Contemporary Vandalism

I have been looking forward to the reopening of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which I was lucky enough to visit in 2019  before it closed for a long, long time. I had understood that the local government  had shut the museum because it couldn't afford to run it, but I think I was being naive in believing that.

In any case, I was sad it was inaccessible and hoped I would be able to return eventually. The place had remained in my mind, largely because, alone in the Birmingham city centre, it provided evidence that there was a time when there were people who felt an intense pride in their city and a desire to create enduring loveliness there. There was a poignance to this, as all around the museum itself - a wonderful, solidly ornate Victorian building, opened by Queen Victoria herself in 1885 - the only other architectural trend on display was one that seemed to blend greed and short-termism. The newer buildings in the area appear to be made to last as long as an Ikea chest of drawers (and, while Ikea at least aims for a measure of elegance in the visual design of the objects it sells, a similar interest in aesthetics is not conveyed to the bystander by the buildings that have risen up during Birmingham's post-war years).

Anyway, today I read this, and my heart sank:

Why do these things happen? How did Britain come under the care of those who hate its culture?

Sometimes I tell myself I ought not to take photographs, that I am spoiling my experience of reality as I snap away. After discovering what has happened at Birmingham, I am kicking myself for having had such a lousy camera when we went there and for taking so few shots. Here are the things I did take pictures of - it seems that, unless things change, you will only see them here:

Corporation Street, Birmingham, in March 1914, Joseph Southall, fresco. The dating of the painting to before the outbreak of the First World War is significant as it was actually commissioned and painted during the war. However, Southall was a Quaker and opposed to the war and preferred to depict a time before it began and European life changed forever. 

Vase and cover, Terracotta, gilding and enamels, England, Devon, St Mary Church, Watcombe Pottery Company, 1875-1880 (The Watcombe Pottery was Devon's first pottery, which began production in 1869. The vase dates from the pottery's early years. The Victorians were interested in the natural world. Very few Victorians would have seen a real cockatoo.)

William Logsdall, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1883 

JMW Turner, The Pass of St Gothard, Switzerland, 1803-4

The museum staircase with a window I particularly loved

A Saint Holding a Book by Simone Martini, circa 1320-30, tempera on panel. Martini was one of the leading artists in Siena in the 14th century but few of his panel paintings have survived. This must originally have formed part of a predella. The saint is shown weeping as he gazes to his left towards a missing central panel which probably showed the dead Jesus Christ.

The Nativity by a Master of the Prado 'Adoration of the Magi, c.1475-1500. The imagery of this painting derives from the writings of St Bridget of Sweden, a 14th century nun. She had a vision of the Virgin Mary kneeling in a. white robe and with loosened hair, adoring her new born son. In the vision, the candle held by Joseph was dim beside the radiance of the child Jesus. We don't know the name of the Dutch artist who painted this work He is identified by a nickname taken from a painting in the Prado museum in Madrid, one of several pictures which seem to have been painted by the same artist.

Tryptych: The Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Presentation in the Temple, by Adrien Isenbrandt, 1510-12, Oil on panel. 

The Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Peter and Mark and a Donor, 1505, oil on panel. The arrangement of the figures in this painting is called a 'sacred conversation'. Saitns Peter and Mark contemplate the virtues of the Virgin who sits between them holding the infant Christ. On the right side, the man who commissioned the painting kneels in prayer. Bellini was a leading Venetian painter and Saint Mark is patron saint of Venice, so this commission would have demonstrated loyalty to the Venetian republic.

The Hon Edward Sackville West by Graham Sutherland, 1953-4. Sackville-West was a good friend of Sutherland. He was also music critic for the New Statesman during the 1940s. This is a study for a full-length portrait. I did some research in the Patrick Leigh Fermor archive in Edinburgh years ago and I have an idea there were some funny incidents involving Sackville-West in there. I will have to go back one day as I need to do further research, so I will have a look and see if my memory is right.

Set in Stone

A few years ago in the Museum of Picardie in Amiens, I noticed these idiosyncratic carvings:

They were labelled variously as fragments of an altarpiece depicting Christ’s passion, found in 1837 in the ruins of the Church of Conty in the Somme, and depictions of various biblical scenes that seem to have come from 19th century private collections. They were said to date from the 15th century.

