow, almost black, on the right, where it is crisply defined against the off-white wall. I find the model’s expression indefinable. She is deep in thought, undoubtedly, but whether this is good news or bad does not yet appear to have sunk in. Having said that, we are told by the title of the photograph: Woman Reading a Possession Order. This is how the work is currently exhibited in the Dulwich Picture Gallery:

To the far left is a post card by Oscar Kokoschka entitled Woman at a Window, made for the Wiener Werkstätte in 1908. Like our photograph it is on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum. On the far right is Gerrit Dou’s A Woman Playing a Clavichord, from about 1665, in Dulwich’s own collection. Each has a white label, whereas our piece has three additional elements associated with it: a white label, which also has an image on it; a grey panel (‘Another Perspective’ on the work, written by a perceptive student from a local school); and a mounted and framed piece of paper. This is the last of these:

It would appear to be the very possession order of the title, the paper which the woman is holding in the photograph. However, there are no visible folds. Initially I thought that it must have been ironed, but I went back to Dulwich yesterday to catch the exhibition one last time – and get some better photographs of some of the works for Monday’s talk – which meant I could check the label: this turns out to be a photocopy of the original. Nevertheless, it reveals that what we are looking at in the photograph is not a fiction. The paper is inscribed in (photocopied) pen at the top ‘ORIGINAL SUMMONS’ and bears three official stamps, one of which is dated 17 JAN 1997. The text starts,

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE

THE QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION

IN THE MATTER OF LAND AND PREMISES KNOWN AS 8, LONDON LANE, LONDON E8 AND IN THE MATTER OF 0. 113 RSC

BETWEEN:

THE MAYOR AND BURGESSES OF
THE LONDON BOROUGH OF HACKNEY

and

PERSONS UNKNOWN

There is more, of course, but I’ll leave it there, as we have got to the title of a series of photographs Tom Hunter took in 1997: Persons Unknown. Curiously, as I headed out to Dulwich yesterday there was a man outside my local pub, which, since I arrived here twenty years ago has closed three times and only re-opened twice. For the last three of four years it has been a squat. The man was affixing an equivalent possession order to the door of the pub, similarly addressed to ‘Persons Unknown’.  At the time Tom Hunter took his photograph he was in his last year at the Royal College of Art, and living in a squat in Hackney – 8, London Lane, as specified above – when he, together with the other squatters, were sent a summons for a hearing at which the Mayor and Burgesses would put forward their claim for re-possession of the premises. They were being evicted, and Hunter made this event the subject of his work, using his fellow squatters as his models. I don’t know what your experience of, or feelings about squatting are, but there is a rather lovely video on the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s website with a discussion between Hunter and his model, dancer Filipa Pereira-Stubbs, about their memories of the squat, what they thought they were giving to the community, and of the photo shoot. You can find it via this link on YouTube. She was 27 at the time, and 25 years later she still has the same poise and beauty. And, of course, her daughter Saskia is now more-or-less the age that she was when this photo was taken. From the whole sequence of portraits, both of individuals and groups, this particular image won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait award in 1998, and has been widely exhibited since. But why has it been shown in the galleries I mentioned? If you haven’t recognised it already, the answer is given by the image on the white label next to this work in the exhibition, which you can see (just about) in the photo above.

This is Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657-9), from the collection of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. This particular version is the one that Hunter and Pereira would have known in 1997. He gave her a book of Vermeer’s paintings to choose which one they would interpret, and this was the one she went for. He was then incredibly rigorous, insisting that they get the exact pose – the tilt of the head, the precise level of the hands – and so on. In the original, the table which blocks our access has a rumpled carpet, but no baby, although there is a bowl of fruit: a different symbol of fertility. For Vermeer there is a curtain, but no real change in colour on the walls – although there does appear to be a darker patch above and behind the woman’s head, at the level of her eye line. Vermeer’s window is open, Pereira’s closed. Both are assessing the news, with Pereira deciding what to do next. For this reason, perhaps, there is a greater focus on the figure, with less space given over to the blank wall. However, let’s look back to the exhibition in Dulwich.

Even on this small scale, you may notice that the Vermeer as illustrated does not appear to be the same as the reproduction I have shown you. An X-ray of the painting taken in 1979 showed that the dark patch on the wall was covering another image. It was believed back then that Vermeer himself had painted over it. However, when they started to clean the Vermeer just four or five years ago, the conservator involved soon noticed that the paint in this dark patch was responding very differently to that on the rest of the surface. A tiny sample of the paint (which you would only ever take from a part of the painting that was already cracked, in case you were worried) was examined in cross-section. This revealed that the painting had been varnished, and a substantial layer of dirt had built up on top of the varnish, before the image was then painted over. This implies that Vermeer himself had not done it. Indeed, it was probably done after the original painting had got quite dirty: the colour of the wall for the overpainting was matched to the dirty paint of the original section of the wall. When it was subsequently cleaned, the original colour would have been revealed on the original bit of wall, but not on the overpaint, hence the dark patch. An international conference of Vermeer experts and conservators then made the incredibly brave decision to remove the overpaint (the original varnish was acting as a safety net!), and this is what they found:

