145 – Me, myself, and I?

Laura Knight, Laura Knight with model, Ella Louise Naper (‘Self Portrait’), 1913. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Happy New Year! And as this is the first blog of the year, let us start with a woman who could count several ‘firsts’ to her name: Laura Knight. Or, if you prefer, Dame Laura Knight: in 1929 she was the first female artist to receive this honour. Seven years later, she was also the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy, and in in 1965 she was the first woman to have a solo exhibition there. I will be talking about her more this Monday, 10 January, as an introduction to the MK Gallery’s exhibition Laura Knight: A Panoramic View. Further talks in January will include Late Constable, some Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace and a pair of Pre-Raphaelite Sisters of Uncommon Power. As ever, the details of all of these – and other things – are on the diary page. I am also hoping to deliver some in-person visits to London museums and galleries, focussing on the National Gallery where I am most at home, but I think I’ll wait for Covid numbers to calm down a bit before I start, so… maybe in February? Watch this space! But whatever follows, let’s look at a rather brilliant painting.

It’s a remarkably original choice for any artist – a self portrait seen from behind: she is focussing on what she does, not what she looks like. Knight appears sensibly dressed, with a mid-length red jacket over a grey skirt, and what I would interpret as a striped foulard around her neck (although, as you probably realise, I am not an expert on women’s dress). As it happens, it’s not a jacket, per se, but a favourite cardigan, which she called ‘The Cornish Scarlet’. She had bought it at a jumble sale in Penzance for half a crown (or 2/6, or 12.5p, depending on your age), and it appears in a number of her paintings. Nowadays it would be classed as ‘vintage’ and cost a whole lot more. She also wears a black hat with a colourful ribbon almost hidden by the upturned brim: all respectable women should wear a hat when in public. Her hair appears to have been plaited and pinned up. If she hadn’t turned her head to the right, we wouldn’t be able to tell who she was – and it is not clear why she has turned so far: certainly not to look at the model, as she looks past her, to something out of the frame. She is holding a paint brush in her right hand, and, from the bend of her left elbow, we can imagine that she is holding a palette in her left. The model, who is completely naked, stands with her back to us on a striped rug, which is itself on a raised platform. While her feet are more or less parallel to the picture plane, she is turned to the left, allowing us a partial view of one breast. She raises her arms around her head, with her right and left hands resting on her hair and right arm respectively. Behind her is a red screen – maybe a folding screen, although the right-angled section to the left has a trim not seen in the plain vermillion area behind her – this could even be a brighter cloth hanging over the screen, but the construction is not entirely clear. In front of it, though, to the left, and behind the image of the artist, is the canvas that Knight is currently working on. Having seen the model herself, here we see her painted image, and, to the left of her, the part of the red screen that the artist has completed so far.

The inflection of Knight’s right wrist means that her hand is held away from her hip, so that she will not get paint on her skirt. It also serves to draw attention to this hand, and to the gold ring on the fourth finger. It looks like a wedding band, even if it is on the right hand (I don’t think she was looking in a mirror to see what her own back looked like: the clothing itself does not reflect her appearance, and she may well have got someone else, possibly even the same model, to model for the back – so I don’t think that this is her left hand as seen in a mirror). She was born Laura Johnson in 1877, taking her husband’s name when she married artist Harold Knight in 1903, at the age of 26. They were both born in Nottingham, and met at the Nottingham School of Art, where Laura’s mother taught.

In some of her early works she experimented with the pointilliste technique of George Seurat, and she continued to return to it when it suited her – as it does here in the separately coloured brushstrokes which define ‘The Cornish Scarlet’. In this case, the brushstrokes are perhaps closer to the Impressionist tache (meaning blot, patch or stain) – a short, broad mark which emphasizes the making of the image. The brushstrokes do not allow us to confuse the painting of the cardigan for the thing itself, it is undoubtedly a painting. What you are looking at, the brushstrokes say, is the work of an artist. How appropriate that she uses this technique as part of her own image, given that she is the person who made it.

If the depiction of herself – or at least of her clothing – focusses on colour, the depiction of the model is all about form. Look how the precise tonal shifts tell us the exact structure of the feet, the slight lift of the right heel from the rug, the width of the Achilles tendon, and the structures of the muscles and the backs of the knees.

Looking at this detail I am more convinced that there is a cloth hanging over the screen – the vermillion appears to wrap around the dark frame. And the painting of this cloth is entirely different to that of the cardigan – extremely ‘painterly’, with long, broad, flowing brushstrokes painted wet-on-wet and blending in with each other. Although not part of the image that she has painted of herself, the use of a different ‘style’ of painting is surely another way in which she is inviting us to enjoy her skills as an artist, demonstrating as it does her ability to choose the brushstroke according to the nature of the material she is representing: here the vermillion cloth is broad, and flows downwards, just like the paint. The subtle but precise modulation of flesh tones continues, defining the curve of the spine and flexion of the muscles, as well as delineating the model’s long, slim fingers. Compared with the impressionistic image seen in Knight’s unfinished painting of the model, this might start to appear like photorealism – but the brushstrokes never let us forget that it is a painting. The canvas she is working on is still clearly unfinished, though. She may have started to paint the model’s shadow on the screen, but not the lit area: the white background remains, and is precisely what allows Knight’s bold profile to stand out so clearly.

When first exhibited in 1913, at the Passmore Edwards Art Gallery in Newlyn, Cornwall (where the Knights were then living), this self portrait – then called The Model – was well received. But later it was apparently turned down by the Royal Academy for their Summer Exhibition, and instead was seen in London at the Grosvenor Gallery, where reviews were mixed, to say the least. The Telegraph Critic, Claude Phillips, called it ‘harmless’ and ‘dull’ (which it is not!) – but he seems to have been in two minds, as he also called it ‘vulgar’, saying that it ‘repels’. As a work which, he had decided, was ‘obviously an exercise’, he thought it ‘might quite appropriately have stayed in the artist’s studio’. So what was his problem with it?

I think that if we focus on this central section we might get a good idea. One of the first things to remember was that women had little or no access to life drawing classes. At Nottingham, the men and women (or girls – Knight studied there for around six years from the age of 13) had been segregated, and the women did not draw from the nude. The model in this painting is Laura’s friend, and fellow artist in Newlyn, Ella Louise Naper. So for one thing, this is a bold statement declaring that women should receive the same education as men. However, the way it is painted also creates some surprising juxtapositions. The light comes from the left – you can see Naper’s shadow on the screen to her right – and, given that Knight turns to the right, her profile is entirely in shadow. However, it still stands out clearly thanks to the brightly illuminated canvas. The negative space created by the artist’s profile – the brilliant white patch of canvas – is similar in form to the equivalent area in red around the model’s left side, with a startling echo from Knight’s nose to Naper’s breast. And, as Naper is standing on a platform, her brightly-lit buttocks are more or less on a level with Knight’s shadowy face, surely enough to make any self-respecting (male) critic blush.

As a whole, the contrast between the two women is intriguing. One clothed, the other naked; one has both arms down, the other up; the artist on the left is turned to the right, the model on the right is turned to the left. Their poses echo each other, inverting only the arms, with Naper’s right arm hiding her profile. Laura Knight, despite the shadow on her face, is the one we can identify, but the various echoes and inversions could lead us to think about substituting one figure for another, reminding us, perhaps, that the artist herself could easily look like this if she weren’t wearing clothes. I suspect it is this that made men uneasy. It was one thing for them to paint naked women – they could tell the difference between artist and subject, but in this painting, the difference is not so clear. That, and the fact that Knight’s acknowledged skill was clearly a threat to their supremacy, of course.

One last question: what painting is Knight actually working on? We know that it is not finished, but we only see part of it. Nevertheless, what we do see is entirely consistent with the idea that the work she is painting is the finished self portrait itself, if we assume that we only see around 40% of it – the section which includes the vermillion cloth. Laura Knight herself is taking a break from painting herself painting herself painting a model – her painted image in this painted image is beyond the frame. Having said that, I do have a sneaking suspicion that she would finish the red screen first.

This complexly-conceived portrait is not in the exhibition in Milton Keynes, but there are many more remarkable paintings which are: do try and get to see them in person! But if you can’t, I will be talking about many of them on Monday. One of them – one of her masterpieces, I think – is Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring. As Zoom is not very good with videos I won’t be able to show you a wonderful newsreel clip from 1943, so click on the link in blue if you want to do some homework! If nothing else, it’s worth watching to see Knight being handed a cigarette by the presenter, and both of them lighting up in the Summer Exhibition itself. Not to mention, of course, how remarkably accurate her portrait of Loftus is. But more about that on Monday – I do hope you can join me!

144 – Make a joyful noise

Geertgen tot Sint Jans, The Glorification of the Virgin, about 1490-95. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

I have a new favourite artist (those of you who follow me on Instagram might have noticed), although sadly a dozen of his works seem to have survived, maybe a couple more or less. This does mean that I can look at all of them when I offer Some Light for the Solstice this Tuesday, 21 December – the Solstice itself. That will be the last talk this year, and I’ll start again with Laura Knight on Monday, 10 January. That week, on the Thursday, I will also talk about Dürer and the Art of the Garden for my friends at Art History Abroad. As ever, as well as these links, details are (or in this case, will be shortly) in the diary. For those at the Dürer talk last week I said I’d come up with some book suggestions. Have a look at those listed on this UK Bookshop link – I’d recommend the book edited by Christof Metzger (the one with the big, coloured wing) and Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s volume in the Phaidon Art & Ideas series (white, with a Hare).

My new hero is none other than Geertgen tot Sint Jans, an artist whose name, which seems unpronounceable (unless you are Dutch, of course), must have contributed to his relative lack of fame. Well that, and the fact that so few of his works have survived, of course. We know almost nothing about him, but what there is I will go into on Tuesday. For anyone who has joined me recently after my talk for Members of the National Gallery, first of all: welcome! And then, yes, this is more or less the same talk, but somewhat edited, with extra added paintings – but you have heard most of it before! The focus for the talk will be the National Gallery’s Nativity at Night, but today I’d like to have a close look at what may be a small painting (it measures 24.5 x 20.5 cm, smaller than an A4 sheet of paper – or for that matter, smaller than US letter size, if you’re over there), but it is, nevertheless, one of the noisiest I know.

The painting is a Madonna and Child, a common-enough subject, but it is unlike any other I have seen, even if it does draw on familiar elements. Mary, dressed almost entirely in red, as she often is in the North of Europe, holds the Christ Child in her arms as they both look down to our left. They are surrounded by a brilliant glow of light which gradually diminishes in a series of concentric oval forms, leaving the corners of the painting in deepest darkness. Jesus truly is, in the words of Simeon during the Presentation at the Temple, ‘A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel,’ (Luke 2:32). Neither the light nor dark is uninhabited, though – imagery is spread across the surface. Mary is poised on a crescent moon, although we cannot see how (this is a vision, after all) – it could be that she stands behind it, with her legs disappearing in the celestial effulgence. Her red robes fall over the moon, with a creature clinging on underneath. We are seeing how the Virgin Mary was associated with the Woman of the Apocalypse, ‘a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars,’ (Revelation 12:1), the description which would be used to furnish the iconography for images of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (for a full explanation, if you still need one, see Picture Of The Day 71 and POTD 72). This was a doctrine particularly associated with the Franciscans (in the 15th Century at least, when this painting was made), although elsewhere in the painting there is evidence that it might be better associated with the Dominicans.

