Venetian Splendours

 

This one is for my lovely friend Gia in honour of her recent holiday in Venice, which she kindly shared with us on Flickr!

I prised myself away from the World Cup to catch the Veronese exhibition at the National Gallery before it closed last weekend.  This had been billed in a lot of the media as one of the “must see” shows of the year in London but turned out to be a blockbuster which didn’t detonate- there was no shortage of tickets for any of the time slots and the galleries, though not exactly suffering from drifting tumbleweed syndrome, weren’t much busier than they would be on a normal summer Saturday afternoon (the exhibition was hung “round” the Gallery’s own resident Veroneses in the regular gallery space rather than the more standard approach of hosting it in the basement space in the Sainsbury wing).   I don’t quite know why it was something of a box office flop.  My guess is that Veronese isn’t quite as big a name for the ordinary punter as he is for the art critics, there aren’t many iconic images buried in the wider public consciousness that one can hang the marketing on and art dominated by references to Christian and Classical histories and mythologies which are increasingly a closed book to the average 21^st century British (and indeed “Western”) viewer is a bit of a specialised taste.  It doesn’t help that the allegories in some of the paintings on display are so obscure that even specialists can’t agree on what they’re supposed to mean and how they would originally have been displayed and I have to admit that I didn’t find the topics from Classical mythology entirely compelling myself.

Veronese’s life story was pretty uneventful- there’s very little “Agony and Ecstasy” there to spice the show.   He was born in 1528 in Verona, then one of the subject communities under the rule of the Venetian republic which dominated most of the north east of Italy from Bergamo right over to Trieste (what the Venetians called the Stato di Terraferma, as opposed to their Stato di Mare of colonial outposts in the Eastern Mediterranean).   There’s a small story over his name.  “Veronese” is a rather unimaginative nickname which he adopted once he’d moved to Venice.  The “official” name he used was Paolo Caliari, though that wasn’t strictly speaking his family name either.   This was Bazaro but Paolo and his brothers adopted the Caliari name from their mother, who was the illegitimate daughter of a minor noble family; presumably the hope was that this claim to higher status would help in business.   The Bazaros were a dynasty of stone cutters and carvers, so young Paolo grew up in an artistic environment; when it became clear his talents lay in the painting field he was apprenticed to local workshops in Verona (he eventually married the daughter of his first teacher).  His first big break came in his early twenties when a rather economy-minded Gonzaga cardinal, acting as regent of Mantua for his nephews, hired a clutch of young, and therefore cheap, artists to work on decorating the cathedral which had just been remodelled.   Young Paolo did well,  and began getting commissions across the Terraferma.   By 1555 he had moved to Venice, where he remained for the rest of his life picking up regular commissions from individual patrons, religious corporations and eventually the various Councils and Committees that ran the Venetian state.  Apart from a possible visit to Rome he never left the Venetian state; with one minor exception he appears to have led an untroubled and prosperous life, highly regarded by his artistic peers and a regular collaborator with the major architects of the day on prestige building projects.   He died rather suddenly in 1588.  

It was perhaps a good thing for his long term reputation that he died when he did and that the original plan for his younger brother to carry on the family business with Paolo’s sons foundered when the more talented of the offspring died a couple of years after his father.   The Veronese workshop was already having serious quality control issues in the 1580’s churning out uninspired copies of Paolo’s greatest hits, a situation not helped by his own apparent tendency to take on any commissions going at a time when he was already heavily committed to work on redecorating the Doge’s Palace after a major fire.   Veronese was a famously quick worker but one has a slight sense that he was overcommitting in the later years of his life. Admittedly he may have been in a bit of a bind.  Public commissions, however prestigious, were often problematic for a working artist as the Venetian state was not good at paying its bills on time; additional commissions and even hackwork studio copies were essential to keep the business cashflow going.  Nevertheless there is a sense that even the work he did in the Doge’s Palace was a notch or two below his best and he may have been on a downward path in terms of quality himself by then.   Obviously the inferior hackwork didn’t get into the National Gallery show (though it is discussed a bit in the exhibition book) but I have to admit I’m not generally so taken with his later works, mostly done in a very dark and gloomy palate which may have met Venetian taste of the time but didn’t fit Veronese’s talents anything like as well as the clearer, brighter colours of his prime.

As frequently happens with exhibitions focused on Renaissance art, there were obvious gaps in coverage.    None of his work in fresco was going to travel, which ruled out some of his large scale public commissions in Venice as well as the decorated ceilings he did in the rural villas of members of the Venetian elite.   Items which are integral parts of the decoration of major sites like the Doge’s Palace were not going to be on offer.   Italian parish churches fortunate enough not to have had their Veronese altarpieces looted by the French during the Napoleonic Wars are often understandably reluctant to loan them out now- it was remarkable that a couple of major pieces included had in  fact travelled from Italian churches.   A few notable pieces are simply so big that moving them is problematic- one factor presumably influencing the way the show was structured within the Gallery to avoid the need to move one of its centrepiece items even within the building.   Overall, though, it felt like a pretty fair overview of the man’s work.

He wasn’t a very prolific portraitist, for instance (at least not in terms of a straightforward depiction of a given sitter “as themselves”- he had other ways of catering to patrons’ desires to get into the picture) and, given the obvious prosperity and importance of his sitters, it’s surprising how many of the sitters in his Venetian years are either anonymous or have traditional identifications which are probably wrong.  The lady at the top of this piece is a good example; she’s customarily known as “La Bella Nani” on the mistaken assumption that she’s a member of the aristocratic Nani family.   In fact nobody really knows who she is.  It’s only a guess that she’s the respectable wife of a Venetian noble rather than one of Venice’s famed courtesans- the quality of her clothing and jewellery could point either way (and in both cases would probably have contravened the letter of Venetian sumptuary law which sought to regulate who could wear what and could be quite sniffy about even noblewomen wearing clothing this lavish).   The main argument against her being the latter seems to be the rather sexist one that she looks too modest and decorous in her bearing by comparison with portraits by other painters which are known to be of courtesans; this doesn’t seem particularly persuasive and the blonde hair could point the other way (it was pretty well a trade requirement for Venetian courtesans to be blonde, leading to a lively market in hair bleach).   Perhaps it doesn’t really matter- there was a lot more cross-influence in terms of style and fashion between the courtesan sub-culture and elite female looks than a male Venetian governing class with strong misogynistic tendencies was ever comfortable with.

