From the mouth of the lion - Saint-Bertrand de Comminges

Some towns, some cathedrals, some palaces, grew over time. They have a lived-in feel. Generations of different patrons, architects, craftspeople, DIYers and repairers, have left their mark on them. They're works of cooperation, of adjustment, of agglomeration and compromise.
Other places are the work of one visionary. Versailles - though its kernel is in fact a Louis XIII hunting lodge, which survives at the centre of the larger, later work like a small jewel set in a much bigger and more exuberant monstrance - can't be seen without the figure of Louis XIV, bestriding the scene in his curly long wig and gold embroidered frock coat. St Petersburg, though many of its buildings are later, has at its heart the great urban plan of its founder, Peter the Great; and quite literally, almost at its geographical centre, his original wooden cabin, predecessor of all the imperial palaces.
The cathedral of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges is one of those works. Even though the Romanesque cloister and narthex and the Gothic choir were the work of others, it's the work of bishop Jean de Mauleon that gives the church its character - the warmth of the woodwork, the fantasy of the carvers, the richness of the decoration, are all his work. Most choir stalls simply fill a space in the east end of the church - these stalls dominate the cathedral, thrusting out into the nave, leaving pilgrims and parishioners (excluded from the choir in the Middle Ages) almost nowhere to go. They're complemented by the organ - unusually, neither set up in the west end, nor as a 'swallow's nest' hanging from the wall of the nave, but straddling the north-west angle of the nave.
Jean de Mauleon was a bishop brought up in a humanist age, and something of a scholar. The work he commissioned shows that dual nature; there are busts of Dante and the Medicis, and the organ shows the Labours of Hercules, as well as a number of musicians including a fetching little bagpipe player. The busts of the Nine Worthies show the pagan heroes Hector, Alexander, and Julius Caesar, in the company of Joshua, King David, and Judas Maccabeus, and the Christian heroes Charlemagne, Arthur, and Godfrey of Boulogne. In the stalls, the dorsals show not just prophets and saints, but the Twelve Sibyls, pagan prophetesses (also found in the choir stalls at Auch, which just happens to be where Jean de Mauleon was consecrated bishop).
His humanism shows through too in the triumphal arches which form part of the concept, an appropriate symbol in this ancient Roman town (there are numerous remains of the Roman forum and theatre in the plain below). The entrance to the choir is through one such triumphal arch, and another is shown, facing it, in the east window.
And then there are lions everywhere. There's a wonderful pair of crouching lions in the choir stalls, their haunches curved with tension as they wait to spring, full of suppressed energy. There's a lion painted high above on the stone of the vault. You might think they are just symbols of strength, like the Romanesque lions which flank the entrances to so many Italian cathedrals; or lions of St Mark. But they are also the bad lion, the Mauvais Lion, Mau-Leon, the heraldic badge of Jean de Mauleon. He's put his mark on the woodwork.

There are numerous St Johns, too. There is a lovely young John the Evangelist with his eagle, carved in the round. There is a John the Baptist whose camel skin garment actually shows a camel's head hanging down beside the fringe- a little like figures of Hercules wearing the skin of the lion. Both of them are shown, together with St Bertrand, in marquetry, above the clergy seats in the choir. And there's a John the Baptist on the bishop's throne; with a rampant lion on a shield below, just in case you had missed the allusion.
Again, not unusual to find either or both of the Sainted Johns in a cathedral, though perhaps less usual to find them so prominent in a cathedral that's dedicated (as this one is) to the Virgin. But then think that of course they were both Jean de Mauleon's patron saints, and again you see how the free-spending bishop signed his work to show off his patronage.
By the lion in the vault the initials EHN (for Jehan, the older spelling of the bishop's name) can be seen - easy enough to work out. The initials OAT are a bit more obscure, but his contemporaries would have known; Omnis Amor Tecum, all love be with you - Jean de Mauleon's motto. The OAT logograph is found elsewhere, on the woodwork on the outside of the choir.
It's not ridiculously overt, like the portcullises and roses in King's College Chapel, or the crescent moon symbols of Diane de Poitiers at Anet, or the Sun of the roi soleil at Versailles. It's rather subtle, worked into a rich tapestry of fantasy and symbolism. Saint John the Baptist mixes sociably with the Company of Saints, the Evangelist and his eagle join Mark with his lion (a significant pairing?), and the lions romp with mermaids, wodwoses, nickering horses, and chained pet monkeys.
The most subtle touch is yet to come. Right at the bottom of one of the east windows, and (consequently) almost invisible from inside the choir, is a little kneeling figure of a priest. Almost always, in medieval art, the little kneeling figure is that of a donor, praying to his patron, or to the Virgin, or kneeling in admiration of the whole sacred scene playing out in the window above. Here, in a surprisingly humble position, if my supposition is right, we find Jean de Mauleon himself.

