Did you make it to the BL exhibition on Henry VIII?

If you did not, you have, of course, missed it now: it ended at the beginning of the month. And if I praise it and describe its riches, that may only serve to increase your frustration. I made it to London only in the last week of the show and what follows is meant not as a review but as a comment on what we can learn from it in terms of future exhibitions.

For this exhibition David Starkey was ‘guest curator’, a designation which could cover a wide spectrum of involvement from the highly engaged to the wilfully insouciant. There were certainly some features of the show that seemed trade-mark Starkey: for instance, the importance, in the early sections on portraits, with the captions attempting to read from the image an insight into the sitter. The exhibition, it must be said, was uneven in its chronological focus, with Wives Three to Six seemingly crammed into the last section, and Catherine of Aragon and her nemesis occupying the (English royal) lion’s share of the space. That, perhaps, reflects both a desire to shape the popular imagination, reiterating the now well-tried line that Henry’s first marriage lasted longer than all the others put together, but also to reflect a popular understanding in which the cataclysmic events of the 1530s were the pivotal moment of the reign. To judge from the evening I was there, and from what else I have heard, the show was certainly a success in terms of number of visitors through the doors. Which is all the more surprising considering what was, for me, the most significant feature of this display.

Being in a library, books were always going to feature heavily in the exhibition, and with that comes well-known difficulties. Books tend to be small items, in scripts illegible to many, around which people cram without quite knowing what it is they are supposed to be seeing. I would not suggest that the exhibition succeeded completely in overcoming those difficulties but what it certainly did do was make the most of these problematic objects. Drawing on the work of James Carley and others, the show emphasised the interest of Henry’s own marginalia in his books. It did this not just be noting their presence in an exhibit, but by providing replica pages next to the item, with a moving light-source literally to highlight the elements to which our attention, like the king’s before, was being drawn. I had not experienced this type of display before and it worked. At times, it was too ambitious: in one corner of the exhibition, where the light was supposed to rise and dim around you to connect a page with the objects shown nearby with which it related, I just could not work out what was meant to happen.  More generally, however, it acheived the tricky task of helping these exhibits accessible without ‘dumbing down’ their content.

It made me think that this could be a prototype for future exhibitions. My dream: let’s have one on Henry IV and his sons, to coincide with the centenary of the first Lancastrian’s death in four years’ time. There are, in the BL, many manuscripts associated with him, with his sons, particularly John and Humfrey, as well as with his grandson. And, as I can point out where Humfrey, duke of Gloucester, annotated his books, the technology they have used could be put to good effect. Is anybody at the BL reading and willing to take up this challenge?

The Nachleben of Holbein

Last week saw me at Windsor, to see the exhibition to celebrate the quincentenary of the accession of the tyrant, Henry VIII. If one undertook the trip and paid the entry fee to the Castle just to see this small exhibition, and did not stay to stand in awe within the splendour of St George’s Chapel, or to marvel at the quality of paintings amassed in the royal apartments, one would be disappointed. There are no revelations or new insights into the career of the second Tudor, and, in several instances, original works by Holbein are substituted by later prints or copies. That, in itself, though, set me thinking.

For someone more familiar with the tale of the late recognition in England of the artistry of the ‘Italian primitives’, what struck me was the recurrent high regard in which the German father of English portraiture, Hans Holbein, has been held. ‘Recurrent’ is probably a better term than ‘continuing’ would be: the fortunes of the ‘great book’ of Holbein’s drawings suggest a disrupted journey. In royal hands in the mid-sixteenth century, it was in the collection of Lord Lumley by the 1580s. On his death, it passed to Henry, Prince of Wales, the ill-starred son of the first Stuart. It thus returned into royal ownership, only to be given away by Henry’s younger brother, Charles I. In the late 1620s, he was willing to part with it, in return for a ‘little St George’, which happened to be by Raphael. The fact that the king parted with a whole set of Holbein drawings for this one small image — now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. – perhaps helps us calibrate the distance in standing between the two artists, in the eye, at least, of one distinguished collector.

