236 – Rubens, before Constable

Peter Paul Rubens, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, probably 1636. The National Gallery, London.

After five weeks talking about the Italian Renaissance I’m going to take a break and head forward to the 19th Century. There is a direct line to be drawn, I think, from Constable, via Monet, to Van Gogh – and as all three have exhibitions in London at the moment, it makes sense to draw the line somewhere… I started with Van Gogh, soon after that exhibition opened, back in October, and this Monday 16 December I will go back (in art historical time) to Discover Constable & The Hay Wain – an exhibition which sets out to clarify how radical the oh-so-familiar nostalgia-infused painting actually was. I’m not entirely convinced that the curators succeed in this aim, but that doesn’t stop it being a great painting, or a good exhibition. Like others in the relatively recent Discover series, it focusses on the titular painting, enlarging our knowledge and understanding of the work, and giving us a better sense of its relevance for the world in which it was created. The following week, 23 December, I will creep into the 20th Century, which is when the particular views The Courtauld are celebrating were painted. If you haven’t seen or booked for Monet and London: Views of the Thames, it is a jewel of an exhibition, but I’m afraid the whole run is now sold out – so maybe the talk would be your best chance to see something of it. I will return to the Renaissance with renewed energy in the New Year, looking first at The Virgin and Child (a brief history) on 6 January. Next is another small exhibition at back the National Gallery, Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome on 13 January. I’m planning to follow that by exploring Women Patrons in the Renaissance before asking What is Mannerism? All of this will gradually make its way on to the diary, of course. Meanwhile, to get us from the Renaissance to Romanticism I want to stop off in the 17th Century. Whether this is Baroque or not I will let you decide for yourselves.

We are looking at a landscape. A cart, enhanced with posts and slats so that it can carry more, splashes through shallow water as it is pulled by horses on a diagonal to our left. In addition to the horses there are two people. At the far left there is a house among the trees, with smoke coming from one of the chimneys. The trees fill a lot of the top left corner of the painting, although there is a clouded sky visible above them. The top right corner is given over to an expanse of open sky, with clouds lit by the sun. A man in the undergrowth is out looking for something to eat – if he can lay his hands on it – and beyond the fields stretch out into the distance.

I say, ‘we are looking at a landscape’ – but not the same one. I was actually looking at Constable’s The Hay Wain – but I’m assuming that you will have followed my description while looking at the picture I’ve posted of Rubens’ Het Steen. I’ll come back to this connection later – but first we should get to know the Rubens better (and of course I will spend more time with the Constable on Monday).

Het Steen can be translated, literally, as ‘the stone’, although it effectively means ‘the fortress’. It is the title of the large manor house at the top left of the painting. Rubens purchased it in 1635, thanks to his enormous wealth – the result of his successful career – and to the status which came from being knighted by both Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England and Scotland. A person of lower rank would not have been allowed to buy such a grand building, and anyone with less money would not have been able to afford it. At the age of 58 Rubens was effectively retiring to the countryside, leaving behind a life of diplomacy and large scale public commissions in order to paint a few portraits and more landscapes – many of which, like this one, were done for his own pleasure. His grand new home bristles with battlements and is complete with a moat. Access to the front door is across a small bridge, from which a man can be seen fishing. Sunlight flashes off the windows, and a group of the nobility (among whom Rubens could count himself) are gathered outside. My guess is that they have been up all night. At the bottom of this detail a woman in a straw hat and red jacket can be seen.

She is the only person riding on the cart. As well as the red jacket she wears a blue skirt, and looped around her left elbow is a cord tied around a large copper jug – which I suspect contains milk. This rests on a barrel, in which there may be more milk (was milk ever kept in barrels?) – although it might contain beer. There is also a calf with bound legs lying on some straw, suggesting that this couple is heading of to sell the rich produce of Flanders at the nearest market. The cart is pulled by two yoked horses, which are steered and driven forward by a man riding the nearer of the two. He holds the reins with both hands, and also clasps a whip in his right. The white splashes of paint which streak back from the horses’ feet and from the wheels of the cart tell us that they are making their way through shallow water – a ford, or, more likely, a sizeable puddle in the dirt track leading away from the manor house.

Further to the right a man is hunting for his dinner… or something to sell. He crouches down, gun in hand, accompanied by a dog. He is hiding from some ducks in the adjacent field, clearly hoping to pot one or two of them, providing that they don’t all fly away at the first shot. He hides behind the hollow trunk of a blasted tree whose lower branches have survived and spread both left and right. This is just the first element in some form of hedge, which develops into a line of trees that stretches along a diagonal to the top right corner of this detail. The huntsman’s right leg, stretched out behind him, forms the beginning of this diagonal which is continued by his back. His gaze also leads our eyes into the distance. He could almost be the definition of the word repoussoir, pushing our eyes back into the depth of the painting. A brook cuts between the trees just beyond the ducks, but there is a precarious plank bridge crossing it. As with so many landscapes, we are invited to travel through this space in our imaginations, and both the obstructions to our journey, and the way to overcome them, are shown. If the trees – and the poacher’s gaze – lead our eye to the top right, the brook could distract us to look towards the top left. The curving, flooded track along which the cart is trundling follows parallel to the poacher’s back, then later curves round to the left, where it echoes the line of the brook before disappearing out of sight. We can still see where it is, though, as its route is measured out by the bases of the trees growing on the adjacent bank.

The line of trees – the continuation of the diagonal which starts at the huntsman’s right foot – gradually diminishes until it is terminated by another row parallel to the horizon – although that doesn’t stop our eye from following the now virtual line to the sun, glowing above the horizon. The painting of the sky is one of the true glories of this landscape, with areas of clear blue interspersed with the puffs and swirls and eddies of white clouds coloured yellow by the sun, with even, I want to believe, a slight blush of pink – although that might just be my imagination. The distant horizon is blue, as if the sky has got in its way. Rubens’ control of atmospheric perspective – the effect that the atmosphere has on the way we see objects at a distance – is nowhere more subtle.

A small city can be seen on the horizon, a church tower standing tall: the distance implies that this would be a mighty structure if seen up close. There is also a small town closer to us, and a little to the right, whose buildings also look blue to the eye. I’ve never been clear if these are real places. Het Steen is 16km north-east of Brussels, and 9km due south of Mechelen. Apparently you can see the horizon 9km away if you are at a height of 6 metres above ground – and so maybe this is, indeed, Mechelen: that is certainly what I have always assumed. Rubens could have been at this height looking out of one of the top windows of the mansion, or if he had climbed the tower which is visible just behind the right end of the house. This serves to point out a basic fact about the landscape: it has a very high, and presumably imaginary, viewpoint – there were no other large structures near by. It is a format sometimes known as a ‘world landscape’, from the German ‘weltlandschaft’ – because it allows you to see so much of the world. For Rubens, it served to show how far away from the common throng he now was – and how much land he had acquired. He also painted the view looking in the opposite direction in the Rainbow Landscape, which belongs to the Wallace Collection. I’ve always wondered which market the couple on the cart are going to. My instinct is that they are heading in the direction of Brussels – but that’s a long way to go in a cart.