Mary does not wear a ‘crown of twelve stars’ though (this was interpreted as referring to the twelve apostles – or for that matter, the twelve tribes of Israel, between them representatives of the ‘gentiles’ and ‘thy people Israel’), but a very elegant, filigree, medieval crown which, in essence, is very similar to the Crown of an English Queen in the Munich Residenz. It rests on a garland of roses – a single red one at the front is then flanked by a number of white (five, maybe?) before another red, and so on, to form a ring – not unlike a rosary. Now, as it happens (though not by coincidence), to the left and right of the holy couple, in the middle, orange/red ‘sphere’, we can see an angel on either side who is holding a rosary. These are made of a number of red beads separated by larger white beads: the connection to Mary’s garland is made clear by the use of identical – if inverted – colours. There was a ‘Confraternity of the Rosary’ in Haarlem, the city in which Geertgen worked. He painted an altarpiece for them which is now lost, although the composition is known through copies: I may have time to look at those on Tuesday. Today’s painting could be another commission associated with that Confraternity, or with one of its members. We simply don’t know where it was until the middle of the 20th Century when it ‘appeared’ on the market in the States. However, the rosary was an aid to prayer specifically associated with the Dominicans. Indeed, Dominican belief was that that Mary herself had introduced the founder of the order to the concept, and paintings regularly show her – or Jesus – handing the rosary to St Dominic. These are all clues which could help us to work out the origins of this jewel-like piece, although, as yet, we don’t have the full story.

In the central ‘sphere’, yellow/gold angels place the crown on Mary’s head, and below them on either side their fellows – cherubim and seraphim – continue the eternal tasking of praying and praising, with their arms raised or hands joined in prayer. Immediately above the crown the orange/red angels hold banners saying ‘laus’ – Latin for ‘praise’ – although each iteration of the word has a line above it, the implication being that these are abbreviations. In this case the full word would be ‘laudamus’, or ‘let us praise’. It works with either reading, or, most probably, with both. Below them are the two angels holding the rosaries, and then two more holding two of the ‘instruments of the passion’ – the ‘tools’ used to torture Christ before and during his crucifixion. Easter is never very far away from Christmas. On the left we see the cross itself, and on the right, the column to which Jesus was tied for the flagellation. In the top left and right of this detail, we see the edges of the third ‘sphere’ with ethereal angelic forms in a deep violet lit with yellow. If you thought it was quiet in heaven, the angel at the top right holds a set of bagpipes. Now, I do love the bagpipes but (and here I must apologise to my Scottish friends) I love them more the further away they are. I live in Durham now, and I prefer the (slightly more local) Northumberland pipes. Opposite the bagpiper the angel plays a fife and drum – more stirring, almost military music, it would seem.

However, this is not an overall ‘theme’, which, in terms of music if nothing else, is inclusivity. Every possible instrument is shown. At the top we see a large shawm (although without its protective cylinder, apparently) and a lute. Going down to the left from these is a vielle (an early form of violin) and a ‘flat hand bell struck by a beater’ and then the ‘long pipe and snare drum’ which earlier I called the fife and drum – I’m quoting from an article by Emanuel Winternitz in the Musical Quarterly of October 1963. In the top left corner is an organ, with the organist joined by another angel who is pumping the bellows. At the top right is another keyboard instrument which Winternitz identifies as – possibly – a clavicytherium (whatever that is…). Next to this are an angel with a number of small bells hung from a string and another playing a harp. The bagpipes are below, and further down there is a curved trumpet.

Continuing down from here, on the left are a hurdy gurdy, an angel with a pair of claw bells and another with a ‘small clapper’, while going up on the right we can see ‘large clappers’, and a triangle hung with metal rings. The orange/red angels on the left hold the cross – we saw the top of it before – and, below that, the spear which pierced Christ’s side. On the right is the sponge with which Jesus was given vinegar during the crucifixion, and above this is the full length of the column. Clinging to the underside of the crescent moon we see the grotesque form of some sort of lizard, its mouth open hissing, its long, thin tongue flicking over the edge of the Virgin’s robes. As God says to the serpent in Genesis (3:15), ‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel’. Mary is seen as ‘the woman’, and Jesus ‘her seed’: perhaps he has lifted his heel out of the way. But this creature is referred to again as the dragon over which St Michael and the angels were victorious: ‘And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world’ (Revelation 12:9). A similar form clings to the underside of the rosary with which Veit Stoss frames The Annunciation in Nuremberg which I discussed back in May last year (Picture Of The Day 70).

At the bottom in the middle sphere are the crown of thorns (on the left), and, on the right, the three nails which were driven through Jesus’ hands (one nail each) and feet (one for both feet), together with the hammer used to commit this barbaric act. Below this, an angel holds two hand bells, but must be deafened by the coiled trumpets on either side. In the bottom left corner one figure plays the clavichord, while another kind soul (quite literally in this case) holds the music. The focus required to play the dulcimer – a stringed instruments struck by ‘hammers’ – is evident in the bottom right corner from the angel’s downturned face. Nearby was can also see a double shawm and a ‘pot’. I don’t know how this works, but it looks like the angel is jangling cymbals over a small cauldron, presumably a version of a kettle drum. In the centre, flying up from below, the last musician blows a cromorne, which Wikipedia defines as ‘a French woodwind reed instrument of uncertain identity’. It certainly requires a lot of puff: look at his cheeks!

Notice how, for the outer sphere of angels, the music continues all around, and for the inner sphere there is a similar continuity of prayer and praising. For the middle sphere, though, there is a difference between top and bottom, a division between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The top four angels hold the banners saying ‘praise’ and/or ‘let us praise’, with a threshold marked by the pair holding the rosaries. Below them are the instruments of the passion, curving down beneath the moon into the zone of the dragon. The way to heaven is through prayer, assisted by the rosary, and this leads us upwards towards praising.

At the centre of it all, Jesus is also part of the music. He has a claw bell in each hand, holding them delicately between thumb and forefinger, each one shining with a silvery light reflected from above. He may be lifting his heel away from the ‘old serpent’, but he could equally be dancing for joy – one leg kicked up, arms swinging from side to side, wriggling with delight. He and his mother, as I have said, look down to our left, but why down there? Well, surely they are looking towards the angel who returns their gaze, the angel who is also playing claw bells. Jesus is leading the way, encouraging the music, conducting even, the source of all the joy and light, the origin of the harmony of the spheres, and all this for the glorification of his own mother. Similar bells can be seen hanging from a cradle in the collection of the Musée Cluny in Paris, dated to the beginning of the 16th century, no more than two decades after this beautiful image was painted.

Bells were used as talismen, as it was believed that their ringing would keep infants safe from evil spirits, as well as imitating the music of the angels at the Nativity. But this is no normal cradle – it is called a Berceau: repos de Jésus, and is neither the cradle of a normal, human baby nor a toy. It is a sacred object, a sculpture, probably made for a nun, to encourage her devotion. Writings recommend that the owner should think of the cradle as their heart, a place where Jesus should safely repose, with the pillars that support it on either side representing the Old and New Testaments. As you rock the Christ Child in his cradle (sadly, if there was an ‘original’ figure, it has gone) the bells would ring. The angels look down from above, the child is safe, and so are our hearts. In the painting, however, it is Jesus himself who rings these bells – and leads the heavenly host in making the most astonishing sound, music like you have never heard. These instruments would never have been played together, the rough and ready with the more refined. As a whole, this must be a remarkable cacophony, but a positive one, a fulfilment of the invocation in the first verse of Psalm 100: ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands,’ with the operative word being ‘noise’!

Whatever your beliefs – and I, for one, put my faith firmly in art – I wish you a very happy Christmas, and look forward to the light on the other side of the solstice. For more of this artist’s delicate, detailed, and delightful paintings, please do join me this Tuesday.

 143 – A new Dürer

Albrecht Dürer, The Virgin and Child with a Flower on a grassy Bench, c.1503. Agnews, London.

It’s not every day that a new drawing by a great master comes along, nor that, when it does, you have a chance to buy it. Sadly, it might just be beyond my reach, but instead I will – and did – have a close look. It’s a perfect way to start thinking about one of the greatest German artists, about whom I will be talking on Tuesday (14 December) in an introduction to the National Gallery’s monumental exhibition Dürer’s Journeys. As ever, details of this and subsequent talks and travels are listed on the diary page of my website. I showed you this image last week, to give you more of a chance to go and see the original first hand at Agnews in London (6 St James’s Place), but as today (Friday 10 December) is the last day that you will be able to do this with any ease, if you haven’t been, by now I am imagining it will be too late.

A pity, it was quite magical to ring on the door bell, and be welcomed in. Along the corridor on the right a dark room opened up with this gem glowing on the opposite wall. The drawing shows the Virgin Mary seated on a grassy bench, effectively a raised flower bed, common to gardens at the time, if their frequency in religious paintings of the 15th and 16th Centuries is anything to go by. As a result, Mary is effectively seated upon the earth – or humus ­– implying that this is a form of ‘Madonna of Humility’ – and yes, ‘humility’ literally means ‘down to earth’. It is a standard form of iconography, although in its usual formulation, Mary shown seated on the ground. However, as the ground is raised in this example, it is also a version of another common image, the ‘Madonna Enthroned.’ Interpreted this way, the drawing is a rather clever elision of the two. This is not Dürer’s invention – a painting in the style of Martin Schongauer in the National Gallery, dated, rather broadly, 1469-91, demonstrates as much. However, it is a theme that Dürer returned to often: together with the ‘Schongauer’ I am showing you an engraving dated c. 1495 from the British Museum.

The bench is constructed, it would seem, from two planks – a relatively narrow one at the top, and below it a hefty slab of wood, sawn from an enormous trunk. They are held in place at either end by a post. Each is a humble affair, a short length of a modest branch – but the attention to naturalistic detail is superb. The upper plank is broken, and has been repaired, the curving edge of the break echoing the fall of the Virgin’s draperies.

Most unusually, the Christ Child’s body faces away from us, and he turns back to look at his mother over his right shoulder. With his left leg in front of his right, it is almost as if he is starting to walk away from her – but maybe I am just reading forward some two decades to when Dürer travelled to the Low Countries and saw Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges, in which Jesus is stepping down from his mother’s lap, while simultaneously clinging to her hand. Dürer’s child holds the long stem of a flower, undoubtedly a reference to the Passion, but it is evoked with such brilliant spontaneity – and so few lines – that there is no possibility of identifying which species Dürer intended it to be. Mary supports her son with her right hand, and he leans gently on it – or perhaps she is preventing him from leaving. She holds a cloth which wraps around her hand, under his arm and around his back, but she doesn’t touch his flesh – like a priest holding a monstrance. The other end of the cloth is held in her left hand – his swaddling clothes, perhaps, but also a foreshadowing of the shroud. Her left forefinger is marked with curious rings – curious, that is, until you realise (and it took me a while) that Dürer is telling us that the end of the finger is in the shadow, as is what we see of Christ’s face, the lower half of his back and his delightfully pudgy bottom, which seems to rest ever so softly against Mary’s fully-lit hand. Her head tilts to one side, as if musing on her experience, as she did after the visit of the Shepherds at the Nativity: ‘…Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart,’ (Luke 2:19).

