With Ruskin in Florence

 

Guide books, let’s face it, are dull. They are all too frequently reduced to lists of things to see, and all too often they repeat each other. Many of them give the impression they were written by AI, repeating the same anecdotes. Certainly that’s what I felt on my most recent visits to Florence.

Of course, the problem with Florence, perhaps the biggest challenge, is that it is a heavyweight cultural destination. I don’t know anyone who has seen every room in the Uffizi. As for churches, they are numberless. Florence is not for the faint-hearted, especially if they don’t know their Gothic from their Renaissance (Florence is mainly restricted to these two, but that doesn’t make things easier for the average tourist).  

That’s why reading Ruskin seemed so inviting. Ruskin never minces his words; of all the guides, Ruskin is the one who makes a direct appeal to your emotions, and the only one who is prepared to say some of the prized cultural objects are dreadful. I like a guide with opinions – at least I can disagree with them!

It seemed, therefore, a good way to see Florence to have Ruskin’s volume Mornings in Florence (1874) in hand. After all, who could resist such a direct openinng line?

If there is one artist, more than another, whose work it is desirable you should examine in Florence, supposing that you care for old art at all, it is Giotto. [Mornings in Florence, First Morning]

Notice the throwaway remark “supposing that you care for old art at all”, as if to say, you are already part of an elite group of art appreciators. Ruskin, in other words, is the flattering, knowledgeable tour guide, who promises to show you the best sites, without you having to worry about the dross. There is far too much to see in Florence, anyway, so you need someone to say which things to focus on. Even the legendary Guida Rossa, the definitive Italian art guide, does not include detals of all the altarpieces, chapel statues, and incidental bulidings, despite its 847 pages devoted to the city of Florence (in my edition, from 2016).

So we strode purposefully, with Ruskin in hand, into Santa Croce, one of the three largest churches in Florence, and headed for Giotto. As instructed by Ruskin, we ignored the roof of the church (it “has no vaultings at all, but the roof of a farm-house barn”). We don’t look at the famous Renaissance tomb of Marsuppini by Desiderio di Settignano, as “very fine of its kind; but there the drapery is chiefly done to cheat you … It is wholly vulgar and mean in cast of fold.” No, we press on to see the Giotto chapels. Similarly, we are told we shouldn’t even think about Ghirlandaio’s astonishing frescoes in Santa Maria Novella (“it is all simply – good for nothing … Ghirlandaio was to the end of his life a mere goldsmith”).

Having dismissed in this way both the early Renaissance of Ghirlandaio, and the full 16th-century Renaissance, what does Ruskin see in Giotto (and Cimabue, his contemporary?) What matters for Ruskin is that their work expresses religious belief! Such a view would be unthinkable in art criticism today. The art historian might praise an artist for their grasp of perspective, for their use of colour, even, at times, for their social criticism, but never for conveying a sense of the divine. According to Ruskin, Giotto taught three things: “You shall see things as they are … And the least with the greatest, because God made them … but also the golden gate of Heaven itself, open and the angels of God coming down from it.” [Second Morning]. Well, I saw the Giottos, and I didn’t see the gate of Heaven open.  

If to be a tourist is to imagine yourself, for a brief moment, as the original audience saw a work, then Ruskin is your ideal guide. The word “cheat” is very significant: for all his immersion in art history, Ruskin was never beyond being a tourist, despite more than 15 lengthy visits to the continent, over a period of more than 50 years. Nonetheless, he reveals in his letters and diaries how he was constantly concerned at all times of the presumed danger of being cheated. For Ruskin, most Italians he encountered had no concept of art, and could only be influenced by money.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on Mornings in Florence. It originated as a series of lectures, and was never intended for publication at all, but, it would appear, was faithfully transcribed by Ruskin’s student Alexander Wedderburn, who attended each lecture. The transcript was subsequently published, with, it would appear, minimal involvement from the author; this explains why Ruskin frequently admits he cannot be bothered to find a reference, for example:

And in one place (I have not my books here, and cannot refer to it) I have even defined sculpture as light-and-shade drawing with the chisel [Val d’Arno]

When I read this kind of thing, I start to think that Ruskin’s references to paintings or sculptures that I cannot locate might not be my error, but perhaps indications of his poor memory. For example, he spends a long time talking about works by Giotto that I can see are located in Padua rather than Florence.

