Siena: 1300-1350, The Rise of Painting 1300-1350
The National Gallery was waaaaay too busy. Pretty stuffy down in the bowels as well. That said it was gilded, splendid, and moving – full of creative energy bursting out of its form, finding previously unknown things to show. Seeing moments when something new is being discovered, a new way of understanding being expressed, new ways of portraying – I always find it powerful. It makes you want to look around you – where are these things today? Should a new set of wonderful artists appear in some part of the world, almost certainly not this one, out of what things around us would they find their art?
Duccio’s Christ plays with the Madonna’s veil and so symbolises the birth of Renaissance humanism – so it seemed to me anyway – finding living behaviour in a formalised Byzantine icon. I almost said ‘breaking free’ but I think that would probably be a disservice to Byzantine art. This Christ is also a child, and children do this.
Watching bodies take shape in three dimensions – Giotto’s great innovation – solidifying out of the symbolic into the more naturalistic, yes, more playful, more observed, suddenly you get the sense that these are people in the world.
I was struck by the idea of Simone’s paintings of Mary and four saints being in the Siena government offices. To be conducting administration of a city dedicated to Mary, underneath those vivid, extraordinary pictures, which must have seemed very new and astonishing at the time, must have created an equally vivid sense of piety.
Was one effect of the portrayal of the newly human saints, looking very much like the men (and women?) with whom you might transact, to make sainthood itself feel more tangible, to create a typology between being a saint and being a political person? The reverse is also true – it made the portrayal of saints and others political.
Textiles from Turkey, Iran, Cordoba, Mongolia, which provide the distinctive tessellations and intricacies of cloth so distinctive of Sienese painting – fragile scraps of cloth that have somehow made their way across seven centuries – were a reminder, always slightly thrilling, of the commerce between diverse cultures, religions and places throughout history, and how important such transactions are for artistic creativity, the ability to make something new and exciting, fresh.
A Surprising Encounter
On the way to the National Gallery bumped into John, a senior manager for a major competitor, who I last saw in Las Vegas, on Regent Street. Doubly wild because he normally lives in the States. He and his colleagues have all been laid off. A strange start to the day. As always you think ‘what if I’d taken my normal route instead of going a different way and then deciding actually you couldn’t be bothered?’ I suppose the negative side of it is all those serendipitous moments you missed out on by not taking a right you were thinking of taking…
Sinners
Was very good. Having a glorious day, where the community is brought together and lives and revels in itself, in a diptych with a night when it is destroyed by evil, produced a really nice balance – warmest feeling vampire film I’ve ever seen anyway. And not one but two grace notes – one an Inglorious Basterds style revenge on the KKK, the other a rapprochement between the old bluesman and the vampires. I think the whole thing only makes sense with that scene at the end, otherwise the view of religion is too confused. I saw a review say that the characters were one note. Yeah, sure, it’s a vampire flick- it gets a lot into its run time.
Couldn’t believe Washington Phillips’ What Are They Doing In Heaven Today? didn’t roll over the end credits though.
The Skin
Curzio Malaparte’s portrait of Naples at the end of la deuxième guerre mondiale. Very powerful, in that cynical Céline sort of way, which makes it seem like a Bosch painting, or at the very least a Breughel picture.
As well as a sort of monde à l’envers satirical force, i like the dark, mystical power this seems to generate in the corners.
All around us was a glint of eyes in the green shadow, a muted laughter, a flashing of teeth, and a silent gesticulation which clove the rays of light that filter into the alleys of Naples at sunset, a light the color of dirty water at sunset, the ghostly light of the aquarium.
and of the effect of the sirocco:
Even voices sound thick and lazy, and words have an unwonted meaning, a mysterious significance, as though they belonged to a forbidden jargon.
Although I’ve got a strong stomach, even a liking for this sort of stuff, by which I mean like Céline etc, his vignette on ‘the languid hosts of homosexuals’ who ‘descended’ on Naples from over Europe is unpleasant. It may be just that I had finished Alan Hollinghurst’s survey of queer life in London, in the 20th century, whose tropes of disgust and pederasty are matched beat for beat in Malaparte’s depiction. Is it worse than his portrayal of blacks? More importantly, is it worse than his portrayal of anyone?
Generally I would say the purpose, the meaning of satire, is to spare nothing and no one (this slightly deviating from a more traditional punish vice and reward virtue – never really actually what it did… or wanted to do.. anway). And generally Malaparte manages the tone to do so, brutally sympathetic, mocking laughter and caustic pity.
He quotes Theseus at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when, calling on the new moon to rise, he cries, ‘Oh, methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!’ It seems like such a great phrase for the breakdown of the politics of the liberal world order through (so Tim Garton-Ash in the FT), amongst other things, the complete breakdown and infection of the information space.
Watching it lose its grip on everything – senescent fingers attempting to hold fast onto something slipping from its grasp – makes you want to sing out with Theseus in anticipation of the new moon.
Music
has been really about Florence Adooni’s wondrous Ghanaian highlife album – fresh, gay, joyous even, cynicism withers in the face of it, any heavy-hearted dolor evaporates.
also yesterday and today, listening to Melody Maker by Horace Andy, and the Big Youth version, Can You Keep A Secret? Melody Maker is great, but Big Youth transforms anything he’s on. Here, his traditional forceful delivery is also jittery and paranoid – the pieces of paper everwhere seem to evoke dangerous mental disorder or administrative collapse. ‘Can you keep a secret? Can you keep it in your mind?’ In one sense well yes, where else do you keep secrets? But in the sense of this track, it opens up an internal space, your mind as a place to be guarded, hidden from the outside world. All this in front of the haunting wailing of Melody Maker and the eerie background of Row Fisherman, Row by the Congos.