As they knew from the 1979 X-ray, an entire painting of Cupid had been covered over. It’s not entirely clear when this was done, but probably in the first half of the 18th Century, just before the painting was acquired for the Dresden collection. The presence of the little god of love suggests that the woman is reading a love letter. Her lover is in all probability far away – in the ‘outside world’, hence the open window. It is this restored version that is illustrated on the label, and comes with a suggestion in the catalogue that the baby in the photograph is effectively the result of Cupid’s action. This is not inaccurate, even if it is not what Hunter or Pereira would have known or been influenced by.

The photograph of the Vermeer above shows how the painting is currently exhibited – I am very grateful to Mark Haimann for tracking it down for me. The bottom of the curtain hangs just above the picture frame, suggesting it is not meant to be in the room with the woman, but hanging in front of the painting itself – a trompe l’oeil game implying that Vermeer was good enough to trick us into pulling it back further to see more of the hidden image. I am also interested in what the painting looks like without the frame.

Look at the very bottom right corner of the painting: a rounded shape tells us that there was originally going to be a large Dutch glass, known as a roemer, standing on a shelf in the foreground, out of proportion with everything in the painting. You might just be able to see the ghostly outline of the rest of the glass through the curtain above the base. The implication would have been that the roemer was in our space, on a shelf in front of the painting, which might originally have been set into a perspective box. Vermeer changed his mind, though, and replaced it with the curtain. In the 17th Century paintings in the Netherlands (and elsewhere) were often protected by curtains like this, hanging, it would seem, from rails attached to the frame (just like this one pretends to be). When painted, as well as showing us Vermeer’s skill, it also tells us how learned he was: it is a reference to a story Pliny told about a competition between two artists. Parrhasius, who won the competition, painted a curtain which his rival Zeuxis tried to pull back to reveal a painting – not realising that the curtain was the painting. Having tricked a fellow painter, Parrhasius must surely have been the better artist. All this is coincidental when considering Hunter and Pereira’s beautiful – and, I think, meaningful – collaboration. But it is because Vermeer was such a great artist, who showed an interest in the life of his community, that Hunter chose him – and that Pereira chose this particular image – to be reinterpreted. And, of course, it is precisely because I get easily side-tracked like this that I am giving a second talk, Women Looking 2… on Monday!

166 – From C- to Sea

Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos, 1946. Tate.

As so often, things have turned out to be more complicated than I expected – and that refers not just to today’s post, but also to what, exactly, I’m going to be doing in September. This much is settled: on Monday 22 August I will be giving a talk entitled Negative Spaces 3: Barbara Hepworth, as an introduction to the work of one of Britain’s greatest sculptors, and in parallel with the superb, touring exhibition Life and Work which is currently at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. The following week, I will return to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, with Women Looking 2… Then, as I’m not sure what September holds, and I’m not sure how much travelling and seeing I’ll be able to do, I am going to revive a 4-part course I did for the National Gallery a while back. This will be different to my usual Monday talks, as each one will last 2 hours: for the four Mondays in September, (starting on the fifth) I aim to talk about Almost All of Michelangelo. You can find links to book for each individual talk on the diary page… But for today, I would like to look at one of my favourite Hepworth sculptures, and maybe untangle the strings that tie her to Naum Gabo, the subject of last week’s post.

Pelagos 1946 Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 Presented by the artist 1964 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00699

I’d like to start by taking you on a walk around the sculpture, without telling you anything about it, apart from what I see. Admittedly this is led by what I already know is there, but I’ll try to keep my observations to the purely visual. The title, Pelagos, is in the heading above, but I will tell you that Pelagos is one of the Greek words for ‘sea’: this might influence your own interpretation of what we are looking at, which I would strongly encourage. In some ways I want to try and approximate the possibilities of ‘slow looking’ – and at each stage you might want to consider what images or ideas – if any – the sculpture evokes for you. Starting, almost at random, from this particular viewpoint (above), we can see a hollowed out form, which is more-or-less spherical, sitting on top of a rectangular wooden base. As it happens, it is ovoid, but we’d probably need to measure it, or move around (as we shall), to make this clear. Like the base this ovoid is carved from wood, which is left visible on the exterior, while the interior is painted a light colour – white, or bluish-grey. There are two projections, or arms, which curve around, with squarish, but rounded ends. They are joined together seven times by a string which is threaded through holes in the two ‘tongues’.

Pelagos 1946 Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 Presented by the artist 1964 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00699

Moving to our right – anti-clockwise around the sculpture – it is perhaps more obvious that the arms are carved out of a single form, but presumably have a gap between them. Seen square on to the long side of the base, the arms reach the same distance across the central void. The exterior of the ovoid is polished, but not highly: it has a matte sheen.