We could tell that the sun is close to the horizon, even if it weren’t in the painting. The trees cast long shadows across the ground, telling us that the sun must be low, and they are lit from the side with a yellowish light. If there sun were higher they would just look green. But how can we tell that it is morning rather than evening? Sunrise rather than sunset? Yes, of course I trust the National Gallery and its titles implicitly (that’s not actually true, I’m afraid… too many titles are ‘traditional’ and unrelated to the artist’s intentions), but if that is Mechelen, then we are looking towards the north and the sun must therefore be rising, as it is in the east. Not only that, but markets took place from the early morning and were usually wrapped up by lunch time. As I said earlier, I suspect that the nobility by the mansion have been up all night, whereas the poacher has tried to get up before anyone else so as not to be seen. Not that I know anything about poaching. There is also the activity of the workers in the fields to bear in mind.

Towards the right edge of the painting, we can see birds gathering on the scrubby bushes in the foreground. One goldfinch flies in with wings spread, while another stands on a branch next to what looks a bit like a blackcap. There I also something coloured, but not shaped, like a kingfisher – so I’m not sure what that is. However, above them (in pictorial terms – actually some distance away in the adjacent field) there are some cows. There are also two humans. One is walking from right to left towards the herd, while another is seated beside one of the cows: she is milking. I once asked a group of school children what time of day you milked cows, and they looked at me baffled. I thought to myself, ‘Ah, they might not even be aware of the origin of milk, as it so obviously comes from plastic bottles in the supermarket’. So I carried on, as was my habit with this painting, ‘Well, it’s something that farmer’s always do first thing in the morning’. At which point they looked even more baffled, and even alarmed. Then several of them blurted out ‘but you’ve got to do it in the afternoon as well’ – at which point I remembered that they had come from a village school, and many of them must have grown up on a farm… They were initially baffled because surely everyone knew when you were supposed to milk cows. Of course, I knew it was something that was done in the early morning because I used to listen to The Archers. All this aside, I’m sure Rubens was using it as a typical, early morning activity.

The colour in the painting is quite remarkable, and serves so many different functions. Primarily it is descriptive, of course. Grass is green, the sky is blue, and jackets can be red, for example. But it also gives us a sense of the time of year: the leaves are both green and brown, so it is presumably late summer/early autumn, before all the leaves have changed or fallen. As well as the time of the year, there is also the time of day. Even without the sun the clouds and the sides of the trees are lit yellow… And then, it gives us a sense of distance – using the standard formula developed as early as the late 15th century that the foreground should be brown, the middle-ground green, and the distance blue, thus conforming to the conventions for depicting atmospheric perspective, which are employed in this painting, as I have said, at their most subtle and organic. This was one of the formulae of art that Constable rebelled against.

But what of the relationship between Het Steen and The Hay Wain? Is it coincidence that, apart from anything else, the woman on the cart in Het Steen wears red, the same colour as the saddles of the horses pulling The Hay Wain? This is yet another function of colour: the touches of red make the green of the landscape look more green – a trick which Constable learnt from Rubens as much as from anyone else. It just helps to make the landscape look fresher. But then, Constable admired 17th century landscapes generally – both Dutch and Flemish. This wasn’t the only connection, though. Het Steen entered the National Gallery as part of the Sir George Beaumont Gift, officially dated to 1823/8. Beaumont’s promise to leave his collection to the Nation in 1823 precipitated the foundation of The National Gallery 200 years ago. He died four years later, in 1827, which is why the gift didn’t materialise until 1828. As well as being a collector and amateur artist, Beaumont was also a great patron, and even mentor, of John Constable. As a result, the artist had frequent access to his collection, and would have known Het Steen well. His painting The Cornfield (which is also in the Discover exhibition which I will discuss on Monday) is based on another of Beaumont’s paintings, Claude’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel. Constable even carried out ‘restoration’ work for Beaumont – and it has even been suggested that some of the clouds in Canaletto’s Stonemason’s Yard were actually painting by the British artist… but that’s another story. Whether Constable was consciously basing the composition and activities of The Hay Wain on Het Steen, or if it was the subconscious result of his through knowledge of the Flemish painting and his understanding of its composition, we will probably never know. But it is almost pure luck that they have ended up in the same collection, allowing us to see the relationship at first hand.

235 – Raphael, after himself

After four weeks talking about the Royal Academy’s superb exhibition celebrating the ‘chance’ encounters of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael in Florence, it will be a pleasure to keep the momentum going this Monday, 9 December by including just a few of their works in my introduction the King’s Gallery exhibition Drawing the Italian Renaissance. There are so many glorious images to choose from that I’m now going through the difficult process of cutting my presentation down to a manageable size… and you probably know what that means. I will come back to the Renaissance in January, delving into A brief history of The Madonna and Child on 6 January (as it’s Epiphany I’m bound to include the odd Magus…), and then I will discuss the National Gallery’s exhibition dedicated to Parmigianino’s The Vision of St Jerome which opens today, and has already received brilliant reviews. However, before then, I will be thinking about colour, and landscape, and Romanticism, with the exhibitions dedicated to Constable (16 December) and Monet (23 December). All of this is in the diary, together with details of the trips I will be taking for Artemisia next year, along The Piero Trail, and to Hamburg, Liverpool, and Florence (…and if you’d like to come, please mention my name when booking, thank you).

One of the things I appreciate more and more is precisely how good Raphael’s drawings are, and how important they were to his process of creating art and disseminating ideas, which is why, even after posting about him for the past two weeks, I want to do so again today. This also happens to be a particularly rare type of drawing – although the reason why is not immediately apparent. We see a man on the far right pointing upwards, with a group of nine others approaching him in different attitudes, some gesturing, one starting to bow, hands in prayer, and one on his knees. We are left in no doubt as to his importance, even though there is nothing notable about his appearance – apart from the fact that he is not wearing any trousers, I suppose. This is clearly a preparatory drawing for a religious scene, but then we knew that from the title: Christ’s Charge to St Peter – but how did the people who gave the drawing that title know what was going on? After all, Jesus did not dress like this, nor was he associated with a group of nine men… However, people only kneel before people they respect or fear (or both), and there is no sense of any threat, even if one or two faces show a touch of concern. On the whole the image radiates calm, and compassion, and even communicates a sense of sanctity – but maybe that is the result of having read the title.

