Sorry about the inordinately lengthy break. First of all I was on my annual break in Orkney and since I got back I’ve been busy at work, with a trip to Brussels ( a really nice one-thanks for a truly special evening, Pauline).

My holiday in Orkney was lovely, helped by the fact that I had the best weather I've experienced there for a couple of years while just about everywhere else seemed to be suffering from heavy Bank Holiday rains ( I do sometimes wonder if I'd have responded quite as strongly to the islands if my first visit had been marked by non stop rain!). Watching the sun set into the North Atlantic while singing at the seals in Birsay Bay was a very memorable moment. It was a very good time, though it now feels a very long time ago.

Of course seals don't exactly "sing"- though the thought of them doing four part harmonies on the rocks is an appealing one. The sound they make is more like a high pitched repeated yelping, with modulations which sounds somewhat unearthly when you first encounter it. The intriguing thing is that, at least under certain circumstances, if you make vaguely similar noises back at them they will respond. I don't know why they do this- perhaps they think you're another seal from a different group with a funny accent- and it doesn't always happen but when it does it's rather special. The long sunny evenings made it possible to sit by some of the rock stacks watching sea birds; it was amazing to see one pair of male kittiwakes chasing and duelling with each other over nest sites for over an hour. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be many puffins about; they seem to be having a bad year all down the coast and the only one I saw was at a time of day when it shouldn't have been there (mid-morning, when it should have been out at sea hunting hours before- I did wonder if this one was on a retainer from the Orkney Tourist people....). I did see lots of them a couple of years ago and they're as amusing and appealing in the flesh as they look in photos; they're remarkably unperturbed by a human presence close at hand and just look quizzically at people on the cliffs above their burrows. Watching them landing is a permanent source of amusement as they are not by any means graceful fliers and always seem to land with their eyes closed, braking frantically as they descend before rather thudding into the ground.

I was staying in the north west corner of the Orkney Mainland this year. The Brough of Birsay is a tidal island- you can walk over on a causeway perhaps 50% of the time- with the remains of what was a major Norse era settlement, including a small monastery. Birsay was the centre of the Earldom until the 12th century and the archaeology reflects that- it's not too hard to imagine the site as being a site of power, defended by the water. Interestingly, the most famous artefact associated with the site is much older, one of the most famous Pictish symbol stones which shows three armed men in some kind of procession as well as the typical enigmatic symbols associated with that genre of carving. What makes this interesting is that there's a real puzzle about what happened between the Pictish period and the arrival of the Norse on Orkney. There isn't a single surviving place name in the islands which can be shown to predate the Vikings and DNA research shows that the populations of Orkney and Shetland are vastly more closely related to those of Scandinavia than those in any other part of the British Isles, even those parts of the North of England which are full of Scandinavian derived place names. This appears to suggest an almost complete population change, and there's a lively local debate between those who think the Vikings simply wiped out the previous population and those who suggest that the locals integrated with the newcomers fairly painlessly. Apparent continuity of occupation at Birsay is one of the factors in the debate; which (unless something dramatic turns up in the archaeology, always possible in Orkney) is likely to rumble on inconclusively for some time yet.

I haven’t entirely given up on art exhibitions, though I’m afraid I’ve also been distracted by the European Football Championships. I managed to catch the Pompeo Batoni exhibition at the National Gallery just before it closed. It was an interesting show, though sadly it appeared to be very poorly attended. I suppose it’s a case of “who was he?”. Even though Batoni was probably one of the best known artists in 18^th century Britain and some of his paintings are probably pretty familiar because they’re endlessly recycled on book covers, he isn’t a name to conjure with these days. Batoni worked in Rome; the reason he was so well known in Britain was that he made a lot of his living painting portraits of members of the British elites passing through Rome on the Grand Tour. Indeed having your portrait done by Batoni became almost an obligatory part if the Roman experience (and not just for passing British aristocrats, though the exhibition didn’t pick up on his potraits of Austrian Arch-Dukes and other noble visitors from across Europe).