The unique nature of greatness

We visited Vernon a few days back. It's quite a nice French town, with some good half-timber houses, a Gothic church, and the Seine flowing past, but nothing special.

The museum isn't anything special either. An exhibition of paintings on the theme of the Seine had a couple of nice Bonnards, but pretty little else; a lot of daubs, a good view of 20th century schools of painting (impressionist, Cubist) and lots of picturesque views that would do for a painting, but really not an inspiring collection.

Then I walked into a room and saw a painting positive glowing. A circular canvas covered in light green water and white waterlilies. The painting seemed to be lit from behind, actually emitting light. The water was moving with that slow, sinister rippling of deep, deep water.

Nothing picturesque about this painting. No self-conscious composition, with the lilies framed by an artfully disposed tree branch or the mossy edge of a pool. Just pure essence of water and waterlilies.

It was a Monet, of course.

Another painting beckoned to me. A headland, fuzzy brown, and a sunset of shimmering pinks and oranges, that seemed to be shining as if the real sun were hidden behind the canvas. The glitter and pulse of the sunlit sea.

I've seen paintings like this - in fact there was one next to it - that dissolve into slabs of palette-knifed colour when you get up close, ruining the effect. But however close I came to this painting, the shimmering was still there; I couldn't see the paint just as paint alone, so strong was the illusion.

Another Monet. Of course.

Now I do play that little game of going into a room in an art gallery and looking round to see what grabs me - and then seeing whether I've found a really good painting or just a flakily noisy one. About eighty percent of the time 'what grabs me' is a genuine masterpiece.

But in Vernon I wasn't playing the game. And those two Monets reached out and stole the show.

That's what great art does.

Gainsborough vs Constable

I visited the National Gallery again to take a good look at the sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian works there. Once I'd done with these - I'll be writing a podtour up in due course - I decided to move along and try to overcome one of my long-term, irrational loathings - Constable.

Now you have to understand that I really ought to like Constable. I'm a Norfolk girl, and I keep being told that Constable is the great artist of the East Anglian landscape.

So: The Hay Wain. (Yes, I know Flatford is on the Essex/Suffolk border and not in Norfolk.)  I looked at it for a good fifteen minutes. And I still hate it.

I just can't get on with Constable's use of paint. He seems to think it's some kind of chocolate sauce or treacle, daubing it all over the canvas. You could read the painting like braille. The heavy white highlights on the water, to me, look like knobs of white paint or putty, not like light on a stream. It just looks muddy. I actually feel less well disposed to the painting now that I've seen it in the flesh than I did before; the churned up surface prevents me actually looking at the subject.

Dispirited, I wandered round the corner and found myself amazed by the luminous poise of Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews. What a gorgeous painting this is! There's a real sense of space; the sitters are on the left, and to the right we see their fields extending into the distance. In the first field, sheaves are neatly stacked; there's a white gate at the end of the field, and beyond this, sheep grazing. This is a working landscape, just like Constable's.

But what I love is the play of light. On Mrs Andrews's satin dress - which is plain, compared to the dresses of many of Gainsborough's other sitters, but on which the play of light makes up for the plainness of the cut. On the tree trunks. On Mr Andrews's rumpled jacket.

And Gainsborough doesn't beautify this remarkably plain couple, with their sulky faces and almost insolently relaxed posture.  There's a storm coming over, too, giving a strangely ruthless edge to the light. But it's not a menacing painting; the slight sense of menace just offsets the poise and elegance.

I've always been told Constable is the greater painter (that may reflect an out of date appreciation, but that's what my art teachers always said). Yet out of these two paintings, the Gainsborough is the one that does it for me.

Pedant? moi?

