Michelangelo, Falling (in love again)

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

I’m too busy seeing art this week to write about it now, I’m afraid! Yesterday I was lucky enough to get to a preview of the Royal Academy’s superb, focussed Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c. 1504, and will head to Drawing the Italian Renaissance at the King’s Gallery today (I’ll be talking about that in the second week of December). So today I’m re-posting a blog about a drawing which might be in the exhibition I’m seeing today… If it weren’t for its date (1533) I could also include it this coming Monday, 11 November at 6pm in my talk about Michelangelo – which will be the first of four introducing and expanding on the Royal Academy exhibition, looking at the artist’s work leading up to, and immediately after, the key date of 1504. The next week, 18 November, it will be the turn of Leonardo, and Raphael will follow on 25 November – with these ideas drawn together to consider what we learn from the exhibition in the fourth talk on 2 December. The first two talks are on sale now, and the others will come online immediately after the first talk – with a discount for those who have attended Michelangelo. Details, and all the links, are included in the diary, of course. There are also details of next year’s Artemisia tours, as the trips for the first half of 2025 have recently been announced. I will be leading return visits to The Piero della Francesca Trail (9-16 March) and Hamburg (28 May – I June). As people have been asking, I should let you know that there is a lot of walking on both trips, with added hills for the first one – but if you are interested, please do mention my name when booking, thank you! But, as the exhibitions I am seeing this week are mainly about drawing, let’s look at a drawing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

232 – ‘There’s so much more to say’

Barbara Walker, Vanishing Point 24 (Mignard), 2021. Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.

Barbara Walker is an artist I should have been aware of earlier: she has exhibited every year since she graduated from the University of Central England in 1996, and has built up a remarkable body of work, distinguished by its integrity, its compassion, and its intelligence – both emotional and intellectual – not to mention by her superb technique, which ranks among the very best. I will be talking about the first survey of her work, Barbara Walker: Being Here this Monday, 28 October at 6pm. The exhibition follows hot on the heels of her nomination for the Turner prize last year, and her election as a Royal Academician in December 2022. Although seen as a ‘retrospective’, looking back across her thirty-year career so far, Walker herself would prefer to see it differently, as she made clear in a recent interview in the Guardian: ‘It’s an introduction, so an audience can see how I’ve started … There’s so much more to say’.

After that, I’m taking a week out to see how the Ghent altarpiece is getting on, but then I will start a four-week exploration of the major offering from the Royal Academy this autumn, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504. The first two talks, focussing on Michelangelo (11 November) and Leonardo (18 November) are on sale already, with the other two coming online just after the first talk, with a discount for anyone who was there. Given this exhibition, and the forthcoming one at the King’s Gallery, there will be a considerable focus on drawing over the next few weeks, and today is no exception. Although Walker trained as a painter (and, as you will see on Monday, her technique is exceptional), she has subsequently adopted drawing as her primary focus. As she has said, “Drawing is an accessible medium that is comfortable to work with. It’s very forgiving. It’s very flexible. It’s a medium that is easy to communicate with (and through).”

In the bottom left of a white sheet of paper, displayed in portrait format and measuring 89 x 74.6 cm – a relatively large size for a drawing – we see a detailed depiction of a girl holding some red coral and a seashell, smiling and looking up towards the top right. Her clothing is not contemporary, despite the date of this work (2021), and, given the historical dress, her hair is remarkably short. Her skirts extend to the bottom left corner of the paper, and she leans in on a diagonal which could easily form one side of a pyramidal composition. On the other side of the paper, more or less at a level with the girl’s head, are the intricately-drawn leaves of a rose bush, a couple of blooms visible, one of which is only sketched in outline. This section of drawing is marginally fainter than that of the girl, reminding us that she is the focus of interest. The two areas which are drawn serve to emphasize the void in between, an absence of form in which only a ghost remains, the seated figure of a woman with her arm around the girl. The woman’s head is at the apex of the implied pyramid, her sleeve and the outline of her dress completing its structure on the right.

Drawing is not the only technique employed here: it is combined with a form of printing which does not use ink: blind embossing. In order to do this, rather than preparing a plate, inking it, and pressing it evenly onto the paper, two metal dies are needed. One has a raised design, effectively a low-relief sculpture, while the other has a recessed version of the same image. By pressing the paper between them the image is embossed. It works better when the paper is not thin (as thin paper might rip) and it helps if the paper is damp, to make it more flexible. In this detail the die has picked out the hair, facial features, and clothes of the subject, leaving her flesh – the face and chest – flat. And white.

The whiteness, and the lack of visibility of this person, is not exactly the point of the image: it is more relevant that we are looking at a Black girl. Walker’s intentions might initially appear to be quite simple – and yet when considered in depth they are of course complex, profound and urgent. The point is that in Old Master Paintings people of colour are rarely represented, and when they are, as here, they are seen as servants or slaves – with the exception of the occasional magus, or king. But, given that viewers tend to concentrate on the ‘main subject’ of the painting, these ‘minor’ characters have often been overlooked. Art Historians in the past have usually done exactly that, and I did too in my initial description of the image – precisely to make this point.

Walker is primarily addressing the problem of the invisibility of people of colour in Western European art, but she is also pointing out the ways in which the Black presence in these paintings has often been ignored. Her work is, as much as anything, an act of re-balancing. Inevitably it goes further than that. I spent more than two decades taking school parties around the National Gallery, and I frequently worked with classes in which children of colour formed the majority. One argument for the value of art, and why it is important for us all, is that it can reveal universal truths – and this is where the problem lies. The children were usually delighted to learn that, given that this is the British National Gallery, and they are British, the paintings belong to them. But what universal truths could I show them? What role models are there to aspire to? What function do people like them play in the universal truths of the world of art? They are servants and slaves, mainly. One musician. And the occasional king. As a whole the collection states, quite loudly, that ‘this is not about you’. Or, if it is, ‘… so now you know your place’.

Let’s take a step back, for the moment, and take another look at the technique. It is superb, using ‘Graphite and coloured pencil on embossed paper’, according to Walker’s website. The complex folds of the dark dress and the white chemise are masterfully modelled in contrasting tones of the graphite, while the coral is delicately picked out in red pencil. Notice how the embossing of the drapery is expertly handled so that it neatly frames the area on which coral and shell are drawn. Not only does it frame these attributes (in the same way that the hand on the girl’s shoulder frames her) but it also leaves a flat area on which the important details can be drawn precisely, thus making them stand out clearly. The neckline of the bodice is low-cut, while the sleeves are mid-length, and gathered in the style of the late 17th century. The girl smiles as she looks upwards, wearing a single string of pearls around her neck. There are more pearls in the shell, which functions as a cup. She is offering the ‘absent’ women the treasures of the sea, the unrecognised, and unacknowledged irony being that she too is one of those ‘treasures’ – an African slave, traded across the sea and bringing great wealth. In classical mythology, coral formed after Perseus slew Medusa, and drops of the Gorgon’s blood petrified the seaweed and turned it red. It is not this girl who has blood on her hands, though.

Walker’s work is a version of a painting by Pierre Mignard which is in the National Portrait Gallery in London, Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth with an unknown female attendant (1682). Kéroualle was French, and first came to England in 1670 as a maid of honour to Henrietta Anne, the sister of Charles II, who had grown up in France during the Commonwealth and married the Duke of Orleans. After this visit, Kéroualle returned to England in 1671, but this time as the King’s mistress: the French government was hoping it would make sense, diplomatically. She bore the king one son, and had some sway in court, but she wasn’t popular overall: neither her nationality, nor her position went down well – nor did her religion. Nell Gynn stigmatised her as Charles II’s ‘catholic whore’. The portrait was painted from life during a visit to Paris in 1682, nine years after Charles had made her, his mistress, Duchess of Portsmouth. It could be that her association with one of England’s major ports led Mignard to identify her as the sea nymph Thetis, one of the daughters of Neptune, and mother of Achilles: although there is nothing classicizing in the way she is depicted, we can at least see the sea in the background, and coral and pearls are relevant attributes. The National Gallery also has a portrait by Mignard, The Marquise de Seignelay and Two of her Sons. The late husband of the Marquise had been Secretary of State for the Navy in France, and in her portrait she too is identified as Thetis. One of her sons is dressed as Achilles, while another is cupid, wings and all, and like Kéroualle’s ‘maid’, he also bears an offering of coral and pearls in a seashell.

The fact is, we know a lot about Louise de Kéroualle, and about Mignard for that matter, but we know nothing about this girl. For the aristocracy servants were a fact of life, but it became fashionable to own Black slaves, who took the place of the servants. Pearls were highly prized for their rarity, and for their purity of shape and colour, which were seen as equivalents to the perfection and pallor of the complexions of the ruling classes. The slaves likewise functioned as an indicator of the wealth of their owners, but, unlike the pearls, they were used as a contrast, a foil to the prized pale skin. We do not know this girl’s name, nor for that matter, if this image is based on a real person: she could be just an imaginary ‘prop’, put there to heighten her supposed mistresses skin tones and to make her look richer. Real or imaginary, I’m not sure which is worse. ‘Real’, of course, but ‘imaginary’ speaks of the same inhumanity.

This is just one of a series of works given the overall title Vanishing Point. Taking its name, of course, from the standard perspectival construction, it plays on the idea of looking at things from a different perspective, while also considering the ways in which people of colour have ‘vanished’ from the history of art. Walker gives pride of place to these anonymous and often overlooked subjects in order to reclaim their lives and their dignity, and, in some way, to counter the historical injustice. As she herself has said in an interview for Art UK, ‘The girl is a possession, but she’s got this stoic look. It’s emotionally and psychologically disturbing, but as I draw, I imagine that I’m extracting and saving her.’  This is Vanishing Point 24 (Mignard), which is now part of the superb collection of 20th century works on paper by British artists at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. It is not, as it happens, in the exhibition at The Whitworth about which I will be speaking on Monday – but eleven others from the series are, a selection from just one of the ‘chapters’ in Walker’s work. So far there are 50 images in the Vanishing Point series, but it is ongoing – there will be more. For some artists individual works are best seen on their own, but for Barbara Walker’s work, seeing the images together is incredibly telling. With each repetition of what might seem like the same idea, but in a different form, the extent of marginalisation, of distancing, of covering up, of passing over and then forgetting becomes more obvious and more vital. This applies equally to each of the other ‘chapters’ into which her output can be divided, all of which are represented at The Whitworth: there’s so much more to say.

231 – in Waiting

Michael Craig-Martin, (title in waiting, read below), 2001. Gagosian.

I’m just back from a fantastic week in Italy following The Piero della Francesca Trail – and looking forward to doing it all again next March (go right to the bottom of the page). I’m also looking forward to picking up on Van Gogh’s idea of ‘a colourist such as there hasn’t been before’, a phrase I quoted in Monday’s talk, by jumping into the deep end, colouristically, with Michael Craig-Martin this Monday, 21 October at 6pm – the exhibition at the Royal Academy is superb. And talking of the Royal Academy, tomorrow I’m off to Manchester to see the Whitworth’s introduction to one of the most recently elected Royal Academicians, Barbara Walker – an artist who, as I keep saying, I think you should know, and whose work I think you will like. This exhibition will be the subject of my talk the following week, on 28 October.

In less than a month’s time, the Royal Academy will open this Autumn’s highlight, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504, which will form the subject of my following four talks, from Monday 11 November to Monday 2 December. Not only will this tie into my Mono/Chrome season, but it will also form the start of a longer series of talks about the Italian Renaissance, about drawing, and about different ways of thinking about the Renaissance itself. The first two talks will focus on Michelangelo and Leonardo respectively, and are already on sale. The other two will come online on 11 November after the first talk, with a reduced price for those who have booked for Michelangelo. There is more information on the diary, and via the appropriate blue links. But now, as I mentioned different ways of thinking – which can imply different ways of looking – let’s look at one of the paintings by Michael Craig-Martin which I have most enjoyed discovering, and which has most intrigued me.

It would be easy to make the mistake that Michael Craig-Martin’s early work was highly cerebral – but that would be to deny its essential materiality, its solidity, and the implied drama inherent in its construction: so many things are only precariously secure. And in the same way, you could – and several critics do – deny that the later, highly coloured works are anything more than superficially decorative, given their saturated, attention-grabbing colour and commanding scale. But of course there is, as there always is, more to them than meets the eye. What we see in this painting is a collection of objects which may or may not be connected. Or rather, they are connected, if only because they all appear in the same painting – but is there anything else that unites them? Reading from left to right and top to bottom, we can see the back of a canvas, a mirror, a ladder, a fire extinguisher, a pair of sunglasses, a pencil sharpener and a belt. I have no doubt that these are the objects depicted in this painting, although art is subjective, and you might be seeing something else.

