Nina Stibbe - "England's greatest living comic novelist"?

I wonder if anyone ever went to a creative writing class proposing to write a comic novel. I didn’t think that creative writing and comic novels could be so opposed, until I read Nina Stibbe’s Reasons to be Cheerful (2019), which tries to be both at the same time. Behind a mask of comic fiction, I sense a sensitive soul trying to escape, dreaming of self-expression, as you would from a creative writing class in which you want to state significant things.

What made me think it was a comic novel? The TLS, no less. In a review by Ian Sansom, entitled “Bantz vs. humour: Differing approaches to the comic novel”, he compares her to other recent comic writers and states “she is in a different league”. In this novel, “Stibbe establishes herself as England’s greatest living comic novelist.” That’s good enough for me! I sat down to split my sides with laughter at Stibbe, twice shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. After all, David Lodge would be a good candidate for the role of greatest living comic novelist, and I found his novels hilarious.

I didn’t laugh. The novel, very unexpectedly, moved steadily away from the comic, to domestic tragedy. I haven’t read all of Wodehouse, but I don’t remember any of the major characters dying by accident three quarters of the way through the book. It kind of takes away the laughter, somehow – call me a curmudgeon if you like. Not only is a major character killed, but the rest of the novel describes the narrator coming to terms with it. I’ve never seen a comic novel moving to emotional self-examination.

The comic aspect is quite formulaic. The narrator, Lizzie Vogel, aged 18, gets a job as a dental nurse. She recites very convincingly all the dental characteristics of people she meets. At the same time, she claims to base her ideas on popular women’s magazines such as Woman’s Own. So, throughout the novel, we see trade names liberally used and mindless advertising slogans as part of the narrative. It’s not very funny. In fact the narrator – or Stibbe’s – approach to characterization is simply accretion, piling up personal idiosyncrasies, phobias, product preferences, and odd eating tastes, until we have some image for each character, based on their tics and consumption habits. Advertising slogans are used throughout in seeming belief:

I … stayed for dinner and watched a hard-hitting TV documentary.

If this is satire, then the character is a cipher. But if we are to believe the character, does she believe these publicity slogans? I suspect Stibbe is attempting to use cliché to arouse our sympathy and empathy with the character - which is ambitious, but not very comic. How else could you read this passage, near the end of the book, that is, in the 'emotional' part:

It struck me that I’d started to prefer the top half of a slice of bread to the bottom half. This hadn’t been a whim; I’d always eaten the crusted top half of a slice of toast, to get it out of the way before enjoying the softer underneath half. And now it was the other way round. It was a shocking realization. What had made me change? I don’t know – perhaps I was eager to change as many things as possible. I’d known sadness before, I’d seen it, but I’d not experienced the sort of pain that makes a person switch sandwich preference.

I’m prepared to read the first sentence as funny, but the paragraph moves towards the confessional. It’s as if Michael Frayn in the last act of Noises Off started to reveal his inner emotions when he wrote the play. But we, the viewers, aren’t interested, and mercifully the farce simply becomes more farcical than ever. Nor, I suspect, does P G Wodehouse go in much for genuine self-examination. I’m quite happy for Jeeves and Wooster to remain ciphers. It’s funnier that way.

Delacroix's failings

Self-portrait, 1837

In a recent post, I wrote about T J Clark’s very odd interpretation of Delacroix. This started me thinking: just what is the essence of Delacroix? What are his strengths and weaknesses? In this post I concentrate on the perceived weaknesses.

It’s always fascinating to see what people don’t like about a famous artist. While for the most part, works such as The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix (2001) do their best to see positives in Delacroix’s art, a few critics and reviewers are more condemning.

For Jason Rosenfeld, reviewing the vast Delacroix exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 2018-19, the essence of Delacroix is cats:

It is perhaps time to reconsider Delacroix’s achievement, to acknowledge his limitations. He was imaginative. He talked a good game in his journals. He was novel in his use of color and in accessing contemporary literature. He did not shy away from the large-scale canvases of the French tradition. But his project was a failure. His pictures are replete with tumult but lack human spirit. His women are ciphers for male violence and desire, and nothing more. Stick with the cats.

