Courtly Magnificence and Stuffed Pelicans

There can’t have been many art exhibitions (other than those dealing with the work of Damien Hirst…) in which a stuffed pelican was a key exhibit.  The V&A’s recent show on Tudors, Stuarts and the Russian Tsars, however, had one on prominent display.   The bird in question, now some 350 years old, was one of a pair brought to England by Prince Pozorovsky, ambassador from Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov to the newly restored Charles II Stuart as a diplomatic present.  It’s pleasing to think that its descendants can still be found taking food from tourists in St James’ Park….

The V&A show shone the spotlight on one of the more unlikely diplomatic linkages in early modern Europe- that between the Russian Tsars and the monarchs of England, then Britain, in the years between the 1550’s and 1690’s -after which Peter the Great’s assertion of his power and his “westernising” domestic policies put his country’s external relations on a new footing..   It was a relationship which began almost by accident.   In 1553 the English mariner Richard Chancellor, looking for a short cut to China across the top of Asia (the “north east passage”) was forced ashore by ice somewhere near the modern city of Archangelsk.  The locals were mightily impressed by the size of his ships and (probably under some duress) sent him off inland to the court of their ruler, Ivan IV (better known as Ivan the Terrible).   Chancellor made a favourable impression there and, to simplify a rather complex tale, the Chartered Company on whose account Chancellor was sailing ended up with a monopoly on Western trade with Russia- as a result of which it took the name of the Muscovy Company.   Ivan was at war with his western neighbours (primarily Poland and Sweden) and was only too happy to establish trading links with a far away but putatively friendly power which could supply him with modern arms and gunpowder.   Chancellor was responsible for shipping the first Russian embassy to England in 1557 (though they ended up shipwrecked on the Scottish coast they eventually made it to London).

This set the scene for relations between the countries for the next century and a half.   Apart from a sticky period under Ivan’s son Fyodor, these were mostly friendly.  This was helped by the fact that they were basically commercial in nature.  Even if the Muscovy Company soon lost its absolute monopoly over Russia’s western trade links it remained a privileged interlocutor of successive Russian regimes for many years.  Russian and British foreign policy concerns rarely overlapped in the 16^th and 17^th centuries so causes for conflict on that score were minimal.   There were other commonalities.  Both countries sat on the edge of Europe and had complex, often conflicted, relations with their neighbours.   After the very earliest contacts established under Mary Tudor’s Catholic regime, both sat outside the European religious mainstream- England’s idiosyncratic brand of Protestantism with its strong royal role in church affairs was a surprisingly good match for Russia’s status as the only independent Orthodox power of any importance.

In practice most Anglo-Russian diplomacy in this period was funded by the Muscovy Company and responsive to its interests.  This eventually rather irked Ivan who complained to his “sister” Queen Elizabeth about the low social status of the men who were acting as her emissaries to his court.   This was unlikely to cut much ice with the parsimonious Elizabeth, only too happy to run diplomacy with somewhere marginal to her primary concerns on the cheap.   Although the social status of ambassadors on the English side crept up a bit under the Stuarts, relations with Russia remained quasi-privatised.    Individual ambassadors might occasionally play a wider political role. One was instrumental in making peace between Russian and Sweden in 1617 and the Muscovy Company exercised a de facto protectorate over parts of northern Russia during the Time of Troubles between the death of Boris Godunov and the accession of Mikhail Romanov (1605-12).   On the whole, however, the formal relationship between the countries was amiable but distant for the first ninety years.  On a human level exchanges were vastly lop sided; there was no Russian counterpart to the small but well-established permanent English colony in Moscow (some of whose leading lights appear to have very much “gone native”) and Russian visitors to England were rare indeed.

Things changed a bit with the Civil Wars in Britain.  The majority of the Muscovy Company’s directors backed Parliament against King Charles.  A Russian Embassy which turned up in 1645 was warmly welcomed in London but not allowed to cross the lines to visit the King.   Tsar Alexei was not amused.   When news of the execution of King Charles reached Moscow he reacted with horror.  Unlike other European states, Russia shunned all contact with the English Republic and the Cromwellian Protectorate even after the initial shock had passed and became a refuge for the most intransigent Royalist exiles.   The most notorious of these was perhaps General Sir Thomas Dalyell (ancestor of the modern day Labour politician) who vowed never to shave or cut his hair after the kind’s execution.  Presumably he looked a bit less out of place commanding irregular Cossack cavalry in Russia than he did back in Scotland after 1660, where he gained a reputation for extreme brutality in suppressing the illegal open air church services of the religious and political dissidents remembered (somewhat incorrectly) in Scotland as the Covenanters.   

