Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  It was not unlike the feeling I used to have coming out of church. As a boy I’d been very religious and my failure to respond to paintings on an emotional level was like my failure to respond to God: one was supposed to love Him but I didn’t know what that meant. Thankfully all that was long since over, but here I was back in the same boat, only now it was Art.

  Reading about Berenson engendered social anxieties too. Increasingly as he grew older the sage held court at his Florentine villa of I Tatti, where he was visited not merely by friends from the world of art but by anybody who was anybody who was passing through. No Nobel Prizewinner was ever turned away.

  All his visitors were constrained seemingly without protest to fall in with his careful self-presentation and inflexible routine; few of them ever demurred, seeming to take this privileged mode of life as some sort of saintly dedication to art, with which, as I see now, it had very little to do.

  That I must have been troubled about Berenson and about art, I realise in retrospect because at the time I wrote something about him. When I first started writing, in the early sixties, most of my stuff came out of being in two minds, the play or the sketch or whatever an attempt to achieve a kind of resolution. So when in 1964 I wrote a parody of an account of a visit to Berenson called Ta Ta I Tatti it came out of being dubious about this social sanctification of art.

  In retrospect I don’t know why I bothered. Re-reading about Berenson for this lecture I found him both intolerable and silly. How can you take seriously someone who had a correspondence with Ernest Hemingway about sex and wrote of himself that ‘He had loved much but copulated little, although with the appreciation one would bring to a fine champagne.’

  Besides being pretentious Berenson could also be a bit of a rogue. For much of his life he was on a retainer from the art dealer Duveen, which meant that some of his attributions were more self-serving than scholarly. He bulks more largely in the history of American museums and galleries than he does here, though he figures in a complicated saga to do with the acquisition of Titian’s La Schiavona, which came to the National Gallery in 1942 and which Berenson originally thought was a copy of a lost Giorgione.

  He was also indirectly involved in the purchase of the group of paintings by Sassetta now in the Sainsbury Wing, which Kenneth Clark bought when he was Director, probably for an inflated sum and again through Duveen, who was also a trustee. Trust, it has to be said, was not Duveen’s strong suit.

  If as a young man I’d had to put into words what my response was to pictures I’d have said I liked paintings that had what I thought of as a glow to them. That is what drew me across a room to a picture and (I say this slightly shamefacedly) made me want to take the picture home. It never came to that, but around this time I did buy one or two early nineteenth-century glass paintings which, whatever their artistic merits, do have, as does all painting on glass, a translucent glow.

  It’s only too easy to demonstrate what I thought of – still think of, I suppose – as this glow. Chosen almost at random there is Bellini’s Agony in the Garden, the glow there coming, I suppose, from the approach of dawn, just as in Giorgione’s Il Tramonto it’s the light of sunset; whereas in this Portrait of a Young Man by Catena it could be thought to be the glow of youth.

  Then there’s the rather cosy glow of Antonello’s St Jerome in his Study. Because its flesh was not supposed to decay the peacock was a symbol of immortality and resurrection. Less well known is the fact that it was supposed to scream at the sight of its own feet, not recognising them as its own – a predicament with which one sympathises more and more as one gets older.

  Technically, particularly with Venetian pictures, the glow is often to do with glazes and the accumulation of glazes which give depth to the painting. Sometimes, too, it has to do with the colour tones being close together but, whatever it is, all I can say is that I know it when I see it, which is of course intellectually not very respectable or communicable. So it was fortunate that around this time, the late sixties, I began to be aware that pictures had another aspect and so began to take an interest in art history.

  Of course I wasn’t alone in this, as it was in the late sixties that the boom in art history really began to take off. The history of the history of art in England in the second half of the twentieth century would make a fascinating study as it would have to take in, be a sidelong look at, all sorts of other developments – the beginning of the colour supplements, for instance, and the expansion of newspapers and illustration, the ungentri-fication of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the notion of the heritage and even, though one winces to say so, the Antiques Roadshow.

