From Stigmata to Golf: Praying through the ages

This was an interesting start to Birkbeck Arts Week. Given the MA Catholic reformation module, I thought it would be a on topic diversion. As the blurb said, 'in our secular world, prayer has become unfamiliar, and past cultures where prayer was more central are harder to understand. Dr Isabel Davis (Birkbeck), Revd Dr Jessica Martin and Dr Nicola Bown (Birkbeck) discuss representations of prayer in literature and art in the Middle Ages, the seventeenth century and the Victorian period. Technique of prayer; what it is and what it is like'.

Dr Isabel Davis and her band of pilgrims set out from the late Middle Ages. For the church going population kneeling was a natural, obvious, submissive posture. And yet, where did this invented and culturally specific idea come from?

Sie sind hier, oder ... : A Dissertation Update

'Germania florescens' 1586

It's about time I did a dissertation update, even if to just place myself on the map; probably right in the middle of 'there be dragons'.  As part of the dissertation process we have to tell our fellow students where we are and what we've been up to so this partly arises out of that presentation.

As an aside I've been blown away by the sheer spread of topics that our little group have chosen, and given that this process is being replicated all over the country by History of Art students, the prospect of intellectual endeavour is dizzying. For instance, we have the relationship of Joshua Reynolds and Admiral Keppel, Holography, 'objects as ruins in the work of the British moderns', Imogen Cunningham and modernism in flowers, the Berwick Church murals and, finally, an exploration of temporality in a Niagra Falls inspired installation. And that is just a handful of the ideas flying around.

The Language Of Sculpture: Bernini Canova Rodin

Finally we reach specific sculptors and a review of three in chronological order. Given that we end with Rilke writing a poem in response to Rodin, it seems appropriate to begin with a few poetic observations.

In my experience, occasionally you discover a piece of art which speaks directly to you, and only poetry gives you the freedom to put words into the 'mouth' of the sculpture. This connection between the two art forms for me goes to the heart of understanding both.

Bernini

Bernini was all about bringing art forms together and breaking boundaries in what is known as bel composto. His church creations are a theatrical installations with a combination of the sculptural, pictorial and architectural. St Teresa is the perfect example. She is in mid transverberation and is sculptural, however the viewer has to step back to see the bel composto, the pictorial effect, essentially a scene from a tableau. Mirrors, lights, and candles all contribute to a theatrical event with viewer as spectator.

Eyes of Gods: The Interiority of Sculpture

Reconstruction of Zeus

These notes continue on from the lecture on idols. The boundaries between gods and idols are rather blurred; both have a persuasive presence and share the same kind of sacred space. They are not just representations, but for the people who worship them, they are real. This reality demonstrated in the art of the sculptor through application of colour, surface articulation, movement etc. This is the art of hidden depths (real or implied). All idol elements, dressing them etc, are at one level designed to create an inner life/have inner power for the statue. They are containers of something non-physical. 

This inner power is conveyed through their 'voice' as well as through the eyes. The Egyptian Colossi of Memnon started to make a noise after being damaged by an earthquake. They became famous because they realised the possibility of an interior voice. The skill of a sculptor is to make a figure look like it is on verge of speaking, making them articulate in both physical and spiritual form.

Sculpture: 'Spending their lives in wickedness...'

Boucher, 'Pygmalion and Galatea'

Last night I could have hugged the lecturer; anyone discussing my all time favourite book of stories is entitled to be worshipped and idolised, as far as I am concerned. An avid reader of Ovid and his Metamorphoses, I was overjoyed when Dr Dent said that the lecture was going to use Pygmalion as structure upon which to hang some sculptural issues regarding idolatry. Everyone knows the story of Pygmalion:

Seminar: Museums I have known - reflections on being a guest curator

These notes were quite difficult to write up because in the end I wasn't sure what I wanted to say. I'm seriously regretting not going to the exhibitions mentioned, and given that one of them closed early Jan 2014, there is no excuse. However I wonder if I had seen it, these notes would have become a review of the exhibition rather than an intellectual discussion about the challenges the guest curators faced in their respective shows. This was also a trial of a new lecture format; each gave a brief overview of the exhibition, and then had a ‘conversation’ where they discussed the challenges, differences, goals, ideals etc of the different venues. I bring them all together because it made better sense.

