Postscript on young Rembrandt

Judas (in the foreground, kneeling) returns the 30 pieces of silver

Having written an earlier piece on young Rembrandt, I couldn’t help comparing what others, notably Simon Schama and Julian Bell, thought about this show. Both of them talk in reverential tones about Rembrandt’s sublime compassion (Schama calls it “empathy”), his feeling for others, particularly the elderly and beggars. I can appreciate that, and I certainly saw it; but Bell and Schama look at other works of Rembrandt’s youth and praise them extravagantly without justification, I think. Judas Repentant, Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, for example, is praised to the skies by Schama and Bell, as far as I can see because Constantijn Huygens claims it has surpassed the art of antiquity. Well, I see it as a murky, highly distorted depiction of a scene, looking as if it had been viewed through such a wide-angle lens that not a single straight vertical line is left. Combined with this melodramatic and queasy line is the young Rembrandt’s continuing fascination with shiny trinkets and moody lighting, leaving the painting more shadow than substance. It is only when Rembrandt stops dressing up and trying to demonstrate his trivial painting skills that we start to see the sublime artist’s compassion.      

As for Julian Bell, he concludes his review of the Young Rembrandt exhibition with a most curious and irrelevant observation:

Rembrandt focused on faces … he fell back less than other artists on preconceptions about the person he was observing: he leant more keenly forward to explore the complexities and corrugations that come with age. 

So far I am in complete agreement. But Bell's review continues to a very odd destination:

Yet paintings fare more than faces: they are spaces from which faces emerge, and for Rembrandt these spaces are prevailingly dark. Why then, for all the burnt umber and bone black he lays down … does his work never lower the viewer’s spirits? Because he reaches into the darkness and pulls effects out of it as he would plunge into his own mind to bring forth a bright thought, and that interior feels oceanic. It teems. It is the opposite of dead. 

I don't see these paintings either lowering or raising my spirits. I see a respect for the individuality of his sitters, something shared with Lucian Freud. But I don't see these pictures in terms of "dead" or "alive" (Bell's review is entitled "Rembrandt and the opposite of dead". If the paintings in this exhibition were all that survived of Rembrandt, I would say he is remarkable for his sensitive studies of old men and women (including his own father); but his paintings are not teeming, and they are no more alive than any other human representation.

How not to edit a classic history text

I’m reading Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, described by Tim Parks as “a joy”. I’ve always found Machiavelli readable, so it seemed reasonable to assume that a translated edition of his Histories (I don’t know why Machiavelli uses the plural of “history”, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a post-structuralised statement about the multiplicity of visions of possible histories).

Well, as you can imagine, the history of Florence is complicated. Florence was one small city state surrounded by several other, often larger, states, among which were the Papal States, Milan and Venice. The story is one of alliances, civil strife between the various groups within Florence, dealings with and double-crossings by mercenaries. It’s a long and involved narrative, and not particularly easy to follow.

But it’s not helped by the edition I am reading: Florentine Histories, a new translation by Laura F Banfield and Harvey C Mansfield Jr, published 1990. The annotation to this edition is minimal with a vengeance, but worse, the translator’s introduction (by Mansfeld alone) is deliberately brief. It outlines how Machiavelli’s view of history is very different to that of the present day, and then concludes:

It is enough for an introduction to introduce; to begin here an interpretation of this marvelously intricate work would in some degree usurp the right of the reader. Having seen that the Florentine Histories is not the sort of history we today might expect, we are left in pleasurable bewilderment as to what sort of history it may be.

So it’s pretty clear, dear reader, you are on your own. But worse is to come; in the Note on the Translation, the translators state in no uncertain terms what their role is:

Most bad translation results from feelings of superiority … on the part of translators – superiority toward the original author and toward the reader. In the same spirit of caution, we have provided only slight and occasional historical annotation. As explained in the introduction, it would be hasty to assume that Machiavelli shares our appetite and esteem for historical information. … We did not want to distract the reader by frequently whispering dates in his ear when Machiavelli did not provide them.

As if to complete the task, the translators acknowledge that they have “profited from the annotation by Franco Gaeta” – but they do not seem to have passed this annotation on.

How does this work in practice? The translation contains no chronology. There are no dates given in the margins or on any page. There is a map. There is a good index, which contains some annotation, although I don’t expect to consult the index of a book to get some idea of what is being described. Here is a typical paragraph from the book (book III, the first lines from section 7):

Sitting in the pontificate was Pope Gregory XI, who, while located in Avignon, governed Italy through legates … One of the legates, who was in Bologna at the time, took the occasion of a famine that year in Florence and thought to make himself lord of Tuscany.

Which year? Which legate? We are not told. This makes life very simple for the translators, but highly challenging for the reader. In this case, the index tells us nothing – simply “Gregory XI, Pope”. We are told at the end of the paragraph that this led to the “War of the Otto Santi”, but I can find no reference to this war in the standard history of Florence 1200-1575 by John Najelmy.

