Saturday, July 25, 2026

the sitters


Ikegobo to the Iyoba (Hand Altar to the Queen Mother). By an unrecorded Edo artist, Benin, c. 1800.




I wanted to read some poetry by Claire Crowther,  just one of the many poets I've always been aware of but have never followed up, and I arrived at this poem which appeared (with five others) on Peter Philpott's
GreatWorks site. (In case you don't know, it's an absolute treasure house.)



ALTAR OF THE HAND


To claim your inheritance:

Birmingham.
Soft shape of black dots.
Ignore its green rivulets where trams rode,
its village making chocolate, the Rotunda.

Concentrate on:

the sitters for Rubens, Tintoretto, Ghisi,
those immigrant paintings.
That lugubrious man in his feathered cap
and peplum. Beccafumi's Venus covered in blusher,
even her knees, the goddess of the hand altar,
thumbs up, stuck in a pattern of palms and fingers.

To become Mistress of the Legend:

See that view of a landscape near Malines,
its blue wings of wood, lake, grey sky?
There is nothing for you in such a healthy grave,
the classical skyline.
Only the sitters, left at home, hold their myth,
St Catherine propped by a wheel,
St Ursula sensing the suburbs as it would be.

Old woman:

Here are your lines, your red eyelids.



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Altar of the hand: A literal translation of ikegobo, an Edo royal artefact. There's one at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham (see the image at the head of this post). At least there is for now; I imagine it might go back to Benin pretty soon.  

Unusually this ikegobo celebrates a woman, or rather a woman's role (the iyoma or queen mother). In Edo religion (this is a hasty impression from unreliable sources) the hand relates to achievements, wealth and prosperity  -- as contrasted with inner psychology. As the poem says, the queen mother is doing a thumbs-up with both hands. 

In a way the Barber Institute itself is a hand altar, endowed by Lady Barber to celebrate the achievements of her late husband, a property developer who made his fortune building the suburbs of Birmingham.  

The poem's other artworks are also in the Barber Institute. 

village making chocolate: Bournville, originally a model village, now a residential area of Birmingham. 

Rotunda: Cylindrical high-rise building in central Birmingham. 


Rubens, A Portrait of a Carmelite Prior. 




Rubens:

Peter Paul Rubens' Portrait of a Carmelite Prior (c. 1616). The sitter has not been identified. 




Tintoretto's Portrait of a Young Man (1554).



Tintoretto:

Tintoretto's Portrait of a Young Man (1554). The sitter has not been identified. 

"That lugubrious man in his feathered cap and peplum" also seems to refer to this painting. (Peplum in modern clothing design = a short or false overskirt at the waist line.)


Giorgio Ghisi's An Allegory of Life (The Dream of Raphael), 1561.




Ghisi:

Giorgio Ghisi's enigmatic engraving An Allegory of Life (it claims to be after Raphael, though scholars doubt this). 

There's more information here:


It's hardly a portrait! Ghisi's "sitter", you'd think, is nothing short of Life itself. 


Venus and Cupid, painting (c. 1519) by Domenico Beccafumi. 



Beccafumi's Venus: Domenico Beccafumi (1486 - 1551) was a Sienese painter. His painting Venus and Cupid (also known as Reclining Nymph, c. 1519) is in the Barber Institute. In the painting Venus and Cupid have rosy cheeks and her knees are a bit red too. This painting was originally a headboard, part of the bedroom decoration for Francesco Petrucci and Caterina Piccolomini, celebrating marriage, fertility and virtuous women. 

[Not to be confused with Beccafumi's later painting Venus and Cupid with Vulcan, which is in the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). Obviously I'm saying this precisely because I did confuse them!]


Rubens' Landscape in Flanders, c. 1635-1640.



landscape near Malines: Peter Paul Rubens' Landscape in Flanders, painted c. 1635-1640. (Malines = Mechelen.)


Bernardo Cavallino's Saint Catherine of Alexandria, late 1640s.




St Catherine propped by a wheel: Bernardo Cavallino's Saint Catherine of Alexandria (late 1640s). 

This is the St Catherine at the Barber Institute.  Cavallino painted another St Catherine, which is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam:



Bernardo Cavallino's Saint Ursula, c. 1650.




St Ursula sensing the suburbs as it would be: Basically I can't find a St Ursula at the Barber Institute. The details in Claire Crowther's poem suggest an intimate interior portrait of the saint, much like Cavallino's Saint Catherine. Well, that was Cavallino's speciality. So my first thought is that the poem is talking about his Saint Ursula, which is at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Maybe it was loaned to the Barber for a while, though I've found no evidence. Anyway, this St Ursula is caught in the very act of sensing something, the suburbs of Cologne maybe, or Birmingham. 

But there's another possibility. After all, the poem doesn't say that the saints themselves are at home, but that the sitters have been "left at home" (in contrast to the "immigrant paintings" that, by one means or another, have fetched up in Birmingham). So perhaps I shouldn't be looking for an interior. 


Christ on the Cross, with a Donor (Bruges, 1480s?)



Here's a painting that is in the Barber Institute, titled Christ on the Cross, with a Donor. It's currently just "circle of Hans Memling", but is sometimes credited to the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula (scenes produced for the convent of the Black Sisters in Bruges, though now dispersed). Well, overlooking the total absence of St Ursula from this particular painting, could the scene behind the two figures be envisaged as a kind of prophetic vision of the leafy suburbs of SW Birmingham and its university? That's my second thought. It doesn't really add up, I know. On the other hand, the poem's "Mistress of the Legend" also seems to point in this direction.


Bernardo Strozzi's The Head of an Old Woman, 1620s.




Old woman: Bernardo Strozzi's The Head of an Old Woman (1620s). The sitter has not been identified. (Given the tenderness of the portrait, some have wondered if it's Strozzi's mother.)

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