One at a time, please – Michelle Lovric

Can you imagine getting so close to one of your favourite paintings that your eyelashes almost graze the canvas? Can you imagine sharing the painting only with a couple of dear friends and a security guard whose love for the work makes you forget the pistol in his pocket? Can you imagine the said guard pointing out the tiny but perfect white cat in the centre of the scene, a cat that is no more than an energetic swirl of an inexpressibly expert paintbrush? And can you imagine doing all of this in a candle-lit abbazia in the middle of Venice?

 

This is an experience on offer for just 50 days this autumn.

Astonishingly, there are only two Canaletto paintings currently resident in Venice – something I have written about for Mary Hoffman’s Book Maven blog. But for this brief and lovely moment in the winter of 2013 you can also see a third: one of his best-known works L’entrata nel Canal Grande e la Basilica della Salute (The Entrance to the Grand Canal and the Basilica of the Salute).

 

 And here is the height of exquisiteness: you can see it in the exact same loggia where, between 1740 and 1745, the artist set up his camera obscura and his easel and sat down to record the wedding cake church of Santa Maria della Salute, the Punta della Dogana, the Palazzo Ducale and the Riva degli Schiavoni. The exhibition is called ‘Gero qua’ – Venetian for ‘I was here’.

 

How did this intimate Canaletto experience come about?

It’s a two-hundred-and-eighty-year old story. The art was of course created in Venice. Lady Lucas and Dingwall was the painting’s first owner. It was then sold to Henry Grey, Duke of Kent. In April 1970 a private buyer acquired it at auction at Sotheby’s in London. Now this philanthropist has lent the painting back to Venice.

In order to make the most of the 50 days, the painting is on display 24 hours a day. A maximum of 8 visitors are admitted each hour. The season sold out immediately.

First, at the appointed time, you enter the Benedictine Abbey of San Gregorio and stand in its courtyard, candle-lit from dusk, to hear the history of the place. Then you are led upstairs to the Canaletto loggia, to look at the painting.

 

We timed it perfectly. We arrived just before four, when the light was dimming, so we first saw the painting in exactly the same kind of light that glows from the canvas. As the guard told us, the painting is thought to have recorded a spring afternoon at around three o’clock. We were seeing the matching autumn light at just the same time.

 

We spent a good half-hour with the painting, shyly approaching it at first, and then becoming bolder. We looked – really looked – in deep searching sweeps of the canvas for once, and then at the scarcely changed reality of Venice behind it. We listened to the guard, who had soaked up the knowledge of hundreds of visitors. He required very little squeezing to let forth a gush of droplets of enchanting facts. He told us that scientists had spoken of tracking the blooms of algae that discolour the canals via this painting; he pointed out that, despite the seeming photographic accuracy of the painting, Canaletto had transposed a couple of angel arms, and had scandalously included only thirteen of Santa Maria della Salute’s sixteen steps.

 

He pointed out how successive renovations of the Palazzo Ducale façade had left it sadly drained of the roseate tones that warm the Canaletto. He told us that with a magnifying glass you could make out the features of the faces of people crossing a bridge in the distant background of the painting. He showed us a sneaky profile peering out from behind a column. And of course he told us about the tiny squiggle of a white cat, right in the centre of everything. (I am afraid my camera is not up to it).

And we – two architects, a writer and a chorister, offered up our own bits of knowledge to the absorbent guard. The Danieli Hotel, we told him, was the old Palazzo Dandolo. And we were fascinated by what used to be beside it: the part now occupied by the hotel’s frightful modern wing. Three higgledy-piggledy houses of straggling heights occupy the site in the Canaletto picture. These buildings were not palaces; they were possibly warehouses: this perhaps explains why they were allowed to be demolished. In front of them stretched a long black awning, perhaps for the cafés that were just starting to feature in Venetian social life in the 1740s, along with a craze for hot chocolate and coffee.

Then the guard urged us to go next door to the room where yielding white sofas awaited us. Lying back, almost swallowed by plump upholstery, we watched the work of cinematographer Maurizio Calvesi, who had filmed the details of the painting using an innovative technique in extremely high definition. The camera swooped over the myriad of intimate encounters that made up the human part of the scene, delivering details of faces and clothing that it was hard to see with the naked eye in the original painting.