Pelagos 1946 Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 Presented by the artist 1964 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00699

The arm which is further back here is far more curved than the other, which is why it appeared lower down in the previous image. The grain of the wood and its sheen are more evident here.

Pelagos 1946 Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 Presented by the artist 1964 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00699

Seen flat on to one of the short sides of the base, it is clearer that the two arms are curling round and in, and the distance between the two – which is not that great – becomes more obvious. What I described as the ‘lower’ arm is also the ‘upper one’, the result of its greater curvature – the other arm is far more ‘open’, or less curved. The long diagonal formed by the light interior – from top left to bottom right here – implies that the right side of the sculpture (seen from this point of view) appears more open. At the top, between the arms, the paint looks to be pale blue, whereas below and to the right it looks lighter: this is presumably the effect of the shadow higher up.

Pelagos 1946 Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 Presented by the artist 1964 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00699

This side of the sculpture is indeed more open, and the painted interior forms a backdrop to the wood of more convoluted arm. The smooth curves of the interior overlap to create a point: remember this in relationship to the drawing which I will show you below.

Pelagos 1946 Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 Presented by the artist 1964 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00699

Seen flat on to the second long side of the base, the negative space created by the two arms takes on its full value, and could be seen as being held in place by the arms. The more open one is hardly visible here, although the strings indicate its position. The more convoluted arm defines three concentric loops – the wooden exterior, the border between the wood and the paint, and the negative space within the paint. It has to be said that Hepworth herself might not have been too keen on these particular photographs – placing the sculpture against a plain, white background takes away the value of the space: something should be seen through every hole. She frequently photographed her sculptures – even the wooden ones – in her garden, thus giving them a place in the world and in our appreciation of it. I’ll leave the last two images for you to describe for yourselves.

Pelagos 1946 Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 Presented by the artist 1964 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00699
Pelagos 1946 Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 Presented by the artist 1964 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00699

More about the physicality of the sculpture: the materials are given, both on the Tate website and in Eleanor Clayton’s superb book Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life (which accompanies the exhibition) as ‘Elm and strings on oak base’. There is no mention of the paint, even though a work from more-or-less the same period, Wave, is described as being made of ‘wood, paint and string’. The paint was originally pale blue, which presumably relates to the title, Pelagos, or ‘Sea’. However, Hepworth often had problems with blue paint, as it often faded. In the end she decided that the matte quality of the paint was more important than the colour, contrasting as it did with the sheen of the wood. At one point the interior was even repainted white. Eleanor Clayton, who is also the curator of the exhibition, tells us, when speaking of Wave, that, ‘The strings are fishing line, connecting materially with the sea and the human community whose livelihoods are bound up with this elemental force’. Given that our sculpture is also called ‘sea’ – albeit in Greek – I am sure that fishing line was used again. It is undoubtedly relevant that Hepworth was living in Cornwall, and near to the coast, at the time the sculpture was made. She described the view from her studio, ‘looking straight towards the horizon of the sea and enfolded (but with always the escape for the eye straight out to the Atlantic) by the arms of the land to the left and right of me’ – which makes Pelagos look less like an abstract sculpture than an accurate description of the landscape. Indeed, Hepworth description was completed with the phrase, ‘I have used this idea in Pelagos’.

In addition to this landscape-inspired interpretation of the sculpture, a statement written for a retrospective exhibition of her work in 1954 – eight years after Pelagos was made – includes Hepworth’s summation of three different ‘types’ of sculpture which had long been important to her. Of these, the third was,

… ‘the closed form’, such as the oval, spherical or pierced form (sometimes incorporating colour) which translates for me the association of meaning of gesture in landscape; in the repose of say a mother & child, or the feeling of the embrace of living things, either in nature or in the human spirit.

So, as well as being an image of the landscape, it is also an expression of the relationship between people. Perhaps the two arms of the sculpture could be seen as two arms reaching around a central space, embracing a void – like the gap that parents feel when children leave them. Look back at the pictures above – there is one I find particularly reminiscent of a ‘mother & child’, and I’d be interested to hear if you see that too. But where do the strings fit into this? Well, we all have invisible ties to people and places. Hepworth herself stated that they represent ‘the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills,’ but, like everything else, they are open to more than one interpretation, and refer to more than one ‘tension’. It is all, in some way, related to our experience here on Earth. For this very reason, the base is important. It is not a subsidiary element, but an essential part of the sculpture – the ovoid form, the arms, the strings – everything is seen in relationship to this flat rectangle, everything is part of a specific environment.  

And what of the question hanging over from last week? What is the relationship to the work of Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo? Well, it’s simply the string really. As I said last week, Gabo arrived in London in 1935, and moved to Carbis Bay in Cornwall shortly after his friends Barbara Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson moved there in 1939. It was at that point that he started using nylon thread in his sculptures. The first was Linear Construction No. 1 of 1942-3. I included an illustration last week, but here it is again for good measure.

