250 – What’s in a name?

Victor Hugo, The Cheerful Castle, c. 1847. Maisons de Victor Hugo Paris/Guernsey.

This week – Monday 2 June at 6pm, to be precise – I am looking forward to talking about the truly astonishing drawings by Victor Hugo in the Royal Academy’s aptly named exhibition Astonishing Things. If I’m honest, I went to see it because I had to (well, I had been asked to take a private group round), but came out wishing I’d got there earlier. I also realised that I should encourage you all to go as well: it’s fantastic! Some of the exhibits are simply good observational drawings – and well worth seeing as a result. Others are so totally original that they look 60 or even 100 years ahead of their time. The techniques employed are both fascinating and original, and while the complex mind of the master novelist can be traced in the story-like elements of some, others are so remarkable and so baffling that even the curators of the exhibition can’t fully explain them – so do please join me if you can, and we can marvel together! Today, as an introduction, I’m going to concentrate on three of the simpler examples.

A prior booking has stopped me talking the following Monday, but then, on 16 June, I will introduce the Artemisia Gentileschi  exhibition which is at the Jacquemart-André in Paris until 3 August. The day after that, 17 June at 1pm, I am giving a FREE lunchtime talk at the newly refurbished lecture theatre in the newly refurbished Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery: Seeing the Light: the Art of Looking in and around Duccio’s ‘Maestà’ – please do come if you can! Then, on 23 June, we will be Revisiting Cimabue, looking back to an exhibition which was at the Louvre, but sadly has already closed.

After over four years of giving these Zoom talks the time has finally come for me to put up my prices: from now on each talk will be £12 (bearing in mind that some organisations were charging more even back in 2020!). However, I’m holding them at £10 each if you book for all three of my Three Sainsbury Stories together – which you can do on that link. Alternately, you can book them individually. More information is on the following links: Opening up the North (30 June), At home in the Church (7 July) and Across Italy… (14 July). Enough plans for now – but keep an eye on the diary in case there are any more!

I would always encourage you, when in a museum, art gallery or exhibition, to look at the art rather than read the label. We seem to be a profoundly verbal culture, and people always spend more time reading the labels than looking at the art: they could have stayed home and read a book! But in this case, although I was instantly attracted to this drawing by its delicacy and refinement, the atmosphere it captures, and the bravura technique, it was the title that really grabbed my attention: The Cheerful Castle. What a delightful idea! Who imagined that a Castle could be Cheerful? Well, a fantastic storyteller, for one. But how would you go about showing that ‘cheer’ in a drawing?

The eponymous edifice is situated upon an uneven, rocky ridge, which slopes slowly down from right to left, before plummeting into a ravine. The background is light and airy, but undefined. White clouds, totally unthreatening, are hovering in the sky. Behind them blocky forms and vague diagonals suggest that maybe we are only someway up a mountain range: there may still be peaks high above our point of view. The castle itself has many turrets and towers, with a wide assortment of differently shaped rooves, finials and oriels, battlements and crenelations. There is no sense that we are looking at a real building, something that Victor Hugo saw in real life: this is an invention, an elaborate dream summoned from his imagination.

If we were to approach the castle from the bottom of the hill on the left, we would first have to cross a bridge which passes over a valley – or maybe moat. A guard house rises to the right of it, with a pitched roof and two chimneys. It could be a barbican: to the right there is a sloping line of crenelations leading to the main body of the building. The drawing here is at its darkest, a sense of threat and foreboding, perhaps, which might help to keep intruders at bay. The forms are smudged in part – Hugo liked to experiment with technique, and here he has wet the drawing to create an atmospheric mist around the edges of the darkest walls. Just visible is a flight of steps coming down towards us on this side of the building, to the left of a large, light, open niche, which is defined by dark shadows, suggesting that it is very deep. Above it the ink is at its blackest, marking ivy, or other vegetation, which is growing over these rocks, or lower walls. In contrast to all this darkness, the castle rises, as in a fantasy, all lightness and specific detail above the dark imprecision of its foundations. This lightness – and the detail – are the first things which convey cheerfulness.

Most of the structure is light, and delicately drawn. With the exception of a massive square tower built on a steep slope, sunlight seems to capture every varied surface. The darker forms serve as a foil, a dark repoussoir encouraging our eyes to look towards the light, and so further into the space of the drawing. Another bridge leads over two arches to a more elaborate guard house on the far right, a pale tower with a tall, spire-like roof, topped with an onion dome and a weathervane. Windows project from the spire, the gradually shifting slope of its sides mapped out by the most delicately delineated rows of tiles. Elsewhere the tiny touches of the pen pick out lines of bricks, small apertures, more crenelations, machicolations, cantilevered projections and a wide variety of flat and curved walls; rough and smooth surfaces; conical or flat, sloping rooves; belfries, flags and chimneys. What we see is plentiful and varied, light and delightful against the barely darker background – a miraculous, fairy-tale vision. This visual playfulness and jokey profusion is surely the essence of Cheerful. The role this delicacy plays becomes clearer if we compare our first castle to a second, from another drawing.

Compared to the wealth of detail and the precision with which The Cheerful Castle is articulated, this second fortress is far more moody, a looming presence emerging from the clouds, big, bold and blocky, more ruinous, crumbling even, and scarcely habitable. It has a far more aged air, and the weather is foreboding. Diagonal lines going from top right to bottom left suggest that rain could be lashing down, although the strong contrast of light and shade on the walls implies that the sun is breaking through gaps in the turbulent clouds. Like a flash of lightening, this creates a sense of revelation, as if we can finally see the true state of affairs: this is what the castle has come to. However, we should remember that in each case we are only looking at part of the image. Here is a second detail of the drawing from which this gloomy fortress is taken.

You can just see the castle looming on the left – but bottom right the atmosphere is altogether different. In both drawings Hugo has used black and brown ink and wash – which means that he has covered some the paper with a thin layer of colour (i.e. ink) using a brush, but without leaving any brushstrokes. In this second drawing there are also watercolours, which pick out the delicate leaves and petals of plants and flowers. They wind their way around a block of stone on which is carved an angel in high relief. Its wings are wrapped around its feet and shoulders, but folded high above its head. It looks down, arms crossed and resting on… a cross? Or the hilt of a sword? It could be either… or both. Is this a fragment of decoration from the ruined castle, or something else? Seeing the drawing as a whole might help.

The plant – a sort of imaginary vine or ivy with unexpected flowers – borders the drawing at the bottom and on the right, and thus frames the vision of the distant castle. The angel, in sharper focus – perhaps because it is closer, and not wrapped around with clouds – does not share the colours of the plants. It uses the same palette as the castle, implying that it belongs to the same world: a fragment then – of the castle’s story, if not of its structure. This is The Castle with the Angel of about 1863, and although I described the first drawing as showing a fairy-tale castle, this drawing is itself more like a fairy tale, I think. The colourful flowers around a desolate castle are reminiscent – to my mind at least – of the impenetrable screen of roses which grew around Sleeping Beauty. The angel is melancholy: could this be a memorial sculpture? Or does it give us a clue about what has happened to the castle? Could it even be some kind of guardian spirit who has been turned into stone? However verbose he might have been, Victor Hugo didn’t always explain what he was about, and some of the drawings remain especially obscure. Nevertheless, the author of Les Misérables and Notre Dame de Paris (which Anglophones know better as The Hunchback of Notre Dame – a title the author detested) clearly knew how to tell a story, and he could do it with images as well as words.

If I wanted to be especially fanciful, I could see these two drawings as being part of the same fable. The Cheerful Castle could be a nostalgic look back to the good old days, with The Castle with the Angel showing the lamentable state we are in now, waiting for the heroine or hero to rescue us. Or it could be the other way round: once the foe has been vanquished, and the gloom banished, The Cheerful Castle could be the Happy Ever After. However, given that the two drawings were created about 16 years apart, I think it is safe to say that neither was Hugo’s intention. I do want to compare The Cheerful Castle to a third drawing, though.

It has a completely different feel to it, I think. Even in this detail you get a sense that you know where you are: on a broad river, or lake, in a deep valley cut through the hills. It doesn’t show a ‘castle’ as such, although there is a ruined tower on an island, its form, features and the fall of light perfectly reflected in the mirror-like surface of the water. Another structure – which could be the ruins of a castle – stands on the slope rising up to the right. The two buildings are defined differently. The tower has sharp edges, clearly defined detail, and shading mapping out the three-dimensional structure. The castle, on the other hand, is only defined as an area of dark grey, its form defined by ‘colour’ rather than line. It is further away, and in the shadows – effectively just a silhouette. The light, coming from the top right, and some way behind us, brilliantly illuminates the escarpment on the other side of the water. Between the tower and the right bank, a sailboat sits becalmed, its sail slack, curving down towards the deck. Dark streaks come down from the top of the detail.

In context we can see that these streaks are a sign that the weather is taking a turn for the worse – they are dark clouds and distant downpours. It is an extensive landscape, much of which is actually water. The top of the brightly-lit escarpment is especially dark and cloudy. This is another example of Hugo’s technical brilliance. Having wet the paper, the ink spreads freely, and yet he only allows that to happen at the top of the distant slopes – not too much is left to chance. A different technique creates the streaking clouds: he has dragged dark ink down the page with a piece of fabric, creating this remarkable, atmospheric effect. The drawing, dating to 1847, is called La Tour des Rats. It’s a real place, and one which Hugo had seen: a tower on the Rhine which inspired poems by Robert Southey and, as ‘The Mouse Tower’, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is a place of myth and fable, involving a bishop being eaten by rats (or mice) which have swum over the river to get him. And yet, of the three drawings, it has a greater sense of ‘fact’ about it – quite simply because Hugo had actually been there. It is a highly romanticised view, admittedly, but it is real.

The three drawings could be seen as representatives of three different modes of drawing – or three different moods. The Cheerful Castle shows many of the features of ‘The Picturesque’. According to 18th Century theory, this term was used to describe landscapes which appear naturalistic, and include irregular forms, variety in texture and detail, and which often featured ruins – they delight the eye, and are pleasurable in their diversity. ‘The Picturesque’ was differentiated from ‘The Sublime,’ which shows grandeur and provokes awe, reminding us how small we are compared to the enormity of the natural world: there is often a real sense of danger. In some ways, La Tour des Rats is closer to the Sublime, given the size and scale of the valley, the dark threatening quality of the weather and the ominous presence of the ruins. For the 18th Century, ‘The Beautiful’ would be a third category – with calmer, smoother, rounded surfaces, relaxing and welcoming. None of these three drawings really match that, though. However, I would suggest that The Castle with the Angel is ‘fabulous’ – in its original sense, that is, meaning that it is related to fables. The curling, coloured foliage and flowers are more alive than the monochrome castle and angel – as if the stones are asleep in the past. It is a highly ‘illustrative’ drawing – although it is left up to us to decide which narrative is being illustrated. This freedom of interpretation just makes the imagery richer, though.

All three drawings show castles, of a sort, and yet all three are different. ‘What’s in a name?’, as Juliet asks. ‘That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. And while this may be true, after centuries of horticulture, roses may small as sweet, but they don’t all smell the same. It seems that something similar is true for castles. It will be interesting to see how many other genres of drawing – and castles – Victor Hugo’s work can encompass when we discover it on Monday.

249 – Rushing to the wrong conclusion (or, How to Look at Sculpture)

Ernst Barlach, The Avenger, 1922. Ernst Barlach Haus, Hamburg.

I can’t remember when I fell in love with the work of Ernst Barlach, about whom I will be talking on Monday 26 May. It could have been soon after the opening of Tate Modern, 25 years ago, when I included a version of today’s work in my schools’ workshops, but I’m sure he was familiar even then. On Monday, as well as Barlach, I want to sneak in the drawings currently on show at The Courtauld in the small exhibition With Graphic Intent (which is open until 22 June) as these will give us different ideas about German Expressionism. Given that we tend to look at, and talk about, paintings far more than sculptures, as well as writing about one of Barlach’s most famous works today, I also want to give you some hints about how to look at sculpture in general. But we’ll get to that shortly.

Monday’s talk will conclude my May series about German art, which I will follow with three talks related to Paris in different ways. On 2 June I will explore the remarkable mind of Victor Hugo, whose drawings are currently exhibited in the Royal Academy. As the title of the exhibition suggests, they truly are Astonishing Things – I haven’t seen anything quite like them, and many are 60 years, or even 100 years before their time. And yes, this week I have actually included the right link for the talk! Having discussed someone from Paris, I will move on to an exhibition which is currently in Paris, a wonderful and rich exploration of the works of Artemisia Gentileschi, whom the Jacquemart-André Museum describes as the Heroïne de l’art. That will be on 16 June. The day after, for the first time in seven or eight years, I will give a free lunchtime talk at the National Gallery, Seeing the Light: the Art of Looking in and around Duccio’s ‘Maestà’. It would be great if you could all be there (apologies to all those of you who are not in London). However, the following week (23 June) I will be Revisiting Cimabue – looking back before Duccio, and to an exhibition at the Louvre which has sadly already closed. Thereafter my last three talks this summer will explore the new hang of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing – but keep your eye on the diary for more information about them.