But are his paintings “ciphers for male violence and desire, and nothing more”? This is a rather glib judgement based on references in his Journals that he used to have sex with his models. Unfortunately, if we write off a male artist because of their failure to develop believable depictions of women, we will have to abandon Charles Dickens. And if we condemn artists who sleep with their models, we will have to cast off Picasso, Lucian Freud, and many others. There are plenty of depictions of women by Delacroix that are not “ciphers for male violence and desire”, for example his Jewish Bride of Tangier.

Jewish Bride of Tangiers, 1832

To summarise some of the complaints about Delacroix:

He is phallocentric (among many other faults). An essay by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in the Cambridge Companion condemns Delacroix for many things, including: “[Delacroix] continually conflated (hetero)sexual intercourse and the act of painting”, since he describes a new canvas as a “virgin” space. But her judgements on the paintings are more, I think, a dialogue with herself and her arguments than a genuine engagement with the picture. 

Massacre at Chios

Thus, in the Massacre at Chios, she seems to complain that the women, about to be taken into slavery, are not erotic, as in similar paintings by Delacroix’s contemporaries: “Delacroix … compromised the fiction of the viewer’s altruistic empathy with violated Greek women by offering a conflicting identification with the male aggressor.” As a modern viewer, I don’t feel any identification with any of the characters in this picture, Greek (victims) or Ottoman (oppressors).

Death of Sardanapalus

Grigsby’s view of Sardanapalus is wilder still. For her, the picture, from its subject matter, should be a wild male fantasy, set in “an Orient identified with his [Delacroix’s] own (hetero)sexual prowess”. This, however, does not tally with the figure of Sardanapalus, rather lacking in the aggression she seeks: “The circling dance of interchangeable nude women fails to secure the unimaginable phallic authority of an oriental despot whose diminutive head retreats from a swaddled body, which despite, or rather because of its preposterously enormous limbs, collapses into a uterine concavity”. This seems to mean he is curled up on the bed. If only poor Sardanapalus had been lucky enough to have a larger head.

He couldn’t draw (Rosenfeld: “There is hardly a “picture without a curious passage or two—an arm akimbo, a horse’s head that is laughably small, glances that miss intended targets by a wide margin.”). Art historians gleefully report any deviation from a photographic realism as if it were a fault. Ingres was another poor painter who couldn't draw the human figure. 

Delacroix wasn’t sufficiently left-wing. Clark, in The Absolute Bourgeois, 1973, writes: “D’s art in 1849-51 was bad because becoming a reactionary … was an experience [that] interfered too palpably with his strange amalgam—of reaction and revolution in art practice.”

His paintings “lack human spirit” (Rosenfeld). This is so much at odds with Delacroix’s major works that it is not worth refuting. His 1837 Self-Portrait is a work full of the passion of the man himself.

So was Delacroix good for anything? Well, he could draw and paint cats, and other animals in movement. Rosenfeld again:

The Lion Hunt of 1855 … is the usual mish-mosh of bodies with misaligned heads and appendages, relieved by deftly distributed color. But oh, the cats. Bristling musculature and rippling tawny fur, deployed claws and gnashing teeth. It is not new in concept—as ever with Delacroix, Rubens got there first—but few artists of the period could match this level of physical presence in their work.

So, yes to cats, and no to women, no to historical painting.  Not much remains from the legacy of one of the most famous 19th-century European artists. Perhaps it is time to look again at Delacroix, and to see if there is anything worth saving, as it were. That can be another post; but we do agree he can paint cats. 

Sex and violence in Delacroix

I have the greatest regard for T J Clark. His The Absolute Bourgeois (1973) and Image of the People (also 1973), and, most of all, The Painting of Modern Life (1987), were for me a model of how to write committed art criticism, aware of the context in which a painter was operating. This view was for me a revelation, to discover another way of seeing late 19th-century art without as a result feeling I should be buying myself an Impressionist calendar every Christmas.