But the Holbein book was hardly thrown into the outer darkness: it passed into the hands of Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, himself a respected and fashion-leading connoisseur. After the Restoration, the drawings were, as it were, repatriated, becoming part of the collection of Charles II. Even then, though, its adventures were not over for, it is said, in the early eighteenth century, it lay discarded until ‘re-found’ in 1727 in Kensington Palace. My suspicious mind does wonder whether this last episode may be one of those myths of loss which can accrue to objects later considered precious and which actually come to form part of their mystique. The claim of underrating can, on occasion, be used to justify a change in the status of the object and that certainly happened in this case: the book was dismantled and, under the guidance of George Vertue, the individual drawings mounted and displayed.

In 1675, it was said that ‘the book has long been a wanderer’ but perhaps its very travels helped it gain a reputation for its artist. The drawings are apparently mentioned in art treatises from c. 1630, soon after it had reach Arundel’s collection. And, certainly, the display presently at Windsor demonstrates that Holbein’s images were considered worthy of copying in the seventeenth century: for example, Robert White produced an engraving of Katherine of Aragon, inscribing it with the words ‘H. Holbein pinxit’. The stimulus to reproduction may, in part, have been the identity of the sitter, but the inscription also suggests that Hoblein’s name was considered known or worthy to be known.

Indeed, Holbein’s reputation could, at times, be a source of misattribution. George Vertue, whom we have already mentioned, painted a portrait of Edward VI in 1745, with the frame stating in gold letters ‘after Hans Holbein 1545′. The original, on display upstairs in Windsor (and on-line), is, in fact, no longer considered to be by Holbein; its present designation is either ‘Flemish School’ or ‘William Scrots’. In other words, the standing in which Hoblein came to be held left some of his contemporaries in the shadows.

What is the moral of this tale? Perhaps it is this: we may tend, at times, to imagine that our own tastes reflect those of our forefathers and assume that the celebration of Holbein in the Windsor exhibition and in earlier ones, like that at the National Portrait Gallery in 1994 (from which I have taken some of the information above) or the ‘Dynasties’ show at the Tate the following year, is the latest stage in unbroken interest, dating back to the artist’s own lifetime.  When we begin to realise that this is not quite so, we are liable to replace that ahistorical view with a narrative of the ‘re-discovery’ of the ‘Renaissance’, in which there is a path — not always easy but definitely visible — from forgetfulness to remembrance. But the information we have suggests something less linear and more interesting: a pattern of knowledge and ignorance across and within generations.  The vagaries of attention shift back and forth and can only with injustice to the subject be simplified into a ‘direction’. And, indeed, moments of low regard, as might be imputed to Charles I’s giving away of the ‘great book’, could actually spur others to a better appreciation.

Tom Phillips’ Dante

Tom Phillips, Dante in his Study

The frontispiece of Tom Phillips’ artistic rendition of Dante’s Inferno seems to have received iconic status in the years since its appearance in 1985. I have seen it displayed at exhibitions, reproduced in scholarly volumes and in newspapers, as well as appearing on websites including the blog of the energetic and learned Kenneth Clarke, Miglior Acque.

I used it myself in a lecture last weekend at a well-attended study-day on Medieval Italy at the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. My purpose was to illustrate the latterday Anglo-Saxon fascination with the dark forest of Dante’s mind, which he have inherited from our Victorian great-grandparents.  I took the opportunity, however, to do something, which seemed to be appreciated by the audience and which I am repeating here. An icon is a work that transcends its immediate purpose and production but, in the process, it can suffer by losing its context. It has become easy to overlook Phillips’ ultimate source for his image: a fresco by Luca Signorelli in the Cathedral of Orvieto.

Luca Signorelli, Dante in his Study

Signorelli’s draughtsmanship, with his tendency to rather weather-worn human figures, may not be to everybody’s liking. The image I have reproduced, in fact, takes the depiction of Dante out of its own original context, surrounded by grotesques and four grisaille images of scenes from the Comedy. But the juxtaposition of it with Tom Phillips’ better-known picture can, I think, remind us of the freshness of his image, precisely by showing us where he was imitative and where not. He takes the hunched, engrossed character and makes him more noble, with sharper outline. He transforms the nature of the book, so it pays homage to his ‘Dux’. He adds the intriguing vista. Placing them together, I think, helps explain to us why the later image is becoming an icon.