When looking at paintings we tend to think about colour and composition, tone (light and dark), mood and meaning. Or rather, unless it is an abstract painting, we start by identifying what is depicted – the people, places and things. Looking at sculpture is no different. In this case, a man is running, and running at speed. This sense of movement is created in a number of ways. His right leg is bent, with the foot resting on the ground. As far as we can tell, the left leg is straight, and held out directly behind: either he is running, or has a remarkable sense of balance. Admittedly the human body is usually more upright when running, maybe leaning forward a little, but not on a complete horizontal like this. Clearly, however recognisable the forms, this is not an entirely naturalistic depiction. It is stylised, with the stylisation used to express a mood or sensation. This figure is so entirely intent on moving forwards that this very intent, ‘to move forward,’ has effectively become personified. Not only is the left leg trailing, but the left elbow projects forward, pointing the way. The chin and the nose also jut forward. The left hand is held behind the head (from our point of view), and the fingers of the right hand can just be seen clasping the handle of a long, curving knife, or sword – a sabre, or scimitar, maybe. This trails behind the head, as if it has been left behind in the impetus to move forward. The figure is wearing a long robe which also flies out behind him, as if blown backwards by the slipstream caused by the rapid movement. Two long, continuous folds develop from the arm and continue, almost parallel, to end above the heel of the raised left foot. Another emerges from below the arm and trails back to a kink in the hem of the robe. Other, shorter folds flow back from the hip and the knee, the latter fold joining the hem which then continues back before curving up towards the foot. The ground is represented by a sloping wedge, which itself adds to the impetus of the figure’s movement. A block of material fills the space between the ground and the robe, but this is purely practical: it would be difficult to support the balanced mass of this figure on the slim ankle of the right foot. The sword, and the urgency of the forward movement, imply that the figure is on the attack, a violence enhanced by the angular forms and folds, and by the jutting anatomical details. This reading of what we have seen is confirmed by comparison with the title of the piece, The Avenger (or, in the original German, Der Rächer). But what is he avenging? The date of the piece might help us to understand the artist’s meaning – but 1922 doesn’t mean anything significant to me. So how much more can we say?

Well, a fair amount. After all, this is a sculpture: we have hardly begun to look (and, in truth, we haven’t looked at it at all: we are looking at a photograph). With a painting you can stand closer, or further away – and both are useful. Close up, you can see the details, understand the structure of the paint, and pick out the different brush strokes. Further away it is easier to understand the composition, how the image is balanced (or not), and how the colours are distributed. But, in a museum (with obvious exceptions), you only get to see one side of a painting. This is a sculpture, so another thing to consider is the format: what type of sculpture is it? Is it a relief? In which case is it high or low relief? What would the best viewpoint be? Would it look better placed high up, or low down, for example, or on the left or right side of a wall? Or is it a sculpture carved fully in the round? In which case, is it equally interesting from all points of view? Or does it have a predominant, primary viewpoint? To work that out, you’re going to have to walk round it. Ay, there’s the rub. With most sculptures, in a book or on a website, you will only get one photograph. And that’s why we don’t look at sculptures nearly as much as paintings: we are never given the right tools in reproduction, so we don’t know how to look at them in the flesh. Having said that, I am incredibly grateful to the Barlach Haus Museum in Hamburg who have published numerous photos of this work. Let’s take a stroll around it.

If we take just a step to our right, it really becomes obvious how much the left elbow is projecting – how much of the forward movement this conveys – and also how strongly the arm wraps around the head. It is also clear to me that the left foot stands out against the apparently darker background, a smooth, curving space which is an abstraction of the ‘underneath’ or ‘inside’ of the flowing robe. This gives us a couple more ideas of what to look for in a sculpture. How is it carved to receive the light? Are areas designed to create shadows, for example, as they are across the Virgin’s lap in Michelangelo’s Pietà? Or are they there to catch the light (like this foot)? Is the artist more interested in surface or volume? Are we looking at the mass of the material, or the space that is occupied? This sculpture is a solid volume, defined by the surface of the sculpture, with its energy expressed through line. The only place where the solid is perforated is underneath the sword, reminding us that this weapon is not part of the whole, and that the ultimate aim of the figure’s movement is to swing the sword away from the body with all the energy wound up in the spring of the arms, which will be added to the forward momentum of the charging body.

This is the only photograph of this point of view that I could find on the internet – and I wasn’t sure, initially, if I could believe it. Why are there no others? Well, let’s face it, it isn’t very interesting: just the stylised closure of the bottom of the robe, with a naturalistic foot projecting from it. It seems evident to me that Barlach never imagined anyone looking from this point of view – we are encouraged to keep walking round, so let’s keep moving.

A few more steps, and the figure begins to emerge again. What we can now see is how extremely the right arm is bent, folded back at the elbow like a hairpin.

Yet more steps and we find ourselves on the opposite side of the sculpture from our starting point. Of interest here are the long lines flowing back from the profile of the figure, which again speak of speed and energy. We also become aware of the power of the hands clenched around the handle of the sword, and their proximity to one another, implying that a focussed, driving force will be unleashed when the slashing blow is finally struck. But we cannot see the head of the protagonist, let alone the face, so we are not entirely involved with the figure. I don’t think this view of the figure is by any means as captivating as our starting point.

However, another step or two around and new features start to emerge. Both the elbows are pointing forward, and their joint silhouettes create a counterpoint with the jutting chin, the pointed nose, the angled forehead and the pursed lips.

Further round still, and we become the focus of The Avenger’s intent – or maybe he is focussed on something just over our right shoulders. We see more than before how tightly the left arm is wrapped around the chin, and notice that the forms of the chin and elbow echo one another. We can also see how close the sword is held to the head. Fabric flares out from the projecting knee, and there is almost a sense of weightlessness: there is no evidence – from this viewpoint, at least – of the left leg.

If we step closer now – and yes, like paintings, sculptures benefit from being seen close to, or further away – we get more detail. Apart from anything else, we can see stippling in the surface – not brushstrokes, but small chisel marks, which were used to refine the detail while also retaining a hand-made feel: it has not been polished smooth – the sculpture is not meant to be that ‘slick’. However, given the stylisation seen overall, the accuracy in the depiction of the tendons and the articulation of the wrist and knuckles might be surprising. The bulge formed by the pressure of the palm of the hand against the end of the handle is especially well observed. The brows slant down from the top of the nose, as do the wrinkles from the nostrils to either side of the mouth. The pursed lips are almost pouting. Is this conviction or concern? Is The Avenger really that confident? In a way, that’s up to you to decide, but Barlach really does focus on this expression. The sabre wraps round over the head, the arm wraps round underneath it, and a fold curves up from the figure’s left shoulder (on our right) to form a peak somewhere along its length, that peak echoed by the termination of the fold further away at the hem. The way in which the head is surrounded by these elements was entirely deliberate – the face is something that Barlach wanted us to see.

Having wandered around the sculpture, we are now back to the starting point. Is this a sculpture ‘fully in the round’? Yes. Is it equally interesting from all points of view? Well, my personal opinion is ‘no’. But you might think differently. However, if you google ‘Ernst Barlach The Avenger’ – or ‘Der Rächer’ – the most common photograph you will find is this one. It is undoubtedly the primary or principal viewpoint, and it was where Barlach started. I have only been able to find one example of preparatory material for the sculpture, and it is a charcoal drawing dated 1914 on the website of the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe.

Der Rächer: 1914, Kohlezeichnung von Ernst Barlach

I think the photograph has been cropped – most of the drawings on the LWL website seem to have suffered in the same way – but maybe this is all of the drawing that survives. The basic ideas are there, though, with the forward movement to our left, the thrusting elbow, the trailing leg, the scimitar wrapped around the head and held over the back. The long, linear folds of the robe are also there, although not in the same orientations. The ground is not sloping, although the long, continuous horizontal lines do imply rapid movement. And the date is informative: 1914. This was the start of the First World War, the ‘war to end all wars’, ‘The Great War’. Like so many people, Ernst Barlach was initially enthusiastic, and this sculpture was designed to express that conviction. He described The Avenger as ‘the crystalized essence of war’, the unstoppable force of the German army, charging forward to cleanse the world in order to leave space for a new and better future. Inevitably, his opinions changed. Having created the initial version of this work from clay and plaster in 1914, this sculpture was carved in wood in 1922. In the process the facial expression changed – from outright conviction to something more ambiguous. By this stage he saw The Avenger as ‘a hammer-wielding butcher’, charging with fury, but without thought, mindlessly swinging out to uphold discredited ideas – as happens all too often after many forms of conflict. It is important to remember, if you ever ask ‘but what does it mean’, that a work of art can change its meaning. Context is so important. Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes is a perfect example of this: what was originally intended as a celebration of the liberty of the people of Florence became a warning to potential despots.

The drawing may show the principal viewpoint, but, as we have seen, it isn’t the only one. Once the initial idea was translated into three dimensions there are many more. And while the Barlach Haus Museum provides a wonderful array of images, they all have one thing in common: they are all taken from the same level, looking horizontally towards the sculpture. But humanity is not that consistent. We are all different heights, and so we all see sculpture differently: from below, from above, from somewhere in between. I have not found a single image of the top of this sculpture. A very few on the internet look down onto it at a slight angle – but none show us The Avenger’s back… The next time I come across the sculpture I’m going to try and see what that looks like. Certain sculptures were undoubtedly intended to be seen from every conceivable point of view, including from above. I’d suggest that Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus was one of them, but I’ll leave you to look it up. However, the Barlach Haus Museum does have one more image I can show you.

Clearly Barlach never intended the sculpture to be seen from this point of view. It certainly isn’t aesthetically pleasing, even if it is a good, technical photograph. It is useful for research, but maybe not much more. Nevertheless, it is revealing: the base, and so maybe the sculpture as a whole, appears to have been made from more than one piece of wood. That might explain the surface treatment. On the museum’s website it is described as ‘Holz (Linde) mit getöntem Überzug’ – i.e. ‘Wood (lime) with tinted coating’ – and this coating might be there to hide any damage and mending that occurred during the making.

There is always more to say – and we still haven’t finished looking at the sculpture as a whole. If you do google The Avenger, what you see won’t always look the same. We should think about colour and tone again, just like in painting. Not to mention the materials from which the sculpture is made. Compare these three images, for example.

The first image is the 1922 version, carved in wood. However, it is also painted with a ‘tinted coating’, as mentioned above. The second image is from the Harvard Art Museums. It is far darker, and catches the light in different ways: it shines, reflecting light. According to the Museums’ website, ‘an edition of ten numbered bronzes were produced, eight of which were completed before 1934’. They date their version ‘1914 (cast before 1934)’. The third image above, from the Detroit Institute of Arts, is dated ‘1914, cast in 1930’ on the DIA website. It is also bronze – but it looks greener, rather than ‘bronze coloured’. In the same way that, in painting, paints can be treated differently – or can have different media (oil, tempera, or water for example) – sculptures can be treated in many different ways. Wood can be painted, bronze can be polished (in which case it would look ‘gold’ and shiny) – but it is more often given a patina. This is a way of treating the surface to make the bronze respond in different ways, oxidising the surface, for example. It can help to cover faults in the bronze casting process, or it can create an entirely different appearance. The green colour here relates to the copper in the bronze: the patina has encouraged the development of verdigris, which, chemically speaking, is copper ethanoate (or copper acetate as it is still often known). Why would you do this? It’s a matter of personal taste. However, most versions of this sculpture I’ve seen (and there are more than ten) have the more usual dark brown ‘bronze’ look.

The above three examples all use the the ‘principal viewpoint’ – although the Harvard Museum version does have alternative views on its website. However, none of the photographs we have seen is my favourite. That accolade goes to the photographer of the version in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, who has, I think, a really good eye.

A bronze cast ‘after World War II’ – so not authorised by the artist, who died in 1938. However, it would have been authorised by the estate – altogether I think there are about 21 examples. It is a good cast, I’m sure, but I especially like the photograph: it is lit brilliantly, which always helps, and from a superb angle. The arm, the elbows, the drapery around the forward leg and the face all catch the light. The folds flow along from the left arm, and seem to spiral out from the heart of the sculpture, the doubtful, yet determined face framed by the blockish forms of the sword and the bent left arm. As far as I am concerned it is the photograph which best expresses what the sculpture, for me, is about: a headlong rush to reach the wrong conclusion.

248 – More value than many sparrows

Max Liebermann, Free Time in the Amsterdam Orphanage, 1881-82. Städel Museum, Frankfurt.

German Impressionism – the subject of my talk on Monday, 19 May – was not a direct rejection of the pristine surfaces and clear, crisp colours of the Nazarenes, who I talked about earlier this week, but it so easily could have been. With Max Liebermann’s paintings, one of which I will be writing about today, we are instantly into the world of rich colour and spontaneous brushstrokes, with all the evidence of capturing the moment and self-conscious making of art that French Impressionism entails. However, we are in a rather different world. During the talk we will look at the way that Liebermann and his contemporaries used the lessons of French Impressionism to take their work in a different direction, and to create paintings which had fundamentally different ideas. The following week (26 May) we will look at the wonderfully emotive sculptures of Ernst Barlach, and use them to think about the nature of Expressionism. I’ve then changed my plans – but fortunately before I’d put anything else online. I was so bowled away earlier this week by the remarkable, inventive, intricate and even surreal drawings by novelist and poet Victor Hugo that I want to have a good look at them while there is still time for you to get to the exhibition at the Royal Academy – it closes on 29 June) – so I will introduce that on 2 June. Many of the drawings belong to the Maison Victor Hugo in Paris, where another private residence, now the Musée Jacquemart-André, is hosting an Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition which runs until 3 August – so there’s a while for you to plan a little jaunt to Paris should it take your fancy! I will talk about that on 16 June, and then on 23 June I will look back to Cimabue – and this is ‘looking back’ in more ways than one. First, I’m afraid that the exhibition at the Louvre (which I saw last week) has already closed – but the talk will give us a chance to reconsider what was there. Second, it looks back before Duccio. Had I managed to time things better, the Louvre’s exhibition would have been a perfect introduction to Siena: The Rise of Painting – which you can still see at the National Gallery. Following on from Cimabue (or even, starting with him) I will end my ‘summer season’ with three talks about the new hang of the Sainsbury Wing in the National Gallery. Keep an eye on the diary for more information!

