The National Gallery: Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300 -1350 Part One

Apologies for the tardiness of this post.  We are still in the midst of family illness.

Introduction

   I feel I should have done some research before going to this exhibition, which is a collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum in New York and The National Gallery in London.  It would certainly have helped, for although filled with beautiful and lustrous images, this is a hard exhibition to take in.  As I said to a friend later that day over lunch, there is a limit to the number of panel paintings one can take in at one sitting, and I write as somebody who usually loves this sort of thing, but something, for me at least, was not quite right.

'The Art that shaped the Future'

     For the ignorant, and I think I may include myself in that category, Sienese art of the Middle Ages being a bit esoteric, both galleries have produced introductory videos to the exhibition.

    The Met video features the James Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge of European Painting, Stephan Wolohojian and Caroline Campbell, then Curator of Italian Art at the National Gallery.  At one point Wolohijan said: '[....] in the last years of the 1340s Europe is infested by the Black Death, this great plague that was especially present in Italy, so by the end of our story none of these artists survive."  The implication being they had all died of the plague. This is nonsense. Of the four artists that this exhibition focuses upon, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his brother Pietro may indeed have died of plague, but Duccio died c1318 and Simone Martini died in Avignon in 1344 at the age of 60.  Towards the end of the video Wolohojian stands in front of the beautiful 'Christ Discovered in the Temple' by Simone Martini with its delicate cusped & subcusped Gothic arch and lilting Gothic folds in the clothing of the three figures and says: "No gable, no Gothic form, a truly kind of framed painting, the way you could see made today...." Why do people make such statements like that, when, in this particular context, the exhibition is filled from beginning to end with panel paintings in square frames without 'no gable, or Gothic form'?
     The National Gallery video, grandiloquently subtitled 'The Art that shaped the Future', features, amongst others, a local Sienese artist Chiara Perinetti Casoni, who has it appears a real downer on Byzantine art. (I hate how in order to re-enforce an argument it is done at the expense of something else.)  She seems to speaking from a place of ignorance and one perhaps tainted by a certain anti-clericalism. In common with the other talking heads she presents a view of Byzantine art that is crude and almost unrecognisable.   She implied, for instance, that Byzantine icons were produced solely by religious ie monks.  However, icons were created both in a monastic and secular milieu.  There were professional secular artists in the Empire creating icons in a workshop system that couldn't have been that different from the one operating in Siena. Too much Vasari, and too much Romanticism.  Certainly this whole exhibition is indebted to Georgio Vasari.

     A claim is made in both videos that the icon tradition is 'rigid', 'rote and stale' and yet icons developed over time just like any other pictorial art, for example the introduction of Chrysography or 'striations'.  Contrary to the impression given, the depiction of the Virgin & Child in Orthodox iconography is not tied to the 'Hodegetria' type, which, according to legend, was established by St Luke the Evangelist.  There are other ways depicting the Theotokos and Child eg. 'Panakranta', 'Pelagonitissa' and most importantly in this context the 'Eleusa'.  According to Wiki it is sometimes referred to the in the West as the 'Virgin of Tenderness'.  Perhaps the most famous example of this type is the Vladimirskaya which dates from c 1130.  So claims that the it was the artists of Siena - 'true artists', mind you - those men, 'whose blood boiled' and 'felt strong emotions' who introduced emotion into the dead language of Byzantium have to be taken with a pinch of salt.  Italian artists before Duccio were producing art with emotion; for example there is the work of the Florentine artist Meliore di Jacopo (fl 1255-85).  Two of his paintings spring to mind: The Madonna and Child with Two Angels, c 1270-75, and The Enthroned Madonna and Child of the same period.

     But then, sadly, although this exhibition opens with a room of icons from the city, it underplays the role of those images in the religious and civic life of the contemporaneous Italian city: there were, for example, processions of icons in Rome and in the cities of Lazio to the south, and in Siena itself, where in addition the cathedral and San Niccolo al Carmine possessed miracle-working icons of the Virgin Mary.  In researching for this post I soon realised that I knew very little about the cultural spread of Byzantine art in Northern Italy.  The presence of Byzantine culture in Venice I understood, and in southern Italy and Sicily too where there were then still Greek speaking communities worshipping according the Byzantine rite. 

      What, however, was worse about these productions is that virtually no speaker in either video could bring themselves to say 'Byzantine', 'Gothic' or 'International Gothic'.  And these are the categories, the concepts, after all that exhibition is dealing with. 

