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 decided to read some poetry by Claire Crowther, a name I bookmarked and have been meaning to follow up for far too long.  

Anyway, I arrived at this poem which appeared with five others on Peter Philpott's long-dormant GreatWorks site (which in case you don't know is 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.




*

Altar of the hand: A literal translation of ikegobo, a type of 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 probably non-authoritative sources -- the hand relates to actual achievements, wealth and prosperity (in contrast to inner personality, represented by the head). 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. 

green rivulets: For such a large city Birmingham is notable for the smallness of its rivers (the Tame, Rea and Cole).

where trams rode: Birmingham's tram system began to decline from the 1930s and ceased altogether in 1953. (It began again on a small scale in 1999, and has since expanded; it's called the West Midlands Metro.)

village making chocolate: Bournville, originally a model village, now a residential area of SW 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 covered in blusher, even her knees: 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 (a cycle of scenes produced for the convent of the Black Sisters in Bruges, though now dispersed to museums elsewhere). 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 gesture 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.)

*

Claire Crowther's poem covers a lot of ground in small compass, and it doesn't waste words. A poem to inhabit rather than interpret, maybe. 

My abiding impression is of the protagonist essaying a "light touch", and coming away with paint on her fingers. Ignore that, concentrate on this, the protagonist instructs herself, but it turns out that things aren't so easily partitioned, they are characterized by what printers call bleed. An artwork is like a face, it both conceals and reveals, and there can be a shock of communication. You hover between admiration, cool amusement, alienation, appraisal, but sometimes the artwork breaks through, and then you're confronted with the personal preoccupations you intended to leave with your backpack. 

The unidentified sitters are important to the poem. The artwork can be transported away from them, it usually will be, but it can't wholly leave them behind, no matter how much distance and centuries and sumptuous presentation seem to assure its transcendence. 

The poem keeps tripping over intrusions, oppressions, insecurities, worries... It's anxiously and perhaps distractedly searching, but not for "a healthy grave". Life won't be kept out. As an artwork itself, it lets us see its smudgy hands.



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Saturday, May 17, 2008

my haul -2

[The second of three parts. The first one was here.]

The Literature of the Highlands, by Magnus Maclean (new and extended edn, 1925). "After receiving a fair classical education, and while yet a student, this wayward fondling of the Muse fell in love with a Glen Etive damsel, Jane Macdonald of Dalness, or Sine bheag nam brogan buidhe (Little Jean with the yellow shoes), as she was locally called, and this winsome maid he married..." (this is about Alexander Macdonald). Not much of whatever may be interesting in the subject (Scots Gaelic poetry, 18th-19th century) is still interesting when it's been translated into sweet Victorian parlour-lyric. Besides, there's a filtering process at work so we hear nothing of what would shock us in Alexander Macdonald's "Praise of Morag" ("His amorous language, indeed, needs frequent asterisks at the hands of publishers and translators"), nor of his 1735 pamphlet with the promising title "An Essay upon Improving and Adding to the Strength of Great Britain and Ireland by Fornication". The terms of critical language create their own story, in this case entirely distinct from the story I think I want to hear. "'William Ross,' says Pattison, 'is a graceful poet, perhaps the most polished of any of the Highland minstrels; although he is certainly inferior to more than one of them in point of strength and energy. He is tender and easy and plaintive.' He delighted in pastoral poetry, of which he seized the true and genuine spirit, and in his descriptions of nature is very sweet and pretty. His 'Praise of the Highland Maid' is a masterpiece of its kind..."

Tres pasos en falso, by E. Jarnés Bergua (1970) - detective novel for students of Basic Spanish; very fascinating. I spent about half my time speculating about the intended audience, apparently good enough at Spanish to negotiate the astoundingly ingenious reasoning of the investigator, yet sufficiently unacquainted with Spanish life to benefit from laborious explanations of eg. cigarettes, nerves, facts, saying goodbye, and even smiling (to laugh without noise). It was only just now that the penny dropped, that the book being designed for readers from any country cannot translate any of its unknown words but only indicate the meaning by using Basic Spanish itself. The other half of my time was spent admiring the darkly intricate story and the bizarre perspectives of the illustrations - e.g. of falling masonry as seen from overhead. Reading a story in another language massively intensifies its effect; what would be beneath notice in English disturbed my dreams for several nights with an impression of desolate sadness.

The Works of Sir George Etherege, vol. 1 - containing a lively account of the author's scandalous life (most of it comes after his brief dalliance with the theatre), and also The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub (1664), - the first real Restoration Comedy, though still partly intermixed with heroick love in couplets. It's difficult to read it without thinking of the brilliant new genre that would solidify immediately afterwards and as a direct result of this play (but from which such transitional vestiges as e.g. a dejected lover falling on his sword would be utterly sloughed off).

