The rise and fall of cities and their art

 

Rubens, Samson and Delilah, c1610, commissioned by Nicolas Rockox, mayor of Antwerp, for his own house

I am intrigued to learn more about cities. That very vague idea is not very helpful – a glance at bookshops for books with “city” in the title rapidly runs into hundreds. It needs to be a more precise interest. How about this? 

Some cities give the impression that they were always big: London and Paris are examples. Their history can be found, but isn’t very visible among the constant renewal and rebuilding of the centre. In contrast, former cities display much more of their history even to the casual observer. By “former”, I mean a specific group, which enables me to refine my interest in cities to something much more specific: cities that experience a dramatic change in fortune, whether growing or retracting, and ideally both. Think about it: cities that were once great, but no longer: Venice, Bruges, Dundee. In England, Norwich, Kings Lynn. Further down the scale, think of Boston, Lincolnshire, with its enormous spire as evidence of a time of wealth, and now looking down on some quite significant poverty.

So, a reading programme about why cities decline. It seems to me a good combination of reading with visiting, since the evidence on the ground will be very apparent – nobody had the money to demolish all the remains of former wealth. One problem, however, is that there always seem to be more books written about “golden ages” (which could include Amsterdam, Antwerp, Venice) but much less about the decline. I find the long slow cultural decline of Florence under the Medici a fascinating subject, even if it shows an inverse relationship between wealth and artistic quality. Or, more precisely, while the Medici remained rich, there was no longer a wide art-buying public.

Does Antwerp fit this scenario? After a couple of visits my superficial impression was the very significant presence of 17th-century buildings and culture. The Rubens House, and his vast output, is entirely 17th century. The Plantin printing and publishing operation had a monopoly of publishing liturgical texts for the Catholic Church. The Rubens House was begun 1610. The Snijders & Rockox House dates from 1603 onwards. Yet we are told the Fall of Antwerp in 1585 reduced the city to a shadow of its former self, losing 40% of its population.

Perhaps it is my contrary thinking, but it looked to me that Antwerp (and surrounds) did not appear to be suffering too much in comparison with its northern neighbour, The (northern) Netherlands. It’s not, in other words, a simple claim that Protestantism is linked with artistic quality. 

But artistic quality may have a link with economic success. At least, in the eyes of Maarten Prak, who writes (in Five Books on the Dutch Golden Age):

There is a big debate about the economic origins of the Dutch Golden Age. The debate is about whether it was the result of Antwerp merchants moving to Amsterdam, and taking Antwerp’s ‘golden age’ with them in their bags, or whether things had been happening already in the Dutch economy before 1600 that helped launch the Dutch Golden Age.

But what interests me is what of course should be obvious, that great art happens when there is economic success. Perhaps it’s just a matter of statistics: painters in the Italian Renaissance painted a lot of pictures because they were being paid well, and widely, to do so. Similarly, in the Dutch Golden Age, there was a vast market for domestic paintings (and paintings paid for by private clients for display in churches). Among those thousands of pictures, a handful will be exceptional. That happened in 15th-century Flanders, in 16th-century Antwerp, and in 17th-century Netherlands. Maarten Prak again:

A group of painters emerged, including van der Weyden and van Eyck, the best of whom were producing for courtier audiences, but still operated in urban environments, and also had an urban clientele … You see that happening in Ghent and Bruges in the 15th century, in Antwerp in the 16th century, and then in Amsterdam, and other towns in Holland, in the 17th century.

But you also see it in 17th-century Antwerp, with Rubens, Jordaens, and others. Why should this be?

Flower paintings at Kettle's Yard (July 2026)

 

Doron Langberg, Hibiscus I, 2022

Painting flowers is one of the most obvious subjects for painting, so you wonder why there are not more flower painting exhibitions. Perhaps the organisers – and the public – have been put off by the practice followed by many galleries, including the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam, to group all the flower paintings together in a single room. This practice might make sense if the gallery had a wide ranger of flower paintings, but both galleries choose to display all their 17th-century Dutch flower paintings together. My heard sinks when I see so many similar works together, all with a black background.

Today, the situation is very different. There are many kinds of flower-inspired paintings, and what could be simpler to curate than an exhibition of them? Except that the Kettles Yard team seems to have extended their brief to include works primarily about people (Kay Donachie), or not including any flowers at all (Howard Hodgkin). Limiting ourselves to those works that are of flowers, what struck me was the difference between the skill of the 50 or so artists included (the show only contains one work only from each artist, so the judgements below apply only to these works).

I would imagine a trawl of amateur art exhibitions would reveal thousands of flower painters: flowers are easy to obtain, they typically last a few days (with some exceptions), and are typically colourful, so it should be easy to get a result. Most importantly, they raise little problem of perspective being largely in a single plane.

For me, the magic of flower paintings is that they represent a kind of pure painting. They aren’t about anything other than the flower being depicted. So when the catalogue tells me that a painting honour's the painter's father, I don't get it.  

Nonetheless, a few paintings stood out very clearly in this show. 

David Jones: a lovely demonstration of watercolour without, as far as I could see, any preparatory drawing, with light flowing, as it were, through the leaves and petals. 

Cass Namoda: a dramatic close-up of part of a single flower, with not enough space within the picture to display the whole. 

Doron Langberg: very rough daubs of bright pink, against green, give a powerful suggestion of hibiscus. The image is representational, but only just. 

William Nicholson: always one to provide a witty commentary on the ostensible subject, Nicholson includes a dramatic shadow that almost obscures the foliage below the peonies. 

Cedric Morris: the viewer appears to be in the middle of an almost exploding bunch of flowers, filling the rectangular canvas with bright, living colours. This man can paint the essence of flowers better than anyone else in the show! His paintings of people are never as good. 

Judith Tucker: A very dramatic view of sea asters against a dark background. The leaves especially are a vivid orange, yet the background is dark, so the effect is somewhat surreal. Undeniable is the power of the piece. Looking up sea asters in Wikipedia suggested their flowers are not that different to any other aster, and not very dramatic: the focus here is on the leaves.

What did I dismiss? Any artist who included human figures, since, in my opinion, the human figure directs the viewer how to interpret the image. Thus, Caroline Walker, whose naturalistic depictions of home life complete with child are not, I think, flower paintings. Charles Rennie Mackintosh is included for a fritillary sketch, but it looked too small-scale in the context of an exhibition gallery.

In summary: great show, but it would have been better to have included a few examples from earlier centuries, especially the 17th century. 

The Bill Gates of the 15th century?