The Art of Book-Burning

I have been fascinated for some years now with the burning of books. I can pinpoint the moment when my interest was kindled: I was wandering the galleries of Louvre and stopped before a large, not highly accomplished, canvas. It was Eustace Le Sueur’s Paul Preaching at Ephesus, painted in 1649 (a couple of months after, on the other side of the Channel, a king had lost his head); it formerly hung in Notre Dame. Paul stands at the centre of the picture with, in front of him, the locals rushing to tear up their books and throw them onto a small but lively fire at bottom-centre of the image. I was standing, in this temple to high culture, before a celebration of biblioclasm.

Eustace Le Sueur, The Preaching of St Paul at Ephesus (Louvre, Paris)

The episode from Acts has proven a fairly rich vein for similar images. The National Gallery in London has what appears to be a preliminary version of Le Sueur’s painting. Several decades before Le Sueur, the Italianate Dutch artist, Maerten de Vos, painted the same scene (now hanging in the excellent Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels). A couple centuries later, Gustave Doré, most famous for his illustrations of Dante, included a similar depiction in the scenes he selected from the Bible. In all of these, there is the anachronism that bound codices, not papyri rolls, are what are being thrown onto the fire. And all naturally follow The Book in seeing the burning of books as a virtuous act.

What brought this information flooding back into my mind the other day was  an article in The Times that my fiancée, knowing my curious interest, brought to my attention. The article is about the Nazi destruction of books in May 1933, the precursor to Kristallnacht five years later, and (according to the article) a staging post on the road to the Holocaust. The inspiration for the article is a book dedicated to the incident which was published last year (though The Times describes it as new). It is by a German journalist, Volker Weidermann, and called Das Buch der verbranntem Bücher. I would not want to judge the book by this article; perhaps that can be done another day. Instead, what I wish to highlight is the mismatch between the article and the headline the sub-editor gave it.

The article itself expresses the accustomed shock at the destruction of Jewish and other ‘degenerate’ books, and I took part in that shock as a reader. I instinctively recoiled at the mention of universities actively condoning the book-burnings by attending the occasions. But, then again, such connivance was hardly a twentieth-century invention: Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan was honoured by being burnt in the quadrangle of the Bodleian here in Oxford in 1683, thirty-two years after its publication. Our shock at biblioclasm is  our culturally-conditioned reaction  but it can hold us back from asking historical questions of the phenomenon. It may also give book-burning a power that, most often, the act itself does not have.

What struck me most in The Times’ article was the description of Weidermann’s own buying up of the books proscribed by the Nazis and his discovery that one bibliophile in Munich had ’spent all his life and money collecting 15,000 first editions of the banned books’. That is a huge number of texts that were banned — and that survived the act of destruction. It would be interesting to know if any work had been completely extinguished in those fires: the likelihood is low. If the Nazis, with their religion of the automated, their science of inhuman organisation, believed that their bonfires could actually end the life of books, they under-estimated the ability of technology to subvert their plans. This is the point captured in the title of the article: ‘The Vanity of the bonfires’.

It is a bitter irony, of course, that it proved easier to destroy a people and whole communities than it did texts. The Nazis were not the first to prove this point — there was a history at least five hundred years old before them. It is not fashionable now to talk of a ‘print revolution’ but that transformation of information technology from individual manuscript to replicated print did change the dynamic between text and book-burner. Even in a manuscript culture, a text could survive the burning of both book and author. But, in print culture, the ability to ensure complete destruction became increasingly difficult. To my mind, the anachronism in the paintings of Le Sueur and de Vos, depicting bound books in front of Saint Paul, speaks to this: it takes the volumes of their own generations and transposes them to a golden era when their destruction could actually have been achieved. And it is surely not accidental that interest in this biblical scene arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as confessional strife lit bonfires across Christendom.

My point is this: the age when book-burning could succeed in destroying knowledge is an Arcadian past. The bonfires may be an act of hate, a symbol of destruction — but, most often, they demonstrate the impotence of the powerful in the face of pen. If book-burnings do have an ability to crush learning, it may not be because of the act itself, but because our reaction is to be shocked and cowed. The despairing on-lookers add fuel to the fire.

