art history – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

In Our Time: Holbein at the Tudor Court

Hans Holbein the Younger was one of the foremost portrait painters to work in England during the Tudor period (and perhaps ever), and it’s his paintings that shape how we see the court of Henry VIII. Discussing his time at the Tudor court on In Our Time were Susan Foister (the National Gallery), John Guy (Clare College, University of Cambridge) and Maria Hayward (University of Southampton).

They started the programme by setting the scene for the Tudor court of 1526, when Holbein first arrives. At this point Henry VIII has been on the throne for 17 years. Cardinal Wolsey is still his right hand man, and Anne Boleyn has just arrived on the scene. In terms of international politics there has just been a bit of a shake up. Previously Henry VIII was allied with the Spanish against the French – there had been a plan that the two countries would co-ordinate an attack on France, and once successful Henry VIII would get to keep northern France (and be crowned King of France) and the Spanish would claim southern France. However the Spanish had won a victory over the French, but then not divided the spoils with England as Henry VIII thought they’d agreed. So the alliance had broken down, and now Henry VIII was allied with France. Which is another factor in the waning influence of Henry’s Spanish wife, Katharine of Aragon, and in the rising influence of the French educated Anne Boleyn. I don’t think I’d heard anyone explicitly point out this political connection before, the narrative generally focuses on the need for an heir and “true love”.

Hans Holbein’s father was also called Hans Holbein and was also an artist, so generally “the Younger” and “the Elder” are appended to their names to disambiguate them. I don’t think they said on the programme where Hans Holbein the Younger was born, but it was in continental Europe (Germany, if I remember correctly). He was probably educated alongside his brother, by their father, in a wide variety of artistic techniques and media. This included goldsmith designs and techniques, frescos and other sorts of painting, and producing illustrations for printed books. This last was particularly emphasised by the experts on the programme as a new and lucrative market for an artist at the time. In early adulthood Holbein and his brother move to Basel (Switzerland) where they make a living mostly from illustrations and engravings, but also from religious paintings.

Holbein was looking for an opportunity to become a court painter (as it was a lucrative and prestigiuos position to hold). I think they said he had tried to get employment at the French court, but not had much success. In 1526 he moved to London, with a letter of introduction from Erasmus to Thomas More. He had probably sent ahead his portrait of Erasmus as a showcase for what his skills were. Thomas More was apparently not very optimistic about Holbein’s chances of employment in London. He wrote that England was “not fertile ground” – tapestries and theatrical sets where the dominant arts in the country at the time, not portraiture. But the experts suggest that with the benefit of hindsight this may have been because there wasn’t an accomplished portrait artist available until Holbein arrived.

During this first stay in London there doesn’t seem to’ve been much work – he started by being employed to paint theatrical sets, and he also undertook some commissions from Thomas More and from some other members of the elite (although not necessarily the court). Holbein returned to Basel – they weren’t clear on the programme why, nor if he originally intended to stay there. I’m not sure if that’s coz it isn’t known, or if it’s just that the programme was concentrating on his time in Tudor England so they were skipping lightly over the other information.

In 1532 Holbein returned to London. This is just as Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII finally get married, and there is some evidence that Anne Boleyn is a patron of his. There are no records available to say whether or not she actually paid him for anything, but there are several paintings with links to her. Including one painting of her in her nightgown (for which read “dressing gown” not “nightie”) – so he had access to her in informal settings such as her bedchamber which is a distinct mark of her favour. He is also first recorded on Henry VIII’s payroll during this time – so he has achieved his ambition of becoming a court painter. Although apparently he wasn’t paid as well as he might like – the French court painters received more money and more privileges from their king!

Holbein clearly had a knack for politics, or rather for staying out of politics. He remained in the employ of Henry VIII until his death in 1543, through the downfall of Anne Boleyn, and even weathered the storm surrounding Henry’s brief marriage to Anne of Cleves. When Henry was looking for his fourth wife, Holbein was the man sent to the courts of Europe to paint the potential brides. The two best known paintings are that of Anne of Cleves and that of Christina Duchess of Milan (who turned Henry down). It’s known that Holbein didn’t actually get to paint the whole Christina’s portrait from life – he had one 3 hour sitting with her, and quite probably only brought drawings back to London which he subsequently turned into a painting. It’s really quite remarkable that Holbein didn’t fall into disfavour after Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves failed almost before it began. Henry’s complaint was that he found Anne too ugly, but there’s no indication that he blamed Holbein for misrepresenting her (he did blame Cromwell, however). And the experts said that Holbein probably didn’t misrepresent Anne – despite Henry’s distaste she seems to’ve been regarded by contemporaries as a handsome woman. Probably the most Holbein did was minimise the German-ness of her clothing and headdress, so she would look more fashionable to English eyes.

As well as this overview of Holbein’s career in England the experts also discussed some of his better known paintings – you’d think that would be quite hard on a radio programme but I recognised all the works they discussed from having seen them previously, so had the right mental images. One of them was one of my favourite things in the Portrait Gallery when I visited it last year: the surviving half of the cartoon for the Whitehall Mural. The finished piece (which doesn’t survive) was a large dynastic portrait of the Tudors so far. On the left were Henry VIII and his father Henry VII, and on the right were their wives – Elizabeth of York for Henry VII and Jane Seymour for Henry VIII. The timing of this portrait is around or just after the birth of Edward VI, Henry VIII & Jane’s son. The cartoon is the same size as the painting was, so we can see that the viewer would’ve been presented with a lifesize image of the King standing directly in front of them – apparently terrifying for those who saw it. Inspection of the cartoon shows that originally the figure wasn’t full frontal, but Henry apparently wanted that changed so it would have the maximum impact.