Dr Tag Gronberg immediately struck a chord with the small audience which was dotted around the large theatre in lonely isolation. She stated that writing can be solitary. Therefore when an opportunity to share research and collaborate on a project with fellow scholars arises, it's a good thing to do. Combine this with working with different types of institution and it results in new challenges and opportunities. This lecture came out of the curating experiences of two academics, Gemma Blackshaw and Leslie Topp. They joint guest curated an exhibition both at the Wellcome Collection and Wien museum called 'Madness & Modernity'. Gemma Blackshaw curated the recent 'Facing the Modern' at the National Gallery - the one I really regret not seeing.

Please Relics Me, Let Me Go....

Here, have some kittehs instead

This lecture was on relics and the cults of the saints and I was presenting – hence the post on propaganda. We have already touched on many of the topics related to saints and relics because they are so central to Catholic worship. Reaffirmed by the Council of Trent, in that particular session they discussed relics at the same time as images, so there is a mingling of ideas with many clerics not making a distinction between the two. 

On reflection and in my current state of mind – you try reading 20+books about Annibale Carracci in two days – the point our tutor made about Mary being the most miraculous was key. This is something I am going to revisit for my essay, however suffice to say that many icons of the Virgin were reframed and repositioned in Renaissance because of their perceived miraculous nature. For my real feeling on this entire subject, please see my concluding paragraph!

Relics: Ideological Messengers of the Church?

True Cross, Santo Toribio de Liébana, Spain.
(photo by F. J. Díez Martín).

This post has come out of a preparation for a class presentation on relics. The module name is 'the art of persuasion' and yet it seems that we have launched straight into the art without actually thinking consciously about the persuasion. Preparation for this course took place in July 2013 at the British Library with the 'Propaganda: Power and Persuasion' exhibition and so finally I was able to draw on prior knowledge to apply to an area in which I am becoming increasingly familiar.[1] To see how relics were used by the king and state, I also read recent books and articles.[2] When I talk about 'relics' I'm referring to the bodily fragments and associated paraphernalia associated with the saint in question which are usually kept in reliquaries or altars in Catholic churches the world over. Given that my tutor will be talking about them specifically, I don't want to cover the same ground as her.

Lecture 5: Altar pieces

It seems timely that Monday’s class was about altar pieces. Given that Hasan Niyazi spent so much of his time investigating and writing about these hugely important paintings, it was soothing to connect with his memory and contemplate some of the wider issues of church art. Hasan concentrated on the pre-Trent period when, it might be argued, the images had a gloriously balanced aesthetic and an aura of beautiful unreality. You only have to look at The Madonna di Foligno to see the difference between Raphael’s abilities and some of the less than average artists we've seen this term.

The focus this week was the way that the altar pieces interacted with the rest of the church; that is to say everything from the liturgy, the architecture, iconographic program, saints patron as well as the wider community. After the Council of Trent, the Eucharistic became of central importance and the altar piece usually reflected this. Our tutor stated that they were more likely to have symbolism in them after Trent than before, a statement which has had me puzzling since I returned to my notes. I would heavily dispute this given the amount of iconographical studies of some difficult altar pieces pre-1563. However what I think the lecturer meant was that symbols were used in a different, more unsubtle way and became easier for the congregation to 'read'.

Lecture 4: The one in which Catholic churches justify their decor

Il Gesu

The title of this fourth lecture held a lot of promise: 'Space, Function and Decoration in a Catholic Church'. In it we examined the church's decoration and design and looked at what these implied in terms of how the space was used. We compared the use of church space pre- and post- catholic reformation and the changes this entailed in the light of new ways of worship. The case study revolved around the most Catholic of post-Trent organisation's churches, the Jesuit 'Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus at the "Argentina"', or Il Gesù for short.