There are two faint, parallel, vertical lines on the left of the detail above, the one further left rising from the angular fold at the edge of Mary’s drapery, next to the grass. These are part of the watermark in the paper, vital for authenticating the drawing, as we shall see below.

You have probably read about it already, as there have been articles in much of the press and across social media. It was bought at a house clearance sale for $30, only later to be identified as an original, and authenticated by Christof Metzger, a curator at the Albertina in Vienna (which has one of the world’s best collections of drawings), who will include it in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Dürer’s work. There were various barriers to this identification, not the least of which was that it only cost $30 – how could it be the real thing for that price? And then, by the time it was bought it had been covered in a coloured wash, which might have been added to give a sense of aging to the paper, to make it seem more like an ‘antique’. This would be a clear sign that it was a forgery, made with the intention to deceive. However, this ‘wash’ has been successfully removed, and although the sheet was cut down at an unknown date, it is in a remarkably good condition. It is drawn with pen and ink on a fine linen paper which has a watermark made up of a trident – which explains the two vertical lines (a third is ‘behind’ the drawing) and a ball, or ring, an emblem used by the Fugger family in Augsburg who owned (among other things) a paper mill. There are more than 200 sheets of this paper used by Dürer which survive. The trident can be seen more clearly above the drapery in the lower left half of a drawing in the British museum, which I am showing you to the right of the Agnews version of the same subject.

The form of the signature – the monogram ‘AD’ – is almost identical, with the horizontal of ‘A’ and the ‘D’ doubled in both examples, and similar flourishes at the top left and right. Together with the similarity in the theme, this has suggested a date of c. 1503 for the newly-authenticated drawing.

What was the purpose of this study? It might have been Dürer playing around, trying out ideas – throughout his career he created over 100 images of the Madonna and Child in different media. Or it could have been him developing those ideas for a larger work. Agnews suggest that the Madonna with a Multitude of Animals (seen on the left below), which Metzger has dated to 1506, is one possibility, although, as far as I can see, the National Gallery’s Madonna with the Iris would be another. Although designed by Dürer, it seems to have been painted by members of his workshop while he was away in Venice. But I will talk more about that painting when I discuss Dürer’s Journeys this coming Tuesday.

Albrecht Dürer, Madonna with a Multitude of Animals, Albertina.
Workshop of Dürer, Madonna of the Iris, National Gallery.

In the meantime, Agnews will sell the drawing by private sale, not at an auction, so if you are interested you’d better get in there quick. You could see it this afternoon, if you can be that spontaneous, and you might even get in at the weekend, although as the National Gallery is hosting a Dürer conference the world’s experts would probably get in the way. It will then go on show at Colnaghi in New York from 20-30 January next year, so if you are Stateside you could see it there. One thing though – start saving now. It may have been bought for $30, but one estimate of the sale price is in the region of $50 million.

142 – Getting carried away

Nicolas Poussin, The Ecstasy of St Paul, 1649-50. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

On the whole I try not to get carried away by things, although, as I’m sure most of you know, my enthusiasm does mean that I rarely have the discipline to edit my presentations adequately – hence my now standard length of an hour and five minutes… I will try and keep them within the promised sixty minutes in future. Honest. My next attempt will be an introduction to Poussin and the Dance, on Tuesday 7 December, an entirely delightful exhibition at the National Gallery in London which dispels so many of the preconceptions people have about this, the most worthy of French (?) Baroque (?) masters. Not only will I explain those two question marks, I will also cover the full range of material within the exhibition, looking at the apparently effortless complexity of some of Poussin’s compositions, which is shared by the remarkable disposition of limbs in today’s painting. After that, on Tuesday 14 December, we will follow Dürer’s Journeys, another superb offering from the National Gallery, a talk which will also include a nod to the beautiful drawing currently for sale at Agnews (see below…). And there are other talks: full details are listed in my diary. But now it is time for some of us – or, at least, St Paul – to get carried away.

Poussin, NicolasFrance, Musée du Louvre, Département des Peintures, INV 7288 – https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010062554 – https://collections.louvre.fr/CGU

A few years after his arrival in Rome in 1624, Poussin was commissioned to paint the Martyrdom of St Erasmus for St Peter’s, but this was to remain one of only a handful of church commissions. So few were they – and so out of tune was he with the Roman Baroque – that the entry on the website of the Met in New York goes so far as to says, ‘The large, theatrical saints in ecstasy and scenes of apotheosis so popular at the time clearly struck no responsive chord in Poussin,’ and yet it is precisely this sort of work – today’s painting, and an Assumption of the Virgin in the National Gallery of Art in Washington – which have always been among my favourites. They are completely airborne, not the earthbound, weighty things that his works, at their most stolid, can be – works which, I’m sure it goes without saying, do not include his elegant depictions of dance! We see St Paul raised aloft by three angels, his usual attributes of book and sword left behind, with the remarkable combination of legs, arms and wings (eight, eight and six of these respectively, although not all are visible) acting as a form of mandorla (Italian for ‘almond’), the shape in which the spiritual glow of an assumption or ascension is usually depicted.

The painting is an illustration of a passage from St Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians, where, in Chapter 12, verses 1-5, he reluctantly describes one of his own visions:

12 It is not expedient for me doubtless to glory. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.
2 I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.
3 And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;)
4 How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.
5 Of such an one will I glory: yet of myself I will not glory, but in mine infirmities.

That this is St Paul is confirmed, as I have said, by the attributes left behind in the stark, classical portico. There is a sword, hilt resting on a doorstep, and blade sloping diagonally to the floor, crossing over, and just touching, the edge of a book. The shadow of the sword, going from left to right, cutting across floor and book, suggests that the light is coming from almost directly overhead – from Heaven – which in turn implies that the shadow which covers one end of the book and a fair proportion of the step must be that of the Saint and his accompanying angels. It is a two-edged sword, in both meaning and function. It stands for the way in which he, as Saul, persecuted the early Christians, but also represents his later martyrdom (in common belief, at least) by beheading. It is also, undoubtedly, a reference to his instruction, in Ephesians 6:10 to ‘Put on the whole armour of God,’ which culminates, in verse 17, with ‘the Sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’. The ‘word of God‘ itself is lying on the floor beneath the sword: the bible. He often holds this book in recognition of the vital role his epistles play in church teaching, but also to represent his own tireless evangelising.

An additional confirmation of his identity is provided by the colours he wears – red and green – although these are not depicted with the same canonical regularity as St Peter’s yellow and blue.  I always take a while to work out what is going on in this extraordinary tumble of figures. It is almost as if the angel on the right, in blue, is leaning back while sitting on a cloud, with the angel in yellow – on the left – sitting on his right knee, and also leaning back. Their legs then alternate. Looking from left to right we see two right legs and two left, with the addition of the blue robe of the right-hand angel falling between the right and left legs, echoing their shape as if it were a fifth ankle, heel and foot, like a pointed blue shoe. As these two angels bear Paul upwards he appears to be resting on the hip of one and chest of the other, his right leg uppermost, supported by the yellow angel’s extended right hand. This dazzling display of legs is rendered all the more remarkable by the flashes of light and shadow which tends to break up their integrity, making them not only more difficult to decipher, but also, surprisingly perhaps, more real. The right wing of the left angel and the left wing of his companion on the right frame this remarkable display, as they look up, in light and shadow respectively, in the direction they are going. The left wing of the yellow angel can be seen pointing downwards at the back, and forms its own counterpoint with the ends of ivory and gold ribbon – something like an ecclesiastical stole – which flutter out behind it.

The topmost angel only serves to guide the way. He points upwards, to heaven, while delicately holding St Paul’s left hand. There is no real support here: he doesn’t seem to bear any weight – nor does he need to look in the direction of travel, but gazes out with an almost visionary fixation. His wings echo those of his companions beneath, whereas the bend of his right arm parallels the open, accepting gesture of the saint. Paul himself appears in his prime. Unlike St Peter, who is always shown with short grey hair and beard (whether as Christ’s first disciple, or more than thirty years later, at his own death) Paul is identified by dark hair and beard. However, his hair is often thinning, and the beard longer and straighter. Here they are thick, and full-bodied – lustrous even. Maybe this is Poussin taking on board the comment, in 2 Corinthians 12:2, that this rapture happened ‘above fourteen years ago’.

Seen as a whole I find the composition truly remarkable. Intricate, accurate, and almost apparently effortless. The whole grouping is surrounded by an even array of heads, wings, arms and legs radiating in all directions, into and out of the fictive space defined by the painting, in its form a sort of sacred sea urchin. And despite this complexity, the internal logic holds: the way in which they are arranged and support one another, the positions they occupy in space, indeed everything we see, is entirely coherent. St Paul, comfortably borne aloft, looks upwards towards the light. Just above him we can see the edge of a cloud which is outlined by highlights which look just a little like lightning – and this reminds me of another painting of St Paul seeing the light which Poussin must have known.

In Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saul – painted for Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome in 1601, 23 years before Poussin arrived from Paris, and 48 years before his own masterpiece – it is the leg of the horse which defines the light coming down from heaven. Is it just me, or do the diagonals of the leg look almost exactly the same as the highlighting of the clouds? I wonder if Poussin was thinking of this? The gesture of the saint is not entirely different, after all, even if he is being carried towards the light, as opposed to being thrown back by it.

Poussin, NicolasFrance, Musée du Louvre, Département des Peintures, INV 7288 – https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010062554 – https://collections.louvre.fr/CGU

It was the second time Poussin had painted the subject. The first, dating from 1643, just a few years before, was for his friend – and patron – Paul Fréart de Chantelou. It was a direct response to a commission for a painting to hang with one of Chantelou’s prized possessions, Raphael’s equally astonishing Vision of Ezekiel. Poussin seems to have been worried that his painting would not stand up well to the comparison with the great renaissance master, and asked that the two paintings should never be shown together. He even went so far as to suggest that his work might serve as a cover for the Raphael, as a sort-of warm-up act, if you like. Today’s painting was the result of another commission, from writer Paul Scarron, who in 1643 had published A Collection of Some Burlesque Verses. Poussin hated Scarron’s work, and tried to put him off. However, the commission came via Chantelou, and so eventually the painter relented. At first Scarron was offered a bacchanalian subject, but, for whatever reason, this was not what he wanted, and the commission evolved into this inspirational image of the poet’s name saint, Paul. For his second essay on this theme Poussin developed a composition which came far closer to Raphael’s Ezekiel than the earlier version, perhaps because this time, there was no chance of a direct comparison.

Poussin, The Ecstasy of St Paul, Ringling, Sarasota.
Raphael, The Vision of Ezekiel, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

Poussin’s compositional skills can not be denied, and he deployed them in equal measure when painting dancers – just one of the reasons why the exhibition Poussin and the Dance is such a delight. I do hope you can join me on Tuesday, and then, the following week, for Dürer’s Journeys. If there’s time in between I may blog about the charming drawing below, but it’s going to be a busy week (see the diary). However, I wanted to show it to you today, to give you a chance to see it in person. Having been bought at a clearance sale for $30 it has only recently been authenticated as an original, and is on display at Agnews (6 St James’s Place) from 10-6 Monday-Friday until 10 December. Do go and see it if you can get into London – just ring on the bell and ask to see the Dürer. I did earlier in the week, and it is a wonderful experience – they are most welcoming, and very generous with their time and expertise. It really is worthwhile spending the time with just one drawing – although there are also other treasures on show. While you’re there, if anyone has a spare $50 million…  

141 – a rose, By any other…

Allan Ramsay, Margaret Lindsay of Evelick: The Artist’s Wife, 1758-60. Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.