From Flanders to Florence: an artistic ‘dialogue’

I was in Florence last week, speaking at what proved to be a successful conference on the Italian Renaissance and the British Isles — the first, we hope, of several. While I was in that inspirational city, I had a couple of hours when I was able to cross to the Oltrarno and visit the Palazzo Pitti, to catch in its final days a small but impressive exhibition on ‘Firenze e gli antichi Paesi Bassi 1430 – 1530, dialoghi tra artisti.’ The artistic commerce between the Mediterranean and northern Europe has become a fashionable area of research in recent years and this exhibition demonstrated both how fruitful an area of investigation it can be and how it is ensnared with potential pitfalls.

The strengths of the show, as well as its evidential problems, are well encapsulated by the first display encountered in the gallery. It brings together three works of art, all of outstanding quality. The basic comparison is between Jan van Eyck’s small image of ‘St Jerome in his Study‘ (now housed in Detroit) and Ghirlandaio’s fresco of the same subject, usually seen in its original location of the church of Ognissanti, on the opposite side of the Arno, where it vies for attention with Botticelli’s ‘St Augustine.’ Placing the van Eyck and the Ghirlandaio together brings home the undoubted debt of the latter work to the former in the structure of its composition. Ghirlandaio must have been able to study van Eyck’s oil painting, which, therefore, can be identified with painting of that description in the Medici inventory of 1492 (priced at 30 florins). There is an undeniable and remarkable association. The question arises of how the van Eyck reached Florence, and the third painting on display tries to provide an explanation — but succeeds only in demonstrating the problems inherent in this type of research. It is another famous and powerful work, a portrait by van Eyck usually identified as Niccolò Albergati, cardinal and papal diplomat. However, the name of the sitter is provided only in a seventeenth-century description, which hardly makes it definite (though, it might be asked, why should an art-dealer two hundred years later make up such an identification). In the late twentieth century, doubts were expressed about whether this was Albergati, and other possible sitters mooted. The exhibition at the Pitti sides with the traditional identification, but on grounds that can not convince. Van Eyck’s ‘Jerome’ displays on the saint’s desk a letter on which the address is legible: ‘al reverendissimo padre e signore in Cristo, Signor Girolamo, cardinale presbitero della Santa Croce di Gerusalemme.’ It has been assumed that, as Jerome was not in fact cardinal of the church of Santa Croce di Gerusalemme in Rome, this must refer to the wearer of the red hat at the time of painting, who would have been Albergati. What this exhibition suggests is that there is a similarity between the depiction of the face of Jerome and that of Albergati in the portrait. Personally, I can not see this association: the round-faced, late-middle-aged sitter (whoever he was) has little in common with the smooth-faced, sleepy Jerome who, it might be said, is painted with less attention to detail than the books that cluster in the cupboard behind him. As for the letter sitting on his desk, its address might well refer to the saint, sometime hermit and long-time inhabitant of Jerusalem, city of the Holy Cross, without us guessing at another explanation.

In other words, one direct link – between the two ‘Jeromes’ of van Eyck and Ghirlandiao – is irrefutably established, but let us be satisfied with that, rather than imagining that we can rush ahead and find a ready explanation for the sets of quandaries the relevation naturally raises. That is a principle which is worth carrying with us when we look at other exhibits brought together in this Pitti gallery.

The second set of exhibits centres on yet another Low Countries painting of stupendous beauty: Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Entombment of Christ‘ (Uffizi, Florence), with its statuesque scene played out on a remarkably realised carpet of leaves and flowers. It is presented in the Pitti beneath a terracotta ‘Resurrection‘ by Andrea del Verrocchio, with the suggestion that this may have been the original layout of the altarpiece in the Medicean chapel in the villa in Careggi. If this were so, it would be a notable combination of different media (leaving aside the contrast of artistic styles) which might make us think again about some aspects of Renaissance interiors. The exhibition groups with van der Weyden’s painting a 1470s missal with a full-page illuminated miniature of the same subject, but the similarities are too generic and the differences too notable to make a direct association convincing. More striking is the similarity with a scene from a predella by Bartolomeo di Giovanni (San Marco, Florence) which is, indeed, close in composition to van der Weyden’s painting — but the lines of association are complicated by the fact that, as the catalogue explains, both appear to echo another predella scene (now in Munich) by Fra’ Angelico. That reference, in fact, is a rare reference to a possible two-way exchange of ideas: though the title refers to a ‘dialogue’, it seems for the most part a one-way conversation in which the Flemish did all the talking, and the Florentines rarely got a word in edgeways.