The protagonist wears a baggy shirt, with the sleeve of the right arm rolled to the elbow. The shirt is gathered at the waist with a belt, and its tails might be tied between his legs, or the man is wearing a pair of baggy underpants which are cut very high at the sides. Raphael seems to be particularly interested in the articulation of the model’s left hip, and the structure of the leg below it. Attention is also paid to the face, looking downwards with a sense of humility, although other details are only hinted at – the short, thinning hair, for example, and the right hand, which is apparently pointing. The left sleeve may not be rolled up – but we can’t be sure as most of the forearm and hand are not seen. This is either because the drawing has been damaged, and/or cut down, or because the paper Raphael was using was not large enough for the whole composition. Just looking at a photograph it is hard to tell, although the edges are very crisp for an old piece of paper, which suggests that it might have been trimmed. The four men visible on our left of the detail above are positioned in a falling diagonal. The man closest to the protagonist is kneeling, and the one behind him is bending over. His shadowed hands, raised in prayer, fall half-way between the two heads. The two men next to him have their heads tilted in different directions, towards us and away, and this is enough to start the curving diagonal which creates a clear space between the group and the protagonist. But then there is another negative space between the praying man and the man kneeling – the latter is singled out from the group: presumably he is the secondary subject of the narrative, St Peter.

I find the delicacy with which each individual face is drawn, and the subtlety of the emotions depicted, truly beautiful. And trust me, it is even more remarkable – and subtle – if you see the drawing in the flesh: there is a softness to the lines which is really very evocative. Notice how the light comes from the left, so that Jesus’s face (or at least, the face of the model who is in the position of Jesus) is the only one that is fully lit. Even there, the side of the cheek and neck are softly shadowed. The praying man’s hands are quite dark, apart from a couple of fingers which catch the light coming over his shoulder. The side of his face is also lit, as is the side of his neck and his back, and this brightness pushes him towards us, as does the light on his large, puffed, 16th century sleeve. He looks younger, and more innocent than the others here: maybe this is St John, the youngest of the apostles.

The kneeling man’s face is more deeply shadowed by close, insistent, parallel strokes which darken around his neck. His hands, clasped to his chest, are also in deep shadow. The light shines on the crown of his head, with short strokes of the chalk defining curling tufts of hair. He looks up with awe – and maybe even some slight concern.

Behind him, the three men we have discussed are divided from the remaining five, a connection between the two groups being made by the right arm of the man to the left of the gap, which crosses in front of the shoulder of the man who whose head is tilted slightly towards us. The man reaching forward looks back over his right shoulder, and this helps to unite the group of five with the rest of the composition. It is as if he is checking to see how they are reacting to the interaction between the protagonist and the kneeling man. The next person – the one closest to us, perhaps – clasps his hands to his chest, a sign of awe, or of devotion, while the character behind him leans forward, also placing his left hand, more crudely drawn that the others, on his chest. We only see the faces of the remaining two, but again each is individually characterised, with one turning in towards us, and the other in strict profile.

It is clear from the three figures on the right, if not the others in the group, that Raphael was using models. They could easily have been studio assistants. These three, who were wearing contemporary, 16th century clothing, have removed their breeches and hose so that Raphael could get understand the structure and articulation of the legs. He carefully demarcates the light and shade defining the forms of the muscles, bones and tendons. If the legs, whether standing or kneeling, are correctly positioned, then the rest of the body presumably follows suit. And if you know where the legs are, and so how the figure is positioned, it is easier to dress the figures, and to understand how and where the drapery will fall. The legs of the younger, praying man (on the left of the detail above) are more freely sketched in, but nevertheless we can see precisely how they work – and Raphael still pays considerable attention to this man’s right ankle, in the bottom left corner of the detail. Like the protagonist (the model standing in for Jesus), the kneeling figure wears a baggy shirt gathered at the waist, and some form of underclothing. Again Raphael looks at the structure of the hip joint, and also the curve of the buttock and thigh. He pays far less attention to what this man is clasping to his chest, but the forms projecting above his hands and hanging beneath his elbow can easily be read as a pair of keys – the keys that loose and bind. This is, of course, St Peter, and the reference is to St Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 16, verse 9. These are Christ’s words to St Peter:

And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

The legs of most of the remaining figures can be seen in the bottom left corner of the drawing – and here they appear to be clothed – although the forms of the legs can be seen through the fabric. Raphael fixed the position of the legs, and then drew drapery on top of them – precisely the method I suggested above. It would be very difficult to identify the form and style of this clothing, though, given the sketchy nature of its depiction. It is also difficult to know how many of these figures are based on models, or how many come from the artist’s imagination – his memory and experience. Would he really have grouped ten people together in the studio to draw them? Or did he build up the composition by posing one or two models in several different poses? There are a number of similar facial types and hairstyles, but these are things he could easily adjust. Having said that, Raphael is said to have had one of the largest workshops of his day, and it was reported he used to walk around Rome with a considerable group of his assistants and apprentices – so maybe it would have been possible to get a group of this size together. What I find most striking in this particular detail, though, is the insistent shading – shading which runs on diagonals at various angles from top left to bottom right, which, as I was saying only recently, is the sign of a left-handed artist – like Leonardo da Vinci. But Raphael was right-handed. It might be possible to work out what is going on if we think about what it is that we are actually looking at.

The drawing was made in preparation for one of the tapestries that Raphael had been commissioned to design for the Sistine Chapel: Christ’s Charge to St Peter. The keys that Peter holds refer to Matthew 16:19, but they are just there to identify the Saint. The incident depicted in the tapestry occurred later, after the resurrection, as you might be able to tell from the fact that Jesus is dressed in white, with ‘supernatural’ gold decorations. Rather than point up, as in the drawing, in the tapestry he points down to Peter with his right hand, and with his left he indicates a small flock of sheep. This is an illustration of John 21:15:

Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs.

This instruction is repeated again in each of the following two verses, and refers, of course, to Peter watching over his fellow Christians: to this day a priest’s congregation is referred to as his flock.

By comparing the drawing with the completed tapestry we can see a number of things. First, the nine men in the drawing are just missing two of the apostles. There were only 11 at the time, as this was after Judas’s suicide, and before St Mathias had been appointed. One was inserted behind and to our right of the young praying figure (who is, indeed, St John the Evangelist). This is presumably St Peter’s brother, St Andrew, usually depicted with a long white beard, who John’s gospel says was the first apostle to be called. The 11th was added at the far back of the group, to our left of the figure in profile. The other thing which you may not have noticed is that the compositions are fundamentally the same. However, they shouldn’t be: they should be the mirror image of each other. A tapestry is designed in much the same way as a painting, with preliminary drawings leading up to a full-scale cartoon. After this the process differs. The would be sent off to the tapestry weavers, who would cut it into sections, and work on the tapestry from behind. In the process, the orientation of the design is reversed. We can check this by comparing the drawing with the relevant cartoon – and that is possible, of course, because some of them have survived. They belong, like today’s drawing, to the Royal Collection, but are on long-term loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

And look – the drawing is the reverse of the cartoon. That’s because this is not actually a drawing: it is an offset. Having made a delicate red chalk drawing, a dampened piece of paper would have been placed over it and the two pieces of paper pressed together and rubbed. An offset is effectively a print of a drawing, and like other printing techniques results in the design being reversed. Three fragments of the original survive: there are two below, now joined together, which are in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The third is the figure of ‘Christ’, which is in the Louvre. The second image below is a detail of the Royal Collection’s offset version, so you can see that they are, effectively, identical.