One of the things that always makes me wonder just how gullible human beings can be is the plethora of Harry Potter and da Vinci Code tours. As far as I'm aware there isn't yet a Lion, Witch and Wardrobe tour of Oxford (though there is a Middle Earth tour of Birmingham) but I'm sure there soon will be.

If you've read the da Vinci Code, be prepared for a shock when you get to know Rome. I spotted quite a few howlers - I know my Roman baroque churches extremely well and I can tell when Dan Brown hasn't done enough research. But for a real in-depth treatment, try Scott's marvellous article "The Dirt on Rome's Earthy Chapel". It came up on Google when I was doing a bit of research for a piece on Rome's skeletons - and it's the most amazing piece. Worth reading, in fact, even if you have no interest at all in the da Vinci code, for its superb explanation of a very complex and interesting work of art, the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.

Heretical Titian

I put in a day's work at the National Gallery this weekend, preparing a free Podtour of the early Italian masters. I finished that survey with an hour to go till I needed to catch my bus - so I played my little game of wandering around and just seeing what caught my eye.

First - Douanier Rousseau's marvellous jungle painting, 'Surprised!' I wonder who it is that is meant to be surprised - the tiger, caught in the vegetation, or ourselves? This is a wonderful painting that you don't appreciate from a small image, because it's full of movement. First of all, over the whole painting is a shimmer, created by diagonal stripes of darker and lighter shade, representing (I suppose) the tropical rain. Then, the  movement of the leaves, the grass, and the striking diagonals of grass and branches counterpointing each other.  And in the middle of this, the tiger, who seems to be going tiptoe on the very points of the grass, suspended in the air, clearly an impossibility.

(I  must have stared at this painting for five minutes. Then I noticed  there was a little painting of sunflowers quite near by.  And then I looked back at the tiger. No competition.)

Another couple of paintings in one of the Impressionist rooms by two artists I had never heard of; Gallen-Kallela and Alfred William Finch. They're both water subjects - a Finnish lake, and a set of breakwaters. They're stunning in the cold colours, the simplicity and austerity of the subjects. There's a Zen like spirituality here, concentration on the essences of things , a meditative feeling.

But the painting I really hadn't expected to love was Titian's Noli me tangere.  I have continually been amazed by Titians - they look like nothing in books; somehow, all the masterpiece exists in the brushwork, in the detail,  the actual incarnation of the idea in oil and varnish. And in an entire room of paintings by different artists, a Titian will often flash at you like a  beacon - it's so alive, so individual, so desirous of being seen.

So it was here. The painting that first attracted my eye was a portrait by Palma Vecchio -  a plump blond woman, just the kind Titian liked, falling out of her bodice, lit dramatically. But though it looked good from a distance, closer to, it seemed blowsy and flabby. Just along the wall, though, was this jewel-like Titian.

It's a stunning work. Slightly dark colours, as so often in Venetian painting, but tinged with turquoise and red, particularly the sky and the stunning velvet of the Magdalen's dress. (They look awfully muted in the jpeg.)

Then something that really doesn't come out in the photo - the incredible brushwork of Christ's loincloth. Here, Titian is at his most painterly; there is transparent material, there are jags of bright white paint creating thick, opaque highlights; there is a vortex of material caught up in  what should realistically be a knot, but is more of a whirlpool. And there is the contrast with the much more staid painting of the loop of mantle that Jesus holds up in between him and Mary Magdalen.

Now when you get these loops and folds in a loincloth on a Spanish Christ, it's usually on the hip. Not here; it's focused on the groin. And then you have a diagonal, starting with Mary's arm, through the two knots. To my heretical mind, Titian has included an overtly sexual meaning in this painting.

Then look at the two trees. One tall tree -  but brown, dark, falling; and behind Magdalen is a wonderful, flourishing bush of bright green. I could read quite a lot into that... if I cared to. Because what for me this painting is all about is not a spiritual meeting, but sexual invitation and refusal. Look at the Magdalen; unusually, though her hair is uncovered, she is quite primly dressed - the focus is all on the wonderful light folds of her chemise, not on a flash of cleavage.  But she takes the risk - she extends her hand forward.

And Christ, for all his nakedness and exposure, is refusing, doubly guarded behind the folds of white fabric. But it's the openness, the invitation, that Titian seems to sympathise with. And while his Christ is shadowed, the Magdalen is lit, is luminous.