 

 

One of Veronese’s brothers was in the textile trade (he’s listed as an “embroiderer” in a tax assessment, which probably means he ran a workshop rather than necessarily wielding the needle himself) and his son eventually went into the wool business after the painting workshop folded.   This professional link to the trade in fine cloth and embroideries perhaps gives a link to Veronese’s obvious love for depicting top quality textiles in all their glory, sheen and shimmer.   The double portrait of the nobleman Iseppo da Porto and his wife Lavinia Thiene from Vicenza and their children (painted fairly early in his career) beautifully bring out this aspect of his work.   Both are clad in the very height of fashion- the deep black of Iseppo’s clothing was extremely expensive to produce to the highest quality.   The fur stole over Lavinina’s arm was carried as a kind of fly whisk-cum- fly paper; it was believed that fur, especially the fur of the marten, drew vermin away from the body (an interesting commentary on the personal hygiene problems even of the elite in sixteenth century Europe).   The marten also had associations with childbirth (martens were believed to give birth without pain), so this may also indicate that Lavinia is pregnant. The adults look towards each other, an image of conjugal harmony.  The children, also dressed up to within an inch of their lives, seem to be treating the experience of having their portraits painted rather differently.  The little girl peers slightly warily from behind her mother’s skirts; her brother would clearly rather run off and play with her and has to be gently restrained by his father.   Veronese had an eye for children and it’s tempting to think that he was a loving father.

 

It’s also tempting to think that he may have been a dog person.   The picture above (again relatively early) has a couple of canines on display- the big docile fellow whom the little girls in the foreground are playing with and the spaniel puppy wriggling in the arms of their brother.   This is a rather extreme example of Veronese’s way of getting patrons into the frame.  Nominally this is a depiction of the meal at Emmaus, from Luke’s Gospel, where the resurrected Jesus reveals himself to a couple of disciples who had passed the time of day with him while walking to the town without realising who he was (the back story is squeezed into the left hand side of the picture).   In practice, however, this event from Scripture is played out before the reverential gaze (at least as far as the adults are concerned) of an unidentified noble family whose servants are doing the honours with the meal.  Inserting patrons into biblical events was not that uncommon and fitted into approaches to devotion which were positively encouraged by many churchmen but this wholesale annexation of a biblical event to the greater honour of the patrons is a bit extreme- I assume the paterfamilias must have insisted that he wanted his whole household to share in the spiritual benefits of his commission.  “Spot the patron” is however a popular game in many of Veronese paintings.

 

There is a distinct element of theatricality in this work, and that’s a common feature in many of Veronese’s paintings.   Time and again his works look like a moment out of a play, framed in a proscenium arch (or even a still from a film…..).   It’s perhaps not a coincidence that there was considerable intellectual interest in the staging of classical drama in Venice during Veronese’s life and what is arguably the first “modern” theatre to survive intact, the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, was completed during his lifetime.   It’s a bit more complex, however, as we are not the only audience in many of Veronese’s paintings- time and again the events they depict play out in front of an audience which is itself part of the painting, a busy and bustling world frozen in time.  One spectacular example of this is the National Gallery’s own “Family of Darius before Alexander”.   This was painted for the Pisani family and hung in one of their terraferma villas (and became part of a messy inheritance dispute when the man who commissioned it tried to cut his wife out of his will); in this case the bearded man centre stage presenting the supplicant women is favourite for “spot the patron”.  The scene is set in the Persian court after Alexander the Great’s victory at Issus and occupation of the royal palace.  The Persian queen and her daughters (as well as most of the court staff and servants, to judge from Veronese’s depiction), understandably worried about their fate, have gone out to plead for their lives with the new boss.  Unfortunately they mistake Alexander’s very good friend Hephaestion for the great man; luckily Alexander sees the funny side, forgives them and chivalrously takes them under his protection.   Interested spectators line the balustrades above the courtyard (no doubt mightily relieved that the Macedonians haven’t already sacked the palace).   To the right the armoured winners strike macho poses of domination, backed up by their dogs and even the head of Alexander’s massive horse Bucephalos; on the left the court dwarf and his spaniel huddles up with what I take to be a couple of court eunuchs guarded by a halberdier.   The contrast between masculine winners and feminised losers couldn’t be clearer.  What is less clear is who is who among the winners.   It’s usually assumed that the central figure in red is Alexander (probably on the argument that red is the royal colour so it must be him) but as far as I’m aware there’s no positive written evidence to confirm this and to my eye the body language points to the figure in armour in the right as the king, whose identity has just been revealed to the women.   Either way, there’s a lot of ambiguity here- and we as the audience are placed firmly on the same level as the feminised vanquished.  Veronese is often described as an unintellectual painter but this is a highly sophisticated and ambiguous theatrical effect- as well as a fine example of Veronese’s taste for depicting magnificence and courtly splendour in its full pomp.

This taste got him into the one tight spot recorded in his generally uneventful life- one which gives us a rare chance to hear the painter’s own voice.  He had been commissioned to paint a Last Supper for a Venetian monastery.   Veronese turned this into a Venetian patrician’s fantasy of a meal, in sumptuous surroundings with Jesus and his disciples almost lost among a host of liveried servants, buffoons, uniformed halberdiers, monkeys and so on.   The Venetian Inquisition took exception and hauled him in for interrogation.   This took a rather surreal turn at times- Veronese was pressed over the halberdiers, who were potentially German Lutheran heretics, for instance- and his answers to questioning on why he had included this or that decorative element were almost simple mindedly naïve and literal.   In the end he was released and the painting approved by the Inquisitors- but under the new name of “The Feast at the House of Levi” (on the argument that the biblical Levi, being a very rich man, would have lived in the style suggested in the painting).   You can still see it in the Accademia Gallery in Venice.  There’s been lots of speculation over this episode.  At one extreme it’s been suggested that Veronese was a crypto-Protestant (as, intriguingly, Isetto del Porto was).   At the other, his responses have fed the image of Veronese as a virtual simpleton without a coherent thought in his head.   My guess is that this does him a disservice- playing a bit dumb was a sensible tactic in the situation- but I very much doubt if he was seriously suspected of heresy.   The rules on what a painter could and couldn’t put into a religious painting were very much in flux in the 1570’s and neither the artist nor his questioners were on entirely sure ground.  The Council of Trent had certainly reaffirmed that religious paintings were acceptable in principle (as against much more restrictive Protestant views) but with some rather ill-defined qualifications whose implications were still being worked through when Veronese was interrogated.  One message emerging from the process was that “unnecessary” or “inappropriate” splendour was not allowed any more.