Some months later I went to Mass at the Eglise de Notre Dame de Croaz Batz in Brittany, (about which I will post in my section called “Mass Tourism” at some later date), and recognised, in an altarpiece in the church, works that looked as if they came from the same hand as those I’d seen in Amiens:

Finally, last year in Naples, in the Capo di Monte (what a gallery, what a collection), I spotted similar figures in an alabaster tryptych of the Passion of Christ, also from the 15th century:

Each time I spotted them, what caught my attention about the carvings was the faces of the little figures depicted in them. They are faintly comic, although I don’t think this was the artist’s intention - and the fact that it was probably not his intention is what endears these works to me. Their lack of genius is attractive. Their slight naivety makes the sculptor seem human, rather than so extraordinary he no longer appears to be a fellow creature existing on the same plane as the rest of us - which is how I imagine Michelangelo whenever I see his works. Looking at these little scenes, by contrast, I catch a glimpse across the centuries of a moderately talented person who had the impulse to be creative, while being less than brilliant, a person who engaged in a struggle with mediocrity and didn’t entirely come out on top - a person, therefore, with whom I can identify.

And after the initial moment of interest, something else caught my attention, when I read the wall notes to these works. According to the curators at both the Museum of Picardy and the Capo di Monte, the person who made these things came from Nottingham.

Nottingham? That didn’t just catch my attention; it surprised me. We're talking about the fifteenth century - how did a bloke from Nottingham manage to get around to all these places in Europe before the invention of Ryanair?

But then I remembered one of the best detective stories I’ve ever read - The Leaves of Southwell - in which Nicolas Pevsner devotes himself to trying to understand who might have created “the leaves which adorn the capitals of the columns of Southwell Chapter House...eight miles west of Newark and fourteen miles north-east of Nottingham.”

To my astonishment when I read it, Pevsner explains that, in the thirteenth century, masons wandered Europe, plying their trade. He notes clear signs that whoever designed Bamberg Cathedral had seen and been impressed by Laon. He refers to a thirteenth century manuscript in the National Library in Paris written by Villard de Honnecourt in which the author explains “that he came from the north of France, looked round and drew at Rheims (aisle windows of the cathedral, ‘because I liked them best’) and Chartres, and even went as far from home as Lausanne and Hungary”. Pevsner also tells us that “the architect of Canterbury Cathedral choir, William of Sens, came from France specially to get the job as master mason to the cathedral” and that “the east parts of Westminster Abbey are so evidently influenced by Reims, that the name of the first master mason, Henry de Reyns, may very well be an anglicised form of Henry of Reims”.

So it was not in fact unusual for a Nottingham man to be making work in far flung places. The thirteenth century was not, as I’d imagined, a time when people were utterly tied to place - and presumably nor was the fifteenth century. However, as Pevsner points out, writing in 1945, whereas “personality and genius are what have interested the West for the last hundred and fifty years, more than all else in the contemplation of works of art”, at the time the Southwell leaves were made - and also at the time that my Nottingham friend was working - the names of individual carvers were not recorded. This prompts Pevsner to ask “Was there such a thing as an artist, as a sculptor in the thirteenth century”, given how “surprisingly few names of artists and architects of the Middle Ages have come down to us...Perhaps their work was but regarded as competent craft.”

And so the great paradox: we do not know the names of many of the individuals involved in stonemasonry in the Middle Ages and yet their works - above all every aspect of European cathedrals - are generally regarded as among the greatest treasures of European civilisation. 

And, of course, as Simon Winder points out at the start of his book Germania, the only reason the work of artists involved in the creation of cathedrals has survived to be admired, where so much other artistic product has vanished, is the fact that they worked in stone:

“What survives from the real Middle Ages” says Winder, “is a range of, in practice, quite arbitrary objects, based on luck and the durability of their materials...Clothing, even precious clothing, has rotted, tapestries have faded, paint has worn away. Much of the texture and visual meaning of the Middle Ages is therefore lost...The massive exception to this decay and disappearance is stone, the stone which gives each cathedral or Schloss such seeming solidity.”

Alabaster isn’t the most enduring variety of stone, but it is enduring enough to have allowed the hardworking aspirant from Nottingham to be thought about six centuries later; and his works are wondrous, in their own modest way - or, at the very least, charming.

Recent Reading - God is Near Us by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI

A wonderful collection, containing much deep insight. The final chapter, My Joy is to Be in Thy Presence, is especially marvellous as it most fully develops the author’s fascinating understanding of time and the eternal.