 

The picturesque remains of Chichele College

The town of Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire, perhaps a little larger today than a village, with a population around 8,000, is not so different to many other small towns in the Midlands: an old church, a market square, a few old buildings, some small-scale industry (shoemaking). But in the centre is the intriguing Chichele College, the ruined remains of a religious institute set up in the 15th century for canons. Today, the property is owned by English Heritage, and is open to the public, courtesy, it would appear, of volunteer curators. I was intrigued by the idea of a “chantry college”, and how it came to exist.

On the site there were a few information boards, but these seemed more interested in the building over the more succeeding centuries following the dissolution of the monasteries (according to Wikipedia, Henry VIII seized the college in 1542). There was no guide, and Pevsner, as usual, focuses on the buildings, rather than about its purpose. What was a chantry college? Wikipedia has an entry for the founder and benefactor Henry Chichele (pronounced “Chichly”) which, although a poor entry, gives some idea about his career: a rapid rise to the top of the English Church, partly as a result of his wealthy connections, notably, his brother. In the town of Higham Ferrers, Chichele also built a grammar school and a “Bede House” (an alms house), both in the grounds of the parish church.

What was a Chantry College?

That, to me, is a mystery. I was aware of Chantry chapels, founded to say masses for wealthy donors, but Chichele College appears to have had at least partially an educational function. Its responsibilities included teaching grammar and song. It appears to have been abolished because it was not part of a university or school.

What was the motivation behind Chichele’s philanthropy?

Clearly, Chichele was wealthy. In addition to Chichele College, founded 1422, he also founded two colleges in Oxford, one for Cistercians in 1437 and one, All Souls, founded 1438, which still exists, as well as Chichele College, and the impression comes to mind of a 15th-century equivalent of Bill Gates or Howard Hughes – whatever was spent on philanthropy only amounted to a small proportion of their total wealth. But is that assumption correct? Chichele’s money came from multiple benefices – at one point, he had at least eight, and was instructed to give them all up except one. Owning more than one benefice was, of course, one of the complaints by reformers against the established Church. English law prevented a bishop having multiple benifices, but nonetheless, Chichele appealed to the Pope, and was granted an exemption in 1407 on being made bishop of St David’s in Wales, enabling him to keep them.

 

Was Chichele corrupt?

According to the Wikipedia entry for Chichele obtained clerical benefices (that is, the position of rector as well as the income from the parish) via his wealthy brother (at least initially). It also mentions how, as archbishop of Canterbury, he investigated and condemned heretics who complained about the corruption of bishops and archbishops. Complaints about corruption in the senior clergy were clearly already widespread in the 15th century, even before Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in 1517.

So my questions are: how corrupt was Chichele (compared with other clergy in the Church of England in Chichele’s time)? Was the founding of the College at Higham Ferrers motivated by genuine altruism or simply face-saving? The Wikipedia entry for Chichele, although over 3,000 words long, gets too involved in trying to arguing with scholars to give a good summary (“The struggle between them [Chichele and Pope Martin V] has been represented as one of a patriotic archbishop resisting the encroachments of the papacy on the Church of England. In point of fact it was almost wholly personal, and was rather an incident in the rivalry between the Duke of Gloucester and his half-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, than one involving any principle.”, but no citation for this claim). The Wikipedia entry uses the term “diplomatist”, an outdated term today replaced by “diplomat”, and which suggests that much of the Wikipedia entry was lifted from an earlier source, probably the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 edition (acknowledged in the references).

It will require some detective work to try to establish, if the sources are sufficient, the real background to Chichele’s philanthropy.  

The house with no kitchen or fireplace

 

The facade of Paycocke's House: built 1509, but all the oriel windows, and much of the highly detailed carving, date from early in the 20th century

Paycocke’s House in Coggeshall, Essex, is one of the best-known Tudor houses in England. It was owned by a wool merchant, Thomas Paycocke, who made his fortune from selling undyed wool. So I was fascinated to see this demonstration of a wealthy Tudor merchant’s lifestyle. But on arrival, my response was a number of questions. 

Like many old houses, this one had been altered. I’ve nothing against adapting old houses to suit current needs, but the biggest alterations took place around 1900, when Noel Buxton made a lot of changes, including adding fireplaces to the main rooms, and moving the main staircase, and more or less rebuilding the front of the house, adding oriel windows, for example. All of these changes were made to give the appearance of putting the house back to its original state. To the present-day visitor, it’s difficult to imagine the house in its original layout, and at a first glance, the front looks all of a piece. But, of course, the reality is, as with so many English parish churches, that what you are looking at is as much a Victorian restorer’s idea of what medieval (or Tudor) looked like, rather than the original. None of those oriel windows existed in 19th-century photographs. Inside, there are beautifully carved bressummer beams, usually found over a fireplace – but none of them is in the original position. All the fireplaces are new.

Those fireplaces intrigued me. Thomas Paycocke used this house as his main showroom, where he met clients, many of them from continental Europe. Indeed, in the main room, visitors can see the table is set for a meal. Yet we learn that Paycocke’s house had neither a kitchen, nor any fireplaces! Records of tenants in the early 20th century report how cold the house was, and it must have been similar for Paycocke in his day. How did he not have a fire, or any kitchen? How can you live in a house with neither? According to the National Trust website, Thomas didn’t live there, but had another house in the town. Nonetheless, he let his son, John, live there. There was originally a third storey, but it’s difficult to imagine fires at that level and not on the ground floor.

Medieval halls had a central fire with a hole in the roof, but I don’t imagine any newly built Tudor dwelling trying to replicate that heating system. So what did Thomas Paycocke do for heat, and what did he do to provide food for his clients? He certainly had the money – he left the equivalent of over £500,000 in bequests in his will.

Sadly, Paycocke’s House raises more questions than answers, and it doesn’t seem to offer a very good example of what everyday Tudor living was really like. Although the later inhabitants are certainly of interest, the reason we visit the house – to get a glimpse of how people actually lived – is not, sadly, something the current house can provide.

He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, by Robert A. Johnson (1974)

 

Parsifal and Kundry, from the 1889 Bayreuth production of Wagner's Parsifal

With a title like that, perhaps it was asking for trouble for me to try reading this bookHe was. But I was struck by the idea of using a medieval epic to present views of masculinity. The author, Robert Johsnon, “a Jungian analyst in private practice in San Diego”, proposes to use the Grail myth, interpreted via Jungian psychology, to explain how men behave. Specifically, he uses the Chretien de Troyes version of Parsifal. I couldn’t resist reading about Parsifal, so I sat down to read this short book (just 84 pages, just 25,000 words). I should have realised it was an unlikely achievement. In that short space, Mr Johnson proposed to use Jungian psychology to explain the male psyche via the Grail story, and to do it in a contemporary Christian context (the book originated as a series of lectures at an episcopal church in San Diego in 1969).