You might agree or disagree with this reading. But one thing is sure; there's always more going on in one of Titian's paintings than meets the eye. And there's always more than you will see in a photographic image, however good.

Playing the room

I recently saw an article about an interesting project by David Byrne (of Talking Heads); he'd taken over an old ferry terminal in Manhattan and made it into a huge musical instrument.

Visitors can 'play' the building through an organ keyboard. Air whistling through the building's pipework makes a flute, or an organ; grilles rattle as percussion, metal hammers strike metal sheets and clang or clash.

The building has become a performance. And it's a performance which is interactive, which appeals to the curiosity of the visitor.

I've seen other installations where visitors turn  lights on and off simply by their presence, or start films rolling.  (Of course, they don't get much choice in the matter with such a simple installation.) But treating the whole building as  a work of art that can be recreated by the  visitor is more ambitious.

It's a pity that so much work on building automation is focused on petty quotidian concerns. It's so pedestrian, so limited - turn the fridge on and off, lock the door, heat the house, feed the cat.

But if I had a house I could play like an instrument - or conduct like an orchestra - I'd want to do more than play 'Baa baa black sheep '. I'd want sliding panels to channel the light; different colours  and intensities of light ; I'd want to be able to create a corridor or a larger room by rearranging the walls. I'd want to do more than just play music on hidden speakers - I'd want to move it around the house, so I could start a sound in the hall and let it run upstairs and into the bathroom, or swoosh it around the main room.

And ultimately, there's something wonderful about a building that isn't just a container for art - as a room is when we play music in it - but that creates that art itself. A building that acts,  rather than just being.          That's why we find fountains and wind towers and sun pipes so interesting - because they create the illusion that a building has life, has secrets, is an active participant in our lives rather than a mere box, a construct.

An interview with Antony Gormley in the Guardian takes flight from the usual discussion of human bodies as the sculptor praises the striking nature of our industrial heritage:

'I want people to be excited about cooling towers and megasheds; they're as much part of our history as the rural barn.'

He praises the telecoms masts of Daventry; the brutal beauty of motorways.

It reminds me of an open exhibition at Horace Blue, in Norwich, where I zeroed in straightaway on Duncan Reekie's beautifully saturated photographs of allotment sheds. There's something honest and straightforward in the subject - Reekie clearly loves the mixture of gridlike rectilinearity and brutal functionality with the slightly random or makeshift nature of the sheds, made of old windows or doors, repaired with plastic sacks stretched over a hole, leaning slightly where the frame has given way. But equally, there's a real love of these sheds, a great affection that comes through in the care he has taken to get them exactly framed in the photo, to saturate the colours and bring out the inherent beauty of the subject.

It's intriguing how we tend to accept some aspects of our industrial heritage and reject others. Canals are good; cooling towers bad. Old tower breweries are good; modern warehouses are bad. But as Gormley points out, there's something honest and brutal in all industrial work that ought to speak to us - something that isn't pretty, that isn't concerned with being 'nice' or not offending people, something that is robust.

I'm aware of it myself when I'm taking photos. I recently wrote an article on Muscat, Oman, for an in-flight magazine, and realised that I had no photos of the commercial centres, the malls which are a defining part of modern Muscat - no photos of the Bollywood Chaat, no photos of Sabco or CCC with their lights, their escalators, their dramatic architectural attempts to gain attention. And no photos of the shops in Ruwi with their bright signage. No photos of the stalls in the souk either - just photos of the architecture. And I realised I'd missed something of the nature of Muscat.

Space and light

I've just been researching as I write up the Podtour for Salzburg, Austria.

The bonus track (ie, I will be putting it up free on the podtours site)  is an introduction to James Turrell's 'Sky space' on the Moenchsberg, near the modern art museum. It's a powerful piece, which has to be experienced, not just looked at. An apparently simple - though actually quite subtly created - circular space with an opening in the roof, it attracts your attention to the sky seen through that opening. White walls, blue sky; after a while you've entered a meditative state. For me, it's Mozart's 'Temple of the Wise' from the Magic Flute - the real Mozart, not the eine-Kleine-not-that-again-Musik-marzipan-Mozart every shop in town is trying to sell.