Context is everything. You’re a very sophisticated lot, and I’m fairly sure that most of you will have completed the above quotation from Romeo and Juliet, that tale of star-crossed lovers. It comes from Act 2, scene 2:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.

This is, of course, Juliet, lamenting that the boy she has just fallen in love with (and will later marry against her parents’ will) comes from the family of her own family’s sworn enemies. Be that as it may, I wasn’t planning to end the quotation with the word ‘name’. I do want to talk about a rose, though, the rose held between the thumb and forefinger of Margaret Lindsay of Evelick, who, as it happened, married artist Allan Ramsay against her parents’ will. It is so carefully and so delicately painted that I want to question if it could be ‘a rose, By any other’ artist? I suspect not, but we will have to look more closely at Allan Ramsay’s work to find out. However, it has been borrowed, and given back, by artist Alison Watt, whose work I will be looking at this Tuesday, 23 November at 6pm (details of this, and subsequent talks, can be found on the diary page of my website). The exhibition A Portrait Without Likeness is effectively a conversation between Alison Watt and Allan Ramsay, between his works and hers, and includes today’s painting as well as another portrait by Ramsay – of his first wife – not to mention Watt’s responses to, or meditations on, or conversations with these and other works by Ramsay. It is a beautiful, focussed exhibition, and I do hope you can join me to look at some of the best of contemporary painting, and the most technically accomplished of contemporary art. Meanwhile, back to the rose…

We see the artist’s second wife, Margaret Lindsay of Evelick, as if caught in the act of arranging flowers. She holds a rose in her left hand, her left elbow apparently resting on the table which supports a large, ceramic vase containing the other flowers. Her right elbow may also be on the table, but the forearm is tucked away, and lost in the abundant lace of the cuff. She looks out towards us – or towards her husband – as if temporarily distracted from her task. The appearance is one of spontaneity, but, as everyone will tell you, it is anything but. She leans into the picture, with her face arriving just to the right of the midway point, one of the features of the composition which suggests her interest in what she is doing. The line of her body runs, more or less, along the diagonal of the painting, from bottom left to top right, and her left forearm – with the hand holding the rose – lies parallel to this. Her right arm lies parallel – again, more or less – to the other diagonal, and continues the line of shadow that comes in from the top left. This interest in geometry, with the zig-zag shape formed by the body and arms, creates a harmony within the painting, but is not too rigid to render it mechanical: it is still a human experience. The panelling, or open door – it is not entirely clear what this is – cuts down vertically, and is another feature that pushes her towards the flowers. It also means that her head is neatly framed – again, evenly, but not too rigidly – by the deep and dark space behind her, so that her face rings out, ensuring that it is the focus of the painting.

The floral arrangement stands out against the background too. There is a wonderful equivalence between face and flowers, as if Ramsay is saying (in the words of Heinrich Heine, set to music by Robert Schumann), ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ – ‘you are like a flower’. A dark gap at the top of the arrangement would be, I think, the ideal place for the last rose, and there it would have an equivalent position to the pink ribbon with which the sitter’s braids, one of which curves around and frames the back of the head, are tied. Even the colours of her face are drawn from exactly the same palette as those of the roses, with the highlight which defines the ridge of her nose, and the silvery lustre on her lower lip being just the same as the tones which model the petals of the flowers. The blue feather, on the other hand, matches the blue patterns on the vase, more flowers, and leaves, which climb around the white ceramic form – Chinese, maybe, or one of the many imitations of the popular imported vessels.

The arm and hand holding the rose were based on a drawing which is also in the exhibition. In the painting they are given prominence by a pool of light which falls onto the vase, neatly framing the hand and pushing it forward as a result of its similar tonal value, a halo against the shadowed section of the vase. This is counterintuitive, perhaps, and the opposite of the head, which is brought forward by the contrast with the dark background. Her lace shawl is remarkably freely painted, with dashes of white and grey defining its structure and allowing us to see the rose-coloured dress beneath, with small dots of black standing in for the shadows it casts. What we are looking at is perfectly clear, even though the painting is entirely evocative, rather than slavishly precise.

The same is true of the rose. It droops, and the stem appears to be broken, something which Watt comments on in the catalogue of the exhibition, noting that we will never know why. For her, ‘it has come to represent the mysteriousness of painting itself’. The part of the stem which Margaret holds remains undefined: a thin, edgy white line passes behind the tip of her middle finger, and then appears, slightly higher up, behind her thumb. However, there is no green here, almost as if this was where Ramsay was going to paint the stem, but, for whatever reason, didn’t. Maybe he realised that the idea was enough. Then beyond the leaves, which are thinly painted over the vase and hand, and faded a little with time, the stem, more fully realised, continues at a different angle, until it reaches the delicately painted and delicately coloured petals. I’m prepared to believe that a rose, by any other artist, wouldn’t look as delicate, or as fragile.

And, as we have returned to Juliet’s words, ‘What’s in a name?’ Here are two photographs I took in the exhibition last week. OK, so one of them is out of focus, but you should still be able to read it.

The first is a label which was attached to the frame at some point in the past, but not as far back as the 18th Century when the work was created. All we learn is that this is ‘The Artist’s Wife’, the name of the artist in question, and his dates. This woman is entirely defined by her husband, there is nothing else we can know about her. The second, even if blurred, is stencilled on the wall of the current exhibition, with her name, ‘Margaret Lindsay of Evelick’, and her dates. Thank goodness we live in more enlightened times: she has – or had – an independent existence after all. The words ‘of Evelick’ tell us that she was from the landed gentry. Her father, Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick, was a well-respected baronet, who presumably wanted ‘the best’ for his daughter. Presumably that would be what suited him best. Ramsay met Margaret on a return trip to Edinburgh in 1751 – his studio practice has been based in London since 1738, and his first wife, Anne Bayne, had died in childbirth in 1743. The couple fell rapidly in love. Knowing that her father would never approve, they eloped the following year, and were married in the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh. Her father never forgave Ramsay, nor did he forgive his daughter for marrying beneath her, and against his will (but fortunately, unlike Romeo and Juliet, nobody died). Between 1754 and 1757 the couple travelled together in Italy, and in all probability this portrait was painted soon after their return, showing, as it does, Ramsay’s later, more delicate style.

It is currently on show at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery as part of the exhibition A Portrait Without Likeness (this is a link to the exhibition itself), near to Ramsay’s portrait of Anne Bayne (his first wife), and separated by two paintings by Alison Watt – both of them variations on the theme of the rose. I do hope you can join me on Tuesday to have a closer look.

140 – A Blog about a Dog

William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug, 1745. Tate Britain, London.

I’m not much of a dog person, but I have developed a fondness for William Hogarth’s pet pug, not least because rejoiced in the name of Trump (no relation). This portrait – if that’s what it is – features in the exhibition Hogarth and Europe, currently at Tate Britain in London, which I will be talking about this Tuesday, 16 November at 6pm GMT. By then I will know what I am doing for the rest of the year (and even, conceivably, the beginning of next), but I will certainly be talking about Alison Watt’s beautiful and luminous exhibition A Portrait Without Likeness the following Tuesday, 23 November. The exhibition – which I was very happy to see yesterday – is effectively a conversation between her paintings and portraits by the elegant 18th Century Scottish artist Allan Ramsay – who will, of course, feature heavily in the talk. But that’s the week after next – let’s get back to Trump.

The Painter and his Pug 1745 William Hogarth 1697-1764 Purchased 1824 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N00112

I questioned, above, whether this really is a portrait. It would seem so obvious that it is a self portrait that we don’t stop and question what genre of painting it actually is. After all, Hogarth is not presenting us with a direct image of himself, but shows us a painting within a painting. The image of Hogarth is, in itself, an object. The likeness of the artist is painted on an oval canvas, and rests, unframed, on a pile of three books. If you get in close, you can see light reflecting from the nails which pin the canvas to the oval stretcher. Next to the painting lies a palette resting on some fabric, and a red curtain hangs down from the top right corner, falling behind the dog. This is a collection of objects – canvas, books, palette, cloth: surely it is really a still life, with the dog featuring in the way that birds, insects, or even the occasional frog do in earlier still lives (see, for example, Picture of the Day 27). But then you could simply suggest that this is a portrait, pure and simple, of Trump, the proud and upright pug seen to the right. He is more real than the image of Hogarth, who, in this case, would have been included as one of the ‘attributes’ of the subject, Trump, telling us more about him: not just what our hairy hero looked like, but more about his background. For a dog, that would include the appearance of the owner, an aspect of the canine character that is usually omitted from the genre of pet portraiture. If this is indeed a portrait of a fully rounded hound, then we would expect the other objects to include further references to his occupations – nowadays, I suppose, that would include balls, mangled toys, and possibly even a dog chew or two. But no such luck – there is no other hint of animal husbandry. There are, however, books.

The Painter and his Pug 1745 William Hogarth 1697-1764 Purchased 1824 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N00112

It seems highly unlikely, judging by what little I know about dogs, that Trump could read, and even if he could, it would surely only be the cleverest canine that would enjoy Shakespeare, Swift and Milton (specifically Paradise Lost), the very words written in gold lettering on the spines of the books. These clearly relate more to the owner than the owned, and appear to be the influences or inspirations that Hogarth is claiming for himself. Indeed, as the painting rests upon the books it would seem to suggest that they are the very foundations of his art.

The Painter and his Pug 1745 William Hogarth 1697-1764 Purchased 1824 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N00112

Another way of looking at it is that his painting, on top of Milton, Swift and Shakespeare as it is, represents the very apogee of artistic achievement. But why does he limit his own appearance to a painting, while showing us the ‘real’ Trump? Maybe he wants to say that he is his art – this is not just what he looks like, but his very essence, as if to say, ‘we are what we do’. The palette says the same, in a subtler and more sophisticated way. This is not, it would seem, the palette of a working artist – there is no paint on it (even though he included grey-scale daubs in an engraved version), nor are there any brushes (although technical analysis shows that once there were, stuck through the thumb hole of the palette). Instead there is an inscription: ‘The LINE of BEAUTY’, after which comes, in fainter script, ‘And GRACE’. Further to the right is his signature – or at least his initials – and the date, ‘W.H. 1745’. This is as much the painting of a theoretician as of a practical painter. In 1753, eight years after the completion of this work, he would publish The Analysis of Beauty, a summation of his thoughts on art, expressed in essence by the Line of Beauty – the S-shaped curve we see on the palette. It implies not only a sense of flow in any depicted form, which he says is more interesting and varied than rigid, straight lines would be, but also gives a sense of liveliness and movement to a painting. It also, he believed, echoed the way in which our eyes look around an image.

The Painter and his Pug 1745 William Hogarth 1697-1764 Purchased 1824 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N00112

As ever, things are never that simple. He was still formulating his ideas when this self portrait was completed in 1745, and painted out the words ‘And GRACE’ – only for them to be revealed again as the overpainting gradually became transparent. Even the line itself is not as simple as it may appear. An S-shape, yes, but one that casts a shadow on the palette. It is, in the world of the painting, a three-dimensional object, like a gold wire floating impossibly above the palette, resting with the lightest touch at either end. It is, in a way, a statement of the power of art to create things we do not know, or which can not exist within our physical world. In his book he would describe the line of beauty as being two dimensional, whereas the line of grace was three-dimensional – suggesting that this is the latter. However, it seems that he hadn’t settled on this distinction by the time painting was completed, and so tried to cover ‘And GRACE’. This still leaves us with Trump. Why is he here? And why is he ‘more real’ than Hogarth himself, given that the artist is ‘relegated’ to a painted image?