I can’t deny, I am fascinated by the medieval tales such as Parsifal. They tell such a simple yet unintelligible story, so that they cry out for an explanation, and

There is no denying, the prose has a kind of comfort about it. As readers, we enjoy being carried along with the author’s argument, when it appears so sensible. One trick is that the author occasionally interjects a common-sense aside, for example, on page 24 he wonders where Parsifal got his sword from “I am very curious. I would very much like to know where Parsifal’s first sword came from.” That seems a very straightforward question, just what we would ask.

Yet this book sold in such astonishing numbers – over 100,000 copies sold, states the cover. How do you sell so many copies? Well, don’t let the reader have any doubt. The Bible, medieval chivalric epics, the nature of the psyche, have multiple interpretations, but despite the multiplicity of subjects tackled in this short book, the author remains sublimely confident that his interpretation is right. His text mixes therapy, Jung, the Christian Bible, and medieval epics, and, do you know, they all have the same message! It’s remarkable. In fact, in reading the book, I was gobsmacked. Have attitudes changed so much in the last 50 years? But let’s go through the book and identify just where my jaw dropped.

Here are some examples of the author’s tone of certainty:

•  “All men are Fisher Kings” (p10)
•  “Read a typical modern novel and you will find that it revolves around the subject of the lostness and the loneliness of the alienated man … We are all wounded and it shows” (p12)
•  “It is an innocent and often foolish thing in a man that will begin the cure for him. A man must consent to this.” [p15]

One imagines Mr Johnson the practising psychiatrist is always right: “In my consulting room a man will sometimes bark at me when I prescribe something strange or difficult for him. ‘What do you think I am? A fool? And I say, ‘Well, it would help.’ For it is an innocent and often foolish thing in a man that will begin the cure for him.” [p15]

And, surprise, Jung is also always right. According to Johnson, every boy goes through a “Fisher King” moment, when he blunders into something that is too big for him. Except, in Jung’s case, his Fisher King moment was not his fault at all – his teacher didn’t believe that Jung could have written the assignment he submitted in class. “There’s one paper here that is by far the best, but it is obviously a forgery.” That’s not a Fisher King moment, that is a piece of hagiography.  This anecdote could have come from the Bible: Jung as Christ.

Everywhere, there is the astounding confidence of the author. He tells us he uses the Chretien version of Parsifal, not the version by Wolfram von Eschenbach, because it “is simpler, more direct, and nearer to the unconscious”. What enables him to make such a judgement?

Another curious technique of the author is to assign unusual meanings to common words. He makes a distinction between “emotion”, “feeling”, and “mood” (which he uses as a synonym for depression). For the author, “enthusiasm”, means “filled with God”. This reassignment of natural language demands a kind of compliance from the reader: if I say it means X, it does so.

But the Parsifal story, you say! It cries out for interpretation. The Fisher King (Amfortas in Wagner’s opera) has been wounded, but his wounds will never heal. He seems to have been wounded sexually – somewhere in the thigh.  His wound will only be healed by the intervention of a fool.

Nonetheless, Johnson’s interpretation of the story is highly questionable. For example, Parsifal covets the Red Knight’s armour and horse, and so he kills the Red Knight. Is this wrong? Certainly not, according to Johnson. “The Red Knight represents that strong, virile, masculine stuff a boy needs so desperately … That is the fierce competitiveness of adolescence and masculinity in general. Almost every boy has to win from somebody else.” [p25]. This is enough to send half or more of the male population into a nosedive because they were not victorious in their last fight.

Even stranger, Johnson mingles the Christian fixation on chastity, with the knightly ideal: “the only proper pursuit for a  knight [is] he must never seduce or be seduced by a woman.” [p28] I seem to remember that the chivalric epics accepted and acknowledge sexual passion – but not in this interpretation. In Johnson’s book, “it is terribly important to make this distinction between the outer, flesh-and-blood woman and a man’s inner feminine quality, and to keep inner laws differentiated from outer laws” [p31]. Whatever that means.

The book is a farrago of “masculine” and “feminine” behaviour. The author repeatedly talks about the need for men to discover their feminine side. To be honest, I’m more interested in identifying my overtly male side and noticing in 2026 how many males seem incapable of relating to other males except by a handful of acceptable male encounters (football, the gym, the  pub).

In the introduction, no fewer than four women are credited with turning the author’s talk into a text for publication. Clearly, the author himself, who presumably wrote some notes for his lecture, couldn’t do the work. He was hard at work writing the sequel to this book, called (inevitably) "She". Or perhaps he was just too busy acknowledging his masculine side to do the feminine work of typing and transcribing.  

A visit to Bath

 

A view from the Holburne Museum: a nicer view outside than in?

Everyone looks forward to a visit to Bath! We all know that for a few years, notably when Jane Austen was writing, Bath was the English centre of pleasure and entertainment. Yet, somehow, that moment of grandeur last for less than a century. John Wood, the architect, created his plan for the development of Bath in 1725, and apparently, already by the 1790s building had slowed; Bath was being replaced by Brighton and Cheltenham as a destination for the rich.

But a visit at the weekend showed that Bath today is again a highly popular place for pleasure. I lost count of the number of weddings and hen parties being celebrated in the streets. We walked in Sydney Gardens, which, apparently, are the only remaining pleasure gardens in Bath, and there were plenty of people around, but the looked more like residents than visitors; the visitors were in the centre, seeing the attractions.

My visit was of course limited. I mostly saw museums (the American Museum, the Holburne Museum, and the Victoria Art Gallery), and had dinner at the former Empire Hotel, now rebranded as The Architect. But there was no doubt that the centre was very lively. Cambridge, where I live, is a city full of tourists, but few of them visit the city for entertainment in the evening. In contrast, Bath seems to come alive as the sun goes down.

What was also noticeable was the absence of traffic in the largely pedestrianized centre. But perhaps Bath was not entirely cosmopolitan: at 10 o’clock in the evening, our formal restaurant was almost empty.

Is Bath a centre of taste?

If there was taste on display, it was from many years ago, and with very different attitudes. The Victoria Art Gallery, despite its fascinating collection, looked as though it hadn’t had any funding for the last 50 years. Paintings were stacked three-high in the one big room. There were some children’s activities laid out, but I didn’t see any children doing them. The ‘shop’ was dedicated to selling tickets to a paid exhibition on the ground floor (the permanent collection is free access, although this isn’t made very clear).

 

The American Museum

The premise of the American Museum, founded by (American) Dallas Pratt and (Briton) John Judkyn, was, to coincide with their vision of American history, based around the Founding Fathers and white settlers. Pratt and Judkyn were antique collectors and dealers, so they had every reason to enjoy celebrating American-made furniture and objects.