Even the first translation of Machiavelli, by Thomas Bedingfield, published in 1595, and available for free online, includes some minimal descriptions of for each book section:

I realise now that the only way to use the Mansfield edition and to make any sense of it, I would have to compile my own annotations – in effect, to edit the entire history to make it intelligible to a non-specialist. Perhaps Mr Mansfield would claim this represents a superior attitude on the part of the translator, and that even Bedingfield’s annotation are unnecessary. If that is the case, I’m happy to be the translator’s inferior. I can choose not to read the notes – if any have been provided.

Why do women read fiction?

Fantin-Latour, The Reading (1877)

Here is a great question. Apparently women account for 80% of all fiction sales. Why should this be? Unfortunately, neither the eponymous title by Helen Taylor (Why Women read Fiction) nor the review of it in the TLS, April 17 2020 gives us a very satisfactory answer.

There are some hints, but as with so many books on broad, attention-grabbing topics, you get the feeling that the author has wilfully ignored all previous thinking on the subject. Instead, Helen Taylor has interviewed 428 women, and the book seems to comprise extracts from these responses. It makes for an entertaining read, and makes it a much simpler book to write, but it is not a formal study. Taylor does contrast two kinds of reading, “vertical” and “horizontal” – the former being serious reading, the latter the guilty pleasure of lying on the sofa reading a novel. But of course there are many more types of reading than that; we all remember Francis Bacon’s categories of reading, and it would be helpful to consider which type of reading we are discussing. And the reviewer Lucy Scholes points out that reading novels need not necessarily be guilty, as the majority of respondents seemed to imply.

More worryingly, for a book that examines why women read fiction, there is no attempt to understand why men don’t read fiction (if we are talking generalities here, assuming you can say something about all men as a set). Yet here, the author goes off at a tangent, quoting J G Ballard: “Even now, simply thinking about Long John Silver or the waves of Crusoe’s island stirs me far more than reading the original text. I suspect these childhood tales have long since left their pages and taken on a second life inside my head.” A fascinating observation of how fiction can take on a life of its own in your imagination, but absolutely unconnected with why women or men read fiction in the first place.

Here the reviewer Lucy Scholes further muddies the waters by thinking about her own reading. As a literary critic, she is very atypical (I remember the critic Frank Kermode saying he couldn’t read any novel without taking notes, which revealed much about him as a critic, but at the same time emphasised how different he was to a typical reader). As a member of an elite that is paid to read, and patted on the back for saying cleverer things about books that most of the others in her class, Scholes unsurprisingly makes a case for reading as more than simple escapism. Essentially, reading is good for you – after all, it got Scholes (and probably Helen Taylor) to where she is today.  Reading fiction helps you empathize with others (a common argument). Helen Taylor approvingly quotes Rebecca Mead, “when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself”.  But I have been grasped and held by reading Agatha Christie, Alexander Dumas, and P G Wodehouse. It was lots of fun, but not “an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself”. I’m not simply being facetious here. Reading can grab you, but for all I know Mein Kampf might be a gripping read.

The review then moves on to even more far-fetched ideas, that there was a specific panic about women reading at the end of the 18th century (an unlikely argument that seems to be proved by mentioned that Dorothy Wordsworth was forced to sew an old shirt rather than reading The Iliad.

Finally, the argument drifts to attitudes to male and female writers, which again is of great interest but unconnected with why women read fiction. “When men write novels about family life, they are considered important and universal, while women writers who do the same are still scorned as inward-looking and provincial”. It’s a sweeping statement, and doesn’t answer the question.

The review ends by saying “for those of us who love books”, our lives are “mapped by books … we imagine ourselves into, and draw sustenance from, those stories of our lives.” Here’s the rub. Books about reading tend to be written by a group who claim they “love books”; but books are not things to be loved as a set in their entirety. If you love books, does that mean you love Mein Kampf? And worse, that reference to “those of us who love books” – the “us” is clearly women, and that subset of women who “love books”. The 20% of men who read are now ignored (and they probably don’t love books in the same way, but we never find out). The review concludes: “Surely the question isn’t why so many women read fiction, but rather why so many men still don’t?” At that point, I gave up in exasperation and went back to my book. Without any trace of guilt. 

Which Rembrandt should we believe?

What surprises you about young Rembrandt (in the exhibition of the same name at the Ashmolean, Oxford) is how capable Rembrandt was of a whole range of styles - perhaps to be expected from an artist at the start of his or her career. In addition, Rembrandt employed assistants, who seemed to have spent much of their time creating copies of Rembrandt's own work, including, rather strangely, Rembrandt's self-portraits (the experts have assigned a famous Portrait of Rembrandt with a Gorget in the Mauritshuis to Gerrit Dou).  It’s not surprising Rembrandt has kept  an army of art historians busy for years trying to work out what is or is not by the man himself. Perhaps the viewer is all the more bewildered because the show looks just at the first years of Rembrandt’s career, from his first known paintings around 1624 to his departure from Leiden and move to Amsterdam as a successful portrait painter around ten years later.