So to see the Clark, now retired and in his eighties, writing about Delacroix (in the London Review of Books, 10 October 2019) was very welcome. Clark strikes a personal note in this article, remembering a poster of Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855) that he bought in 1966, and how the painting was for him a “talisman” that he compared with Jacob wrestling with the Angel, in the church of Saint Sulpice, Paris. But the conclusions Clark draws are not the way I see Delacroix.

For Clark, in these two paintings, “I was being shown what violence was, the full range of its beauty and monstrosity, and how deeply human beings can be in love with both”.

Certainly Delacroix, like Gericault, is a painter attracted in some of his paintings (but by no means all) to violence, or more specifically, to moments of animals and humans in distorted and non-classical movement, in dramatic conflict of the highest intensity. The lion hunt shows a lion that, despite the title, looks to be triumphant, having just landed on top of a horse and man, perhaps its rider. On the right of the scene, another lion is digging its claws into a horse. The scene is depicted with astonishing intensity, partly from the way the figures are piled on top of and alongside each other, partly from the way the canvas is filled with contrasting movement, with no space for any background or landscape. Clark gives more reasons for the intensity (he has seen the original, which I have not): the sheer scale of the painting, around 3.5 metres in width, and finally from the unfortunate fire damage that removed much of the top of the painting in the 19th century. As Clark, states, the result is ‘congested’; it is a magnificent painting.

Clark then refers to an article he wrote in 1969 about Delacroix, and how he concluded Delacroix was a “desolate reactionary, shipwrecked in the 19th century by the failure of Napoleon”, which means that Clark views Delacroix with an “unresolved mixture of admiration and distaste”.

 Although Clark’s article is several thousand words long, he doesn’t explain how he reaches this conclusion. I haven’t (yet) read what he wrote in 1969 (and he doesn’t give a citation), but I dislike people referring to other content that they don’t summarise or explain. He states (but does not explain why) the Lion Hunt was meant by its maker as an “antidote to Liberty Guiding the People”. Perhaps it was; please tell me why.

Finally, Clark concludes, the Lion Hunt and the Death of Sardanapalus (1827) are both about Delacroix’s view of sex.

“Sex and violence, Sardanapalus says, are completely and necessarily entangled.  Sex is antagonism … dominance and submission are indelibly part of it.”

I’m not sure about this; and I’m certainly not sure about Clark’s next statement:

Dominance and submission … in the years following Sardanapalus he [Delacroix] decided not to state the case so openly … but the metaphor he then fell back on, of combat between men and animals, was sufficiently easy to decode. The lions and tigers and shrieking horses in his pictures are to be understood as women. Men are truly endangered by them, and regularly lose their hard and fast identities in the struggle. The loss is unnerving, but delectable, for eventually the men will win … this is the story we call patriarchy.”

This is more about Clark than about Delacroix. In the Lion Hunt, the lion is winning. If Delacroix wanted to show the triumph of patriarchy, in Clark’s terms, he would have depicted a dead (or defeated) lion. Where is the evidence that Delacroix saw violence on animals as a metaphor for human sexual relations? In Clark’s terms, I could retitle this work “The Triumph of Woman”, and leave my audience mystified. 

I won’t go into Clark’s interpretation of Sardanapalus here (it does not seem very relevant to this discussion). But I will challenge Clark’s final comparison, between Jacob wrestling the Angel and Lion Hunt. He describes the Jacob painting as a moment “when violence transmutes to balance and mutuality … the great oaks looking down on the wrestlers, their branches mimicking but also dwarfing – ironising – the ways of man.” Well, there are no oaks in Lion Hunt, by which I mean no background to provide a context. And I don’t see much sign of balance in the Lion Hunt either; it is a moment of raw intensity. Perhaps, over 40,000 words, and with sufficient explanation, Clark’s argument would make some sense. But here, it does not.

David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy: a hilarious epitaph for the seventies

There have been some comments that this blog is too negative. I haven’t counted the number of approving or disapproving posts, but it’s probably true that the negative outranks the positive quite substantially.