One of the ideas that fascinates Craig-Martin is the unavoidable fact that we do see these objects, and yet none of them are there. There is only a canvas covered with acrylic paint. Not only that, but we see solid objects, even if we know that this is a two-dimensional surface. We can identify the objects, if we are familiar with them, even though we know that they are not these colours, nor are they this size. The problem with size is a complex one, of course: everything is relative. In the painting the glasses appear far larger than the step ladder, which we know is not the case ‘in real life’. A fully grown adult could climb up that ladder wearing glasses, so they would have to be far smaller than we see them, surely? The canvas measures 274.3 x 223.5 cm, as if happens, which would make the pair of glasses more than a metre wide. However, being a sophisticated bunch of people, we read into the image the conventions of post-Renaissance painting. We know about perspective. We know that nearer things look larger, and further things smaller – so the glasses must be far closer than the ladder. They fill up about half the width of the painting, and must be hovering in front of our eyes.

Inevitably we try to make sense of what we are seeing. Indeed, we already have. I have suggested that the ladder is further away than the glasses, and that the latter are hovering. But that doesn’t make sense. Glasses don’t hover. We know, however, that artist’s make choices, and before long we ask ourselves ‘what does it mean?’. Now, Michael Craig-Martin has said, more than once and in different ways, that art should be experienced rather than interpreted, and I do hope that you can go and experience this superb exhibition in person. I say ‘superb exhibition’: it is, undoubtedly. It is a thorough display of Craig-Martin’s work, with good examples of his output representing all stages of his career from its beginning to the present day. It is well-presented, beautifully designed, and superbly interpreted. Most critics can’t get past the stage of wondering whether they like the art or not, nor are they sufficiently engaged to question whether or not it is a good exhibition of art that they do not actually like. Trust me, it is a good exhibition of Craig-Martin’s work, the best that you are ever likely to see. However, I can’t guarantee that you will like the art. I’m not even saying that it is good art (although I really do think that it is), but it is definitely a good exhibition of that art.

What Michael Craig-Martin has done is to depict a collection of objects which wouldn’t normally go together, in colours that they wouldn’t normally have, in an arrangement which might not initially appear to make any sense. And one of the results of this is that we start to ask ourselves why all of these unrelated objects are all depicted on the same canvas. He wants his art to be experienced, not interpreted, but we are hard-wired to try and interpret what we see. If we weren’t, humanity would have been killed by wild beasts in its earliest days, and we wouldn’t be able to go shopping now. The relationship between the word ‘milk’, an actual bottle of milk, and the arcane symbols £1.45 and 2.272L makes life possible: we grow up connecting the things that we see, making sense of them, and making decisions accordingly.

All the images appear in front of an intense, fuchsia-coloured background, which is undoubtedly flat, and with no spatial value – although we do see it as being ‘behind’ everything else. The objects ring out against this luscious, rich colour, putting each one into a form of splendid isolation. The image of the canvas, which I mentioned earlier, is possibly the only object that requires specialist knowledge. We see the stretcher, which is a wooden frame, usually rectangular in shape (as it appears to be here, but we can’t see it all), around which the canvas is stretched and then attached with tacks or nails along the edges. Although we can see the back of the canvas – it appears to be mauve – we cannot see it wrapping round the stretcher, nor can we see any tacks. We can however see the small wedges (red in this case) which help to keep the corners at right angles and which are used to adjust expandable stretcher frames. They are called tightening keys, corner keys, or corner wedges: they were developed in the mid-18th century. The mirror is of a type you would expect to find attached to a bathroom wall. Thanks to the criss-cross structure, it can be pulled out, or pushed back, and could presumably also be swivelled – which can be important if you’re shaving and want to catch the right light, or the right side of your face. It would also be useful when applying make-up, I would have thought. I don’t remember seeing a mirror like this in Craig-Martin’s other work, but I could easily be wrong: I haven’t seen it all. However, the back of the canvas and the step ladder feature regularly in his vocabulary. In the Royal Academy’s exhibition, the ladder appears as early as 1980 in a wall drawing entitled Reading with Globe, for example – it’ll be in Monday’s talk – while the painting appears first (in this exhibition at least) in 1990, as one of the objects in Order of Appearance (we’ll see that on Monday as well).

At the bottom of the painting the belt – a subdued dark teal with a brilliant yellow buckle – is another object I’m not familiar with from the rest of his oeuvre. The yellow of the buckle – unusually close to the gold-coloured material from which a buckle could be made – links it visually to the yellow frame of the painting on the opposite side of the painting, and also to the ladder at the top right. The other objects are in some ways contained by this yellow triangle. The three larger objects are more elements in Craig-Martin’s lexicon which feature regularly, although not necessarily before today’s work was painted.

The fire extinguisher occurs fairly often. In Alphabet, a painting from 2007 – six years after today’s work – a full 26-letter alphabet is overlaid with 26 objects. It formed part of an exhibition that year entitled A is for Umbrella. The fire extinguisher is associated with the letter ‘T’ – for no particular reason – although that is not the ‘meaning’ it carries here. It had already appeared in 1996 (five years earlier than today’s painting) with very similar colours in Innocence and experience (fire extinguisher), which is illustrated above right. Its appearance in the earlier work, alongside office lockers and a pair of handcuffs, implies a dramatic situation, or novelistic encounter, which we are effectively invited to reconstruct. Given the title, which of the objects would you say represent ‘innocence’, and which ‘experience’? Is there even a distinction?

There are glasses like the ones we are looking at today, as well as another ladder, in another of the wall drawings in the exhibition, Modern Dance (1981). Here is a photo I took earlier.

The appearance of the spectacles here suggests that they are not necessarily sunglasses, whatever I may have said earlier: the glass might be colourless, but is shown red anyway, in the same way that every other colour is different from ‘normal’. Or are they meant to be rose-tinted glasses? Does that help with the interpretation of the painting? Or is it a red herring? Colour often has a powerful metaphorical value…

The pencil sharpener might not be a frequent symbol, but it does occur in the exhibition on its own at an enormous scale. The canvas on the right, Sharpener (2002), measures 289.6 x 172.7 cm.

What does it all add up to? What is the relationship between these objects? What is it that brings them together on the same canvas? We have one further piece of evidence to bring in to play, which might just help: the title. I have omitted it at the top of the post, going against my usual convention. The painting is called Las Meninas II. Las Meninas I was painted in 2000, the year before this version. It is slightly smaller, but has a very similar composition, with the same objects in slightly different sizes but with very different colours. If you’re interested in the art market, it was sold by Christie’s in 2016 for £149,000. They are both, of course, transcriptions by Michael Craig-Martin of one of the world’s greatest works of art (I’m not alone in making this assertion), Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez.

As with other aspects of Michael Craig-Martin’s work, some of the connections between the two paintings are obvious, while other objects tantalise with their tangential relationship to the original. And what seems obvious to me might result from the assumption I am making that there is a 1:1 relationship between the objects in the two works – which, as will soon become clear, there is not. However, what is undoubtedly ‘obvious’ is that both paintings show the back of a the canvas on the left hand side. There are differences, though. Velázquez’ example has three cross bars arranged up the painting, as opposed to Craig-Martin’s one. Velázquez paints the edge of the canvas wrapped around the stretcher (you’d need a bigger image to see that, though), but not any tightening keys (but then, they hadn’t been invented yet).

In the background, the Queen’s chamberlain looks out towards us from a doorway, his feet on two different steps – and I have no problem in equating the stepladder with this short staircase. To our left of him hangs a mirror, reflecting both King and Queen as they watch Velázquez create his masterpiece. Or are they standing there as models, while the artist paints their image in the mirror? Whichever it is (it is both), we stand just to their right, our point of view being equivalent to the vanishing point of the painting, which is at the chamberlain’s raised elbow. To me, the connection between the mirror in both paintings seems clear. In the original canvas, Velázquez himself peers out from behind the work in progress. In the same way, the fire extinguisher could be described as peering out from behind Craig-Martin’s canvas, with its one yellow eye, and a hose which is not entirely unlike the Spanish master’s left arm. Why Craig-Martin should depict Velázquez as a fire extinguisher is not clear, but of all the possibilities that painting provides, of all the different flames of inspiration, this is the one that Velázquez has chosen, thus extinguishing all others. He has things under control, and has contained the burning need to paint. Or maybe this is Craig-Martin himself? What would that say?

And what of the glasses, the pencil sharpener and the belt? Given that there are seven more people in Las Meninas who are not, as yet, ‘represented’, is it possible that these things can stand in for more than one person each? I don’t think it is that simplistic. These three objects can be interpreted in whatever way you will – but then, so can the other four. However, I really want the belt to stand in for the dog, sprawled across the floor in a not entirely dissimilar way. After all, it’s not unlike a collar, or lead. In a similar way (and this really is what I want it to be, what suits me and my mood now), the pencil sharpener makes me look to one of the court dwarves, Maribárbola, a little taller than the Infanta, perhaps, but a fully grown woman. I’ve always assumed that she was a redoubtable character who would take no prisoners – and probably wouldn’t take any nonsense from the young Infanta either. She would keep everyone sharp. She was also one of the court jesters, and probably had a sharp tongue too.  Which leaves us the glasses.

Ah! The glasses! Probably my favourite detail. And they are my favourite because, as one object, they have to relate, somehow, to the six people we haven’t mentioned so far. Or to the paintings hanging on the walls, all of which can be identified by reference to inventories of the Royal Palace. Well, I can’t make them tie into all of this – but I’m sure they represent many different things. The interpretation of paintings is rarely ‘either/or’, but more frequently ‘maybe/and’. In this case, there are several ‘and’s. For a start, their size suggested earlier that they might be hovering in front of our eyes. Maybe they are actually standing in for our eyes, looking at the work, and trying to work out what is going on. They represent the act of looking itself, and our presence in front of the canvas.

Earlier I pointed out the implication that we are standing to the right of the King and Queen: maybe the glasses are also two royal lenses joined as one, the King and Queen, who watching the proceedings, watching Velázquez painting them watching as they are reflected in the mirror. But there are also Las Meninas, the eponymous ladies-in-waiting, standing on either side of the Infanta and watching over her, keeping a close eye, framing her so that we see her clearly, diminutive in the middle of this enormous painting. Maybe Craig-Martin has painted lenses-in-waiting, watching over a notable absence, the Infanta herself, the powerless hope for the future of the dynasty. I don’t know. But I want all of these interpretations to be true. However, I would also be very happy if you saw things differently: it depends on your point of view. Unless Michael Craig-Martin tells us exactly what he was thinking, we will never know. And I suspect he might not even have known himself: that is what makes him an artist, I suppose – or one of the many things. There are always different points of view, different ways of seeing. It depends how you focus your lens – so I’ll try and keep things focussed on Monday.

My work is simple and sophisticated at the same time….My picture of our society is that the things that unite us, at a very simple level, are the ordinary things we make to survive.
—Michael Craig-Martin

Sunflowers – a repetition

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888. National Gallery, London.

In 1924, a hundred years ago, The National Gallery acquired Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. It was the centenary of their foundation. This year, the bicentenary, they are celebrating this acquisition – together with that of Van Gogh’s Chair, bought in the same year – with an exhibition dedicated to the time the Dutch master spent in the South of France. As far as I am concerned, this is also a very good excuse for me to re-post an entry from February 2022 which I wrote when the Courtauld staged Van Gogh Self Portraits. As I said then, “There can be few artists more famous or more popular these days than Vincent van Gogh, and I must confess that each time I hear about a new exhibition my heart sinks a little. But I’m glad to say, I am often wrong! The last one was Tate Britain’s Van Gogh and Britain which I thought would be completely pointless: he was hardly here, and wasn’t even an artist at the time. I was wrong about the former, and the latter didn’t matter – it was a brilliant exhibition, and I would still recommend the catalogue. As for the current one – well – that’s an exception. I knew it would be good.” And indeed, the Self Portraits exhibition at the Courtauld was superb. I wasn’t so sure when I heard about Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. I confess this was partly because of the purple prose on the National Gallery’s website, which is why I have called my talk Vincent, speaking for himself…. On seeing the exhibition I was glad to realise that indeed he does, not only in the richness and brilliance of the painting, but also in some appropriate and well-chosen quotations from his ample correspondence. I’ll explain exactly what I mean if you can join me on Monday 14 October at 6pm. I’m glad to admit that yet again my initial fears have been proved wrong. Apart from anything else, there are some truly extraordinary paintings, many of which took me by surprise – and are still surprising me.

The following week, 21 October, I will continue with the element of colour, but with an artist whose work was initially fairly monochrome, yet with an unexpected depth. Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy is a spectacular exhibition, a joy to wander through, or to contemplate at length, and at times a real challenge to our assumptions about what art can be. On 28 October I will move north, to Manchester, for an introduction to the recently elected Royal Academician and Turner Prize nominee Barbara Walker. As I said last week, if you don’t know who she is, you should! As ever, everything is in the diary… But for today, let’s look one of Vincent’s most famous paintings: Sunflowers. He painted several – there were four initially, and three repetitions – a word adopted by the experts because they weren’t exactly copies: he was restating the original idea, but with with a new intention. This is one from the first campaign.