X-ray analysis tells us that Hogarth had initially planned a more formal portrait to feature in this ‘still life’. In all probability it was more like the miniature by André Rouquet, which is included in the exhibition I will be talking about on Tuesday. However, that formality – fully bewigged and dressed with cravat, waistcoat and jacket – was relaxed to show the artist in his cap and house coat, the way you would meet him ‘at home’, rather than dressed to the nines in performative fashion when out in Society. This is the man himself. And he was, of course, a man who loved dogs. He had a succession of pugs – Pugg, Trump and Crab are known by name, but Trump was the favourite, and gained the most renown. Apparently Hogarth often remarked how similar they were, and in this painting the proud pooch becomes an emblem of Hogarth’s pugnacious nature. The scar on the artist’s forehead, of which he was rather proud, might even imply that he (like Trump?) was a bit of a bruiser, although as it happens it was the result of an accident in his youth, rather than the trophy of a fight.

Trump himself became a well-known character. He may well appear in four other paintings, and nowadays he even has his own Wikipedia page, if you want to see what they are. Not only that, but he was modelled in terracotta by the great French sculptor, and friend of Hogarth, Louis François Roubiliac – whose terracotta bust of the artist (which, like the miniature above, belongs to the National Portrait Gallery) is also in the exhibition. Sadly the original Trump has been lost. Wedgwood made a version in black basalt based on a cast he got from a plaster shop owned by a man called Richard Parker. That doesn’t seem to have survived either: I certainly can’t track down a photograph. However, the Chelsea Porcelain Factory also released a white version, probably based on a similar, commercially available, plaster cast.  So here is Roubiliac’s Trump in a version by the Chelsea Porcelain Factory, now in the V&A. That’s what I call celebrity.

One question remains: in the exhibition Hogarth and Europe, how does our painting relate to the rest of the continent? Presenting the artist as a typical British Bulldog (or rather, Pug), and resting on three of the great British authors, there wouldn’t seem to be anything ‘European’ about it, until you realise that The Line of Beauty – that sinuous S-shaped curve – is, in itself, one of the founding compositional principals of Rococo art and design. As so often, Hogarth may have expressed disdain for everything ‘overseas’, but he was a great lover of its art. But is that even what Tate Britain’s exhibition is about? That in itself is a complex issue, so let’s think about it on Tuesday.

The Painter and his Pug 1745 William Hogarth 1697-1764 Purchased 1824 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N00112

Revisiting Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, c. 1660. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

I am currently in Dresden, where yesterday I saw one of the most perfect exhibitions – Vermeer: On Reflection – at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister: thoughtful, thorough, purposeful, explaining everything you would want to know through a remarkable collection of truly superb works of art. As I am lucky enough to come back here next week, bringing a group with me, and in between will be giving a talk about the exhibition (a room by room introduction of the ideas it covers and the paintings it includes), I’m afraid I find myself a bit short of time, so I am revisiting a blog from February this year, in which I talked about the Dutch master’s Milkmaid – which is always worth a second look. And after that, a third, and a fourth, and so on. The exhibition was planned as a result of the exciting new discoveries about one of the Gemäldegalerie’s own paintings, A Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, and places it even more firmly within Vermeer’s oeuvre, showing, room by room, how it connects not just with the artist’s own development but also with the concerns of his contemporaries. It also traces the source of the imagery, and does as much as it can to explain the inexplicable: the remarkable allure of this most focussed of artists. If you would like to know more, then please do join me on Tuesday, 2 November at 6pm GMT (remember that, in the UK at least, the clocks go back on Sunday!). In subsequent weeks (all Tuesdays for the rest of the year) I will talk about exhibitions in England and Scotland – Hogarth and Europe at Tate Britain on Tuesday 16 November, and Alison Watt: A Portrait Without Likeness (Scottish National Portrait Gallery) on Tuesday 23. A couple more will follow. But for now, as The Milkmaid is not in the Dresden exhibition, let us look at it again.

The last time I posted this blog I was having trouble deciding whether I find this painting disarmingly beautiful or beautifully disarming – I’m sure there’s a difference. But also, I was wondering, if it is one, or other, or even or both of these things, what is it that creates this impression? I suppose because it is a painting that, for whatever reason, I do find very beautiful, and this always makes me try to analyse where that beauty lies – a process which can all-too-easily kill the simple pleasures of looking. It is disarming, I think, because at first glance it looks so simple, and yet it is hypnotically compelling. Vermeer paints everything with such apparent honesty and conviction that we remain convinced that there must be something more profound going on than the simple act of pouring milk. To try and work out if there is, I’m going to start at the top and work my way down.

I’ve always loved the way Vermeer paints walls. It’s never a case of getting out the roller and covering the whole surface with white matt. What we see is subtly modulated, with every square centimetre differentiated from every other. The setting – a corner of a room with a window on the left – was not his invention: it had already been used by artists for about 10 years by the time he picked up on it, it seems, and from then on he used it regularly, often returning to the same, or similar, corners. With the window a little way in from the back wall, the corner itself is left in shadow. The light passes through the glass at a diagonal, and illuminates the back wall away from the corner, the illumination getting ever brighter as we move to the right. Two nails are driven into the wall, and the higher of the two, further to the right, is in the light. It casts the sort of diffuse shadow that suggests this is large window, far higher than the part of it we can see in the painting. On the left a wicker basket – used for shopping, presumably – hangs from a similar nail, with a highly-polished copper pail hanging from another on the back wall. Above the basket we see what is probably a small picture: it’s too high to be a mirror. To the left of the nail from which the basket is hanging one of the panes of glass has been broken – there could easily be a a breeze coming through – and in the pane below this the glass is cracked, with the broken edge catching the light. If you go down one more pane, and two to the left, another of the small plates of glass threatens to fall into the room. The attention to detail is breathtaking.

The fall of light from left to right illuminates the maid’s face, showing its bold, simple forms: a down-to-earth presence, whose broad features would have been interpreted as indicative of her lowly status. The light also charts the very specific folds of her simple linen headdress, especially to the left of her face, where the sharp fold at the level of her forehead gradually opens out, so that, as it gets lower, less light falls on the fabric. As the hem curves forward the lower edge is left in shadow.

The light is one of the features which creates the attention-grabbing boldness of the central figure, and renders her monumental. Her right shoulder (on our left), the top of her right arm, and especially the back of her right hand – the one holding the handle of the jug – are brilliantly illuminated, making them stand out against the shadows on the wall. On our right, the shadow which forms the curve of her left shoulder, and the right side of her left arm, stand out against the brilliantly illuminated wall behind. Vermeer enhances this by painting the thinnest of white lines around the edge of the sleeve as it comes down from the shoulder. The reversed contrasts of light and shade push her towards us, making her more immediate, more entirely present. Not only that, but the perspective pulls our eyes towards her. The horizontals of the window frame and the leading which holds the glass in place form orthogonals receding towards a vanishing point, placed at the crook of the maid’s right arm. As the vanishing point is theoretically our point of view, this means that our attention is focussed on the action of holding the jug and pouring.  

The colour is also subtly vital. Her bodice is yellow, and she wears a blue apron. For me this is still a surprising colour for an apron (even given that I know nothing of the history of aprons), especially as Vermeer has used that most prized of pigments, ultramarine. The bodice uses lead-tin yellow, another good, traditional pigment, but nowhere near as expensive. For the sleeves – which are rolled up – he mixes the two to create green. It is almost a lesson in basic colour skills: yellow mixed with blue makes green – and in this case, the specific yellow of her bodice mixed with the distinctive blue of her apron makes this particular green.

The attention that the maid gives to the act of pouring also demands our attention: if she takes it this seriously, then so should we. This is not a haphazard act, but a careful, determined action, the support given to the milk jug by her left hand helping to make sure the liquid flows at precisely the right speed.

The measured flow of the milk has made people think that she is doing something specific, and one suggestion is that she is preparing a bread pudding. There is plenty of bread on the table, after all, and some of the pieces next to her bowl appear to have been broken. You have to put in exactly the right amount of milk, apparently, or the pudding would either be too soggy, or the bread would dry out and become too hard and crunchy. This is simple fare, made from wholesome ingredients with good honest labour. Again the light plays a major part, showing us the deep, sculptural folds in the sleeves and apron, and the form and textures of the bread and basket – and yet it does not do so with the highly focussed detail of a fijnschilder – or ‘fine painter’ – the name for artists like Gerrit Dou whose every surface is an almost microscopic exploration of precise surface textures, and yet not a single brushstroke is visible. As if he were a precursor of Seurat and the divisionists, Vermeer builds these objects up through a myriad of dots and dabs of paint. You don’t believe me? Look at this.

When talking about Vermeer it is hard to get away from the theories which try to explain his peculiarly focussed vision by suggesting that he used a camera obscura – basically a form of pinhole camera that projects an image onto a surface and allows you to trace the outlines. However, this would only provide the outlines, and not the colours or textures. Admittedly, the images a camera obscura produces can sometimes include some of the effects he uses – the bright, blurred highlights, for example. Although, if you think about it, you only get bright highlights on shiny objects, not on matt loaves of bread. This may well be the sort of effect you could see with a camera obscura, and that may be where he got the idea – but he would never have seen the particular highlights painted here. They are part of the magic of the image, and create the wonder – and some of the texture – of this fresh bread, the bounty of this work-a-day basket. As it happens, the construction of the perspective also suggests that he didn’t use a camera obscura: it isn’t traced, but drawn. Technical examination has revealed a pin hole in the canvas itself, at the crook of her right arm – the vanishing point. Vermeer would have inserted a pin, and tied a piece of thread to it. This could be covered in something like charcoal dust, pulled taut, and then snapped against the canvas to ‘draw’ lines onto it. It was a common way of working out perspective, as the lines drawn inevitably lead to the vanishing point.

When we get down to the bottom of the painting the lesson in colour continues. Under the apron the maid’s skirt is red – so she is wearing muted versions of the three primary colours, yellow, blue and red. This particular shade also harmonises well with the brick-red floor, and the ceramic pot, one of the truly revealing details in this painting. It is part of a footwarmer – a wooden box, with a perforated top – and the pot would have held hot coals. A practical object perhaps, given that we are presumably in a cold kitchen, ideal for keeping and using dairy products, although it is very small compared to the size of the room. In any case, footwarmers were used when seated. Behind it is the wainscoting, made of Delft tiles – local produce, of course, as it was in Delft that Vermeer lived and worked. Three tiles are visible, and the imagery of two of them can be read. On the left is cupid, wings to the left, firing his bow and arrow to the right, and to the right of the footwarmer, there is a man with a walking stick. Are these relevant? Probably. Have a look at this picture from the Sinnepoppen, an emblem book published by Roemer Visscher in 1614.