Batoni didn’t just do portraits- indeed in his own mind the portrait side of his business had a relatively low status.. One of the interesting parts of the exhibition in fact was that it put the full range of his work on display; he did devotional works for religious institutions in Rome (a side of his output hardly ever seen in Britain as it’s far too Counter-Reformation Catholic in spirit ever to have appealed to Protestant tastes), scenes from classical mythology and general purpose allegories (which did sometimes find their way northwards- classical antiquity was acceptable where a Virgin and Child would not have been). These are interesting but just a shade conventional and saccharine in feel- lots of fluttering putti and elegantly drooping young women impersonating virtues.

The portraits are what makes the exhibition interesting. Batoni was an astute businessman- he needed to be as he had twelve children from his two marriages. He dabbled in art dealing and ran cultural evenings in his studio for potential sitters- his second wife was a noted singer and saw to that side of things. He also drove a hard bargain with his clients, insisting on 40% of his fee up front. This gave him a certain reputation for greed, compounded by the fact that he wasn’t always quite as deferential to his clients as they would have liked, calling them back to his studio at times which suited him rather than them to make late alterations to paintings. It was also probably the case that he took on rather more work than he could really handle, especially as (unlike so many of those working in the portrait business in that era) he does not appear to have farmed out most of the work to studio staff and consequently maintained a consistently high quality of output.

Obviously, as a portrait paint of the great and noble he wasn’t in the business of “warts and all” reproductions. Part of his skill lay in making clients look just a little bit better than they did in the flesh. He also had a pretty clear brief most of the time to indicate, whether by placing his subjects in identifiably Roman settings or by juxtaposing them with such items as classical sculpture, that the person in the painting was a cultivated sort of fellow who had been to Rome and absorbed the influences of classical antiquity which were supposed to be found there. Occasionally, when the disparity between the sitter and this brief were too wide to bridge credibly he would take a different tack (the Duke of Gordon, who notoriously found the whole ruins and statues side of Rome a massive bore, was painted returning from the hunt in the countryside round the city). More subtly, however, one senses that at times Batoni might have been very subtly sending up his sitters by taking them absolutely at their own estimation of themselves. Colonel Gordon (a relative of the Duke, visiting Rome at the same time) is shown above in full martial Scottish array, plaid and broadsword and all. He looks more like a barbarian conqueror who’s taken a moment out from pillaging the city than someone come to gain a bit of civilising polish among the ruins of the glorious past. Some of the other portraits in the exhibition displayed this faintly ironic side too. Interestingly Batoni was much less inclined to do this to his (much less frequent) female sitters and he never did it at all to children. Batoni clearly loved children (just as well…..) and dogs- and it shows in his art. One of the most charming paintings in the show depicted a little girl, all rumpled and no doubt the despair of her mother, cuddling a fluffy little dog. The fact that she was a Honourable and the daughter of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who had stopped off in Rome on the way to Turkey scarcely matters. There is a real affection in the depiction which isn’t always evident in Batoni’s work with adults.

I hope I won’t quite be as lazy and slow about keeping up to date again….. I’ll try to put a few Batonis on my Flickr site soon.

Sorry about the even longer gap since my last blog. I’ve been busy in a variety of ways- travelling for work to a very snowy Slovenia and to Brussels, for instance.

I still managed to visit the “other” Royal Academy exhibition of the moment, running in parallel with the Russian one I wrote about last. This covers the art of the 16^th century German painter Lucas Cranach (strictly speaking “Lucas Cranach the Elder” as his son of the same name also went into the family business). It had its moment of controversy too. In the run up to the show’s opening, London Underground decided that the advertising posters, which were based on the painting of Venus shown above, infringed the company’s decency code and could not be displayed. There was a predictable uproar, much shouting about “censorship”, “prudery” and “making London a laughing stock” and in the end the Underground backed down. The case raises some interesting issues, though. There’s no doubt in my mind that the painting is in breach of the rules in question and that a modern advertiser who tried to use a photograph of a living model posed in an identical manner would see the advertisement rejected out of hand- and at least some (though not all) of those who rose up in outrage at the ban on Cranach would be entirely in favour of the rejection. If one has to have rules regulating the content of advertising on public decency grounds (whether one really does is a separate argument) then why exactly should Cranach be exempt from them. Because he’s a certified “great artist”? The same could be said of some modern photographers. Because he’s been dead for some 450 years? In that case, when does the “statute of limitations” run from? Because his nudes aren’t really that erotic to a modern eye? There may be more mileage in that argument, but it’s a rather subjective one- just because I don’t find his nudes much of a turn on doesn’t mean nobody out there would do so- and ultimately rather undercuts the status of historic art in the modern world. If it’s so safe and tame is it really worth wasting time over? Because great art is somehow above considerations of decency? This sounds uncomfortably like the special pleading of Victorian era connoisseurs justifying their collections of pornography because the pieces were created a long time ago by famous artists. I don’t pretend to have a good answer and I snorted as loudly as anyone when I first read about the Underground ban but the more I’ve thought about the issue the murkier it becomes.