But, of course, that comfortable, long-established vision of US history, taught to generations of schoolchildren, has been completely side-stepped by the belated recognition of colonialism and slavery, the admission that Native Americans, and African Americans, were almost entirely written out of the history presented in the Museum. This raises a fundamental problem: history books are rewritten with each generation, but the Museum’s collections are almost entirely what how the white settlers lived and what they collected. Now, the collections don’t tell the story the curators would like to tell, and worse, what is on display is offensive simply by what it leaves out. Overall, this is a disaster for the museum organizers: a tone of almost self-congratulation has switched to a place for apology. Unsurprisingly, the permanent collection is full of apologetic captions (which are easier to change than the objects themselves) mentioning, for example the Native Americans who once occupied the lands shown in the Puritan and Shaker rooms, for example. Temporary exhibitions, of course, are much easier to change, and the exhibition of Gee’s Bend quilts is a stunning contrast to the permanent collection. These quilts were made in Alabama by descendants of slaves. Not only that, the quilts are quite simply stunning.

 

The Holburne Museum

The permanent collection at the Holburne Museum has never been very exciting. Perhaps it’s my taste, but large-scale portraits, even by Gainsborough, to enable the rich visitors to Bath to congratulate themselves are not very exciting – even when dressed up as a Bacchante:

 

Perhaps part of the problem is that the spectacular house that houses the collection was not designed as an art gallery, and, despite all the changes made to accommodate visitors, the space still works very poorly. The ballroom was converted to a gallery by Reginald Blomfield, but the main room has too many windows to make it suitable for pictures. You can’t see the pictures, and the view out of the window is too good; I chose the view. Unfortunately, the 2011 extension, by Eric Parry Architects, an ostentatious building, simply adds more small rooms that aren’t connected to each other. Now there are two separate staircases and two separate sets of small rooms on the second floor.

Sadly, the permanent collection isn’t much to write home about, even after the addition of the Schroder collection of Renaissance objects. Holburne and Schroder both collected in many different art forms, with the result risking being an incoherent muddle. The museum administrators acknowledge this when they created a display of lots of the Holburne collection in one “room”. 

There is no attempt to tell you what each of the pieces is; it’s just an impression of lots of stuff. If it were my grandmother’s house, that I had to deal with after she had died, I’d get rid of everything and start again. Worse, it turns out that Holburne was heavily involved in slavery.

You pay £16.50 to enter the museum, with no concessions for pensioners. For that, you are treated to the collections of two very rich families. You also get a glitzy website and lots of marketing (invitations to become a member on most screens). In the basement, a £2.5m development has the Schroder family collection of Renaissance objects – the vast majority of which are shiny. The main idea behind this collection is, apart from a handful of exquisite portraits, to display the Schroder family’s wealth. Admittedly, the Renaissance loved rare stones and expensive objects, but that doesn’t mean we have to follow the Renaissance slavishly and simply admire this family’s wealth.

There was an interesting exhibition of 19th- and early 20th-century prints, which in highlighted the  lack of excitement from the permanent collection.

 

Is Bath worth a visit?

Galleries and museums are stuck what the collection they have. Probably a better experience of how it felt to be in Bath during its heyday could be obtained by visiting different locations, such as the Royal Crescent, and Roman baths, and the Assembly Rooms. Nonetheless, I think more could be done with each of the three venues I visited.  

Miss Marjoribanks, by Mrs Oliphant (1865-66)

 

Margaret Oliphant: a photograph from 1860 (public domain

My first impression was how accomplished a writer Mrs Oliphant is. Highly complex sentences, very precisely described scenes; but further reading suggests there might not be much behind the artful syntax.

What people will say about the book today is that it is by a woman writer and features a largely female cast. Lucilla has the ability to twist all the males she meets around her little finger; she is certainly the most dominant character. At the same time, you could reduce the plot to one sentence: which man will Lucilla choose to marry? After all her efforts to become the centre of the social universe of the small town of Carlingford, it appears she will dutifully take her place as a second-rank citizen. There are vague references to good work that she will do after her wedding, but it is acknowledged that the married state is the only truly desirable outcome.

The lack of characterisation for the two main male characters is astonishing. We know nothing about Mr Cavendish or Mr Arbuthnot, the two prospective suitors, nor of Tom, her cousin. Very strangely, he is dismissed at the start of the book as hopelessly uncoordinated and incompetent, yet at the end he is, remarkably, the most suitable choice of husband – an immense about-turn that is never satisfactorily explained.

One of the major characters is an archdeacon, but his speech and manner suggest anything but a clerical background. Perhaps he is an imposter – he does not appear to wear a dog collar, but a shirt and tie. When confronted for details of his dealings with Mrs Mortimer, he shows anything but Christian charity. Yet a few pages later, he is dutifully lined up to marry her. As for Mr Cavendish, it is never quite clear what the nature of his “crime” was.

When I read the word “pre-Raphaelite”, I was impressed, but it would appear that Oliphant uses the word to mean any painter. There is similarly loose language with the terms “Broad Church” and “Low Church”. It’s clear they are used to distinguish social levels, which is fine, but the term Broad Church is used very frequently, without, I think, always being clear about what is implied.

Oliphant drags out the plot – many pages go by without any precision about what actually happened in the past. At the same time, some events happen so fast they are difficult to believe. The book is organised in two parts, separated by some ten years. The first (Iarger) part comprises Lucilla establishing her reputation, which seems to take place within a couple of years, making her no older than 19. During that time, she has been able to set up a school for the poor, with a school mistress, and a well-established garden, as well as being the major society hostess of the town.

There is a lot of repetition, not simply like Dickens as a kind of leitmotiv, but repeating details of story and attitude. It wouldn’t be difficult to cut 50+ pages and make the novel more powerful.

There is some resemblance to E F Benson: small town society and its controversies, determinedly removed from politics and current affairs, and of little interest to anyone outside the town. Unlike Benson, Oliphant has less humour, so the going it slow, at times, but the rise and rise of Lucilla, the doctor’s daughter, as she creates her salon, is enjoyable to follow.

Keeping out of politics by saying “he is the right man for Carlingford” makes it easier for the writer but convenient for the novelist – no need to take sides. If you believe Mrs Oliphant, the choice of MP was made without reference to any party politics.

 All in all, an interesting a readable novel, but not much of an assessment of the society around her, and a woeful plot.

Beyond the Arabian Nights: an exhibition at the Louvre-Lens

 

A copy of Delacroix, Femmes d'Alger, 1867, by Henri Fantin-Latour

I should have got the message from the title of the exhibition, the impression I got was that it would have major works from the Louvre’s world-class collection of Islamic art.

For the first time ever, a remarkable group of pieces from the Department of Islamic Arts at the Louvre Museum will be displayed at the Louvre-Lens. Among them are two exceptional masterpieces: the Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon. This unprecedented loan is complemented by artworks from French and Belgian collections.