So it is refreshing indeed to report not one but three novels that are entertaining, informative, and full of narrative energy. They are the three novels comprising David Lodge’s sequence, The Campus Trilogy. The first, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), dsescribes the exchange of two academics, Morris Zapp from the US and Philip Swallow from the UK, at each other’s institutions, with plenty of opportunities to contrast the UK and US academic systems. Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), introduces the character of Persse McGarrigle, a rather innocent young Irish researcher, and his search for the woman he thinks he loves, with rather obvious (but funny) echoes of Percival searching for the Holy Grail.

Finally, Nice Work (1988) expands the series well beyond higher education to include the world of a small industrial company in Rummidge, and the interaction of Vic Wilcox, the industry boss, and Robyn Penrose, junior lecturer at Rummidge, as part of a government initiative for academia and industry to get closer together. They do indeed get closer together, an episode that is a tour de force, given that it is highly unlikely an academic and industrialist would ever have any time for each other in the real world. 

One character, Philip Swallow, appears in all three novels, and much of the action (pretty much the whole of the action of Nice Work) is set in Rummidge, a loosely fictionalized Birmingham. Having enjoyed the novels so much, I am slightly reluctant to investigate too closely how and why they are successful, but as a former student of literature, I feel it is my duty to, ahem, show off my skills and discover how they work.

One achievement is that Lodge writes from the inside. As a former professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, he had an intimate knowledge of a redbrick university in a large industrial city. Fascinatingly, however, he doesn’t attempt to make the city or the university any more appealing than it is. He is a remarkably objective and often unsympathetic describer of the industrial midlands, particularly in the third novel.

Remarkably, Lodge is very aware, as an academic might be in Birmingham, but not in Oxford or Cambridge, that academic life is not the only way to live. Nice Work contains lengthy arguments between the industrialist and the academic, each defining their own existence, and the academic is by no means wholly successful. The academic career structure is shown to be elitist, unfair, underpaid, and often irrelevant to the local community, yet Robyn Penrose, dreaming of obtaining a tenured position, defends it passionately – even though she is likely to be a victim of the very system she defends.

Wilcox said, ‘Who were you trying to hurt?’

‘Hurt?’

‘A strike has to hurt someone. The employers, the public. Otherwise it has no effect.’

Robyn was about to say, ‘The Government,’ when she saw the trap.

It becomes clear to Robyn that the strike has little effect on the government, the students, or the general public. The exchange is revealing for Lodge’s remarkable balance. Few professors would have such a dispassionate and even jaundiced idea of their own profession; you feel that these novels could not have emerged from the far more precious world of Oxford or Cambridge, where there is no countervailing force to the academy.

Still more remarkable, the novels make a solid attempt to communicate some idea of literary theory. I came away from the novels with a refreshed idea of what terms such as metaphor, metonymy, and less common, aporia, meant, even though I had dutifully learned them years ago. In any case, my university education largely predated structuralism and literary theory.

Not only can Lodge balance academia and industry, he also succeeds impressively, to my mind, in balancing male and female attitudes. Admittedly, some of the female characters, notably Hilary Swallow and Mrs Wilcox, appear to be mere ciphers, but some of the other younger women in the novels are very believable, notably Robyn Penrose. She is believable partly because she is so centred in a place and time. Her slightly hippy clothes, her possessions, even the way her partner Charles massages her, are so typical of the 1970s and 80s. And yet she is more than just a cipher. Despite her innocence, she tries to make sense of the world around her and to respond to it towards some kind of success; it’s almost tragic, that both Wilcox and Penrose are almost doomed in their respective home and work environments, oppressed by forces they have almost no control over, and yet they continue to struggle and to fight a very unequal battle. Lodge does not write about industry as an insider, and yet his depiction of a small-scale British manufacturing company trying to survive in a declining industrial environment is moving and almost tragic. Wilcox’s company has few options other than cost-saving – something it has in common with Rummidge University, faced with endless cuts in funding and hence staffing.

So, a set of incisive novels that seem unerring in their depiction of fashions and styles of the 70s and 80s, set against a brutal realistic background that offers little hope for the main characters. Similarly, family life, notably the life of the Swallows and the Wilcoxes, seems to have just one direction: down. By the end of the trilogy, Swallow is reduced to a hard-of-hearing, rather ineffectual head of department, unable to do anything to respond to external events. And yet the trilogy was compelling to read. A remarkable achievement.