As far as the exhibition itself is concerned one has a sense of a quart being squeezed into a pint pot. Cranach was incredibly productive and lived to a ripe old age (indeed his sheer productivity led to him being for many years somewhat under-valued by comparison with contemporaries like Durer or Holbein). He painted in a wide variety of genres. This superabundant production is somewhat squeezed into the RA’s “secondary” exhibition space. Evidently it’s the sequel to an exhibition in Frankfurt which, judging from the catalogue, was substantially larger and it feels cramped in its current home.

Leaving aside the nudes (and the modern annexation of his painting of Adam and Eve to provide the opening sequence for “Desperate Housewives”) Cranach is probably primarily thought of as the “painter of the Reformation”. He knew Martin Luther personally and painted him several times (the most famous Luther portrait, a double one with his wife Katherina von Brora, isn’t in the show but a couple of lesser know ones are, including a somewhat strange image of a bearded Luther dating from the period when he was supposedly living in hiding under the alias “Junker Georg”). He was court painter to John Frederick of Saxony, Luther’s earliest and strongest supporter amongst the ruling houses of Germany. He was mayor of Wittenburg several times when that town was the Protestant Rome. Most importantly, perhaps, his engravings illustrated the top of the range versions of Luther’s German Bible and therefore formed part of the mental landscape of several generations of the Protestant elites.

While this aspect isn’t exactly ignored in the exhibition, it is somewhat de-emphasised (his engraved work, for instance, gets very little coverage in the show). The argument advanced is that Cranach (not his original name; he was, appropriately enough, originally called “Maler”- “Painter”- and adopted the name of his place of birth) was basically a professional artist who would do a job for anybody. Clearly there is some truth in that view. Cranach was a well established artist well before Luther got into the business of nailing theological position papers to church doors. He had created plenty of thoroughly Catholic images in his own version of the rather expressionistic South German style of the 1500’s. These included rather theatrical saintly martyrdoms set in spiky “Gothic” landscapes and a depiction of the thoroughly unscriptural Holy Kindred (which also featured members of the Saxon dynasty as husbands of the Virgin Mary’s half sisters with the Emperor Maximilian inserted as one of St Anne’s three husbands- allegiance to the Habsburg ruler was important to the Saxons at the time it was painted). Even once the upheavals of the Reformation were in train, he was quite willing to take portrait or other commissions from both sides of the incipient confessional divide. After all, he had a big workshop to keep employed- he was one of the largest single employers in Wittenburg by the time of his death and all these apprentices and journeymen had to be kept active, not to mention the models (the same women reappear in several paintings, often wearing what was clearly the Cranach workshop’s property high fashion frock). It probably helped that confessional boundaries remained fuzzy for many years, which helped to sustain the market for images of saints and the Virgin Mary as even Lutheran parishes took years to work out whether they were allowed to have paintings of saints or not.. Even if the religious markets became increasingly segmented and parish committees or priests in strongly Catholic regions became less and less inclined to put business the way of heretics, there was always the “secular” market for nudes and paintings referring to classical mythology (often the same thing) which transcended the confessional divide.

I’m not sure however that it’s entirely correct to dismiss Cranach’s Lutheranism quite so easily, even if turning him into a kind of proto-ecumenical figure (albeit driven as much by the profit motive as theological conviction) may make him more sympathetic to modern eyes. Certainly his alignment with the Saxon ruling house was very strong- he went into exile with his employer John Frederick when the latter was deposed for a few years after the Lutheran Princes were defeated by the Emperor Charles and the circumstances of the exile suggest a degree of personal commitment to both the man and his religious cause. There appears to have been a rather touching relationship between the ruler, whom Cranach first painted as a rather worried looking six year old, and his much older court artist.