When it comes to portraits, he can paint brightly-lit, highly detailed formal (and celebratory) portraits as well as any 17th-century Dutch painter, he can paint formal (and rather dull) historical paintings in bright colours, he can even paint genre pictures, which surprised me,  but even from his earliest works, what seems to have captured his enthusiasm are three subjects most of all.

First he showed a decided interest in introspection, in very moody and atmospheric self-portraits. While his public portraits are uniformly lit, his self-portraits show himself in deep shadow. The deep shadow can be very effective, when the image is just of his face. In other works, the darkness is so pervasive, it is difficult to see what is happening.

The commentators describe some of these as major works, but I have to take their word for it. Julian Bell in the TLS goes into raptures over Judas returning the pieces of silver, 1629, but although it is a great theme for a painting, I can see next to nothing from the catalogue reproduction.

As for his portraits, Rembrandt has a fascinating for dressing up, and the more exotic the costume, the better. The result is a strange double effect: the face is exquisitely captured, the sense of introspection is fascinating, but the crazy outfits have almost the opposite effect. Are these paintings serious or a joke? Looking at the crazy Self-Portrait in Oriental Attire with a Poodle, 1631, are we to admire the insightful depiction of his face, or to laugh at the dog in front of him? Who could be so thoughtful and so lacking in self-awareness at the same time? He reminds you of Sherlock Holmes and his daft disguises; except that Sherlock Holmes made no claim to deep significance.

Second, Rembrandt has a fascination with the unglamorous. He takes subjects that would be shunned by most painters and compels you to examine their faces. He draws and paints old people – his father and mother, and a magnificent, reverent portrait of an 83-year-old woman. You cannot ignore an expression like that. 

In common with painting subjects that other painters ignore, if the catalogue is to be believed, Rembrandt is the first painter to depict a non-idealized female (presumably meaning a female not portraying a character such as Eve or Diana):

Third, Rembrandt appears to be deeply religious. He sometimes, in these early works, captures the pathos of some highly emotional religious scenes. And yet, even in these scenes, there are moments that jar completely with the serious subject that you would think is Rembrandt’s motivation for the picture. 

A highly accomplished engraving of the Good Samaritan story, for example, is highly moving – until you notice a dog doing a poo right in the foreground. What kind of mind combines deep emotion and the trivia of genre painting? If this represents the first ten years of Rembrandt’s career, who knows how it will turn out in the end? All you can deduce from these paintings is that here is a highly talented artist, who has learned to paint, draw and etch in several styles. He is obsessed with his own image. Who knows what he will become in the next ten years. 

Titian: Love, Desire and Death

Titian, Diana and Callisto

As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the London National Gallery closed its Titian exhibition after only three days. Very few people saw this show, which, I understand comprised just seven paintings:  the series of six “poesie” (the term used by Titian) on subjects from Ovid, painted for Philip II of Spain (plus a later painting, The Death of Actaeon, which seems to belong to the original set).

The show brings together for the first time since the 17th century the astonishing set of works. It’s not clear from the documentary if Titian was ever paid in full for the paintings, or even what Philip thought of them. But it’s pretty clear in art-historical terms that these paintings rank amongst the greatest works of Titian, and more than that, formed the basis of several other artists’ attempts to create a mythological art: neither naturalistic nor simply a narrative, but with one foot in the land of the gods, as it were. All six pictures are derived from stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Titian depicts them in an idealized never-never land.

When the BBC showed a documentary about the show, I jumped at the chance – only to find it a great disappointment.

TV programmes about art are very rarely successful. It is difficult to translate a static art into a medium that requires motion. So in this documentary, the camera is almost always moving over the paintings, rather than just showing them. That technique may be annoying, but it’s not the main fault of the programme. More significantly, the time was frittered away by irrelevant footage that looked as if the Daily Mail had been invited to review the exhibition. A life model states there is always a sexual element to modelling naked. The woman who now owns Titian’s house in Venice talks about how she was once a cover model for Cosmopolitan. The man who owns what was Titian’s studio claims to be something of a Casanova, and shows pictures from his smartphone to prove it. A local author stated there were 11,000 prostitutes working in Venice in the time of Titian. What did all this have to do with these paintings? Only that the paintings have an intense eroticism about them; they are among the most sensuous paintings ever created.

More significant still was the claim that Titian was guilty of “the male gaze” in these works, ignoring the fear and discomfort experienced by the women in some of the stories. But even here, the treatment was misguided. Mary Beard talked about how many editions of Ovid she has in her library. More helpful would have been to read what Ovid says in the sources for these paintings.