However this lecture was vaguely unsatisfactory and I was pleased that I had supplemented it with a lot of reading - there is too much to cover in depth in an hours lecture. I'd read Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque which clearly sets out the subtle differences between rhetoric, persuasion and propaganda. It also discusses and dismisses the notion of 'the Jesuit style', a label which should definitely be avoided. I've also been reading the truly excellent The Sensuous in the counter-reformation church which covers in depth a number of issues that we merely touched upon in class. Art historians like to use the Jesuits as examples for various things so lecture and reading all tied in well.

Lecture 3: St Peter, the Pope and the Eternal City

Rome as a religious centre? Pardon? Ok, what exactly did I know about Rome as a place of pilgrimage? I’ve seen Gladiator and I, Claudius(!), been awestruck by Nero’s golden house, paid homage at the Pantheon and I’ve even been on a private tour of the Villa Medici. I’ve never been to the Vatican because of the crowds and ‘Look at me, I’m the Pope’ so for me Rome is antiquity, pagan glory and the best baba al rhums I’ve ever had. Last night’s lecture was yet another excursion into the unknown. 

We started at the symbolic centre of Catholic, holy Rome with the authority of the popes – the c17th façade of St Peters, where the power of the Church is represented visually, an architectural creation of sacred place/space. St Peters is not the cathedral of Rome but it is the most important church. The focus is on the tradition and establishment of St Peter as head of the church in Rome. 

Lecture 2: Reform and reformations

This course has piqued my interest in a huge way. After nearly spending the entire weekend – unintentionally – in the Warburg Library reading about reformation music and refreshing my memory regarding the Council of Trent, I am hooked. Happily the security guard escorted me out when he realised he’d locked me in.



Background

Last week I cast my mind back to the historians that my A-Level teacher talked about. I refreshed my memory concerning revisionist history books of the 80/90s which were all the rage in 1990-2 and we were encouraged to read JJ Scarisbrick, C Haigh, D Starkey and disregard J Elton and AG Dickson. So finally reading the latter, who was the set text this week, was quite an interesting experience. This continuous re-editing of history proves the reformations throughout Europe at this time were extremely complicated.

Christianity was not monolithic even in the 15th century. Devotion varied; in practice and belief which had evolved. After all, the New Testament is not a set of rules or a religion. The gospels are interpreted and even the bible is made up of council picked, selected texts. Church tradition, dogma and doctrine evolves throughout the Middle Ages

Lecture one in a new term: Am I persuaded?

No nudes thanks, we're post-Trent Catholics

It's that time of year again when we're dusting off the pencil cases and hole reinforcers and toddling off to university as if the summer didn't happen. This first term, second year, is shaping up to be purgatorial because the options were rather limited. I opted rather anxiously to do 'Art of Persuasion: Catholic art of the reformation'.

The reminder to treat the past (and religion) as a foreign country is never more important than in this tricky area. To distance yourself from your own faith (or lack thereof) and maintain an open minded historical perspective, concentrating on what they believed THEN is crucial. I'm thinking of the Catholic Church as a political entity rather than anything religious or spiritual and as we are supposed to be thinking about belief in context, this should work.

Passez-moi l'absinthe...

Le banc d’orfèvre

It's time for a change topic wise. I have a summer project to do and guess what? I've chosen another awkward one. The Research Project, we students are told,  'is your first piece of extended, independent research. It draws on the methods, issues and skills that have been raised in the Research Skills seminars and in the Core Course.'

It continues, 'the Research Project is principally concerned with the PROCESS of research rather than solely with the RESULTS of that process. It might have a practical or applied focus, for example, it could be based on a museum or a gallery, an exhibition or arts policy. Or it might focus on a particular work of art that explicitly raises questions of interpretation'.

Tate Britain Print/Drawings: ReTurning to Turner

'Explosion' in the Tate 

On Friday the MA group went on a field trip to the Tate prints and drawings room. It was reminiscent of the visits I made last year to the V&A, RAI, London Met Archives and the various other amazing places who open up their archives for interested people.