The show goes on with an array of impressive images drawn from a wide catchment area of present locations, with again and again clear and direct links made. Only once, at the end of the display, does the level of argument slide down from proving connexions to proposing ‘influence’ — a descent into the speculative conditioned, one presumes, by the fact that the tondo on show is from the Pitti’s own collection: a fine Filippo Lippi of ‘The Virgin and Child’ in which the construction of space is said to be ‘an indicator of Flemish influence’. Too general a similarity to have much meaning, in my view. More generally, however, the quality of this exhibition persuades the visitor. For the viewer, there is a fascination in playing high-brow snap, tempered for some — on the basis of conversations I overheard — with a tinge of disappointment at catching Old Masters making ’simple copies.’ (Though, in some cases, like the Ghirlandaio ‘Christ in Benediction‘, it might arguably surpass its portotype, in this case Hans Memling’s depiction). As I have suggested, the main question which dogs the meticulous work which underpins the exhibition is the old one of what constitutes sufficient evidence to prove an association. When, so to speak, can one shout ’snap’, without risking a high forfeit.

To achieve the level of certainty we should hope we can gain, we need to move beyond the images themselves and consider their immediate context. The question is often not so much ‘did B emulate A’, as ‘could B have known the particular work of A that seems to be emulated?’. That is to say, to reach a conclusion we need to look at not at the end-point as much as at the lines of communication, the methods by which artistic motifs travelled. This exhibition does not set itself the challenge of investigating such matters, though it does display drawings by both Andrea del Verrocchio and Piero di Cosimo which show them recording for themselves northern images, something which, of course, became much easier and more frequent in the age of print. But the wider matter of the availability of images is one which would be a worthy subject for an exhibition as scholarly and as enthralling as that which I will remember for a long time having visited in the stately surroundings of the Palazzo Pitti one autumn morning late in October 2008.

When was the Renaissance?

When was the Renaissance? It is an old question which came to mind as I was walking around the Queen’s Gallery at Holyrood House last week. The temporary exhibition ‘The Art of Italy: the Renaissance‘, is one half of a larger show of works from the Royal Collection, previously presented in London, where it also covered the Baroque. In the smaller but elegant space available in Edinburgh, the display allows us to muse on some memorable paintings, as well as drawings and a very few books. What struck me was that nearly all the items are datable to the sixteenth century: they include well-known portraits by Parmigianino, Agnolo Bronzino and Lorenzo Lotto, as well as more enigmatic images by Titian and Lodovico Pozzoserrato (whose Italianised name hides his Netherlandish identity); the oldest work was a copy of the masterpiece published by Aldus Manutius from his Venetian press in 1499, the illustrated Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Where, I wondered, was the Renaissance of the quattrocento, the fifteenth century, that is home to me?

It is not as if the Royal Collection lacks art from fifteenth century Italy. I remember, about fifteen years ago now, having, in effect, a private view of Andrea Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar at Hampton Court – they had, at that point, been removed from the public rooms, but, being a pushy student, I asked to see them. It was a memorable half hour in front of images remarkable for their classicising style and sheer magnitude, with an equally interesting history to tell as one of the purchases of Charles I from the sale of the Gonzaga treasures. Perhaps the Mantegna are considered too frail to travel for exhibitions, but there are other quattrocento works available as well in the Royal Collection. The Queen can feast her eyes on a work by Benozzo Gozzoli, best known for his lively frescoes in the Medici Palace in Florence. Up the road and to the right from there, the convent of San Marco hides within its tranquil, contemplative walls the work of Fra Angelico, also represented among Her Majesty’s artworks. The exhibition could also have branched out into ceramics and included the bust by Guido Mazzoni of a laughing child, owned by Henry VII as one of the first Italian Renaissance items in the English royal collection. But all were absent, leaving out at least a century of what I would consider Renaissance art.