Land in Bloom, by V. Safonov. This won the Stalin Prize in 1949. Pentti Saarikoski (I am still reading Saarikoski in the midst of all this), struggling with Le breton sans peine, reflected: "Lenin's method of language study was brutal: he read his way through a dictionary and a grammar book, then proceeded to construct sentences. He was equally impatient in his construction of the Soviet state. Never would he have put up with this idea of proceeding in daily twenty-minute increments. Everything had to be done now, not on the fifteenth." Safonov's Lysenko is also like this. "Perhaps it was only his perseverance, his extraordinary thirst for knowledge and his undeviating pursuit of the road he had chosen that distinguished him from the rest. And one other very characteristic feature: for him, knowledge was something that was immediately put into practice... The fact that, having arrived in Ganja in the autumn, he did not wait until the spring to commence work on his legumes, already revealed the 'Lysenko style'." The result was a demolition of the fallacious "laws" of the spluttering Morganist Mendelists, representatives of the science of the West in its terminal decline. For, as Michurin said: "We cannot wait for favours from Nature: we must wrest them from her." Johann Eichfeld, interviewed by Safonov, explained: "One must not mark time in science. Not on anything, not on any theory - like the theory of intraspecific struggle. Ossification means death for the researcher." He held a book in his hand, "one that he, evidently, was constantly consulting, for its margins were heavily annotated and numerous passages were underscored... He put on his spectacles and read the following: 'Content is impossible without form, but the point is that a given form, since it lags behind its content, never fully corresponds to this content; and so the new content is obliged to clothe itself for a time in the old form, and this causes a conflict between them.' These words, the utterance of a genius, sum up the dialectics of the development of the science that casts aside the old, that seeks the new, and pushes ever forward. They are the words of Stalin..." (Robert M. Young shared my fascination .... )

Soil Biotechnology, by J. M. Lynch (1983). This does not, for the most part, mean genetic engineering (then a technology in its infancy) - it means, more generally, "manipulation of soil micro-organisms and their metabolic processes to optimize plant productivity". In that sense cultivation, straw mulching and burning, fertilizers and pesticides are also biotechnology. The two irritants of the proponents of a "sound scientific basis" are snake-oil salesmen selling miracle preparations and emotive, inaccurate, environmentalists. But the author is reasonably fair: "it is interesting that organic farmers using composts as a basis for their system seldom encounter major pathogen problems... Organic systems include the composting of plants and animal wastes, the science of which is generally poorly understood." More generally an adequate grasp of the entire ecology of what one is manipulating seems not to have been attained: the science has tended to be funded where significant money is at stake, i.e. to treat specific problems of current conventional methods, a kind of patching-up. Facts thus drift in a void, but some of the facts in the book catch my eye, e.g.: "Most plants form non-pathogenic associations between their roots and fungi (mycorrhiza): the sedges, crucifers, some chenopodiaceae (e.g. sugar-beet) and certain aquatics are the exceptions".

Rubens, by Kristin Lohse Belkin (Phaidon, 1998), who writes persuasively of the linked themes of peace and women in his later allegories. But basically, this is the kind of art book you get for the illustrations; a large and excellent selection, though of course there's no shortage of material - it doesn't show e.g. the National Gallery Judgement of Paris. When I want to read about Rubens - or Van Eyck, Rembrandt, or Cuyp, - I'll always drift back to Eugène Fromentin, but it's even better to read him with this book open at e.g. the Antwerp altarpieces. The only time I ever wept in an art gallery was in front of the Chateau de Steen landscape, much to my own surprise. Hysteria, I thought as I hid my face. Must be a bit over-wrought. Nothing to do with the stupid painting. Which to a large extent was true, but somehow Rubens has happened to punctuate my life at important moments. His paintings, therefore, become portals to an inrush of memory. What do these private associations have to do with the character of an art? Nothing worth public discussion - ?

Diplomat, by Gunnar Hagglof. Memoirs of distinguished service as a Swedish Envoy, including during the second World War. This golden era of diplomacy depended on an upper-class cultivation of non-specialist hunches, in turn on the conception of national types - "I have never found it rewarding to try to define the 'character' of a nation," Hagglof remarks, but his zeitgeist was too strong for him, so he spent the next couple of pages doing exactly that about Germany. The book slips down easily - Hagglof, of course, knew "everyone" - the usual anecdotes of Goering, Roosevelt, Gide, Eliot... the raison d'être of memoirs is to lay bare what was confidential at the time, but something makes this less than arresting - a feeling that the author's temperament remains innately diplomatic...

Our Lady of the Sewers: And other Adventures in Deep Spain, by Paul Richardson, 1998. Of all the books in my pile of treasures, this was the one that, before opening it, afflicted me with a feeling that it didn't fit; it looked like the kind of book that sells to casual passers-by and keeps the book trade alive. The author, columnist for Harpers, the Sunday Times, etc seems to meet in Spain a sort of analogue of his own media conceptions; searching for "Deep Spain", the disappearing Spain that still resists homogenization, he keeps finding media events. For authenticity is itself an imaginative projection of media culture (this is Baudrillard's hyperrealism in one of the senses I've learnt to give it) - inexplicable search for a lost paradise. (This reminds me that Richardson speaks of "shiny happy po-mo Barcelona" - in contrast to Vigo, "rough-edged Atlantic port city,... rusty, musty, sad...") - This is bookmaking, rich with facts, not because anyone will ever seek them here, but because facts go into the mix. Richardson uses words like "unfazed", "downside" and probably "into the mix" - perhaps I have a snobbish problem with finding these chatty contemporary Islington Barcelona words in my books? - Still, I learnt a few things. "The downside of whitewashing is that it leaves your hands feeling like dried-up bits of leather, But for this, too, deep Spain has a solution. A leaf of the aloe cactus, which grows wild all over the south, is broken and the jelly inside is smeared on the skin, for near-instant healing.... The dog barked and bared its teeth at her... she reached inside her dress and discreetly rubbed her right hand under her left arm, holding out this hand for the dog to sniff. Instant recognition, instant respect..." To be honest the more I quarrel with the book the more I begin to discover a friendly feeling towards it. Isn't this, too, a diverting concoction of facts?

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