One of the problems we have to confront when we look at this painting is that, by now, the image is so familiar that we recognise it instantly, we know that we know it, and we simply don’t look. To be honest, knowing anything about a painting is one of the first boundaries we all have to cross if we want to learn something new. So let’s just look at it. I have done this with a number of different audiences at different times – mainly school groups, often members of the general public, and occasionally on private tours. I would love to ask you a series of questions, but this is a blog and you can’t answer, so I will just give you the answers I get 99% of the time. Here are the questions:

  1. What is this a painting of?
  2. Where are the Sunflowers?
  3. Where is the vase?

The answer to no. 1, is obvious, really – Sunflowers, the clue is in the title – as is the next answer: in a vase. And the answer to question 3? On a table. It’s that simple. I get these answers every time. The only slight variation is in question three, and fair enough. A few people answer ‘on the floor’ – but very few people say that, simply because very few people have vases on the floor (as far as I’m aware). But, if I asked you to draw me a table, how would you do that? What does it need in order to be identified as a table? A table top, of course, but also legs. And van Gogh hasn’t given us any legs. So why do most people think this is a table? Well, because you tend to keep vases on tables or shelves, and this… well, it doesn’t look like a shelf to me. All this tells me two things. First, the human brain has a remarkable ability to fill in missing details. Second, van Gogh had a remarkable ability to abbreviate. How has he painted the table? With a change of colour and a blue line. There are relatively few artists who can convey so much with so little. Let’s face it – there is nothing about the painting of the table that suggests it is a horizontal surface. Imagine cutting out a section of the canvas, like this…

Please don’t actually try cutting out a section of the painting, it would be a rather expensive act of vandalism, and you would certainly get arrested. However, I have done it digitally, which is alright, and you can see that there is no shading, no perspective, nothing to say it is a horizontal, or even flat surface at all. In fact, there is nothing particularly remarkable about this bit of painting in any way, there is just the rough handling of the paint, with almost random brush strokes, used to fill up the space and little more. So we can move on to the next question: what shape is the vase? Or, to put it another way, if you were to take the flowers out and look at the top of the vase from above, what shape would you see?

The answer I always get is ‘a circle’. But how does Vincent tell us that? (I say ‘Vincent’ because that’s what it says on the painting.) There is barely any shading on the vase – OK, so the right side is lighter than the left, but it’s not exactly consistent, and it’s certainly not the subtle variation in tone to model the form in three dimensions that was perfected during the Renaissance. What really gives it the shape is a single line – the blue line curving down from one side of the vase and then up again on the other. This, and the slant of the word ‘Vincent’, together with the white blobs of paint. They are so obviously blobs of paint that quite a few people have asked me if the painting is damaged, or maybe unfinished. But no, blobs of white paint are exactly what Vincent wanted, and they represent a highlight reflecting off the vase, a highlight so bright that only white paint would do. It tells us (here’s the answer to the next question, which I shall therefore omit) that the vase is made of glazed ceramic. But wait a second. If there’s that much light reflecting off the front of the vase, what should we see, somehow, behind the vase? A shadow, surely? But no. No shadows. No shadows, no perspective… what else can he avoid using, I wonder? Well, we’ll have to go back to the painting as a whole in order to answer the next questions.

Pick a simple colour as an answer for every question. What colour is the wall? What colour are the flowers? What colour is the vase? What colour is the table? The answer to all of these questions should have been ‘yellow’. OK, so I know there are different shades of yellow, plus details in green and brown, and a couple of blue lines, but basically this is a painting of yellow flowers in a yellow vase on a yellow table against a yellow wall. It is almost – but not quite – monochrome, and the creation of a monochrome painting was incredibly original in 1888. I know that Degas painted Combing the Hair using only red, but that was about 8 years later, and, while we’re at the National Gallery, Théo van Rysselberghe used only blue (more or less) for his Coastal Scene. But that was in 1892 – a little closer to Sunflowers in date, perhaps, but still four years later. And it still shows that van Gogh’s work was far more innovative that you might have thought. OK, in a letter to his sister Willemien (see below) he cited Monticelli as a precedent, but Monticelli’s paintings aren’t exactly yellow… And we are left with the problem that, if Vincent’s painting is all yellow, then how does he make the vase visible?

It’s simple really, which is why it is so brilliant. The wall is lighter yellow than the table, and the top part of the vase is darker than the bottom. He places the dark of the vase against the light of the wall, and then, further down, the light against the dark. Economical, but telling.

And how does he depict the flowers themselves? At the bottom two droop down, balanced, but not exactly symmetrical. Each yellow petal, and each green section of the former bud, curves round in a single, curving brushstroke. One of the things that this painting makes clear is that van Gogh loved paint. He loved the feel of it, he loved the way it moved, and he loved applying it in different ways, with brushstrokes describing the qualities of his subject almost as much – if not more – than their colour and form do.

Just above the vase the composition is again balanced, but not symmetrical – with two thickly-painted seed heads in the centre, made up of thick blobs of glistening paint dabbed onto the canvas. To the left and right, and slightly higher up, are two more blooms with curling petals, tilted down, another tilted out. The petals here are fuller, and formed by a number of brushstrokes, each one with fairly thick paint in which we can see the lines formed by the separate hairs of the brush.

At the top we have a pyramid, with one, central, dominant flower. Admittedly it’s a very squat pyramid, but it focuses our attention on the centre of the image, leaving the top left and right as just ‘background’. Two flowers look out at us, one central, one on the far left, but both appear to be losing their petals, a little worse for wear. The one on the left even looks a little tipsy – but I probably shouldn’t anthropomorphise. The texture of the paint is fantastic. The large central flowers are built up of the blobs of paint, dabbed and pressed onto the surface with the tip of a brush held at right angles to the painting, I presume, while the pale yellow background is applied in short horizontal and vertical strokes, almost as if it were woven.

The ‘story’ of the painting is well known, I think, but just as a reminder, it was painted when van Gogh was about to be visited in Arles by his hero of the moment, Paul Gauguin. They had met in Paris in 1887, but they weren’t exactly friends, and Gauguin only went down south because Vincent’s brother Theo – an art dealer – promised to pay him: Gauguin was desperate to raise cash to escape from France. Around 18 August 1888, shortly before Gauguin arrived, Vincent wrote to artist Emile Bernard saying,

I am thinking of decorating my studio with half a dozen pictures of “Sunflowers,” a decoration in which the raw or broken chrome yellows will blaze forth on various backgrounds – blue, from the palest malachite green to royal blue, framed in thin strips of wood painted with orange lead. Effects like those of stained-glass windows in a Gothic church.

And then, about three days later, he wrote to his brother Theo:

I am hard at it, painting with the enthusiasm of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won’t surprise you when you know that what I’m at is the painting of some big sunflowers.

I have three canvases going – 1st, three huge flowers in a green vase, with a light background, a size 15 canvas; 2nd, three flowers, one gone to seed, having lost its petals, and one a bud against a royal-blue background, size 25 canvas; 3rd, twelve flowers and buds in a yellow vase

Our painting is the fourth… he mentions it in a letter to Theo written around 27 August:

I am now on the fourth picture of sunflowers. This fourth one is a bunch of 14 flowers, against a yellow background.

And he mentions it again in a letter to his sister, Willemien:

So I myself too have already finished a picture all in yellow – of sunflowers (fourteen flowers in a yellow vase and against a yellow background …).

… which is pretty much the way I have described it for years, even though I only read this letter today! (You can find all the correspondence here – linking first to the letter to Bernard, in a better translation than I’ve quoted). In the end, rather than using this painting for the studio, it was hung in the room which Gauguin would use. The time the two artists spent together is the stuff of legend by now, but if you don’t know the story it will have to wait for another time, I’m afraid. Vincent presumably wanted Gauguin to feel at home, to enjoy himself, and to want to stay, so no wonder he wanted to decorate his room with a painting ‘all in yellow’ – the colour of light, the colour of life. But is it a happy painting? I’ll let you decide.

One last question: why does he sign himself ‘Vincent’. Well, I can assure you I’ve spent hours with every Dutch visitor I’ve ever shown this painting to – including entire school groups from The Netherlands – trying to get them to help me to pronounce ‘Van Gogh’ correctly. So far I have failed. Most English go for ‘van Goff’ (‘van’ to rhyme with ‘can’ – it should be more like ‘von’), the French for a soft ‘van Gog’, the Germans ‘van Goch’ (with a gutteral ‘ch’), and the Americans for an insistent ‘van Go!’. It must have seemed far easier for him to stick to ‘Vincent’.

[Revisiting this post two and a half years later, I find that I could have been right. I was always semi-joking when I made this suggestion in the past, so you can imagine how pleased I was to hear Cornelia Homburg, the Dutch curator of Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, make exactly the same point recently: Vincent was far easier for non-Dutch speakers to pronounce. I don’t suppose I’ll have got any closer to the correct pronunciation of ‘Van Gogh’ by Monday – Vincent will have to do.]

Piero’s ‘Annunciation’ four and a half years later…

Piero della Francesca, The Annunciation, c. 1455 San Francesco, Arezzo.

I’m re-posting this today, because of the date (25 September – two thirds of the way between the Feast of the Annunciation and Christmas), but also because tomorrow I will be on my way to Italy, to remind myself of a few steps on The Piero Trail, which I will be discussing this Monday, 30 September at 6pm. Put quite simply, The Piero Trail is an artistic pilgrimage through central/north Italy to see the works of the Renaissance master Piero della Francesca which are – more or less – still in the towns and cities for which they were painted. If you want to know more… see you on Monday! Two weeks after this (14 October) I will introduce the National Gallery’s fantastically well-reviewed exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers in a talk I have entitled Vincent, speaking for himself…

This autumn there are several exhibitions which really focus on colour, and others which, being predominantly drawings, will be notably monochrome – and so for the rest of the year (as far as I can see) the talks will come under the loose heading of Mono/Chrome – there is more information about this in the diary. I’ll start by looking at two contemporary artists who have exhibitions currently showing, or opening soon – Michael Craig-Martin (at the Royal Academy) on 21 October, and Barbara Walker (the Whitworth, Manchester) the following week. If you don’t know who she is, you really should – her work is both beautifully made and profoundly significant – so do join me on 28 October.

But for now, back to Piero. As you will see, it was originally ‘Picture Of The Day 8’ – only a week into this blog, before I even had a website. We were four days into lockdown. I have barely edited it at all, just adding in a detail of the painting to make something clearer. I wish I could get back to the wide-eyed innocence that I seem to have had at the beginning…

Day 7 – Piero della Francesca, The Annunciation, c. 1455, San Francesco, Arezzo.

Originally posted on 25 March 2020

Something to look forward to: it’s only NINE MONTHS to Christmas! And while we’re at it, I’d like to wish all you mothers out there a Belated Happy Mothers’ Day! The two are not unconnected. Admittedly, anyone reading this outside the UK will be going, ‘But it’s nowhere near Mothers’ Day’, because elsewhere it is celebrated in May… the month of Venus. Not that they are pagans. But then, the UK is officially a Protestant country, and yet we choose to celebrate Mothers’ Day as close as possible to Lady Day, or the Feast of the Annunciation, which, put like that, sounds rather Catholic. Thanks to endless Nativity Plays, and the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, we associate the Annunciation with Christmas. But it is when the Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she will become the mother of Jesus, so it must be nine months before Christmas. It’s today!

So to celebrate, I have chosen an Annunciation by that most Renaissance of artists, Piero della Francesca. I’ve had a request for Piero from a rather fantastic author, who also happens to be a mother. This particular story also works well, as we have just looked at two other Archangels (see #POTD 4 & 5)

What makes Piero so ‘Renaissance’? Well, long story short, it is the way in which he grounds this most mystical of events in a rational, human world, imbuing it with order, clarity, and a due sense of proportion. That’s not to say that everything is ‘to scale’. Mary has a great sense of majesty and dignity by dint of her monumental appearance – she is far larger than Gabriel. Of course the bible does not give the heights of either of them. You would think that their appearance is a matter of artistic interpretation, but it is usually determined by tradition.

The aim of the painting is to tell the story, and for this story you need the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary. After that, anything else is optional. So how do artists know what to choose? Well, that’s where tradition is important. I’ve always thought of images like this a bit like cover versions of a song – the lyrics and melody remain the same, but the rhythms and the backing track are different. And very often, you like the one you knew first the best. 