 

This didn’t rule magnificence out, of course, in the right place.   It was fine in an Adoration of the Kings, for instance and, as the example above shows, Veronese could do a suitably splendid Adoration (the exhibition in fact hung two that he had done for different Venetian patrons at about the same time in close juxtaposition- and they weren’t the carbon copies of each other that one might have expected even if there were some common elements).   In the version above the Bethlehem stable becomes a kind of jerry built lean-to extension of a set of massive classical ruins but the three kings are magnificently attired and come with the train of servants suitable to their rank (including a slightly improbable camel).  In addition to them, the Angelic Host provide an audience- as does someone hanging off the roof timbers of the shed.   It’s assumed he’s one of the shepherds, moved over to make way for their betters after leaving a couple of lambs in a cage which would certainly have animal rights enthusiasts in a fury.  By extension it’s also assumed that the figure in white with a similar soft felt hat in the bottom right is also a shepherd, though the author of the exhibition book notes that he must be the best dressed shepherd in art when one takes account of the quality of his clothes and I’m sure the dogs he’s holding never herded sheep in their lives; my guess is that he’s a royal huntsman with his lead dogs.    It’s interesting to note that, while the oldest king and his African colleague reappear in other Adorations and are presumably artist’s models (clearly it wasn’t too hard to find African faces even in a city like Venice somewhat removed from the Atlantic slave routes) the middle king varies.   “Spot the Patron”?

The post-Tridentine rules for religious painting favoured clarity and a degree of restraint in depicting miracles- as well as a certain modest stripping away of the more improbable apocryphal legends associated with certain saints.   The martyrdom of St George above perhaps fits into this mould.   The dragon is nowhere to be seen, long dead (or perhaps tamed, depending on the version).   Instead of glorying in the multiple martyrdoms inflicted on the saint as earlier depictions did (he was martyred seven times, using an ingenious variety of methods of torture but survived them all- in some popular versions rose seven times from the dead), we are at the moment just before the final, definitive, blow from the headsman’s sword.   The saint seems almost oblivious to the pagan priest going through the motions of exhorting him to worship Apollo; calm and composed, he has his eyes fixed on heaven where the saints are already interceding for him and whence an angel has been sent carrying his personalised martyr’s palm.   For all the brutality and anger on the faces around him, it’s a surprisingly calm and composed image without the blood and violence often associated with depictions of martyrdoms.   With the focus on saintly intercession it’s nicely theologically on message and one knows George will make a good end when the sword swings at his neck without having to see the gore.   It fits the churchly rules of the times- and possibly also Veronese’s temperament as he doesn’t seem to have relished the depiction of violence to anything like the same extent as some of his contemporaries.

Not everything Veronese did was on a large scale.  He also did smaller pieces more suitable to private devotions, like the depiction of St Helena’s dream above.   St Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, was responsible for rediscovering what was believed to be the actual cross used for the Crucifixion of Jesus; the inspiration for undertaking this early example of Holy Land archaeology was believed to have come to her in a dream.    Again Veronese did more than one account of this theme and they looked radically different.   In the version shown here, a youthful looking and well-dressed lady sits by a window, resting her head on her hand; above her, cherubs heave a cross across her putative line of sight.   There’s nothing to show explicitly that she’s the mother of the Roman Emperor (unlike another version in which she’s clad in royal robes and wears an imperial crown) and she seems to be daydreaming rather than deep in slumber.  The cherubs look as if they’re being hoisted into the flies of a theatre, after playing their role in a piece of devotional drama.  The overall atmosphere is calm and we as viewers are privileged to spectate on the dissolution of the barriers between the visible and invisible; by inference, this can happen to anyone with enough faith, not just the very great and putatively good.

The final piece nicely ties some of these devotional themes together- even if it does come from the late, dark-toned, period.   This was done for the church of St Pantalon in Venice.  St Pantalon isn’t a big name in Western Christianity; he’s a much more familiar figure in the Orthodox world and his presence underlines Venice’s role as cultural intermediary between Christian traditions as well as between Christian and Islamic worlds.   According to legend, he was a medical doctor who converted to Christianity after healing a child through use of a Christian prayer.   Here he is shown about to perform the miracle; he looks upwards for heavenly assistance while a mutilated statue of a pagan deity averts its gaze with what looks like a faintly sardonic expression on its face.   Pantalon’s young assistant offers him his usual medical kit, not required in this case.   The child lies across the knees of an older man in clerical dress.  This is in fact a portrait of the priest who had commissioned the work for his church (“”spot the patron…”)- somewhat daring as this kind of self-glorification by someone of only modest importance was rather frowned on in Venetian church circles.  His presence does however underline the importance of the priesthood in linking heaven and earth as well as its important social and charitable role, all points stressed by the Council of Trent.  Veronese was back on message…

 

Vikings without the horns on their helmets

Back when I was young (dinosaurs had only just stopped roaming the Earth….), it was all fairly simple.  The Vikings were a Bad Thing, violent pagan thugs who came out of the north to wreak havoc on peaceable folk all the way from County Cork to Tuscany and every coastal settlement in between.   The specialised in rape, pillage and disembowelling people in gruesome ways.    And they had horns on their helmets- that was axiomatic.  

Not everything about them was utterly reprehensible.  It was admitted that they were supreme sailors who got as far as North America (perhaps more a point in their favour in England than, say, in France) and fearsome warriors.   Their mythology was vivid and memorable (even if they weren’t directly responsible for Wagner’s Ring Cycle).  They created some very fine literature with their sagas, even if these were long on violence and feuding and dark pagan reminiscences.  They had a sturdy egalitarian streak- the Isle of Man called its parliament after a Viking popular assembly and Icelanders were for ever going on about how they had the longest running democracy in Europe (the Danes, by contrast, were apt to claim that their royal family descended in unbroken line from rulers of the Viking age).  On the whole, though, they were people you didn’t want as neighbours- at least not until they’d been tamed by Christianity and the civilising influences associated with an adoption of wider Christian/feudal cultural values.

