Charles I at The Royal Academy

God gives not his kings the stile of Gods in vaine:

For on his throne his sceptre do they sway....

The Basilike Doron, King James I & VI

....."when it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-rate masters, I have never seen such a large number in one place as in the Royal palace." These are the words of Rubens written in 1629 after a visit to the Palace of Whitehall, the locus of Charles I's astounding art collection. At the Royal Academy that collection, which was dispersed after the king's execution, has been re-assembled and the effect is almost overwhelming in both its scale and the intensity of its vision.  Indeed Charles's political and cultural vision was bold.  Centred, fatally perhaps, on his court rather than the larger (and inherently riskier) theatre of the public realm - he undertook no progresses like his predecessor Elizabeth I had done so successfully - it combined Neo-Platonism and Aristotelian theory of spectacle, manifested in a cultural, political and religious gesamtkunstwerk, that attempted to symbolize and embody an arcadian vision of Britain drawing on ancient myth and history.  Britain reunited under the Stuarts for the first time since its ancient mythic past, was once again an Empire.  And Charles, appointed by God, ruled as his image on earth.

     "No other English monarch was so intensely concerned with his own image, and in the splendid series of masques that [Inigo] Jones created for him in the 1630s, we may see the royal imagination fashion through the art of his master Surveyor as with Van Dyck and Rubens an ideal realm and ideal self."* 

     Except, as we know, it all fell apart into rancour and Civil War and the eventual execution of the king. This, therefore, is the sort of exhibition that brings with all sorts of cultural and political baggage and the reign of Charles I still has the power to excite political debate here in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

     All that said, Charles was the greatest Royal art collector (yet) in our history.  Not only did he secure the great Gonzaga collection from Mantua, and send out his agents to scour the Continent for art coming on to the market, he was also a major patron of contemporary art.  All of this drew artists to Britain; Le Sueur, Honthorst, Jordeans and most importantly Orazio Gentilische (and later, briefly, his daughter Artmesia); Rubens and, most importantly of them all, Van Dyck. All three produced work on a monumental scale for Charles and his wife Henrietta Maria.

     It fell to Van Dyck, however, who I've long admired, to capture both the culture, and define the image of the king, that we most associate with Charles's reign. And it is perhaps the most striking of Van Dyck's images of the King, 'Charles I in three Positions', that confronts the visitor in the first gallery. Painted in order to provide an image of the King for the Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini in Rome to sculpt a bust from. Iconic is a far too heavily used term in our culture at this moment (it's just bloody lazy), however in this instance I think Van Dyck has created an equivalent to an icon, a Neo-Platonic ideal image of translucent beauty, and flickering, sensual paint surface.  That same calm poise of the sensuous and the spiritual is present in Van Dyck's other, monumental, paintings of the king, as though in his body all things can find their resolution, their sublimation.

     There is however nothing half-hearted about Charles I's taste, which was mainly interested in Northern Renaissance, and Late Renaissance and Baroque art from Italy, particularly the Veneto. These are full-bloodied, intense and at times transcendent works of art. Nothing 'nice'.  I'm thinking in particular here of Rubens' swirling, overwhelming Baroque painting 'Minerva protects Pax from Mars' or 'Peace and War'.  An immense tour-de-force. In the foreground is a satyr proffering the bounties of nature to some bewildered, if not downright frightened children. Right to be frightened too of a satyr, a nature spirit for neither the spiritual or natural are 'nice', but fraught with the unpredictable and the transformative (which itself brings danger). Nothing could be further from Matthew Arnold's idea of culture as 'sweetness and light', tempting as that sounds. Anyway, to be honest 'War and peace' is not the sort of work I like; I was much happier, I have to confess, looking at the Northern Renaissance masters such as Holbein, and although the exhibition did not change my views in that regard it did give me an increased appreciation of the achievement of men such as Rubens.  It is an art not at all to be doubted.
     In contrast to those large works that in my memory dominate the exhibition, the penultimate gallery explores the contents of the king's cabinet.  This is a schatzkammer of delight, a crowding of miniature treasures, and for me the culmination of the exhibition, except that the final room held for me one last, absolute delight: a late self portrait by van Dyck.
     The culminative effect, as I have said, was pretty overwhelming and an hour so in the crowded, darkened galleries left us reeling, I for one possibly suffering from Stendhal Syndrome, and we staggered out into the courtyard for fresh air.

* 'The King's Arcadia: Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court' John Harris, Stephen Orgel & Roy Strong (Arts Council Exhibition catalogue) 1973