Another of the paintings they discussed was the girl with a squirrel that we’d seen in the British Museum’s Germany exhibition in 2014. This portrait combines a clever use of symbols with a warm & touching portrait – the squirrel is not just the girl’s pet, it’s also part of her family’s coat of arms. And they also discussed The Ambassadors, which I think of as “the one with the weird skull in front”. This painting is also not just a portrait of the two men – it also showcases Holbein’s skill at painting many different objects. Including the distorted momento mori motif of the skull, which looks just right if viewed from the side of the painting.

Even at the time of Holbein’s death he was regarded as a particularly good portrait painter, and his reputation has only increased since. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Holbein’s portraits are how we see Henry VIII’s court. Those paintings are what shape our mental image of “the Tudors” and are what take them from a collection of dates and facts and turn them into people in our collective imagination.

Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden (Exhibition in The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace)

Last summer I went to an exhibition about paintings of gardens – Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden – in the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. Mostly I went because I had free entry to it (having been to the From Cairo to Constantinople exhibition earlier in the year (post)), and I was in London for a few days. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, but there were some interesting paintings to see. I think they way they do these exhibition is to pick a theme, see what the Queen owns that fits, and then put together some sort of coherent narrative for the exhibition. So this was all about gardens, and there was art ranging from Persian garden scenes through to paintings of Royal Garden Parties of the Victorian era. The narrative thread holding it together was the changing way that gardens are perceived over time. In general I liked the first couple of rooms of the exhibition, and found it got duller & twee-er as we got towards the later Hanoverans and Victoria. This quite possibly just reflects my biases about what history I find most interesting, rather than the exhibition 😉

It started with a couple of Persian garden scenes to set the scene and to explain the title of the exhibition. The word “paradise” comes in to English from Persian via Greek. The Greek word paradeisos (παράδεισος) is of Persian origin, based on two words meaning “to form” and “around”. The key features of a Persian garden are that it had walls around it, and a water feature. So a somewhat different conception of garden than the modern one, which has much more of an emphasis on plants.

The main part of the first room concentrated on the Renaissance Garden – much to my tastes, particularly as one side of the room was dominated by a large painting of Henry VIII and family (with the gardens of Whitehall visible behind them; sadly I couldn’t get a decent straight on photo of it). The themes explored were: the garden as an expression of princely power (as in said painting); the garden as a religious symbol; the garden as a place to grow exotic and/or useful plants. Obviously the religious symbolism of the garden ties in to the title of the exhibition – the garden of Eden as an earthly paradise. But gardens also show up in the art of the time in reference to the image of Christ as a gardener (both symbolically and to illustrate Mary Magdalene mistaking the risen Christ for a gardener when she came his tomb). And the Virgin Mary is often painted in a garden. As well as important symbolism tapestries depicting gardens were used to bring colour & life to interiors particularly in the winter.

The next little section of the exhibition displayed some (rather ugly) china (in my view) with garden themed decoration. And some stunningly beautiful Fabergé flowers, which I liked a lot.

The next room looked at the Baroque garden – in particular the formal gardens of the Stuarts and the early Hanoverans. Gardens in this period were still primarily expressions of princely power and status – “look how well I bend the world to my whim”. There was a particularly striking picture of Hampton Court Gardens during the time of William III: a birds eye view of how well nature had been tamed and formally organised. I also liked the tulip vases – pagoda-like structures with each flower in a separate hole.

The Hanovers continued into the next room – more pictures of rigidly laid out gardens, where it almost seemed like the plants were an irrelevant extra. I confess to spending rather more time looking at the sunflower clock in the middle of the room, which was surrounded by a large number of rather fine porcelain flowers.

Gardens gradually became more informal, and the paintings also change to suit this new perspective – eye level and intimate views rather than overhead or otherwise formal points of view. By the Victorian era a garden was seen as a place of family relaxation. This was also the period when the culture of Royal Garden Parties started, and so the Royal Collection has paintings of those as well as of Victoria and her family enjoying their garden.

For me the exhibition gradually tailed off – the last bit was pictures of floral borders or baskets of flowers. Some of which were painted by members of the Royal Family, I think. But not nearly as interesting to me as the first couple of rooms had been.

As well as the photos in this post I have a small album of photos up on flickr, here.

Defining Beauty (Exhibition at the British Museum)

Back in April J and I visited the Defining Beauty exhibition at the British Museum which finished in early July. It’s the only one of their exhibitions where I’ve been as ambivalent about it on the way out as I was on the way in – which says rather more about me than the exhibition, I think. The subject of the exhibition was Ancient Greek sculpture and the incredible impact it has had on the modern Western definition of beauty. And I’m afraid that when it comes to Greek sculpture I’m somewhat of a heretic – I find all those gleaming white idealised bodies rather … bland. Even as I grant that it has indeed had a major impact on the art of more modern times (modern here meaning in the last five or six hundred years) and a worthwhile subject for an exhibition.

(You might be asking why on earth I went to see it! But there’s been exhibitions at the British Museum in the past where I’ve not been enthused in advance but have been by the end, so it was worth a try. And as we’re Members we have free entry so it’s easy to pop into an exhibition just because it’s there.)

The exhibition opened with a bit of scene setting. Part of this was a map of the extent of the Greek world in Alexander the Great’s time (after he did his conquering bit) – despite knowing he conquered vast swathes of the known world I’m always a bit taken aback at how big that is on a map. The other piece of information that particularly struck me was that what’s known about Greek sculpture mostly comes from Roman copies of Greek originals. And one of the pieces in this room was Lely’s Venus (normally on display near the Assyrian Galleries in the BM), which is one of these Roman copies. The other sculptures in this introductory room illustrated the range of styles of sculpture – using three pieces by three different artists who were all training & active in the 5th Century BC. The variation came in whether they were interested in things like mathematically perfect proportions of bodies, or representing the fluidity of movement.