Linear Construction No. 1 1942-3 Naum Gabo 1890-1977 Presented by Miss Madge Pulsford 1958 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00191

There are several versions and variants of this piece, all of which seem to have more or less the same date. It is called ‘linear’ construction, because of the straight lines made by the nylon filament. Seen together, these become tangents to a virtual curved line. In the 1930s Hepworth and Nicholson became active members of the European avant garde, and became particularly associated with the Constructivist movement. In 1937 the book Circle: International Survey of Constructivist Art was published in London. Its editors were none other than Naum Gabo and Ben Nicholson, together with architect Leslie Martin, while Hepworth designed the layout, as well as being responsible for the production of the book and writing one of the essays. At the time her sculptures had names like Three Forms (1935), Ball, Plane and Hole (1936) and Pierced Hemisphere (1937) – entirely abstract titles. On moving to Carbis Bay in 1939 things started to change. In part, this was the result of the war – materials were not readily available, and she was left with full responsibility for looking after her four children, leaving precious little time to work – and precious little material to work with. When she could grab a moment she would draw. Here, for example, is Oval Form No. 2, from 1942:

Many of the drawings executed at this time were titled Drawing for Sculpture. These were not plans for sculptures as such, but explorations of the possibilities of three dimensional forms. I have chosen this example because it considers the inner geometry of an oval, as many of them do. If you look back, you’ll see that some of the overlapping curves in this drawing are not unlike some of the views of Pelagos above. Notice how, in a Constructivist way, she builds the drawings from separate lines and geometric shapes. Notice too, that two of the curves are constructed from overlapping straight lines. There is every possibility that this work precedes Gabo’s sculpture (the drawing is dated 1942, Linear Construction No. 1 is 1942-3), rather than being inspired by it. As it happens, there are plenty of drawings from 1941 using similar ideas. And anyway, Hepworth used string for the first time in a piece called Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red), which she completed in 1940. So maybe it is not Gabo influencing Hepworth, but the other way round? However, I should show you two other works, both by Gabo: Sphere Construction of a Fountain and Construction in Space (Crystal), dated 1937 and 1937-9 respectively.

The former, as far as I am aware, has not survived, while the latter is just about holding on in the Tate collection. Gabo used new materials, not all of which have stood the test of time. Cellulose acetate in particular – from which these two were made – is not as stable as was initially believed. Both use threads of some form. Gabo had also incised lines into his plastics. He didn’t start using nylon thread until 1939, perhaps, but ‘lines’ had been an element of his work for some time before this. What we are seeing is a shared idea, a common interest, a new way of defining space through line, and, as in one of the interpretations of Pelagos, the fact that both Hepworth and Gabo used ‘string’ of one form or another is as much an indicator of their artistic relationship as anything else. However, it is also an indicator of the differences between them. Hepworth was profoundly affected by living in Cornwall, and, having been an avid Constructivist in London, in 1946 she wrote to her friend Margaret Gardiner, ‘I hope my work will always be constructive but I don’t want to be called a “c-ist” any more than “Nicholson”’. By the time she was fully settled into Cornwall, the titles of her works changed: Wave (1943-4), Landscape Sculpture (1944) and Pelagos (1946) are just three examples. Her art was always part and parcel of her lived experience – hence the title of Eleanor Clayton’s book and exhibition – and that applies to the works with abstract titles as well as those with more lyrical, picturesque names. And there are plenty more! On Monday I’m planning to talk about several which are not in the Edinburgh exhibition, hence my comment in the first paragraph that my talk is ‘in parallel’ with the exhibition, rather than an introduction to it, as other talks in this series have been… just so you’re warned!

165 – Sculpture Ban

Naum Gabo, Revolving Torsion, Fountain, 1972-3. Tate, on loan to St Thomas’ Hospital, London.

OK, I’m not suggesting that art has been censored here, but as a fantastic embodiment of Naum Gabo’s art, his Revolving Torsion, Fountain, on long term loan from Tate to St Thomas’ Hospital, has probably been switched off in line with the hosepipe bans which are (or should be) in place by now, given the imminent, if not current, drought. It is, after all, a fountain, and as much as fountains are highly decorative, they are also a profligate use of water. Having said that, when I have walked over Westminster Bridge and past St Thomas’, the fountain has only sometimes been working, but I don’t know if there is any rhyme or reason for this. I want to look at it today only partly because I am interested in the use of water as a sculptural medium, but also because its ethos is related to the work of Barbara Hepworth, the subject of my next talk (Monday 22 August at 6pm). The following week I will return to Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition, The Woman in the Window, for the cut-price part 2 of my introduction Women Looking… I’m also looking forward to more talks ‘in person’ at the National Gallery for Art History Abroad. They will introduce the Winslow Homer and Lucien Freud exhibitions, on 23 September and 20 October respectively, and you can read more about those on the diary page of my website. I will repeat these talks online for those who aren’t free on those dates, or can’t make it to London, and will let you know the dates as soon as they are fixed. Sadly I can no long go on the trip to Porto this year, but AHA will be announcing next year’s tour schedule soon.