I like the way the Louvre is thanked for its “unprecedented loan” to the Louvre-Lens, in other words, to itself. However, Islamic art was outnumbered in this show by French works. The exhibition focused on European (mainly French) responses to Islam, or imaginations of Islam. This kind of exhibition (which we can call Orientalism, although the term has been extensively criticized for its ambiguity) is now quite a commonplace for art exhibitions. Said’s book, Orientalism, dates from 1978, and there were exhibitions at the Royal Academy in 1984, The Metropolitan in 2004, and many others. I was astonished to discover the Metropolitan was lining up a new Orientalism exhibition from June 2026.

Isn’t it somewhat colonial to continue to focus on Western artists and their response to Islamic art, rather than look at the Islamic works themselves? What I saw was a number of exhibits that by current standards would never be shown in public, for their sexism and racism. The Louvre has a major collection of Islamic art (in fact, there is a catalogue of the Louvre Islamic collection available to view in this exhibition, although it is not on sale in the Louvre-Lens bookshop), comprising over 14,000 objects, displayed in Paris with a dedicated Islamic gallery only opened in 2012. It wouldn’t be difficult to have an exhibition of some of these pieces in Lens, and to have an exhibition of Islamic art per se. Instead, this show gives the impression not just of tolerating old attitudes, but even encouraging, condoning, or even paradoxically celebrating them. Why are we being shown stereotypical attitudes that are today widely condemned, via artworks of little quaility? For example, you can be pretty sure that any commercial film adaptation of The Arabian Nights dating from the 1960s or earlier would have primitive attitudes, and the clips seem to confirm it. Was it really necessary to include them? Are these among the 300 “masterpieces” on show at this exhibition? This show looks, for the most part as if the curators looked in the dusty archives to see what wasn’t being shown, but was easy to use. Even when you think a major work has been included – there are works by Matisse and by Delacroix – you then discover that the version on show of Delacroix’s Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement is a copy, rather than the original. Other works, such as a bronze Napoleon riding a horse, seem to have little relevance to the show’s theme.

Instead, we had displays of what the museum already holds – lots of Orientalist works from the last 150 years, much of it displayed out of context. For example, there were the remains of a Paris collector’s apartment, with Islamic objects – but the like so much else in the exibition, these objects were included because a French collector had purchased them. Imagine a show in Saudi Arabia of French art that only included pieces bought by Arab collectors; it would not be a very comprehensive display.

The exhibition closed with some contemporary works, which were supposed to illustrate some kind of progress in orientalist attitudes, but I’m afraid to say in some cases they perpetuated the stereotypes. There was a video of a woman writing on her bare belly, explaining that she was in so doing removing the objectification of women in so much European art. Since her head was never visible, I didn’t feel I a position to see the video in a non-objective way.

There were indeed two major Islamic works, Baptistery of Saint Louis and the Lion of Monzon, but the first is well-known because of its use for baptising French kings. I would have like to come away from the exhibition knowing more about Islamic art, not more about what 19th-century French artists and collectors thought about it. To quote from the exhibition blurb: 

Orientalisms are historical and imaginary accounts. Like any account, they can be transmitted, rewritten, expanded, questioned and criticised. Like any account, they contain both light and dark elements. Like any account, the rest of their history remains to be written, which is expressed by the views of contemporary artists whose artworks are present throughout the exhibition.

Personally, I would stop calling it “orientalisms”, and I would focus on “Islamic art”. It doesn’t seem so radical.

What Robin Lane Fox thinks about The Bible: The Unauthorized Version

 

I wrote about this book while I was immersed in it, and now I have completed it, I can give perhaps are more rounded impression.

Books and websites about the truth or otherwise of the Bible are so prolific, that you would think some ground rules would have been established. Nonetheless, I have only praise for Lane Fox for writing the book, as I initially welcomed the idea of reading what a readable but authoritative historical scholar thought about the Bible. I was brought up in a Christian environment (largely from my school, but also from the wider world) where the Bible was taken, well, as gospel. So the realisation that Biblical scholars have been reassigning and critiquing Bible texts for more than a hundred years was a remarkable discovery. Although this book is largely a distillation of others’ research, it is welcome for all that, since it provides a very clear vision of two opposed worlds: the biblical scholars, who assume authors such as “D” or “P” to explain discrepancies in vocabulary, subject-matter, and chronology, contrasted with the world of believers. The Web is full of writers who will artfully explain to you why the Bible is right, even though the scholars have just proved it wrong. One of the things missing from Lane Fox’s book is just this contrast. There could be a hundred books like this one, without it making any difference to the world beyond the academy. Should this not be considered? In the domain of science, no doubt many people still believe the sun rotates about the Earth,  but it doesn’t make a huge difference, as their knowledge is a kind of cul-de-sac. In contrast, belief in religious systems causes deaths on a vast scale, and (to give just one example) is coupled with the dominant political ideology in the United States and fills me with dread (such as recent calls by right-wing Christians for women to lose the vote and to remain in the home). Academic knowledge, in this domain, is strangely impotent, and you would think that Lane Fox would consider the impact of his writing. Voltaire, in contrast, gleefully grabbed the headlines with his anti-clericalism and dissemination of inconsistencies in the Bible (in his Philosophical Dictionary and elsewhere). The world has need of a  Voltaire today.

Is Lane Fox a believer?

One reviewer summed it up nicely as “Fox doesn’t believe in God, but he does believe in the Bible”. Make what sense of this you can. You would think it a rhetorical question when the author announces as early as the Preface “I write as an atheist”. Yet his fondness for some of the books, such as the Gospel of John, is very visible (he keeps referring to its author as “the beloved disciple”

To summarize the book, it is a broad overview of Biblical textual scholarship, covering the Jewish Bible, the Christian New Testament, and some of the other early Christian writings. This would make it just a secondary review of literature, and to a large extent, it is, but Lane Fox attempts to provide his own angle in two ways. First, he writes as a historian, and claims to assess the Bible as history. I’ll discuss that one below. Second, and much weaker, he has his own views on the many Biblical scholars he refers to – but as a reader, I’m so overwhelmed with the details he is reporting that his own views are of minor interest.