Of course I’m writing from an Anglophone perspective here (though views in France and Italy seem to have been pretty similar; German approaches were more complex for a number of historically contingent reasons).  Obviously Scandinavians didn’t see them in quite the same way- nor did people in places where descent from the Vikings was a major element in local identity, as the Guizer Jarls and blazing longships of Shetland’s annual Up Helly A demonstrated.   On the other hand, I don’t suppose the decision by the Waffen SS to call their unit for Scandinavian volunteers “Wiking” and the extensive use of Viking imagery (horned helmets and all) to recruit collaborators for the Third Reich did their image even in Norway or Denmark much good post 1945.

By the time I was at university it was clear that the Vikings were getting a major image makeover.  The big name on this rehabilitation process in the English speaking world was a historian called Peter Sawyer (I met him once; a thoroughly charming man who wouldn’t have blood-eagled a goose).  I suspect the fact that he was married to a Swedish archaeologist may have given him a different perspective- and indeed the new interpretations drew heavily on archaeological evidence.   Out went the rape and pillage, in came a world of wide ranging trade links, peaceful peasant settlement of conveniently empty lands round the North Atlantic rim and deep into Russia.   Instead of being culture destroyers, they were culture bringers, the makers of states like the Kievan Rus, intermediaries who linked western Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic world- symbolised by the piles of dirhams from the Caliphate dug up in trading sites in Sothern Sweden alongside material from England or the Frankish empire and silk from Iran found in a dig in Dublin.   Interestingly there was something of a geographical reorientation here, with more emphasis on those Vikings who went east (reflecting a greater degree of Swedish input into the picture?).   At times the results of this rehabilitation could be downright bizarre, as when I encountered a book which, to judge from the blurb, sought to argue that the Vikings were in fact the first Europeans and the spiritual ancestors of the modern European Union (I wasn’t inspired to purchase the book so I don’t know if the content was quite as off the wall as this suggests).  In fairness, this was to go well beyond anything that the Sawyers and or “serious” academics influenced by their approach would ever have claimed, but the general tone was that the Vikings were decent sorts at heart,  sometimes a bit rowdy after a few beers but basically amiable types- a bit like Danish or Swedish football supporters, in fact (even though these latter continued to wear plastic horned helmets despite conclusive proof that these were a myth inspired by early productions of  the aforementioned Ring Cycle).

Inevitably there’s been a bit of a swing back in more recent years- you can’t seriously write violence and pillage out of the Viking story altogether.   One serious scholar even advanced the argument that the Viking raids in the west targeted monasteries and other Christian cult sites not just because they tended to be repositories of valuable loot but as a conscious act of pagan resistance to Christianisation and Frankish expansionism.   She didn’t find much support but helped to put violence very much back into the picture.   More sophisticated approaches noted that trade and raiding were not actually mutually exclusive.   Traders were sometimes “encouraged” to shift markets from one place to another by pretty heavy handed means.   It was noted that disruptions on the trade routes towards Byzantium and the Caliphate around 990 seemed to coincide with a surge in raiding activity and the extortion of ever larger sums of Danegeld in England (see some of the silver pennies extorted from English taxpayers below).

Commerce and war intertwined in complex ways.  Trade negotiations could easily turn violent; it may be significant that the first recorded victim of a Viking raid in England was the royal customs man at Portland in Dorset.   Viking raiding parties and, later on, the bigger Viking “armies”, would open markets to sell their loot almost in parallel with grabbing it.   Above all, one of the biggest lines of “peaceful commerce” that Scandinavian merchants engaged in was slave trading (a point easily lost sight of as, give or take the shackles which do indeed turn up in the archaeology, slave markets and the slaves sold in them don’t necessarily leave a lot of unequivocal material traces behind).    It hardly needs pointing out that this is an inherently violent trade, whose “stocks” would normally be people removed from their homes at swordpoint.   Similar stories blending commerce and violence can be told of the eastern lands down the Dneipr and Volga and Don to the Black and Caspian Seas.

Even the sturdy peasant farmers of the English Danelaw or Normandy must have got their land by displacing- or exploiting- previous occupants.   Iceland and Greenland were unusual in being more or less uninhabited (bar a few possible Irish monks- the Dorset people of the Arctic hadn’t pushed far enough south in Greenland to be in occupation when the Vikings turned up).   There’s an ongoing debate in Orkney and Shetland about what exactly happened to the pre-existing Pictish populations of the islands.   The “Orkneyinga Saga” is written as if the islands were uninhabited when the first Scandinavians arrived and one, rather convenient, view is that this may actually have been the case (again bar a few Irish monks) due to the effects of war or disease.   The alternatives are either that the locals reinvented themselves as Vikings so comprehensively that not a single indisputably Celtic place name survives (unlike the Hebrides where Vikings were talking Gaelic within a few generations)- not ideal for a population which self-identifies very much in Scandinavian terms and has been increasingly inclined to do so since Scottish devolution- or that they were comprehensively exterminated- again, not a comfortable thought.  For what it’s worth, genetic analysis shows that the modern Orkney and Shetland populations have an exceptionally high level of Scandinavian ancestry, mostly traceable to a limited area in west Norway.   It’s even higher than equivalent data for Iceland, where analysis strongly suggests an original settler population made up of mostly Scandinavian males and mostly Celtic women- slaves and concubines raided from Ireland and the west of Scotland, presumably.   One inference is that the first Norse Orcadians brought their wives and families with them and didn’t intermarry with locals to any major extent (suggesting there weren’t many of them?); another is that the supposedly ultra-Viking world of Iceland was inhabited by people with as many ancestors from Ireland as from Norway.   The overall result is a rather blurred and complex; no doubt intellectually satisfying to academics but a bit confusing.

This complexity is all too clearly reflected in the Viking exhibition currently on at the British Museum and due to move on to Denmark and Germany.   Several reviewers have complained that, although it’s full of interesting items, it seems a bit light on a clear organising structure; having seen it, I’m inclined to agree. Despite its sub-title "Life and Legend", it's also rather light on the legendary side of things.  There’s a sense in the accompanying book (as seems to be the way of the material produced with British Museum shows, this is both more and less than an exhibition catalogue- strong on wider interpretation and context but not covering every object in the exhibition) that the people behind the exhibition would rather like to junk the V-word altogether.   It’s not agreed what it means- there are several possible etymologies but which one you go for depends on the view you take on the violent thug versus peaceable trader dichotomy.   It’s reasonably certain that “viking” is really a verb in origin- one goes viking-ing.  But what you do in this process is a lot less clear and it’s possible to create derivations which point either to raiding or trading.   The time frame is equally messy, particularly at the end.   Conventionally the rise of more centralised kingdoms in Norway and Denmark and, rather later, Sweden, have been seen as the end of the true Viking era.  On that basis, though, figures like Knut (the English Canute, of waves fame) or Harald Hardrada (or indeed Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney) aren’t Vikings- which feels absurd.   The exhibition officially fizzles the Viking era out in 1066, but that’s very Anglocentric and not consistently applied.  Indeed if you took it seriously some of the most charismatic items in the show (the Lewis Chessmen, the wonderful image of a Viking fleet scratched on a piece of wood dug up in Bergen in Norway) would not be there.  In Scotland we were taught to date the end of the Viking era to 1264 and the failure of Haakon IV’s attempt to reassert Norwegian control over the Western Isles (I can’t help interpreting the Bergen find as showing this fleet about to set off southwards…).   The problem is that there isn’t a satisfactory alternative term- and I can’t imagine the British Museum selling out tickets for a show billed as dealing with the later Scandinavian Iron Age.