I’m somewhat reassured to find I am not alone in finding Mornings in Florence distasteful. Henry James, for example, was shocked by it:

 I had really been enjoying the good old city of Florence, but I now learned from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have gone about with an imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghirlandaio in the choir of that very church [Sta Maria Novella]; but it appeared from one of the little books [Mornings in Florence] that these frescoes were as naught. I had much admired Santa Croce and had thought the Duomo a very noble affair; but I had now the most positive assurance I knew nothing about them. After a while, if it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, not the stupid Brunelleschi, not the vulgar Ghirlandaio [Henry James, Italian Hours]

Had Ruskin lost his critical faculties by this stage (Italian Hours dates from 1874, while his major works, such as Modern Painters, date from 1843)? Perhaps, as Kenneth Clark states, Ruskin’s strength and weakness was lack of self-awareness. He is insightful and objectionable in successive sentences. It was “sheer self-indulgence of him to give his opinion on every single topic” [Ruskin Today, 1964]. Certainly, from my experience in Florence, Ruskin is to be enjoyed at arm’s length, with the reader’s critical faculties fully intact, questioning every sentence. There may be gems there, but they perhaps reveal more about Ruskin and 19th-century taste than eternal truths about art. 

Anna Ancher

 

Brondum's Dining room, Skagen, 1891

Anna Ancher gets a solo exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery - apparently, her first solo exhibition in the UK. When you visit Skagen, where she was born and lived, you immediately get the impression of a group of artists, living and working together; Anna as one of several contemporaries. Consequently, it was strange to see Anna Ancher in a solo show here, detached from the Skagen artists. Seeing work by the other group members would make it easier to form ideas of how Ancher was (or was not) unique. Her profile portraits, for example, are very much in the group style, as can be seen from the photograph above.

At her best, Ancher captured some lovely effects of light, notably in the best painting in the show, Sunlight in the Blue Room, 1891. 

But it’s difficult to make much of a judgement on the basis of the works exhibited. For me, one of the most impressive works by Ancher was actually a joint painting with her partner Michael: Appraising the Day’s Work, 1883. This painting is in the catalogue, and is held at the Skagen Museum, so why wasn’t it in the show? It seems to demonstrate very clearly the relationship between the two, sharing ideas. This painting surely, answers the question posed by the catalogue, how Anna Ancher was able to be a full-time female artist around 1900? As the catalogue states, “One wonders whether her success would have been possible without the help and support of the male painters in the artist colony, including her husband” [catalogue, p18]. But for this show, you would hardly know her husband, or the other artists in the Skagen group, existed. It seemed very strange to pull just one artist out of this group  - not all of them male – as they painted and exhibited together. Instead, we get four works by women contemporaries – hardly enough to get much of an idea. What about Nordic contemporaries, such as Hanna Hirsch Pauli, who currently has a solo exhibition at the Hirschsprung Gallery in Copenhagen? Did Ancher not see any contemporaries?

As a result, we are left with a small collection, which doesn’t give us enough evidence to make a decision about Ancher. Apart from her ability to capture light, what else is there? A girl in the Garden in summertime 1914 could be a work from any number of provincial collections from the early years of the 20th century. The exhibition raises our hopes about a large number of rough sketches recently discovered, with only two on display, it’s difficult to get any idea of how talented Ancher was in this area. It’s not easy, either, to see much of a progression in the work. There are two paintings of removing feathers from fowl from 1902 and 1904, but the progression between the two seems to have been from a more impressionistic style, with rough brushwork, to a more precise, representational manner; I would have expected the other way round.