Cranach was a brilliant portrait painter- to my eye his portraits are his finest works and I wish there were rather more in the exhibition. He had an ability to convey a sense of a real person behind the mask of power- and, unlike so many early modern portraitists, he could paint children as children, not as little adults, even if these children are already having to play an adult rule. The Electors and Dukes and Counts of his paintings may have a disconcerting amount of facial hair and dress in an impossibly elaborate style but they are still individuals. One focuses all the more on them because they’re almost always painted against an entirely neutral background without any external props to underline their status (one of the few exceptions, intriguingly, is the arch anti-Lutheran Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg). Of course they’re also politicians- one can imagine them giving press conferences to explain their position on the latest crisis in the Empire or the church- but, like modern politicians, their eyes or their gestures sometimes give hints that not everything in their public person is quite what it seems. Not all the portraits are of members of the social elite- Luther’s mother and father are also in the show, painted with the same detail as any prince and giving an equally strong sense of personality. It’s not surprising that, when the German Expressionists rediscovered Cranach in the early years of the 20^th century his portraiture bulked large in that rediscovery. His nudes, important though they are in art history terms, didn’t have anything like the same long term impact. Maybe London Underground should have justified their decision in those terms…….

I’ll try to post material from the exhibition on Flickr in the coming week.

Back after another break….. I’m afraid I just haven’t felt very inspired to write in the past month or so- I go through these phases from time to time, usually associated with just how much time I’m spending hunched over a keyboard at work.

I’ve finally been shaken out of my winter torpor by the latest Royal Academy blockbuster. It’s entitled simply “From Russia”- I assume the implicit reference to a certain James Bond film is quite deliberate. Indeed it looked as if it might be all too apposite a few weeks ago when there was a very real likelihood that the show would fall victim to the latest round in the Cold War between the UK and Putin’s Russia. The Russian authorities suddenly decided that there was a risk of litigation surrounding the ownership of the art on display and said they wouldn’t let it leave Russia. In truth, most of the art is, to put it bluntly, stolen property which was seized from its original owners by the Bolshevik authorities after the Russian Revolution and handed over to a variety of state owned galleries. Much of it then disappeared into the vaults during the Stalin era when modernist art was viewed as “formalist” and anti-Soviet and remained there for decades (unlike Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union didn’t try to make money out of this “decadent” art by seeking to sell it abroad), in many cases only seeing the light of day again in the 1990’s.

There are direct descendants of the original owners out there who are still trying to get some compensation for their ancestors’ losses, so the possibility of legal action in the UK courts was not a complete fantasy, though clearly the whole affair was something of a try-on by the Russian authorities, who sought (and obtained) a formal UK Government guarantee that nobody would be able to make claims in the British courts concerning the art in the show. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. Part of me says that there isn’t a major art or museum collection in the world which doesn’t contain items whose provenance and legal ownership wouldn’t stand up to too much close scrutiny and that the culture of litigation over allegedly confiscated art which has developed in the past twenty years or so has increasingly become a form of legal extortion driven by lawyers rather than genuine claimants. The other part of me simply imagines the massive outcry there would have been had a similar blanket guarantee been granted in respect of, say, a show involving German and Austrian galleries lending early 20^th century art and can’t shake loose from the thought that there are double standards at work here even though there have been some low key criticisms of the UK Government’s decision in the broadsheet press.

The controversy certainly hasn’t done attendance numbers any harm- the galleries were packed when I went to the show and I’m going to have to go back (possibly more than once) to get a real sense of what’s there. The core of the exhibition is formed by works collected or commissioned by the aforementioned small number of enthusiasts for modern art in pre-Revolutionary Russia, in particular Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin. These were interesting figures; both very rich (obviously) but merchants (traders in things like textiles and sugar) rather than traditional aristocrats. In other words, they were outsiders- something reinforced by their religious background (both came from Old Believer families). The very fact that such people existed and could have such a visible social role- Shchukin even opened his house to the public as an art gallery- is an interesting indication of just how the rigidities of Russian society were beginning to break up in the years before 1917.