A large number of girls are gathered in a courtyard, wearing a uniform that is almost identical throughout: a long dress with short sleeves, red on the left and black on the right; a white headdress; and, for most, a white apron. The building is formal, with bold, brick pilasters framing large windows. A sweeping perspective pulls the eye towards the far wall of the yard, and a doorway framed in the same colour as the windows. On the left, the composition is closed by a line of trees, under which some of the girls chat. The leaves are light green, and sunlight passes through them to creates mottled pools of light on the floor and on the wall.

In the foreground on the right a group of eight girls are busy sewing. They are so focussed on their work that we could imagine there is total silence here. Some seem to be sat on the base of the architecture, and one is partially hidden by the strongly projecting pilaster in the foreground. With her left hand she lifts some white fabric, which is indistinguishable from her apron, if she is wearing one, while her right hand pulls back a needle, the thread just visible. Next to her another girl – who clearly is wearing an apron – reaches down to pick up some of the white material, with a third girl sitting on the ground in front of her looking down at her own work. Another girl sits sewing behind the one who is bending over, with a fifth peering down to see what she is doing. Two more sit in the next bay, between two of the pilasters, one of whom is more involved in sewing, while the other seems slightly distracted. However, she is still more involved in her work than the girl who is standing, framed by the pilaster which is second in from the front. She stands upright, her white cloth held with both hands in front of her waist, looking down over her right shoulder as if considering something on the floor – maybe the dappled pools of light. Further back the light falling through the trees hits the wall, and seems to take on the red of the girls’ uniforms. It also falls on the apron of the only girl I can see who is wearing an apron, or smock, hanging full-length from her shoulders, who is precariously perched on the base of one of the pilasters. Behind her another girl, half hidden, reaches up.

This girl is actually reaching up to pump water, the spout projecting horizontally to the left just above her waist. The jet of water that results is disguised, as it follows the outline of her skirt, but it must be there as you can see splashes of water above the broad, low basin on the ground: they are caught in the sunlight. Further back more girls sit and sew, while others stand and chat to them. Elsewhere there is more activity, with one girl running from right to left, the foot of another, curved up in a similar way, just visible: they are chasing one another. There also seems to be more conversation taking place in front of the doorway in the distance. Maybe some sound will reach us from the far side of the courtyard: a buzz of conversation, the footfall of the running girls, maybe the occasionally shout, the splash of water. Nearer to us, on the left, two girls walk arm in arm, and others turn to each other in conversation. High up on the right, attached to one of the pilasters, is the curved bracket of a lamp, the sunlight glinting from the glass of the lantern. The top left of the painting is filled with the trunks, branches and bright green leaves of the trees, their light colour enhanced by the sunlight, yes, but also suggesting that we are probably some way into spring, but by no means at the full height of summer, by which time they would be darker. This precision of detail, the spontaneity of the movement, and the accuracy of the interactions and of the intense focus on the needlework suggests that the artist, Max Liebermann, was there, capturing the essence of the scene as he saw it – but this is all artistry. It might come as quite a surprise to learn that the trees were not there.

This is a sketch of the courtyard – and of the girls – which Liebermann made when he was in Amsterdam in 1876. This was the year of the second Impressionist exhibition in Paris – the first had been in 1874. Like one of his French contemporaries, he was painting ‘en plein air’ in front of the ‘motif’. Or, to put it another way, he was outside painting what he saw, capturing the moment. Born in Berlin in 1847 (he was seven years younger than Monet, so of the same generation), he went to art school in Weimar at the age of 22, and travelled widely, often to the Netherlands. In 1873 he moved to Paris, and spent the summer of 1874 in Barbizon, which could be considered the ‘capital’ of of plein air painting… He was in the right place at the right time, you would think. However, his art continued to align itself more with Realism – effectively painting the things that concern real people, rather than saints or deities, miracles or myths. He made return visits to the Netherlands in 1875 (when he spent a long time inspired by the broad brushstrokes of Frans Hals) and 1876 (when he visited the orphanage in Amsterdam), and settled in Munich in 1878 after meeting a group of German artists in Venice. However, it wasn’t really until 1880 that his style shifted towards Impressionism. In Amsterdam once more, he visited the Oudemannenhuis (the ‘Old Man’s House’), where the men, dressed in black, were sitting in the garden, and light was filtering through the trees. The effects of this light were a revelation, and Liebermann later said that it felt “…as if someone were walking on a level path and suddenly stepped on a spiral spring that sprang up.” It was this that inspired him to paint what became known as “Liebermann’s sunspots” – like the ones we can see in today’s painting. The difference in style is clear, especially when compared to the sketch.

The finished work has tall trees on the left of the path, with bright sunshine filtering through to create sunspots on the floor, on the walls and on the girls’ dresses and aprons. The sketch, from the Kunsthalle, Bremen, does not have these sunspots – but then, there are no trees in the sketch for the light to filter through, just a couple of bushes. It doesn’t even look like a sunny day. Quite the opposite, in fact – it could be grey and overcast. The sketch is signed, and clearly dated 1881 – but Liebermann must have painted it in 1876, when he was there. By 1881, when the finished painting was started (in his studio in Munich) his style had changed substantially – but for whatever reason, that was the date he gave to the sketch. Over the years he based a number of works on the sketches he had made in 1876. In many ways, therefore, he wasn’t an Impressionist at all, trying to capture the ‘sensation’ he first had on witnessing this scene. He may have painted preparatory sketches en plein air, but he developed them later, back in the studio, adding trees, changing the weather, inventing the dappled sunlight… Having said that, the French Impressionists weren’t always as spontaneous as you may have thought – just think of Monet, completing his Thames views during the three or four years after he had visited London. Is has been said, with some degree of justification, that some of the artists (Degas, for example), rarely, if ever painted outside anyway. This is art, though – does it really matter? And even if he invented the trees, and the sunlight, Liebermann’s depiction of the building itself was entirely accurate. We can tell that because it’s still there: here it is with a detail of Liebermann’s painting.

The Amsterdam orphanage – the Burgerwaisenhaus – had its origins in 1520, and moved to this location sixty years later. The ‘Burger’ is important here. It wasn’t an orphanage for the poor, nor were there any foundlings. These were the children of citizens who had been orphaned – effectively the children of the middle-classes – and there were boys as well as girls: we just happen to be in the girls’ courtyard. Plagues and epidemics in 1602, 1617 and 1622-28 had substantially increased the number of orphans, and 1634 the orphanage – which was originally housed in a medieval monastery – was enlarged. This building was probably designed by Jacob van Campen, who was also responsible for Amsterdam Town Hall (now the Royal Palace), and the Mauritshuis in The Hague, among other notable buildings. When Liebermann visited in 1876 the children still wore these uniforms in black and red – the colours of the Amsterdam coat of arms – and would continue to do so until 1919. The orphanage itself staid put until 1960, at which point it was transferred to a new building, which is said to be a modernist design classic. Since 1975 the 17th century building has been the home of the Amsterdam Museum, with the adjoining boys’ courtyard now used as an open-air café.

I’d like to finish by returning to one of the details of the painting: the one distracted girl in the right foreground.

It wouldn’t be true to say that any of the girls here look happy, but they do at least look engaged. All of them, that is, apart from the one standing up. She holds her fabric to her stomach and looks down over her shoulder. To my eye she looks unequivocally Dutch, but I’m probably relying on broad-brushstroke stereotypes. However, she does look melancholy: what is prompting this reflection? What is she looking at?

The direction of her gaze isn’t entirely clear, to be honest, and it could be that she isn’t looking at anything at all, just lost in her thoughts. But if she is looking at the floor, then maybe she is mesmerised by the sunspots, created in the painting with thickly impasto-ed strokes of white and cream-coloured paint. Or maybe she is fascinated by the sparrows, pecking away at whatever they can find, gleaning a meagre existence from anything that has fallen from the trees, or has been dropped by the children. There is no evidence of them in Liebermann’s sketch: were they really there? Or is he trying to say something allegorical about the situation of the orphans, gleaning a meagre existence from the charity of others? Being who I am, my mind instantly turns to two passages from the Gospel according to St Matthew. Chapter 6, verse 26 says, “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” Meanwhile, in Chapter 10, verses 29-31, we read, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.”

It’s possible that these verses are relevant, although it is worth noting that Liebermann was Jewish. Given the increase in secularism over the 19th Century, the gospels were probably not standard reading for many artists at the time, and it would have been even less likely for Liebermann. However, he had painted two versions of The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple just a couple of years before: such situations are never as straightforward as you might think. Changes in the Prussian law regarding Jews benefitted him as a child, but as an old man he suffered professionally – as so many did – with the rise to power of the National Socialists. However, his death in 1935 – at the age of 88, and from natural causes – meant that, although a broken man, he was not a victim of their worst atrocities. Inevitably we will touch on this on Monday, although the majority of the time will be spent looking at his paintings, and those of his fellow German Impressionists, as we discover what the implications of that term really were.

247 – In the midst of the doctors?

Marie Ellenrieder, Christ in the Temple, 1849. Royal Collection Trust.

My next stop on the journey through early modern German art will be The Nazarenes, this Monday, 12 May at 6pm. If you’ve never heard of them, don’t worry, but they are rather wonderful and should be known! Nevertheless, a striking feature of the History of Art is its ability to forget artists who were, in their day, remarkably successful. And the Nazarenes really were successful – especially in Britain. It’s just that very few paintings have made their way into public collections anywhere outside Germany. Not only that, but tastes changed very quickly after their initial success. John Ruskin’s Modern Painters would turn out to be an enormously important and influential book: amongst other things it includes an early defence of the paintings of Turner. However, when the first volume was initially sent to the publishers – the prestigious John Murray – it was turned down: apparently Murray said that they might have been more interested if it had been written about the Nazarenes. As Ruskin was concerned with nature, God and society, he would surely have been interested in their work, as they ticked at least two of these three boxes – God and society.  They would also turn out to be an important influence on British art, as we shall see on Monday. Apart from anything else, their clear, crisp colours and strong simple outlines are a balm for troubled eyes – and trust me, I should know. I must apologise for this post being rather late. I got back from Paris on Thursday, and meant to finish writing it yesterday. However, I went out for an hour or so to have an eye test and order some new glasses, but only got home some 10 hours, four nurses and three doctors later after minor laser eye surgery. I’m fine, it was a precautionary measure, but I lost a day’s work unexpectedly.

Today I want to write about Marie Ellenrieder. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t one of the Nazarenes, who, like the Pre-Raphaelites, were effectively a ‘Brotherhood’. However, she knew them, and her work is strongly influenced by theirs. I’ll go into more detail on Monday, of course. The following week (19 May) I will move onto German Impressionism, and then, to conclude this series, on 26 May I’m looking forward to enjoying the sculptures of Ernst Barlach – whose work will be the main Aspect of Expressionism I will be discussing. In Paris I saw two superb exhibitions dedicated to Cimabue and Artemisia Gentileschi, and I’ll be talking about them in June: do keep your eye on the diary for more details.

In light, crisp, clear colours Marie Ellenrieder is depicting a story whose consequences I discussed just a month or so ago, looking at Simone Martini’s Christ discovered in the Temple. As I said in that post, I think Martini was painting what happened next – after Mary and Joseph had found Jesus. When he was 12, according to the Gospel of St Luke, the family went to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem. On the way home Mary and Joseph realised that Jesus was not with the rest of the group – so they returned to the city, and eventually, after three days, they found him in the temple, ‘sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers’ (Luke 2:46-47). Ellenrieder has a very particular take on the story, and one that differs from the medieval and renaissance versions. Unlike ‘traditional’ images she does not show the moment of discovery, with Mary and Joseph to the side, or in the background, nor does she show a large group of doctors – there are usually at least four, or how could Jesus appear ‘in the midst’ of them? In Ellenrieder’s version he isn’t even in between the two who are present, one of whom isn’t paying him any attention anyway. In a similar way to Simone Martini, I think she is extending the range of the narrative, but whereas he takes the story beyond the moment of ‘discovery’, Ellenrieder has arrived to witness a scene beforehand. Jesus is only really communicating with one of the doctors, which makes me wonder if he has only recently entered the Temple. Let’s see if that makes sense!

The interaction between the old man and the 12-year-old boy is very direct, and very personal. It could be a scene of one-on-one tuition, although one in which the tables are turning. The man, with his long, white beard, is assumed to be both old and wise. On his lap rests a hefty tome with his right hand lying on top, the forefinger tucked into one of the pages to keep his place (there is also a bookmark ribbon marking another page). He looks towards Jesus, his left hand raised to emphasize a point in his argument. Jesus looks up towards him, holding an unrolled scroll, pointing towards the text with his right forefinger. His sanctity is evident – a simple gold ring circles his head as a halo – and his Christianity is subtly alluded to. Whereas the older man has his head covered by a russet-red hood, Jesus’s centrally parted and neatly combed hair is there for all to see. I don’t know when the tradition started – but long before Ellenrieder was alive – but Jewish boys would often start to wear a yarmulka (or kippah, or skull cap) at the age of three. Jesus is twelve – admittedly not yet thirteen, when he would be obligated to follow the commandments of the Torah, but the point is clearly made. In medieval and renaissance iconography, scrolls are usually used by characters from the Old Testament – i.e. Jews – whereas codices (books with pages that turn, rather than unroll) were not developed until the 2nd or 3rd century, and so are associated with Christianity. With Jesus pointing to a scroll, Ellenrieder could be implying that he has a profound understanding of the Old Order from an original text, rather than a ‘modern’ commentary. The glance that passes between the two suggests that this is the case. The old man’s head is tilted, and, to me at least, his gaze seems to imply a sense of doubt, with an idea coming into his head that had not been there before. The tentative positioning of his left hand is similarly not decisive – it is not the bold statement of an unequivocal truth, or the secure gesture of a well-practiced argument. The Doctor’s face is pale, his cheeks hollowed, and there are a few dignified wrinkles (the Nazarenes were not too worried about excessive lifelike veracity, but were more interested in communicating an idea as simply and directly as possible). Jesus has a perfect, porcelain complexion, unmarked but glowing with health – and youth. He looks up into the old man’s eyes with just a hint of a smile, showing conviction, understanding, and even love. His hand casts a shadow on the scroll: it is illuminated from above, as if by his Father in heaven. However, the words on the scroll are not legible. They are neither Latin nor Hebrew characters, but I suspect Ellenrieder is painting something ‘other’ to suggest the latter. Jesus wears a simple red robe, as was traditional, although it is not yet covered with a blue cloak. Perhaps that is because he has not yet formally begun his teaching – and wouldn’t, until after the Baptism. The old man, on the other hand, wears a subtle range of colours – russet, yellow, pale blue, orange and green.