Obviously relations between Britain and Russia resumed after the Restoration (hence the pelicans) but on a rather more “official” basis.  The Muscovy Company’s role was never quite the same either.   Links between the countries remained loose but were conducted on a rather more formal basis.  One has a faint (and quite anachronistic) sense of things marking time until Peter seized control of the Russian state from his sister and encouraging the establishment of permanent embassies on the modern model  (though the St Petersburg Embassy was for many years a place which would-be diplomats tried to avoid being sent to- in modern diplomatic parlance it was a “hardship post” because of the substantial costs which the Ambassador had to meet from his own pocket on order to keep his country’s end up in a very expensive city, as well as the health hazards connected with the prodigious consumption of alcohol in fashion at the Russian court).   It’s an intriguing sidebar to history.   The exhibition, full of beautiful things as it was, didn’t quite map on to it.  

One problem was a basic disparity in material.  The core of the show was a massive (in every sense of the word) collection of English silverware dating from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  The majority of the pieces on show came from the Moscow Kremlin museum.  Not all were gifts from king (or queen) to tsar; Russian ambassadors did shopping in London behalf of their monarchs while English ambassadors and the Muscovy Company might make parallel gifts to the tsar or key members of his court.  The cumulative effect however was pretty overwhelming- and must have been equally if not more staggering when the items were ranked up as a collective assertion of royal power and wealth on grand occasions in the Kremlin (most of them were far too grand ever to have been used for anything as vulgar as serving food or drink).  Perhaps surprisingly given Russia’s own turbulent history, English silverware of this period survives rather better in Russia than in England, where much was melted down for the intrinsic value of the metal during the Civil Wars.   Only present at the V&A in virtual form, but presumably one of the centrepieces of the show when it goes to Moscow, the lavishly decorated processional coach presented to Boris Godunov by an English embassy in 1600 also survives as a remarkable example of early coach building.  

The problem is that (stuffed pelicans apart) there appear to be no equivalent surviving items from the presents which the Russians brought to London to balance things out.  This is perhaps understandable as the evidence suggests that the most valued gifts from Russia were consumable items like furs, gems or hunting birds.  Furs were especially prized, especially rare items like Astrakhan lamb which in the 16^th century was thought to come from a plant called the “vegetable lamb”.  One of Elizabeth’s ambassadors had to go to extreme lengths to conceal items which he had been given as a personal gift from the Tsar from the queen’s claim to pre-emptive rights over such gifts.   This absence of identifiable surviving gifts is compounded by other cultural disparities between the partners.  Secular painting in any form only began to appear in Russia in the second half of the 17^th century so, apart from a couple of small, icon-like, portraits of Tsars Mikhail and Alexei Romanov, there is nothing to compare with the gallery of royal portraits on the English side.   The wonderful portrait of Elizabeth at the very beginning of her reign (see top)- or something derived from it- might just possibly have found its way to Russia if she had shown any interest in taking up Ivan on the proposal of marriage which he sent her in one of his letters (and what a wonderfully improbable match that would have been….) but she turned him down tactfully.   

This disparity of artistic practice also means that, one small depiction currently kept in Hungary apart, there are no images of western embassies being received in Russia.  More surprisingly given that one might have expected a degree of interest in the no doubt exotic emissaries from Russia on the part of London based artists there appear to be no paintings illustrating the ceremonial surrounding the reception of Russian ambassadors there.   The exhibition tried to fill this gap with reference to a series of paintings depicting the pomp and circumstance surrounding the formal reception of a Spanish embassy to Charles II- all very interesting in its own right but somewhat removed from the Russian subject matter of the show (especially as Spanish court dress and etiquette was far closer to that observed in England than Russian practice).   The splendid portrait of Prince Potemkin (a distant relative of the “villages” man) in full Russian finery by Sir Peter Lely below is a rare late example of a Russian ambassador being painted by a London artist and perhaps a sign of future developments with the closer integration of Russian diplomats into the wider work of European diplomacy.