It seems obvious when you think about it but Tate Britain is known primarily for its collection of Turner material/resources, including a complete reference collection which they keep up to date. Though his paintings are all over the place, he didn't leave provision in his will for the contents of his studio  - sketchbooks, small preparatory watercolours, juvenilia, etc, so it all came to the Tate. There are many ongoing research projects, including a cataloguing project which was started by John Ruskin, then continued by Turner's biographer, Joseph Finberg. Sadly two thirds of this collection was affected by the flood in the 1920s and even now, the crinkling and water marks are evident in his early sketchbooks. 

An uncontroversial look at art and AIDS

In a week that has seen tentative steps towards a cure for a devastating disease, unforgivable hypocrisy in the church and the cardinals getting together to elect a new pope, rather appositely my class this week was about art and AIDS. Sometimes the connections just beg to be written about, so this is a brief one with a just a few observations on the differences between how governments, artists and commercial organisations responded to AIDS in the early 1990s. 

Ramblings about the Grotto Grande

Interior of first chamber

This piece of work has been sat in my MA file for years. However the subject matter has recently become quite popular and if the gossip is anything to go by, it's shortly to get the Dan Brown treatment. So before this happens, I thought I'd get this essay into an abridged form (ha!) on here.

The Grotto Grande, or Buontalenti's Grotto sits in a quiet corner of the Pitti Palace/Boboli Gardens in Florence and has been subject to many interpretations. It is very much a patchwork reflecting the personalities of the three Grand Dukes under which is was built. The ostentatious façade (1556-1560) built for Cosimo I began as Vasari's fish pond and decorated with Bandinelli's Ceres and Apollo. It was the partnership of Francesco I and Bernardo Buontalenti who designed and constructed the façade’s second storey and the three unusually decorated chambers. The completion of the third chamber and the finishing touches were provided by Ferdinand I (1587-92) after the death of his brother, Francesco.

The surface of the upper storey has been covered with material from nature. Stalactites soften the classical edges of the facade and there are mosaics of coloured shells and stones which picture the insignia of the various Medici dukes. Though they are now poor specimens and you have to really look for them, there are plants in terracotta pots behind the stalactite edges of the gable. There is an anonymous eighteenth century watercolour of the grotto showing large healthy plants; this was a considerable time after Buontalenti but there is no reason to doubt that this was his idea.

Observations on Martin Kemp's chapter 'Mark of truth'

These are notes from Martin Kemp, 'The mark of truth: Looking and learning in some anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance and eighteenth century' in WF Byrum and R Porter, eds., Medicine and the Five Senses (Cambridge, 1993) pp85-121

Notes for the seminar on 29 Jan 2013. They may not be strictly coherent but offer a summary of Kemp.

Illustrations in medical texts are central to their usefulness, after all a picture says 1000 words and they provided a fundamental change in the history of dissemination of scientific information. 

Exhibiting the body: Seminar notes

I have been grappling with space for weeks so the thought of examining the art/science of the human body was appealing, something on a scale which which I am familiar. To look inward rather than outward reflects Renaissance notions of 'as above so below', macrocosm to microcosm. However The Body is obviously turning out to be just as vast as space. Inevitably and wonderfully. 

These notes condense two seminars and introduce central themes of the module. Interestingly, despite a thematic spread across the ten weeks, there is still a feel of an artistic narrative in the images/sculpture we have been discussing, perhaps reflecting the linear explanation of medical/anatomical developments, e.g., starting with Leonardo and Vesalius through to Jo Spence and John Isaacs. Timelines have also been handed suggesting a coherent structure is required in this area of art history. A skeleton of dates, requiring the flesh of artistic endeavour, perhaps...

War, memory and museums

Of all the lectures so far this one interested me the most even though some of the ideas Dr Gabriel Koureas presented I want to argue with. I remember being deeply affected by a visit to the Imperial War Museum's Holocaust galleries, as well as visiting the Wiener Archives earlier in the year, so I read the entire suggested lecture journal/book list with fascinated interest.

'Traumatic recall is full of fleeting images the percussion of blows, sounds and movement of the body' wrote Roberta Coulson in 1995. Ordinary memories are something we can recall or narrate however this is not the case with traumatic memories. There is a break in the narrative. Someone who experiences war finds it hard to construct a narrative for that event. They experience embodied flashbacks/memories.