So I was glad to find an interview with the artist available on the web.  His Quaker spirituality, but also an interest in astronomy and powered flight, infuses a lot of his art. It's an interesting interview but I particularly like his assertion: "There is a truth in light."

What I particularly love about his work is that he tries to get us to approach and experience light directly - for itself. None of the cleverness of Bernini, who wants to make light play tricks for him. Just pure, undiluted light. A real joy.

And something I wish, on this very grey December day, I had got here...

Uniqueness

Another lovely post fromGawain on Heaven Tree, with two identical jade cups. It's an interesting play between uniqueness and duplication - while the two cups replicate each other, the laborious technique by which they were made surely makes them unique in their way, a sort of specialness like that possessed by identical twins.

I got round to thinking how much of our travel is looking for the unique. Sometimes, we're looking for copies. Travel to Vegas, and are you looking for a copy of Venice? or are you actually aware, in a rather ironic way, of the specialness of the Italian city 'recreated' in the heart of American kitsch and glitz?

In the same way, if you visit a 'typical' Tuscan hill town, are you looking for it as a copy of that ideal you carry in your head (or guidebook) of the archetypal Tuscan hill town? or as a uniquely perfect townscape?

When we spend too long looking for the typical, we actually neglect the unique. And perhaps also we make ourselves immune to surprise. Immune to the shock of seeing a clash of the old and the new, experiencing a back street epiphany as we stumble upon that hidden antique store or sudden view out to the country.

Can we look for the unique? Possibly not. But we ought to hold ourselves open to experiencing it.

Ten unique places:

1. The silversmiths' supplies shops in Muttrah souk, Oman. I bought two dies for stamping out little ornaments in silver; weighty brass octagons carved with symbols - hearts, half-spheres, stars.


2. The 'Cosa nostra' Italian importers in Novgorod (this was years ago, so I can't guarantee it's still there).


3. The archangel's cave basilica on Monte Gargano, reached by steps carved in solid rock, with its Byzantine bronze doors, and old women burning braziers in the wintry streets outside.


4. Reculver, on the Kent coast, where the ruined towers of a great Minster brood over a caravan park and solitary, desultorily used amusement arcade.


5. The via cava that leads from Pitigliano to Sovana - an ancient Etruscan road where you can still see the ruts made by ancient carts, and walk on last year's leaves slowly rotting in the covered lane.


6. The great abbey church on Mont Saint Michel on a January evening, when the floodlights shine from outside through the windows, bleaching the inside into a ghostly shimmer.


7. Fish Hill, where the road from the Cotswolds drops down a series of sweeping curves to the Severn flood plain.Or Bredon Hill, seen from the Malverns above a sea of  roiling mist, or (once) isolated amidst the silver of flooded fields.


8. Nine Standards Rigg, on the coast-to-coast path above Kirkby Stephen, where huge tall cairns guard the way down from the Pennine watershed, and the road seems to drop forever away from the peaty tops.


9. Okocim Brewery, Poland - a cathedral of beer where the huge cellar is cut into the side of a mountain, and the only sound is the slow dripping of condensation from the overhead pipes.


10. The éoliennes (wind turbines) on the cliffs at Wimereux, just south of Boulogne. I stopped once in the car park on the side of the motorway, and their thrilling hum drowned out the noise of the cars.

Let there be lights

York is being illuminated, along the lines of the fine light shows at Chartres and Amiens. Artist Usman Haque is lighting York Minster from 26 October to 3 November 2007,with an installation that will let visitors activate the lights with their own voices. There'll also be a trail of light-based art works in the city, as well as 'Weather Patterns' in light on the York Art Gallery facade.

Statues of strangeness 2

One of my favourite occupations when travelling is to keep an eye open for unusual statues. Any city is full of the great and the good - often, generals who were well known in their time but now almost forgotten, or civil servants whose claims to fame have lapsed - but the statues I'm looking for are the unofficial, sometimes strange or quirky.