While Shchukin and Morozov were buying up Cezannes and early Picassos and commissioning massive canvasses from Matisse (the painting at the top of this blog was created by Matisse for Shchukin’s house as part of a matched pair symbolising music and dance), they were not the only people creating links between the artistic avant garde in Paris and its Russian counterpart. At a slightly earlier period, Russian art had been influenced by Impressionism and the so-called Wanderers group broke away from the St Petersburg Academy to paint out in the Russian countryside. In fact the Impressionists they probably knew best were pretty second division figures like Carolus-Duran or Daubigny and-ironically- their work was to be annexed as a precursor of Stalin era Socialist Realism but the landscapes of men like Levitan do present an appealing view of a fast changing Russia (onion domes and steamships side by side). Set beside this, though, was a fascination for the Russian past, often viewed in religious terms in a way which would have puzzled the average Impressionist.

The most important intermediary figure between Russia and the West (particularly France) in this era was, however, Sergei Diaghilev. In a sense this doesn’t come as much of a surprise- his “Ballets Russes” were a massive sensation when they played Paris and introduced audiences there to the music of Stavinsky and the dance of Nijinsky. Diaghilev’s impact was even wider, though. His dance productions employed a whole series of Russian avant garde artists to create scenery and costumes (notably Leon Bakst, whose wonderful portrait of Diaghilev, improbably flanked by his elderly nanny, hangs in the show), thereby giving them publicity and contacts outside Russia which some would rely on in post-Revolutionary exile. He sponsored a series of art magazines and reviews which offered a forum to artists in Russia and beyond. His activities cross-fertilised the Paris and Russian art worlds in interesting ways which went beyond the theatres where his dance troop appeared.

The final section of the exhibition is devoted to the Russian avant garde. I blogged about the linkages between Italian Futurism and its Russian counterpart some time ago; this exhibition brings the Franco-Russian linkages into closer focus. Evidently the received term for the art produced in Russia under these Franco-Italian influences is Cubo-Futurism (I don’t think that’s a contemporary term- Russian artists claimed to be Constructivists or Suprematists or Rayonists- but it’s not a bad one for the style). The relationship between French and Russian art could be ambivalent at times (some of the Russian art on show clearly responds to French influences by sending them up rather than adopting them wholesale). As I noted before, there are in any event striking differences between the Russian approach and those of western artists despite shared interests in decomposing objects to give a sense of looking at them from different angles or viewing them in movement. Russian artists were far more interested in drawing on traditional folk arts and even on traditions of church icon painting than their western counterparts- some even undertook commissions for religious institutions at a time when very few western avant garde artists would have been seen dead in a church). In some cases the folk art is a bit of a fraud- modern artists began looking there for inspiration just when the masses were dumping it for modern forms of entertainment and not many of the artists had genuine roots in the peasant villages where folk art was still a living tradition. Nevertheless there is a definite nationalist tonality underlying much of this art- perhaps underscored by a range of paintings which subtly favours the Russian side of the show (some of the most famous French items from the Morozov and Shchukin collections haven’t been lent, with lesser works coming in their place)

There are some lovely things here, though, from Larionov’s and Goncharova’s pseudo-primitive portraits though Chagall’s surreal fantasies from Jewish life to Naum Altman’s gorgeous portrait of the poet Anna Akhmatova. The show does however slightly fizzle out. It contains Malevich’s famous Black Square, which could be seen as a statement of the final death of figurative art (though when this was first displayed it was hung in a context which echoed where the family icons would have been hung in a Russian home- again the subtle reference to an Eternal Russia of folk/religious art) and finishes with a model of Tatlin’s proposed headquarters building for the Third International (a kind of deconstructed Eiffel Tower on steroids which would have dominated the Moscow or St Petersburg skyline has it even been built- the fact that there was no consensus on where it would go shows how much of a pipedream it was).

The political link is of course appropriate- the artistic culture which this exhibition documents was ultimately destroyed by politics. The great collectors saw their collections expropriated. Some of the artists headed westwards, to very varied fates (Kandinsky and Chagall ultimately did pretty well, Goncharova ended up distinctly marginalised). Those who remained in the Soviet Union were ultimately dependent on state favour and patronage to work, and that dried up as Stalin tightened his grip on power. Many came to untimely ends in the Gulag, which has posthumously cast them in the role of noble victims of a philistine state. Whether that is entirely justified is another issue; I don’t think any of the avant garde who remained in Russia ever made much of a fuss when their former benefactors were hounded by the new regime and they were quite happy to work for and glorify what was from the outset a thoroughly repressive system. Had Stalin favoured Cubo-Futurism I’m sure many of those who painted in that style would have been only too happy to collaborate with the regime in every way, including denouncing artistic rivals to the NKVD.