Piero’s ‘backing track’ is a deceptively simple piece of architecture, highly decorated in specific places. Mary stands under a loggia supported by columns. She is in a ‘reserved’ area, her own sacred space, almost as if she is standing in a shrine. The angel steps forward, bowing slightly out of respect, the gesture of his right hand somewhere between greeting and blessing. In his left hand he holds a leaf – which might surprise you. You might have been expecting a lily, the symbol of Mary’s purity and virginity, part of the usual ‘backing track’.  However in this instance he is holding what is probably meant to be a palm leaf, usually held by martyrs to symbolise their victory over death. This might in itself be surprising, given that the Roman Catholic Church believes that Mary is without original sin, and as a result, she never died. So it must refer to the victory over death promised by the incarnation – God becoming man – which the angel is announcing now, as Christ would die to save mankind from its sins, and so triumph over death. This is relevant in this particular painting, as it is part of a cycle, a series telling a rather long and wonderful story, ‘The Legend of the True Cross’ (i.e. the very cross on which Jesus died).

Gabriel stands in front of a door, which has the most intricate and complex decorations – the paler ones include a circle containing three swirling leaf shapes, which, given that Gabriel is announcing the conception of the Son of God, probably refer to the Holy Trinity. The brilliance of the decoration also serves to emphasize the supernatural nature of his of greeting.  Mary also stands in front of a highly decorated panel, which is, in all probability, another door. Doors are very common in Annunciations, one of the regular elements of the ‘backing track’. They are usually shut, and refer to the ‘hortus conclusus’, or ‘closed garden’ mentioned in the Old Testament in the Song of Solomon. Early Christians interpreted this reference as foretelling Mary’s virginity: the garden is fertile, but it has not been entered – the door is shut.

In the top left of the painting we see God the Father, dressed in a traditional blue and red, with long white hair and beard. He is looking down at Mary from the clouds and holding his hands out towards her, as if he has just released the dove which represents the Holy Spirit. But you’ll be hard pressed to find the dove… It is just about visible, but easily mistaken for a small cloud (which would probably have been Piero’s intention). However, it is far less visible now than it would have been.

There is more than one way to paint on a wall. All wall paintings are murals, but not all murals are frescoes. A fresco is painted onto fresh – i.e. wet – plaster, and the paint bonds with the plaster as it dries, effectively becoming part of the wall. This is known as ‘buon fresco’, or ‘true fresco’. However, you could also paint once the plaster has dried – a technique called ‘a secco’ (i.e. on the dry plaster). The trouble with this is that the paint doesn’t bond with the plaster – and so is far more liker to wear off. A lot of the Holy Spirit seems to have been painted ‘a secco’. Either that, or he’s flown away.

Piero uses the architecture to structure the painting, but also to give it meaning. Each of the characters has its own space – God the Father up in the sky, Gabriel approaching in front of the wall, and Mary in her dedicated space. Various art historians have probably attributed ‘meaning’ to the window and wall at the top right, but I would be dubious about taking any complex suggestions too seriously. It does include features common to 15th century Italian houses, though, and ensures we know that the event is taking place on Earth, and somewhere that we recognise – this is our world. The wooden pole in front of the shuttered window would be used to hang out laundry, or to air rugs, for example. It also allows Piero to show off his ability with perspective, light, and shade, all of which are used to create three-dimensional form and space. The light is especially relevant here, as this is the point of the Christian story at which the Light of the World (Jesus) comes into the world.  However, in this painting, God is not the major source of light: notice how the column is lit from the right. This helps to make the column look more realistic for the any viewer in front of the fresco itself, as the main window in the chapel is just to the right of this painting (in the second image you can see the window, admittedly at night, behind the Crucifix which hangs above the High Altar of the church). Lighting the column from the right therefore makes it look as if the light on the column is coming from the window in the chapel – so the column appears to be real, and in the same space as us.

It is not just a column, though, it is a metaphor for Mary: it has the same proportions, for one thing. A column has three sections – a base, a shaft and a capital. A capital is the ‘head’, in this case scrolled and leafy, at the top of the column. The size of the capital compared to the full height of the column is exactly the same as the size of Mary’s head compared to her full height. Piero maps this out for us.

The column is supporting a beam-like structure called an entablature, which is in two sections, going left to right above Mary’s head, and diagonally backwards towards the second column. This diagonal section of the entablature is in line with God the Father – and especially with his hands. It would appear to mark the direction of travel of the Holy Spirit as it heads towards the Virgin, like a landing strip. It also connects the front column to Mary, showing us the similarity of their proportions. But what makes it a metaphor? In the same way that the column supports the building, Mary supports the Church – in its broadest sense – and for that matter the whole of God’s mission, through her acceptance of the responsibilities, joys and sufferings inherent in becoming the Mother of God.

For most other artists this would have been more than enough, but Piero’s brilliance means that there is even more to it. I think the architecture holds yet one more meaning. ‘The Annunciation’ stands out in this fresco cycle as the only story that is not part of ‘The Legend of the True Cross’. However, another part of the narrative is missing: the Crucifixion itself. I honestly can’t remember who came up with this idea, and it might even have been me  (but probably not!): the Crucifixion is not in the chapel itself. In the church as it is arranged today it seems to be represented by the far earlier painting hanging above the High Altar, a placement that surely, in some way, reflects the situation when Piero was working. In the narrative ‘The Annunciation’ leads up to this, of course (admittedly from the other end of Christ’s story), but it also performs another function. The bible tells us that Jesus was crucified alongside two thieves, and often all three are shown in a row, with Jesus in the centre. Not so here, you might think. But look at the second illustration again. To the right of the Crucifixion, the fresco shows the ‘Dream of Constantine’. The Emperor himself lies in a cylindrical tent with a conical roof, supported by a vertical pole. The pole takes an equivalent position to the column in the Annunciation. In the same way, the base of the roof of the tent, and the overlapping entablatures in the other fresco are also equivalent, and are placed at the same height in both frescoes – about 3/5 of the way up the painting. Seen this way, the compositions of both frescoes are based on the cross. ‘The Annunciation’ and ‘The Dream of Constantine’ sketch out the positions of the two thieves on either side of Christ. It may be nine months to Christmas, but we’re a lot closer to Easter.

230 – Mannerly devotion shows in this

Unknown artists, The Palmers’ Window, mid-15th century. St Lawrence’s Church, Ludlow.

In the three and a half years I’ve been writing this blog I have only talked about stained glass once (see Day 78 – St Petroc). However, given that this Monday, 16 September at 6pm I will be talking about some English saints, and that much of the art which depicted them has been destroyed, this is an ideal opportunity to look at some more. The saints I am interested in are Behind the King in the National Gallery’s splendid Wilton Diptych, and they are the subject of the second of my two talks wondering Who’s Who in Heaven? This week, as well as identifying the characters themselves, we will also think about why it is useful to know who they are: what does the choice of saints tell us about the patron, the original location of the painting, and the reasons why it was painted, for example? Two weeks later (30 September) we will set out on The Piero Trail, and after two more (14 October) we will head back to the National Gallery to rediscover Van Gogh in the National Gallery’s brilliantly reviewed exhibition, hoping that this is Vincent, speaking for himself… The details, and links to book, are also in the diary, of course.

There are many different ways of organizing a stained glass window, even more than the variations on the possibilities of an altarpiece, I suspect. It is quite common to have a whole series of individual saints in different lights (the section of a window which forms a single opening contained by the stone tracery), but it is also quite common to have a number of different, unrelated narrative scenes. In this case each light has a single episode from a longer story, like chapters in a book – or maybe paragraphs, as each episode is relatively short. Actually, it is two stories combined into one, but that turns out to be the whole point of the window. It hasn’t always looked like this, though, even if it probably did when it was first made in the middle of the 15th century. It was lucky to avoid the wide-spread bouts of iconoclasm that happened as a result of the reformation, both during the reign of King Edward VI, England’s first truly Protestant monarch, and the interregnum, with the Commonwealth headed by that notable killjoy Oliver Cromwell. The iconoclasts were sent far and wide to destroy what was considered to be idolatrous imagery, but they didn’t get everywhere. The majority of the glass in St Laurence’s Church in Ludlow survived, and it’s a real treasure trove. Glass survived more than sculptures and panel paintings as it happens, partly because it was harder to reach, and also for purely practical reasons: the iconoclasts didn’t necessarily want the churches to get cold or wet. However, it wasn’t just the iconoclasts who got to the windows. Churches were frequently rebuilt and redecorated for reasons of taste, or as the result of decay. By the 19th century several panels from this particular window had been moved, and were installed in the tracery of another, nearby window. By then, though, there was a considerable revival in the Church of England, and various waves of restoration ensued. This didn’t always return the material to its original state (often that just wasn’t possible), but to what the 19th century artists and designers thought that it should have looked like had the original makers done it properly. And if they didn’t know what that was – well, they just made it up. We shall see some evidence of that here… although thankfully, it seems, not too much. We will read the window as you should read any good book – in a European language, at least – from left to right and from top to bottom. For some of what follows, I’m indebted, among other things, to an agreeably thorough study by Professor Christian Liddy of Durham University in the Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, as well as to some superb photographs by @granpic on Flickr.

At the very top there are two coats of arms. On the left we can see a golden cross against a blue background (my apologies to anyone interested in heraldry, but I’m going to use the standard English terminology for colours, so that I and everyone else can understand). In each of the four corners of the cross, and underneath it, there is a golden bird with no legs, described as a martlet. These are attributed arms, which means they were effectively ‘invented’, a practice applied to members of the nobility who had lived before the age of heraldry. In this case they were the attributed arms of a king of England who was later canonized: Saint Edward the Confessor. His title implies that he lived a life of great sanctity, but rather than dying for his faith (which would have made him St Edward Martyr), he died in old age still confessing his faith. Historians might argue this fact about the man himself, but that is all but irrelevant to the beliefs of those who commissioned the window. Recently I realised that the same arms appear on the roof of Aberdeen Cathedral, where they are attributed to St Margaret, mother of King David I of Scotland. The arms to the right are those of the town itself, Ludlow, not far from the border between England and Wales. However, they might not be original: when the window was restored/reconstructed between 1875 and 1878 the firm responsible asked for confirmation of the appearance of the Ludlow Arms. This could suggest that originally the space was given over to something else, maybe the arms of the Palmers’ Guild, the patrons of the window. As we shall see, they claimed that their statutes had been authorised by none other than St Edward the Confessor, but that’s not possible: the guild wasn’t instituted until the 13th century, and he famously died in 1066.

Palmers were theoretically people who had travelled to the Holy Land, and come back with a palm leaf as evidence: to all extents and purposes the word ‘palmer’ was synonymous with ‘pilgrim’. I first came across it – as with so many great words – in the works of William Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet can be quite tricky for the protagonists as we have to believe that they are truly and profoundly – and instantly – in love, and yet they are hardly ever on stage together. You’ll have to take my word for it: I played Romeo early in my career, and there are few lines to convey such intensity. But of course, as ever, Shakespeare helps you. The first words that the two lovers speak to each other form a perfect sonnet: fourteen lines, perfectly scanned, with an elegant rhyming structure to boot. If their ability to improvise one of the tightest verse structures as teenagers in the middle of a party to which one of them was definitely not invited is not a sign that they were made for each other, I don’t know what is. It’s Act 1, scene 5 and these are their very first shared words:

ROMEO
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET 
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
ROMEO 
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET 
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO 
O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do.
They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET 
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
ROMEO 
Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.

I rest my case. A bit of digression, I know, but… palmers are pilgrims.

So far we know that the window is in Ludlow, and dedicated to St Edward the Confessor. In the lights below the arms (see above) there are six blue arcs, framed by small sections of red and green glass, containing a series of blue circles. I’m sorry, but I’ve never seen anything like this before (I’m not actually a Window Historian), and can’t begin to explain the origins of this decoration. Maybe something to do with the vault of Heaven over the ensuing story which happens down on earth, but I couldn’t even tell you whether they are original to the 15th century design, or a 19th century invention.   

This is the upper tier of lights. At the top of each is a canopy, and the way they are designed helps to date the window to the mid-15th century, ‘three-sided structures decorated with turrets and pinnacles, with arches opening to reveal a vaulted roof’, according to Christian Liddy. The chapel containing the window was rebuilt between 1433 and 1471, which adds strength to the suggested date. In the left light we can see an English ship (the flag of St George is flying on the main mast), on which we can see a man in green and two in blue. The next two lights show more men in blue in the countryside, while yet more are gathered, in an interior setting, in the fourth light. It’ll be easier to understand with details. The majority of the story actually comes from the Golden Legend, which I have mentioned often, a collection of stories about the lives of the saints put together in the 1260s by a Dominican friar (who eventually became Bishop of Genoa) Jacobo da Voragine. However, the Life of St Edward the Confessor wasn’t included in the original version: it was one of several Lives of English saints which were added to an English translation of 1438. The so-called the Gilte Legend was probably the source for the Palmers’ Guild window, even if the story was also included in a subsequent translation which became far better known: the version by William Caxton. However, as that wasn’t published until 1483 it was too late for this window.