The things in the book that I particularly want to remember:

From God With Us and God Among Us:

“God looks out from eternity into time”

“God is a God with us and not just a God in himself and for himself.”

From God’s Yes and his Love are Maintained Even in Death:

“In the washing of the disciples’ feet is represented for us what Jesus does and what he is. He, who is Lord, comes down to us; he lays aside the garments of glory and becomes a slave, one who stands at the door and who does for us the slave’s service of washing our feet. This is the meaning of his whole life and Passion: that he bends down to our dirty feet, to the dirt of humanity and that in his greater love he washes us clean...We, who repeatedly find we cannot stand one another...are welcomed and accepted by him...We are washed through our willingness to yield to his love...John’s account shows us that even where God sets no limits, man can sometimes do so. Two such instances appear here (in the 13th Chapter of John’s Gospel). The first becomes apparent in the figure of Judas...This is the No given because we want to make the world for ourselves and are not ready to accept it as a gift from God...I think we all ought to ask ourselves, right now, whether we are not just like those people whose pride and vainglory will not let them be cleansed, let them accept the gift of Jesus Christ’s healing love...there is, however, also the danger of piety, represented by Peter: the false humility that does not want anything so great as God bending down to us; the false humility in which pride is concealed, which dislikes forgiveness and would rather achieve its own purity...that refuses God’s kindness.”

“Jesus’s words at the Last Supper...tear the world free from its unbearable boredom, indifference, sadness and evil.”

“God does not desire human sacrifice...he desires love, which transforms man and through which he becomes capable of relating to God, giving himself up to God...all this vain and eternal striving to bring ourselves up to God can be seen as unnecessary and yet, at the same time, as being like windows that allow us, so to speak, a glimpse of the real thing.”

“Being jealous of salvation is not Christian.”

From The Wellspring of Life:

“Death is the ultimate question.”

From The Presence of the Lord in the Sacrament:

“We live in the sphere of death; we can reach out in thought in the sphere of the Resurrection, try to make approximations. But it remains something different that we never quite comprehend. This is because of the the boundary of death, which closes us in and within which we live.”

“The fundamental error of regarding only what is material, tangible, visible as reality...’Reality’ is not just what we can measure...quantifiable entities...are always only manifestations of the hidden mystery of true being...here, where Christ meets us, we have to do with this true being...substance refers to the profound and fundamental basis of being. Jesus is not there like a piece of meat, not in the realm of what can be measured and quantified.”

“Christ is greater than the bread, other, not of the same order. The transformation happens, which affects the gifts we bring by taking them up into a higher order and changes them, even if we cannot measure what happens...The Lord takes possession of the bread and the wine; he lifts them up, out of the setting of their normal existence into a new order; even if, from a purely physical point of view, they remain the same, they have become profoundly different...This points us back again to the fact that being a Christian...is to be transformed, that it must involve repentance and not just some embellishment added onto the rest of one’s life. It reaches down into our depths and renews us from those very depths.”

“The Eucharist transcends the realm of functionality...The significance of the Eucharist as a sacrament of faith consists precisely in that it takes us out of functionality and reaches the basis of reality...The Eucharist is more real than the things we have to do with every day. Here is the genuine reality. This is the yardstick, the heart of things; here we encounter that reality against which we need to learn to measure every other reality.”

“To receive Christ means: to move toward him, to adore him.”

“Whenever we pray in the eucharistic presence, we are never alone...we are praying within the sphere of God’s gracious hearing, because we are praying with the sphere of death and resurrection.”

From The Immediacy of the Presence of the Lord:

“Only within the breathing space of adoration can the eucharistic celebration indeed be alive; only if the church and thus the whole congregation is constantly imbued with the waiting presence of the Lord, and with our silent readiness to respond, can the invitation to come together bring us into the hospitality of Jesus Christ and of the Church, which is the precondition of the invitation.”

“Love or friendship always carries within it an impulse of reverence, of adoration.”

“When the conscience becomes dulled, this lets in the violence that lays waste the world.”

“The reform of human relationships rests in the first place on a reinforcement of moral strength. Only morality can set limits to violence and selfishness, and wherever it becomes insignificant it is man who is the loser every time, and the weak first of all.”

“We can only understand love by sharing it.”