Why would Raphael have done this? Well, he was an incredibly accomplished and thorough artist. He wanted to know – before he went too far – that the composition he was designing would look alright once it was reversed in the tapestry – so he made the offset just to be sure. The reversal of the image explains why the right-handed Raphael was apparently drawing as if he were left-handed… it’s a result of the process. And maybe, as an offset, that is also why the ‘drawing’ has a softer appearance than many of the other marvellous examples in the King’s Gallery exhibition… if indeed it has. Why not join me on Monday to find out?

234 – Raphael, after Leonardo, and after Michelangelo

Raphael, St Catherine of Alexandria, about 1507. The National Gallery, London.

After discussing Michelangelo and Leonardo, I looked at Raphael on Monday, and so we are all set up for the last of my four talks relating to the Royal Academy’s ‘perfect’ exhibition, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence c. 1504, this Monday 2 December. It will effectively be a virtual guided tour of the exhibition itself, looking at the connections between the three ‘titans of the Renaissance’, and the ways in which their work relates not only to that of the others, but also to the social, political and artistic life of Florence at the time. You could argue that the first three talks were artificial constructs, looking at individual artists with little or no reference to whatever else was going on around them – and, truth be told, most exhibitions are constructs of this type. This became all too clear on Monday while I was trying hard to talk about Raphael without mentioning the other artists who were in Florence at the same time. By the way, if you missed the Raphael talk, I will be repeating it, with some variation, for ARTscapades this Tuesday 3 December. The week after (9 December) I will introduce the other superb Renaissance exhibition with which London is currently graced, Drawing the Italian Renaissance at the King’s Gallery. The talk will, of necessity, be selective, as there is such a wealth of remarkable material – but I will choose the best, the most interesting, and, quite frankly, my favourites from among the treasure trove on display. I recommend going, getting your ticket stamped as a pass for the year, and then going back often! In the weeks after this I will return to the ‘colourful’ side of my Mono/Chrome series, by looking back from Vincent van Gogh (about whom I talked in October), to reconsider what I consider to be the later development of ‘romanticism’ in art, introducing first The National Gallery’s exhibition Discover Constable & The Hay Wain (16 December) and then Monet and London (23 December) at The Courtauld. Details are now online and on sale via those links, and can also be found on the diary.

Today, though, I want to think about a painting which is not in the Royal Academy’s exhibition, but which does date from Raphael’s time in Florence, and shows so much of what he learnt from the great masters who were also present in the Tuscan capital. It is not known for whom it was painted, but given the small to medium-sized format (it measures 72.2 x 55.7 cm) it was presumably made for private devotion – or even, just conceivably, as a work of art, something that was beautiful in and of itself. This was still a relatively new concept in 1507.

After her conversion to Christianity, the Emperor Maxentius tried to dissuade Catherine from her monotheistic ways, first by imprisoning her. In her captivity she was visited by the Emperor’s wife, whom she converted to Christianity, leading to the Empress’s immediate execution. Catherine had not been killed straight away, presumably because she was a virgin: the death of an ‘innocent’ was always frowned upon. The Emperor then sent 50 of his leading philosophers to persuade Catherine that she was wrong – but they failed. They were converted too, and likewise executed. She was then tortured with four spiked wheels, but God intervened and destroyed the wheels, so eventually the Emperor resorted to decapitation. Among other things Catherine is now the patron saint of philosophers (thankfully, as she could prove even them to be wrong), and her feast day is celebrated by various denominations of Christianity on either 24 or 25 November – so I’m a bit late for the festivities, but not by too much. Raphael gives us no sign of her imprisonment or suffering, although she does lean on a wheel, the instrument of her torture. She stands in a calm and peaceful landscape, with white, fluffy clouds floating in an otherwise clear blue sky, and she looks up over her right shoulder towards the sun shining at the top of the painting.

It was probably obvious earlier, but seen closer we can tell that this is not the sun, but the light of God shining down from above. Catherine’s sanctity is confirmed by the thin, gold ring of her halo which encircles her head. Similarly thins beam of light emanate from the golden glow in the top left corner – the love of God rewarding her devotion. The whites of her eyes show us that she is looking up and to our left, and we can see the underside of her chin, a result of the twist and tilt of her head as she looks towards the source of her inspiration. Her lips are slightly parted, as if she herself is inspiring, or ready to speak and witness to her faith. A small plait curves around a spiralling bunch of hair which is tied by a red ribbon as it curves around the back of her neck. At exactly the point where the lower edge reaches the flesh, a transparent veil emerges, its brightly lit hem curving over her shoulder and echoing the gleam of the foreshortened halo. The hem is also echoed by the concentric curve of the underlying bodice, and the golden yellow lining of her cloak which falls over her left shoulder. The top of her bodice appears to have a black trim – but chemical analysis shows this contains red and blue pigments, and was presumably intended to represent a purple velvet.

The buttercup yellow of the lining curves down and behind her waist at the level of a dark green belt, and then emerges under her right elbow, where it is illuminated by the light of God to appear a far paler yellow. The clouds, and the blue of the sky are reflected in the lake behind her, as are the freely painted trees and bushes. Buildings stand on either side, in front of distant, blue hills, and palings can be seen embedded in the lake, showing us, like the buildings, that this is a cultivated landscape. The cloak is a rich red, while her dress is lavender. Her right hand is held to her chest as a sign of her heartfelt devotion, and the fingers rest on the veil which crosses diagonally from her left shoulder down to the belt above her right hip.

The folds in the yellow lining of the cloak spiral around, looping down and across her right thigh and then up again to be held under her left hand. Her left elbow rests on the wheel, which appears to have been disarmed: rather than the sharp spikes, it has rounded bosses – a sign, perhaps, that her faith has rendered it harmless. Or maybe, Raphael wanted a far calmer image than the violence of sharp spikes would have suggested. However, maybe that violence is indicated by the colour of her cloak, the deep red flowing from beneath the golden lining at the level of her shoulders – not so far from her neck, which would be severed from her head. The red then pourss along her left arm, with folds of drapery lapping over the wheel at front and back, before continuing down her left thigh to her right. The deep blood-red is also visible in the shadows between the spokes of the wheel.