What's with the word 'radical'?

The execution of Charles I, 1649

Raymond Williams, in his book Keywords (1976), emphasises the importance of word and phrase meanings in scholarly discussions. His book deals with “vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions.” He describes how he was struck by a word being used in a discussion, and how “the problem of its meanings seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problem it was being used to discuss”. The problems that arise when people do not define their terms were described in a recent blog about the term “neoliberalism”, where the term was being used at times with opposing meanings without explanation.

Blair Worden, a highly regarded expert on the English Civil War, highlights the term ‘radical’ in an interesting review (in the London Review of Books, September 2019) of two books about English Radicalism during the seventeenth century. Worden notes that the term ‘radical’ was used by Christopher Hill in his pioneering books of the 1970s, notably his 1972 book The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution, which was a highly fashionable study of radicalism.

Worden points out that term ‘radical’ was not used in the seventeenth century in the sense in which Hill uses it, meaning a view dissenting from the political order of things. He also points out that Thomas Hobbes was as radical as anyone in the period, but is not included in Hill’s collection of radicals. Hill concentrated on small groups such as The Levellers.

So far, I agree. But Worden is a man of rather fixed opinions. The review becomes a rant against Hill, something Worden has done several times before, even though Hill was writing more than 45 years ago. There are many more mentions of Hill in this review than of the two books ostensibly being reviewed.

What is Worden’s complaint about Hill? For Worden, Hill is in thrall to a doctrine that doesn’t fit the facts: 

“The language of ‘radicalism’ enabled Hill to play down differences among his groups and to situate them with an essentially unified ‘culture’ of protest.
“Hill, who saw events as the mere superstructure of history”
“This perplexity did not detain Hill. Taking political and religious dissent to be articulations of a single set of class relations, he [Hill] thought them natural allies.”

Yet one of the books under review is entitled “Radical Parliamentarians”. Clearly Hill can’t have been entirely wrong, then.

 You wonder why the London Review of Books follows this strange practice of giving reviewer X the opportunity to review a book by Y, when in fact we all know that X will write about Z. It might be more helpful to commission a review article, along the lines of “Is Hill still worth reading today”, by someone more balanced.

The close of the review, if I understand it correctly, is about how the American libertarian right has championed John Lilburne as one of their heroes, and praised “Leveller attacks on trading monopolies … as pleas for a free market”.

At this point I noticed how Worden places in inverted commas terms he is not happy about – every mention of the word radicalism appears in this way, as if its meaning were not to be trusted. However, if any term should be distrusted, it is ‘free market’ -there has probably never been a free market anywhere (see, for example, Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism).

Worden suggests, I think, that ‘the British radical pantheon’ [his inverted commas] cannot monopolize radical ideas for the left.  Yet the phrase ‘radical right’ was captured by Raymond Williams in his Keywords way back in 1976. On the one hand, the term “radical” continues in use to the present day (as the book being reviewed demonstrates). On the other hand, the fact that the right-wing has made use of the term “radical” hardly invalidates the term itself. In Justin Champion’s view, in a Guardian interview in 2009, “Blair [Worden] is correct, that the political experiments of the 1650s were defeated … but … once 1649 [the execution of Charles I] had happened there was no turning back.” Worden is unrepentant; he can’t see “what good it did” to behead King Charles I. All this talk about radicalism really comes down to your opinion whether it was right or not to execute the king. 

However, despite Professor Worden's reservations, the word ‘radical’ is clearly still being used in book titles, and no doubt will continue to be used meaningfully by ‘the British radical pantheon’ for a few years yet.

On reading Burckhardt

It’s a long time since I opened a book by Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97), Swiss professor, and son of a priest. On turning to his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) I was expecting a stimulating, well-informed overview by a world expert in Italian culture and history (after all, Burckhardt was the author of the famous Cicerone, 1855, subtitled Art-guide to painting in Italy. For the use of travellers).