The man in green is holding the tiller, steering the ship across the sea, which is only just visible as white waves in the bottom right of this detail: it is barely more visible in the light as a whole. The precise, naturalistic lines of the tiller-man’s face, and the crisp, taught curls of his hair couldn’t be more 19th century. The same is true of the detailing of the ship itself. Indeed, this panel is the major area of ‘restoration’ – for which read, ‘reinvention’. Apart from the canopy above this scene, the whole light had been lost by the middle of the 19th century, whereas the glass in the rest of the window is original, according to a contemporary (i.e. Victorian) report. It is not entirely clear how accurate that was, though… The two men in blue at the brow of the ship – just next to the anchor – are praying ardently for God to protect them, and to bless their journey across the sea to foreign lands. Their hats are typical of those worn by pilgrims, even if there are no pilgrim badges attached. The hats, if not their gestures, tell us that they are two of the Palmers. This is not, strictly speaking, part of the story of St Edward, although it will become so. It gives us a hint that the Palmers were using the story for their own ends.

The story really starts in the second light, for which I’m afraid I don’t have a terribly good detail. I hope you can pick out, in the foreground, two men with long white beards – two old men. The one on the right is higher up and wears a blue cloak over a red robe. He has a broad white collar, or cape, flecked with black: ermine, a sign of royalty. But then he also has a sizable gold crown – he is a king. Indeed, he is King Edward. Saint Edward, even. The man on the left wears what appears to be a pale, possibly white cloak over a blue robe. His diminutive stature suggests that he might be kneeling, and his hands are reaching out towards the king, a gesture which the king himself reciprocates. One day when travelling, the Life of Saint Edward the Confessor tells us, King Edward met a poor beggar, who asked him for alms. The king responded, good and holy man that he was, with the gift of a precious ring. The importance of this ring is demonstrated in the third light: we can see it very clearly at the top, just above the trees. The beggar, now clad entirely in blue, but recognisable thanks to the same white, forked beard, hands the ring to one of the two Palmers.

When seen in close-up it becomes obvious how large this ring is – an enormous gold loop mounted with a precious stone which could even serve as a bracelet for the impossibly slim 15th century wrists of these figures. It is certainly far too large for their elegantly stylised fingers. Here the glass is original – apparently – but I’m fairly sure that the painted details of the trees are 19th century. It is exactly the sort of patterning you can find in Morris & Co. windows, even if the firm responsible here was Hardman’s of Birmingham. As it turns out (and doesn’t it always) the poor beggar wasn’t a poor beggar after all, but St John the Evangelist in disguise. Edward the Confessor was known to have had a particular devotion to the Evangelist, so it isn’t entirely surprising. St John revealed himself to some pilgrims in Jerusalem, telling them not only who he was, but giving them Edward’s ring, and asking them to return it to him. St John also asked them to tell Edward that they would soon be meeting each other – in Heaven – in a few months’ time. It was 1065.

In the fourth light (and apologies for the quality of this detail), the Palmers kneel before the king, who sits enthroned, holding the ring in his right hand. It is a similar size, but not as clear due to the condition of the glass and the quality of the detail. Courtiers in red gather around the king, standing and sitting, while the Palmers kneel. Together with the ring, the Palmers passed on St John’s message about the king’s imminent demise, and the rest is history – and the only date that the English are supposed to remember. The story of the ring was first written down around 1161, just under a century after the king’s death, in a Life of St Edward. It almost certainly derives from the fact that, when the tomb of the king was opened (for the first time) in 1102, there was indeed a ring on one of his fingers. This was later taken off when the body was moved (for the first time) in 1163. It became the symbol by which he was most commonly identified – his most important attribute. However, devotion to the saint had waned by the 15th century, when the window was made, as the immigrant St George had long before taken his job as the main patron of England. Edward’s relevance for the Palmers’ Guild was secure, though. The supposition, in the window, that the pilgrims who met St John in the Holy Land were members of the Palmers’ Guild is pure invention. However, the story that the window tells is about them, with St Edward the Confessor being relegated to the role of a supporting actor in their legend.

Christian Liddy has pointed out that in the 1st and 4th lights in the bottom tier the canopies precisely match those directly above them, whereas in the 2nd and 3rd lights they are reversed. It could easily be that, when the windows were replaced into the right tracery in the 19th century, the two central sections were inadvertently installed the wrong way round.

The lower four lights show the continuation of the Palmers’ version of the story: none of this occurs in any version of the Golden Legend. The scenes as now ordered alternate between external and internal locations, with grass and rocks in the first and third, and intricate tiling in the second and fourth – but we should remember that the 2nd and 3rd lights should be reversed, so the two external scenes would be followed by two interiors.

The first light show a procession of clerics led by one holding a processional cross, followed by others with candles, a bible and, I suspect, a thurible (an incense bearer), with the two Palmers further back. They are winding through the countryside towards a building, and might appear to be progressing towards the second light, in which king Edward sits enthroned. However, they should be processing towards the greeting in the third light, from which the right hand detail above is taken. This procession welcomes the Palmers back from the Holy Land, and when they arrive at the gates of Ludlow they are greeted by the chief magistrate, who we can see wearing red, on the left of the right hand detail, where he is embracing one of the Palmers (the other stands in the shadows on the right). Let us overlook the fact that this is supposedly 1065, and Ludlow didn’t exist then, and also the fact that it didn’t have impressive town gates like the one shown in the window until the 13th century. What is important is that the Palmers are being celebrated by the leading citizens of the town. Stylistically, to my eye, the two embracing figures have the most medieval-looking painted detail – slightly scratchy, as if worn with age, and in any case more spare. The same is not necessarily true of at least two of the figures in the background, whose eyes look just a little too naturalistic.

This detail, from what is now the second light at the bottom, shows the two Palmers kneeling before King Edward, their pilgrims’ hats tipped back off their heads as a sign of respect. We can see the intricate details of the king’s crown and ermine collar, which makes me think that even if the glass here is original, the painting of the details must be restoration: it is too specific, too precise, too clear – and too much like other Victorian neo-gothic windows – to be original. His left hand (with admittedly medieval-looking fingers) rests on a piece of paper, decorated with an intricate circular design, which is being taken by one of the two Palmers. Behind them a cardinal, dressed in red, with a broad-brimmed red hat, gestures towards the paper and its design. This represents the Founding Charter of the Palmers’ Guild, given to them, according to this window, by none other than St Edward the Confessor himself. However, as I’ve already said, this is impossible: his death resulted in the Battle of Hastings, which we all know happened in 1066. According to surviving records of the Palmers’ Guild from 1389, the guild itself had been founded in 1284. Historically speaking, though, it might actually have begun earlier, in 1248, when pilgrims – or rather crusaders – returned from the crusade of the French king, Louis IX (Saint Louis of France, in case you were wondering, or if you know your Caravaggio).

In the final light the Palmers, in their formal livery of long blue robes, but without their pilgrims’ hats – they have been replaced by fashionable, 15th century red chaperons – are celebrating with a guild feast. They join hands to express their ‘brotherhood’, and are entertained by a musician playing the harp: friendship and harmony are the order of the day. At the bottom of the light are the words ‘fenestram fieri fecerunt’. This inscription follows a blank space, and if you look back there are similar gaps at the bottom of the other lights, suggesting that this is only the end of a text. Comparison with equivalent inscriptions elsewhere suggests that, in full, it would have read something like, ‘Pray for the souls of the brothers and sisters of the Palmers’ Guild. Here they have had the window made’ – although the only words which survive are ‘have had the window made’. There is no little irony in the fact that none of the ‘sisters’ of the guild (and they are known to have existed) are represented in the window. Apart from this, the imagery is notable for the way in which the guild glorifies itself. In the upper tier it inserts itself into the story of St Edward the Confessor – or rather, it inserts the story of St Edward and the miracle of the ring into the guild’s own story. The miraculous events are framed by the idea that two of the Palmers travelled to the holy land, and returned to Ludlow: these scenes occur in the two left hand lights, one above the other. The two windows at the top right imply that it was these two Ludlow Palmers who were the pilgrims mentioned in the Life of St Edward – which is, of course, pure invention. The central two lights in the bottom tier then demonstrate how central the Palmer’s Guild was to the life and prosperity of the town itself, and also that their authority came from none other than royalty. They were lauded by both the leader of the town and the ruler of the country, and all this because they were trusted by saints. No wonder they felt the right to celebrate in the final window. All this is very useful as far as Monday‘s talk is concerned, as we will now be able to identify at least one of the saints Behind the King in the Wilton Diptych.

229 – Wise Men, Kings, Saints…

Jacopo di Cione and workshop, The Adoration of the Kings, 1370-71. The National Gallery, London.

I know, there are still 118 days to go before Christmas, but even so I have decided to look at a painting of the Three Wise Men. I’ve chosen this painting because the protagonists feature in Jacopo di Cione’s magisterial San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece, one of the National Gallery’s great unsung masterpieces, which will be the focus of my talk this Monday, 2 September at 6pm. Entitled Who’s Who in Heaven: 1. Around the Queen, it is the first of two talks dedicated to saints. The Queen in question is the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven, and in the altarpiece she is surrounded by no fewer than 48. My intention had been to talk about all of them, but honestly, what was I thinking? Given that I would like to put them all into the context of early Italian painting, I clearly won’t be able to cover every one.  The talk will serve as an introduction to this fantastic polyptych, and will also be a reminder of what sorts of things we should look for – and why – when we are identifying the people represented in Christian art. Two weeks later, on 16 September, I will follow up with 2. Behind the King, taking the jewel-like Wilton Diptych as my starting point. We will look at the religious and political concerns of King Richard II, and use what we have learnt to draw some conclusions about the the importance of context when interpreting other religious art.

At the end of the month, on 30 September, we will take a virtual journey around The Piero Trail, and finally (for now) on 14 October, I will be introducing the National Gallery’s main offering for it’s bicentenary, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. However, rather than the purple prose on the Gallery’s website, I would like to think about what the paintings themselves tell us, hoping that this will be Vincent, Speaking for himself… Details, as ever, are in the diary.

The San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece is a remarkable survival: a four-tiered polyptych painted in 1370-71 for the eponymous Benedictine church in Florence. Its survival is remarkable for a number of reasons, the main one being that the church itself was destroyed in 1784. Even before that, the polyptych had been taken down from the high altar, and broken up because it was too large for the side chapel to which it was moved: the panels survive, but not the frame. The National Gallery has the three upper tiers of the polyptych. The predella, which originally formed the lowest tier, is elsewhere. Today we are looking at one of the panels from what would have been the third tier up, dedicated to a very abbreviated life of Christ, in six episodes. This the second of the six, The Adoration of the Kings. Having seen the star in the east, they have travelled to pay homage to the Boy Born to be King, and are gathered around him in the bottom half of the panel. He sits on the lap of his mother Mary, who stands out by virtue of her rich, deep blue cloak. This uses the highest grade of ultramarine, which would have been far more expensive than the gold leaf used for the sky.

The use of gold leaf was not profligate: it was beaten into such thin sheets that it was translucent – you could see light through it. If it had been stuck directly on to the white ground used for the rest of the painting, the white would have been visible through the gold, making it look rather dull. To avoid this, any area to be gilded would be prepared with a red, clay-based paint called bole, which, when seen ‘through’ the gold, made it look far richer – and far more ‘gold’. The bole can be seen around the gold at the top of the painting: they only gilded the section of the sky which would be visible once the panel was framed, for economic reasons. The shapes taken up by the gold and the painted hills on either side tell us the shape of the original frame.

There is a light brown hill on the left topped by a pale pink castle, with four trees growing further down the slope. On the right there is a taller grey-pink hill, with two trees growing as far up as we can see. There are two clefts coming down, one through the taller hill, and another between the brown and pink hills. From this cleft emerges the head of a horse, and below that we can see two camels, and several men. The entourages of the three kings are arriving from the valleys between the hills, which, in the painting, have been stylised into apparently impassable clefts: the painting is about storytelling rather than the depiction of naturalistic space. A thatched roof projects from a pink building on the right, and at its apex we can see a star – the star – which is precisely what has led the kings to this location. The thatched roof is part of the stable, which, as I’m sure you all know by now, is not actually mentioned in the bible.

Three men stand on the left, all fashionably dressed (for the 1370s, but not for the date of Christ’s birth), with the one we can see full-length wearing a short, striped, yellow tunic over the must-have item for well-to-do men: red hose. They are presumably the kings’ valets, or equivalent. The three kings kneel with different degrees of obeisance, the eldest bending the lowest. He has removed his crown and placed it on the ground in front of him as a sign of his humility, and he leans forward to kiss the child’s foot. Jesus hands the gift of gold to his stepfather Joseph, who is standing on the right of the picture. Below him is a gully, in which a pipe gushes water. It’s an odd detail which I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere, but I presume it is a reference to the coming of the Messiah, the Water of Life.