The shortage of “Russian” material led to a slightly blurred focus in the exhibition, which at times seemed unclear whether it was primarily about the Anglo-Russian links or covering a wider “courtly magnificence” agenda.   On the one hand, the choice of portrait paintings (monarchs apart) was very much focused on people with more or less close links to the Muscovy Company, most of whom were London merchants or at most very minor gentry- as a result they were often a bit second division in terms of quality.   Other areas- jewellery and tapestries, for instance- were represented by high quality items with at best tenuous links to the Russian agenda.   This was particularly notable for the early sections.  The Dacre Beasts (below) are fabulous and I really love them (especially the dolphin) but they were made decades before Chancellor set sail for the north.

The same could be said of Henry VIII’s full suit of armour dating from the 1540’s.   It’s a great example of high quality Renaissance armour and a physically imposing presence in the exhibition (even if the Henry’s 54 inch waistline is an ominous indication of how far he had gone to seed physically- in the 1520s’s the figure was more like 32 inches) but again predates links with Russia by a decade and half.

The armour pattern books from the Royal Armouries in Greenwich give a wonderful sense of what the well dressed military aristocrat was wearing when preparing to repel the Spanish Armada but there didn’t seem to be any evidence that Greenwich armour was ever exported to Russia as a diplomatic gift.   These were beautiful things to see but all at one remove from the core subject of the show. 

 

Perhaps it will work better in Russia as a show primarily about English princely display. I wonder if the stuffed pelican will find his way home for a visit….

Italian Style- the Photographer’s View

The latest Estorick Gallery show returns to the exploration of Italian photography by looking at the work which Giogio Casali did for the architecture and design magazine “Domus” from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.

Casali was responsible for a very large number of the magazine’s covers in this period as well as providing the pictures for stories about prestige architecture projects and new products in the home furnishing and fittings line.  Indeed he seems to have been the “go to” man when Gio Ponti, the founding editor of the journal as well as a notable architect and designer in his own right, wanted a striking cover during these decades.  These were the years of the Italian economic miracle, when the country went from being a basically rural society with patches of industrialisation round Milan and Turin to becoming a modern developed economy.   Millions of people from the deep south streamed north to work on the Fiat assembly lines or in other factories at the other end of the country (rather than emigrating to the USA, Argentina or France as their grandparents might have done).   Towns and cities across the north sprouted new suburbs, with blocks of flats rushed up to accommodate the incomers.   Even Italian football was affected; the new arrivals in Turin took to supporting Juventus (for years a backwater club favoured by the Torinese middle classes) because the long-established local working class, which rarely viewed the newcomers with a friendly eye, supported Torino.  It was a massive social upheaval.

And you wouldn’t have seen much evidence of it on the pages on “Domus”, at least not directly.   Even though Ponti did design a few (probably rather upmarket) housing developments they don’t feature on the covers Casali helped to create.  The journal was aimed very much at a professional, art-school trained, audience with a certain sale among those social groups who saw themselves as the leaders of fashion and style.       Its world view was resolutely modernist- Frank Lloyd Wright- influenced villas in the middle of the Tuscan countryside, new office buildings on the edge of historic city centres or skyscrapers like the Pirelli Tower in Milan, interior design with strong Bauhaus echoes and so on.    The tone was set by movements like Pop and Op Art. Most of the items depicted on its pages would have been far too expensive for the average immigrant from Calabria struggling to make ends meet in the suburbs of Milan- and would probably have looked bizarre and alienating to someone from that background.  It probably didn’t have that much sale to members of the Milanese working class either.   The wider popularisation of this modernist style would come perhaps a decade later than Casali’s photos.

This rather rarefied social context doesn’t stop Casali’s work from being something of a nostalgia trip for those of us of a certain age.   It’s a remainder of a world where plastic and formica were the last word in modern design and glass and reinforced concrete the marks of up-to-the minute architecture.   I suppose the Sixties are far enough away (and culturally prestigious enough) for not all of it to look hopelessly antiquated and outdated even some fifty years on.   I have a feeling that some of my lovely friends would love to have a try out of the outfit the young lady below is wearing, for instance…..

The Estorick show includes a few of the more iconic items depicted in Casali’s photographs.   Some, like the “Superleggera” chair whose virtues are being illustrated (probably by Casali’s wife) at the top of the page, cleave to a functionalist aesthetic.  Others are a bit idiosyncratic.   Take the “book chair” illustrated below.   People at the opening night of the show spent much time debating how they thought one was supposed to sit on it.  The majority view was that the model had it wrong and that the “natural” way to engage with the seat was to turn the leaves over until you arrived at a comfortable angle and sit with your back against the upright surface this created.  Sadly we weren’t allowed to try it out either way. 