Sometimes I find details in a painting a marvel in and of themselves – and this is one such detail. Above all, I love the poise of the man’s hand directly in front of his beard so that its insecurity is framed by his age and experience. The subtle articulation of the fingers, each one different – with the index finger opening out and the ring finger curling in – surely creates the sense of hesitation. And then there are the colours – the pale lemon yellow of the tabard, which is buttoned on both sides along the shoulders, and the way that this colour is picked up in the patterning of the Wedgwood-blue sleeves. There is a similar pattern on the tabard in a more muted, neutral colour. Above all, though, it is the expression, as if asking ‘how is this possible, from someone so young?’ But then, as it says in Psalm 8, verse 2, ‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast though ordained strength…’ Maybe that’s the verse that Jesus is pointing at. He would certainly know this text later – in Matthew 21:16 he says ‘have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?’ He could even be asking that now.

The bottom of the painting has some further, subtle pointers to Jesus’s status – and more delicate detailing. Notice how he wears no shoes, whereas the Doctor has delicate yellow pumps, the same colour as the tabard and with similar decoration. The blue/yellow colour chord is there, as it the contrast between the green cloak and its deep amber lining. Jesus being unshod is presumably a reference to Luke 10:4, in which he instructs his followers ‘Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes’. I quoted an equivalent text (Matthew 10:10) when talking about Martini’s painting, in which the 12-year-old wears sandals (‘nor shoes’ does not necessarily proscribe other footwear…). In the same painting, Simone’s Joseph, like Ellenrieder’s old man, also happens to wear yellow(ish) shoes.

Being younger than the Doctor, Jesus’s legs are shorter, and rest on a higher step. The Doctor’s feet are split between two lower levels. Oddly, perhaps, the old man is on a slightly higher level of the bench or parapet on which both are seated: it does not appear to be continuous. I don’t think there’s a meaning to this, though, and I’m also not entirely sure that it was a deliberate choice on the part of the artist. What was intentional, though, is the lighting. Not only does it shine from above, brilliantly illuminating the scroll and Jesus’s pointing right hand, but it also leads our eyes into the painting, going from the lit floor at the bottom right and up the steps which lead toward Jesus himself, as does the diagonal arrangement of the feet.

But what of the man in the background? He is also Jewish – his head is covered – and although he is not, seemingly, an ‘elder’, as his beard is relatively short and dark, he is clearly a mature man who is focussed on scripture. His right hand is raised ready to point to an unclear word, or to keep his place in case he is distracted. Has he turned away, or has he not yet become interested in the prodigy? It would be impossible to say, without the artist’s explicit statement, and I’m not sure to what extent Ellenrieder explained her own work. He is clearly significant, though, and is neatly framed by the architectonic elements – which give him prominence, whilst also asking their own questions.

Where, exactly, are we? The biblical text suggests we are in the ‘temple’ – but this looks for all the world like a gothic church with pointed arches and ribbed vaulting. It is, admittedly, an unusual form of architecture, as the columns have no capitals, but that’s not unknown, and anyway, maybe Ellenrieder was using her imagination, and seeking something simple. We are looking from the right of centre of one particular arch – columns frame the painting at the left and right. A lantern hangs in between them, to the left of the point of a blind arch on the back wall. The lantern – exquisitely formed – is presumably hanging from the centre of the vaulting in this particular bay. However, medieval paintings – notably medieval Flemish paintings – tended to show the temple with romanesque architecture, acknowledging some form of time frame: Romanesque was ‘old’ (so implied the Old Order), Gothic was ‘new’ (and was used for the New). So why did Ellenrieder choose Gothic? Is it simply, as in other choices here, that she wasn’t too bothered about medieval tradition? This would go against the Nazarene’s ideas: they were interested in the supposed purity and faith of medieval artists, as we shall see on Monday. Maybe she had something else in mind – and of course, I suspect that she did. I’ve talked about this painting more than once in a number of series about women artists, and it’s always reminded me of something, but until recently I couldn’t remember what that was. The cool grey stone and the lighter grey walls are reminiscent of the architecture of Brunelleschi in Florence, but translated into Gothic (curiously, Brunelleschi’s ‘Renaissance’ was doing was neo-Romanesque, rather than neo-Roman, but let’s not go into that right now). But I have seen this architecture somewhere before.

I first came across Marie Ellenrieder in Konstanz, in South-West Germany, which, for four years, was the location of my ‘country house’. She was born there in 1791. At the age of 22 she started her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich – and was, as it happens, the first woman to be admitted to any German academy. Nine years later she went to Rome, a study trip which lasted more or less two years, until 1824. It was there that she met the Nazarenes, becoming especially influenced by the founder of the group, Johann Friedrich Overbeck. After other travels she returned to Konstanz in the 1840s, where she continued to paint, and teach, until her death in 1863. This particular painting dates to 1849, and so must have been painted in Konstanz. It was bought that year by Prince Albert, and Queen Victoria bought another of her paintings at the same time: both can be seen in Osborne House, the royal residence on the Isle of Wight. Albert’s interest was not explicitly because she was German – he had come across her on one of his visits to Rome – but he presumably got to know her work through the German artists there in whom he was interested and who were, after all, his contemporaries. If it was painted in Konstanz, I’m not sure how it got to Rome – but that is by the by… Konstanz is the clue.

Medieval Konstanz was a very important diocese, and the only place in Germany which has ever hosted a Papal Conclave – back in 1417. The diocese included most of present-day Switzerland – stretching as far as St Gottard in the South, but also going as far North in Germany as Stuttgart. It also stretched from Bern in the West to Ulm in the East… Its Cathedral – now a Minster – was (and remains) magnificent, even though Konstanz ceased to be a Bishopric in 1821. Somewhere along the line the cloister lost two of its wings. The remaining two flank the church and chapter house in an L-shape, and frame one corner of the town’s main square. Here is a photo of the interior, together with a slightly truncated version of Ellenrieder’s Christ in the Temple:

Notice the gothic arches, and the bench running along the back, at the base of a blind arcade. Notice also the way in which the ribs of the vault overlap, the spaces they create, and their cool, grey colouring. But more than anything else, look at the columns: it’s clear to me that there are no capitals. This is a section of the cloister which is deeper than others, hence the free-standing column on the right of the photo – elsewhere it is only one bay deep – not unlike the painting. I can’t help thinking that Jesus and the Doctor are in this cloister, seated in one of the arches that lead into the open space in the middle, and imagined as seated on a similar bench to the one which runs along the back wall. This is Ellenrieder’s ‘mother church’, still a cathedral while she was growing up. What better place to imagine as the Temple than the oldest and most majestic building in the city of her birth? Admittedly she has slightly changed the profile of the arch, and includes a different transition from column to ribs – but I think these are small details. Her imagination has taken her to Jesus’s arrival in the Temple, having left his earthly step-father to ‘be about [his] Father’s business’. This could be the first interaction with one of the people there. The old man might then alert the younger man, and they could then summon others, who will be ‘astonished at his understanding and answers’. Eventually, when Mary and Joseph arrive, they will find Jesus ‘sitting in the midst of the doctors’. At least, that’s what I think is happening.

246 – Lonely as a Cloud?

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, about 1817. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is one of the archetypal images of German Romanticism – so what better painting to look at as an introduction to my eponymous talk this Monday, 5 May at 6pm? To be honest, I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen it in real life, as the last time I was in Hamburg (December 2023) they had moved it into an exhibition looking forward to the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth (1774), which unfortunately didn’t open until the week after we’d left… Since then, different embodiments of the show have been seen in Dresden and Berlin, and it is currently at the Met in New York, marking over a year of celebrations. The American incarnation closes on 11 May, in case you are stateside and on the East Coast: the first half of Monday’s talk will effectively walk us through it. However, I’m hoping that the Wanderer will be back on the walls of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg by the time I get there on 29 May – who knows if I’ll be lucky? As well as Friedrich, Monday’s talk will also look at the intriguing and idiosyncratic paintings of Otto Philipp Runge, an acquaintance and colleague of Friedrich, and another of the leading Romantic artists. I shall try and include others when appropriate. In the weeks that follow I will gradually work my way through German art history, looking at The Nazarenes (12 May), German Impressionism (19 May), and Ernst Barlach (26 May). All of these talks are now on sale, and you can either click on these links or look in the diary for more information. In the midst of it all I am heading to Paris for two days to catch the exhibitions Revoir Cimabue (‘A New Look at Cimabue’) at the Louvre and Artemisia: Héroïne de l’art at the Musée Jacquemart André. I am hoping to give lectures on both in June. Meanwhile… Germany.

This is undoubtedly one of Western Art’s ‘iconic’ paintings – the sort that is widely recognised, and often quoted. Maybe it’s not as familiar as the Mona Lisa, Munch’s The Scream, or ‘Whistler’s Mother’, but it is up there somewhere. Like all of them, there is a single figure forming a bold silhouette, so that the composition makes a strong, initial impact. This is easily remembered, and so can be instantly recognised: the boldness creates a sense of familiarity. This painting has the added bonus of mystery: who is this man? We would not recognise him even if we met, as he stands with his back it to us. We cannot see what he is thinking, or guess how he feels. He stands atop a rock formation looking out over the title’s ‘sea of fog’ (‘das Nebelmeer’ in the original German), and over the mountaintops which project from it. He wears a dark green, well-tailored coat, knee-length and gathered at the waist, with matching trousers. The rocks on which he stands are as dark, although brown, while the fog ranges from white to bluish-grey, with hints of lavender and pink, colours which are echoed in the sky.

These colours, and the shapes they form, help us interpret the painting, I think. I don’t know how much time you spend looking at the sky, or thinking about what you see, or even where it is, but if you look directly upwards, you are looking at the part of the sky that is closest to you. The sky above the horizon, or just touching it, is furthest way. I know this is obvious, but it’s worth considering, and I suspect it is not something we often register explicitly. When painted, the sky acts as a sort of external ‘ceiling’, directly above an equivalent, perspectival floor, so that, at the top of the painting, the sky is in the foreground, and the lower down the painting it goes, the further away that section of the sky is: where it meets the horizon the sky is in the background. This is still really obvious, I know, but it’s worth clarifying. In this detail, which shows all of the sky above the distant mountains, the clouds at the top are turbulent, with puffs of strongly contrasted light and dark, whereas those below are calmer, with stable, horizontal streaks of similar, close-hued, light tones. This implies that the weather nearby is rougher than that in the distance. If we are travelling in that direction – as the gaze of the ‘Wanderer’ suggests – things are going to get better: we are looking towards the calm on the horizon, both visually and metaphorically.

However, it is not entirely clear where the Wanderer is standing: on top of some rocks, yes, but not quite at the very top. And we don’t really know where these rocks are. Placed against a backdrop of fog, and with other rocky peaks which seem to be lower, we inevitably assume that he is at the top of a mountain. However, as we see these rocks out of context, we have no way of telling how broad, or high, this mountain is, nor how close he is to any vegetation… or for that matter, civilisation. He seems to be alone in the world, and potentially on the edge of a precipice. Nevertheless, these rocks do create that archetypal artistic construction – a pyramid – and he is placed on top of it, the focus of the composition. His left foot is higher and placed at an angle. His right foot points directly into the painting, stable at the end of a straight, supporting leg. The left leg is bent. I have no doubt that he is poised, stationary, to contemplate the view – he has a walking stick which projects to the right, helping to create visual, as well as physical, stability. Nevertheless, there is still the possibility that he could straighten that bent left leg and take a step forward with his right, either onto the higher stone, or even over the brow of this particular peak. Is he content to reach this summit, or will he head on to the mountains in the distance?

To the left, the rocky peaks are broad, and rounded, and, like the foreground where he is standing, they are devoid of vegetation. To the right, a larger mass of stone is topped with trees, but trees which, thanks to their distance, appear quite tiny: each would easily fit, pictorially, into the gap formed by crook of his arm. But has Friedrich got the perspective ‘right’? The trees seem too small, making that distant outcrop seem even further away than the shapes made by the fog would suggest. Of course, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about it: the artist is using our understanding of perspective to show us the size and scale of the world around us: the world is enormous, and we are tiny in comparison. The painting is an example of the ‘Sublime’ which, in philosophical terms, represents a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. It can be exciting, or terrifying, or even both. For observers of a painting it works particularly well, though, because we know that, how ever large and potentially dangerous the world is, we, at this moment, are safe in the comfort of our own home.

Having said that, this man does not appear to be ‘tiny’ in comparison to the world. By making the rocks on which he stands equivalent to those in the distance, and by showing him as so much larger than the trees, this man is made truly monumental – heroic, even. Indeed, he is the very essence of the Romantic hero. His head is of the same order of size – on the picture surface – as the rock formation to the right. This is actually a fairly accurate depiction of the Zirkelstein, a table mountain which overlooks the River Elbe about 50km South East of Dresden, where Friedrich lived and worked. I can’t help thinking that the mountain has a head and shoulders not unlike the ‘Wanderer’. He is part of nature, and yet separate from it – another essential Romantic idea. Nature seems to converge on him. Notice how, just below the Zirkelstein, the top of a long, gently-sloping hill emerges from the clouds, and leads down in a shallow diagonal from the right edge of the painting to the Wanderer’s right arm. Another hilltop leads down in a similar shallow diagonal from the left to his left arm. There are mountains visible on either side of the flared skirts of his coat, and, as we saw above, he stands on top of a pyramid of rocks – which could in themselves be the tip of a far larger mountain.