     You know, looking at these videos I felt just that bit cheated - I mean, all this people educated - lengthily, expensively, exclusively - talking with all the inanity of a fashion journalist.  PR rules.

    

Sir John Soane Museum

      Just a few snaps which I took of the interior of the Sir John Soane Museum on my last trip to the Smoke.  Hard to think, looking these images just how crowded the museum actually  was.

  The museum is quite the most extraordinary of spaces in London - part house, part office, part museum.  If you haven't been then I strongly suggest you do!  It is a marvel.

August

 August by John Clare (1793-1864)

Harvest approaches with its busy day;
The wheat tans brown, and barley bleaches grey;
In yellow garb the oatland intervenes,
And tawny glooms the valley throng'd with beans.
Silent the village grows, — wood-wandering dreams
Seem not so lonely as its quiet seems;
Doors are shut up as on a winter's day,
And not a child about them lies at play;
The dust that winnows 'neath the breeze's feet
Is all that stirs about the silent street:
Fancy might think that desert-spreading Fear
Had whisper'd terrors into Quiet's ear,
Or plundering armies past the place had come
And drove the lost inhabitants from home.
The fields now claim them, where a motley crew
Of old and young their daily tasks pursue.
The reapers leave their rest before the sun,
And gleaners follow in the toils begun
To pick the litter'd ear the reaper leaves,
And glean in open fields among the sheaves.

'Elements of Architecture' by Rob Krier

     Since my trip to London and Cambridge I've been in a bit of a PoMo mood. So a fortnight or so ago I treated myself to this book, 'Elements of Architecture' by Rob Krier, Leon Krier's older brother.  I remember seeing other books by Rob Krier back in the 80s and really I should have bought them at the time, but to my regret I didn't.

     'Elements of Architecture' was first published in 1982, by Academy Editions, and edited by Dr Andreas Papadakis.  I have the 1992 edition.  It quickly established itself as an important text of architectural Post-Modernism, along with 'Learning from Las Vegas' (1972) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown & Stephen Izenour, and Charles Jenck's 'The Language of Post-Modern Architecture' (1977), becoming a set text in many schools of architecture.  Whereas the other two books are largely are theoretical, 'Elements of Architecture' stands in the tradition of books produced by, say, the likes of James Gibbs and Batty Langley in 18th century England, that engage on both a theoretical and practical level with the reader.  They are meant to be a sourcebook of ideas for the designer, and they are essentially pattern books.  And in that Krier's book is no different.  There is however in contrast to, for example, Gibbs's 'Book of Architecture' Krier presents the reader with a series of ideal, slightly Platonic, types - facades, spaces, plans, stairs, etc.  An attempt, perhaps, to establish new typologies of building.  One is therefore tempted to believe that the work Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760-1834), the French architect and theorist, is a more pertinent comparison here.  For instance, the 'Rudimenta Opera Magnis et Disciplinae' c. 1790, which seems to have least some influence on Krier's graphic presentation and his vigorous drawing style - which is all together engaging.  In fact, one of the delights of this book are the large colour reproductions of Krier's drawings at the beginning.

     But whither Post-Modernism? It was, I suppose, a short efflorescence - lasting - what? - some twenty years or so. In some respects though its presence has remained, and in recent years there has even been a revival of sorts.  In Britain, for example, we have the 'Blue House' by FAT, the 'House for Essex' by FAT and Grayson Perry, the 'Red House, by David Kohn, and the work of Camille Walala, and Adam Nathaniel Furman.  Most of this is toward the playful end of Post-Modernism. In Italy there is the austere work of Paolo Zermani, with its echoes of Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi and the whole Rationalist and Neo-Rationalist schools, and the Scuola Metafisica.
     Sadly, however, I feel this book's lesson will have to learnt all over again by the professionals.  Really, the architectural profession are like the Bourbons: 'They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing'.*

Further reading

'Elements of Architecture', Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1982 &1992

'Rob Krier on Architecture', Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1982

'Architectural Composition' Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1988

'Rob Krier: Architecture and Urban Design' (Architectural Monographs No 30), Academy Editions, 1993

'Urban Space, with examples from the city of Stuttgart' Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1975

*Usually accredited (and wrongly?) to Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord.  Napoleon called Talleyrand 'that turd in a silk stocking'.

The Temple Church

     After leaving the Garden Museum I retraced my steps, walking back along the river downstream to Westminster Bridge and the Tube, and took a train to Temple. 
     Out of the tube I passed Two Temple Place, a house designed by John Loughborough Pearson for the Astors.  Tudoresque, in Portland stone. Not the sort of thing one associates with Pearson but he acquits himself well enough.