Naturalistic plants appear at the bottom of the image – most notably a dandelion seed head in the left corner. The dandelion is interpreted as a bitter herb which is often associated with the death for Christ. Its presence here reminds us of Catherine’s suffering, and of her faith. It is strangely truncated though, emerging from nowhere, and the figure too seems to terminate abruptly. As it happens the painting has been cut down on all four sides – but not by much. The top, left and right of the image have a ‘barbe’, a sort of lip, or ridge of paint, implying that it was painted with an engaged frame. However, as the barbe is still there, we know that none of the image has been removed on these sides: all that has gone is the frame itself and the unpainted wood under the frame. However, there is no barbe at the bottom, so some of the painted surface must also have been removed – but there is no way of knowing how much. There is a cartoon for this painting in the Louvre, but it doesn’t extend to the bottom of the image. It stops just below the fingers of Catherine’s left hand, and it’s not clear where the design of the legs comes from. Raphael might have improvised them on the panel itself, based on his earlier preparatory drawings. If you want more information about this you can find the whole, detailed catalogue entry on the National Gallery’s website.

The position St Catherine adopts – her hips twisted to our left, her shoulders to our right, and the head back to our left, with the added flow of the drapery wrapping around her form – is a superb example of a composition which was common in the 16th century. Known as a figura serpentinata  – a ‘serpentine figure’, it gives life and movement to the image, and, in a religious context such as this, can refer to the soul spiralling upwards towards God, almost like a flame. But where did Raphael get the ideas for this painting from? A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Leonardo’s drawings of Leda, at least one of which resulted in a painting, sadly now lost (see 233 – Leonardo, hatching ideas). I showed you a version of the one that he doesn’t seem to have painted. Today, as promised, I can show you the drawing Raphael made of the one that he did. Part of the Royal Collection, it is currently on view at the Royal Academy – this is just a detail.

The stance of the figures is remarkably similar, with the left shoulder of both figures angled away from us, and the right shoulder closer, and lower down. Each has a right hip which curves outwards, enveloped by another form – the gold lining for the Saint, and the wing for Leda. They both have a similar tilt of the neck to our left, but whereas St Catherine looks up, Leda looks out towards us.

Leonardo’s painting was last mentioned in 1625, when it was in the Château de Fontainebleau, not so very far from Paris. No one knows what happened to it, but it may well have been destroyed by someone who disapproved of the imagery and its implications. Nevertheless, it was popular in its day, and there are many copies of it – six or seven, at least, just counting the ones which survive. This version, from the Galleria Borghese in Rome, was painted by the Sienese artist Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, known as ‘Il Sodoma’. Raphael’s swan is, admittedly, more like a goose, and his Leda acknowledges us rather than looking bashfully to her progeny, but otherwise the relationship is clear. And it is not just the composition which his St Catherine owes to Leonardo, but the way in which so many details spiral – the plait, the hair around which the plait is wound, the curve of that hair around the neck, the folds of the golden lining of the cloak, not to mentioning the looping and flowing of the lining itself, and of the transparent veil. These are all things which obsessed Leonardo, and which he drew often. But Raphael’s observation of Leonardo’s work doesn’t explain everything – this is not just ‘Raphael, after Leonardo’. For the strong turn of St Catherine’s neck, for example, or the head foreshortened from below, we must look to Michelangelo. This is Raphael, after Leonardo, and after Michelangelo.

As the sculptor’s work on the David drew to a close, he was commissioned to carve a series of the Twelve Apostles for the cathedral of Florence. He was supposed to carve one a year, and he did at least get started on the St Matthew, but went no further – the unfinished sculpture is now in the Accademia in Florence, part of the avenue of unfinished works leading to the David. Eventually he managed to extricate himself from this commitment. Apart from anything else, Pope Julius II wanted a tomb – and then a ceiling – and then later Popes wanted other things: a façade, a funerary chapel, a library, a palace, a wall… Michelangelo always found it hard to argue with a Pope. We know that Raphael saw the unfinished St Matthew, because he drew it – and the drawing (above right) is now in the British Museum (but not in the RA exhibition). Raphael used this drawing for one of the figures in his Baglione Entombment, which was originally in Perugia, but stolen to order for Scipio Borghese, and so now in the Galleria Borghese, not far from the Leda above. But he also used the drawing for St Catherine.

Having clarified the anatomy and clothing of the St Matthew in his drawing, Raphael’s debt to the sculpture in the St Catherine is easier to see. The position of Catherine’s legs, with their exaggerated contrapposto, and the angle of her head, are clearly drawn from Michelangelo. Notice also how the strap across Matthew’s chest meets with one end of his belt, as Catherine’s veil does with hers. There is even a hint of Catherine’s belly button: St Matthew’s is seen clearly in the drawing. Raphael had come to Florence to learn, according to a much-disputed letter, and here we can seen him doing just that. This is really what the Royal Academy’s exhibition is about: precisely what drawing was ‘for’, whether it was used as a tool for learning, observing, or preparing, or as an art form in its own right. Raphael continued to learn when he got to Rome, to the extent that eventually Michelangelo complained in a letter that, “ciò che aveva dell’ arte, l’aveva da me” – ‘that which he had of art, he had from me’, to translate literally. This is clearly an exaggeration. Look at how much Raphael learnt from Leonardo, for example. Or from Perugino, before that. But then Raphael was a sponge: he saw, he absorbed, he learnt, and then he squeezed himself dry to produce something that was truly his own – always the sign of a great artist. And he gave to others in his turn. But he did learn a lot from Michelangelo. I even wonder if the left hand of St Catherine is actually derived from the Virgin’s hand in the Taddei Tondo – he certainly quoted that hand in another painting which I will show you on Monday. Maybe this is just a hand, though: I’ll let you compare and contrast, and decide for yourselves. As for the other lessons he learnt – and what Michelangelo and Leonardo shared with each other – well, that is what Monday‘s talk will be about.