Our eye level should be where we see the horizon, which suggests that the distant mountain is higher than his current position: it looms above his head. The slopes are apparently less rocky, and we might assume that it would be relatively easy to climb – an uphill walk, maybe, arduous, given the scale, but not a scramble. Some people think this is either the Rosenberg, or the Kaltenberg, but I’m not sure that either has exactly the right profile – but again, that is immaterial. Friedrich went out into the countryside, made sketches, and later rearranged them and altered them according to what would work in the painting – ‘pictorial necessity’. Here it is notable that the right slope of this mountain leads down behind the man’s face: he is looking at this very slope, and the hills beyond.

However bold the composition as a whole, the details are remarkably delicate. Notice how the light catches his shirt collar on the left, and to a lesser extent, also on the right. If you look closely enough, you can also see that it glances over the outline of his left ear. His ginger hair blows in tufts in the breeze. Caspar David Friedrich had red hair, by the way. This could be him.

But what does it all add up to? Everything focusses on the Wanderer: the rocks in the foreground support him, the apex of a pyramid, and mountains frame him to the left and right. The tops of the hills slope down towards him on either side – as if pointing towards him – and a distant mountain even resembles him. He is also exactly in the middle of the painting, his body lined up with the central vertical axis. We are looking directly at him, and yet we cannot see his face. However, by painting him from behind – what the Germans would call a Rückenfigur (literally, ‘back-figure’) – we are invited to look at what he is seeing, the ultimate repoussoir. We are looking at the act of looking, and the implication is that we consider not only what we can see, but also, how that would make us feel. This is the very essence of Romanticism: a personal response to the world around us. The movement grew as a reaction against the Enlightenment, during which the world was explored, measured, evaluated and rationalised. Romanticism invites a more emotional response. Friedrich is not documenting a precise geographical location, telling us physically where he stands, but is provoking us into a metaphorical consideration: how do we feel about our place in the universe? However, he doesn’t tell us how to feel. As a result, the interpretations of this painting are many and varied. It has been suggested that Friedrich’s concerns were political – relating to German Nationalism, as a response to the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, just two years before the painting was begun. Ironically, by occupying many of the small independent states that made up the fragmented political landscape of Germany, Napoleon’s actions provoked a greater sense of what it meant to be German. He therefore helped to promote unification (the same was true in Italy). Alternatively, the painting could be a religious statement, expressing awe at the majesty of God’s creation, with the rocks as a symbol of a secure Faith, standing strong and reaching to the firmament. Friedrich profoundly believed in God’s presence in nature, as we shall see on Monday. Or it could be a meditation on his own journey through life. Every peak of achievement can turn out to be the brink of a precipice. And even if that’s not the case, how can we ever know if we have reached the ‘top’? How many more mountains must we climb – metaphorically – before we can find the peace promised by the calmer skies and gentler slopes on the horizon? As far as Friedrich’s own life is concerned, is it a coincidence that not long after he began this painting he would get married?

However we see the painting, the formalised composition implies that there should be a metaphorical interpretation. The sense of life’s journey, and the Romantic notion of an individual’s response to the situation in which they find themselves, is expressed explicitly through the notion of the Wanderer himself, and the very idea of Wandering. You only have to remember what William Wordsworth was doing in the opening line of what is surely most famous poem by one of Britain’s most famous Romantic poets: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud…’. Wandering – and the discoveries which result – is essentially Romantic. However, for Caspar David Friedrich – judging by this painting, if nothing else – clouds were anything but lonely.

Flora: a second bloom

Evelyn De Morgan, Flora, 1894. De Morgan Collection.

As I said when I originally posted this essay, ‘There have been a plethora of exhibitions of the work of Evelyn De Morgan in the past few years, but I am only now in a position to dedicate an entire talk to her’ – that was in August 2023, thanks to the exhibition The Gold Drawings at Leighton House. It was focussed on a very specific aspect of her work – and an especially refined, and elegant one at that. Now, with the exhibition Evelyn de Morgan: The Modern Artist in Victorian London at the Guildhall Art Gallery, I will give a more general introduction to her work (Monday, 28 April at 6:00pm). I saw the exhibition yesterday – and it’s a perfect opportunity to get to know a wonderful artist and remarkable woman. Not only that, but it’s free – so don’t miss it! I first encountered one of her paintings at the exhibition Botticelli Reimagined at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2016 – it was today’s work which was exhibited – and then she resurfaced in the National Portrait Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelite Sisters in 2019: the catalogue of that exhibition includes what is probably the best writing about her that I know. One of the stars of that show, as far as I was concerned, was Night and Sleep, about which I wrote on Day 41 back in April 2020. This talk will conclude what has been a short series about exhibitions currently in London. After this, May will be devoted to German art, starting with German Romanticism on 5 May, and then, on 12 May, The Nazarenes. More will follow – but check out the diary for information about them, including dates, and on-sale dates.

Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, vegetation and fertility – and so effectively, also, of Spring – is shown full-length in a suitably floral dress, scattering blooms and standing on a lawn growing and strewn with yet more flowers. Behind her is a fruit-laden tree, dark against the clear blue sky, with just a hint of dusk on the horizon. She stands in classical contrapposto, with her weight on her left leg and her right lifting off the ground as if she were walking, or even, possibly, dancing. Over her shoulder is a blood-red shawl, and her hair flies freely in the breeze.

The tree is a loquat (Eriobotrya japonica), presumably chosen as it has the rare distinction of flowering in autumn or winter, so that it bears fruit as early as spring – an ideal demonstration of Flora’s fecundity (for this and all subsequent botanical identification I am, as ever, deeply indebted to the Ecologist, now Professor of Ecology at the University of Liverpool: congratulations, and thank you!). The loquat has its origins in China, but was known to Europeans as early as the 16th century. It may even have arrived in Portugal back then. The silveriness on the underside of the leaves is diagnostic, apparently, and is one of the many features that De Morgan captures accurately. The full moon hovers in the dusk sky, and below it a goldfinch flaps its wings. Not only is the bird colouristically related to Flora – the red on its face matches that on her shawl – but its association with the Passion of Christ, and therefore Easter, also makes it appropriate for a spring painting, a natural resurrection following the death of winter.

Further down, a second goldfinch looks up towards its mate from the right of the painting, not far from the head of a siskin, whose pair can be seen on the left, just below Flora’s elbow. A third type of bird is shown on her red shawl: picked out in gold, there are stylised swallows. Even if ‘one swallow doesn’t make a spring’ the number represented suggest that the season is well advanced. Admittedly this particular saying is also applied to summer, but I should be able to explain this confusion later on. The red colour of the shawl itself is related to the rich red roses which Flora is clasping, along with the others she is scattering – a metaphor for the way in which the arriving spring brings with it flowers. I particularly like the flick of the beaded red shawl just above Flora’s right elbow which echoes not only the curls of her hair, but also the shapes of some of the leaves and the curve of the siskin’s back and tail.

De Morgan captures the fall of the scattered roses rather brilliantly. It is as if they are frozen in time. The swirls of drapery, on the other hand, seem to have a life of their own, clinging to her bent right knee and curling behind, almost as if they are growing. All over the dress – which is modulated from cream in the light to a buttery yellow in the shadow – we see pansies, apparently growing with their leaves, which are either embroidered or printed onto the fabric. The name ‘pansy’ is derived from the French pensée, or ‘thought’, although that probably has little relevance here. They are included, like so much else, as indicators of spring, even if developments in horticulture mean that there are now varieties which will bloom all the year round. They don’t withstand the heat of summer, which could be relevant: as we shall see, De Morgan was painting in Florence, where the heat can be unbearable.

By the time we hit the ground (a final pink rose can be seen falling from the top of this detail) there is an explosion of flora. In between the left border of the painting and the figure’s right toes is a cyclamen, and to the right of the same foot are two primroses (Primula vulgaris), one the more common yellow form, the other a pink variant. There are also pinkish daisies (Bellis perennis) mid-way between the feet and below Flora’s left heel, and below the latter daisies are the flowers of another cyclamen. The rest of the flowers – whether deep blue, light blue or pink – are florist’s cineraria (Pericalis x hybrida), with the exception of some tiny forget-me-nots (Myosotis) to the left of Flora’s right foot (above the cyclamen), and a periwinkle (Vinca) to the left of the second set of cyclamen flowers.

The bottom left of the painting shows the same species, although the deep pink flower at the very bottom left corner might be ‘new’. The periwinkles can be seen more clearly (to the left of the full cyclamen plant and above a yellow primrose), and there are more forget-me-nots in the bottom right corner of the detail.

The bottom right of the painting also has the same selection, with more scattered roses, but there are also what appear to be double flowering ranunculus blooms, with tightly-packed petals in either yellowy-orange or red. The ‘new’ flower in the previous detail might also be a ranunculus. In addition, there is a cartellino – a small piece of paper, or label – inscribed with a verse and, on the underside, curled round on the right, the signature: ‘E De M. Maggio 1894’ – Evelyn De Morgan, May 1894. May is the month of spring, even if nowadays we associate its arrival with March. The Romans celebrated Floralia – the festival in honour of Flora – from 28 April – 3 May, and in Britain these rites survived with the celebration of a May Queen well into the twentieth century (there was a maypole in our playground at school, although I don’t remember anyone ever dancing around it). This ‘traditional’ celebration of spring is followed close on its heels by the arrival of summer in June (optimistically speaking – it was still raining in August when I originally wrote this), with ‘Midsummer’ being 21 June. This might explain the confusion over which season is ‘made’ by the arrival of an appropriate number of swallows. From 1890 until 1914 Evelyn and her husband William De Morgan (renowned potter, some of whose work I will include in Monday’s talk) spent the winter months of every year in Florence – and in this particular case at least, that could continue through to May. It was in Florence that Flora was painted. As far as I can read it, I think this is a correct transcription of the verse, for the benefit of those of you who have some Italian:

   Io vengo da Fiorenza e sono Flora
Quella città dai fior prende nomanza
   Tra Fiori son nata ed or cambio dimora
   Fra I monti della Scozia avrò mia stanza
Accoglietemi ben e vi sia caro
   Nelle nordiche nebbie il mio tesoro.

It uses antiquated Italian – even for the late 19th Century – including the medieval form of the city’s name, Fiorenza, as opposed to the ‘modern’ version, Firenze. The medieval form (like the English) is closer to the Roman name ‘Florentia’ – the flourishing city – and so to Flora herself, but also ties in with the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ ethos of the painting, influenced as it is by an artist born many years before Raphael. As a sophisticated group of cognoscenti you will have seen the parallels already, and I hinted as much when I said that I’d first seen the painting in the exhibition Botticelli Reimagined. Before we get to that, though, here is my translation of the verse (you will understand why I never became a poet). It is rough, I know, but I wanted to try and replicate the rhyme scheme, and allude to quaint archaic forms (or rather, in this case, Scots dialect – apologies to my Scottish readers).

   I come from Florence, and I am Flora –
That city from the flowers takes its name.
   Born among flowers I’m now an explorer:
   The hills of Scotland soon will be ‘ma hame’.
Welcome me well so that my treasure
   Amid the northern mists will give you pleasure.

The implication is that Evelyn De Morgan painted Flora for a Scottish patron, although precisely who that was remains unknown: the first recorded owner had no known connections north of the border. As for its visual origins, De Morgan’s love – and understanding – of the work of Botticelli must be clear. For one thing, Flora owes a great deal to her namesake in the Primavera, which De Morgan could easily have seen in the Uffizi (in Florence) during her regular winter sojourns.

Dressed as a Florentine bride, with jewelled belt and necklace turned into garlands of flowers, Botticelli’s Flora has a similar dress to that of De Morgan’s, with the draperies folding and flowing in equivalent ways, covered (whether embroidered or printed) with flowers growing complete with their leaves. Both figures also scatter roses. Botticelli associates her with the nymph Chloris, seen emerging from the right edge of the detail. According to Ovid, Chloris was captured and raped by Zephyr, the west wind. To atone for his misdeeds, Ovid tells us, Zephyr transformed Chloris into Flora – hence the flowers coming from Chloris’s mouth as she looks back up at Zephyr whose head is just visible in this detail. This myth explains the origin of spring, as the barren land is made fertile, so it was believed, by the arrival of the west wind. Flora’s dress is also exceedingly like the figure reaching over to clothe the newly born goddess in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which is also in the Uffizi.

De Morgan’s Flora has hair more reminiscent of Venus herself, though. The colour may be similar to that of the attendant – reddish to fair – but the long curling locks blowing in the wind are closer to those of the goddess. I’ve cut Venus out from this detail for technical, WordPress related reasons, but you don’t need to take my word for it. We know that Evelyn de Morgan knew Botticelli’s painting: she copied a detail from The Birth of Venus, and her study has survived. Like today’s painting is owned by the De Morgan Collection.

In this small sketch De Morgan conveys the gilding which Botticelli used freely across his paintings with strokes of cream-coloured paint, but elsewhere – including in her painting of Flora – she picks out details in gold – real gold – just like her Florentine inspiration. She became especially interested in the use of this particular material, a metal, and an element in its own right, to the extent that she executed a considerable number of drawings using gold, and gold alone. It is a highly unconventional technique and one that was practiced by very few artists. As far as I know, she was the major exponent. There are a few examples of this remarkable refined technique in the current exhibition, and I will include them in the talk on Monday. I will also be able to discuss the development of her career as a whole, thanks to the superb collection of paintings and drawings currently on display at the Guidlhall Art Gallery.