Any emblem has three elements, ‘pictura’, ‘inscriptio’ and ‘subscriptio’ – or picture, heading, and explanation. For the title of his book, Visscher invented a new word – where ‘sinne’ means the ‘sense’ of the emblem, and ‘poppe’ means the image. By creating a word that combines two elements from which we can determine the meaning, he is echoing the function of an emblem precisely. Neither the pictura nor the inscriptio gives the full sense on its own – they have to be considered together. The relationship between them – what, together, they mean – is explained in the subscriptio. In the example above, ‘Mignon des Dames’ means “the ladies’ favourite” – as in sweetheart, or lover. The subscriptio goes on to explain that modern ladies love nothing so much as a foot warmer, as it provides them with constant warmth. Any man who wanted to pay her court would find himself playing second fiddle to this household object. They can be seen often in Dutch 17th Century genre paintings, but even Visscher’s explanation doesn’t fully account for their presence. That is because Visscher wants you to be as clever and inventive as himself, and is always expecting you to make connections and take the meaning further. Think about it: when seated, the hot coals would fill the user’s skirts with warmth. Presumably, any potential lover would have to prove as reliable if he wanted any degree of success. Combined with the image of cupid shooting an arrow towards the source of heat, the implications are that our maid could easily be the subject of inappropriate attentions, welcome or otherwise. It’s worthwhile bearing in mind that it was usually assumed that milkmaids were sexually forthcoming.

Having said all that, from this point on you can make up your own mind. And that’s not because I don’t want to tell you what is going on here, or because I don’t know what is going on here, but because Vermeer’s great genius includes the ability to leave things open. Is it coincidence, for example, that her skirt plays with the same tonalities as the earthy floor and the glowing coals, which we can imagine but not see? Does it imply a heat within? Or does the fact that she is standing, at work, rather than sitting down enjoying the welcome updraft, suggest that she is a figure of virtue, rather than potential quarry, worthy of pursuit? It’s possible that the very title of this painting is incorrect, as it happens. A milkmaid would work outside, with the cows, milking. The woman in the painting is really a kitchen maid (although in some households they did double up, apparently). But then, kitchen maids often had the same reputation. I cannot get away from the care with which she pours, and I suspect that Vermeer is questioning the assumptions we make about the people, and objects, depicted by his contemporaries. The first assumption is that milkmaids – or kitchen maids, for that matter – were bound to be ‘up for it’. After all, in this case, she seems entirely focussed on her work. The tile with cupid and the footwarmer might imply sexual impropriety – but do either have any effect here? In other hands the jug itself might seem suggestive. Artists like Jan Steen regularly show women holding vessels with open apertures towards men who reciprocate with any number of phallic equivalents, from bulging bagpipes to pistols cocked. And yet here the act of spilling – which could be a sign of incontinence – of sexual incontinence, that is – is entirely controlled, and measured. If our maid represents anything, then maybe, for Vermeer, she could be a modern-day Temperance. Compare her with this print by Jan Saenredam, made in Haarlem in 1593, based on a design by Hendrick Goltzius.

This is the most common representation of Temperance – although not that we saw painted by Giotto, who has her sheathing her sword (see Day 59 – Virtues vs Vices), or for that matter, the version painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in his Allegory of Good Government, in which she watches the first known image of an hour glass. In Saenredam’s personification she carefully pours liquid from one vessel to another – usually interpreted as watering down the wine, a true sign of Temperance, as opposed to complete abstinence. This careful, measured pouring is precisely what our maid is doing. And if she is Temperance, then maybe we could interpret another of Vermeer’s paintings, Woman Holding a Balance, as a personification of Justice. The comparison here is also from the series designed by Goltzius in 1593, but this time executed by different student, Jacob Matham. I don’t have time to say more about this painting now, unfortunately, but, as it is in the Dresden exhibition, I will include it in Tuesday’s talk, Vermeer: On Reflection.

Before then, though, what conclusions can I draw about The Milkmaid? Is she awaiting an assignation, or, conversely, distracting herself from temptation by concentrating on her work? Is she a figure of virtue, expounding the positive values of honest labour? Could she be a personification of Temperance? Vermeer’s focus, his attention to detail, the care with which he has structured the composition, combined colours, balanced tones, and modulated light, not to mention the dignity he gives to his subject, an apparently commonplace maid made monumental, suggests that there must be more than meets the eye. What is this painting about? What is going on? Well, there is a woman pouring milk. What more do you need?

139 – Cavalier attitudes

Judith Leyster, The Last Drop (The Gay Cavalier), c. 1629. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA.

Famously, Frans Hals’ painting, The Laughing Cavalier, is neither laughing, nor a cavalier – I will talk about what he is and who he might be this coming Monday, 25 October at 6pm in the context of the Wallace Collection’s small (but perfectly formed) exhibition Frans Hals: The Male Portrait. In subsequent weeks in November I will talk about more exhibitions – Vermeer: On Reflection (in Dresden) on Tuesday 2, Hogarth and Europe (Tate Britain) on Tuesday 16, and Alison Watt: A Portrait without Likeness (Scottish National Portrait Gallery) on Tuesday 23 – all of these are now on sale. But for now, I’d like to talk about another painting which does not show a cavalier, by someone who could be considered one of Hals’ greatest rivals – although she was also one of his admirers – Judith Leyster. It seems only fair to look at the work of a woman, as the Wallace’s exhibition has an almost ‘dare to be square’ attitude – which is acknowledged by the director of the museum in his preface to the catalogue – given that it focuses on paintings of white men by a white man, with no suggestion that there might be any other type of person in the world. You could argue, I suppose, that as the curator of the exhibition is a woman, that the male bias is actually OK. But as far as I know, no one has suggested that it isn’t! Anyway, it’s a good excuse to talk about Judith Leyster – not that she needs an excuse. She was a great artist – we should talk about her more often.

Today’s picture is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and their online catalogue calls it by the title, or titles, that I have used above: The Last Drop (The Gay Cavalier). It’s worth remembering that neither of these would have been used by Leyster herself. Apart from the fact that she was Dutch (and so anything she called the painting would have been in Dutch), artists simply didn’t give paintings titles back then – it was more common to describe what was depicted – ‘two drunk men with a skeleton’, for example. I have talked about the issue of names before – way back at the beginning of the blog, I think, with paintings like The Fighting Temeraire (which is actually just part of Turner’s title). So many paintings – The Laughing Cavalier included – have been given nicknames relatively recently (by which I mean the late 19th or early 20th Centuries), and even though they often have little or nothing to do with the subject of the painting, they have stuck irrevocably. I don’t know when today’s picture got the two titles it now has, but only the first is accurate. None of the people represented is dressed as a cavalier – although you could argue that the skeleton might have been one when alive. However, The Last Drop is entirely to the point.

Clearly, The Last Drop doesn’t only refer to this particular drink, even if the seated man on the left is on the verge of draining his stoneware tankard dry. This is also the last drop he will ever drink. There may be a small reserve of liquid in the very bulbous body of the vessel, but short of tipping it up vertically, there is not much more he could do to finish it off. It doesn’t really matter, though, as Death is watching eagerly to see if is time to finish him. The skeleton itself is an unmistakable Memento Mori ­(literally: ‘remember death’) – but it (or is it he? I’m going for ‘he’) is also holding other symbolic objects. Held aloft in his right hand is an hour glass, with the last few grains of sand trickling through. Time is nearly up, and the skeleton smiles gleefully as he displays the hour glass as evidence that soon it will be time for him pounce. As if a skeleton on its own wasn’t enough, he has a second skull in his right hand, clutching a lit candle with it, as he bends over to check that the drink – and so, it seems, the man’s life – is finally done. When it is, the candle will presumably be snuffed out, and the drinker, too, will ‘snuff it’, if I can use that most disrespectful of terms for death. Meanwhile, the candle sheds an unnatural glare around the profile of the drinker. Apart from that harsh light, the man is already in the shadows. Almost inevitably it reminds me of ‘the Scottish Play’ (and, if you can get a return, try and get to see the production at the Almeida Theatre, which is on until 27 November – tickets for the last set of performances go on sale today, 21 October). Here is ‘the’ speech from Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The hourglass tells us that the man on the left is at the last hour of his recorded time, and that the brief candle will soon be out. But this man has not drunk alone.

His standing companion has clearly had more than one too many, judging by the garish expression on his face – not to mention his all-too-evident teeth, which are rarely, if ever, seen in paintings of respectable people. Here too the expression is enhanced by the harsh lighting, and neatly framed by the brilliant highlights around the rim of his hat, and also by the bravura painting of the turned up trim of his collar. The sleeve is wonderfully handled too, with free, slashing brushstrokes of barely-mixed lighter and darker reds modelling the folds in the odd, baggy garment. Rather than the skeleton’s hourglass, this chap holds a smoking pipe aloft – another symbol, like excessive drinking, of a dissolute lifestyle, and also, of death. Like life, smoke is insubstantial, fleeting, and is gone before you know it.

That we are near the end is confirmed by the fact that this drink too (like the fun) is finished. Nothing remains in the upturned tankard, every last drop is drained. And as for the costume, it is extraordinary. Such a large, voluminous jacket, which is worn over a dark blue unbuttoned doublet. Underneath that is a white blouse, also unbuttoned, revealing far more of the reveller himself than the strict rules of 17th Century Holland would have allowed.

The tankard is maybe too brilliantly lit for an object which is at that distance from a candle, but I’m sure that this is a choice by the artist to make the whole painting seem more garish and more glaring, thus emphasizing what is important, and what is at stake. But it is also done to catch your eye – it draws your attention for more reasons than one. In 1903 this painting was attributed to Frans Hals, who was, after all, the master of the freely handled brushstroke. However, in that year someone noticed the letters ‘JL’ written on the mug – the signature of Judith Leyster (1609-60) – just to the left of the handle, where it joins the body of the vessel and is so brilliantly illuminated. If people had seen it before, they had failed to identify it, probably because until 1893 (just ten years before) she had fallen into obscurity, only to be rediscovered when her signature was identified on a different painting. The ‘JL’ is usually followed by a star, as her name, Leyster, means ‘Lodestar’ – another name for the pole star, the one used by sailors as a fixed point for navigation. She was famous in her lifetime, and even praised, punningly, as the ‘leading star’ in art. In 1633 she was the first woman to join the Haarlem artists’ guild – indeed, she was the first woman in Western Europe to be admitted to any painters’ guild. It was probably to celebrate this that she painted the wonderful self portrait which I wrote about during lockdown 1, on Day 34 of ‘Picture of the Day’. Leyster probably trained with Frans Hals, although there is no firm evidence for that. However, she did witness the baptism of one of his children in 1631: they were clearly (at that stage) on very good terms. Her status as a ‘Master’ meant that she was allowed to teach, and in 1635 she took on three pupils, although one of them subsequently left her to work under Hals. She sued the older master, and although the student’s mother paid Leyster punitive damages (but only half of what she asked for) and Hals also paid a penalty, Leyster too was fined by the guild for not having registered the student in the first place… But, as the saying goes, all publicity is good publicity, and work picked up… at least until the following year, when she married fellow artist Jan Miense Molenaer. There are hardly any works by her dated after 1636, the year in which she married. It could have been that, as a mother of five, she simply didn’t have the time to paint. Although it could also have been that, as a man, Molenaer was in a better position to sell the paintings, and so she worked as one of his assistants – a member of the workshop, but not its leader. It’s not that he was taking credit for her work, but that it was financially expedient for her to work this way. But back to the painting: why is the standing reveller dressed in this unusual manner?