And as we’ve been talking about Leda… I really would encourage you to go and see the Barbara Walker exhibition in Manchester! This is her large-scale drawing, The End of the Affair (2023). There’s nothing ‘bashful’ here – quite the opposite – but there is a soaking red…

Re-Announced

Raphael, The Annunciation, c. 1506-7. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

This week I had planned to write about a drawing by Raphael after a painting by Leonardo – but as predicted, I’ve run out of time. So instead, I will re-post an entry about a drawing by Raphael which may have been made for a painting by someone else… it’s not entirely clear. It comes from the period when the young artist was in Florence (c. 1504), and so is a perfect introduction to my talk this Monday 25 November at 6pm, covering the works by Raphael in the Royal Academy’s perfectly focussed exhibition, discussing them in the context of his early career. Next week I hope I will get to write about a painting he developed from the drawing I had wanted to talk about this week. As well as being inspired by Leonardo, the painting also took ideas from Michelangelo – thus making it the perfect introduction to the last talk in my series of four, Florence c. 1504, in which I will draw all of the ideas together and see how the works of all three artists relate to each other – and to the other paintings, books and ideas which are also exhibited at the RA. If you missed the first two talks (Michelangelo and Leonardo), I will be repeating them, in a slightly edited form, as a study evening for ARTscapades, on Tuesday 26 November, 5.00pm – 7.30pm. On 9 December I will introduce the other remarkable renaissance exhibition currently enriching the London scene – Drawing the Italian Renaissance at the King’s Gallery – details, as ever, are in the diary. If, rather than reading something old (today’s post was originally published in April 2022 as ‘Pre-Announced’), you would rather read something new, an entry I wrote for The Visual Commentary on Scripture is this week’s ‘Exhibition of the Week’. If you don’t know VCS, click on the link anyway: it’s a superb initiative, aiming to illustrate every section of the bible with a virtual, online exhibition.

The subject matter of today’s drawing is unsurprising, perhaps – The Annunciation – but what is remarkable is the quality of the drawing and the degree of finish. This is not a ‘sketch’, nor is it a working-through of ideas. It is a fully-fledged composition with almost every detail thoroughly considered and all the concomitant problems effectively resolved. What is surprising about that? Well, what is it a drawing for? Raphael made other drawings like this for altarpieces – but no such painting exists. In the catalogue of Raphael drawings, written by Paul Joannides (my PhD supervisor, as it happens), it is categorised as a ‘presentation drawing’, which can have two meanings, I suppose. Either it was made as a proposal for a project, and presented to a potential patron – effectively a way of saying ‘this is the work I could make for you’ – or as a drawing in its own right, to be given (i.e. presented, hence ‘presentation’) as an independent work of art. It was only during the Renaissance – at some point in the late 15th century – that drawing acquired this status. On the whole though, drawing was still used to make observations, to think through ideas, to develop forms, to plan compositions, and to transfer the ideas to the finished work.

There are other oddities. Usually the Annunciation takes place in a domestic setting – Mary’s room, usually her bedroom, or some private space where she has been contemplating the scriptures.  However, in this instance the characters appear to be in a large building, presumably a church – although as the events depicted took place nine months B.C., and churches wouldn’t be legal for another 313 years, that would be entirely anachronistic. So it could be a synagogue or temple, I suppose. The angel Gabriel kneels in humble reverence of God’s chosen vessel, holding the by-then (then being Raphael’s time) traditional lily, symbol of Mary’s purity, in his right hand. His left hand rests on his chest as a sign of his heartfelt awe in the face of such beauty and perfection. Mary turns to greet him, standing in a classical contrapposto with the weight on her left leg and the right leg bent, the drapery pulling tighter around her right knee, her thigh illuminated by the bright light shining down from above.

In between them we can see a large, semi-circular apse, the architectonic structure that makes this look like a church, which is exactly the place where we would expect to see an altar. However, there is none there. Nevertheless, directly behind Mary, and off-centre, there is a large flat block of stone (presumably) on slightly broader base. It is too tall to be an altar, and its function is not clear. This should make us realise that the drawing is not, perhaps, as fully resolved as we first thought. It could be the base of a large column, although there is no column there – which could be a metaphor for the promised arrival of the Messiah, a tower of strength, if not, exactly, a column. To the right of Mary you may just be able to make out the rising diagonal of a reading desk – the drapery falling from her left arm falls from it (and while we are there, notice how her left hand is on her breast, just like Gabriel’s). She has been kneeling there, reading, and presumably praying. When the angel appeared she stood and turned round to greet him – her body turning 90 degrees, with the head completing the full 180.

The shadowy depth of the apse is conveyed in two ways. To the left, above the angel’s head, there are vertical lines, and then, overlapping these, are slightly curving diagonal strokes which appear to link the two figures, almost as if this is the energy binding them together. The slight curve shows us the way they were drawn, with Raphael holding the quill (this is a pen and ink drawing) and making long strokes like a compass, with his elbow at the centre of a circle and his hand tracing arcs around it at the full length of his forearm. Try this yourself, and if you are right handed – like Raphael – you will make this sort of curve, with the lines going from top right to bottom left (for the left-handed Leonardo, the diagonals go the other way). The angel’s wings are just sketched in, the right one fully visible, with the other crossing behind his head, so that the foremost curving outline (do wings have ‘elbows’?) projects to the right of his nose. Notice how, despite the subtlety of the shading, none of the three hands in the detail above (or, for that matter, Gabriel’s right hand in the previous detail) is shaded. They are defined by outline alone, forming bright highlights, this clarity serving to make them more expressive.

The arched top of the drawing is very subtly sketched in, and perfectly frames God the Father, who looks down at the action below while surrounded by clouds and a small delegation of the heavenly host. Equally spaced are five tiny heads of cherubim and seraphim, creatures so holy they do not need a body but appear just as heads with wings. They are disposed symmetrically, with one each at top left and top right, two more towards the bottom left and right, and a fifth, bottom centre of this detail – although, if you wanted to read the loops of cloud as further cherubim, I wouldn’t disagree. Then there are four winged youths, evenly spaced in a rectangular formation, hands held in prayer or resting on chest or cloud, with the Father central. He looks down to Mary, his right hand raised in blessing, the fore- and middle fingers separated, and thumb held apart – so delicately defined, for such a tiny detail. The left hand seems to hover, as if to calm – to calm the angel, perhaps? It’s as if he was worried about getting the words wrong, but I suspect he is following the divine instructions well, and is being reassured from above. Or maybe, to calm Mary – who, nevertheless, does not appear to be especially troubled at the angel’s saying.

The Father hovers above the apse. It is almost as if the roof of the church – or temple – has dissolved as he manifests his presence. Yet more cherubim and seraphim solidify from the clouds below the previous group, and below them all, at the centre of the semi-dome of the apse (but some way in front of it) is the Holy Spirit, a tiny dove with a tinier dove-sized halo, appearing against another, larger halo, the same size as the Father’s, but flat against the surface of the drawing rather than angled in space. Of course, it is not there at all. There is a circle drawn by the pen – quite firmly, as the light catches indentations made on the paper – but the halo itself is not there. That is just blank paper. It is possible that details like this halo – the glow around the Holy Spirit – were drawn first with a ‘blind stylus’ – i.e. a pointed object without any ink. The outlines were indented in the paper in a way that is almost invisible – and then traced over with pen and ink if they are deemed to be in the right place.