The restless camera rendered the orderly Canaletto suddenly noisy and messy with human life: the tall man striding through the centre of the scene appears to be talking to himself, angrily. The shoeshine boy utters his pretty patter to his noble patron, no doubt earning himself a tip as he flourishes his snowy-white rag before setting himself to work on those leather slippers. We felt the thud of bales of cotton being unloaded, the chuckling of the dark liquid inside barrels of wine. We saw the cynical face of a nobleman being petitioned for some favour by a commoner, the bulging muscles of the crippled man struggling up those thirteen steps to pray for his health.

 

Canaletto’s quiet painting was now alive for us: we understood that the artist had also recorded the Venetians, their activities, their work, their sustenance in a way that a writer can only envy. Even the mooring pole to the left forefront of the picture had its story to tell. The water of the Grand Canal was in 1740 so clean as to be transparent. Canaletto showed its outline deep into the water.

Then we came back to look at the real painting again, our knowledge enlarged by what we had just seen. Now the sun had set and the painting glowed in the room, more like an animation than a static piece of art.

Slowly and sadly, we left it, at the guard’s most discreet and regretful mention of the hour. We returned to the courtyard where we were offered drinks, and, most of all, a chance to descend from the almost dopiamine high of utter intimacy with a Canaletto exactly where a Canaletto should be.

 

We strolled around the candle-lit courtyard, where another film of the abbazia was projected onto billowing silk, and then slipped out into the darkness of Venice, quite suffused with afterglow. It was a while before any of us could talk again. If any of us had smoked, it would have been the moment for a shared cigarette and a long, tender sigh.

The evening left me wondering about the physical research we writers do. And how it moves us. I am currently writing Venice in 1737 and so ‘Gero qua’ could not have been a more perfect experience for me. But there are other paintings I love, in galleries in London and Venice, which also deserve the ‘Canaletto treatment’. And can we not almost do it ourselves?

I worked as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute for Art for three years, which gave me access to the gallery as often as I wanted. Why did I not spend my lunchtimes as a devotee in front of any one of the magnificent works there? (Well, because I never had a lunchtime, but even so…)

We could all do this: give a painting what it deserves. What if we dared to go to the National Gallery, or the Courtauld, with a view to seeing just one painting, and thus really seeing it? What if we showed it the courtesy of research into its background before we saw it, so that we knew already what details were important? What if we allowed ourselves the luxury of a whole hour with one work, just the triangle of the painting, the writer and the writer’s notebook, with the writer’s words aiming to draw the past into the present?

Perhaps some of you have already shared such a long moment with a work of art of an object from the past? If so, please share.

 

Michelle Lovric’s website

Her eighteenth-century Venetian novels include Carnevale, The Book of Human Skin and The Fate in the Box.

 

A Trip to the Sir John Soane’s Museum

by Linda Buckley-Archer

In last Saturday’s post Dianne Hofmeyr described how a dozen or so History Girls met up to push our primarily ‘virtual’ relationships into the real world. And what a lovely day we had. Do take a look at Dianne’s photographs if you haven’t viewed them already.

Our excuse was a group visit to the home of architect Sir John Soane – which has been preserved and renovated to appear as it would have done at the time of his death – and it is my personal take on the museum which is the subject of today’s post.

Ten years ago I told a friend that I was starting work on a children’s novel set in eighteenth-century London. She immediately said: I will take you to the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – you will LOVE it. So she did, and I did, and I have done ever since. In fact, the dates didn’t quite fit in with my fictional narrative but Lincoln’s Inn Fields itself became a setting which I returned to in all three volumes of The Gideon Trilogy. When I subsequently found both a literary agent and a publisher within minutes walk of the museum, visits to the S.J.S.M. became a regular event and it won a firm place in my subjective London atlas. As a novelist rather than an historian, it is less the detail (and heaven knows there’s enough detail here to satisfy anyone) than the spirit of the place that keeps drawing me back. It is a unique space, a London gem, a step back into the home and mind of a great English architect and inveterate collector of artefacts.