  Crucial to the development of art history in this country was the arrival here in the thirties of refugee art historians from Nazi Germany, many of them iconographers. Now Berenson had had little time for iconography, being more taken up with what a painting looked like than with what it might mean. This seems pretty obviously short-sighted as one of the bonuses of iconography, of unpacking the meanings within a picture, is that you are detained longer in front of it; like sleeping policemen, iconography slows you down and you have to dwell on the picture with a particular purpose in mind and then, as a side effect (and side effect is exactly the right word because it’s something that happens out of the corner of the eye), the beauty of the painting, which is hard to confront directly, begins to be unwittingly taken in. As E. M. Forster says, ‘Only what is seen sideways sinks deep.’*

  To find, though, that paintings could be decoded, that they were intellectual as well as aesthetic experiences, was something of a relief because it straight away put them in a familiar and much more English context if only because a lot of iconography, saying who’s who and what’s what in a painting, could be taken as a higher form of that very English preoccupation, gossip.

  Emmanuel de Witte, Adriana van Heusden and Her Daughter at the New Fishmarket in Amsterdam

  Take the portrait of Adriana van Heusden and Her Daughter at the New Fishmarket in Amsterdam by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Emmanuel de Witte. Now it helps to know the gossip about this picture which is that when he painted it de Witte was on his beam ends, and that by an undertaking he’d entered into with his landlord everything he painted was to belong to him in return for board and lodging. And that Adriana van Heusden, who looks pretty formidable even over the squid and skate, was his landlord’s wife.

  Or look at Veronese’s wonderful panorama of The Family of Darius before Alexander. Darius, the King of Persia, had been defeated by Alexander at the battle of Issus and had fled the field, rather caddishly leaving his mother, wife and children to face his conqueror. There’s always been some dispute as to which of the two young men standing right of centre is Alexander and which his friend Hephaestion. And this of course is also the subject of the painting, as Darius’s mother Sysygambis addresses her pleas to the wrong man. Now Plutarch says that Alexander could get quite smelly so it’s been conjectured that the figure on the left in red is more likely to be Alexander because, unlike the figure in black, he’s not in armour; knowing he’s going to be meeting the Darius family and mindful of his problems with personal hygiene, Alexander has had a quick shower and changed. Which is art history, but it’s also gossip.

  Veronese, The Family of Darius before Alexander

  Knowing the saints and their stories is another source of gossip and here I find it hard sometimes to suppress my sense of the ridiculous, though it took me time to realise that appreciating pictures didn’t rule out laughing at them. Saints and their attributes always seem to me to have a droll side to them though some more than others.

  Having struck it lucky once with Jesus, it’s understandable that Mary Magdalene should thereafter never go anywhere without her pot of ointment, so when she’s reading, in the painting by Roger van der Weyden, she has the pot ready just in case there are more unexpected feet to anoint. And approaching the sepulchre in Savvoldo’s painting, once again she is taking no chances, and the pot doesn’t jar
because it’s generally quite discreet.

  San Rocco, the patron saint of the plague, is more difficult to take however well he’s painted because he must always be hitching up his skirt to show you his boil, which is unfortunately placed at the top of his thigh. In the painting by Crivelli which is in the Wallace Collection you half expect him to be wearing suspenders.

  Almost any painting of the martyrdom of St Sebastian hovers between pornography and the ridiculous without it ever being quite a martyrdom as the saint didn’t die from his wounds but was nursed back to health by some holy ladies, only to get himself battered to death in less picturesque circumstances. So the real martyrdom of St Sebastian never gets depicted. Invariably his response to the arrows is quite inadequate, no more than wincing as yet another bolt finds it mark, as if to say, ‘Oh, really. Must you?’

  Then too there’s the mixture of nudity and decorum as in the version attributed to Antonello at Bergamo. His private parts are so neatly packaged they look like an uncooked apple turnover. Scarcely any of which applies to the National Gallery’s Pollaiuolo with the superb archers in the foreground and the spreading landscape behind. Though again I feel it’s the saint who lets it down a bit.