The captions were not very helpful. There was a picture of a couple with their rabbits, and the caption stating “perhaps he is waiting to eat the rabbit”. Perhaps he is, but there is nothing in the painting to suggest it. And the quotes highlighted, both in the exhibition and in the catalogue, were not very inspiring: ”Anna Ancher had the courage to stand out … Her many repetitions of similar motifs and her many sketches reveal her persistence and dedication”. The suggestion that in her day landscapes were seen as masculine did not strike me as very convincing. I would have liked more quotes by her, and more context. There may be a story here, but we have to work it out for ourselves, on the basis of rather partial evidence. 

Reading Groups: a new idea

 

photo by Paréj Richárd on Unsplash

I became interested in reading groups when I was having dinner with three librarians at a conference recently. They were all members of the same (long-distance) reading group. When asked what they were currently reading, none of them could remember! I’ve heard of books having an influence, but never of a book having so little effect that three members couldn’t recollect the title, or even the plot. It suggested that the real motivation for many reading groups is just to get people together; which perhaps is no bad thing. Reading may be for many reasons; I remember my mother borrowing armfuls of romantic fiction titles from the local public library, giving me the impression that filling the time was the key function of these books.

Following my discovery of the forgetful reading group, as an exercise, whenever I meet people for social chat, I asked them if they are involved with a reading group. All the women are present or recent members of a reading group; none of the men. Then I asked them how they got on with the group.

Organisation

A common gripe among members is having to read something they don’t like. However, the mechanism for choosing books seems to invite this kind of criticism – in one case, one person chooses all the books, but in several instances it seemed to be not quite a democratic process, meaning that each member had an equal opportunity to suggest new titles entirely of their choice. Of course, looking for consensus is its own form of censorship. Something very innovative is unlikely to be chosen if suggested by only one member.

Which books?

Strangely (in my opinion) reading groups seem to concentrate on fiction, and recent fiction at that, “recent” meaning from the last 25 years or so. Suggestions that something older could be considered are usually not received with any warmth. Perhaps I’m unusual, but I feel that this kind of selection process is likely to focus on subject matter rather than quality, I would imagine.

A reading group that never meets

One local reading group enthusiast talked about a very different formula. The group never meets in person; the group leader simply assembles every few months extracts or comments from the members, which she then distributes as a print booklet for the others to enjoy. I was given an example of this output, and initially I was very excited. My enthusiasm waned somewhat when I realised that many of the extracts were just that, included without any comment, leaving me none the wiser if the reader approved or disapproved of the extract, or of any other opinion. The reprinting of an entire Tim Dowling column from The Guardian suggested an uncritical enthusiasm.

What are reading groups for?

So often, a discussion about a book involves people talking past each other. X likes the book, because she enjoys horse riding. Well, it might be a justification, but not for Y, who likes historical dramas. You sense we aren’t really talking about the book, here: the act of reading is reduced to individual taste, rather than engaging with the text in a meaningful way. But perhaps I’m over-thinking it – maybe the dinner is the most important criterion, not the book.

A new idea for reading groups

Having to read a whole book is a slog; life’s too short for me to devote several days, if not weeks, to struggling with a book I didn’t choose. My preference would be to select short stories, or something so short that everyone can read it even the same day if necessary. Perhaps even better might be to have a reading group where nobody has to read anything new at all! Each member simply has to talk about something interesting they have read since the last meeting. There is no obligation for others to read it; but the person reading it will feel the need to justify their choice to the others. I will promote it as “the reading group where nobody has to read anything new”, an idea so novel that it will probably be suspected as some kind of plot. Not, of course, a fictional plot. 