There's a nice article in the Telegraph today on London statues. Now I don't think  Christopher Somerville should have left out the fine Charles I by Le Sueur in Trafalgar Square. It's not a Bernini, but it breathes the same air of Baroque plenitude. But some of his other selections are interesting. He prefers the informal (Churchill and Roosevelt cracking a joke) to the formal, the fantastic (the composer Purcell dreaming) to the ordinary, 'everyman' (the Jewish children of Liverpool Street) to the nobs. And he also finds room (as I have done in my own life) for one very special companion - a feline, Hodge, Doctor Johnson's cat, "a very fine cat indeed." (Being a lover of the Baroque rather than the Enlightenment, I don't like Doctor Johnson overmuch, but his ailurophilia - and in particular his consideration of Hodge's feelings - is an endearing feature.)

I think I blogged the great statue of the tom cat in El Raval, Barcelona, a while ago. Wikipedia's now got a picture of it. And El Pais has an article on it (only if you speak Spanish, though), pointing out that it's already had several lives - it's lived in the Olympic stadium, the Ciutadella park, on the Paral.lel...  and it is now purring away quite happy in this slightly seedy quarter, where no doubt it can find enough food in the rubbish bins!

Guided art tour on a website

The Boing Boing blog made me aware of this excellent site - Making sense of Marcel Duchamp.

It's a guided tour of Duchamp's work. The elegant design is an immediate recommendation. But what I particularly like is the commentary - particularly, pointing out Duchamp's sense of comedy, and the way he subverts artistic forms.

'The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even' is deconstructed, and made to operate as a sort of perpetual motion machine through the use of cartoons that interpret Duchamp's original designs (not all of his ideas made it through to the final work).

And there's a timeline which makes it easy to see where Duchamp's works fit in the overall progression of his art.

The technology is a perfect fit with the content. You can't say that about many websites. And I really do feel, having spent half an hour with the site, that I understand a lot more about Duchamp - an artist I previously knew only for the famous (or rather notorious) urinal. I like him a lot more, too.

Travel as art

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has a Richard Long retrospective.

I've known Long's work for a while and love it. He takes not so much landscape, but the land itself as his subject - mud, twigs, the process of walking. "Throwing muddy water" uses mud splashes on the wall to create a triptych of enigmatic symbols. "A line made by walking" is simply a photograph - in black and white, starkly reductive - of a straight line path made in a muddy field.

There's something quite meditative about these works. The subject is the artist's interaction with the landscape, the soil, the natural materials. We see how the mud has been thrown, squelched, left to dry. There's an element of time; Long exposes natural forces such as gravity, erosion. He opens up, in small, a vista on to geological time and infinite space (it reminds me of the way Tennyson sometimes does this in his poetry, a tiny lyric opening up into a whole universe).

Perhaps it's because his work is to do with time that so many of his works are represented by photographs. They're not intended to be permanent. Their impermanence is part of their meaning. And yet they are strangely permanent, decisive in their effect; a straight line marked on a field, a decision made, which will never be reversed; even when the trodden path has long been eroded, the mark of that work of imagination, that engagement with the landscape, is ineradicable.

For anyone interested in long distance hiking as a mode of spirituality and engagement with the earth, rather than simply an olde worlde way of getting from A to B, Richard Long's work is an essential reference.

Two precious wall paintings - a disappearing heritage?

Frecoes are, for most of us, an Italian thing. Painting on walls just isn't something we think artists did in medieval France and England.

But that's got more to do with centuries of damp than it has to do with medieval artists' work. Every so often you come across a wall painting that startles you with its vividness - and makes you realise how much we have probably lost.

Amiens Cathedral for instance has a lovely painting of the Sibyls; fashionable fifteenth century ladies, in lovely springtime colours - living green, sweet pink, golden yellows. But look more closely, and you'll see the paint is actually flaking off the wall; how much longer will they be there?

I was amazed recently to find a stunning wall painting in my own city. I never knew it was there. Yet it's of such fine quality that if it were in Florence or Venice, it would be in all the guidebooks.

St Gregory, Pottergate, Norwich, was only open because there was a craft fair inside. Norwich has many fine Perpendicular churches, and at first sight this was just one more of the same style - whitewashed walls, most of the furnishings gone, cobwebs and damp.

Then I saw the painting at the back of the north aisle. St George and the dragon, against the  dreamlike parapets of a fantastic castle. Its colours seemed darkened by time but the lines of the painting were still clear.

Maybe it doesn't rank with Uccello. But it's an amazingly beautiful piece of work. It's also a testimony to the medieval culture of Norwich, where St George and the Dragon were part of the guild celebrations (a dragon still turns up to the mayor's procession), and the Guild of St George was one of the most powerful.