It’s a fascinating show but it’s hard to avoid a degree of ambivalence when visiting it, as well as a sense of regret for a moment when the future for Russia looked promising but history took another turn. Modern Russian billionaires are again pouring money into art patronage (almost exclusively Russian this time- nationalism rules); it will be interesting to see if anything of lasting value emerges.

I’ll be putting some of my favourites on Flickr in the next day or two

Hope you all had a lovely Christmas and a great start to the year. I found the former hard work- family duties in Scotland are never much fun- but the latter much more pleasurable.

I even managed to get some culture in for the season by going to the National Gallery’s current exhibition “Siena; Art for a City”. As those who’ve followed my blog over time will know, Siena is one of my all time favourite places so this was an exhibition I had been looking forward to. It is however an exhibition with an agenda and I’m not sure it entirely works.

The agenda, articulated by its chief curator Luke Symons, is on one level simple- Siena had a Renaissance and the art which was created in that period has been seriously under-rated. It is certainly true that the period 1450-1530 tends to be seen as something of an appendix to the story of Sienese art in which Siena became a backwater and its art fossilised. Admittedly not everybody has been so negative- back in the 19^th century John Ruskin proclaimed that Sienese art was worth fifty times its Florentine counterpart and his views were echoed by some of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Indeed there have always been critics who counterposed “spiritual” Siena against “worldly” Florence and preferred the former (though even they were probably referring rather more to the 14^th century than the 15^th). Generally however the history of Italian art from the 13^th to the mid 16^th century is still viewed very much through the Florentine-centred blinkers of Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists”. Vasari, court painter to the regime of Grand Duke Cosimo de Medici which crushed the last Sienese Republic and annexed its territories to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, had axes to grind. Even in his own lifetime he faced a storm of criticism for his glorification of all things Florentine and downgrading of all other art centres in Italy- indeed he was forced to bring out a rewrite which gave Venetian art better coverage. Venice, however, was the publishing capital of Italy in the 1550’s and well placed to look after its interests- Siena wasn’t so lucky. Its artistic production in the second half of the 15^th century has generally been seen as old fashioned, an uninspired recycling of a dated traditional visual language (lots of gilding and very frontal and static images, uninterested in perspective or the growing fascination for the art of classical antiquity which marked developments in Florence and elsewhere).

There are plausible reasons why Sienese art might have gone up a cul-de-sac. The city was very hard hit by the Black Death in 1348- its cityscape is still marked by the massive cathedral whose construction had to be abandoned after the plague, leaving huge walls leading nowhere. Several of the great artists of the 14^th century- most notably the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini- appear to have died then, disrupting workshop traditions. Economically and politically it was badly affected by the downturn which followed, with a series of increasingly fragile regimes presiding over a republic ravaged by raiding mercenary companies and under growing pressure from its neighbours. For all practical purposes Siena went broke in the late 1390’s and sold itself to the Duke of Milan.

Even though it regained independence a few years later, it remained an edgy, fragile place, a small player in an Italy increasingly dominated by a limited number of large states and a republic in a world of self-made autocrats. King Alfonso V of Naples, who meddled in Sienese politics himself, memorably compared the Sienese to the inhabitants of the middle floors of a shaky building, pissed on by those above and smoked out by the fires of those below them. It was governed by a shaky coalition drawn from the supporters of three of the successive 14^th century regimes which had mutated into what were known as “monte”- a kind of cross between a political party and a Mafia family. This settlement excluded both the “old” nobility and another of the “monte” and was itself marked by regular purges and coups. Perhaps predictably, the more fragile the republic became, the more insistent the official stress on republican virtue articulated in the art its rulers commissioned. There was money around, of course, but much of it was in the hands of those excluded from power, like the Piccolomini family which provided the Sienese Pope Pius II (whose election was nevertheless celebrated with great splendour by a commune which barred his family from membership of its councils). This was not necessarily a congenial environment for artistic innovation, particularly when the most visible artistic innovation locally was being done up the road in Florence since there was a violent anti-Florentine sentiment among the Sienese population based on years of war between the cities (this isn’t entirely dead yet- one of the “ultra” groups of hard core supporters of the Sienese football team calls itself “1260” in memory of the Sienese victory over Florence at Montaperti in that year). “It’s Florentine looking” would not have been a sales point in Siena……