The first half of the next room was the stand out highlight of the exhibition for me. They had half a dozen replicas of sculptures painted as we think they would’ve been at the time. And given my “complaint” about this art form is that it strikes me as bland, well this was anything but. Perhaps a little garish, but so much more interesting. One of the pieces was a large (plaster replica of a) bronze of Athena – it’s easy to remind oneself that the dull green of bronze was once a shiny gold, but it’s quite another thing to see it. I also liked an Athene wearing her snake-trimmed cloak, in a vivid green with the snake heads picked out in colours. And did you know the Persians wore brightly coloured onesies? Me neither!

The next room looked at what made Greek art different from other contemporary (or just older) cultures art styles. One section was a compare and contrast with Egyptian and Cypriot sculpture – three statues in a row each of a young man striding forward, one from each culture. The Greek one was noticeably more natural in appearance, with the Egyptian and Cypriot ones looking very stiff and stilted in comparison. The Greek one was also naked, which came up again in more detail in the other compare & contrast – this time between Assyrian reliefs and Greek reliefs. Again the subject matter was similar, both reliefs were battle scenes – and again the Greek example had more fluidity and motion. The use and meaning of nudity was markedly different between the two cultures. In the Assyrian example it was the defeated prisoners who were naked – a sign of their low statues, shame & humiliation. In the Greek example the heroes are naked to show off their virility and their virtue.

The third room also had a few other themes, although they made slightly odd bedfellows. One of these was a case talking about women in Classical Greek art – most of what I remember from this is the juxtaposition of male nudity as virtue and women clothed for their virtue. There was also a section about representation of the gods, where the key point was that the gods were people. Impossibly beautiful, divine people, but people nonetheless.

The next room started with a look at representation of the stages of life, and ended with the erotic in art – again a slightly odd juxtaposition. The stages of life looked at were birth, marriage and death and my favourite piece in this section was a stunning representation of a baby. The labels here talked about how representation of childhood and children as they really were was a departure from previous art styles. The section on marriage was mostly concerned with how marriage was thought of for women – analogised with abduction (which I was previously aware was a trope) and with death. Having side by side pieces where women are moving from girlhood to wifehood as if they’d died next to gravestones for young warriors slain in battle was quite striking.

In the penultimate room we moved forward in time past the golden age of idealised beauty (or blandness, depending on taste) to sculptures that had more differentiation. Faces in particular began to look like real people – although quite probably not the person they’re were supposed to be. The room ended with a pair of pieces representing knucklebone players, with very different flavours. One of these was two girls playing a peaceful friendly game as a last hurrah before marriage and womanly respectability. And the other was the remains of piece where two boys had come to blows over a disagreement about the game. Only one of the boys was still intact, all that remained of the other was the arm that the first boy was biting – which made the piece very striking in a way the artist wouldnt’ve expected.

That room also had a case looking at the representations of (North?) Africans in Greek sculpture – sometimes as caricature, but sometimes in a more nuanced and human fashion. The piece that caught my eye here was a centrepiece for a table of an acrobat and a crocodile. This part of the room neatly segued into the start of the last room, which looked at the way that Greek art changed as it met the other cultures that Alexander the Great brought into the Hellenistic world – in particular India.

The exhibition finished with two large reclining male nudes which had a particular impact on the Renaissance. The thematic statement for the exhibition, if you will. These pieces when discovered changed the way artists represented bodies in Western art. Think of the way that Medieval art has these stiff clothes horses that don’t really look like they’d move like people, and then think of the art of Michaelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci and you’ll see what a difference this renewed interest in the idealised beauty of Greek sculpture had.

As I said at the beginning, this exhibition wasn’t really my cup of tea. Which doesn’t mean it was bad, far from it – just I’m a bit of an uncultured barbarian 😉 What I came away from it thinking was that I would like to see more of the painted replicas – knowing they were painted and seeing what they looked like are two very different things.

Art of China

Andrew Graham-Dixon has done several series for the BBC about the art of various places – one of the more recent was about China and we watched it earlier this year. He covered the art of this vast and long-lived culture in chronological order, so the series also provided an overview of the history of China. Even though it was chronological the three programmes also covered different themes – starting with the art of & for death (and religion), then art concerned with the natural world and finally art influenced by the world outside China.

The first programme started with prehistoric art – even pre-China art. The first objects Graham-Dixon looked at were a collection of bronze masks (of varying sizes) which had large staring eyes as their most prominent feature. These objects were buried in a way that suggests they were once used for ritual purposes but then were no longer necessary – as if the culture/religion/tradition that they were associated with had been superseded but they were still given respect for their previous significance. There doesn’t seem to be any continuity between this culture and what later became China as we know it.

The next objects were more bronzes, but these were associated with the cultures that lead up to China proper – the Shang and Zhou bronzes. These are mostly ritual vessels for food and drink that would be buried with people – perhaps also used in the burial rituals themselves. These vessels are highly decorated, with a distinctive style. Concurrent with the vessels is the development of the Chinese writing system, which is an influence on a lot of later Chinese art. Graham-Dixon showed us some of the actual oracle bones which have the first writing on them – annotations as to the question asked of the oracle, the answer given and the eventual outcome. This last makes them a critical historical resource for this period as the questions the kings asked tended to involve matters of state. I’ve read about these more than once, but never seen one so this was pretty cool to see 🙂

The programme then moved on to China proper with the First Emperor, who is the emperor who was buried with the terracotta army. This is a particularly extreme example of taking everything with you when you go, and Graham-Dixon also pointed out that this was the First Emperor planning to conquer the afterlife as he’d conquered the known world in this life! The following dynasty (the Han) also provisioned their tombs with all the items they needed for the next life, and this has lasted through to the modern day to some extent. Graham-Dixon visited a place that makes paper models of everyday objects for funerals, like computers and cars and so on – these are then burnt to transfer them to the afterlife for the deceased to use. The last section of the first programme looked at Buddhist art of the afterlife. This depicts a completely different class of thing. Instead of physical items and provisions the art is concerned with transcendence and joy, or with damnation.