Asking again: painted by a madman?

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895. Private Collection.

If you think I’m being rude – or insensitive – I should point out that the title of today’s post is simply a quotation, in English, from the words that Edvard Munch himself wrote on the first (or second) version of The Scream. An infrared photo of the offending text is at the very bottom of the post, if you want to check it for yourself… There are several versions of today’s painting – two in paint, two in pastel, and a lithograph which survives in a number of different versions, some coloured, some not. I am reposting this entry today as an introduction to the talk I will be giving on Monday 21 April, Edvard Munch Portraits, introducing the eponymous exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Sadly the exhibition doesn’t include today’s work, even if you could argue (at a stretch) that it is a form of psychological portrait… but that’s not the point of the exhibition. The talk will be the second of three looking at exhibitions currently on show in London. The third will be Evelyn de Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London (which has just opened at the Guidlhall Art Gallery) on 28 April. After this, I am devoting May to German art from the 19th and early 20th centuries, starting with German Romanticism (5 May), and then The Nazarenes (12 May). I will also cover German Impressionism (19 May) and the series will conclude with a talk focussing on the sculptor Ernst Barlach (details still to be defined) – but all that will find its way to the diary before too long.

The Scream is one of those images which needs no introduction, so familiar are we with it, and with all the versions, mainly satirical, that it has spawned. Let’s face it, it’s the only painting I can think of that has inspired an emoji 😱, and the film franchise, Scream, uses the protagonist’s face for the mask worn by the killer. Like the many pastiches of Munch’s masterpiece, this franchise is a ‘comedy’ hommage (French pronunciation) to the slasher genre it apes. I’m sure the irreverent approach is just a means to undermine the darker implications of the painting. It is so familiar, perhaps, that we no longer look at it properly. We think that we know what is there, and we just stop looking: familiarity breeds disregard. So let’s look again. I’m going to focus on Munch’s third version of the subject, the pastel painted in 1895, but will consider the development of the series (briefly) below.

When you look at this image (and try to look at it as if you’ve never seen it before), what is the first thing that you notice? My first response, when I started thinking about this post, was surprise at the brilliance of the colour. The colour is why I’ve chosen this particular version to focus on – the others have faded, or were, in any case, duller. The sky is an intense vermillion, the bold, wavy lines interspersed with buttercup yellow and a couple of bands of pale blue. It takes up just under a third of the height of the painting, with a clear horizontal line in a darker blue marking, as the adjective suggests, the horizon. The lowest band of the sky appears to be made up of undulations of this darker blue – although reference to other versions imply that these ‘undulations’ are based on distant hills, blue as a result of atmospheric perspective. The majority of the land and sea is formed from a mid-toned blue, although small amounts of the reds and yellows creep in, in the same way that there is some blue in the sky. Overall, therefore, we have warm colours in the sky and cold down on earth. This lower section is almost square in shape, cut across diagonally by a straight path, with a fence or railing running alongside it. The path is formed of a series of straight lines, individual strokes of the crayon, and the railing consists of three parallel bars. The lines of the path and the bars of the railing conform to a strict, if exaggerated, perspective, converging at a vanishing point on the horizon at the far left of the image. The depiction of the land and sea is all curves, contrasting with the rigid, linear depiction of the path – we are looking at geometric forms and abstract values, particularly contrasts: warm and cool colours, straight and curved lines, squares and triangles, horizontals and diagonals. These abstract values are given meaning by what is represented. The path is presumably a jetty, and we see the sea with a curving coastline forming a bay, and, judging by the greens interspersed on the right, some vegetation. There is an androgynous figure, just to the right of centre, cut off by the bottom of the image. Its mouth and eyes are wide open and its hands are clasped on either side of its face. Further away on the jetty two more figures – men, as they wear top hats and this is 1895 – are sketched out full length. There is a boat on the sea, and buildings on the land, just visible on the horizon.

Looking closer at the figure at the bottom we can see its alarm more clearly, although the precise nature of the expression of this skull-like face is not easy to define. What is the wraith-like figure actually doing? The body seems almost immaterial: it is wavy, rather than solidly vertical, and is made of strokes more like the sky than the earth, all of which gives it a sense of insecurity. Is this person screaming, or does the open mouth speak of surprise, shock or horror? And do the hands express surprise as well, or are they clasped over the ears to shut out sound? There seems to be an unbearable pressure here, either coming from within, or closing in from the outside. As suggested above, the perspective of the jetty is distorted. It seems to recede too quickly, or, rather than receding, it could be seen as rushing towards us, giving the impression that we are zooming in, focussing on a close-up of the protagonist in a moment of high drama. Even the vegetation pushes in, the curved lines echoing the bend of the inflected wrist, pressing claustrophobically on the fragile figure.

Compared to the heightened drama of the protagonist, the two characters in the background seem relaxed, nonchalant even. One walks away, another stops to lean on the railing. If there is an audible sound – a scream – they do not seem to hear it: they certainly do not appear to be reacting to it. The boat just off the shore is a common feature in Munch’s work, and may imply the possibility of escape – but this is a possibility that is all too distant.

The sky is searing, with rich and brilliant colours, although oddly only the yellows are reflected in the water. The railing along the jetty, and even some of the planks of the path do take on some of the reds, but the intense colour is really the preserve of the sky, and is its defining feature. However, the nonchalance of the two figures could suggest that there is nothing unusual about it. Or maybe it is simply that they do not see it – or, that they do not see it like this. But then, the character in the foreground is not looking at the sky: he (is it ‘he’?) may have turned away.

I think that everything I have said so far is visible in the painting, although I can’t help wondering that so much of what I ‘see’ is coloured (deliberate choice of word) by what I have always known. It seems like ‘always’, anyway. I can’t remember when I first became aware of Edvard Munch, let alone The Scream. However, although there are unanswered questions in the interpretation of the image, we do know what Munch himself thought about the painting, as he wrote about it on more than one occasion. His first account was written a year before he made the first image. In a diary entry dated 22 January 1891, he said,

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun went down – I felt a gust of melancholy – suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death – as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends went on – I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I felt a vast infinite scream through nature.

This makes considerable sense of the image: it is Munch and two friends. They have moved on, but he remains, ‘trembling with anxiety’. Maybe this explains the wavy forms of the torso, even if he is not now leaning against the railing. The sky is ‘bloody red’ and we get a sense of the ‘blue-black fjord and city’ even if the colour chosen is not quite as dark as that might imply. What is key here is the last phrase, ‘I felt a vast infinite scream through nature’. He is not screaming (it is ‘he’), but there is a scream, a scream that maybe he is trying to block out with his hands. However, this is problematic, as he doesn’t hear the scream, so he can’t silence it – he feels it. What is truly ground-breaking about this image is that it isn’t a picture of something seen, but of something felt. We are at the very beginnings of Expressionism.

The year after Munch had this experience he tried to capture it visually twice, once in pastel – which may have been the first version, it’s not entirely clear – and once in paint, using both oil and tempera, with pastels as well. These two are both in Oslo, and are owned by the Munch Museum and the National Gallery respectively. The reason for thinking that the pastel is the earlier of the two is that, although the basic ideas are sketched out, the details are absent – no boats, and no buildings – features which do appear in what is, presumably, the later version.

There were two more versions in 1895 – the pastel which I have discussed (the only one in which one of the ‘friends’ leans on the railing), and a lithograph. We don’t know how many prints were drawn from the original stone, but about 30 survive, some of which were hand coloured by Munch himself. They were published in Berlin, and bear the title Geshrei, i.e. ‘The Scream’ in German, although the literal translation of this would be ‘Screaming’ or ‘Shouting’, apparently (‘The Scream’ would be Der Shrei in German, or, in Norwegian, Skrik). There is also a phrase at the bottom right, ‘Ich fühlte das grosse Geschrei durch die Natur‘ (‘I felt the great screaming through nature’). Often the image has been trimmed down, effectively cutting it out of the original ‘page’, meaning that the words do not appear – even if they were clearly important to Munch. This particular version, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was signed by the artist in 1896.

A final version was painted in tempera in 1910. This, too, is in the Munch Museum in Oslo, and, like the others (with the exception of the lithographs), is on cardboard. The first version in paint (1893) is the one which bears an inscription. It says (in translation): ‘Could only have been painted by a madman!’ It is written in pencil on top of the paint, and recent analysis has confirmed that it is in Munch’s handwriting. It was probably his reaction – presumably ironic – to the public response to the painting when it was first exhibited in Norway in 1895. Typical of this was the comment of critic Henrik Grosch, who wrote that the painting was proof that you could not “consider Munch a serious man with a normal brain.”  The implications of this statement would have been more profound for the artist than Grosch would have realised – probably. I don’t know how aware he was of Munch’s family background. Born in 1863, Edvard was the second of five children. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, as did his elder sister when he was fourteen. He was a sickly child, and was often kept out of school, which created an enduring sense of isolation. One of his younger sisters was diagnosed with a mental health disorder at an early age, and by the time The Scream was exhibited, she was cared for in a local institution. For the rest of his life the artist was haunted by the possibility that he had inherited the same condition.

Somehow, through all of this, he seems to have captured the essence of what could be described as one of the defining features of the 20th and 21st Centuries: angst. A quick internet search defines this as ‘a feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general’. The painting would have been perfectly at home in Vienna at the time of Sigmund Freud, but it also appears to visualise the Existentialists’ post-war fear of ‘the Void’: if there is no God, what is the point? For that matter, it could be an expression of man’s inhumanity to man, as seen in the holocaust, or even the cold war fear of nuclear annihilation. It speaks of the inner horror of so many of Francis Bacon’s subjects – even if it isn’t one of the usually acknowledged sources – and, oddly perhaps, it seems to demand to be owned. Both paintings have been stolen – the 1893 version in 1994, and the later one ten years later. And in 2012 the 1895 pastel – the one we have looked at – was sold for $119,922,600 to a private buyer. That’s very nearly 120 million dollars, which at the time was the most ever paid for a single painting.

‘Could only have been painted by a madman!’? It was as much the fear of the implications of this phrase – even before he had written it – that must have inspired his initial experience, and the images that flowed from it. This total honesty is what people have found hard to face, and yet, at the same time, it is so totally compelling. What else can have made it an early modernist Mona Lisa, ubiquitous and instantly understood? It undoubtedly touches a nerve, triggering an understanding of the human psyche. And, as we shall see on Monday, it was Munch’s psychological perception that helped to make him such a great portraitist.

245 – Out of the Corner

Édouard Manet, Corner of a Café-Concert, probably 1878-80. The National Gallery, London.

This week, after the splendour of Siena in the 14th century, it is time to turn our attention to another flourishing city – Paris, in the second half of the 19th century – but we will look at it via Switzerland. Over several decades in the 20th century the Swiss businessman Oskar Reinhart acquired a remarkable collection of paintings and works on paper. These included an admirable selection of the Impressionists and Post Impressionists, some of which I will be talking about this Monday, 7 April at 6pm, as they have been lent – for the first time as a group – to The Courtauld, where they form the nucleus of their enormously successful exhibition, Goya to Impressionism. I want to lead into this by writing about a painting by Manet from the National Gallery, at the other end of the Strand in London. It is not in the exhibition, but it was, for a while, part of a painting that is. Two weeks later, on 21 April, I will look at the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of Edvard Munch Portraits – some of his finest work, frankly. And finally, for April, I want to go to one of London’s great, but under-visited, free museums, the Guildhall Art Gallery, to introduce their exhibition Evelyn de Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London. I am planning to devote May to German art – but more news about that as the series develops: keep an eye on the diary!

The Café-Concert of the title would have been just one of at least 150 such establishments in Paris at the time this was painted. They varied in size and in the scale of their entertainment – from a piano in the corner to a full-sized orchestra – but the basic idea was the same: they provided musical entertainment and refreshment. However, up until 1867 they were strictly regulated: the performers were not allowed to wear costumes, being restricted to everyday ‘streetwear’, and no more than 40 songs could be performed in one evening. Even then, the entire programme had to be passed by the police to prevent any seditious material being heard. There was to be no dancing, no dialogue and no sets – the aim being to protect musical theatre. Theatre as a whole had long been under ‘royal’ control, but by 1867 Napoleon III’s popularity was waning, fifteen years into the ‘Second Empire’. The relaxation of the law in 1867 not only led to the flourishing of the Café-Concerts, but also helped just a little to keep the Emperor going – until France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War just four years later. The Café-Concerts, on the other hand, went from strength to strength, and, as a feature of contemporary society, they became a popular subject for avant-garde artists such as Manet, hailed as ‘the painter of modern life’. In the painting, we see members of the public seated at a table being served drinks. A waitress places one glass of beer on the table while holding two more in her left hand. She looks off to our right, perhaps checking for other customers in need of service, or reminding herself who ordered the drinks she is still holding. In the background we can see a singer, or dancer (or both) on stage, with an orchestra seated in front.

One of the reasons for the popularity of the Café-Concerts was probably because they were – like the ballet – some of the few places where you could see a woman’s legs in public. Indeed, the performer appears to be dressed for the ballet, wearing something like a tutu. She has a remarkable slim waist (and is presumably corseted), and sports a décolletage which is low-cut, even given the word’s definition, and held up by the slimmest of shoulder straps. Leaning forward with her arms flung out she could either be taking or bow, or maybe singing. The setting is non-specific, with just a hint of a pale château with a blue roof seen between trees, in the midst of a Renoir-like array of light turquoise and blue brushstrokes. The gilded curtain can be seen to the far right just inside the proscenium arch, which frames the stage. The orchestra is separated from the performer by a screen topped by a row of glowing footlights and what looks like a low fence.