      From there up some dark and steep steps into Essex St. Turning left into Devereux Court I found myself, finally, in Middle Temple.  The Temple is really a remarkable part of London - an interlocking series of lanes and courts, intimate and intricate, untrammelled by the worst aspects of 20th century architecture and planning.  It is a 'liberty', a sort of self-governing enclave within the City of London, a place of solicitors and lawyers.  My goal was the Temple Church, situated within the Inner Temple, and by shear luck it was open.

     This was the second Anglican Establishment church of the day - it being a Royal Peculiar (i.e. being outside of normal episcopal jurisdiction).  It was also the second round nave of the trip away.  Like the Round Church in Cambridge, Temple Church it is connected to the religious orders founded during the Crusades.  In this case the Templars and the Hospitallers, who, after the suppression of the Templar order in 1312, were granted the site.
     Temple Church consists of two parts: the circular nave (Transitional Gothic, consecrated 1185) and the Choir which is Early English, vast and serene.  Deliciously cool too, on such a hot day.  It has been speculated (by Diarmaid Mcculloch among others) that the nave which is based not (only) on the Anastasis rotunda, but the second Late Antique centralized structure in Jerusalem: the Dome of the Rock, which was by the 12th century erroneously believed to be the Temple (the 2nd Temple) in which Christ was presented in the flesh. I'm not sure what the consensus is on the origins of the Temple nave.  The website of the Temple Church, does not mention any link. The Temple rotunda however does have a three story internal elevation like the Anastasis, but of a form such as you might find in a grander Norman cathedral or abbey church. (As has the Round Church in Cambridge.) Importantly, the nave contains a number of Templar effigies, and on the exterior sports a very fine Romanesque w door.

     The choir is that rare, almost unique, thing in the British Isles - a 'hall church', that is the vaulted nave and aisles are the same height.  It was consecrated on Ascension Day 1240.  The church was restored by Blore in the 19th century and suffered heavily in the Blitz.  The effigies in the nave were seriously damaged, as were the Purbeck marble piers in the choir.  After the War the piers were replaced without taking down the original Medieval vaults.  Quite the undertaking.  The opportunity was also taken to restore Wren's altarpiece to the church (it had been removed in the 19th century).  A fine thing it is too.  Blore's extensive Gothic Revival decorative scheme was not re-instated, the architect Walter Godfrey designing new furnishings in a Neo-Georgian style.  I think the result is just right.  It's all rather lucid and beautiful.

 

Cecil Beaton at The Garden Museum II

 

'We ate breakfast drank hot drinks and enjoyed the spectacle confronting us of the garlanded house, the ilex trees with bird-cages hanging from their dark moss-green branches in the light of the early morning sun.  The windows of the orangery, still lit from within displayed a word of artificially brilliant colours.  I felt that, as ever, Ashcombe had played up to the occasion.'

     And so, finally, to 'Cecil Beaton's Garden Party'.  This small exhibition, which has been curated by Emma House, and designed by Luke Edward Hall, looks at Beaton as a creator of gardens that act (in a sort Baroque manner) as a unifying element in his life, being not merely the physical backdrop to his rich social life and his photography, but the inspiration to further creativity.  It was perhaps fitting, and purely serendipitous, I hasten to add, that I should have visited the exhibition in Ascot Week.

     Perhaps at this point a little explanation is needed. Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was one of the most important, and influential, British photographers of the mid 20th century.  He was also a designer for stage and film.  He won an 'Academy Award for Costume Design' for his work on Vincent Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of 'Gigi'; and (more importantly for this exhibition) two further Oscars for Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction for George Cukor's 1964 adaptation of Lerner and Loewe's musical 'My Fair Lady'.*  He has been described as a polymath. Beaton was also a dandy, with amazing personal style. An aesthete. An inhabitant of the Beau Monde. He was a (waspish) diarist, and as this exhibition neatly shows, a very keen gardener.  Piquant and perennially fascinating; perhaps his greatest work of art was himself.

     Beaton created two gardens in his life, both in Wiltshire: Ashcombe and Reddish (actually they sound like a - What? - A solicitors? A department store?).  In the interwar years at Ashcombe (he lived there 1930-45) there were flamboyant fetes - all those 'bright young things' nipping around dressed as nymphs and shepherds, and all that. Life at Reddish, where he lived from 1947 until his death in 1980, was perhaps a bit more sedate, but there was a steady stream of 'the great and the good' including the sort that this blog admires: David Hockney & Peter Schlesinger, Sir Roy Strong & Julia Trevelyan Oman, Patrick Proctor.   