The second programme looked at the period of history from the Song Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty, which is in many ways a golden age of Chinese art. The two primary media of art in this era were ceramics and painting. Chinese painting is made using the same techniques as Chinese writing and the same tools. A scholar of the time was both writer and painter. Nature features heavily in the paintings, although the scholars rarely painted whilst in front of the thing they were painting. The natural scenes (whether real or imaginary) were intended to summon up a mood – often melancholy or isolation. The most iconic pieces often come from scholars who had retreated from court or official life – who felt disaffected or displaced by a change in regime for instance after the Mongol Yuan Dynasty conquered China. The Yuan to Ming transition also displaced many court officials who were loyal to the preceding dynasty.

The art style of this era was heavy on symbolism and meaning. To illustrate this theme Graham-Dixon talked about the last Yuan Emperor, who came to the throne unexpectedly after several preceding heirs had died. He’d been brought up as an aesthete not a ruler and as his empire began to crumble around him (due to his lack of administrative skill) he tried to reverse the situation by commissioning and painting pictures of good omens and good fortune. Unsurprisingly this didn’t work out so well, and more time spent on administration might’ve been a better bet 😉

The third and final programme covered the last dynasty of Chinese Emperors (the Qing) and modern China. The theme of this programme was that the art of the period was influenced by the outside world, primarily the West. In some ways this was a manifestation of the early Qing dynasty resting on their laurels – they “knew” they were the most sophisticated culture in the world, so looked to the outside world for trinkets and art. Forward momentum in the sciences was lost at just the time that the West was beginning to go through the Industrial Revolution. There were still obvious ways in which the Qing art was continuous with the previous traditions & Graham-Dixon spent a bit of time talking about the Forbidden Palace (first built in the Ming Dynasty) and also the way the ceramic art traditions continued & changed in the Qing era. For the latter he particularly pointed out how the elegant simplicity of Ming ceramics gave way to brightly coloured and decorated Qing ceramics which were often rather garish in comparison.

As the Qing dynasty continued their relationship with the European nations changed in character – from cultural exchange as equals to occupied nation. Graham-Dixon covered the history of the 19th Century with the Opium Wars, and the destruction of Chinese sites by British colonising armies. This rather shameful period of British empire building did lead to developments in Chinese art and not just destruction. In particular Shanghai was one of the towns where the British forcibly established a trading base, and the art produced in the town became a hybrid style between Chinese & Western. Instead of painting on scrolls or long wall hangings as was traditional artists began to paint pieces designed to be framed and hung on walls. The traditional pallet of blacks & greys (and perhaps red) began to be replaced by bright colours. The subject and the style, however, remained traditional.

By the end of the imperial period in the late 19th Century & early 20th Century some Chinese artists were training in Paris and using western techniques and styles in their paintings – but still painting Chinese subjects. Some of these artists embraced the “old-fashioned” traditional techniques of Western art and painted large representational oil paintings – for instance Graham-Dixon showed us one that depicts a key scene from a Chinese hero’s story, yet it wouldn’t look particularly out of place in a gallery of early 19th Century art. Other artists embraced the new modern art movements that were coming to life in 20th Century Paris.

The rise of Communism in China put an abrupt stop to this flirtation with Western styles and techniques. Mao’s suppression of intellectuals in general also had a particular focus on rejecting Western influences. Artists who had produced un-Chinese art were persecuted and sent to labour camps, their paintings and sculptures destroyed. Since the change from Maoist communism to the current pseudo-capitalist communism there has been a bit of a relaxation of that attitude. Graham-Dixon finished the programme by talking to current artists and looking at their work – most are consciously looking both to their roots as inheritors of a long artistic tradition, and to the modern globalised world.

I enjoyed this series – good to see both the sweep of Chinese history from another angle, and to learn more about the themes & purposes of the art of the country.

Border Country: The Story of Britain’s Lost Middleland; Rococo: Travel Pleasure Madness

Border Country can be fairly characterised as unashamed propaganda for the No-to-Independence side of the upcoming referendum in Scotland. To be fair that fits my own bias* so I was predisposed to like the series. The narrative structure for the two programmes was a history of the border regions of England and Scotland from the time of the Romans through to James VI & I as ruler of both countries. It was presented by Rory Stewart, and his thesis is that the border between Scotland and England is not a natural cultural breakpoint, but more of an arbitrary line drawn across the region. And he believes that these sorts of line-on-the-map borders lead to more problems than they solve.

*One selfish reason: if Scotland isn’t part of Britain then as the English born child of Scottish parents I lose my sense of national identity (I’m British rather than Scottish or English). One more political reason: As someone who can’t vote in the referendum I’m not looking into it closely, but the rhetoric in favour of independence that I do see is heavy on the “of course the bad stuff stays with the UK but we’ll get to keep the good bits of the Union even once we’ve left”. And that feels naive and foolish to me – maybe everything will work out the way they want, but unless there are some signed agreements then making contingency plans on worst case scenarios and reassuring your public about them would seem sensible.

The intros from the BBC continuity announcer for both programmes were very pointed about this being Stewart’s personal opinions, and he says that himself several times through the series. Part of this is distancing it from his job – he’s the Conservative MP for the Penrith and the Border consituency in Cumbria. So important for him to point out repeatedly this is him speaking for himself and not the Tories in general. But this also came up several times when he was talking about the history of the region – he’d fairly often say something along the lines of “many historians believe X but I believe Y because …”.