The orchestra itself is painted remarkably freely. A trombonist sits on the left, his instrument stretching behind his head on a diagonal from bottom left to top right, and, neatly framing the grey hat, a tuba player sits behind him. Both instruments are only just sketched in with creamy yellow and blue dashes, a style of painting that would be more at home in a late Impressionist or a spontaneously Divisionist painting. But then the freedom with which Manet could deploy paint, yet still hold onto the essence of his subject, is demonstrated clearly by the dashes of colour with which the beer is painted, a slight head of foam visible through the glass, the waitress’s black dress seen through the beer, but broken up by the colour of the light which both illuminates the beer and reflects off the glasses. There’s a real sense of how much these drinks would weigh – and therefore of the waitress’s skill in delivering one drink whilst focussing elsewhere. Nearby, the man in the foreground holds a clay pipe, from which curls a puff of smoke. The stem of the pipe rests on his thumb and his forefinger is curled over it, clamping it onto the knuckles of the remaining three bent fingers.

The central ‘drama’ of the image is not whatever is happening on the stage, but the split focus of the two protagonists: the waitress looking to our right, the smoking man to our left. Both appear to be focussed on things beyond the frame: there are aspects of this Café-Concert that we will never know. This fragmentary depiction is one of the truly modern features of the painting: the artist is not showing us everything, but allowing us a glimpse of just one of the things which interests him, a moment of alienated interaction which suggests that these two people have no interest in each other. While we may not know everything that is going on, this impersonal interaction is one of the hallmarks of life in modern society: Manet is showing us not only what people look like, but also how they behave. He is also giving us a small cross-section of Parisian society. The smoker, in the customary workers’ blue – the Bleu de Travail – is wearing a black cap and smoking his pipe. Next to him another man wears a slightly smarter hat, like a taller version of a bowler hat, but in grey and with a broad back ribbon – I think it’s a tall crown bowler (or, for the Americans, a high crown derby). Beyond him, a woman turns away, her hair pulled back behind her ear and piled on top of her head, where it is dressed with yellow ribbons which merge, visually, with the brass of the trombone. Is she with the man in the grey hat? There is no evidence that she is, but could she be her on her own? It would seem unlikely, in the 1870s – unless she is there alone professionally… draw your own conclusions.

The Bleu de Travail is the dominant element in the foreground, baggy so as not to restrict movement at work, hardwearing and cheap. But it’s not evenly blue – a hard line cuts down the worker’s back directly below the two beers, lighter on the right and darker on the left. This is a sure sign that Manet extended the painting, adding a new section of canvas on the right. When originally completed it would presumably have looked more coherent, but as the new section was not prepared in the same way – the surface blue doesn’t have the same layers of paint underneath it – it has faded to reveal the addition. While we’re looking at this detail I’d like you to try and find something else. The beer is not necessarily for this worker – he has a dark brown drink in a tall glass in front of him. To the left of the top of this glass, just above the level of the liquid, is a tiny pink detail, at the bottom of a green drink that looks suspiciously like absinthe. This pink detail casts a shadow on the table beneath it – remember it, because I’ll come back to it later.

According to the art critic Théodore Duret, Manet was particularly impressed by the waitresses in the Brasserie de Reichshoffen, ‘who, while placing with one hand a glass on a table in front of a customer, were able to hold several more in the other, without spilling a drop.’ Manet asked one of these waitresses to pose for him, but she was reluctant, and said she would only agree if her ‘protector’ could be there too – and he would have to be paid as well. He is the worker in the foreground: the ‘alienation’ is a fiction, as they knew each other well. This may have allowed Manet to develop a particularly taut composition. The waitress’s left arm hangs down from her shoulder to her elbow and then up to her hand holding the beers, while the worker’s left arm goes down to the elbow, resting on the table, and up to his hand holding the pipe. The two hands, together with the beers, frame the worker’s head. The waitress’s right arm, clad in black, fills the gap between the worker’s brilliantly illuminated left forearm, and her white cuff meets his blue. Her hand remains hidden behind his arm, even though we can see the beer she has placed on the table. The far left and right of the composition are framed by the heads of the trombonist and a double bass player respectively, and also, on the right, by the proscenium arch. Its visibility on the right, but not the left, implies that the stage spreads far beyond the frame of the painting on the opposite side. Whatever the apparent spontaneity of the image (and remember, Manet never exhibited with the Impressionists – he wasn’t necessarily painting what he saw when he saw it) this is a rather brilliantly planned composition. However, it isn’t called Corner of the Brasserie Reichshoffen – we are in a Café-Concert, not a Brasserie. But then, Manet had changed his mind.

This is actually a screen shot taken from Monday’s talk. On the left is Manet’s Au Café (1878) from the Oskar Reinhart Collection – one of the paintings in the Courtauld’s exhibition. On the right is Corner of a Café-Concert. The painting of the Brasserie Reichshoffen was originally intended to be a reasonably sized composition, but Manet was unhappy with its progress, and cut it in two. Most accounts say he ‘cut it in half’ – but they are nowhere near equal ‘halves’. If you remove the addition from National Gallery’s painting, it is about half the width of its Swiss companion: he effectively cut a third from the original composition. Both were then re-worked into independent paintings, with the setting of the left section remaining securely in the Brasserie, while the other was transformed by the addition of a stage, a performer and an orchestra into a Café-Concert. All of these elements are far more freely painted, showing that the younger generation of Impressionists had a notable impact on their older mentor. I haven’t read a full account of the precise relationship between the two paintings (stuck in my study on the Wirral I don’t have access to the right libraries), but this is the best match I can come up with, the shadows of the drinks on the right matching those on the table on the left. Not only that, but the tiny pink detail at the bottom of the ‘absinthe’ is revealed to be the fingertips of the girl on the left. The Reinhart painting shows a more obviously respectable couple – a man in a top hat with a cane (of a ‘higher class’ than the men opposite him, clearly), with a woman modestly dressed in a beige-coloured coat and hat – who is probably his wife. The girl at the far end could even be their daughter, but she wouldn’t be drinking absinthe. Maybe that belongs to the unaccompanied woman at the end of the table who is turning away from us. [A few days after I wrote this I finally got round to reading Rachel Sloan’s entry about the Reinhart painting in The Courtauld’s catalogue – the re-working of the original painting was more complex than I had realised, and initially the canvas was cut between the man in the top hat and the ‘girl’ at the end of the table – who might originally have been a young man: look at the stiff white collar… That’ll teach me to research things properly!]

The additions to the Corner of the Café-Concert turn it into the very type of establishment mentioned in the title – a place of popular entertainment, which would in its turn evolve into the British Music Hall. By extending the canvas Manet also makes the waitress central, so that she becomes the real subject of the painting, rather than leaving her cornered. It does leave me wondering, though: if he hadn’t done this, how would he have painted her particular skill – delivering one drink while securely holding several more? Surely there would only have been just enough room for one glass of beer, if that. Maybe it was this that led to his dissatisfaction.

244 – Full of Grace

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Madonna del Latte, about 1325. Museo Diocesano, Siena.

I will complete my series of talks relating to the National Gallery’s truly glorious exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting this Monday, 31 March with Ambrogio Lorenzetti. I always thought I knew his work, but there is so much more than I imagined – although his masterpiece, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico, does loom large: we will look at it in depth on Monday. However, today I want to have a look at a painting which is in the exhibition, the Madonna del Latte, bearing in mind that this Tuesday (25 March) was the Feast of the Annunciation. The painting belongs to the Museo Diocesano in Siena, a museum I have never visited. However, I am hoping to get there next year as part of a visit to Siena with Artemisia. We will also go on a daytrip to Massa Marittima to see the painting I posted last week. We’re still very much in the planning stages, but if you are interested at all, contact Charlie Winton via the Artemisia website and she will get in touch when the plans are more secure.

If you’ve missed my talks in this series, I am repeating them in an edited form for ARTscapades, combining my five talks into a two-part short course, Four Sienese Artists. I delivered part one, about Duccio and Pietro Lorenzetti, on Tuesday, but it was recorded and will be available on catch up for a month. Part two, Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, will follow next Tuesday, 1 April – you can book them separately via those links.

After Siena, April will be taken up with talks based on exhibitions in London, introducing shows at The Courtauld, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Guildhall Art Gallery. They are, respectively, Goya to Impressionism (7 April), Edvard Munch Portraits (21 April), and Evelyn de Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London (28 April). I plan to dedicate May to German art – but more news about that soon. Of course, you can always check on the diary! But for now, back to Ambrogio Lorenzetti.

The painting is called the Madonna del Latte – a literal translation would be ‘Madonna of the Milk’ – i.e. the breastfeeding Madonna. It is a subject that was relatively common in medieval and renaissance art, stressing the humanity of the holy mother and child, something which is also clear from the child wriggling in its mother’s firm grasp, and distracted from feeding by something over our left shoulders. At the same time as making the figures entirely human, Lorenzetti assures us of their sanctity through the prominent inclusion of richly tooled haloes. These touch the gabled frame at top left and middle right, ensuring that we focus on the couple and nothing else. The composition is beautifully rigorous, with Mary leaning to our left, so that her elbow (and, almost, Christ’s right toes) are effectively touching the frame, while the hem of her cloak, which hangs down from her left hand, leads down to the bottom right corner. The flat gold background is delicately tooled around its edges, and is surrounded by a red-brown painted frame. The base of the outer, wooden frame of the triangular gable is slightly narrower than the rectangular base on which it rests. It forms an equilateral triangle, triggering thoughts of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the realisation that God the Son is now also a man, sprawling in his mother’s arms. Whether or not the triangular form of the gable does refer to the Trinity, its combination with the lower, rectangular shape seems to imply something more about this painting, an idea confirmed by comparison with Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s earliest known work, the Madonna di Vico l’Abate, painted in 1319 and currently in the Museo di Casciano in Val di Pesa, about 19km outside of Florence.

The rigid and sculptural qualities of the earlier Madonna (on the right) echo not only the paintings of Giotto, but also the sculptures of Arnolfo di Cambio, reminding us that Ambrogio, like his elder brother Pietro, spent a considerable time in Florence in his early years. That the later work is more fluid, and lyrical, suggests a return to the ethos of Siena, even if we don’t know the original location of the Madonna del Latte. However, by this stage he had been painting frescoes alongside Pietro in the Chapter House of San Francesco in Siena, which we will look at on Monday. The main point of this comparison, though, is not necessarily to point out Ambrogio’s stylistic development, but to explain the shape of the frame. The earlier work, named after the town for which it was painted, has a similar shape, although the triangular gable is narrower in relation to the rectangular section below. The shape of the painting is defined by the shape of the throne on which Mary is seated. Its arms are depicted in an early form of perspective, with the result that the nearer, splayed ends are cut off by the frame of the painting. Nevertheless, the inlaid panel behind Mary’s legs fits the width of the picture surface perfectly, while the equivalent panel behind her back is further away, and so appears narrower, allowing it space for a flat, fictive frame of its own. This upper inlaid panel is equivalent to the flat gold background of the Madonna del Latte, while the framing element, painted as if made of a pale wood, is replaced by the red-brown frame in today’s painting. When we look at the panel of the Madonna del Latte what we see is actually the throne itself, with Mary and Jesus painted in front of it. By doing this, Ambrogio presents mother and child with an unparalleled immediacy – not unlike the image of Christ in his brother Pietro’s Cut-out Crucifix.

Mary’s apparent proximity is enhanced by the layering of forms: her halo is in front of the painted frame, and her head is in front of the halo, thus pushing her closer to us. I can’t be certain how the red-brown frame was made, and I don’t have access to any technical reports, but if you look in the corners where the halo touches the wooden frame, there are small patches where the colouring seems to have flaked off, revealing gold. I am fairly sure that the painted frame is a rich, reddish, translucent paint applied over tooled gold leaf – but don’t quote me on that! You can see the gold through the paint, which creates a slightly unusual effect, almost like tooled and gilded leather. The asymmetry of the placement of Mary’s head – with the halo covering the painted frame on the left, but clear of the delicate tooling along the edge of the flat gold background on the right – emphasizes the way she is leaning back to get a better look at her son. Her gaze is incredibly subtle, but I can’t help seeing a contained, inner radiance, a subtle look of profound love combined with awe, and the slightest hint of a smile on her pink lips.

Jesus does not return this gaze, but looks out beyond us, his tiny hands firmly clasping Mary’s breast. Admittedly Ambrogio wins no prizes for anatomy here, but there is the possibility that he was trying not to be too explicit – or naturalistic. The Madonna Lactans – the Latin term for the genre of breastfeeding Madonnas – fell out of popularity in the second half of the 16th Century, a victim to the Counter Reformation, which considered it ‘inappropriate’ – in a somewhat 21st century way. The decorated pattern at the end of Mary’s white veil curves around the breast, and the veil hangs down in narrow, wrinkled folds, implying that it is made of the thinnest and most delicate of fabrics. Ripples of the hem frame Mary’s face, and the veil is twisted, rope-like, as it curves across her chest and under her blue cloak, which appears to be turned back near her left shoulder to reveal a green lining.

The same green appears as a belt around Mary’s waist, gathering her dress which is a bright, un-patterned red. Jesus has got himself into one of those awkward positions in which babies excel, wriggling so much that Mary looks in danger of losing her grasp. His left foot is lifted, and rests in the crook of her right elbow, while the right foot hangs down by her side. Ambrogio has tried to emulate the folds of flesh in a chubby baby’s limbs and stomach with curving lines which I suspect were more subtle, and less evident, when the painting was first completed. Their curves clearly show us the three-dimensional forms of his body. I am intrigued by the pink swaddling cloth in which Jesus is wrapped. It is not the usual white, which so often looks forward to the shroud, and I am not aware of an others of this colour (although it could be that I have simply not registered them). It may relate to the red loin cloths with which Jesus was painted in Crucifixions of the late 13th Century (and also, later, by Raphael, in the Mond Crucifixion), a reference to Christ’s royalty – but that might be an interpretive step too far. What is clear is that Ambrogio has thought very carefully about the way it hangs: notice the folds that are pinched up by Mary’s right forefinger, and the sagging of the drapery behind the child’s back, held up by the middle finger.