  Perhaps the hardest saint to take seriously is St Peter Martyr. He had had a holy life, beginning when as a seven-year-old child, according to the Golden Legend, he came home from school to find his uncle reeking of heresy and promptly gave him a good talking-to, thereby setting the tone for the rest of his life … in the course of which by laying his hands over his chest he cured a nobleman, who thereupon vomited a worm with two heads and covered with thick hairs. Alien has nothing to teach the Golden Legend.

  St Peter Martyr is seldom represented without an axe buried Excalibur-like in his head, though in fact he wasn’t killed with an axe. While he was being murdered, as in the painting in the Gallery by Bellini, it happened that woodmen were chopping down some trees nearby so the axe somehow went to his head.

  But the fact that the saints can never be separated from the instruments of their martyrdom but must always cart them along to whatever picture they’re appearing in seems to indicate a highly developed degree of social inadequacy. Unless she trundles in her wheel St Catherine thinks nobody will recognise her, as indeed they won’t. And what Peter Martyr is saying is, ‘Hello, everybody. [Pointing to the axe in his head:] Remember me?’

  Of course it’s not only saints who have their attributes, and there are modern equivalents. I once did a film in the north that included a scene with two old men talking on an allotment, one of them played by the old music hall comedian Albert Modley. Albert Modley’s trademark, his attribute, was an outsize cloth cap, and it happened that in the scene we were doing he was supposed to wear a cap, though not of the cosmic proportions of his music-hall one. He was quite happy to discard the large cap for the smaller version, but not so Mrs Modley, who said, ‘Oh no. Albert has to wear his big cap or else the public won’t know who he is.’ I imagine St Lawrence’s mother kicking up a similar fuss if he came on without his barbecue.

  Similarly I once did a disastrous production of one of my plays in America with among the cast the actress Celeste Holm. It was a comedy and, though I say it myself, she had some good lines but she got very little response from the audience. She put this down not to her own inadequacy but to the fact that the audience didn’t know who she was and needed reminding. She had made her debut many years before as Annie in Annie Get Your Gun so she had the inspired notion that it would recall her to the audience’s memory if she came on at her first entrance and fired off a shotgun. It didn’t, nor did it endear her to the rest of the cast, and since the play was set in a suburban drawing room the gesture was, to say the least, opaque.

  But San Rocco with his boil, Mary Magdalene with her pot of ointment, Albert Modley with his cap, Celeste Holm with her shotgun … they are all attributes.

  Somewhere in the Gallery I’d like there to be a notice saying, ‘You don’t have to like everything.’ When you’re appointed a Trustee here Neil MacGregor takes you round on an introductory tour. Mine was at nine in the morning, when I find it hard to look the milkman in the eye let alone a Titian, but we were passing through the North Wing, I remember, and Neil was about to take me into one of the rooms when I said, ‘Oh, I don’t like Dutch pictures’ – thereby seeming to dismiss Vermeer, De Hooch and indeed Rembrandt. And I saw a look of brief alarm pass over his face, as if to say, ‘Who is this joker we’ve appointed?’

  But of course I didn’t quite mean that. By Dutch paintings I meant (and this will be just as shocking to the curator, Christopher Brown) Dutch landscape and marine paintings. Pictures like Jan van de Cappelle’s A River Scene, for instance, or A Moonlit View by Aert van der Neer. And feeling foolish about it afterwards, I asked myself why I didn’t like them, and realised it was because as a child I’d been given far too many pictures like them to do as jigsaws. So much sky and so many browns: they may be masterpieces, but as jigsaws they are a bugger.

  Besides the Dutch landscapes, which I was exposed to too young, there were other casualties of inept or promiscuous reproduction. I don’t like The Haywain because it featured on a table mat at home. Gainsborough had a narrow escape, too, due to The Blue Boy regularly featuring on old biscuit tins and at one point was, I believe, a brand of toffee.