Yet this painting is unnoticed, unprotected, in a redundant church that's open a few times a year. And though it's in a better state than the Amiens Sibyls, I wonder how it will fare in future, in an empty church that's used a few times a year.

William Morris - local hero or national asset?

Sad news that Walthamstow council in London is downgrading its support to the William Morris gallery.

Morris is probably best known for his design work. If you enjoy fine printing you may know of his Kelmscott Chaucer; he also wrote romances, translated medieval poetry, and had a huge influence on art theory of his day. He painted, designed stained glass and furniture, and was a practising architect. A Renaissance man - three hundred years late.

Morris was also a committed Socialist. And that meant something rather different to him from what it might mean to a modern politician. He believed that everyone had the right to beauty in their lives - and that everyone should also have the right to a job that was satisfying and gave them pride.

William Morris is a major figure in the development of English art and design. So it's disappointing that one of the major galleries devoted to his work may be downgraded - and eventually close - because a local council wants to save money.

I don't think it should be a council funded museum at all, anyway. It's a national treasure.

England is full of local museums. Often, the main exhibits are three gas masks from the Second World War and an old mangle to show the way our foremothers did their washing. Maybe a couple of flints found by a metal detectorist, and some old maps. These are characterful little museums, but no single one is really irreplaceable.

But the Morris Gallery is something else.  It needs to be saved - and invested in for the future.

Because in a world where McDonalds asks its employees to have 'passion' for the soggy cardboard food they serve, and where the ugly and the futile is all around us, William Morris is important: "Have nothing in your houses that ou do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

Links:

Visit the Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, north-east London (or on the web).

Sign the online petition to save the William Morris Gallery (and yes, I've done so already).

More about William Morris on Wikipedia, with some good pictures, if this has whetted your appetite.

I don't like Rubens but...

I've never liked Rubens.

His fleshy, ruddy nudes and well fed cherubs don't do much for me. I find them a bit overdone, and there's a feeling of grotesquerie in some of his painting that suggests the Breughel/Bosch streak in Flemish painting never died out.

So I wasn't expecting much from a trip to Antwerp and Mechelen.  However, I was in for a surprise.

First of all, the 'Miraculous draught of fishes' in Our Lady's Church over the Dijle in Mechelen. It's amazing - the matte surface, the vibrant, bright colour, reminded me of 1930s works rather than the high Baroque. The treatment of the apostles' bodies and drapery could almost come from the socialist realism tradition. It's a striking painting - almost the antithesis of everything I thought Rubens was about - and the fact that the evening sun was falling full on it brought the colours out in all their liveliness.

I found another Rubens painting I liked in the Rockox House in Antwerp. Nicholaas Rockox was Rubens' friend and patron and so you'd expect to find a couple of Rubens paintings here. And so no surprise to find a Rubens crucifixion hanging on the wall.

What's surprising is that it was so small. I thought Rubens was about big things - most of his best known paintings are huge, super-life-size canvases. But here, the whole scene of the crucifixion is reduced to a canvas not much bigger than an A4 piece of paper, and you can actually see Rubens' brushwork, swirls and flows of paint. Sometimes it's diaphanous, thinned right down; elsewhere there are blobs of thick impasto. It's all alive, bright, a moment caught on the fly.

My last Rubens shocked me. It's in the Plantin Museum in Antwerp. I'm interested in the craft of letterpress printing so this was a compulsory stop for me; Plantin was the greatest printer of his age in the Low Countries,  and Rubens even contributed frontispieces for the Plantin/Moretus press's books.

The 'Dying Seneca' here is related to a number of paintings which include a large history painting in the Prado, and the 'Four philosophers' painting in the same room of the Plantijn Museum. But this painting is striking in a way that the others aren't. Here, we see simply a portrait of the dying man; no event, no disciples, no philosopical reference frame, just a man dying. His eyes stare yet they're already becoming blind with death; there's a starkness in the delineation of the naked flesh that implies pain and struggle, and yet the painting as a whole is also strangely peaceful. And around Seneca's figure there is nothing but darkness; the darkness he will soon enter.

I haven't been so struck by a painting since I saw one of the Rembrandt self-portraits 'in the flesh'.