If we look closer at this scene, we can see how sophisticated the conception of the painting was, if not, maybe, the execution: this is why it is assumed that Jacope di Cione was assisted by his workshop. Well, that, and the fact that this was one of the largest altarpieces in Florence at the time, which would have required the collaboration of a numerous people anyway – carpenters, frame makers, assistants to mix the paints, goldsmiths to do the gilding, etc., etc. Delicately poised on his mother’s knee, the Christ Child lifts his right hand in blessing, while his supernaturally strong left hand holds the gift of gold at arm’s length. He reaches over Mary’s hand as he passes it to Joseph, who reaches behind the supporting strut of the thatched roof to take it. Joseph holds the hem of his cloak – lilac with an olive-green lining and gold trim – with his right hand. I’ve often imagined a whole pile of presents stacked behind the stable, but I probably shouldn’t be so frivolous. The folds of Jesus’s red cloak are picked out in gold, and the same fabric – red with gold highlights – is worn by the youngest king.

The age of the kings is clearly demarcated: the youngest has no facial hair and a pale complexion, a sure sign that he hasn’t been out in the world that long. He still wears his crown (knowing that he will be last in line to greet the infant) and holds his gift (myrrh) in his right hand, the left tucked under his right arm. Next to him, in green, the ‘middle’ king has a full head of hair (like his younger companion) but also a moustache and short beard of the same ginger. He gestures with his left hand, his elegant, slim fingers widely spaced, with the forefinger pointing up towards the star: he seems to be telling the youngster that they are definitely in the right place. He has already removed his crown – although it is not clear where he has put it. The eldest has white hair, with a receding hairline, and a long white beard. He holds the Child’s left foot delicately between thumb and forefinger. We will see a very similar gesture, and consider its implications, when we look at the Wilton Diptych in a couple of weeks’ time. Notice that there are six haloes. Obviously Jesus, Mary and Joseph are considered holy, but the three wise men also have the unmistakable signs of sanctity.

There are three main panels in the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece: the central one shows the Coronation of the Virgin, while the flanking panels each has a group of Adoring Saints – it is mainly these that I will be looking at on Monday. Above each panel is a pair of narrative images, and the two illustrated here sit above the left-hand group of Adoring Saints. The one on the left shows The Nativity, with the Annunciation to the Shepherds and the Adoration of the Shepherds. Mary sits in prayer, under the same thatched roof, in front of the same building, next to the new born infant, who is swaddled and lying in the manger. The Ox and the Ass are lying behind the manger, in adoration, just like the two shepherds to the left. Above the holy mother and child, a choir of angels sings and plays heavenly music. St Joseph, in the same clothes as in the other panel, sits at the bottom left of the image. What should be clear is that both events – The Nativity and The Adoration of the Kings – happen in the same place. It is easier to see that if we compare details, though.

We have the same two hills, topped by a castle and four trees on the left, and two trees on the right, but the colours are different. The hill on the left is far darker in the Nativity than it is in the Adoration, but that is because the former takes place at night time. It is actually one of the earliest nocturnal scenes in a panel painting, the darkness emphasised by the glow of divine light emanating from the angel who is announcing the good tidings of great joy to the shepherds. The supernatural light gives the hillside with its two trees, as well as two shepherds, four sheep and a rather forlorn looking dog, a warm yellow glow. All of these things have gone by the time the Magi arrive, leaving the star to hold its own in the daylight. One of the features that has always amused me is that the stable has a retractable roof. Like a skilled theatre designer, Cione must have realised that there wouldn’t be so much space on stage with three kings and their retinues, so he pushes the thatched roof out of the way.

Aside from the shifting roof, the stable looks pretty much the same, and the stage is indeed far more crowded. In the foreground the rocky ledge on which the stable has been constructed has exactly the same cracks and crevices in both paintings, and both have the same gully with the pipe spouting the same flow of water. However, by the time we get to Epiphany (6 January) a creature has arrived to drink. I’ve always assumed it is a beaver. I have never known what it is doing there, nor have I ever seen a reference to it. The same shepherds which were atop the hill, watching over their flocks by night, are now at the bottom of the valley in prayer, one, with red hair, with his hands pressed together, and another, with a medieval hoodie, crossing his hands over his chest – another early form of prayer. They do not have haloes. How come they are not considered holy, but the Magi are? Is there a class bias? Are the poor labourers not considered worthy? It could, potentially, be worse. As the shepherds were in the nearby fields they were seen as locals, whereas the kings were clearly outsiders. As such, the shepherds came to represent the Jews who converted to Christianity, while the kings represented the Gentiles. Is it antisemitism that has denied the shepherds their haloes? I doubt it: no one has doubted the sanctity of the apostles… I have never heard of any relics of the shepherds, though. The kings, on the other hand, have ended up in Cologne – having been stolen from Milan by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ in 1164 (they had been taken to Constantinople by the Empress Helena, where they were given as a gift – by her son, Constantine the Great – to the Bishop of Milan, in case you were wondering). They were highly revered in Florence, as it happens. This is a detail from the left panel of Adoring Saints.

It is a little confusing, as you can probably pick out four crowns. The one at the top left is a princess, though, a virgin martyr, presumably (she is carrying a lily), but I’m not sure if anyone has worked out which one. At the top right is the oldest king – usually given the name Caspar – with his receding hairline and long white beard, his gift of gold held proudly in front of him. At the top centre is the middle king (Balthasar, although the order of names was not fixed), with red hair, moustache and beard, also holding his gift. Directly below him, with his pale, beardless face, is the youngest, Melchior. Their appearance in the San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece reminds us that they were – and are – considered Saints by the Catholic Church (there was no other church in Western Europe at the time), but also that they were highly revered in Florence in particular. A religious confraternity, the Compagnia de’ Magi, was set up in their honour, and in the century after Cione painted his masterpiece many of the Medici family were members. Based at San Marco – the rebuilding of which was largely financed by Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’ de’ Medici – annual processions on the Feast of the Epiphany would pass along what is now the Via Cavour to get to the church. This is probably one of the reasons why the Medici built their ‘new’ palace in its prominent location on that street in the 1440s. It is also the reason why the chapel of the palace is decorated with Benozzo Gozzoli’s stunning Procession of the Magi, which winds its way around three of the four walls, with portraits of the Medici family included in the retinue behind the youngest king. Having said that, I would challenge anyone to pick out the three kings in the San Pier Maggiore altarpiece from a distance.

I’ve mentioned four of the Saints today – three kings and an anonymous princess (in the top left corner of the bottom left panel) – which only leaves 44 for Monday. Let’s see how many I can include…

228 – Curtains for My Parents

David Hockney, My Parents and Myself, 1976. The David Hockney Foundation.

David Hockney must surely be Britain’s most famous, and successful, living artist. He also happens to be one of those who is most interested in the art of the past, which is the point made by the National Gallery’s capsule exhibition, Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look which I will be talking about this Monday, 26 August at 6pm. In just three paintings, and some relevant documentation, it becomes clear that he has spent years enjoying the paintings in the National Gallery, and is intrigued by the many different ways we can interact with the art of the past. Today I would like to look at some paintings and drawings which don’t make it to this exhibition, nor for that matter the catalogue, but which are, nevertheless, entirely relevant. The following week (2 September) I will consider the question Who’s Who in Heaven? This is one of two talks, with the second following on 16 September. The first will look at the figures Around the Queen – focussing on Jacopo di Cione’s Coronation of the Virgin in the National Gallery, which includes as many as 48 different saints. In the second we will see who is Behind the King in the glorious Wilton Diptych. Two weeks later (30 September) I intend to take a quick tour around The Piero Trail – thus returning to Piero della Francesca, one of Hockney’s major sources of inspiration. But I’ll post that on the diary nearer the time.

There are only three paintings in the small exhibition, but they form a perfect triptych. Nevertheless, I won’t have time to cover all of the material related to them on Monday, so this is a somewhat convoluted exploration of the origins, and implications of just one of the three paintings, David Hockney’s My Parents (1977). Above is an earlier version, My Parents and Myself, which was started in 1975 while Hockney was living in Paris, but then abandoned – much to his parents’ distress. Unfinished, it languished for decades in his Los Angeles home until seen in public for the first time in 2020. Hockney’s mother and father are seated to our left and right respectively on what looks like a square platform, with curtains slung on a rail above as if they are on stage. In between them is a bright green cabinet with a vase of yellow tulips on one side, and a mirror, reflecting the face of the artist, on the other: this is a triple portrait.

The light brown lines you can see rising above Mrs Hockney’s head, above the tulips, and to the right of the mirror are remains of masking tape which was left in place when the painting was abandoned. I can’t for the life of me think what he would have been masking here, but he might have been planning to overpaint the background and leave a geometrical framework of the underlying layer: there is a similar geometric structure in another version of the painting there were three) which we will see later. I am especially interested in curtains at the top. They are not especially detailed, but then, this is an unfinished painting. As a result it is not at all clear how they are attached to the pole, which stretches from one side of the painting to the other with no visible means of support. The light brown colour suggests that it is made of wood, but given the weight of the curtains, and the slim profile of the pole, it is surprising that it does not bow in the middle. The curtains are a jade green, or very light turquoise, and serve to frame the images of mother and father below. The curtain on the right is slightly more open, with the lower end brought forward and slung over the back of the pole further to the right. The bottom edge and corner of the curtain are visible to the right of the other folds. It spreads further than its equivalent on the left, which is slung over the pole in a more compact way: it isn’t stretched out as much, and the lower end is hidden between the folds of the front and back sections. The curtains echo the placement of the figures.

Mrs Hockney faces directly towards us, her shoulders parallel to the picture plane, while her husband is at an angle, in three-quarter profile, with his body aligned on a diagonal from back right to front left. As a result, like the curtain above, he is more ‘spread out’, while Hockney’s mother is more contained. In a similar way, there seems to be an equivalence between the objects on the cabinet and the human figures. The vase has the same light colouration as Mrs Hockney’s hair, and both have swelling forms which narrow towards the bottom, with a neck and shoulders (or equivalent) at the top. The mirror is framed with wood, and could be swivelled, not entirely unlike the diagonals and verticals of Mr Hockney’s wooden chair (Mrs Hockney’s chair is only just sketched in, but looks as if it would have had a slim metal frame).

Mum’s feet are crossed over, while dad’s rest flat on the ground (I mention this as the finished painting of 1977 is different). They are on a mottled blue and red carpet, with a dark blue band at the front, one of the things which creates the sensation of them being on a platform or stage. In between them, the lower shelf of the bright green cabinet is stacked with books. A large, thick tome and several slimmer volumes of the same height lie horizontally on the left, while four smaller, light blue books stand upright, if slightly leaning, on the right.

The David Hockney Foundation has a study for My Parents and Myself which was drawn in coloured pencils in 1974. It shows that the original idea for the composition was fundamentally the same, with his mother on the left facing front with feet crossed, and his father on the right, at an angle. The green cabinet is there – though on wheels, and slightly angled – with the vase (which is darker) and mirror standing on it. Hockney’s reflection is there, although his face takes up more of the surface: the intention was definitely to have all three members of the family given an equivalent presence. The curtains are very different, though. They still hang from an apparently wooden pole, but have black curtain rings clearly visible. They are a yellowy-orange, and hang the full height of the back wall of the room. Why did he change the colour, and the way they hang?

A photograph of the sitting (also in the David Hockney Foundation) suggests that there weren’t any curtains there at all – although they are present in the painting which has been placed behind Mrs Hockney (this is clearly a highly staged photograph). The light vase contains the yellow tulips, and the mirror reflects the artist – though at a far smaller scale than in the Study, given his distance.  The reference to Old Master Painting should be clear. With a mirror, reflecting an otherwise unseen presence, seen between a married couple, one looking towards us, one at an angle, he can only have been thinking of the Arnolfini Portrait. In addition to Jan van Eyck, at least two other artists have influenced this painting. The books on the cabinet (which is nowhere near as brightly coloured as in the painting) are in a different arrangement. There are now five vertical blue books on the left, and fewer large, horizontal volumes to the right. The one at the top is clearly titled ‘Chardin’, and is a monographic study of the 18th Century French artist famed for his timeless still life and genre paintings. Both parents sit on the same type of chair – the wooden, angled form that the father uses in the unfinished painting – and they are both half on and half off a very specific rug.

It is a woven version of Piet Mondrian’s unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-44, Kunstmuseum, The Hague). Not an ‘old master’ perhaps, but another artistic reference, and also one which speaks of timelessness and balanced, careful composition.