The exhibition does certainly have a lot to say about trading links- dirhams in Scandinavian hordes and all the other material evidence for wide ranging trade links make their expected appearance.    Indeed there’s a lot of trade- related material which hasn’t been seen in the west before, either because it hadn’t been dug up the last time there was a major Viking exhibition in London back in the early 1980’s or because it was sitting in the vaults of museums in the then-Soviet Union as it contradicted the state line which tried to minimise the Scandinavian origins of the Kievan Rus in favour of Slavic lineages.  I suspect that this material may now disappear back into the vaults when it gets home, at least in Putin’s increasingly nationalist and xenophobic Russia where Scandinavian roots for the first organised “Russian” state are unlikely to be welcome; Ukrainian nationalists might possibly be a bit more receptive to a lineage which anchored the first organised “Ukrainian” state in the west.   Appropriate to the favoured academic discourse of our times, there is  quite a lot about cultural borrowings and the openness of the Vikings to adopting influences from elsewhere- a runic title deed written on birch bark, the preferred writing material in the Slav lands, Viking merchants using Islamic measures, themselves derived from the Roman ounce, the brooches adopted from Irish and Pictish sources and worn as status markers by men as well as women (some so massive that their pins almost look like an attempt to get round “no weapons allowed in this house” rules in Viking pubs), 

the top quality sword blades imported from the lower Rhineland and fitted out to Viking tastes in the way of hilts and decoration (it was faintly gratifying to find that trade mark piracy was a problem in the ninth century; many of the “Ulfberht”-labelled blades found in Viking burials turn out to be low grade imitations). 

  Some of the “cultural hybridity” looks plausible enough- the brooch dug up at Hunterston in Ayrshire with an inscription in runes identifying someone with a very Gaelic name (Maelbrigda) as the owner (the runes are on the other, less decorated, side, stylistic borrowings to and fro between peoples along the Baltic coast.

Sometimes it’s rather less convincing and looks like an attempt to remake Vikings in a 21^st century image; one contribution to the exhibition book suggested that female weapons burials might actually be the graves of female warriors after all.   “The Vikings- Equal Opportunity Plunderers”?  

The violent side is there too.  There are lots of swords and axe heads and shield bosses on show.   One of the more gruesome exhibits reconstructs a recently excavated grave pit from near Weymouth in which the bodies of some fifty adult males had been thrown, with their severed heads piled up to one side.   Analysis of their teeth shows they were of Scandinavian origin; the assumption is that this is a raiding band which came to a messy end at the hands of the locals.   An Irish shrine reliquary has a runic inscription scratched on it- the guess is that this is a piece of loot given as a present to a wife or girlfriend  (“ It’s so cute and just the right size for my earring collection; it’ll look great once I’ve washed the blood off”).   The Lewis Chess set includes a berserker chewing on his shield rim. 

This is perhaps a reminder that men (and women?) who went off “Viking-ing” may have had a complex relationship with wider Scandinavian society for all the prestige attached to courage and military skills in that culture.   Even at the height of the raiding age in the ninth century the majority of Scandinavians were subsistence farmers.   It’s not entirely clear how far going off for a raid or two was part of the normal growing up experience for all young men of a certain economic status- a violent kind of gap year before one settled down to life on the farm- or whether those who sailed off to plunder down the Atlantic coasts formed an identifiable, even somewhat marginal, sub-culture within Scandinavian society.  Perhaps both situations applied, with raiding crews made up of a hard core of “professionals” supplemented by a changing cast of lads doing it for a year or two, men temporarily at a loose end from more legitimate trading enterprises etc- that, after all, is how 17^th and 18^th century privateer ships assembled their crews, including men who under other circumstances would have worked on outright pirate vessels.   There is some evidence that these “hard core” Vikings were identifiable by their dress (there are certain types of knee buckle designed to pull in very wide trousers at the knee- an extravagant use of cloth which has been associated with the ostentatious display associated with successful raiders) and even by body markings.  Obviously the tattoos which adorned their bodies are long gone, as indeed is the make up which (according to puzzled Arab commentators) both genders made use of.   One rather strange custom does however leave archaeological traces- tooth filing.  A skull with filed teeth is in the show- the filing taking the form of a series of parallel grooves filed at the top of the teeth.  It sounds (and looks) a pretty gruesome process.   The grooves were filled with coloured material to give a suitably ferocious look.   It’s suggested that the nickname of the early Danish king known as Harald Bluetooth reflects this sort of display rather than defective dental hygiene.  The exhibition book explicitly makes analogies with groups like Hell’s Angels- though whether the cultural baggage which that analogy carries today applies to ninth century Scandinavian is another matter, as indeed is the question of whether attitudes shifted over time.

The Lewis berserker, part of a chess set which includes a bishop and therefore produced in a Christian society, also raises issues about Viking spirituality which the exhibition tries to tackle. 