The facts and stories that he told us were mostly the same as in many other programmes about British history. But there were two major differences in the way the narrative was framed that made this a series worth watching. The first of these was that it was strongly focused on the stretch of land between the river Humber and the river Forth, which he referred to throughout as the Middleland. He emphasised the continuity of culture across that region, both before and after the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall. The first programme covered the tribal culture of the people who lived in the region before the Romans, then the effect the Wall had on them. This was followed by the aftermath of the demilitarisation of that border when the Roman Empire shrank back away from Britain. And that programme ended on a high note with the golden age of Northumbria – the era of the Venerable Bede and St Cuthbert. A time when this region was a centre for religious thought and art across Europe – note that Northumbria at the time covered areas on both sides of the border. The second programme was full of death and destruction. He concentrated on the Vikings, then the Harrowing of the North by William the Conqueror and finally the Anglo-Scottish wars of the late medieval period and the clans of Reivers who terrorised the area during this period. The power of these clans, in Stewart’s narrative, was broken only when the border ceased to divide the countries. He said that the unification of Scotland and England into the United Kingdom meant that the Reivers weren’t useful to the military of one side or the other so it was easier to enforce the law in the region.

The other way in which the framing of this series was different to many other British history programmes is that Stewart frequently drew parallels between our history and areas of the world today. He was a deputy governor in Iraq for a while, he’s got a lot of involvement in charity work in Afghanistan and has walked through that country and written a book about it. As well as other places. So, for instance, he was comparing the tribal Celtic culture that existed before the Romans arrived to rural Afghanistan. He compared the golden age of Northumbria to modern day Tibet – because of the monkish religious cast to the culture. Never in a “it’s exactly the same” sort of way, but in a way that drew out the parallels and made you think about both the history of Britain and the current state of the world in a new way.

I don’t think I always agreed with him – I could see places where I thought he’d had to be careful to pick his facts to fit his story (like the Edward I trying to conquer Scotland bit didn’t quite sit right with me, for instance). And I think the implied “don’t vote for independence because it’ll all go up in smoke” is a bit too far-fetched. But equally, I do agree that the boundary between Scotland and England is a historical artifact – drawn by the Romans for their own imperial reasons. And it was thought provoking, and good to look at the history I know through a different lens.

Rococo: Travel Pleasure Madness was a three part series about the Rococo art movement presented by Waldemar Januszczak. It’s a sequel of sorts to the series he did last year about Baroque art that we watched in February (post). In the Baroque one he moved across the continent following the movement, this Rococo series was done in three themes instead. And his themes were picked to support his thesis that a lot of the modern world has its roots in the Rococo. First he looked at the period and the art in terms of travel – particular emphasis on Venice as a tourist destination, as well as the fondness for paintings of exotic animals and Chinoiserie. Next was pleasure, and there were two strands to this. One was the sort of decadent pleasure epitomised in Boucher’s Blonde Odalisque (a painting I’ll never look at in quite the same way after seeing Januszczak sprawl across a sofa in the same pose (with his clothes on, thankfully!)) and in Marie Antoinette pretending to be a milkmaid. The other strand talked about things like how “the pursuit of happiness” as a human right is a Rococo idea. The last of the themes was madness – a lot of the Rococo style is rather otherworldly and unreal, and this programme focussed on where that could lead and the darker side of the Rococo.

As with the Baroque series it’s hard to find things to say, because it’s all about the visuals. One thing that does strike me is that Januszczak’s programmes have a distinctive style to them. I’m not sure I can articulate it, it’s more of a feeling than something I’ve got figured out – but I’m hard pushed to think of another presenter who spends so much time walking away from the camera with his back to the audience. Another quirk is that often he has people looking at the paintings he’s talking to – and they’re not just people around in the art gallery by chance, it’s always the same handful of people so it’s for deliberate effect. This series also had people dressed up and acting out silent vignettes completely ignoring him while he stood and explained what was going on.

I still think Rococo art is overall a bit too frilly and a bit too pink, but I do now know more about what’s there behind the pink frilliness!

When Albums Ruled the World – nostalgia for the heyday of the vinyl LP, the 60s & 70s.

Episode 3 of Pagans & Pilgrims – series about the sacred places of Britain, presented by Ifor ap Glyn.

Animals Overnight: Sleepover at the Zoo – programme about sleep and animal sleep patterns. They set up cameras around Bristol Zoo to record what various of the animals did overnight when no-one was around, and also visited various sleep scientists to talk about what we know and don’t know about sleep. Most surprising fact for me is that REM sleep appears to be the result of convergent evolution, even if we still don’t know what its purpose is.

Episode 1 of The Plantagenets – Robert Bartlett covers the history of the Plantagenet dynasty, who ruled England for nearly 300 years.

Episode 5 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

“Figurines in Ancient China: From Prehistory to the First Emperor” Sascha Priewe

Last Thursday we went to the British Museum to go to a talk about Chinese figurines (and we’d hoped to go to another talk later the same day but it was sold out). In this talk Sascha Priewe (a curator at the British Museum) was talking about traditions of figurine making in ancient China and how this did (or didn’t) lead to the First Emperor’s terracotta army. He started by talking briefly about the Ice Age Art exhibition that had been in the British Museum last year (post). This had several examples of small figurines made in Europe more than 10,000 years ago, and you can trace the development and traditions of these figures (again in Europe and also in the Middle East) through the intervening time. This tradition eventually leads to things like Greek statues. However in China it seems (at least from a Western perspective) that the terracotta army buried with the First Emperor appears almost from nowhere in the 200s BC. So his talk was exploring whether or not this was actually the case, and what evidence there is for figurines before these notable (and large and numerous) examples.