As far as I am concerned, London is a never-ending source of wormholes to the past: to walk this city’s streets is to be part of an historical continuum that in varying degrees fascinates, illuminates, humbles and occasionally disappoints (though, as that great biographer of the capital, Peter Ackroyd, asserts, London always survives). So, in the midst of such riches, why should you divert from your path in order to visit the Sir John Soane’s Museum? In no particular order, here are some of the reasons why I suggest that you should: its perfect situation, on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the iconic yellow drawing room with its delightful views over the square; the astonishing folding Picture Room (Soane’s ingenious solution to running out of space for his paintings was to insert some extra ‘walls’ and put them on hinges); Soane’s collection of Hogarths (The Rake’s Progress and The Election) and his Canalettos (views of Venice); the Crypt crammed with treasures from the ancient world; Soane’s use of glass, of convex mirrors, and his opening up of dark spaces in order to create effects with light; the juxtaposition of the domestic with the astonishing, cluttered legacy of one of the world’s great collectors of artefacts, ancient and modern. The house is such a tardis: so packed with fascinating objects you always leave vowing to come back, yet it is small enough for you to appreciate properly in one visit. Here is a link to the museum’s website which will give you a taste of the delights contained within its walls – although is absolutely no substitute for going there in person:

http://www.soane.org/

Photograph of Lincoln's Inn Fields by Stephen Craven for the Geograph project.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields has to be one of the loveliest green spaces in London. The square is, to use a hackneyed but in this case appropriate term, a small oasis situated between busy Kingsway, Holborn, Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn itself. But you don’t have to be a lawyer to eat your lunch under a giant plane tree and admire the architecture. First developed in the seventeenth century, it used to boast a theatre (demolished in the mid-nineteenth century) and has long been home to the comfortable professional classes, particularly, of course, the legal profession. The pitiless lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn, of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, had his offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the brass plates of law firms still abound. On the south of the square, opposite the Sir John Soane’s Museum, you can see evidence of another gentlemanly profession: the headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons. This fine edifice also incorporates the Hunterian Museum (a museum of surgery) which certainly deserves another post all to itself.

This benign and kindly face belongs to Sir John Soane (1753-1837). Apprenticed to the architect George Dance, he studied architecture at the Royal Academy and won a travelling scholarship that allowed him to spend two years in Italy which engendered his lifelong appetite for collecting all things classical. His commissions included the Bank of England, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Holy Trinity Church at Marylebone. Over the course of his lifetime he acquired and rebuilt three adjacent houses, 12,13 and 14 (in 1792, 1813 and 1823 respectively), and constantly reworked his home and reconceived his displays of artefacts. Before his death he established his home as a museum by Act of Parliament. As Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, he used his displays to teach and test his pupils’ knowledge of classical art and design.

Aside from the extensive collections which Sir John Soane amassed (Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, terracotta and bronze artefacts, reliefs, stucco fragments, sculpture, death masks, paintings, sketch books, etc, etc, etc – pity the poor archivist), the museum gives a wonderful insight into domestic life at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the early nineteenth century. Susan Palmer, of the museum, has written an excellent account of this in her book: The Soanes at Home (a volume to which I have turned in my research and would highly recommend). Drawing on and reproducing original documentation from the museum archives, it is a wonderful source for understanding just how a house was run at this period: the servants, the plumbing, the heating, the cooking, the laundry, mealtimes, the delivery of coal and milk, and so on. (Incidentally, for younger visitors, Fanny, Mrs Soane’s dog, gives a charmingly illustrated account of life at numbers 12 and 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in her book, The Journal of Mrs Soane’s Dog Fanny, by Herself, written by Mirabel Cecil and illustrated by Francesca Martin. Both books are available from the museum.)

Scaffolding currently envelops Sir John Soane’s home and this is because the museum is undertaking a major project – due to be completed in 2014 – which will restore the entire 2nd floor of no. 13. Visitors will be able to view Soane’s private apartments: bedroom, bathroom, oratory, Mrs Soane’s morning room and her husband’s architectural models room. These exciting renovations will cost £7M. £6.5M has already been raised. If anyone would like to help with the remaining £0.5M, follow the link:

http://www.soane.org/opening_up_the_soane/donate_to_outs/

You can visit the museum in the evening, by candlelight, on the first Tuesday of the month, and, for a princely sum, you can also hire the museum for events. I must admit that my ultimate venue for a book launch has long been Sir John Soane’s dining room and library by candlelight. Future publishers kindly take note...