Overall, the position of God the Father directly over the circle enclosing the Holy Spirit looks like a practice run for the Disputa, one of the frescoes Raphael would later paint in the Vatican Palace (if you don’t remember it, there is a detail below, and I will show a full image on Monday). The position of the dove is slightly unusual, to my mind. If proceeding from the Father, I would expect to see it in between the Father’s head and Mary’s. However, I suspect its position speaks of an absence – or rather, of a future presence. The apse should contain an altar, and on the altar, during the Mass, at the Elevation of the Host, the bread becomes (in Roman Catholic belief) the actual body of Christ. And so Christ would eventually be physically present directly underneath the dove, forming a vertical axis of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Again, this is equivalent to the monstrance containing the consecrated Host in the Disputa. I hope these two details appear side by side for you:

The space between Gabriel and Mary is, after all, full of grace. These are the words Gabriel is speaking in Luke 1:28. In the Vulgate, the Latin is ‘ave gratia plena Dominus tecum’. The King James version gives us ‘Hail, though that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee,’ or, in the Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition, about which I know little but seems a more accurate, and poetic, translation than some, ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee’. Imagine these words written on the curving lines between Gabriel and Mary, and you will realise that the space between them is sanctified – it is, in itself, ‘full of grace’. This is the place where the Mass will one day be celebrated, and so where the body of the announced Messiah will be shared. Raphael is imagining Jesus between Gabriel and Mary, I think.

As for the function of the drawing – well, however highly finished it is, I don’t think it’s quite finished enough to be a drawing in and of itself, a work of art in its own right. There are still ideas which aren’t clear enough. I’m fairly sure that it is the design for an altarpiece, in which anything that is not yet specific would be resolved by colour. So much survives by Raphael: he was remarkably productive given that he only lived 37 years. In part, that was because of his skills as a draughtsman, and because he was an incredibly generous man. For example, as a teenager he designed the frescoes which Pinturicchio painted in the Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral, and later he also drew The Holy Family with a Pomegranate, which was then painted by Domenico Alfani. We shouldn’t be surprised if other things haven’t survived. Nevertheless, it seems likely that Raphael’s renown would mean that we would know about any altarpieces he painted himself, even if, by now, some no longer exist. But if this drawing were used by another artist the painting would not have had the same reputation, and neither its existence, nor its loss, would have been recorded in the same way. On the other hand, it could simply be that it was a project for an altarpiece that, for one reason or another (for example, the unexpected death of the patron) was never executed.

I don’t know the answer to this problem – but I don’t really mind. It’s such a beautiful drawing that I’m not too worried about what it was ‘for’. And trust me, it is far more impressive than the photos I have shown you would suggest. When I first wrote about it, in April 2022, it was in the Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery – and by now it will have returned to its home in Sweden. Nevertheless, there are more delights currently on view at the Royal Academy, which I will talk about on Monday, and even more at the King’s Gallery… but we’ll leave those for another week!

233 – Leonardo, hatching ideas

As I said on Monday, when talking about Michelangelo, the Royal Academy’s Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504 constitutes, for me, the perfect exhibition. It is beautifully focussed, with great art, all of which has a reason for being there, and it elucidates with clarity a small moment in the History of Art which had an enormous impact. I will continue my exploration this Monday, 18 November at 6pm by looking in detail at the works of Leonardo da Vinci which are on display, putting them into the context of his career up to this date. By doing this for all three artists I am hoping that, by the time we get to week 4 (1504, 2 December) all of the connections between the three protagonists and the art of their time will fall neatly into place. By then, though, we will also have had the chance to see the masterful drawings and paintings by Raphael (25 November) in the exhibition – and which are so brilliantly hung that the relationship between the works and the interactions of the artists are clear to see. Details of these talks, and the first few of Artemisia’s tours for next year, are now on the diary (apologies if you looked last week: somehow my edits didn’t upload…)

No one has ever thought about saving the pieces of paper that sit on my desk, where I take notes and make the occasional doodle, and were you to see them you would know why. Thankfully, however, so many of Leonardo’s musings, doodles and scribbles have been saved – and they really are the feature of his output that makes him so truly fascinating. Having said that, I find people’s attitude to art can be surprisingly contradictory. So many people dismiss ‘modern’ art out of hand for its lack of ‘skill’ or ‘finish’ without even stopping to think about what they are looking at (or rather, what they have not even bothered to look at). On the other hand, we are drawn to a mess like this – an untidy page of preparatory scrawls which were never meant to be seen, covering two different ideas at least. The other side of the paper has nothing to do with art at all, although the insistent ideas seep through the page to confuse the appearance of the drawings we really want to look at.

Where does the fascination lie? Of course, even among the untidy mess, Leonardo’s innate talent remains unquestioned. I’m not sure that there is enough on this one piece of paper to qualify him as a ‘genius’, though – but we probably all realise that this page is just one of the facets of his remarkable creativity, all of which are expressions of his agile mind, which together add up to nothing less – genius. But is it ‘art’?

As far as I am concerned there are four main areas of interest on this page, which is catalogued in the Royal Collection as RCIN 912337r. The ‘r’ stands for ‘recto’, meaning it is the right way round, or, in other words, that this is the front of the paper. We will see the back (or ‘verso’ – ‘v’) later. Calling this ‘recto’ implies that this is where Leonardo started – or it could be that, when it was catalogued, this side was considered to be more important – probably because it has the artistic ideas. The four sections I am interested in show a rearing horse, at the top of the paper just to the right of centre, and then three sketches, unconnected to the horse, which all explore the same idea. They are lined up on a diagonal going from half way up the paper on the left, to the bottom of the page to the right of centre. However, I doubt this was the order in which the three sketches were drawn. I will start with the horse.

Standing on its hind legs, the horse rears up to our left. Leonardo has settled on the form of its torso, which is firmly outlined in a sharpened black chalk, with softer, broader strokes merging together to model its haunches, belly, flanks and shoulder (I know nothing about horses, but the Wikipedia entry on Equine anatomy might help). However, there is much for him still to decide – and that is the purpose of this drawing. While the position of the near hind leg (i.e. the left one, apparently) is fixed, the far one is shown in two different places – both further back and further forward than the left, with the former variation being sketched in at least two slightly different positions. The forelegs are not subject to this variation, but the far leg is only faintly delineated. Nevertheless, their position seems secure, even if they were not deemed important enough for the purposes of this study to draw them more strongly. Alternatively, it could be that the far foreleg is fainter in order to remind us that it is further away. The tail is only hinted at, with faint lines suggesting potential positions for its top and bottom. The same is true of the head: the position is apparently fixed, and it even has a slight tilt to the horse’s right, but Leonardo was not interested in the detail (there are other drawings which cover that). If you look just below the horse’s head – at the top of the neck – you may be able to pick out something else: the head of a rider, with the profile and a mop of hair sketched in, and an eye clearly marked with a couple of dark stabs of the chalk. This is Piergiampaolo Orsini, a captain of the Florentine army, and the drawing is related to Leonardo’s planned mural of The Battle of Anghiari – but as I will discuss that in detail on Monday I won’t go into it now. The sketched outline of Orsini’s back can be seen curving up from the horse’s, with the human shoulder just to the right of the equine neck. Orsini’s right arm is bent, and held behind him, while the left reaches down in front of the horse’s shoulder. Leonardo has decided how the rider will be sitting, but in this drawing he is still focussing on the precise forms of the horse. The writing, and scrawled, almost-parallel lines you can see around the horse are actually on the other side of the paper, so let’s not worry about them now. Instead, we will think about the gradual development of an idea which is completely unrelated to The Battle of Anghiari.