The bulk of his talk was an overview of Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology in China, looking at sites where 3D figures have been found. There is a tradition of female figurines found in the northern part of the country during the Neolithic – that may be reminiscent of the earlier European female figurines. But he stressed that this could be an artifact of it being the same people discussing them rather than inherent to the figures. Also during the Neolithic there is a tradition of making phallus models, this is in a different geographical area – the Yellow River valley, if I remember correctly. There’s no indication that these are parts of whole body representations – instead they appear to’ve been created as just a phallus. A little later in (I think) the same area of the country you also find what look like pot lids with a modelled human head on them. Again there isn’t any indication that these are broken off a bigger statue – they appear to be complete as they are. Priewe then talked a bit about the Bronze Age artifacts. There are some developments of art in the round – like the bronze funerary vessels – but in many ways these seem to be 2D art wrapped around a 3D object rather than inherently 3D. While there are some representations of animals during this period (in some places) there are still not large numbers of human figurines.

So the First Emperor’s terracotta army does actually appear to’ve been the start of this tradition in Chinese art. Priewe next turned his attention to where it might’ve come from if not growing out of previous traditions. One suggestion, although he didn’t seem to think it was terribly plausible for the sole reason, was that the First Emperor and/or his immediate predecessors in the Qin culture had learnt of Greek statuary via trade routes across to the area of modern Afghanistan (which would put them in contact with Alexander the Great’s Hellenic empire). His preferred explanation is that the terracotta figures were reflecting a growing shift in funerary beliefs. In the Qin culture immediately before the First Emperor there are indications of human sacrifices buried with leaders. Priewe said that he thinks the terracotta army are a shift from burying your servants to take them with you (which was a recentish development), to burying symbolic figures of your army and your servants. A more cost effective way of ensuring you had the proper entourage in the afterlife than killing a whole lot of trained soldiers etc.

Priewe finished the talk by moving forward in time from the First Emperor showing how this tradition of providing for the afterlife via symbolic figurines and models continued and even extends to the modern day. So he showed us some of the Han dynasty tomb goods (that were on display in Cambridge a while ago (post)) including the toilet for the use of the deceased … He also talked about the Tang Dynasty figurines a bit. And he finished up by noting that in modern Chinese funerals people will burn model houses and money, and even viagra, so that the deceased can take these things with them into the afterlife.

At the beginning of the talk I was a bit worried that it was either going to be too academic or too disorganised to follow easily. But once he got going it was an interesting talk 🙂

Baroque! – From St Peter’s to St Paul’s; Guilty Pleasures

Baroque! – From St Peter’s to St Paul’s was a three part series presented by Waldemar Januszczak about Baroque art and architecture. The three programmes moved in geography (covering Italy, Spain & the Netherlands, and Britain respectively) and forwards in time. He started off with the story of how baroque art has its roots in the Counter Reformation – basically intended to propagate the “right” Christian message via eye-catching art. In particular as a response to the more austere Protestant sensibility, a sort of “you say we have too much art? we’ll show you too much art!”. As the movement took off in Spain (via Naples – a Spanish colony) the religious subject matter became darker and more visceral. Baroque artists also became the court painters of the era. Januszczak was entertainingly dismissive of the Hapsburg rulers of Spain & the Spanish Netherlands (and to be fair, there’s a lot there to to be dismissive of) while extolling the virtues of their taste in art. The Spanish court paintings were one of the vectors that introduced baroque art & architecture to England – Charles I’s visit to Spain when he was hoping to marry a Spanish princess brought him into contact with the court culture and painting. This wasn’t to be the baroque movement’s first jump to a Protestant nation – that was the Netherlands. Once the baroque took a hold in England it was given extra space to grow because of the Great Fire of London – about half of the last episode of this series was about the various churches (including St Paul’s) which were rebuilt in a baroque style after that disaster.

I’ve found it hard to write about what was in the programmes, because a lot of the point was (unsurprisingly) the visuals – Januszczak showed us a lot of paintings and buildings both well known and not. The style of the programme was gloriously over the top, as befits the subject matter. Well worth watching 🙂

This week we also watched both parts of a series that we’ve had on the PVR for ages – Guilty Pleasures. This series was about how modern attitudes to luxury have been shaped by our cultural roots. It was presented by Michael Scott, who’s a classicist, so it’s no surprise that the first episode was about the influence of the Ancient Greeks; the second episode was about the influence of medieval Christianity. In Ancient Greece he followed three strands of Greek attitudes to luxury – the first of these was the Athenian democracy that spent time and legislation on trying to prevent ostentatious private luxuries by channeling the urge to consume into public luxuries. And tried to tie society together by having ritual communal luxuries – like sacrificing large numbers of cows which would then give every citizen some meat. The Spartans in some ways had their downfall through unsuccessfully navigating this tension between public & private luxury. As prominent Spartan citizens began to gather wealth to themselves rather than live in the spartan communal fashion their society began to decline. And the last society he touched on in that episode was the Macedonians who embrace luxury (for the ruler) much more than the Athenians or Spartans – they use their wealth as a propaganda tool and to enhance the division between the ruler and the ruled (unlike the more egalitarian principles of Athens or Sparta).

By the middle ages luxury has become a sin. Having contact with luxurious things is supposed to lead you into ever worse sin – fine foods, fine clothing is just a precursor to other indulgences. Scott also talked about how the Black Death actually led to increased luxury for the people who survived. People at the lower reaches of society in particular gained land and better pay because there was a lack of labour available. Which increased the feelings of guilt around luxury. Another factor was that the plague was seen as God’s punishment on people, and so at higher levels of society people took a second look at their lives and came to the conclusion that God was not pleased about their sinfulness (including their luxuries).

And Scott tied it together at the end by thinking a little about modern attitudes to luxury, in particular in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis. The Greek influences can been seen in how we generally react to conspicuous consumption as divisive, and the medieval influences are most obvious in the very idea of a “guilty pleasure”.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of The Stuarts – a series about the Stuart Kings of England & Scotland, presented by Clare Jackson, and about how they shaped the United Kingdom and how they were shaped by it. Broadcast on the Scottish version of BBC2 only.