William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How India transformed the world

 

Ashoka Pillar at Vaishali, Bihar, India (c250 BCE) [Wikipedia]

After the excellence of Dalrymple’s The Anarchy (2019), it proved a real challenge to get through The Golden Road (2024). It might have sold more copies than the earlier book, but it is a much less entertaining read; it’s not so easy to follow the vast canvas. In this book, Dalrymple has taken on subjects well outside his core territory. His thesis is that India exported religion, culture, and science, during the period from the Buddha (C5 BCE) to around 1250, not that he tells you explicitly these parameters. Dalrymple is a great narrative historian, but not all histories make for good narratives, and this book is an example. Within a few days of finishing it, I could remember only a few key individuals, such as the monk Xuangzang. History of science is not his forte, and I feel there as an element of uncertainty about his arguments that is revealed by the vast number of footnotes (there are around 98 pages of footnotes for 289 pages of text). Referencing your sources is a good principle, but here the subject is too vast, both by location and by subject, for Dalrymple to keep in manageable proportions, and the endless footnotes suggest he hasn’t quite mastered the (largely secondary) sources. He draws on a few primary sources, but many of the references are to other secondary works (inevitable, given that he is covering India, the Middle East, China, and Southeast Asia over a period of 1,000 years).

The book describes well the transmission of Buddhism via traders and wealthy donors (who paid for the large number of sculptures and buildings across SE Asia) – not the way I imagined early Buddhism at all.

perhaps counter-intuitively for a faith that embraced poverty and renunciation as an ideal, it was spread around the globe most effectively by wealthy merchants engaged in trade.[p42]

To give an example of the strength and weakness of the book, here is a quote that had me scratching my head:

But just as it was the conquest of northern India by the Kushans that opened the way for the Buddhist conquest of China, so it was the Umayyad Arab conquest of Central Asia, and its absorption into the wider Islamic world, that opened the way for Indian learning to seduce the western mind with its brilliance and sophistication. [p246]

Even if you are familiar with the Kushans and the Umayyad conquest, which I am not, you will find this proposition contrary to your expectations. Dalrymple is stating that in both cases, India was conquered, and yet its ideas were exported. That may have been the case (take the Roman conquest of Greece), but it requires some explanation.

The big questions I have from the text are around these cultural spreads. Why was Buddhism so popular outside India, when it did not spread even across the whole of India? Why did Jainism never gain significant followers outside India? And then, why did Buddhism start to be replaced after around 1200 in China and SE Asia? As a historian, Dalrymple is of course dependent on his sources, but these questions I think deserve answering.  

A few notes on the e-book (Kindle) edition

• Uses CE/BCE in the text, but AD/BC on the paperback cover
• I am reading the e-book and there don’t appear to be any illustrations. As often happens with e-book editions, there are credits for photographs, but not a photo to be seen. Nor does this edition have any maps.
• The index has a very strange layout, not helpful at all. Here are the first few entries:

• Readers use page numbers to get some idea of the type of reference, but if all the references are to “here”, the reader has no clues whatever – are these references found close together, in one chapter, or widely separated?
• The book has ten chapters, and as often found in pop history books, the chapter titles tell you little or nothing about what the chapter is about; the main coverage of the monk Xuangzang, who travelled from China to India in search of Buddhist learning, is covered in the chapter “The Sea of Jewels”.

All in all, Dalrymple is a fine historian, and all credit to him for using art and architecture as a way in to periods of history about which I for one know very little. It could have been better organised, but I am grateful for the insights and analysis provided. 

The Museum of Other People (Adam Kuper, 2023)

 

Anyone who believes the world of museums was staid and unchanging needs only read a few pages of Adam Kuper’s book to realise the civil wars that have broken out in recent years, most notably around museums of anthropology – which were typically founded as “museums of other people”, or as part of a cabinets of curiosities. It all began with terms like “civilization” in the 18th century:

Museums of civilization [such as The British Museum and The Louvre] embodied the Enlightenment theory of history. All human societies progress from a lower to a higher condition … the goal toward which all must travel is what French philosophers in the late C18 began to call Civilization.