But what I read in the first few pages shocked me. Burckhardt is to history as the News of the World is to culture – only of interest if it is scandalous and, hopefully, immoral. Burckhardt is not interested in what happened when, who was in power and who came next. For Burckhardt, finding a spectacular crime or an appropriate anecdote is all – and I don’t think he particularly cares if it is not true, as long as it fits his case. Burckhardt’s Renaissance Italy is a creation of pure fantasy, a Sunday scandal newspaper approach to history. This is history as an impassioned statement of wild forces, characterised rather than summarised by melodramatic and lurid illustrations:

And what can be thought of Frederick III? His journeys to Italy have the air of holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the expense of those who wanted him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity is flattered to entertain an emperor… At Ferrara, on his second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a whole day without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty titles.

We aren’t told who Frederick III was, where he as emperor, what his background it; only that he was fabulously, thrillingly corrupt. Only a truly immoral man, he implies, would not leave his chamber when distributing titles.

Burckhardt is fascinated as well as repelled by immorality. The term “bastard” seems to raise his writing to fever pitch:

Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of the fifteenth century was the public indifference to legitimate birth, which to foreigners—for example, to Commines— appeared so remarkable. … In Italy, there no longer existed a princely house where even in the direct line of descent, bastards were not patiently tolerated.

You recognise the shocked Swiss bourgeois visiting Italy and becoming aroused and appalled by the sense of vice and immorality. No bastards in Switzerland, clearly. 

From henceforth that thoroughly immoral relation between the governments and their Condottieri, which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became more and more common.

Quite what is a “thoroughly immoral” relation? Was the rest of Europe particularly moral, at the time?

Burckhardt revels in lurid descriptions:

When in 1494 Charles VIII approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity that every house in the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled. the peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the fresh-grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts grew fat on the bodies of the slain, on so-called “Christian flesh.”

Alongside the prurient fascination with evil, there is casual racism:

taxes … were collected by those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is impossible to obtain any money from Orientals.

Moreover, Burckhardt succumbs to the same prejudice that affected many 19th-century German academics: a facile stereotypical view by northern Europeans of Italians as wildly passionate, and hopelessly incapable of living in organised societies, for example, the Renaissance princely states … “displaying the worst features of an unbridled egotism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture”. He uses throughout metaphors of health and disease (and it is pretty clear that Burckhardt and his home of Basel are the healthy ones).

When I look again at descriptions of Burckhardt, these characteristics for me invalidate him a serious thinker. What is all the more astonishing is how relatively recent figures praise him to the skies. Jonathan Jones in the Guardian (10 July 2010) states “His book drips with love of Italy and the Italians. It is … one of the most passionate homages ever paid by a northern European to southern Europe … its greatness as a book lies in its imaginative intoxication”. Intoxicated and wrong?

For Professor James Davidson, in the London Review of Books (20 August 1998), comparing Burckhardt’s treatment of ancient Greece with the Italian Renaissance, “Burckhardt’s account of the currents of energy within and between those epochs still depends on the clichés of dissipation, dilution and adulteration”.  That’s exactly what it is, and yet Burckhardt is not condemned for it. Davidson, incidentally, mistakenly describes Burckhardt as an “intellectual voluptuary”, when the phrase was actually used by Peter Gay to describe Macaulay. Davidson quotes, apparently admiringly, a typical anecdote from Burckhardt, on the subject of suicide:

An epidemic of this kind once afflicted the girls of Miletus, and was attributed to a morbid influence in the air; all of a sudden they longed for death, and many strangled themselves. The pleas and tears of their parents and friends had no effect, and they evaded the closest surveillance, until a clever man suggested a public edict stating that those who died in this way must be carried naked through the agora; this put an end to the problem.

Burckhardt’s sense of cultural (and sexual) superiority, of condemning the worlds he depicts, make him highly suspect as a cultural critic - those foolish, easily-led young girls. It’s as if Pevsner were to rewrite The Buildings of England based around the scandalous vicars who inhabited the parishes of which the church buildings are the only remaining evidence. Fun to read, but not history.

What does the Italian Renaissance mean?

You can’t say this blog does not tackle the big questions. No, it’s not the next winner of Celebrity Come Dancing, but the meaning of the Italian Renaissance.