I mentioned that there were three versions of the painting. Unlike the one we are looking at today (on the right) the version to the left was completed, and exhibited, but no longer exists: Hockney later destroyed it as being ‘too contrived’. This is the version I referred to which has a geometric structure, a triangle rather than the implied rectangle formed by the masking tape. The base cuts behind the heads of Mrs Hockney and her son (in the reflection), with the bottom right corner pointing toward Mr Hockney. It binds the family together. However, given my interests in religious art, and Mrs Hockney’s profound Christian faith, I wonder if there was something else? The relationship between Mother, Father and Son is clearly important, but is there also a nod towards the Holy Trinity? There is an implied reference in a painting seen in the third iteration of the composition – even if I’m not sure that Hockney would have been interested in that aspect of the work in question. Mrs Hockney seems to be sitting in a metal-framed chair – the one planned for the unfinished painting, perhaps – while Mr Hockney sits in the one seen in the pencil Study, rather than that in the photograph. The carpet stretches the full width of the painting, and the green cabinet, on wheels, is at a slight angle, as in the Study. There are no curtains.

The completed version was finished in 1977 after Hockney had returned to England. By now you can pick out the themes and variations for yourselves, but I will point out that the arrange of books is the same as in the photograph (although the Chardin monograph is now at the bottom of the pile, and there are six vertical books), and that the rug, scrubbed clean of the Mondrian, is neatly placed within the frame and on a wooden floor. As a result there is no sense that they are on a platform. The chairs, as in the photograph again, are half on and half off the rug, and it’s curtains for the curtains. Or is it? They are there, but hidden in plain sight. As you will have realised, there are a number of other differences. Mrs Hockney’s feet are not crossed, her husband’s are raised at the heels, and he bends over to look at a book lying on his lap. I’ll talk more about the relevance of these details on Monday. But something else is missing, which is reflected in this version’s title: My Parents, rather than My Parents and Myself. We do not see Hockney’s face in the mirror. However, he is reflected there, albeit symbolically.

Two images can be seen in the reflection. One is a print of Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ – the painting exhibited alongside My Parents in the National Gallery’s Hockney and Piero. The other shows a green curtain. The catalogue entry on Tate’s website suggests that this is a reflection of Hockney’s Invented Man Revealing Still Life (1975, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City) which I’ve illustrated on the right. However, the National Gallery’s catalogue for the current exhibition implies (but doesn’t state explicitly) that the curtains are those from the unfinished version of My Parents and Myself. What do you think? My personal feeling is that we are seeing a reflection of the unfinished painting. In any image of Invented Man… that I have come across, the curtain at the right (seen at the left of the reflection) is at the very edge of the painting, to the extent that it is slightly cropped in the image from the Hockney Foundation website I’ve used above. However, in My Parents and Myself there is a gap between the curtain and the side of the painting – as there is in the reflection. Not only that, but in Invented Man… we can see the black curtain hooks which Hockney had shown in the Study for My Parents which are not in the unfinished painting. They are not visible in the reflection – suggesting that it is My Parents and Myself, which must be propped against the back wall of Hockney’s studio in London. The National Gallery catalogue suggests that the reflection of the unfinished My Parents and Myself seen in the finished My Parents suggests an idea of spiritual renewal which is not entirely unlike the act of baptism. I would further suggest that the ‘missing’ figure in Piero’s Baptism – God the Father – would complete the Holy Trinity implicit in the figures of Jesus and the dove (the Holy Spirit). This would be the connection with the red triangle in the destroyed version of the painting. There is a profound sense, therefore, that Hockney is associating himself with Piero and his work. He is subtly making us aware of his heritage, as the product both of his parents, and of his artistic forefathers, his physical and artistic ‘families’.

However, none of this explains my interest in the curtains. Where do they come from? Somehow I know, but I don’t know how I know. I suspect that I’d have to read everything I’ve ever read about Hockney to find out, but I really can’t remember what that was. Nevertheless, have a look at the next two images.

The first is a detail from My Parents and Myself. The second has all the black curtain hooks in Invented Man… – and sketched in, even with different curtains, in the Study for My Parents and Myself. It also has the vertical support from which the un-bowed pole hangs in Invented Man… It is a detail from the predella panel of Fra Angelico’s San Marco Altarpiece, painted for the eponymous church in Florence and now in the eponymous museum. David Hockney discusses his love of Fra Angelico in an interview in the current National Gallery catalogue, and picks out the Annunciation frescoed at the top of the stairs in the former Dominican friary which now houses the Museo di San Marco. However, the borrowed curtains are not mentioned, so I’m very glad I remembered them [since writing this post I have found a reference to the Fra Angelico painting on the David Hockney Foundation website, on a page about the year 1975, when Invented Man Revealing Still Life was painted – but that’s not where I know it from…]. There are others references, too, adding up to an entire ethos. But that’s what I’ll be talking about on Monday.

227 – Another pearl

Gerard ter Borch, Woman Writing a Letter, 1655. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

In her beautifully written and wonderfully readable book Thunderclap, Laura Cumming leads us through her life with art and her experience of the works of the brilliant, but ill-fated Carel Fabritius. As she takes us on this journey we also encounter a number of other artists who mean a lot to her, and it is some of these that I will talk about this Monday, 19 August, at 6pm. Thunderclap: the ‘other’ artists will look at Rembrandt, Cuyp, ter Borch and Coorte – some of whom I have known for years, others who have become favourites more recently, thanks, in one case, to Cumming’s writing. I will write about one of them today (although without the same ease, I fear). The week after, I will introduce the National Gallery’s Hockney and Piero, and then, in September, it’s ‘back to school’. I thought it was time for a revision course on Who’s Who in Heaven? There are two talks: part 1, on 2 September is entitled Around the Queen, while part 2, two weeks later, is Behind the King. You can find more information via those links, or on the diary. And if anyone is interested in New Music, and just happens to be free next week, I will be narrating a couple of pieces in an informal, free concert at one of the city churches, St Vedast, Foster Lane, on Wednesday 21 August at 6.30pm: there’s no booking, so just drop in and say ‘hello’ afterwards!

A woman sits writing a letter. It’s a familiar idea, especially in Dutch art: Vermeer, among others, painted the subject more than once. But this is a first – the first in a series of women writing letters painted by Gerard ter Borch, and, it is said, the first by any Dutch artist. What was the fascination? We’ll get there. But first, let’s look. Unlike some other paintings of this subject that I know, there is no sense of urgency, worry or threat. It is calm, and relaxed, and the woman appears to be focussed: intent on her task and in control. There is a warmth, created by a variety of reds. The background is dominated by a deep red canopy bed (somewhere on its website the Mauritshuis describes this as a four poster, but I can’t see any evidence of any posts). A different shade – brick red? – can be seen in the carpet on the table, and the woman is sitting on a brilliant vermillion cushion. She herself wears a bodice which is a light red or pink, maybe salmon. The other colours blend in with these reds – the dark brown of the wall, and the lighter brown of the table on which the woman is resting.

The top 40% of the painting is given over to the ‘background’ – the dark grey-brown wall and the canopy hanging in front of it. There is also a rectilinear form at the top, just to the left of the canopy, which in the picture as a whole, if not this detail, reads as a painting, indistinct in the darkness at the back of the room. The canopy itself appears to be circular – although it could be oval – and hangs from the ceiling. At the top there is a red fabric sphere with a gold trim, and a black line rises above it out of the painting – a rope, or chord, which must be attached to the ceiling. To the right we can see the shadow of this sphere, and of the chord: the length of the shadow implies that the ceiling is some way above the picture frame: it is a large room, which tells us – as if the bed and the clothing didn’t – that this is a wealthy woman. Below the sphere a circular fringe crowns the conical top of the canopy. At the bottom of the cone the fabric hangs over a circular loop, with another fringe, forming a sort of pelmet. The curtains of the canopy are just open at the front. They are also trimmed with gold, and slightly parted to reveal a dark interior.

At the bottom of the painting is the table, which would normally have been completely covered by the carpet. Not only would this help to display the carpet – an expensive item of interior decoration – but it would also keep the table clean and free of dust for times when it is used. This is one of those times, and the carpet has been pushed back to provide a firm, flat surface on which to write. People often ask – when looking at a Vermeer, in particular – why is the carpet pushed back? This is why – so that part, at least, of the table can be used. And also, because it looks more interesting. There might be other implications, as well: something is not quite as ordered as it should be, perhaps. The table itself is elegantly carved but not overly elaborate. The flat surface is made up of two leaves: if this were a contemporary table I would say that it could be extended, but I’m not sure if that’s applicable to the 17th century. The leg that we can see is topped with a square section, fluted like a pilaster, and this is is supported by a round leg. It stands directly beneath the woman’s torso, visually (and perhaps, by implication morally) acting as a firm support. She holds her quill in her right hand, with her left lying on the bottom of the paper to keep it steady. Next to her writing hand is an open pewter ink well, and next to that is another pot, the function of which is not clear – perhaps powder, or sand, to dry the ink? I confess I don’t know the technicalities of 17th Century Dutch letter writing. The brilliant cushion is a surprising highlight – by far the brightest and most intense hue in the painting, which might suggest that there is more to this woman than meets the eye, something bold and daring. The vivid colouration is enhanced by the contrast with her dark skirt – which, at the other end of the visual spectrum – is quite possibly the darkest thing depicted, apart, perhaps, from the shadows. The contrast also serves to show us how caught up in her letter the woman is, as it helps us to see that she is leaning forward to write. The skirt flows back behind her before being tucked firmly under her thighs, which must be resting on the forward edge of the cushion.

The focus of the woman is complete. If we follow her gaze as she looks down at her writing, the diagonal from her eye to the page passes through the tip of her nose, the feathered end of the quill and then down to the black, ink-stained tip. The light from the window – which must be large, and behind our left shoulders – lights up both the letter and the woman’s flesh, making them equivalent in colour and intensity. Her forehead, the seat of memory, reason, and intellect, is the most brilliantly illuminated part of the painting. Her neck and shoulder are also bright, as is the pure white chemise which ruffles up underneath the well-tailored bodice, perfectly fitted to her form. Particularly brilliant, and even a little sensuous, is a dimple of shadow where the neckline passes around her right shoulder, the result of the right arm being brought forward to write. It marks the transition from the shoulder to the top of her breast, and carries the suggestion that the bodice might even fall off the shoulder. The slightly parted curtains disappear behind the back of her neck, the dark shadows contrasting with the brightly illuminated flesh.

The paper has already been folded, and yet she is still writing. I would assume you would write on a flat piece of paper, and fold it when you were finished. It has been suggested that she is correcting something, having noticed a mistake. Or she could be adding something, to make a point. She has only written on the top half of this page – although there is another sheet underneath. I particularly love the way in which the corner of the paper to our right curves up. A shadow is cast along the full length of the page, but this curl makes it more visible. It also allows us to see the shadowy underside of the paper, not to mention the thinnest line of its beautifully lit edge. While many of the forms are evocatively vague, in this case Ter Borch has shown us how skilled he was: he has painted the thickness of a sheet of paper.

The woman’s hair is clean and lustrous. It has been thoroughly combed and pulled back into a number of bunches. One is wound round the back of her head, while another – presumably two others, one on each side – is arranged at the side of her head, casting a shadow on her neck. Ringlets, formed from strands of hair which are too short to tie back, frame her forehead. And she has a pearl, but it is not an earring: it is hanging from a sky-blue ribbon. With the exception of some of the patterning in the rug, this is the only touch of blue in an otherwise red-brown painting. And rather than her ear, it is attached to one of the locks of her hair. You can see the strand being pulled down vertically by its weight. It’s not an earring – but then, it’s probably not a pearl. A pearl that size would have cost an enormous sum, well beyond the reach of an artist. It’s probably an imitation pearl: the Venetians were highly specialised at making them from glass. The same is true for The Girl with the ‘Pearl’ Earring, which currently hangs next to this painting in the Mauritshuis, a clever nod by the curators to the connections between these two works and their artists.

When we look back at the painting as a whole, it now seems ever clearer to me that the table leg is a support for the woman. Her left arm, on which she is leaning, rests on the table above it, and it is lined up so precisely with her torso. However, the opening of the canopy is slightly to the right of this vertical axis, which feels somewhat disjointed. The gap widens slightly as it falls from behind the pelmet down to the woman’s brilliantly illuminated back, and, if anything, lines up with the dark shadow to the right of the table leg, and the darkest of the woman’s skirts. The cushion pulls our eye in that direction, framing the darkness, and if I’m right that its glowing red suggests something unexpected about this woman, then maybe that would give us a clue about the content of her letter. But it can only be a clue – there are no legible words, no real evidence. As so often, our interest is aroused by the very lack of certainty. However, she is almost certainly writing about love – people in paintings almost always are.

This was the fascination behind women writing letters – or reading letters – or men writing letters, because women would read them (there’s a beautiful pendant pair of this last coupling by Gabriel Metsu in the National Gallery of Ireland). Young women of a certain class were not allowed out of the house unchaperoned, but were kept safe in their gilded cages. Only specified men could come calling. And yet letters could travel unobserved, especially if there was a pliable servant, or maid, or a window that could open. There were whole books containing model letters – what to write to [insert name here] if you wanted to tell him/her about [see list of concerns in index]. As ever, Shakespeare sums up the problem. In As You Like It, Rosalind is in disguise as Ganymede, and has promised to cure Orlando of his love for Rosalind by getting him to woo Ganymede, who is ‘pretending’ that he is Rosalind (…and the woke generation think they’re on to something new…). In Act IV, Scene I, Orlando, frustrated with Ganymede running rings around him (and Shakespeare is often aware that a lot of the women are smarter than a lot of the men), starts to despair, with the phrase, ‘O, but she is wise’. To which Rosalind (as Ganymede) replies, ‘Or else she [i.e. ‘I’] could not have the wit to do this’. He (she) continues:

The wiser, that waywarder. Make the doors upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement. Shut that, and 'twill out at the keyhole. Stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.