His claim to evaluate the Bible as history is at odds with his practice. He seems quite relaxed about the telling of miracles in both Jewish Bible and the New Testament. Voltaire, in contrast, has a clear point of view, and enjoys himself immensely revealing the inconsistencies of Christians, who maintain that every miracle carried out by Christ and the Apostles in the New Testament is infallibly true, yet reports of more recent miracles in the present day are treated with great doubt. Well, Mr Lane Fox, where do you stand? Do you believe some of the miracles but not others? As a historian of the ancient world, Lane Fox has the example of Herodotus to compare. I’m no Herodotus scholar, but apparently Herodotus also had this kind of on-off view of miracles: he believed in the Delphic Oracle, but not in some other miraculous events he reported. Nonetheless, Herodotus was prepared to believe in the intervention of the Gods. Whatever the case, I would expect Lane Fox to compare the treatment of miracles in non-Biblical sources with Bible accounts. You could explain them, perhaps, as part of the ancient world view, just as views of women, justice and revenge were fundamentally different at that time. But that isn’t made sufficiently clear; I don’t think the author ever clearly states his view on the major Christian miracles (the resurrection, the Virgin birth, and so on). 

What Lane Fox reveals

Nonetheless, the book has some startling revelations. Among the discoveries reported by Lane Fox (he wasn’t the first to find them, but they are nowhere nearly as evident as they should be) are:

1. The Christian Bible does not move from retribution to forgiveness (as we are taught at school). The Book of Revelation ends with “the slaughter of most of humanity”. “There is no comforting progression, from a barbarous God of war to a later and milder God of love”
2. The Nativity is a fabrication. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, and the wise men were added later.
3. Many of the links between the OT and the NT were added by later editors.
4. The Bible is not the word of God (one of the most often repeated claims). Its textual history is messy and highly contested. Many books of the Bible appear to be by multiple authors, written at different times and shoe-horned together. Even the accounts of Jesus in the New Testament are reported in the four gospels with discrepancies between them. Specifically, quotes attributed to Christ are written in four different styles, depending on the author – and the style is continued in the author’s text, so, in essence, you are presented with four different Christs. 

A poor piece of publishing

It’s partly the author’s fault, and partly the publisher’s:

• Poor index: there are over 400 pages of closely-argued text, but the inadequate index covers mainly proper names. A digital version with every word indexed would be a great help.
• As an academic, the author hides behind the use of “we” and quotations that are not cited in the text. This gives the impression of a committee of authority that knows the truth, which we, the readers, are privileged to share (but not to alter).
• Lane Fox’s peculiar system for citations is weird. Quotations are cited, but not in a clear way. He chooses, for reasons best known to himself, not to assign an author to most of his quotes in the main text, and only to refer to these authors in an elliptical way. At several places I have wasted time trying to work out who he is quoting.
• He assumes far too much knowledge on the part of the reader. He expects a grasp of Middle Eastern ancient history, early Jewish history, early Christian history, and good knowledge of the Bible text, including the Apocrypha. He provides no chronology, no list of Bible books, and maddening chapter titles that do not describe what is contained in them.
• Perhaps the book would be better organized as a thematic companion to the books of the Bible
• The author thinks he is witty, and includes many cryptic allusions, which you might (or might not) recognize. Either way, it doesn’t help the intelligibility of the text.
• His concepts of “historian” and primary sources aren’t very helpful. I’ve written about the former in an earlier post. He confidently distinguishes books that are more valuable because they have “primary information”, such as the books of Kings, but to be honest, I think this misses the point. If presented as a work of faith, we judge it differently to a work of history. We remember the Book of Job, which doesn’t have the slightest historical truth, rather than the Book of Kings, however accurate it may be. 

The Unauthorized Version is just one of many books by scholars attempting to clarify their view on the veracity, and historical position of the Christian (and Jewish) Bible. Below the surface, it seems to me that the author is struggling with some kind of belief that he cannot somehow reconcile with his academic career. Four hundred pages later, he is no more comfortable, it would seem, than when he started. The Bible is full of errors, he seems to say, and yet, four hundred pages later ... 

Jan Steen's Old Testament paintings

 

Jan Steen, The Wrath of Ahasuerus, c1668-70, Barber Institute (detail)

Does an era have a defining characteristic, a way of thinking and feeling that is so typical of its time that it becomes difficult to escape? Perhaps The Netherlands in the 17th century, the so-called Dutch Golden Age, is an example. We are so familiar with genre painting from this period that we expect it everywhere we look, so familiar, in fact, that an intense artist like Rembrandt is a surprise, partly because he is such a contrast with his peers.

The spirit of the age came to mind when looking at a Jan Steen painting. In 2018, The Barber Institute had a fascinating exhibition focusing on just one work: Jan Steen’s The Wrath of Ahasuerus (c1668-70). Such a focus is a lovely rarity, and I don’t know why other institutions don’t follow the idea (I seem to remember the Caen Beaux Arts did something similar). I didn’t get to see the exhibition, but I noticed the catalogue in a second-hand collection, and read all of its 84 pages.

The painting relates to the story of Ahasuerus, in the Book of Esther, an Old Testament king of the Persians. Ahasuerus is informed of this plot by his wife Esther. She had been adopted and brought up by a Jewish court official, Mordecai. When Mordecai refused to pay reverence to Hamam, in retaliation, Hamam decided to kill all the Jews in the kingdom.

The painting shows the banquet at which Esther reveals she is Jewish, and the plot to kill all the Jews. Dramatically, Ahasuerus switches the intended execution victim from Mordecai to Hamam.

Why is this painting of interest? For two reasons. First, it represents an atypical subject for Steen. Secondly, it is an example of the moral tales from history so common in Western art; the picture that tells an improving story. 

Steen the painter

I am familiar with Steen for his detailed and lavish costumes and settings, typically of witty and irreverent moments in domestic Dutch life, often with messages concealed in the objects. His paintings usually stand out in galleries of Dutch art by the colourful details such as the rich tablecloths. This painting is unusual, in that it has all these details, as well as a sweet little dog, but it is a historical tale. Which is it, a genre piece or a history painting? Or, as with Veronese, could it be both? You can’t help feeling it works either as one or the other, but in this case, with an impending mass killing only narrowly averted, you feel the dog does not quite give the right message.

As the catalogue states, Steen’s figures are not classical, and Ahasuerus has a stage-villain look about him. So too does the cowering  Hamam. There is a lovely baroque sense of dramatic movement, although the figures tend to exist in isolation of each other, rather than (as with Guercino) being integrated by their movement. Nonetheless, the painting gives a powerful sense that this is a dramatic moment, a moment of change.

 

The context of the painting

Who was it painted for? The catalogue can only guess that it was painted for a Jewish collector, and presumably the purchaser chose this  subject. Indeed, it seems (from the catalogue) there were Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam during the 17thh century, who collected historical paintings, even paintings with Catholic subjects,  to my surprise. The enduring interest in the story of Esther is primarily because it was the origin of the festival of Purim.

How historical is this painting?  

