Monday 13 March 2017

HIGH ART

The Repentant Magdalene

I popped into the National Gallery a few days ago to buy something in the shop, and thought I would take a look at the special display in Room 1 (on the left just inside the old main entrance). Here they are showing a picture called "The Repentant Magdalene" from the Norton Simon Collection in Pasadena, California. The painting is by an obscure seventeenth century Italian artist called Guido Cagnacci, of whom I had never heard; there are no pictures by him in public collections in UK, nor many in the great galleries of the world. He worked mostly around Rimini (which was no doubt a handsome place before we destroyed it in the Second World War). The room contains this one big picture and a series of information panels, about the artist and the picture.

I went back a second time on Saturday and sat for twenty minutes in front of this picture; it is an astonishing piece of work. In the foreground the repentant Mary Magdalene lies on the floor, with her sister Martha kneeling at her head. lecturing her. Behind, and to the side, two servants bustle out through a door onto a brightly-lit loggia. At the back of the room an angel stands, expelling a demon, who is somersaulting in mid-air. Extremely bright light falls on the two sisters from the upper left. apparently from a window. Martha points towards the source of the light (I think). Martha is dowdily dressed, and is a plain young woman with a big nose, and a scar on her foot from ill-fitting sandals. The Magdalene is pretty, with the customary long red-gold hair. She is also almost naked, with just a thin shift bundled around her waist, and she has been crying. Beside her on the floor are her discarded dress (ultramarine blue, the most expensive pigment), together with a staggering pair of blue and gold shoes, and a heap of jewellery and an open jewellery box. The Magdalene holds a skein of gold chains as though they were a rosary. All this is rendered in almost shocking photo-realism. The background, meanwhile, is handled quite differently, perhaps suggesting a different order of reality. Once you look carefully, there are a number of problems with the physical structure of the setting, which I felt inclined to attribute to this notion of a second order of reality, but it may just be that Cagnacci wasn't that good a painter, and simply messed that bit up (I won't go into the details). But really your eye doesn't worry about all that; you may work out the angel and demon, or personifications of Virtue and Vice (as the Americans seem to prefer) and wonder at the remarkable pose of the demon (which I've never seen painted before) but your eye keeps going back to the two sisters and the incredible still-life on the floor around them. I forgot to mention the jar of ointment, which is behind the Magdalene, by her gorgeous hair (as in wiping Jesus' feet) and which is a glass jar, so Cagnacci can show off his technique: I have no idea how he tells you it is ointment and not water, but he does!

Now there are some sixteenth and seventeenth century versions of this subject which are just an excuse for painting a nude (Titian, for instance) but that's not the case here. The drama in the picture is acute, and there is a profound ambiguity about Cagnacci's handling of the Magdalene and her nudity. She is utterly desirable, with the most gorgeous skin-tone, but she is also deeply vulnerable. Her modesty is cleverly maintained, which given that the artist seems to have been known for titillation is rather impressive. Her pose is vulnerable and defensive, but exposes a huge amount of lovely flesh, and all around are her discarded clothes and jewels, painted with the utmost care and rendered very gorgeously. If the message of the battle between virtue and vice is that asceticism should be the goal, then that's not what comes through here. Cagnacci gives us the message, by his paint, that the good things of creation are indeed good, that truth and beauty have moral value, but that evil can corrupt it all. Go and see this picture! It is a stunner (and free).


Hitler's Favourite    

It's always a problem with Wagner that Hitler liked him so much, and especially that he particularly liked Die Meistersinger. which I went to see on Saturday. This was the first night of a new production at Covent Garden, which I would not normally have touched with a bargepole, but a friend encouraged me, and I'd never seen it live before, so we went (a very poor seat cost as much as a reasonable meal out for two). Helen and I had the Overture as our wedding march, so it has associations, you might say. I cried a bit. It was stunning. Bryn Terfel was great as Hans Sachs, the moral centre of the story, and the rest of the singing was excellent, especially the Welshman who sang Walther. The orchestra were terrific, and the staging clever, without being clever-clever, I was amazed that four and a half hours on stage did not drag at all, and really never felt as if it could be any shorter I had a little giggle at the Mastersingers coming out in Masonic regalia (a fair point). Incidentally, there's not the slightest reason to suppose that Beckmesser is meant to be Jewish (at least not going on the text they were using). You might call him Pharisaical, but that's quite another thing. I really didn't expect to be blown away, as I was. I keep humming the tune. If you can afford a seat, and can actually get one, go; it's worth it.


More Midwives

I caught the last two episodes of this series of Call The Midwife, and cried constantly. A friend said that she admired it because it is a very rare drama that allows the participants to be motivated by faith, and that's absolutely true. I hadn't watched it for ages, partly because it's something Helen and I always watched together (and I used to cry at it then) but I thought I would try again, eighteen months on. They've got to 1962, and seem to be sticking there, because I'm sure the real Sisters didn't stay much later in Poplar than that. Spotted St George's-in-the-East as the exterior for the wedding last night. My one criticism has always been that it wasn't dirty enough, certainly at the start, but it has given an important reminder of just how grim people's lives were in the inner city only fifty or sixty years ago. Those were the sort of stories that inspired me when I was an ordinand; do other people feel their power today?