Young women were not allowed out of the house unaccompanied – but letters could ‘out at the casement’ (i.e. go out the window), be slid under the door, or simply be carried to their destination by a maid. The more I look at this painting, the more the bed becomes a looming presence, with the spreading canopy linking the rucked-up carpet and the scarlet cushion, while the gradually parting curtains suggest where the story is going. Which makes me wonder about the model for this painting, and what she thought of it all. And the reason why I wonder is that, unlike so many others, we do know who she was: Gesina ter Borch, the artist’s half-sister, who was also an artist. I’ll show you some more pictures of her – and by her – on Monday.

226 – Wise saws and modern instances

Oleksandr Bohomazov, Sharpening the Saws, 1927. National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kiev.

The Royal Academy’s exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s, about which I will be speaking this Monday, 12 August at 6pm, is undoubtedly one of the most visually exciting exhibitions I have seen for a long time. Relatively few of the artists who are included were known to me, and those who were, such as Kazymyr Malevych (Ukrainian, rather than Russian transcriptions are favoured throughout) and Sonia Delaunay, do not have the same impact as some of the brilliant artists who are, for me, discoveries, such as Vasyl Yermolov or Oleksandr Bohomasov, about whom I am writing today. The fact that the paintings have made it to the UK is a story in itself, and if you can’t make it to the talk on Monday I would urge you to get to the Royal Academy before the exhibition closes in October. The following week, on 19 August, I will return to Laura Cumming’s superb book Thunderclap, to think about at The ‘other’ artists – i.e. the ones she discusses who are not Carel Fabritius. To round off the talks in August, on the 26th I will look at the act of looking itself, alongside Piero della Francesca and David Hockney, by introducing the National Gallery’s Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look, which opened yesterday. After that things are still pretty much up in the air, but will probably include two talks looking at saints from medieval paintings in the National Gallery, an introduction to the NG’s forthcoming Vincent van Gogh exhibition, and a tour around ‘the Piero trail’ – thus returning to one of our heroes from the end of August, in anticipation of what looks like being a very ‘Renaissance’ autumn. But as soon as things are pinned down I will post details in the diary.

This painting was never meant to be seen on its own. It was originally supposed to be part of a triptych, a form which is otherwise unknown in modern Ukrainian (or for that matter, Russian) art. But for now I’d like to look at it as an object in and of itself. We can see three men performing various actions relating to the title of the painting, Sharpening the Saws – and, even if the definite article didn’t tell us that ‘the’ saws were the subject of the painting (rather than the men), the painting itself makes that clear. I can see six, painted in a variety of rich colours, and at two predominant angles: just off vertical and just off horizontal. Both of these features – colour and angle – are essential aspects of Bohomazov’s work. His major concern was how an artist could communicate with his audience, or, in other terms, what it was in a work of art which conveyed the feelings and sensations an artist experiences to the viewer. He wrote several theoretical texts about these concerns which seem to have anticipated the ideas – and art – of the likes of Kandinsky and Malevych, but even now they have been relatively little read (including, I confess, by me). In this painting, for example, both the colours and the angles of the saws help to convey the energy of the activity. Rhythm was another essential aspect of his work, something which he saw as not only quantitative but also qualitative, an element of art which could express concepts as diverse as speed, energy, regularity or mood: something which can be both measured and felt.

This detail shows the bottom left corner of the painting – which disguises the fact that the titular activity – sharpening – takes place at the exact centre of the canvas. A man in a fuchsia-coloured top and burgundy trousers is sitting on a section of a log with what appears to be a dark green saw resting across his lap. Holding a file in his two hands – the handle in his right, the working end in his left – he is sharpening one of the teeth of the saw about a fifth of the way along: the file is almost at the dead centre of the painting. Given that there are three other saws lying next to him, he clearly has his work cut out. These three saws – in deep blue, an even darker green, and cerise – splay out from a single focus. This is a technique which Bohomazov had developed in his earlier, more abstract works, and is one way in which he conveys movement. This can be read as energy either leading in to the focal point, or radiating out from it. Bohomazov’s prime interest could be rendered as ‘we see what we feel’, and the way you personally see this movement – in or out – is, I suspect, dependent on your own temperament. As well as having this rhythm of forms, there is also a rhythm of colours – blue, green and cerise – which helps to create the visual excitement of the painting, and reminds us that the saws are the subject: the colours are far more intense than those of the partial logs on which the man is sitting, and so they grab our attention. The saws are all tapered, with the broader end closer to us – the exception being the more vertical example held by the man in yellow on the left (we’ll come back to him later). The broader end has a thin bar attached to it, with a ring at the end, through which a small round pole, presumably made of wood, has been inserted. There is an unusual object in the bottom left, the same colour as the poles (so presumably also wood), the function of which is not immediately apparent (unless, perhaps, you are a sawyer). It is circular, with round poles projecting from opposite sides – similar to those on the end of the thin bars – and square protrusions at right-angles to the plane of the circle. There is also a black line describing the diameter of the circle.

The man standing on the left of the painting is checking that the process of sharpening is complete, looking along the saw to check that everything has been done correctly, and that each tooth is correctly aligned and suitably sharp. This is perhaps the most naturalistically coloured example, with the blade arguably a tempered yet slightly rusty steel. The harmonious way in which the men work with each other, and with their tools, seems to be expressed by the way in which the saw is aligned with this man’s left leg, on the same off-vertical diagonal. His weight is supported on his vertical right leg, almost like a classical contrapposto. This leg is the only significant vertical in the painting, suggesting that the man is clearly stable, in control, and, we can therefore assume, reliable. Lying on the ground behind his right foot is a log, a section of a tree trunk which has been cut transversely, but not yet longitudinally. Once the saws are sharpened and put to good use, this log will be turned into a series of rectangular beams, some of which we can see to the left of this standing man’s leg, stacked in an open, square formation to dry, or ‘season’, the lumber.  Above this is an orange structure, presumably constructed from even more beams.

A similar orange structure forms an almost theatrical backdrop to the man in green with a yellow-green hat. The striations in this structure again suggest that it could be formed from a series of cut wooden beams, which admittedly look as if they are rather precariously stacked. One of the problems of interpretation is that, apart from the deep blue sky, the dark blue distant hills, the green grass, and some of the logs, colour is not used for its descriptive function, but for expression, differentiation, and – as ever, with Bohomazov – the creation of rhythm. The man in green smiles, and looks over to his colleague who is hard at work. He looks relaxed – which might imply that the work for the day is almost done. He holds a red-pink saw with a hand that looks slightly oversized – presumably gloved, given the way he wraps his hand around the teeth of the saw: even if it were blunt this wouldn’t be comfortable! On the far right there is a pink cloth draped over a pole – presumably a tent-like construction to store the wood, or the saws.

If we return to the centre of the action – the sharpening of the saws – but this time looking at the bottom right corner of the painting, certain things become clearer. For one thing, we can see the curious circular structure from the bottom left corner put to its proper use: it is at the thinner end of the cerise saw, the black line across the diameter being a slit into which the saw has been inserted. The two short, round poles are handles: the saw could therefore be held at either end, but, given how long it is, it would need two people to operate it. The man in green is sitting on one of several logs which have been sawn longitudinally – along the trunk – but have not yet been refined into rectangular beams. The different qualities of the wood and bark are expressed by different non-naturalistic colours – pale blue on the outside (the bark, effectively), a thin a layer of pink and a thicker one in pale green, and underneath a more-or-less naturalistic wood colour. These hues are less saturated than those used for the saws: while these sawn logs are relevant as part of the process, it is the saws, as ever, which are most important. This is insistently stated, even evoking the action of the saws. The angle between the green saw (being sharpened) and the blue one could be read as describing the sawing motion itself, back and forward, with the repeated regularity of this movement restated by the nearer green and cerise saws.

As a whole the painting is a paean to this process – from the trunk, cut into logs transversely, the logs cut longitudinally, then refined into beams, which are stacked openly to dry, and then, when fully seasoned, stacked more densely.  The work has resulted in the blunting of the saws and the need for them to be sharpened. But, however complete this process may appear, it is not the whole story. As I said above, this painting was just one from a triptych, of which only one other was completed.

The central section, Sawyers at Work (1929), is also in the National Art Museum of Ukraine – but sadly, not in the exhibition (for historical reasons I suspect it is rather fragile). It shows the saws in action – being used just as supposed. The men standing atop the open platform hold the handles attached to the thin poles at the broader end of the saws, while the men on the ground hold those on the circular structures which are threaded over the thinner ends. The saws are operated vertically, or at a slight angle, as they make the long longitudinal cuts. As they work their way through each trunk, the trunk itself would also have to be moved, edged further out, or they would find themselves sawing through the supporting platform. Note how the most active man wears the deepest colour – a dark blue – and is about to thrust down the most richly coloured, red, saw. Meanwhile, a man in green (possibly the same one as in the other painting – he also wears a pale hat) sits on a completed beam at the top right. Maybe this contrast between action and rest, and the tones and hues used to portray it, could tell us about Bohomazov’s language of colour. And maybe one day I will read Bohomazov’s Painting and its Elements (1914) and find out.

Sadly, as I have said, the triptych was not completed, although it had been fully planned. Among many other drawings and sketches, a watercolour study survives, which was sold relatively recently by James Butterwick, the leading dealer in Ukrainian art (and one of the Partners in the publication of the superb catalogue, £10 from the sale of which goes towards supporting museums in Ukraine). The watercolour has has been used in a reconstruction of the triptych in one of the interpretation panels at the Royal Academy.

When seen together we can see how the rhythms of the painting are all-important – with the dark diagonals formed by the logs in the left hand image leading from the top left down towards the central painting, in which the vertical action is paramount. On the right, the man in yellow frames the edge of the painting, with his saw leading us in, but also framing the man who is sharpening, who is ‘supported’ but the three saws on the right. At a lower level these echo the logs in the left hand painting, and lead our eye in from the right of the triptych towards the centre. The standing man’s saw in the right painting is reflected by the beams which support the platforms in the two other paintings. From left to right – or right to left – the rocking rhythms surely echo – once again – the act of sawing itself. This triptych was executed from right to left, and could equally well be read that way: all the elements of the process – and the art – work together.

Whichever way you read the triptych, the watercolour sketch Rolling the Logs (1928-29) shows what could be seen as the first stage in the process, with the unsawn logs being rolled up onto the wooden frame in preparation for work to begin. The logs are large, and extremely heavy, and six men work together to perform this task – the colours suggest that they could easily be six of the eight men in Sawyers at Work. If it hadn’t been obvious before, this act of collaboration could help our understanding of the overall meaning of the triptych: this is the work of a collective, with the citizens of the soviet working together. The irony of this is that, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, fasces – which give fascism its name – are bundles of sticks. A single stick can be broken easily, but as a bundle it is unbreakable. In both cases the group effort is seen as essential to the survival of the whole society. The problem with both systems is, I suppose, that individual rights get suppressed by the directives of the few in control. But let’s face it, I’m not a political theorist. Yet here we are, realising that art is not necessarily an escape from the everyday world (which, of course, it can be), but also an essential element in understanding who we are and how we live. It’s not the icing on the top – it is an expression of the whole thing.

But what were the politics of the artists themselves? There is, apparently, a lot of work still to be done on the motivation of Ukrainian artists at the time. Bohomazov’s work is some of the first you will see if you visit In the Eye of the Storm – but his early output is unrecognisable when placed alongside The Sharpening of the Saws. Many artists – and Kazymyr Malevych is the most famous example – changed their style from abstract, or at least highly stylised, to a more politically acceptable form of socialist realism, which is how we could describe Sharpening the Saws. However, it is not clear, for each individual artist, whether this was the result of obligation – effectively a pragmatic stratagem for survival – or genuine political conviction, or even inwardly motivated artistic development. Whichever it was for Bohomazov, it is chilling to think that, had he not died of TB in 1930, he may well have completed the Sawmill Triptych, but, even so, he would probably have died in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, like many of his contemporaries. The fact that these paintings survived at all is effectively an accident of history – but more about that on Monday. And that fact that they have been brought to safety speaks of the dedication of some determined and courageous people who realised that this art – this witness to the power of the human spirit – should be seen more widely. For this reason, if none other – the brilliance of the art, for example – I cannot recommend the exhibition highly enough.