For most people, including myself, the Italian Renaissance means, more than anything else, paintings and sculpture. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa – images as familiar to us as Beatles songs and national anthems. But, of course, devoid of any context, who knows what they represent to the modern eye. Part of it is the way museums hoick paintings out of any background and display them in a neutral gallery, against a blank wall, with nothing above or below.

Like many people, I enjoy looking at paintings in my spare time. I’d like to think it is more than simply train-spotting, just identifying the recognisable pictures in various galleries, but it becomes challenging to explain exactly what I have learned, or imbibed, after a quick tour around a fine art collection. And of all the mysteries, I am more often drawn to the Italian Renaissance pictures than any other (not quite true – to be precise, it’s the period 1500 – 1575, for me, but that’s another story). What is the fascination of the Italian Renaissance?

Well, for a start, the Italian Renaissance is immediately recognisable. There is no doubt in most art galleries which are the Italian Renaissance paintings. They have mastered perspective, which earlier generations did imperfectly, if at all, and while still being largely religious in subject matter, tend to depict their subjects in a more naturalistic way.

But beyond these rather simplistic and trivial details, there is a feeling, which you sense powerfully in Florence, but also in most major western art galleries, that the Italian Renaissance seems to have been something of a whirlwind. Everyone in the Renaissance seems to have been painting like there was no tomorrow. Of course, this might simply reflect the buying practices of the museums: are there more Italian renaissance paintings in Western galleries because more were produced, or is it simply that they are today valued more highly than other schools of art? Whatever the case, the Italian Renaissance is highly esteemed, and often given pride of place in museum collections.

The ubiquity of the Italian Renaissance! As soon as you start looking, you see references to the Italian Renaissance in so many places. Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves (1925) depicts mercilessly the communities of British and American wealthy individuals believing they could somehow imbibe the spirit of the Renaissance by living in the Tuscan hills overlooking Florence. The most famous of these individuals was of course Bernard Berenson, who made a highly effective combination of interests and income living at the villa I Tatti and advising wealthy clients which paintings to buy.

Donald Olsen’s 1986 book, The City as a Work of Art, is clearly a reference to Jacob Burckhardt. After a visit to Florence earlier this year, I recalled reading Burckhardt’s astonishing book for the first time, many years ago. The Florence he describes is not, of course, the real Florence of the Renaissance, but his vision was so compelling, and even the words he used have become fixed in the language: “The State as a Work of Art” is the title of his first chapter. In terms of influencing generations of visitors to Italy and students of Italian history, its importance cannot be overstated. Burckhardt’s vision of artists and thinkers probably led to the proliferation of Renaissance artefacts in Washington, New York and elsewhere as wealthy collectors in their enthusiasm collected objects in the belief that by ownership they could acquire something of this magical Renaissance spirit.

Of course, it’s another matter to decide if Burckhardt’s vision was correct, and if it still deserves its place as an introduction to Renaissance Italy. There is a topic! How far is Burckhardt relevant today, if at all, and does he misrepresent the Renaissance? Quite a theme, and quite a challenge. To be precise, the task would be to identify why Burckhardt appealed so much to his twentieth-century readers, and whether the more recent overviews of the same territory appeal and why.

For a start, Burckhardt’s subdivisions of the book make clear what he is omitting:

Part One: The State as a Work of Art

Part Two: The Development of the Individual

Part Three: The Revival of Antiquity

Part Four: The Discovery of the World and of Man

Part Five: Society and Festivals

Part Six: Morality and Religion

This does not appear include the private enterprise that was clearly flourishing at the time in Florence. But to look at that in detail would require something of a study of Burckhardt, as well as a comparison with more recent titles. For example,

Peter Burke’s single volume on the Renaissance, Culture and Society in Italy, was consciously modelled on Burckhardt and attempted to update it for the second half of the twentieth century. Some 25 years after reading these books, I again looked at the Renaissance in the shape of a more recent overview, Art in Renaissance Italy, by Evelyn Welch (2000). It would be fascinating to compare the differences in their perceptions of what the Italian Renaissance meant at various points in modern history: 1860, 1972, 2000. Watch this space!