So just what is it about this fountain that is relevant to Barbara Hepworth? Before we can answer that, it would help to look at Gabo’s work, so that we know what we are talking about. Resting on a circular base is a geometric, stainless steel framework defined by straight and curvilinear elements. Numerous jets of water issue from the inner curves of the form, projecting both into and out of the sculptural structure. These jets create lines in space, a bit like a three-dimensional drawing, and they break into individual droplets, an impressionistic spray. The concave unit which faces towards us in this photograph is made up of three identical elements, almost triangular, but with the same segment of a circle cut out of each, which are welded together along the straight edges. There are more units exactly the same which go together to form a fourth projecting axis at the back of the framework. At the top the two projecting elements – flared, and looking a little like arrow heads – are braced by a slim, curving piece which you might just be able to see has a kink in it. There is a similar brace at right-angles to this one going across the bottom of the form. The framework is supported by two elements which spiral up from the circular base: the nearest lower projection is held up by one which comes in from the bottom left, and the back lower projection is supported by a unit which starts just behind the front centre (from this point of view) and slopes up to the right of the base. Of course, the best way to see this framework would be to walk around it, but it would take a lot to get you all there. However, I can help by showing you a photograph of a sculpture Gabo made some 35-40 years early, which is also part of Tate’s collection:Torsion, from 1928-36.

Torsion 1928-36 Naum Gabo 1890-1977 Presented by the artist 1977 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T02146

Made out of plastics (polymethyl methacrylate and cellulose acetate, according to Tate’s website), the sculpture espouses Gabo’s belief in using modern materials for a modern age. As most of the materials are transparent, it allows us to see the whole form, without the sculpture itself getting in the way, with the reflection and refraction of light – off and through the transparent form – turning the edges of the piece into a three-dimensional drawing, just like the jets of water in the fountain. The form of the sculpture is essentially the same as that of the fountain, with four of the cut-out triangular elements stuck together, creating four of the arrow-head projections. In this work we can see that the kink in the slim braces at the top and bottom are made of rectangular elements – opaque black here – and that, like the braces, the two black rectangles are at 90˚ to one another. The sculpture – and fountain – use a form of  symmetry regularly adopted by Gabo. For me, the best way to explain it is to ask you to touch the tips of your fingers and thumbs together so that your hands form a broad, curving dome, then twist one hand a bit towards you and the other a bit away. You could then put them together so that they meet between thumb and forefinger – but don’t. This is the symmetry: a mirror image with a 90 degree rotation. It sounds rather mathematical – and it is. The beauty of the geometry, and its mapping of space, is exactly what Gabo wanted. As he said in his Realistic Manifesto in 1920, ‘we construct our work as the universe constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of the orbits’.

Head No. 2 1916, enlarged version 1964 Naum Gabo 1890-1977 Purchased 1972 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T01520

In 1916 he had made his Head No. 2 from cardboard, but this version (like everything else today, in the Tate collection) is an enlargement of the original, made in 1964 from cor-ten steel. The shape and volume of the head are mapped out by the edges of two-dimensional planar elements. The fact that it is put together – rather than carved or modelled – was also an innovation: Gabo was one of the first ‘Constructivists’, putting their works together, as the name suggests, from separate elements. He published the Realistic Manifesto with his brother, Antoine Pevsner (Gabo had changed his name to avoid confusion), and as part of it they established five ‘fundamental principals’. In the fourth they stated, ‘We renounce in sculpture, the mass as a sculptural element… we take four planes and we construct with them the same volume as of four tons of mass’. The volume that Head No. 2 occupies is not defined by the solid mass of, say, marble or bronze, but by the planes from which it is constructed. It was the definition of space which really interested them. They had already covered this in their third principal: ‘We renounce volume as a pictorial and plastic form of space; one cannot measure Space in volumes as one cannot measure liquid in yards: look at our space. . . what is it if not one continuous depth?’ Admittedly, with Head No. 2 the depth is not continuous – the planes of cardboard (1916) or steel (1964) get in the way. Not so with the plastic of Torsion, where the transparency allows you to see the continuous space, and to appreciate fully the volume which the piece occupies.