It’s now a commonplace to point out that the “conversion” to Christianity which occurred over time was a long and tortuous affair with a lot of syncretism in which individual Vikings took the Christian God into their belief systems alongside their local deities- nicely symbolised by a casting mould which could turn out crosses and Thor hammers at the same time (interestingly in a ratio of two to one in favour of the former)..   Just who these “local deities” were is another matter.   There now seems to be a lot less confidence that the “traditional” view of the “Norse Gods” I grew up with reflects what real live pagan Vikings believed.  After all, many of the core texts articulating this model were written down by Christian Icelanders a couple of centuries or more after Iceland voted to adopt Christianity.  Just how Odinn and Thor and all the rest of the inhabitants of Asgard fitted together is subject to considerable debate.  There may have been considerable local variation- and (a point which I don’t think ever gets enough consideration) considerable variation over time as a direct result of interactions with the Christian world over the course of several hundred years.   At a very simple level, I can’t help wondering whether wearing a Thor hammer was a cultural response to the cross-wearing of the Christian world and something which only became necessary when there were enough Christians around to make a visible declaration of allegiance meaningful.   There’s enough evidence from other parts of the world in more recent times of how the presence of Christian (and indeed Muslim) holy men can have major impacts on how other religions structure themselves (there are for instance scholars who argue that modern  Hinduism is very largely the result of attempts by educated Brahmin elites from the late eighteenth century onwards to structure an amorphous mass of intensely local belief systems and customs into something coherent enough to resist Christian and Muslim pressures).   Thinking you needed somewhere like Asgard for the gods to live in a (relatively) neatly organised society with clear divisions of labour between them might well have been a reaction to Christian preaching, an attempt to impose a meaningful structure on “the old ways”.  What wearing a Thor hammer meant to the wearer in 1050 might have been very different from what it did a hundred years earlier.

The intellectual fashion now seems to favour a pre-Christian religious world which was a lot more disparate, localist and fluid, with sprits present everywhere in all manner of potential relationships with humans.  The Valkyries are now viewed as simply one group of such figures, one which got recognition by later writers. 

Add in belief in shape shifting into various animal forms and forms of communication with the dead and you find yourself waiting for the first sighting of “shamanism” as part of the interpretative material.   To their credit the people organising this part of the exhibition are very cautious about employing this grossly overused term, which has become a lazy shorthand for all kinds of very different belief patterns and practices used by very different societies from Siberia to Amazonia (whether some of those whose work they are drawing on have been as methodologically scrupulous is less clear; the modern “reconstruction” of a shrine whose photograph is in the show has a “Native American” look in line with current fashion).   There are certainly individual burials which hint at special people with special powers- the grave goods of a female burial form Fyrkat in Denmark include white face paint and hallucinogenic/poisonous herbs like henbane alongside more enigmatic items (amulets, a wand, a box full of owl pellets and animal bones) which may have some ritual functions.  Her good also include bowls which may have come from Central Asia- a link back to the trade connections of the Viking world.

In the end you can’t credibly do a Viking show without ships.  They are woven through the culture- in jewellery and in children’s toys.  They were as lavishly decorated as the people themselves, as the “weather vane” below shows.  It’s only appropriate that the undoubted star of the show is the longship whose remains dominate the latter part of the exhibition.   Only a quarter of the timbers actually survive but, when placed in a suitable framework, they are massively impressive.  The ship was dug up near Roskilde in Denmark (ironically during building works to expand a museum of Viking ships- the waters round Roskilde are full of ships, some of them sunk as blockships to control the channel leading to the port) and it’s the biggest Viking ship ever found (nearly 38 meters long).   Its sheer scale suggests it was a royal ship, though it’s less clear which king might have owned it as the wood which it is made of was cut in Oslofjord around 1025, when that area was the focus of intensive fighting between Knut of Denmark and Olaf Haraldsson (later remembered as St Olaf) of Norway.   Either might have had it built.   And it’s very much a war vessel.   Even without horns on their helmets you can’t ever convincingly take the sword out of the Northman’s hand for long.

Fanny and Stella- A Victorian Scandal

I finally got round to reading Neil McKenna’s “Fanny and Stella: The Young Men who Shocked Victorian England”- somewhat belatedly, I admit (it’s not easy to keep on top of a bad book habit in four languages).   This deals with a Victorian transvestite cause celebre.     In April 1870, Ernest Bolton (known to his many friends and admirers as Stella) and Frederick Park (Fanny) were arrested leaving the Strand Theatre (a notorious pick-up venue) after an uproarious night of drinking and attention-seeking behaviour in the box they were occupying with two young men.  Both were in full on Victorian female finery (Stella's on the left above, in a photo taken when they were doing some theatre work in Essex).   Over a year later the couple, accompanied by two male associates (with others charged in absentia) were tried on rather convoluted charges relating to conspiracy to commit sodomy.   After a six day trial all defendants were acquitted.  In the intervening year the investigation had seen both key defendants subjected to grossly intrusive and humiliating medical inspections to determine whether they bore on their bodies the traces of regular participation in anal intercourse, the impounding of large amounts of female clothing, photographs and correspondence stored in rented accommodation and the mobilisation of police forces as far away as the depths of rural Scotland in search of suspects.  The case had international ramifications- one of the accused in the Old Bailey dock was the US Consul General in Edinburgh.   It was also marked by the mysterious, possibly faked, death of a duke’s son and former MP.  The press lapped the whole affair up; broadside ballads and other ephemera were published to feed public interest.

McKenna’s account (written in a sometimes florid, even rather camp, style) sweeps the reader through the whole tangled tale.   He refers to the two stars of the show by their chosen female names throughout- and the choice of gender identifiers gets a bit confusing at times, though that also reflects the confusion of contemporary observers.   The case threw a spotlight on a lively and at times remarkably visible cross dressing scene in mid Victorian London.   This covered a very broad spectrum of activity.   At one end there was a world of more-or-less respectable and at times very public theatrical performances.  Stella, blessed with a very fine singing voice and radiant good looks, had star status, garnering positive reviews in regional newspapers for her stage appearances (her season in Scarborough with Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, the duke’s son mentioned above and her intermittent off-stage husband, brought the house down).  Fanny, less overtly pretty and requiring rather more aid from corsetry and the make up case to look her best, specialised in older feminine roles.   Somewhere below this lurked a world of quasi-private drag balls with suitable retiring rooms for ladies to fix their make up- or get up to more carnal pleasures- and rented rooms for part time ladies to store their clothes (Victorian frocks and underwear must have taken up an awful lot of space…) and entertain friends.

At the other end of the scale lay overt prostitution.  This sometimes overlapped with an active sub-culture of male prostitution, sometimes competed with the female variety (Stella first came to the notice of the police when she and another friend from the theatrical world were attacked by a group of female prostitutes who saw them as unfair competition).  McKenna is in no doubt that both his heroines engaged in remunerated sexual activity- and that their clients might not always have been aware that the lady of the night whose services they had procured was not quite what she seemed.  It was a world in which prostitutes very rarely ever stripped naked to service a client and where anal intercourse, though frowned on as an import from France, was nevertheless a common enough request even from straight male clients.  