      Luke Edward hall has decorated the exhibition space - tin foil in the display cases - with a nod to Beaton's early portraiture when he was heavily influenced by Surrealism and did strange things with Edith Sitwell.  The exhibition gave a rounded sense of Beaton the man - of a life, one might say - with paintings, designs and letters and objects.  Of his work for stage and screen the exhibition concentrated on three works: 'The Chalk Garden' (1955), the opera 'Turandot' (1962-3), and 'My Fair Lady' (1964).  There are number of still photographs - studio shots - of the costumes used on film, including from the famous Ascot scene.  I loved the film poster for 'My Fair Lady' with artwork by Bob Peak - which manages somehow to show Rex Harrison for the randy old goat he was.

 'My garden, is the greatest joy of my life, after my friends.  Both are worth living for.'

    The Garden Museum is, by rights, the sort of place I'd love -  it was in parts fascinating - but in general the place was tired, lost and dirty, in places just downright filthy.   And there there was the 'cooler than thou' attitude of the staff in the café.  It was like intruding upon a private party rather than a public space. 

*  I remember when I first saw 'My Fair Lady'.  It was Christmas Day, BBC1 (they had dropped the Christmas Day circus by then).  It was a minor cultural event, and I was bowled over.

Cecil Beaton at the Garden Museum I

Apologies for the late arrival of this post. Family crisis.

     Wednesday and my first visit to the Garden Museum hard by Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  I walked from Waterloo Station, where people were gathering in their finery for a day at Ascot, along the Thames to Lambeth. I think that part of the embankment beside St Thomas Hospital is the finest bit of riverside we have in central London. 

     The Garden Museum is housed in the former church of St Mary-at-Lambeth - an ancient site.  The tower is late medieval (c1370, when the rest of the church was rebuilt) but the body of the church is 19th century by Philip Hardwick, replacing a much more picturesque structure, which was, in fact until the 19th century a village church.*  Both tower and church are built of Kentish Rag.  The 'Buildings of England' volume on South London, however, says that the arcades and clearstory are medieval but it all felt Victorian to me.  The Historic England website says the nave and aisles are all 19th century and the Survey of London agrees.  Either way the result of Hardwick's restoration is such that it would be very easy to dismiss the whole building as just another Victorian suburban church.**

      That would be a mistake, as given its location St Mary's is, or was, another example of an Anglican establishment church.  After all the church does contain the graves of some six archbishops of Canterbury, and members of their various households.***  Bishops Tunstall and Thirlby are also buried there, as is Admiral Bligh, the antiquary Elias Ashmole, and (most importantly for the subsequent history of the church) the Tradescant family.  (The church is generally rich in monuments.)  All that being so, it strikes me as odd, to say the least, that the church was allowed to become redundant (1972) in the first place and was scheduled for demolition.  For four years church and churchyard fell into decay as it awaited its fate.  Apparently they were to make way for a coach park for Waterloo Station.  That surely can't be true, can it?  Didn't the Church really not care about its patrimony?  The answer to the latter question is probably 'no it did not', and that remains true today.

     The church may not have cared, but Rosemary and John Nicholson did.  In 1976 they visited the churchyard in search of the Tradescant Tomb.  The scene of desolation they encountered galvanised them into action, and later that year it seems Lambeth council restored the graveyard.  In 1978 the Tradescant Trust was founded with the aim of restoring the church as a 'Museum of the History of the Garden'.  In 1981 the museum held its first exhibition, and two years later the Queen Mother opened the new garden - I think that was the now lost knot-garden designed for the museum by the Marchioness of Salisbury.  The rest, so they say, is history.

 

     

 *  The village has been now largely swept away, to be replaced with commercial properties.  The church and palace, and the former rectory and one side of Pratt St appear to be the only things left.

** I can't help that Hardwick, although faithful to the remaining parts of the Medieval structure, souped things up a bit - possibly heightening the nave and aisles and certainly increasingly the pitch of the roof.  Late Medieval roofs are, as a rule, at a much lower pitch.

*** A cursory look at the List of Vicars shows that many were also domestic chaplains to the Archbishop and were destined for higher things - heads of Oxbridge colleges, deaneries, and bishoprics.