This is the faintest of the three sketches, the one towards the bottom of the page just to the right of centre. It looks as if it has been crossed out, but the rusty-looking diagonal lines which pass through it are the result of the iron gall ink seeping through from the other side of the paper. Although only a whisp of an idea, it is still possible to make out the form: a human figure kneeling on its right leg, the left knee bent, with the foot planted on the ground. The hips face outwards on a diagonal to our left, while the shoulders are twisted the other way, with the chest facing out and to our right. The head is tilted to one side, and the right arm crosses the torso. Together with the left arm, it gestures behind the figure. A small oval may indicate another form, and a curve to the right of the neck might imply another, lower position for the head, potentially looking at whatever the oval represents. There is also something else above the figure, to the left. At the bottom of this detail a line is marked with equally spaced dashes, which might allow for the sketch to be scaled up – although looking at the page as a whole, this scale appears to relate to a different idea, which is difficult to interpret.

The image on the far left – here seen at the same scale as the first – has been far more thoroughly worked. It is impossible to tell which of the two sketches came first, but this one clearly triggered more ideas than the one we have already seen. The drawing looks rather frantic, as if the figure is scrabbling around, trying to settle – and in a way, that is what Leonardo’s mind and hand are doing: scrabbling around, trying to settle on the right form – the best form – for this particular idea. This is a technique he would have learnt in the studio of Verrocchio: drawing different possibilities for the same image on the same piece of paper, gradually focussing in on the one that is most of interest (again, I will talk about this more on Monday).

Eventually the effect can become confusing, and there were at least two means of clarification. The first was to transfer the best idea – the most interesting lines – to a new piece of paper, either by putting the first drawing over a blank sheet and drawing over the lines you want to keep with a stylus, pressing hard, thus creating an indented but colourless line on both pieces of paper. Alternatively, you could prick the outlines on the top sheet with a pin: the holes in the blank piece of paper underneath would be enough to sketch the outline. Here, though, rather than transferring the drawing to a fresh page, he has decided to clarify the outlines with pen and ink – the only problem being that the idea has so much potential there are yet more confusing possibilities in ink. Nevertheless, what we are looking at is basically the same idea as in the first sketch. More obviously than before, it is a female figure: the breasts are clearly marked (and if you know where the drawing is going they are just visible in the previous sketch). She is still kneeling on her right knee and turning to her left, and has various other features drawn around her, although it is still not clear what they are. In the black chalk I can see at least four possible positions for the head, with a fifth picked out in ink, probably over a black chalk original. Leonardo has decided to focus his attention on a particular area of the composition, and has sketched a rectangular framing element in ink: this is the part of the drawing that he is interested in, leaving some of the roundish forms to the bottom left of this detail out of the picture – quite literally.

The same composition is repeated in the third sketch – the one in the middle of the three – which is also shown at the same scale here. Again there is a mass of chalk marks, which, if anything, are even vaguer, but the pen and ink outline settles the composition firmly and with greater clarity than before. As in the first sketch we can see that both arms reach back to another figure, a small child, or even baby – the circle with a line across it can be read as having two eyes, a nose and a mouth. There are two hemispherical forms below it. Other elements of the chalk drawing – a mad mass of hair, and undefined details to the left and right – have not been picked out in pen. To follow the idea further we have to switch to another drawing, dated c. 1505-07, in the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth House.

The idea has evolved: there will have been other drawings we haven’t seen, and which may not have survived. Although she is still kneeling on her right knee, with the left knee raised, the woman is no longer turning to her left – thus taking out the twist in her torso. Instead, she faces towards us, her head tilted to one side, and she gestures towards not one, but four babies, all wriggling on the ground. Near them are a number of rounded forms, the development of the two hemispheres I mentioned above. The babies have just hatched from eggs, obviously… Well, it is obvious if you know the story, and realise that we are in the world of classical mythology where anything is possible. In addition, a new character has been introduced: a swan stands next to the woman, its left wing folded, its right protectively – or possessively – round her shoulders. It whispers sweet nothings into her ear – or nibbles her hair as if it were pond weed. This is, of course, Jupiter, King of the Gods, who has transformed himself into a swan in order to seduce Leda. The end result – pregnancy, inevitably – was followed by the safe delivery of two eggs. Each egg hatched a pair of twins. Castor and Pollux were in one. Associated with horses and war, they brought news of victory and defeat, as well as saving those in trouble at sea or danger in war. The other egg hatched to reveal Helen of Sparta – the most beautiful woman in the world, better known as Helen of Troy – and Clytemnestra, who murdered her husband Agamemnon because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia… It’s a long story, and even telling in at greater length might not clarify the twins’ paternity. Let’s just focus on the drawing. It was one of two versions of Leda which Leonardo developed, but no paintings by him of the subject are known. He doesn’t seem to have painted this composition – but other people did.

This version is in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Kassel (central Germany). It was painted by an artist known as Giampetrino (probably Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, but it’s not certain), who was active between 1495 and 1549, and a member of Leonardo’s circle in Milan. The idea is different again – so again there must have been more drawings. The swan is gone, and the twins are distributed on either side of Leda, with one of them held in her right arm. Raphael did paint a version of the other composition, although it hasn’t been seen since 1625, and may have been destroyed deliberately. I am hoping to write about it next week, but it looks like I’ll run out of time… However, I will eventually show you Raphael’s drawing of it – but not on Monday, when I will be focussing on Leonardo.

Oh, of course – I was going to show the other side of the drawing – the verso. Here Leonardo focusses on warfare, an expertise he had stressed when applying to work at the court in Milan back in 1482. The drawing has been given the title Mortars bombarding a fortress, and RCIN 912337v shows just that, with an all-out assault over the walls from mortars stationed just outside the building. Leonardo sketches the parabolic trajectory of the missiles with apparent ease, with explanations provided by neat, ordered notes in his idiosyncratic mirror writing: contained, controlled, inhuman. I’ll stick to the other side – even if the implications are inconceivable…

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.