What about the relation of the subject to history? “Scholars agree” to identify Ahasuerus with Xerxes I, king of Persia, described in Herodotus as “fickle and hot-tempered”. So is the purpose of this Biblical story the same as the episode in Herodotus, to provide a little moral story for our edification? Whatever the case, neither the story of Xerxes by Herodotus nor the Biblical episode has any basis in historical fact.   According to Robin Lane Fox’s criteria, neither is a primary source, nor based on a primary source.

So we should judge the story as a fairy tale. Was it inspiring to have such a tale in our living room? Did we feel improved by  seeing how close the Jewish community came to total destruction, saved at the last moment by a ruler with little judgement?   

What do the art historians think?

The final essay in the catalogue “The Critical Fortune of Steen’s OT Paintings” describes how the critics universally dismissed his historical works as lacking decorum. The author’s response is that the sales prices for these works has always remained high: “His biblical painting have realised high prices …while sometimes a discredited part of his oeuvre, Steen’s OT scenes deserve their place in the limelight”. That’s not much of a defence.

What do I think?

Genre painting was, and still is, in my opinion, rated lower than other kinds of painting. This is unfair, because its best practitioners, of whom Steen is an example, could paint well. The paradox of Steen is that he paints scenes of disarray and excess with great care and attention to detail; he is a painter who always wants to include something happening in every corner. However, when commissioned to create a historical work, he cannot drop this style; in this sense, he is a prisoner of the spirit of the age. Just look at that dog, jumping up. If I owned this work, I’d remember the dog, not the moral. 

What makes a work of history trustworthy?

 

Albertinelli, The Creation of Adam (Courtauld Galleries, London)

Much of the debate about the crisis in scholarly publishing has centred around trust and authority. Research integrity looks at these issues, but they are crucial for the assessment of any text. In their specialist subject, a researcher may be able to make an expert judgement on an article, and decide for themselves about the truth or otherwise of the article. But, of course, scholars don’t only read in their specialist area; I would guess (and hope) that a large proportion of scholarly reading will be in areas where the researcher has only limited expertise. Understanding, after all, requires context, and most of our reading, however many PhDs we may have will be outside our area of expertise. How then do we make a judgement that we are to trust the author, and to trust their claims, when we are not a subject-matter expert?

A case study

Robin Lane Fox, in his The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (1991), gives us the tempting prospect of a scholar revealing his working, as it were. Lane Fox is a classical historian, and so (I imagine) familiar with the challenge of dealing with an ancient writer such as Herodotus, the historian, and trying to ascertain how much of what Herodotus writes is history, and how much is simply a folk tale (Herodotus includes a lot of both). Using this knowledge, Lane Fox then applies similar standards to the books of the Bible, to see if we can apply a historical evaluation to a book that is usually judged on very different terms. After all, the opening words of his book are: “The Unauthorized Version is a historian’s view of the Bible … I write … as an ancient historian who is accustomed to reading the Bible narratives like other narratives which survive from the ancient past.” And later, he writes: “It is as a historian that I will explain it [the Bible], accustomed to putting Pilate’s question to written evidence from the distant past.” [p14]. Pilate’s question, of course, is “What then is truth?”

Of course, the Bible is a particularly challenging example, because, unlike other ancient texts, it is frequently read by believers, who will all have some adherence to the text for reasons of faith.  Lane Fox’s first chapter reveals pretty much his entire position; he then uses the same method to examine both the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible, in considerable detail. and considers the claims any of the authors might have to be a historian. I will concentrate, therefore, on an example early in his book.

Incidentally, I ask myself who the intended reader is, if not Lane Fox himself. To read The Unauthorized Version, I found I needed to have a working knowledge of early Jewish history, plus a good knowledge of the main Bible narratives. I found I had to refer to a list of all the books of the Bible and Apocrypha, ordered by date of narration, as well as by order of composition, to be able to keep up with the author. Including these tables would have been helpful to this reader, at least.

For me, the key question is to know what Lane Fox means by “history” and “historian”. He first distinguishes “faith” from facts:

The Bible is not always a text of [faith]. It does also refer to events and persons … it narrates, refers, and prophesies. It therefore invites the question of truth.” [p14]

With such statements, Lane Fox uses terms such as primary and secondary, but there is more to it than that. Nowadays, authority derives from a historical writer writing from personal experience, which makes him or her a primary source. This also is Lane Fox’s view. But with most of the Biblical books is that we have little or no choice to validate what has been written – we have few, if any, comparable sources. We have therefore to try to work within the limitations of the source we have.

As we know, The Bible contains many well-known inconsistencies and contradictions. There are two separate tales of the Creation in Genesis, for example. Many Enlightenment writers, such as Voltaire, made long lists of such discrepancies, and used them as ammunition to attack established religions. After all, if God’s instructions are so unclear, by transmitting them to poor mortals in such a confusing and ambiguous way, such that they require an army of textual scholars to decide what is meant, it is difficult to state “all you have to believe is the Bible”. A further complication is that there is a substantial gap between the orthodoxy of the established churches, and the scholars.

What is a historian?

Lane Fox uses the term “historical” in several senses, it would appear. For example, he describes the author of Kings as “a historian whom we can understand without ever needing to believe” [[195]

In contrast, he has no respect for the accuracy of the author of Chronicles: “When was this splendid liar write and who was he?” [p196] I dutifully assumed that this author would be struck off the list of accepted history, only to be stunned when I subsequently read:

His work is patently secondary, with a strong historical bias, a pleasant gift for fictitious monologues and little value as historical truth. The enterprise, however, was the work of a historian, even if we can rarely trust him further than we can throw him. [chapter 13, p197]

This leaves me thoroughly confused. Is the author of Chronicles a historian like Herodotus? Or just a liar?

How to determine quality historical writing

Lane Fox’s views are nowhere stated explicitly; they have to be pieced together from his use of the term throughout the book. For Lane Fox, a  historian adheres for the most part to the current consensus of scholars’ interpretation of the text. Thus, for example, the two accounts of Genesis are explained very clearly:

The first story, we now know, was the second in time. It was written by a Jewish priestly writer who took the sabbatical view of Creation. [p21]

“We now know” means that the scholarly community have broadly (although never entirely) agreed on this interpretation of the text. Using the first person plural (“we”), as in academic articles, emphasises this collective understanding.  The text alone does not reveal enough to clarify which of the two narratives comes first. Both of the two creation myths are contradicted by science, but we can establish some facts about the statements.

A good historian, emphasises Lane Fox, looks at the context of a statement or object, which equates to the text scholars trying to know about the period and place where the text was composed. But a historian is also described simply as an author who is “trying to record the past” [p162]. This is a very broad description!

Poetic truth

Even if untrue, the creation myths in Genesis are fascinating to read. The creation myth continues to reverberate today, because the story is so haunting. Let’s call this “poetic truth”. Lane Fox always has room for poetic truth, if it is well enough written.