So let’s forget the documentary, and concentrate on this central problem. We today feel uncomfortable about some of the subjects in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Diana and Callisto, Callisto is raped by Jupiter who has taken the form of Diana, unknown to Callisto. It’s not her fault, but once raped, Callisto is now guilty, according to Ovid, and is expelled from Diana’s entourage. “Where is the justice in that?” we cry. Why would Titian depict such a scene? Because there is a justification in the literature for a nude scene. Here is Ovid:

Diana exclaimed with pleasure at the sight, and dipped her foot in the water: delighted with this too, she called to her companions: “There is no one here to see us – let us undress, and bathe in the brook.” [Metamorphoses, translated by Mary Innes, 1955]

But Callisto, like Eve, is no longer comfortable naked.

The Arcadian maiden [Callisto] blushed. All the rest took off their garments, while she alone sought excuses to delay.

The moment chosen by Titian is this combination of nudity and shame. Perhaps the simplest justification for Titian to choose this moment is that opportunities for depiction of nudity were rare in the 16th century. There are only a handful of episodes in the Bible that can include nakedness: Susanna and the Elders, David spying on Bathsheba (and none of them reflect well on the (male) participants either). In Diana and Callisto, Titian goes all out to present a sensuous scene of acres of naked females. It’s not at all clear that Callisto is covered in shame in the painting; if the viewer was not told the story in advance, they would not see Callisto's shame as the central point; but it is certainly the case that the other women are revelling in their nakedness. The guilt of the raped female was simply not in question, neither in Ovid’s poem nor Titian’s painting. This is not a picture about guilt, it’s a celebration of the naked female body en masse. Such a depiction was enough to send shock waves through western art for the next 400 years. Only today do we begin to question the whole basis for the painting. 

Quotations about Reading

Any traveller by road in France will be familiar with the first encounter with a new town. On approaching, the visitor is confronted by a sign stating the name of the place, of course, but also the peculiar French expression celebrating the town’s claims to fame: “ses eaux, son chateau”, and so on. The waters, the castle, belong to the town; they are a sign of its identity, and however small the place, it is something to be proud of.

Any town or city needs an identity, and fortunately Reading has some assets here, all sadly lacking in Cambridge. Cambridge probably has a hundred times more visitors than Reading, but few people would be able to state what is distinctive about Cambridge (as opposed to Cambridge University, a very different beast).  You can discover things about Reading at the excellent Reading Museum. Moreover, Reading has its own publisher, a local publisher in the best sense. The Two Rivers Press was founded 1994 by Peter Hay, and since his death in 2003 continues to provide local books in the best sense: informative, quirky, and elegant. They have over 70 books in their catalogue.  The volume in front of me, A Much Maligned Town (1997, second edition 2008), is a charming little book of quotations by travellers about Reading, with woodcuts by Peter Hay himself.  

Quotations about places are a mixed bag. There are of course the curmudgeons who see nothing good in any place they visit – Tobias Smollett is the classic example – and some who sprinkle their praise without regard. Much more interesting for a place like Reading, where fewer people feel obliged to say something about the place they visit (unlike Cambridge), is to dig around and to find some genuine insights into the place.

So, a few examples:

A town of negations that Reading is – no tree – no flowers – no green fields – no wit - no literature – no elegance! Neither the society of London nor the freedom of the country.Mary Russell Mitford, letters, 1813-20 

We came to Reading prepared for anything but charm in that town of biscuits, and we were not inclined to alter our ready-made opinion upon sight of it.Charles G. Harper, 1884 

Very little remains of the old town remains and the new commercial buildings are depressing when they are not actually unpleasant to the eye … It’s not too much to say that Reading serves a compendium of what to avoid.Country Life, 1909 

It is astonishing that so little of the Reading known to history should have survived into our own time. Prosperity swamped it in brick, decorated it with the ephemeral gaudiness of advertisements, and there is hardly enough of the old town left to prove its existence before the nineteenth century.F V Morley, 1926 

Reading is a town struggling to be a city.unattributed, presumably by Adam Sowan, the editor.

The majority of the quotes are negative; I don’t think it is the fault of the book that none of them quite capture some of the quirky appeal of Reading: the decayed but spectacular terraced houses, the proud front of the Royal Berks Hospital, ignored by all the traffic passing in front of it, and the sweet lampstand cum monument by John Soane in the centre of Market Place (the subject of another book from Two Rivers Press). But one visitor, Mary Atkinson, 1973, noticed “the startling war memorial in the form of an enormous lion, over seventeen feet long and sixteen tons in weight, portrayed in the act, apparently, of taking a comfortable stroll with its front legs while running with its back ones”. That seems to capture the peculiar charm of Reading.