The Royal Collection’s decision implicitly to define the Renaissance as sixteenth century is in many ways a return to an old fashion. Many would now use the terms High Renaissance and (though highly problematic) Mannerist to describe the trends in art of the generations of Michelangelo and his followers. But, to the nineteenth century, this is where it truly was: the art of the quattrocento – Masolino and Massaccio, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna himself – constituted ‘the Primitives’, before the grace and supposed perfection of the early cinquecento so influentially by Vasari. Few, however, would consider that we should return to those designations or that periodisation.

The real question, of course, is whether it matters. After all, the Royal Collection have provided a pleasurable exhibition which fits into the space available. In many ways, it does not matter or, rather, should not – but there are two current issues which do give it some import. In the first place, it relates to the academic division between ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’, which, in history departments tends to fall around the year 1500. As someone who studies both sides of that divide and who sometimes describes himself an expert in that part of the Middle Ages called the Renaissance, this is one more example of a tendency which reinforces an unfortunate separation which we should be working instead to undermine.

This, though, is about more than the relatively unimportant matter of how academic departments choose to organise themselves. What is also at stake is how we perceive historical ‘progress.’ There are surely few, if any, historians who would admit to believing that there was some definable shift from ‘medieval’ to ‘early modern’, a moment or simple process moving from one era of society to another. The passage from past to present is more complex, and much less about a linear vector of development, than that would suggest. But I would want to take this further and to warn against making too close an association between different cultural ‘movements’ or phenomena. Historiography can provide many ‘Renaissances’, particularly clustered in the sixteenth century but – as the case of Italy shows – not confined to that time-period. In popular textbooks, the impression can be given that those Renaissances, usually defined by country, share an identity, as if it were a baton-race from nation to nation. It is wise to be aware of the evident links between these phenomena, but all the more essential to appreciate the disconnections and the distance between them. In the end, we can use the concept as we wish, either confining our own use to the sixteenth century or allowing to range from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in chosen contexts – just as long as we recognise we are always constructing ‘Renaissances’ for ourselves rather than expressing some ineffable reality.

In short, it is tidier to have a Renaissance confined to the sixteenth century and certainly less complicated to imagine it was a single phenomenon which manifested itself across Europe. But, in this case, I am on the side of messiness.

Painting a human tragedy: Caravaggio in Dublin

Last week saw me at the Society for Renaissance Studies International Conference at Trinity College, Dublin. It was a successful event with many stimulating papers – I particularly enjoyed the session on Natural Disasters organised by Trevor Dean of Roehampton. However good a conference, one always finds some time to escape and explore and, though I have been to Dublin several times to work with the manuscripts and teach palaeography workshops, I have never visited the National Gallery, to which I made a pilgrimage on the Friday, only to be lured back there the next day.

It is an interesting collection with some striking images but the one which held me under its spell was Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ. Caravaggio has the ability to see afresh, to alter – in every sense – the viewer’s perspective. When I am in Rome, each time I try to see the Conversion of Saint Paul in Santa Maria del Popolo; the Taking of Christ has the same arresting quality.

The action depicts the moment that Judas kisses Jesus, but hardly has his lips touched his master’s cheek than the soldier grabs his prisoner by the shoulder. There is a powerful dynamism to the picture, a sense of hurtling motion that pushes the subjects off-centre, and pulls the viewer with it. At the centre of the painting is the armour of the soldier with his arm outstretched, glistening in the moonlight.

But the fascination for me about this painting is the depiction of the central character, Judas Iscariot. Christ, it must be said, is a pallid, nearly sepulchral, figure, beside a Judas who is depicted with care for his humanity. This Judas’ best days have passed, he is corpulent and balding. And, with the veins raised on the hand which grips Jesus, he is stressed, conscious of what he is doing. Caravaggio brings home to us that this image depicts the tragedy of two men, a double tragedy of which the Son of God was surely aware, as he knits together his hands, sorrowful at what is unfolding.

It is well-known that Caravaggio adds another feature to the painting, a self-portrait. He is at the right, balanced against the fleeing and screaming disciple at the extreme left. He crowds in with the soldiers, holding above their heads a lamp which, however, proves ineffectual: it sheds no light on the event. So, this artist, remembered for his raucous sins as well as for his painterly skill, places himself among those who have made Christ suffer, and modestly implies that he has no insight into the event – a modesty which is undercut by the piercing revelation that he provides.