  Then there was Mrs Siddons, though Gainsborough’s portrait of her was confused in my child’s mind with the lady in the lunette at the start of Gainsborough Films. This was a British company operating in the forties and fifties, and the lady posed as if she were a painting, then, just before the film began, turned and inclined her head graciously to the cinema audience. The fact that American films as often as not began with a lion that roared and British films with a lady who bowed could, I suppose, be thought to signify something about our national vitality, but somehow Gainsborough the painter got the blame for this genteel tastefulness.

  Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews

  It wasn’t until much later when I saw what I think of as the much gawkier (because earlier) Gainsboroughs, particularly Mr and Mrs Andrews, that I changed my opinion. I particularly like the bad temper of

  Mrs Andrews, who even if she doesn’t quite have a drop on her nose certainly looks as if she’d be better off indoors. I like too the recently acquired early Self-portrait of Gainsborough with His Family, done before he got into his full fashionable stride.

  In those unillustrated days just after the war when so much of English life was on hold my mother would take magazines like My Home and Ideal Home, which sometimes included flower prints, and Mam with her yearning for gentility would cut them out, put a frame round them made out of passepartout and hang them above the sideboard, thereby so far as I was concerned knocking another school of painting for six. In the Spanish Still Life exhibition I loved the first couple of rooms, particularly Cotan’s hanging cabbages, but when I got to the flower paintings, thanks to Ideal Home forty years ago, I swept straight through.

  What is hard to recall about growing up in the forties and fifties is that while one did not feel deprived there was a kind of illustrative famine, a rationing of reproduction, particularly in colour, which really only ended in the early sixties. I don’t recall art galleries selling posters, for instance, and the range of postcards was very limited. One of the pleasures of going abroad then – I first went to Italy in 1957 – was to see not merely the pictures in the galleries but the postcards that were on sale there too and which seemed to me, partly because they were so glossy but also because they were bled off, that’s to say they had no margin, the picture taking up the whole card … they seemed truly glamorous. This was Art, it seemed to me, certainly when contrasted with their English counterpart: poorly printed, undetailed and always set within a timid white margin.

  Even today, though reproduction is so much improved, the margins persist and still represent to me drabness, austerity and everything that abroad wasn’t. I believe I differ with the
director on this, who prefers margins and who has, I’m sure, cogent arguments in their favour, but were he fifteen years older he would understand. A postcard with a margin is to me part of a world that includes nylon shirts, custard powder and thick Utility socks. I recoil from it with the same shudder that young people today reserve for flared trousers.

  If one can find an explanation like the jigsaws for one’s dislikes and blind spots, it’s reassuring, makes one feel taste isn’t just an arbitrary business. Of course the greater the artists the more timid one is about voicing one’s opinions. I have to say, for instance, that I don’t much care for the paintings of Leonardo, though I dislike some more than others, with St John the Baptist, from the Ashmolean, particularly unsympathetic. It’s the smile I find hard to take, though I suppose smiles in paintings are quite unusual at this date, but this one’s so knowing it’s practically ‘Won’t you come up and see me sometime?’

  Of course if he or she is too shamefaced to avow an opinion, a writer has a remedy or a resource not available to other people: writers simply displace their uncertainties and put their opinions into the mouths of their characters. When I did this in 1988 in a play about Anthony Blunt, A Question of Attribution, I can see that, like the sketch about Berenson, this too was a flag of distress about art. There were three voices in the play: Blunt’s voice which, not altogether successfully, I tried to make authentic, the voice of Chubb, a fictional officer from MI5 and the third voice that of Her Majesty the Queen … with the policeman and to some extent the Queen bearing the burden of my doubts and uncertainties about art.

  ‘What am I supposed to feel?’ asks the policeman about going into the National Gallery.

  ‘What do you feel?’ asks Blunt.

  ‘Baffled,’ says Chubb, ‘and also knackered’… this last remark very much from the heart.