McKenna has intriguing things to say about the practicalities of Victorian drag.  Stella, Fanny and their friends were beneficiaries of the then-new world of mail order shopping which made it much easier to acquire cosmetics or items of clothing without necessarily having to go into a shop (though nascent department stores also helped to make shopping a more anonymous process than in the days when a lady would have had to be measured up individually for a new dress).   He doesn’t mention shoes, which I suspect might have been much more of an issue than frocks (at a pinch girls could run up their own dresses on the new-fangled sewing machine even if dress patterns look surprisingly expensive on McKenna’s figures; producing your own shoes would have been a lot harder). It may have been an advantage that fashionable female hairdos in the late 1860’s were heavy on artificial hair extensions, meaning that suitable braids and the like were readily available and no lady’s hair looked entirely natural.  The downside was that hairdos took a lot of assembly.  A girl wanting to go out for a night on the town would generally acquire assistance in getting ready (this was an era when servants were to be found a remarkably long way down the social scale), though it’s gratifying to find that girls generally helped each other out in this area.   There were other problematic areas. Clothes took a lot of upkeep in a world without effective washing machines and there are some suggestions that Stella and Fanny’s outfits looked far more impressive in gaslight than in the cold light of day. Unwanted hair was obviously a problem too; electrolysis lay decades in the future and plucking only got you so far in any reasonable time frame.   Corsetry helped a good deal in attaining a suitably shapely figure but might need supplementing; McKenna mentions rather gruesome-sounding breasts made out of animal innards (I can’t see those ever coming back into fashion even amongst the most organically minded contemporary t-girl) though Stella and Fanny seem to have used lots and lots of padding to judge from what the police took into custody.

And dabbling in prostitution had its own hazards in a pre-antibiotic age- Fanny eventually died young as a result of inadequately treated syphilis.

The book is a thoroughly engaging read and McKenna’s sympathy for his heroines is clear (especially Fanny, who does come across as the nicer of the two, much less high maintenance and demanding than her adoptive sister Stella even if she did slide into Lord Arthur’s bed when he wearied of Stella’s naggings- though I feel McKenna is a bit unfair to her about her looks- she looks pretty sexy and desirable in the photo below) 

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It does have some shortcomings.   Some of his literary references are a bit shaky (Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind is not a factory owner).  The precise order of events is sometimes rather hard to work out.   McKenna is also inclined to present what must surely be his own speculations on his characters’ subjectivities as fact (neither Stella nor Fanny wrote their memoirs, after all, and we can only guess at how they saw themselves).  When it suits his story he sometimes takes at face value evidence from individuals whose credibility was trashed by the defence in the Old Bailey trial.  

He also under-examines some of the mysteries surrounding the case- not least why it was brought in the first place.   As McKenna points out, it was not all that rare for Central London magistrates to find themselves sitting in judgement on men who’d been pulled in by the police while out on the streets in drag.   They normally got off with a modest fine for breach of the peace and a slapped wrist.   Fanny and Stella, it rapidly emerged, had been under surveillance for days if not weeks before they were arrested by a team of detectives in the Strand Theatre. They were clearly an above averagely noisy and visible pair but why the special treatment?  Some murky documentation (which the defence exploited to the maximum in the main trial) hinted at conspiracies.   Something unusual was going on here but McKenna never really elucidates what might have spurred the police into quite such elaborate activity (did E Division of the Metropolitan Police have nothing more urgent on its casebooks?).   My suspicion would be that Stella hooking up with Lord Arthur may have been part of the issue.   He was clearly a monumental embarrassment- godson of the Prime Minister Mr Gladstone, briefly MP for Newark (a constituency which doesn’t seem to have much luck with its MPs….), bankrupt and deep in debt (McKenna suggests that Stella was selling her body to keep them financially afloat as a couple) and thoroughly indiscreet about his sexual preferences.   But surely it would have been simpler to bundle him out of the country on a remittance rather than risk a prosecution in which his name was bound to appear prominently (which, if you take the view that his death was faked, is what happened anyway but only after the damage had been done; my guess is that the suspicious aspects of his death were a cover for suicide, a possibility that McKenna doesn’t discuss)?

Similar questions surround the Old Bailey trial.   On the face of it, this saw the full might of the state on display; the Attorney General led for the prosecution, the Lord Chief Justice presided.  As McKenna says, however, at times the prosecution’s heart didn’t seem to be in it.   The Attorney General more or less admitted in his opening speech that the case had been pursued to court at the insistence of the Home Secretary (and by implication against the advice of the Law Officers).   The police had cut no end of corners in assembling their case, searching properties and impounding private property without a warrant. The prosecution witnesses were either deeply unimpressive (a former policemen thrown off the force for misconduct, a rather ineffectual theatre manager) or had shifted their ground in the period since the committal hearings- almost invariably in ways which favoured the accused (McKenna hints they’d been got at by the defence).   Neither Fanny nor Stella took the stand- they were under no legal obligation to- but Stella’s mother was allowed to give a bravura performance in support of her offspring which left hardly a dry eye in the house.  She was never seriously pressed on her convenient memory lapses and the inconsistencies which riddled her account.  Mr Boulton was conveniently out of the country on business. 

It is of course possible that the Attorney General, Sir Robert Collier, was simply a rather poor courtroom performer who managed a problematic case badly.  He wasn’t one of the stars of the Victorian bar, his legal career prior to his appointment had been solid rather than stellar and he would have got the job as much for political services as for legal expertise.    In fairness it was never going to be easy to prove the (rather convoluted) charges.   It was notoriously difficult to make consensual sodomy charges stick unless the parties were either caught in flagrante or one of them was persuaded (or induced) to turn evidence.   This wasn’t going to happen here- which was why the stated charges majored on conspiracy rather than the actual commission of an offence even though this led to some logical absurdities worthy of WS Gilbert. 

Even conspiracy was hard to prove.  Stella and Fanny may have been flamboyant but they were not utterly reckless; they had gone out of their way to inform the rather besotted young man in the box with them at the Strand Theatre of their true gender more than once and he simply didn’t believe them- he was effectively a defence witness when called.  He wasn’t alone; even when they were in male dress they were often taken for women posing as men, to the extent that some contemporary commentators hinted that they might, in today’s parlance, be intersex- a factor further muddying the already murky waters.  For all its horrors, the medical examinations they had been subjected to worked doubly in their favour; firstly as the medical luminaries involved voted five to one that there was no physical evidence of anal sex to be seen on their bodies and secondly because the whole business of examining them was of highly questionable legality and did the prosecution little good.    