His unusual garb ties the painting inextricably to another by Leyster, the Merry Company, now in a private collection, which was sold by Christie’s in 2018 for a little shy of two million pounds. They are of a similar size, and although the Merry Company is a little smaller, it has probably been cut down.  Seen next to each other like this, the similarities are clear. The two revellers in our painting are seen at a later stage of merriment – the plumed hat has been lost, and the man in red is now wearing the blue hat of his companion. He has also lost his blue belt, allowing his jacket to fall open – and the blue doublet has also been unbuttoned. He also seems to have grabbed a different tankard, while the seated figure drinks from the same vessel he had earlier. Their drinking started in daylight, and has continued well into the night – they have lost their more soberly dressed companion, but their debauchery has summoned Death. The moral is clear: it’s all very well to have some fun – but don’t take it too far. The baggy costumes – so unlike the closely tailored fashions of the 17th Century – are derived from Italian theatre, the Commedia dell’Arte, and had been adopted as carnival costumes by the 16th Century. So this could be vastenavond – the Dutch word for the night before Lent (literally ‘the evening before fasting’) – or, in other words, Carnival.

The Merry Company must have been significant for Leyster, as she quoted from it in her Self portrait. Surely there were reasons for this choice: technical analysis has shown that originally a female figure was depicted on the canvas, which Leyster covered with the fiddle player later on. It could be that she wanted to show that she was the master of at least two different genres – portraiture and the one annoyingly known as genre painting (i.e. normal people doing normal things). She was the only woman to paint genre scenes, after all. However, the reason for this choice might be more sophisticated. In Het Schilder-Boeck – ‘The Book of Painters’ – written by Karel van Mander in 1604, the author refers to a Dutch proverb, stating that ‘the more a painter he becomes, the wilder he gets’. By including the wild fiddler from The Merry Company, Leyster could be replacing ‘he’ with ‘she’.

I’d love to know what happened to the red hat with its oversized plume, though. It must have been lost somewhere along the way. Maybe it was picked up by Frans Hals, or taken by the wayward student, as Hals painted a young man wearing a very similar hat – and holding a skull – in one of his works in the National Gallery. If you want to see what I mean, click on that link, as it’s not a portrait, so I probably won’t be talking about it on Monday.

138 – Transfigured

Apse Mosaic, c. 549. Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna.

This coming Tuesday, at 6pm, I will be Revealing Ravenna – or at least, talking about the remarkable mosaics, putting them in their historical and religious context, and explaining why the best Byzantine art is in Italy, rather than in Istanbul. And the following week I will be lucky enough to visit them in person. But seeing as I know not all of you can come with me, and not all of you will be free on Tuesday, I thought I would write about one of the mosaics today – particularly as this one will not really get much of a look in, because it’s not really in Ravenna. In subsequent weeks I will start what is effectively a new ‘series’, talking about the increasing number of exhibitions which are opening in museums in London, across Britain, and even Europe-wide. Once more I’m doing this because I know that not all of you will be able to get to all of them – but also, in case you are able to go, to serve as an introduction. So far only one of them is on sale – Frans Hals: The Male Portrait, inspired by the exhibition at the Wallace Collection. That talk will be on Monday 25 October. Gradually, once I’ve been able to check everything out, I will release tickets for Vermeer: On Reflection (2 November), Hogarth and Europe (16 November), and Alison Watt (23 November). These will all be on Tuesdays, because I will be teaching a course for the National Gallery on Mondays – but more about that when that too is confirmed. There will be details about everything on the diary page, of course. Meanwhile, back to Ravenna.

I have not often visited the church of St Apollinare in Classe for the simple reason that it is a little out of the way – although maybe not as far as I used to think. Although it is one of the suburbs of Ravenna today, Classe (two syllables, clas-sé) was originally the port of the Roman city, its name coming from the Latin for ‘fleet’ – classis ­– and it was about 4km away. Each time I go, I am struck by the simple majesty of the building, although this is the result of complex historical processes which turn out not to be not simple at all. The church itself has a standard ‘basilica’ structure, with a central nave and two side aisles, separated by arcades, which lead to three apsidal endings. Originally the walls of the nave would have been covered with mosaics, but these have been lost. They were replaced with frescoes in the 18th Century, of which only the roundels with portraits of the bishops of Ravenna have survived, just above the arcades. The upper part of the walls, and the walls of the side aisles, have been stripped back to bare brick – wonderfully evocative, but decidedly modern in ethos. But at least they do not distract from the central apse, which is the true treasure of the church.

The church was dedicated to St Apollinare (five syllables – A-pol-lin-ar-é) in 549 – which gives us the approximate date for the mosaic within the apse. It was founded by Ursicinus, bishop from 533-536, and was dedicated by Maximian, who had also managed to get a promotion, being Archbishop from 546-556. Apollinare himself was said to have been the first bishop, having been converted to Christianity by none other than St Peter, although the ‘life’ which reports his deeds and martyrdom was, in all probability, written by Maurus, Archbishop from 642-71. There is no concrete historical evidence that Apollinare ever existed, if we’re honest, and Maurus almost certainly wrote his ‘life’ to make the diocese of Ravenna look more important, and to emphasize its apostolic origin. Indeed, one of the major subjects of the mosaics is the apostolic succession.

In the semi-dome of the apse we see Apollinare, dressed as a bishop, and with his arms raised. This is the attitude taken by an orant – someone at prayer – a common image in early Christian art. Walking towards him are a number of sheep: six on each side, making twelve in total, like Jesus’s apostles. But why are they sheep? Well, the earliest images of Jesus show him as ‘the Good Shepherd’, and indeed, priests and vicars today still refer to their congregation as their ‘flock’. Here Apollinare’s flock is the same size as Jesus’s. Apollinare therefore stands in for Jesus. If not Christ’s vicar on Earth, he is at least Christ’s vicar in Ravenna – and this is precisely what the apostolic succession is all about. In John, Chapter 21 Jesus appears to his followers after the Crucifixion and asks Peter the same question three times. The third time is in John 21:17,

He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.

He has already, in Matthew 16:18-19, told Peter that he will give him the keys of heaven:

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Either of these quotations, taken separately, would serve to affirm Peter’s position as the first leader of the church after Jesus. Together, the message is reinforced. Peter takes Jesus’s place, and then, according to the belief current in Ravenna, Peter both converted Apollinare and appointed him bishop: so Apollinare takes Peter’s place, in Ravenna at least. In the mosaic he leads 12 sheep as Jesus led the 12 apostles. Above his head is a blue circle, set with stars and a jewelled cross. Three more sheep stand on the ground, two people appear in the golden sky, and a hand appears from the clouds. But I’ll come back to these details later.

About 120 years after its dedication, the church was partially remodelled, and additions were made to the mosaics above the arch of the apse. We see Christ blessing in the centre, surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists. On the left the eagle stands for St John, the angel is the symbol of St Matthew, and the lion – as anyone familiar with Venice will know – is St Mark. This leaves the ox to represent St Luke. The most handy mnemonic to remember these is that plant which makes such good hand cream – the ALOE. If the letters stand for Angel, Lion, Ox and Eagle they are in the right order for the canonical arrangement of the gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Below these symbolic beasts, and once more against a golden sky, twelve sheep have left the gates of two jewelled cities – Bethlehem and Jerusalem – processing towards Jesus in the same way that their equivalents do towards Apollinare just below.

And further down again, below Apollinare, there are four figures depicted in the mosaics between the windows. They are all bishops, all of whom were Apollinare’s successors. In traditional accounts, he was the first Bishop of Ravenna, his episcopacy lasting until his martyrdom in 79 CE. From left to right the first of the chosen few is Ecclesius, the 24th Bishop, in position from 522-532, who founded the church of San Vitale (home to some of the glorious mosaics I will discuss on Tuesday). He is followed by St Severus (c. 308-c. 348), the 12th bishop; Bishop Lacuna (dates unclear); and Ursicinus (533-536), 25th Bishop and the founder of this particular church. OK, so there never was a Bishop Lacuna, it’s just that I can’t get a good enough detail to be able to read his name and tell you who he is. These four bishops show us, in abbreviated form, how the apostolic succession continues – Jesus appointed Peter, Peter appointed Apollinare, and he is followed by a number of successors in turn, down to the present incumbent. But what exactly is going on above Apollinare’s head?

Most striking is the jewelled cross in the blue circle. In the apse mosaic of San Vitale, Jesus sits atop a similar blue circle: it can be seen to embody the cosmos, over which he rules. The cross needs no explanation, although the jewels with which it is embossed express its value, as they do for the cities seen on either side of the mosaic in the additions. There are twenty of them in the cross: four on either arm (reminding us, perhaps, of the four evangelists), leaving 12 going from top to bottom – a reference, perhaps, to the 12 sheep, and so to the apostles. In the very centre we see, as an apparently minute depiction, the face of Christ. To the left and right of the cross are the letters alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of the Greek alphabet, as God proclaims more than once in the Book of Revelation. This is chapter 1 verse 8:

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

Underneath the cross are the words SALVS MVNDI – ‘the health of the world’ – or, to put it more explicitly, ‘salvation’ – and above we see (although not very clearly) ἸΧΘΥϹ – ‘ichthys’, the Greek word for ‘fish’. The fish was one of the earliest symbols for Jesus, and is derived from an acronym. The letters stand for the Greek words meaning ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’. Nowhere in this image is Jesus explicitly named, nor, with the exception of the tiny image of his face, is he visible. But what of the three sheep, and the two people in the sky? Should we see the sheep as three of the apostles, by comparison with the others below? And if so, who are they? They are not named. However, the two half figures in the sky are. The one top left is labelled ‘Moyses’ – or Moses. The top right inscription is harder to read, but it is Elijah. The presence of these two Old Testament prophets is the key to the understanding of the mosaic. Here is Matthew 17:1-3 (and helps to know that ‘Elias’ is just another version of ‘Elijah’):

And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him.

This is The Transfiguration, itself transfigured. The three sheep represent Peter, James and John. Matthew says that ‘his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light’, but in this mosaic Jesus is transfigured into pure symbol, whether as the cross, or as the words: ‘alpha and omega’, ‘salus mundi’, ‘ichthus’. Too perfect to represent, Jesus becomes entirely transcendent. Later on (17;5) Matthew tells us that, ‘a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’. The disembodied hand is that of God himself, and is the visual equivalent of the ‘voice out of the cloud’. And how better to represent ‘a bright cloud’ than with the light reflecting from a gold mosaic?

In the context of the church the meaning of the mosaic becomes clear. At the top, Jesus is seen as if in Heaven, blessing the congregation. His word is conveyed by the four evangelists beside him, and preached by the twelve apostles who process towards him – albeit in ovine form – from Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Below, in the apse – on Earth – he is transfigured. Seen in the presence of Moses and Elijah, and witnessed by Peter, James and John, this is the Son of God. In a direct line below him, Apollinare takes his place, having been appointed by St Peter, where, praying, he leads his own flock. His role is then taken by successive Bishops and Archbishops, whose throne would originally have been in the apse, directly behind where we now see the relatively modern altar (the same was true for all churches, although the only English cathedral to have its cathedra in this original position is in Norwich). Everything – the mosaics, the architecture and the original fixtures and fittings – would have combined to say that the apostolic succession continues to this day.