At this point, you remember how, while most museums seem to have existed forever, some have closed, and you ask yourself why. There was once a Museum of Mankind in London, and a Musee de l’Homme in Paris. Both were in the tradition of collections of the artefacts of “primitive” people. Over time, questions began to be raised, and today, any collection with an ethnographic angle reveals a fundamental uncertainty, a defensiveness, towards the displays, as the museums have been caught unawares that their current treatment of “other people” is inadequate – we no longer call them “primitive”, for a start. This was very visible, for example, from a recent visit to the London National Maritime Museum Pacific gallery, which had many glass cases, and looked to me as if it had been set up forty or fifty years ago, but which now has signs prominently displayed at each entrance, stating something like “we recognise this collection is presented with colonialist assumptions, but we haven’t had time to fix it". That is the quickest, and most unsatisfactory, way to deal with the problem.

Kuper’s book makes for gripping reading, as museum after museum struggles to rethink its collection policy, its view on returning objects (return to where?), and lurches from justifying its collections on artistic, then on ethnographic grounds, and then changes track again.

The issue of how many of the famous objects came to be held in European and US museums, such as the Benin bronzes, is described in horrific detail – looting, or via a dealer after looting, is the usual route. Nonetheless, however compelling the reading, the problem remains for the anthropologists: how do you hold a collection that represents a people? Is it possible to build such a collection without being patronising? I don’t think the first chapter, “Faraway people”, quite matches the coverage of the subsequent chapters. A recent visit to the Museum of Manchester suggests one idea increasingly seen in museums: information boards featuring a living person, who is interviewed for the display.

This isn’t the first book to describe a problem without identifying a successful solution. Nonetheless, Kuper has a gift for narrative, and brings the unexciting subject of founding and managing museums to life. His narrative skilfully combines fascinating background details about pioneers whose name we know but whose background we don’t – who, for example, knew about James Smithson, the illegitimate son of an English duke and his lover, christened Jacques Macie, and subsequently founder of the Smithsonian? The breezy style makes for compulsive reading, and the reader doesn’t (usually) notice when the narrative drifts off to something unrelated but a good story, such as how Jeremy Bentham’s body came to be preserved at University College London. Kuper is such a fluent writer that he keeps your attention throughout, and we don’t worry too much that he is better at describing what has gone wrong rather than suggesting better solutions. He points out, for example, that the modern concept of providing “closure” by reburying skeletons dug up for experimental purposes in the 19th century may well be inappropriate, in that it was in many cases unlikely that these dead people were buried in the first place. In other words, we are still imposing our ideas of what the civilization might have been like.

I recommend the book highly, if for no other reason than as a corrective to the way that some museums claim to have solved the problem of their collections of skulls and artefacts by stating the provenance – back to the white European (usually) who acquired the objects in not very clearly stated deals.

Made in Ancient Egypt (Fitzwilliam Museum)

 

Container in the form of the god Bes (1550-1069 BCE)

Great show, but poor for children – and hence poor for anyone who is not a specialist. We learn a lot about what the conservators have been doing, but not much about ancient Egypt generally. If you want to know why ancient Egyptians tried to preserve their dead, this show won’t tell you. There is a lot of valuable information on how things were made, much of it in the section introductions to the catalogue, but I feel much more could have been made of the information. For example, one monument has the recently discovered signature of the sculptor, in hieratic characters, rather than hieroglyphics. But what is hieratic? It is briefly explained on a later caption, but not explained at all in the catalogue, nor mentioned in the glossary. A friendly attendant explained that hieratics were used in less formal settings. A comparison of hieratics and hieroglyphics would have been welcome.

I visited the show at the Fitzwilliam Museum with two children, aged five and eight. They enjoyed the show, and tried whatever interactive tools were available

 

No attempt to show any hieroglyphics

The two young visitors are very keen on hieroglyphics, and there were plenty of these to be seen. But there was an opportunity missed by not providing any indication, either in the captions or in the accompanying  guide of the hieroglyphic names of the person celebrated on the object. This was tantalizing! We are told this is, for example, the Stela of “Dedia” – but where does this name appear on the stela? To write the catalogue entries, someone must have known what these names are in hieroglyphics.