Episode 1 of Bible Hunters – series about the search for early texts of the Bible in Egypt.

Episode 1 of Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England – this was part of the BBC’s Tudor Season in 2013. It’s a series about life in Elizabethan times from the perspective of the differences between now and then, what you’d need to know if you could travel back there.

New Secrets of the Terracotta Warriors – Channel 4 one-off programme about the terracotta army found buried near the Emperor Qin’s grave in China. Partly about the history of Qin era China (the first unification of the country in c.200BC, and partly about the techniques currently being used to learn more about the terracotta soldiers. A little shallow.

Episode 1 of The Great British Year – series about British wildlife and countryside over the whole year. Lots of gorgeous shots of animals, and timelapse sequences of landscapes.

Britain’s Most Fragile Treasure – Janina Ramirez programme about the East Window in York Cathedral. How it was made, who made it, how it’s being conserved, and what the various scenes and stories are.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 2); Strange Days: Cold War Britain; Rise of the Continents

The second episode of Alastair Sooke’s series about the art of Ancient Egypt covered the Middle Kingdom (briefly) and most of the New Kingdom. He only picked a couple of objects from the Middle Kingdom – both from Senusret III’s reign. He gave the impression that this is because the New Kingdom was the Golden Age, which is true in some ways, but the Egyptians themselves looked back at the Middle Kingdom as their “classical age” where art and culture first achieved great heights. I think it’s a shame he didn’t make it more clear the reason it gets short-shrift in programmes like these is because not as much survives for one reason or another. Often because sites were re-used or updated by New Kingdom Egyptians wanting the association with past glories.

The other eight treasures on the programme were from the New Kingdom between the reigns of Hatshepsut and Tutankhamun. As well as looking at some of the iconic art from her reign he spent some time talking about the iconography of Hatshepsut as Pharaoh. Pharaohs are male, so Hatshepsut was represented with all the male accoutrements and a masculine body in her official art works. One thing I hadn’t realised before (or had forgotten) is that it was during Hatshepsut’s time that the term Pharaoh actually started to be used – it translates to “the palace” so it’s the equivalent of talking about the White House doing X or Y in the USA (and surprisingly the example Sooke used was Brits talking about the Crown which I don’t even think is the best of the possible UK equivalents – No. 10 would be better).

There was obviously some considerable discussion of the new art style that Akhenaten brought with him when he changed the state religion. Both in terms of the slightly bizarre body shapes of the earliest stuff, and the new informal poses and domestic scenes on official art works. Which does give a very different impression of the royal family of that time, even as I remind myself it’s propaganda first & foremost. Obviously the bust of Nefertiti featured in this section, you can’t really miss it out. But the item from around that era (just before it) that struck me most was the little glass fish, that’s now in Berlin. I’ve seen it before & it’s a lovely piece, but what made it the highlight of this programme for me was that they showed us how it was made. I’ve read about how these glass objects were made before but it’s different actually watching it happen. And as always I’m somewhat in awe of what people were able to do before the advent of modern technology.

Obviously the programme ended with Tutankhamun’s mask – another iconic piece you can’t miss out, which also illustrates how what we have to admire depends so much on chance. The next episode covers the rest of Egyptian culture up to Cleopatra, quite a wide range. There’ve been a few clips of the temple at Abu Simbel, so presumably that’ll feature 🙂

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This week we finished watching Dominic Sandbrook’s series about the Cold War – Strange Days: Cold War Britain. This three part series looked at British history from 1946 through to 1989 through the lens of how the Cold War affected politics and culture. So part of the series was Sandbrook telling us about the major events of the Cold War, and giving some indication what life was like on the other side, to give us context for the effects on Britain. And the other part was looking at events in Britain from a perspective we don’t always think of. Some stuff was obvious when you thought about it – like the popularity of James Bond films tying in to revelations about Russian spies in the UK. And the John le Carré novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as the much less glamorous and more cynical take on the same thing. Other things less so – consumerism being a part of how we differentiated “us” from “them” makes sense when I think about it, but I’d never’ve thought of how capitalism was in some ways kept in check by a desire to prove it was better than the alternatives. Which made more sense when Sandbrook talked about it than I have quite managed to articulate here!

The threat of nuclear war and how that shaped our culture was one of the strands running through the programmes, and the various attempts government made to prepare people for this. Sandbrook highlighted several times the contrast between the almost optimistic government handbooks which aimed not to panic people (even if this backfired at times) and the bleak films and TV serieses which were closer to what the reality might be. He showed us clips from The War Game (a 60s film that wasn’t shown on TV for about 20 years) which was a meticulously researched documentary, and Threads (an 80s film) which was more overtly fictional. Both grim enough even in excerpt that I know I don’t want to watch them in full. In the third programme Sandbrook also mentioned a book he’d read for class when he was 10 (I looked him up on wikipedia, he’s a couple of months younger than me) – as he started to talk about it I knew exactly which book he meant before the reveal. It was “Brother in the Land” by Robert Swindells, which I’ve read. Once. I’ve dipped into it occasionally since, and it’s still on my shelves, because I remember it as a good, well written book. But I’ve never re-read it cover to cover, despite my love of post-apocalypic novels. It’s just an extremely grim and depressing and unrelentingly bleak tale of the first months after a nuclear war. I read it at about 13 or 14, a few years after it was published, and it’s stuck with me since then – it must’ve been pretty traumatising to read at the age of 10 particularly when you had to think about it for school rather than stick your head in the sand (I’ve always adopted the ostrich approach to the idea of The End of the World As We Know It catastrophes).