The steps leading up to the altar date from the restructuring of the church in the 670s. By raising the floor a crypt could created beneath the high altar for the display of the relics of Sant’Apollinare, allowing pilgrims to pay homage without disturbing the celebration of the mass. In the mosaic Apollinare appears directly above his own relics, as well as directly above the modern-day Bishop, who would be, in a more worldly and less symbolic way, presiding over his own flock. There should be no doubt as to the authority of this man – it descends from Christ, is justified by his suffering on the cross, and has been passed down from the first Bishop, himself installed by St Peter.

By the 9th Century the harbour silted up and the importance of Classe diminished. Not only that: pirates patrolled the nearby coast, and they would not be cowed even by the direct display of God’s authority. To protect Apollinare’s relics from the raids, they were moved to a church in the centre of Ravenna. Built as the chapel of the palace of King Theoderic, and dedicated to Christ the Redeemer in 504, in around 540 it was re-dedicated to St Martin and then, in 856, it was re-dedicated a second time, to Sant’Apollinare. Today it is known as ‘the New Sant’Apollinare’, or Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. The changes of dedication are reflected in subtle changes to the mosaics, which take on an added complexity. But I’ll be talking about all that on Tuesday.

137 – The little Lord Jesus, Asleep…

Cosmé Tura, Virgin and Child, 1480s. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

Having spent a fair amount of time in my youth in Ferrara, when I was researching my PhD about the sculptures there, I grew inordinately fond of the idiosyncratic school of painting that flourished alongside my far scarcer sculptures. The paintings themselves are remarkably sculptural, we know that some of the painters designed three-dimensional works. I have always thought that at least two of them may also have carved, or at least modelled, themselves. They are Cosmé Tura – the great genius of the 15th Century Ferrarese school, about one of whose works I will write today, and Francesco del Cossa, who softened Tura’s style, and then moved on to Bologna – quite possibly because he didn’t like the way he was treated in Ferrara. It is one of his paintings – an Annunciation – which is the inspiration for my talk on Monday at 6pm, How to wear your halo – and the Significance of the Snail. Details of this are (a) on this link and (b) listed alongside details of everything I’m up to on the diary page of my website. Apart from the fact that it is a Ferrarese painting, the main reason for my choice today is the nature of Jesus’s halo, given that the ‘History of the Halo’ will form a considerable segment of Monday’s talk…

For obvious reasons, when I am taking people around the Accademia in Venice, home to this gem, I focus on the Venetian paintings. It is the strong point of the collection, after all, and I always assume that that is precisely what visitors will want to see. However, it does mean that I rarely get to talk about this image, for which I have a particular soft spot – a Ferrarese Madonna and Child in its original frame. Little is known about its origins, and nothing is known about the patron or the location for which it was intended. Before it was purchased by the Italian State for the Accademia in 1896, the painting’s history is a blank – so we have to rely on the evidence before our eyes. Stylistically it would appear to date from the 1480s, but to explain that would entail a book-length discussion of the work of Cosmé Tura. Let’s just go with his dates – which the National Gallery in London gives as ‘before 1431 – 1495’ – making this a fairly late work. By 1460 he had a salary from the Ferrarese Court (under Marchese, later Duke, Borso d’Este) making him, effectively, the unofficial ‘court’ artist. It has been suggested that the unusual stylisation of his work, with its angular twists, turns and sharp inflections, relates to the complex line of thought followed by the Ferrarese scholars – although, to be honest, Borso was far more interested in partying that listening to erudite conversation. That was more the concern of his predecessor, half-brother Leonello d’Este.

There might be some clue as to the original patron, and/or intended location, from the section of the painting at the top. The frame is a piece of miniature architecture. Two pilasters, decorated with what are referred to as candelabra, are topped by classically inspired capitals, sitting somewhere between Ionic and Corinthian – but this is an early renaissance form, as the full ‘classical language’ of architecture had not yet been fully formulated by renaissance architects. Nevertheless, the two pilasters support a full entablature, made up of an architrave (the ‘beam’ at the bottom), a frieze (decorated with stylised leaves, some of which seem almost anthropomorphic) and a cornice – the three flat strips at the top. In its turn, the entablature supports a segmental pediment, with rosettes sitting to the left and right and at the summit. The pediment itself is also painted with two angels in red holding onto a sun-like symbol. This is the ‘Name of Jesus’, a monogram formulated by the ardent 15th Century Franciscan preacher St Bernardino of Siena. As seen here it looks like ‘yhs’ – with a line through the ‘h’ – but ‘ihs’ would be a more usual formation, being derived from the first three letters of ‘JESUS’ in Greek (ΙΗΣΟΥΣ). The line through the ‘h’ tells us that the monogram is an abbreviation, but also, conveniently, forms a cross with the vertical of the ‘h’. Taking the idea from the biblical text, ‘At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow’ (Philippians 2:10, cue communal hymn singing), Bernardino used this sign to unite warring factions, and to inspire devotion. It would therefore make sense if this painting had been commissioned for a Franciscan church – and there is indeed a San Francesco in Ferrara, and there was from as early as 1232. But then, there was also a church – and convent – dedicated to San Bernardino himself. It is not there anymore, though – it was destroyed in 1825. At one point (1509) the convent was acquired by none other than Lucrezia Borgia (who was, among other things, the second wife of Duke Alfonso I of Ferrara) as a gift for her niece, who eventually, in 1543, became the abbess – but that’s another story.

Looking down to the main image – as indeed the two angels in the pediment are – we can see what, at first glance, could be a standard depiction of the Madonna and Child. However, that first glance would have to be a very quick one. The original gilt frame holds a separate wooden panel which has its own trompe-l’oeil frame painted in pink, a bit like a window frame looking out into the countryside (more of that below). Mary is seated on the window sill, her left knee bent, with her shin lying across the sill and her foot hidden behind the frame to our left. Her blue cloak falls over the frame, linking our space to hers, making the image more immediate. The weight of the Christ Child rests on her knee, with one of his feet planted on the cloak where it lies on the window sill – his foot is therefore protected from what could be cold, and potentially dirty, Verona marble. The other foot floats, almost unnaturally, in the air. He is completely naked – a common feature in 14th and 15th century images, although it went out of fashion with the strictures of the Counter Reformation in second half of the 16th Century. His nudity stressed not only his humanity, but his masculinity – he was both God and Man… Nevertheless, for the time being he is fast asleep, his right hand resting on his left shoulder, and his head almost weightlessly resting on that hand. The left hand hangs down limply, almost as it would in a Pietà. Mary looks down at him with tender affection, holding onto him gently with her left hand, and resting the fingers of her right hand even more gently on his shoulder.

When we look closer, we can see more details of the painted frame – the light is coming from the left, lighting up the inside of the right hand frame, but leaving the underside of the top section in shadow. However, you can’t see the inside of the frame on the left. This implies that, in its original location, when the painting was first seen, we would have been standing to the left of it, looking over towards it on our right. Tura seems to have taken the words of Leon Battista Alberti to heart. When writing down an explanation of how to do perspective, Alberti said, ‘I draw a rectangle which is considered to be a window through which I see what I want to paint’. He didn’t actually say ‘paint a window frame’, but more than one artist decided to play this game – Tura, in this instance, was one of them. It’s impossible to pinpoint the vanishing point with just one orthogonal (a line in a perspective scheme that is supposed to be at right angles to the picture plane) but, judging by the diagonal at the top right of the fictive frame, the vanishing point, and therefore our view point, would appear to be – roughly speaking – at the bottom left corner of the painting. This implies that not only would the painting have been to our right, but also quite high up. Mary’s halo barely fits in between her head and the painted frame, which of course begs the question, ‘What, exactly, is a halo?’ – just one of the questions I want to try and answer on Monday. Well, in this case, it seems to be a thin, flat sheet of gold which reflects some elements of Mary’s headdress. Jesus’s halo certainly appears to be solid – Mary’s veil rests on it, with several folds bunching together, wrinkling over the top, and falling over the other side. But if they are sheets of gold, how do they stay up? I’m not going to answer that question today.

Behind Mary’s head a vine has been strung up behind the window frame – or just happens to be growing there – with a bunch of grapes hanging from it on either side. Grapes make wine, of course, and Jesus will offer wine to his apostles at the Last Supper, saying ‘Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.’ (Matthew 26:27-28). This eucharistic reference strengthens the echo of the Pietà which we have already seen. But then, so does the goldfinch at the top right, which is a symbol of the passion of Christ. It looks down towards Jesus, echoing Mary’s gaze. The bird at the top left might also add to this meaning – but no one is really sure what it is doing there. The Accademia website says that it is another goldfinch, but it isn’t. It’s rather like a treecreeper, but with a red flash on its wing. In fact, it’s a wallcreeper – or Tichodroma muraria. As for its symbolism – well, I have no idea, although as it clings on hard, it could, like ivy, stand for steadfastness and fidelity.

Further down the painting an intriguing image comes into focus. Apart from the blissful sleep of the child, and his mother’s delicate touch, not to mention the curious folds of the veil going over the solid halo, there are gold patterns surrounding the Virgin’s shoulder. Sadly these have worn away a little – but I hope you can make out the image of a woman in the sky, her head tilted towards the baby much as Mary’s and the goldfinch’s are. This is the astrological sign Virgo – the Virgin. Apt, you would agree, but unusual. Throughout history the Church has had an ambivalent attitude towards astrology. Even when it was indistinguishable from astronomy there were those who thought that, even though God had placed the stars in the sky, the stars themselves could not govern our fates: astrology was superstition and should be discouraged. However, there were also those who thought that God had deliberately placed the stars in the sky as yet another way of communicating his message – which would mean that astrology had a certain validity. Above right of Virgo are also Sagittarius, Pisces and Aquarius, apparently (I can’t make them out here, to be honest), although these are not in the right configuration, and their combined significance has yet to be deciphered. It should be said that he court of Ferrara was especially interested in astrology. One of the city’s great treasures is the Room of the Months, each of which is governed by the appropriate astrological sign – not to mention the three relevant Decans, really obscure personifications – but more of them, briefly, on Monday!

Whatever the implications of these details, the overall symbolism of the painting is clarified when we look at the sill on which Mary is resting. Our attention is drawn towards it by the rich flashes of the deep blue cloak falling over it, and it would in any case have been more immediately present, as it would have been roughly at our eyelevel. It bears an inscription which reads

Sviglia el tuo figlio dolce madre pia
per far infin felice l’alma mia

‘Wake your son, sweet holy mother, so that my soul will finally be happy’

Now, as I’m sure you know, when visiting a mother with a young baby, it is always a bit disappointing if the baby is asleep, as it means that you can’t play with it and have a cuddle. But for the mother, it is a godsend, as her child is finally quiet. However Mary is on the verge of waking her child just for us – her right hand is poised to touch his right shoulder ever so gently, and wake him up without alarm. His little left hand, hanging for all the world as if he is dead, will come to life, and so will he. And our souls will finally be happy, because this reminds us that, in roughly thirty-three years’ time, the dead Christ, lying in a not entirely dissimilar way on his Mother’s lap, will also come back to life. The sleeping Baby Jesus is a symbol both of the death and of the resurrection of Christ – and this applies to any painting in which you see Jesus asleep.

The solidity of the halo is a mystery, though. Surely a halo is just a visual embodiment of the light of God, and the glow of sanctity? Or does this very solidity imply that the light and the sanctity are real? That, however spiritual, they are both solid and dependable? I don’t know the answer – but it is a possibility. The talk on Monday may provide alternative explanations…