“People are not shaped merely from within outward; another line of influence runs from without inward, and to overlook this or to deny its existence is a kind of spiritualism that soon takes its toll. Holiness, the Holy One, is there in this world, and whenever the educative effect of his visible expression disappears this leads both people and the world to become more superficial and more barbarous.”

From Standing Before the Lord

“The word progress has acquired an almost magical ring. Yet we know, at the same time, that progress can be a meaningful term only if we know where we want to go.”

From The Church Subsists as Liturgy and in the Liturgy

“The Church is adoration.”

“The world needs more than just itself.”

“People do not need a distraction that will in the end become dreary...; they are asking for mystery even if they do not realise this themselves. They need the sign of the wholly other, the living word of God, entering into this our age in unadulterated trustworthiness and dynamism. That is the great task you (new priests) are taking on ...rooted in the apostolic structure of the Church, to remain steadfast in its word and thus to bring it to fruition: to bring into the world the great and transforming Other, the element without which the world can only sink into grey boredom.”

“When death comes onstage, the game is at an end. Man is set before the truth.”

Haredi Israelis

If this claim from the former research director of Vienna's Boltzmann Institute is accurate, I wonder why Islamists bother attacking Israel, when they could just sit tight and wait a few years. Once the Haredi are the majority, who will defend Israel when the Islamists move in? 

“In Israel, the extreme orthodox Haredi segment of the Jewish population holds a vision of the proper and desirable social order that is at odds with the country’s modern, progressive, mainstream society. They believe in gender segregation, reject secular and scientific learning, and consider the study of Torah to be the only worthwhile activity. Most of their men eschew wage-earning professions and live instead on government subsidies and on money earned by their wives. The wives believe that financially supporting the husband’s lifelong full-time Torah study by working, birthing, and raising as many children as possible is the fulfillment of a woman’s role in the divine order. The Haredim disapprove of the state of Israel as an entity and vigorously oppose the recent attempts to include them in the military draft. Though disengaged from their nation, for tactical reasons, they maintain high voter turnout, voting as a bloc and as instructed by their rabbinical leadership. This makes them a critical factor in coalition building and lends them considerable weight. It’s a clever strategy. No need to fight, no need for the men to slog away at boring jobs. They need only industriously impregnate their women. 

Currently, the Haredi population accounts for about 21 percent of Israel’s Jewish population. At their rate of 6.7 children per woman, projections place them near or over 50 percent of the Jewish Israeli population by the end of the century. They make no secret of their wish to impose strict religious rules of behavior on the rest of the population, and by their numbers, they will be able to do that. Their triumph will, alas, be short-lived. Israel will have a population half of which is pacifist, its males economically unproductive and, with their sedentary scholarly lifestyle, not physically fit, its females pregnant, lactating, and overworked; it won’t make them very competitive in a neighborhood dominated by hyperactive, aggressive Arab males and their equally procreation-inclined wives. The Haredim seem on course to win control of Israel, briefly, until they lose it all to the Arabs. And the secular Israeli state is hastening this outcome by paying bonuses for each additional child. This program failed to incentivize its modern citizens and ended up benefiting only the minority that is poised to bring the house down.”

What Do You Think of This?

Following the almost complete alteration of meaning of ‘disinterested’, (it now means ‘uninterested’ almost universally), I have noticed that ‘definately’ is becoming almost interchangeable with ‘definitely’.

There is a strong argument that English is successful precisely because it is flexible. There is also historical evidence that demonstrates spelling has only recently been standardised. However, some might say ‘definately’ is the thin end of the wedge.

For me, the spelling of a word isn’t that much of a worry, provided it is still understandable. But the loss of nuance that has occurred with the repurposing of the earlier ‘disinterested’ makes me sad.

What Do You Think of This?

I was surprised to see a clip on the BBC news the other evening purporting to show Iranian armed men hunting for an American serviceman whose plane had apparently been shot down in their country. I found it unsettling that the BBC chose to air this footage. I wondered if they would have done the same if the technology in World War Two had allowed them to get hold of some footage of Wehrmacht or SS officers setting out to hunt down Allied airmen shot down in enemy territory.

In Children of Men, PD James points out that “you don't need to manipulate unwelcome news; just don't show it.” Most evenings, the BBC follows this advice very closely. Huge events it doesn’t care for are ignored or get the briefest of coverage, while tabloid nonsense pads out the half hour. To me that makes the decsion to show viewers footage that I suspect comes direct from the Iranian regime’s propaganda machine particularly mystifying.

What do others think?