Linear Construction No. 1 1942-3 Naum Gabo 1890-1977 Presented by Miss Madge Pulsford 1958 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00191

This can also be seen in Tate’s Linear Construction No. 1 of 1942-3. Made from the same colourless transparent plastic as Torsion (polymethyl methacrylate), it also utilises nylon thread, and embodies Herbert Read’s statement that Gabo’s work hovered ‘between the visible and the invisible’. Gabo was born Naum Pevsner in Briansk, Russia in 1890. Staring in 1910 he studied medicine, and then natural sciences, and then engineering in Munich, where he met fellow-Russian Wassily Kandinsky and was intrigued by the possibilities of abstract art: he started making his constructions in 1915. He returned to Russia after the Revolution in 1917 in the hope that they would welcome his revolutionary art, but inevitably this was not to be. He left for Berlin in 1922 and a decade later headed to Paris, then on to London in 1935. Among other artists, he got to know Barbara Hepworth and her second husband Ben Nicholson, following them to Cornwall in 1939, thus escaping the capital as the nation was on the brink of war. The year after the allied victory Gabo left for the States, which is where he died in 1977. It was shortly after his arrival in Carbis Bay – very close to the more artistically ‘famous’ St Ives – that he started using nylon thread, the straight lines defining curves in space in a similar way to the definition of space itself by the edges of the planes in Head No. 2.

When looking back to Revolving Torsion, Fountain all of these ideas coalesce: the construction of a sculpture from separate elements; the definition of its volume by the edges of these elements; an appreciation of the continuity of space through, in, and around the sculpture; the jets of water creating their own, complex and changing lines as the wind, weather, and water pressure also change, in many ways equivalent to the nylon threads. And yes, the water pressure does – or should – change. From a still photograph you wouldn’t be able to tell, but the title gives a clue: this is not a static piece. Unlike Torsion, the plastic embodiment of this form from 1928-36, this is Revolving Torsion, and it does – or should – revolve a full 360˚every ten minutes. At the same time the pressure of the water – and so the projection of the jets – decreases to a minimum and returns to full every 10 minutes, two cycles of change which are synchronised.

Torsion (Project for a Fountain) 1960-4 Naum Gabo 1890-1977 Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1969 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T01171

The project for a fountain went back to the 1960s. As yet another of its remarkable collection of Gabo’s works, Tate also holds Torsion (Project for a Fountain), 1960-4. Again, the precise forms of the sculpture are far clearer here than in the photograph of the fountain, which is helpful. In 1968, four years after this maquette was completed, the then director of The Tate Gallery (as it was originally called) Sir Norman Reid, visited Gabo in his studio in the States. Gabo told him about the project, and showed him this model. Long story short: Reid made it happen. Alistair MacAlpine, since the age of 21 a director of the engineering and construction firm Sir Robert McAlpine and Sons (founded by his great-grandfather) had by this time reached the grand old age of 26. He agreed to cover all of the costs. The firm drew up detailed plans, the fountain was constructed by Stainless Metalcraft Ltd between 1972-73, and on completion McAlpine gifted it to The Tate Gallery. Two years later it was installed in its present position outside St Thomas’ Hospital, where, since 2016, it has rejoiced in its new status as a Grade II listed building.

Back in 1920 the Realistic Manifesto had proclaimed:

We say . . .
Space and time are re-born to us today.
Space and time are the only forms on which life is built and hence art must be constructed.

In 1905 Einstein had published two articles on the Theory of Special Relativity. One of the things this theory tells us is that time is a fourth dimension. Artists tried to include the fourth dimension in many ways, just as the Renaissance had developed perspective to show the third. Kinetic sculptures – sculptures which move – were just one of these strategies.

Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) 1919-20, replica 1985 Naum Gabo 1890-1977 Presented by the artist through the American Federation of Arts 1966 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00827

Gabo had introduced movement, and therefore time, with his sculpture Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) of 1919-20, just before the publication of the Realistic Manifesto itself (this photograph is of a replica from 1985). It is made from a steel rod – a solid, straight line. It is only its motion, created by a motor in the base, which makes it look curved, and almost transparent. It would be another fifty years before an equally eloquent statement of Gabo’s radical ideas would be realised with the creation of this magnificent fountain.  It may seem sadly inappropriate now, during a time of drought, but let’s hope it won’t last long… However, none of this answers my earlier question: what relevance does this have for Hepworth? Well, you’ll have to read next week’s blog… or come to the talk on Monday, 22 August!

164 – Nude, with clothes…

Glyn Philpot, A Student with a Book, 1920. Ömer Koç Collection.