Anyway, that was a bit of a digression. I liked this series, in particular I thought they did a good job of mixing archival footage with new stuff seamlessly switching between the two in a way that made the old stuff seem more immediately relevant. I even liked the somewhat overblown style, but I think J found the sweeping generalised claims made at times a little irritating.

We also finished another series this week – Rise of the Continents – which I really enjoyed so I wanted to say a few words about it even though this post is already quite long! This was a series about plate tectonics and the geological history of the earth, presented by Iain Stewart. Each week Stewart looked at a different continent (Africa, Australia, the Americas and Eurasia) and followed the geological story of the continent after it split from Pangea (the supercontinent that existed when the dinosaurs roamed the earth). He showed us the evidence that tells us about this geological story, and he also showed the impact that geology has had on both evolution and on human history. He’s a geologist so was strongest on that subject, pretty good on palaeontology but said a couple of dubious historical things we noticed (but otherwise was OK on that). Basically what you’d expect as he got further from his actual area of expertise. He was also a charmingly enthusiastic presenter.

One reason I enjoyed it so much is because I think the idea of plate tectonics is inherently cool. The earth not being static but consisting of vast sheets of crust all moving around and crashing into each other is awesome. It’s also an area I don’t know much about – I think the last time I read a book on it was in the 80s, when the science was still fairly new. So there were all sorts of things I didn’t know, and most of them were in the “neat facts” category. Like did you know that as India travelled on its way to crashing into Eurasia it moved over a magma plume, which turned a big chunk of it into a zone of volcanoes. This thinned the land so India started to move quicker. But also while it sat over this region for a few hundred thousand years the amount of volcanic eruption dumped toxins in the oceans and changed the climate – so this is thought to have contributed to the decline of the dinosaurs (before an asteroid finished them off). Or did you know the silver mines in South America exist because of subduction of the Pacific Ocean floor carries water down under the land. I can’t quite remember how Stewart said this then lead to the silver deposits, but the very idea of water being carried down under the crust is one I’d not thought of before (and it’s kinda cool as a concept).

I think J didn’t like the visual effects on the programme much – there were quite a few transitions where they used a jumble of still shots and mixed up audio before Stewart explained something. It didn’t bother me as much though.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Sacred Wonders of Britain – Neil Oliver visits several sacred sites in Britain dating from prehistoric times through to the Reformation.

Episode 2 of The Brain: A Secret History – Michael Mosley series about brains, minds and experimental psychology. We never managed to record episode 1 but we decided to watch the other two anyway.

Episode 6 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 1); The Art of the Vikings

There’s a new series just started called Treasures of Ancient Egypt, so of course we’re watching it not long after it airs (the day after, actually, but because of the way I’ve scheduled my blog posts this post has gone live 8 days after). The series is presented by Alastair Sooke, and is similar in format to the Treasures of Ancient Rome series that he did a while ago (post). It is a chronological survey of the art of Ancient Egypt from the early pre-dynastic through to Cleopatra, each episode will have 10 “treasures” and this first episode covered the period up till the end of the Old Kingdom.

I’m not going to name check each piece of art, but he covered quite a wide range of types and styles. Some were well known iconic pieces (like the Great Pyramid or the Narmer palette), and some were less well known. Although having said that, I think we thought we’d seen most (but not all) of the items in the flesh – we have seen rather more than the average number of Egyptian museum collections tho! He started with petroglyphs out in the Sahara dating from before the Sahara was a desert, which pre-dates the association of the people who will later become the Egyptians with the Nile. But he was able to point out features in this carvings that anticipate the later art style we expect (like figures with front facing torsos but legs in profile). Because he was looking at each piece as a piece of art rather than in terms of what it tells us about the historical context there were things I’d not thought of before. For instance he used the Meidum geese (a personal favourite of mine) to illustrate how the Egyptian artists used small variations in their strict symmetry to stop it looking sterile and boring – so with the geese there are differences in tail position etc that keep it interesting. There were also a handful of segments with modern Egyptian artists working in the same mediums as the ancient artists, which to be honest I found less interesting.

The next episode will cover the Middle Kingdom & the New Kingdom – so I imagine we’ll have Akhenaten-era stuff and something of Tutankhamun’s as our well known items.

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Amongst the other programmes we watched over the week was a one-off programme presented by Janina Ramirez about Viking art, called The Art of the Vikings (part of the Secret Knowledge series, which are all one-off half hour programmes, I only recorded this one). Ramirez was showing us the Viking items from an exhibition in Edinburgh, and giving us some context for them – demonstrating that the Vikings weren’t solely the destroyers of popular culture. There wasn’t particularly any new information (to me), but it was nice to see the objects. Especially fine was a large silver brooch (for holding a cloak shut), and I also liked the bead necklaces.

But I mostly mention this programme because it was somewhat startlingly amateur. Ramirez was a good presenter as she generally is, and the filming was also good – but the sound was very variable, with some bits sounding like Ramirez was recorded in a bathroom. And the onscreen titles were dreadful – the chosen font/layout had really weird spacing between the letters, with every “i” seemingly suspended in space making words like “Ramirez” read more like “Ram i rez”.

Other TV watched this week:

Episodes 1 & 2 of Strange Days: Cold War Britain – series about Britain and British culture during the Cold War, presented by Dominic Sandbrook.

Episode 2 of Rise of the Continents – series about the geology of the continents and how that’s shaped them and their wildlife (and us) presented by Iain Stewart. This episode was about Australia.

Episode 5 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

Episode 1 of Sacred Wonders of Britain – Neil Oliver visits several sacred sites in Britain dating from prehistoric times through to the Reformation.

The Truth About Immigration – one-off programme presented by Nick Robinson about immigration into the UK. He talked to immigrants, Brits, employers & politicians, and got across how complicated the subject is and how little it’s actually debated in an informed fashion.