 Either way, they convey a sense of style- and articulate the image of an Italy which was both very much at the forefront of design with qualities which stood comparison with the great achievements of the national past (as suggested in the juxtaposition of Brunelleschi’s Dome on Florence Cathedral with modern design items in the shot below) and thoroughly integrated in the cutting edge international design culture of the day as defined in New York or London or Paris.   In the divided political and social cultures of Cold War Italy, “Domus” was clearly on the Christian Democrat side, even if the stricter brand of Catholic might have been uncomfortable with the hints of elite decadence some images suggested. 

This implicit alignment perhaps explains the at first sight surprising number of pictures of new churches which found their way into the pages of “Domus”.   Obviously the massive population shifts created an urgent requirement for churches in the new suburbs.   Even in the south new churches were required- Ponti’s striking co-cathedral below was built in the southern port of Taranto to supplement a medieval building which had become inadequate for the needs of a population vastly expanded by the establishment of massive steel and chemical works (which made Taranto one of the most polluted cities in Italy…).    

Even as church attendance began to drop off in Italy (and I wonder how many readers of “Domus” were devout church goers) church commissions provided a steady flow of income for architects and designers.   At times the results have a slightly dream like quality.  Take the design illustrated below (Casali had a reputation for being able to photograph design models in ways which made them look “real”- but he had his work cut out on this one).  This looks a bit like a spaceport from a Dan Dare strip (giving my age away there…).  It’s actually a design for a church which was supposed to be built beside the Sea of Galilee.  It dates from the mid 1960’s in the euphoria following Pope Paul VI’s visit to the Holy Land; unsurprisingly the project appears to have fallen victim to the politics of the Middle East though I wonder how “buildable” it actually was even if war hadn’t intervened.  

Estorick regulars recalling a show a few years back on Italian design in the 1930’s might have wondered whether “Domus” wasn’t guilty of a little selective amnesia over its own past by the time Casali started collaborating with the magazine.  “Domus” was not a new title in the 1950’s.  Ponti founded it in 1928, fell out with the team running it in 1941 and regained control in 1948.   In other words, it appeared regularly right through the high years of the Fascist regime.   The famous “Superleggera” chair, with its use of non-traditional materials, looks remarkably like a belated child of that regime’s “Autarchy” drive which I’ve written about before (and the web site dedicated to preserving the memory of Gio Ponti’s life and work implicitly locates a lot of  his design work, including the “Superleggera” in that period, not post-war).   Indeed there were distinct family resemblances between quite a few of the ultra-modernist high tech consumer items made out of new plastics in the 1930’s and goods being produced, also out of plastics and other “artificial” materials, which were highlighted on the pages of “Domus” from the 1950’s.   The quality and durability of the plastic was obviously a lot higher second time round and the products probably worked a lot better but in design terms the linkages were there.  

Obviously the Estorick show wasn’t to blame for Ponti and “Domus” being a bit economic with the truth about what they’d been doing in the Ventennio.   It was however a little disappointing in another way.  Despite Casali’s obvious skills with the camera, he remained a rather shadowy figure as an individual.    Clearly he didn’t start taking photos in the 1950’s.   He was born in 1913, evidently lost both parents at an early age and started working as an errand boy for a photographer in his early teens, picking up his camera skills as an apprentice there.   He set up his own studio in Milan in 1938.   The show includes a tiny number of photos which predate his “Domus” collaboration and reveal a different side to his art- a couple of slightly brooding landscapes daring from the war years but with no indication of what he as doing then (he would have been well within call up age in 1940).  

 It also includes some of what amount to his holiday snaps from trips to Spain and the Italian south (unlike some professional photographers Casali clearly enjoyed taking his camera on holiday and snapping what he saw around him- and his holidays intriguingly seem to have been spent in places where the “Domus” aesthetic was hardly known).  These are several cuts above the normal holiday album fodder and again are rather different from his “professional” work, full of people going about their work and play in rather down at heel surroundings.   In all honesty I found them more attractive than the skilful but sometimes slightly superficial work he did for a living and I’d have liked to know rather more about the man behind the camera than we’re given in this show.