Glyn Philpot is one of those artists who should never have been forgotten. There’s a long discussion in ‘The History of Art’ which asks who the last ‘Old Master’ was – but of course it’s a question which has no answer. There is also a long discussion about whether the term ‘Old Master’ really has any validity nowadays. However, you could just conceivably argue that one answer to the first question would actually be ‘Glyn Philpot’. There is certainly no doubt that for the two thirds of his career he was consciously working in the tradition of the Old Masters. Not only did he have the most brilliant technique, but he also had a superb understanding of their work – as today’s painting demonstrates. The current exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester – the first retrospective of his work in 38 years – is a brilliant introduction to the artist and his career, and I’m looking forward to talking about it this Monday, 8 August at 6pm, as part of my series Looking in Different Ways, in a talk entitled Looking at Men. Two weeks later, and still part of that series, there will be an introduction to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s comprehensive exhibition Barbara Hepworth, which fits into my subseries Negative Spaces. I thought talks for the summer would end there, but there was so much material in the Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition Reframed: The Woman in the Window, I ran out of time last week, and decided to do a cut-price sequel, Women Looking 2 – which will be on Monday 29 August at 6pm. All of these exhibitions are accompanied by superb books, rather than a ‘traditional’ catalogue. Chichester has published a monograph on Glyn Philpot – the first in 71 years – written by the curator of the exhibition, Simon Martin, who is also the director of the Pallant House Gallery – none of which is a coincidence. I can recommend it very highly – although it came out after I’d published a list of The best recent exhibition catalogues with Shepherd, a new book sales website, which might interest you.

Today’s painting was exhibited in 1920 under the title A Student with a Book next to another, The Rice Family. The student looks similar in appearance and dress to Mr and Mrs Rice’s son Bernard, and so it has long been assumed that he was the model for this work. The family had recently arrived in England from Austria: Bernard was born in 1900 in Innsbruck, and had studied drawing, painting and wood engraving even before arriving in London. The family had been interned in Austria during the First World War, and, according to the exhibition label for this painting, ‘Philpot found them accommodation in London and helped Rice to secure a place at Westminster School of Art’. Bernard went on to study at the Royal Academy Schools, but didn’t hang around: in 1922 he left for Yugoslavia, and continued to travel for much of his life, not dying until 1998.

Rice sits on a plain wooden table with a large book held open on his lap between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. Visible on the right hand page – the one which has more visual prominence when leafing through – is a monochrome image, presumably a black and white engraving. But then the painting as a whole is more-or-less monochrome, moving through a palette of ivory, creams and browns to black, with nothing quite as bright as high white, or even as dark as the deepest black. It is the palette you would associate with the late works of Leonardo, Rembrandt or Caravaggio, although the clarity of depiction is closer to the earlier, but mature phase, of the third of these. The sitter looks over his left shoulder, creating a strong twist through the body, given that his legs are angled to our left, and his head to our right. He doesn’t appear to be looking at anything, though, but remains deep in thought, maybe contemplating what he had been looking at in the book, or planning something, or maybe even musing on the past – we are not told: this, I think, is part of the allure of the work for me.

At the back right corner of the table is a still life arrangement of rectangular objects: a cuboid box with a lid and a book with a pale cover on which rests a thin, cream-coloured booklet. There is a pencil just in front of the objects, and a piece of paper tucked under the book – together with the book Rice is holding, these can be seen as some of the tools of a student artist. Formally they are also an abstraction of Rice himself – the box is equivalent to his torso, while the booklet resting on the pale book is not unlike the larger open book resting on the student’s lap. As well as echoing Rice’s form, these details also close off the composition, making sure that our eyes don’t follow his gaze. By placing the sitter’s head in the centre of the painting Philpot creates a strong pyramidal composition – a typical construction of the Renaissance and Baroque.

Philpot was a keen observer of fashion, and interested in details of clothing of any sort. The attention he pays to the turned-back left cuff of Rice’s shirt is typical, as is the precise delineation of the folds of the thin cotton of the sleeves. You should see Siegfried Sassoon’s collar in another portrait! The artist was also keenly aware of human anatomy – particularly male anatomy – but apart from his own personal interest in the subject, this was also something he’d learnt from another artist. If you look at the very specific inflection of the right wrist, which is maybe slightly exaggerated, you may recognise the major influence on this painting. But then, if you can work out what the illustration in the book represents, the inspiration is made explicit.

It’s one of Michelangelo’s Ignudi, the naked men who sit atop the imagined continuation of the walls of the Sistine Chapel and frame the outer edges of the ceiling. As nudes they must be in a state of grace (Adam and Eve only started wearing clothes after the fall), and I’ve always assumed they are Michelangelo’s representation of angels. Philpot – and the student Bernard Rice – would both have been interested in the work of the great Renaissance master, but maybe, as curator Simon Martin suggests on the exhibition label, it was also ‘a covert expression of [Philpot’s] interest in the male nude’. Even if this is the case, does that say anything about Bernard Rice? To be honest, it doesn’t really have to, given that this is not a portrait, but a character study, and doesn’t seem to have left Philpot’s possession during his lifetime. However, as Martin points out in the book, this particular ignudo also appears in the background of the Portrait of Montague Rendall, Headmaster of Winchester College – admittedly in an incredibly shadowy form.