 

Catalogue has no index

This is a fundamental error. If this is a book accompanying a show, we should be able to find items in the show, and see wherever they are mentioned.

 

Interactive exhibits don’t display their actual function

Some of the interactive exhibits were great – a do-it-yourself squared template enabled children to create their own drawing of a possible sculpture. But other interactives looked more informative than they turned out to be. An example of this is a model showing how a bow system can be used to turn a drill. By moving the bow backwards and forwards, the motion is transferred to a circular turning of a drill that then makes a hole in stone or wood. But the example showed nothing being drilled. Children could move the bow, but to no purpose. It didn’t advance their understanding in the least.

 

14 pages of quotes by experts

These are mildly interesting, but only peripherally. A few of them are conservators, but most of them academics. One conservator compares the baskets in this exhibition with an example at the British Museum (not illustrated) which is apparently “close to perfection”.

 

Lack of background information about ancient Egypt

I know little about ancient Egypt, but this exhibition didn’t increase my knowledge very much. There is no mention of dynasties (although most of the exhibits are from the New Kingdom and Middle Kingdom) and no indication of changes in practice during this thousand-year period. I know this was an exhibition about makers, but most of those visiting will have little knowledge of ancient Egypt. For example, exhibit 27 is a lovely figure of Bes, described as “a popular household god … closely associated with protecting women in childbirth and children”. But that’s all you get – the rest of the catalogue entry is about the making and details of the object.

 

Overall

Great show, but I recommend any visitor starts with the permanent Egyptian collection in the Fitzwilliam before seeing this rather technical show. Some of the captions in the permanent Egyptian galleries at the Fitzwilliam are more informative than those for this exhibition. 

William Nicholson

 

 

The Pallant House Gallery exhibition of William Nicholson was a fascinating visit. On the basis of this show, which looked to be a representative survey of the various types of his work – portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and book illustration – he strikes  me as immensely talented, but not achieving as much as I would have hoped in any of those categories. His later work seems to me very poor; many of his best works look to have been done before the end of the First World War, when he appeared to be more able to take risks.

In caricature, he had a genuine talent – the drawing of Queen Victoria was what made him famous, and his illustration of Rudyard Kipling is wonderfully evocative.

 

 

Portrait of his son Ben at age 7.

His portraits of children were sensitive, but there seem to be very few examples of adult portraits. He was good at painting women, following the style of Corot, with a dressing-up box in his studio so his models could adorn themselves with wild hats. Nicholson himself was quite a dandy – his polka-dot dressing gown appears in more than one image of him. Later portraits by him can be woeful, such as the Sidney and Beatrice Webb portraits (1928).

 

 

Nicholson can capture the wildness and elemental quality of some Sussex landscapes. He certainly followed Whistler in being prepared to eliminate any unnecessary detail to focus on only one or two objects.

There are few depictions of specific locations, but one stunning view of the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. Are there other, similar works? A landscape from Bengal could have been painted anywhere.

Still life

Nicholson chose simple objects, rarely a combination, and often depicted the reflections of light on a silver jug or vase. He shows talent, but many of the compositions appear to me rather sparse, not a satisfying mise-en-scene. One or two of the flower paintings are good, such as the Cyclamen (1936).

 

 

Caricature and illustration

Nicholson’s drawings and designs are full of life and movement. Even sketches for costumes have a satisfying vividness about them that makes them worth viewing in their own right, not just as preparatory sketches for a theatre play. They have a very characteristic thick  line, which I think must have been done with a carefully handled brush – there is little sign of Nicholson using an ink pen, although there are traces of pencil in many of the orks.

 

I’m afraid to say, despite William’s talent, his son Ben Nicholson goes beyond anything the father produced. Just one work in the permanent collection was enough to make this clear, an abstract work called “1946 (Still Life – Cerulean)”.