The same is true for her left hand, where her fourth and fifth fingers pull up curves of drapery, marked by little pools of shadow ringed by highlights above. The flat back of her hand is strongly marked by shadow, and separated from the light on her fingers by the knuckles. The pink cloth curves over the thumb and forefinger, falling down to the left and right, hemmed by the thinnest of black lines. The gold hem of her cloak cuts between the pink cloth and the back of her hand with an almost abstract geometry. This photographic detail was taken from a different file to the others, and dates from before the recent conservation. It still shows signs of woodworm in the panel – the tiny black holes in Jesus’s forehead, for example. But it also shows clearly the delicacy of the tooling of the halo, a splayed cross-shape marked out to remind us that this is indeed Christ, created with a variety of tools. There are smaller and larger rings, dots, and a stippling between the shapes in the one arm of the ‘cross’ that we can see clearly. The leaf-like forms were probably ‘drawn’ into the gold leaf with a stylus after the gold had been burnished. The rings would have been made then too, using a tiny tube tapped onto the gold with a hammer. After this, a thin stylus would have been repeatedly pressed onto the gold to make the stippling which fills the gaps in between.

I took this detail at an angle from below in order to catch the reflection of the light. Up close you can see how egg tempera is applied, with small, unblended brush strokes in different colours. From a distance they combine to create the overall effect. The brush strokes themselves help to define the form of the jaw and chin, modelling the contours, and creating shadows as more dark strokes are introduced. The thicker black lines along the nose and the profile cut the face away from the veil which hangs behind, thus making the head look more sculptural. The veil itself hangs in thin folds in front of Mary’s forehead, and faintly reveals the hair underneath. But the point of the photograph was really to look at the intricacy of the tooling. The halo is defined by the thinnest of circular guidelines, created with a sharp stylus and a pair of compasses. There are eight of these, and going in from the outside, between the third and fourth is a circle of rings containing dots. Between the fifth and a sixth guidelines, letters were incised in the burnished gold and surrounded by stippling. Further in still is another circle of dots, but without the rings. This is hidden at a point in front of Mary’s forehead by the veil, enhancing the sense that all this is real and solid. As for the letters, they can be read more easily where the light is reflecting from the gold, but if you move your head as you look at the painting itself you can read quite easily the words of the angelic salutation:

AVE · MARIA · GRATIA · PLENA · DOMINUS · TECUM · BENE

‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee’. The ‘BENE’ is cut off, but is the beginning of the next phrase ‘benedicta tu in mulieribus’ – ‘blessed are you among women’. This is a quotation from Luke 1:28 in the Vulgate, the official Roman Catholic version of the bible. In this context, ‘grace’ refers to acceptance and goodwill, regardless of whether or not it is deserved. Another term would be ‘favour’ – which is why the King James Version renders the phrase as ‘Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women’ – Mary’s name is not included in either translation, but it becomes an essential part of the one of Christianity’s most essential prayers – the ‘Ave Maria’, or ‘Hail Mary’.

Ambrogio’s inclusion of this prayer in Mary’s halo is a first, and the combination of word and image would become one of his areas of expertise. We will certainly see it as vital to the interpretation of the Allegory of Good and Bad Government on Monday. For now, though, the inscription in the halo is a fitting reminder that the good news brought to the Virgin on the Feast of the Annunciation – celebrated on Tuesday – was fulfilled by the birth of Christ. Full of grace, Mary now holds Salvation in her arms.

Revisiting the Virtues in Colour

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Maestà, c. 1335. Museo di Arte Sacra, Massa Marittima.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 at the National Gallery is undoubtedly the most beautiful exhibition I have seen for many years, and I can’t wait to tell you all about it this coming Monday, 24 March at 6pm. It charts, as the title suggests, the rise of painting to become ‘top art form’, taking over from the work of goldsmiths and enamellers which had flourished in the 13th century. As my recent talks have outlined, the exhibition ‘stars’ four main artists: Duccio, Simone Martini, and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, although the exhibition includes much more besides. I will cover as much as I can this Monday, and then the following week (31 March) I will come back to Ambrogio Lorenzetti. As yet, I haven’t dedicated an individual talk just to him. Details about the subsequent talks, introducing exhibitions at the Courtauld (From Goya to Impressionism) and the National Portrait Gallery (Edvard Munch) will be posted soon in the diary.

To make up for the delay in talking about Ambrogio, I’m going to have a look at one of his paintings today. It is not in the exhibition, but I do hope to go and see it in Massa Marittima with Artemisia next year, as a daytrip during a visit to Siena itself. This is actually an entry I first posted back in 2021, about a year into the blog. As it happens, the fifth anniversary of the first post was yesterday.

Evidence about the two Lorenzetti brothers is scarce, although both were, in all probability, born in Siena (Pietro around 1280, and Ambrogio about a decade later). It is possible – but by no means certain – that they both trained with Duccio. Ambrogio spent some time in Florence, as did Pietro, who also worked in Cortona, Assisi, and Arezzo. It may well have been in Florence that they became familiar with the work of Giotto, whose naturalism and solid humanity influenced both brothers, although neither ever let go of the lyricism inherent in Sienese practice. They worked alongside one another on the façade of the Hospital opposite Siena Cathedral (although sadly these frescoes have not survived), and each painted an altarpiece for the cathedral as part of the elaboration of the themes of Duccio’s Maestà.  As there is no mention of either brother after 1347 it seems likely that both died during the Black Death. Today, I would like to look at the Maestà which Ambrogio painted for one of the churches in Massa Marittima, famous enough to have been mentioned by Vasari, but lost for centuries. It turned up in 1867 in the attic of the Convent of Sant’Agostino, where it had been split into 5 sections, and, although some of the altarpiece has probably been lost, to look at it today you would never know that for a while the panels were used as a bin used to clear ashes from a fireplace.

Maestà means, quite simply, ‘Majesty’, and as the title for a painting it implies the full majesty and splendour of the Madonna and Child enthroned in the Court of Heaven. Ambrogio pulls out all the stops, packing the firmament with more saints than you will ever have seen, and, for that matter, more than you could identify, or even count. They are arranged in three ranks, although precisely how this works physically is by no means clear. It could simply be that all the saints at the bottom are really short, although there could be three platforms on which they stand. However, apart from the six angelic musicians – three on either side – who are clearly kneeling, or the three figures sitting on the steps, it is not at all obvious what is supporting any of these people. But then, they are souls in heaven, so the question is immaterial, in more senses than one. You can see the front row of each of the ‘ranks’ of saints quite clearly, and this disguises the number of people who are present – until you look closer.

You might start to see that the halos overlap like waves, each ‘rank’ of saints being three or four deep. You might also realise that there is, actually, no throne. The steps are the only solid element. The cushion on which Mary is seated is actually supported by a pair of angels, whose inner wings are raised. The stone-grey feathers suggest the back of a throne – but there is nothing there. It is a matter of faith: you know there must be a throne, and so you believe it. At the very top, another pair of angels is preparing to scatter flowers in celebration of the Virgin, who is herself associated with so many different flowers, although the splendour and majesty is subtly undermined by the oh-so-human affection demonstrated by mother and child. They bump noses, slightly cross-eyed, and yet maintain what is, under the circumstances, an almost comical gravity. This is God made Man in a very real sense, and a detail to the left suggests that Jesus has only just been born: as yet, nothing has happened to write about.

John the Evangelist stands in the position of honour at the right hand of the throne (that is, on our left – although on the right of this detail). He is poised to write the opening of his gospel, ‘In the beginning was the Word’ –  but as yet the page is blank, apart from the illuminated initial ‘I’. His quill is held delicately between thumb and forefinger, all of the feathery bits removed as was the practice at the time. The beautiful and elaborate illumination is made up of scrolling leaf-like forms reaching down the left hand side of the left hand page of the otherwise empty spread, looking for all the world like the sort of decorated paper you can still buy in Tuscany today. Standing next to him is St Peter, with the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, and then St Paul, sword held informally over his shoulder. Although the halos are gold leaf (would it be possible to count them?) his sword was silver, but it has tarnished to black. Behind and below these three most of the saints cannot be seen, let alone identified, but at the bottom left is St Catherine of Alexandria (see the full painting above for her wheel), and next to her, St Francis, in the brown Franciscan habit.

In the foreground, and forming the foundations and support of the spiritual throne, are three steps, each of which is a different colour, with a figure dressed in the same colour sitting on it. The white, green and red steps are labelled ‘FIDES’, ‘SPES’, and ‘CARITAS’ respectively – Faith, Hope and Charity. The three figures are personifications of the three ‘Theological Virtues’ which I first discussed back in April [2020] (see Day 42 – Some Virtues and Day 45 – Virtues, again…). The relevant biblical text is, of course, the first epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 13, which ends with verse 13:

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Faith sit on the lowest step and holds her left hand to her chest while looking at a painting – or a decorated shield, perhaps? – on which we can see two faces looking left and right, both bearded, the former with a shorter beard. What we can’t see, hovering above the heads, is a dove – the Holy Spirit – but technical analysis must confirm that it was there, as this is identified as an image of the Holy Trinity, the very thing in which Faith believes. She wears a gorgeously fashionable, beautifully painted semi-transparent wimple, held in place with a crown. She also has gold work on her bodice for which the gold leaf was applied, then tooled (circular ‘punches’ of different sizes have been pressed, or tapped, onto the gold leaf to create indentations) and then, in part, painted. A pair of wings spreads out behind her, crossing the top, red step, which is delicately decorated. This is another way of using gold. In this case the leaf was applied to the panel, and the red painted over it. Much of the decoration you can see – including the ‘TAS’ of ‘CARITAS’ – was revealed by scratching away the red paint to reveal the gold underneath, a technique known as sgraffito – which, like modern-day ‘graffiti’, means ‘scratched’ (even if today graffiti is applied with a spray can).

Hope sits on the middle, green step. Unfortunately her robe has discoloured, and looks more brown than green now. Usually we would expect her to look up towards heaven, hands joined in prayer, but here she supports a tower, representing the Church. The image of the Virtues in this painting is derived from a 12th Century French theologian called Peter the Chanter.  Faith forms the foundation of the Church, Hope lifts it towards Heaven, and Charity, which St Paul says is ‘the greatest of these’, sits at the top, expressing the burning passion of the unqualified love of – and for – God.

An ethereal pink, rather than the richer vermillion of the step, Charity has a more spiritual feel than the other two, partly because she is all but monochrome, and partly because she lacks the naturalistic, contemporary dress of her companions. In her right hand she holds an arrow, or dart – more like the pagan Cupid, perhaps – and in her left, a heart, just as Giotto’s Charity does in the Scrovegni chapel (See Day 45) .

Colour symbolism is notoriously unreliable in art, but the common understanding that white, green and red stand for Faith, Hope and Charity is given its fullest and clearest exposition in this painting. It was this symbolism which led the colour combination to be so widely used – by the Medici in Florence, the Gonzaga in Mantua and the Este in Ferrara, for example. Raphael’s portrait of Pope Julius II (in the National Gallery) also uses precisely these colours: so many virtuous people. As for modern Italy – well, the tricolore was inspired by the French tricolore (different pronunciation!) Apparently the Italian press (or equivalent) had mis-reported the French Revolutionary colours as red, white and green (rather than blue), and the Italian nationalists adopted these instead – and stuck with them. Subsequently they have become associated with the Theological Virtues, although that was not the original intention. However it would have been driven home by reference to the Divine Comedy, for centuries the second most widely-read book in Italy. When Dante first encounters the semi-divine Beatrice, to him the paragon of virtue, towards the end of the Purgatory (Canto XXX, 28-33), she wears precisely these colours:

‘within a cloud of flowers which rose from the angels’ hands within and without, a lady appeared to me, girt with olive over a white veil, clothed, under a green mantle, with the colour of living flame’.

I can’t help thinking that, in Ambrogio’s Maestà, Charity looks like a ‘living flame’ – and that the angels at the very top of the painting scatter flowers in much the manner that Dante describes. Between Dante and Peter the Chanter, much of the imagery of this altarpiece can be explained. But how much of this would Lorenzetti have known? In 1347 he appeared before the Council of Siena and impressed them ‘with his words of wisdom’. So he must have been learned, a reputation which lasted long enough for Vasari to mention it in the 16th Century. But someone else must have suggested the elements to be included – and in particular, precisely which saints he should paint – although by no means all of them would ever have been identified. As yet, we do not know who that was. I shall leave you with one more saint, though, as it is one you have probably never seen before – and may never encounter again.

On the far right of the painting is a bishop in black. It is San Cerbone, the patron saint of Massa Marittima, and dedicatee of their cathedral: he is believed to have been the bishop in the middle of the sixth century. Once appointed to the diocese, his flock were soon disappointed because he always said mass at daybreak, which was far too early for most. After a while he was summoned to Rome to explain his behaviour to the Pope, and on the way he tamed a gaggle of wild geese with the sign of the cross. They followed him all the way to Rome, only flying off again when he made the sign of the cross a second time. He may have to do it again, though, as the geese have just rushed into the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. That’s how we know who this is.

This Monday, when I talk about the National Gallery’s glorious Siena exhibition, I will include the few images by Ambrogio Lorenzetti which are included, but will discuss his work as a whole – including his masterwork, the Allegory of Good and Bad Government – the week after. I do hope you can join me for either – or both – of these talks!