The painting to our left of Rendall is far clearer – the prophet Daniel, also from the Sistine, who just happens to be seated above the head of our ignudo, if on the other side of the chapel (which is not far…). Given that Rendall was, presumably, a far more ‘public’ figure than Rice, it seems surprising to me that Philpot might risk expressing his own personal interests in the male form – strictly illegal if acted upon, of course – in this portrait. This in itself might explain why the representation of the ignudo is so unclear. But why choose it in the first place? There are plenty of bold, female figures to choose from: the five Sybils who alternate with the prophets, for example. It would help to know more about Rendall – or Rice, for that matter – and I’m afraid I’m still writing these posts on an extremely ad hoc basis, gradually building up endless possibilities for future research. However, I have tracked down what I believe to be an entry from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which was included on a web entry of imprecise nature. Here are just a few details. Having been awarded a first class degree in Classics at Cambridge in 1887, two years later Rendall ‘…made the first of many journeys abroad to study the masterpieces of continental art, and laid the foundations of his lifelong enthusiasm for medieval and Renaissance Italian painting. In the same year he was appointed to the staff of Winchester College.’ This could, of course, explain everything. A ‘lifelong enthusiasm for… Renaissance Italian painting’ would more than justify the inclusion of two details from the Sistine Chapel. However, the biography also makes reference to ‘his sensitive taste’, and states that he was ‘Almost resolutely unmarried’. I could be wrong to focus in on these phrases, but, as far as I’m aware, sensitivity was not a quality greatly prized in men outside of the 18th and 21st centuries, and for many years, when sexual acts between men were illegal (and for a couple of decades after they weren’t) the term ‘confirmed bachelor’ in obituaries would have been interpreted by anyone even slightly in the know as a euphemism for ‘homosexual’. It’s not as if Philpot’s own tastes were unknown. He was a member of the Official War Artists Scheme during the First World War, when he asked if could paint soldiers bathing – as Michelangelo had intended to – but his request was denied. ‘I will bet anything that Philpot suggested it because it gave him the opportunity of painting the nude,’ according to one official. There are other references in Rendall’s biography which I find intriguing, but my reasons for choosing them could all too easily be misinterpreted by the ill-disposed. Of course, I could be imagining things. It could simply be a love of the work of Michelangelo that Philpot shared with Rendall… but why include the ignudo in the first place, and then go on to disguise it? And why choose Daniel, rather than any other prophet or sybil? I’m not sure there’s any way of answering the latter question. All I know about Daniel (without re-reading the book) is that he was protected by God, and good at languages. The first could possibly be said of Rendall, and the second was certainly true. In later life he was a trustee of the BBC, and devised its motto ‘Nation shall speak peace unto Nation’, for example. Daniel was also a just judge, which would be perfect for applying discipline in a school. As the biography states, ‘In college Rendall upheld high moral standards but softened any severity by his natural sympathy for boys.’  It was Daniel who cleared Susannah of the accusations of the elders, after they had spied on her while she was bathing naked. But we must be wary of drawing too many conclusions about someone who condemned looking on naked women: we could so easily be led up the wrong garden path.

Whatever the reasons for including Daniel, or this particular ignudo, Philpot really did understand Michelangelo’s work. I remain entirely convinced that I recognise the pose of Bernard Rice. Indeed, I’ve been trying to pin it down, to see if it has an exact source, but as far as I can see it doesn’t.

Overall it is remarkably similar to the Delphic Sibyl, who also has her knees to our left, whilst looking over her left shoulder to our right. The arms are in a different position, perhaps, but if you were to lift her right arm and lower the left, they wouldn’t be far off.

I suspect I might have recognised the inflection of Rice’s right wrist from Adam’s – or Rice’s right arm as a whole from Adam’s left, stretched out towards God the Father. But then, it’s not that different from the left arm of the ignudo above, either. There is no exact source for this pose (although I am increasingly convinced that the Delphic Sibyl is a good fit), but the position of the body as a whole and the articulation of every single joint speaks of a thorough understanding of Michelangelo’s work, which has been seen, studied, appreciated, absorbed, digested, and then remade in a new way. The only real difference is in the palette – nothing like the lucid and luminous colouring of Michelangelo. But even here Philpot is being remarkably sophisticated, and subtle, I think. Michelangelo is represented in Rice’s book by a black and white engraving. Modelled on elements derived from similar reproductions, the student appears to us in all his full, three-dimensional, monochrome splendour, every bit a sculptural as a Michelangelo painting, but with the tones of the print. This is Michelangelo remade for the neo-classicism of the 1920s, a trend which has been widely ignored, unless espoused by an acknowledged master such as Picasso – until recently, that is, and with Pallant House at the forefront of its rehabilitation. However, a decade after Bernard Rice was painted, Philpot would have his own ‘Picasso’ moment. He changed direction completely, and started to embrace modernism in his own, remarkable, idiosyncratic way. But to learn more about that you would need to see the exhibition, read the book, or come to my talk on Monday! Keep looking for those sources…