Many of the Bible stories we are familiar with from our childhood are stories of this kind, or “Just So” stories, as Lane Fox aptly puts it. Unsurprisingly, these tend to be the stories that are depicted in medieval and Renaissance church paintings.

Factual truth

When The Bible states facts, it can potentially be proved to be wrong. For example, in the Gospel of Luke, there is a mention of a “decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed”. According to Lane Fox (or to the scholars whose work has been endorsed by him) in the time of Augustus, Jews were not part of the Roman world, so this statement cannot be correct. Errors like this are explained by the author writing much later than the events related taking place. Lane Fox also states that one of these errors “has not grown up from history” [p35] which suggests an external reality which is only partly captured in any textual account. Lane Fox, as a historian, can detect what has or has not “grown up from history”.

The Lane Fox synthesis

Historical study “has to assess the use which fundamentalists make of its own evidence Historians and on a wider, more challenging front it has to try to appreciate scripture for what it is.” This would appear to be responding to the text as a literary object – just as the plays of Shakespeare might be at odds with history but great literature for all that. For my part, I find it easier not to reconcile the two at all; if this composite text is so full of errors and inconsistencies (and Lane Fox takes 417 pages to show this), I find it difficult to “appreciate scripture for what it is”. When I read social media, I find that factual inaccuracies and false statements tend to incline me against the argument of the writer. Is this so unusual? Why, then, do we give religious texts so much leeway? 

Is the Bible true? Measuring religious texts against criteria of truth and accuracy

 

A page from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the sources discussed in The Unauthorized Version [Public Domain]

I used to recommend that all theology departments in universities should be closed down, since their very title “department of theology” suggested to me at the time that they were at odds with the disinterested search for the truth that is the essence of the enlightenment institution. This was the result of reading a lot of Voltaire, I must admit. He used to sit at home of an evening, with his partner Madame du Chatelet, having great anti-clerical fun in discovering inconsistencies and impossibilities in Bible texts

Reading Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (1991) has changed my view somewhat. It makes me realise that much of the output of theological departments is valuable, in that it demonstrates the impossibility of any kind of belief in the “truth” of scripture. Within a few pages, Fox reveals a very different view held as a consensus by biblical scholars about the Bible: for example, that the Gospels were mainly not written by the person whose name is attached to them. In the Old Testament, anonymous (and often multiple) authors are the norm. So not  only is there a “Q”, a supposed source for the New Testament narratives, there are also sources J, E, P and D for some of the most familiar Old Testament books such as Genesis.

So this I can understand. University departments of Literary Studies are used to trying to establish an accurate text, and in some cases, this is simply not possible. Lane Fox has tried to apply the skills he has learned from working in a classics department to determine the truth or otherwise of Biblical books, regarded simply as another classical-period text.

The result is fascinating, even if more difficult to read than it should have been (see below). Basically, Lane Fox tries to determine if Biblical books make use of primary sources (they do not), and if they can be regarded as proper history (they cannot, for the most part). This is where his argument becomes interesting, because he applies, I think, rather simplistic criteria to assess his texts. Here, the index fails completely: it is only an index of proper names, so there is no index term “primary”. So I have to hunt for myself, using the digital version in The Internet Archive, to find Lane Fox’s discussion about what constitutes history. There is a very relevant passage in Chapter 11, “Ideas of History”. Lane Fox describes the distinction between primary and secondary sources, that we are all familiar with from school, and claims to use this as one criterion for evaluating Bible texts:

For the question of historical truth, the line between primary witness and secondary source or tradition is more fundamental than the line between oral and written. In the Hebrew Old Testament it is clear that no book is primary in this strong sense. [p173, Penguin edition]

While I am fascinated by Lane Fox’s careful survey of a mountain of over a hundred years of Biblical scholarship, I think his idea of what constitutes history is somewhat simplistic. Probably 99 per cent of all historical writing is not based on primary sources, and this book is a typical example. I don’t expect Lane Fox to have read all, or even any, of the primary sources he is discussing; it would take a lifetime. Instead, I am grateful that he has summarised what many scholars, no doubt based in university departments of theology, have done: to review, line by line, the original texts, and to determine their authenticity, the theological equivalent of the Arden edition of Shakespeare. We read the Arden edition because it is the considered thought of a scholar much more knowledgeable than us, and with more time than we have, to reach a conclusion. When we read, we use a variety of means to assess how far we can trust the scholars, and then we make our own judgement -- and at various points in the narrative Lane Fox is very emphatic to state his own view of the evidence, for example, on page 85, “The mission of Ezra … involves the law more historically; in my view, it is historical and belongs to 398 BC (others opt for 458).” In writing this, Lane Fox is telling the reader, trust me, I’ve read this stuff, and I have weighed the evidence for myself.

In departments of literature, scholars may spend several years preparing a critical edition of one text. For the most part, all of us, academics, students, or general readers, we assume the decisions taken by the textual scholar are trustworthy, and we move on to assessments of interpretation of the text. Something of this kind must happen in science, also; a narrative is used as the explanation for what is happening, and for most purposes, we work within the limitations of each model.

So I’m very grateful to Lane Fox for the work he has put in to assemble this view, even though his is a secondary work. Most of my historical reading (and, I guess that of most people) has been of this kind of level. After all, it’s how we operate. We read or listen to the news and we don’t have time to investigate primary sources. If we hear a news clip, we know it has been heavily edited and selected and may not reveal the truth of the story, but we have no choice but to accept it, for the most part, until we find some reason to doubt.

Incidentally, my only complaint about Lane Fox is, paradoxically, his slapdash referencing system. He does not use footnotes, but links to references by using references to the main text. But his use of references is partial (he doesn’t cite all his sources) and uncertain: many direct quotations in the text at not cited properly in the endnotes (e.g. p81 “exemplified by completeness” – which book is this extracted from?), plus, equally annoying, the assumption that the readers know more than they do. For example, the reference to “Samson’s unfortunate foxes” on the same page (p81) made no sense to me, until I looked up the reference and found out what the episode was about. Lane Fox has a rather cavalier attitude to his readers: they don’t know scholarship about the Bible, but they do know (a) the outline of Jewish history, including all the major exiles, and (b) the books of the Bible and everything they contain, even if they don’t know the latest scholarship. Finally, there should be a full list of all books cited or referred to, in alphabetical order. As often happens in books for a wide audience that have scholarly pretensions, Lane Fox assumes in his bibliography you may want a review of the latest year’s articles, when most of his readers are struggling to follow his basic text. Still, I'm grateful that this book exists; it's made me think much more deeply about topics that are taken for granted for so much of our lives. 

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.