The exhibition makes the best case possible for Sienese art in this difficult era. The admitted conservatism of most public commissions is viewed not as decadence but a conscious affirmation of civic identity in hard times, bolstered by the positive value attached to certain iconic pieces of art by such venerated figures at St Bernardino of Siena, the hugely admired Franciscan preacher of the 1430’s and 40’s. In any case, the conservative tradition (which, interestingly, is taken as looking back to the Lorenzettis and Martini rather than the more recent figure of Sassetta, who still remains curiously undervalued in this account), was not monolithic and was open to adaptation in response to stimuli like the short residence of the great Florentine sculptor Donatello in the city. And things did change; artistic innovation was more acceptable if filtered via the papal court in Rome, where many of those excluded from the game of Sienese politics by being born into the wrong families resided and from where they imported artists when creating projects in their city of origin.

It’s a valiant efforts but it doesn’t quite convince. What Symons has come up with, it seems to me, is a more socially and politically sophisticated version of a familiar tale. Even his account admits that painters in the Sienese tradition like Sano di Pietro went on too long and were responsible for workshop production of gilded Madonnas on an almost industrial scale, most of which lacked any real artistic merit. Some artists like Matteo di Giovanni were able to produce works which looked both backwards and forwards like the massive Asciano altarpiece illustrated above, complete with the heavenly orchestra in full cry. It’s hard to avoid the feeling, though, that the tradition was getting very played out and the modest impact of Donatello (who never completed the work for the cathedral which he had been imported to undertake by a somewhat less anti-Florentine regime than usual ) was pretty marginal. Although Sienese artists did get commissions outside their city, they seem to have been less mobile than masters elsewhere, protected by even more stringent guild regulations blocking foreigners from work in the city than were usual elsewhere in Italy. They were therefore very vulnerable to changes in official policy.

It’s also revealing that a lot of the most interesting work on show was nevertheless produced by those “foreigners” who managed to slip though the loopholes in the guild ordinances, for instance by being employed by those “inside outsiders” like the Piccolomini and their Spanocchi associates. The most intriguing of these painters is simply known as the Griselda Master (from his depiction of the Story of Griselda on a series of panels, possibly part of the case in which a bride transported her trousseau- though the rather ghastly story of Griselda seems an uncomfortable image for both parties to a wedding even in a society which regarded the duty of wifely obedience as absolute). His name is unknown and it’s not certain where he came from- possibly from further south in Italy. His spiky and almost caricatural style certainly picks up the obligatory classical references in architecture but employs them in idiosyncratic ways.

Others came in when the whole system of 15^th century Siena was destroyed by another coup which ultimately broke the power of the “monte” and established a regime headed by Pandolfo Petrucci. This retained a republican façade but under it power was shared out within a closed oligarchy among those closest to the new boss. Petrucci had grown up in exile and effectively overturned the guild regulations. His artistic policy was quite consciously anti-traditional, displacing venerated images from the 13^th century from the cathedral in favour of his own commissions. He appears to have consciously favoured “foreign” artists but it rapidly became clear that given a free choice the Sienese elites were only too willing to junk local traditions as well. Deprived of elite support as articulated through official and quasi-official commissions local production seems to have withered and there must have been a lot of unemployed Madonna gilders in Siena by 1500. Revealingly the exhibition’s later stages focus entirely on the “court” art produced for Petrucci and his hangers on by imported masters like Pinturicchio.. Some of this is very fine indeed, but it rather contradicts the agenda of the show in its thoroughly un-Sienese nature.

The final room makes a big pitch on behalf of Beccafumi (ironically the one Sienese artist of the era valued by Vasari and a political weathercock who painted for the Petrucci regime and then for the revived Republic which followed its overthrow). I’m afraid it just doesn’t work for me; his hazy proto-mannerism leaves me cold. I’d rather have a gilded Madonna.

I’ll be putting some of the art from the show on my Flickr site in the next day or so- even a couple of Beccafumis to show I’m not biased.