Trying to bring sodomy-related charges before a jury in the 1870’s wasn’t quite as straightforward as Victorian stereotypes might imply.  As McKenna notes, there was a seamy side of blackmail and extortion to law enforcement in this area, where corrupt policemen worked hand in glove with male prostitutes to extort cash from men not to pursue fraudulent allegations of sexual assault.   Fanny’s brother Harry (though pretty obviously gay himself) had been the victim of entrapment of this sort and had skipped bail to avoid the courts- tragically he was the main victim of the case, tracked down thanks to his correspondence with Fanny and sentenced to hard labour which killed him.  When arrested, Stella’s first reaction was to offer to pay off the detective involved- whether with money, sexual favours or both is unclear.   The middle aged middle class males who would have made up the Old Bailey jury were no doubt well aware of this context.   They were also, to an extent that McKenna doesn’t entirely recognise, drawn from a social group which in the mid-Victorian age might not have liked “sodomites” but was also highly ambivalent about the assertion of state power to pry into areas of private life (especially the private lives of middle class individuals) and far less convinced of the unique wonderfulness of “our policemen” than their children and grandchildren would become.   They were likely to be every bit as worried about police encroachments on the liberty of the subject as by claims of sodomitical conspiracies.  

A competent defence team could make much of these concerns.  Fanny, Stella and their comrades in the dock were very well defended indeed- to an extent which leads one to wonder who was paying the costs.  It’s suggested that the leading solicitor who orchestrated the defence was acting out of a sense of sympathy for the underdog and that the £5000 plus which must have been involved (add a couple of zeros or more to get a sense of contemporary values) came from one of their friends- but she is later recorded as having died in poverty.  Maybe the drag scene took a whip round to raise the cash (sadly no advertisements for benefit events survive……); possibly some of the barristers (including the wonderfully named Mr Straight QC) took the case out of sympathy with Fanny’s father, a respected judge.    It’s an issue McKenna doesn’t really pursue, perhaps for lack of evidence- but a slightly frustrating gap.

All things considered, the real puzzle is why the Home Secretary insisted on going to trial on such a shaky case.   McKenna at his most florid implies that the prosecution was set up to fail in order to show that the nation was not as undermined by sodomy as some were suggesting.   Put in those terms, this sounds a bit far fetched and depends heavily on taking one of Collier’s rhetorical flourishes out of its wider context.   Bruce’s career doesn’t give many clues.   He was hardly one of the big beasts of the Victorian political jungle; this was the only Cabinet post he ever held as he gave up politics in the mid 1870’s to pursue his business interests.   The only piece of legislation associated with his name was a Licensing Act which made it a great deal harder to obtain a licence to sell alcoholic drinks and piled additional regulation on pubs and bars.  This might suggest a puritan streak- but was very much in line with Gladstonian Liberal attitudes so may not entirely reflect his personal views.  It is of course possible that the puritanism verging on sanctimony integral to Gladstonian Liberalism played a role at political level.  My guess, for what it’s worth, is a subtle variant on McKenna’s view- that Bruce pressed for a trial because simply dropping the case after the initial committal hearing would have been grist to the mill of those in the media dropping dark hints of wide ranging sodomitical conspiracies in high places involving the political and social elites.   Going to trial, even accepting that the case was likely to fail, would at least choke off the wilder allegations of cover ups and conspiracies by allowing justice to be seen to be done.   It may be relevant that the press coverage quoted most by McKenna came from the 1870’s equivalent of the tabloids (the radical, quasi-republican “Reynolds News”, always looking for a stick to beat the aristocracy with, the scandal- oriented “Pall Mall Gazette” etc).  What else was in the papers at the time?   Presumably the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune got some coverage in the period between the original arrest and the trial- what were the major domestic news stories that Fanny and Stella were competing with for headline room?   McKenna doesn’t tell us.  I suspect their case didn’t quite monopolise press coverage for months on end in the way he implies, for all the Victorian love of a meaty courtroom drama.

McKenna does try to follow his characters beyond the trial, though in some cases this proves impossible.   The two stars had somewhat different fates, though both ended up in America.   Fanny, as noted above, died there a few years later of terminal syphilis.  Stella opted for a full time stage career working, ultimately with her brother as accompanist, in a kind of proto-revue act of songs and sketches- though under an assumed stage name as not every press revue was friendly when it came to light that she was the notorious Stella Boulton.  The photo of her in pastoral mode below dates from that period.  The act toured with reasonable success on both sides of the Atlantic until well into the 1890’s; she died in her fifties in 1903.  She never ended up in the courts again, nor does she seem to have located another long term partner, which is a little sad.   For all their over-the-top behaviour and her tantrums, she and Fanny seem to have been enjoyable, life-enhancing, people to know and to have inspired a considerable loyalty from their friends.   Despite its shortcomings McKenna’s book brings them very much back to life.

Shimmering robes and bound lambs

Finally emerging from hibernation again….  I’m afraid I go through spells where I find it very hard to work up enough enthusiasm to write things and I’ve been through one recently.   I should really have found lots to write about the exhibition of Viennese Secession portraits (actually covering a much wider time frame) at the National Gallery and the Royal Academy show of Daumier’s work which, for once, focused more on him as a painter than his better known graphic art satirising (mostly) safe subjects in the France of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire (his reputation as a fearless opponent of censorship is rather exaggerated; when it became clear that the authorities were going to play hard ball over press control he, and those he drew for, took the hint pretty quickly).   Maybe I’ll get round to writing about these eventually, taking a longer perspective….

What jolted me back into action was an exhibition in Brussels- for once the timing of my meetings meant that I was able to catch a late night opening.  This brought together paintings by Francesco de Zurbaran; fascinating in their own right but also forming an interesting compare and contrast exercise with the Murillo show at the Dulwich gallery last year.   The two men would presumably have known each other, though Murillo was some twenty years younger.  Both were active in Seville in the mid 17^th century, though Zurbaran was not a native of the city and moved around rather more, taking on commissions in Madrid and finally moving there for the final years of his life.  Both painted a great deal of devotional material for patrons in the local church establishment (Zurbaran seems to have been the go-to option for certain monastic orders, in particular the Mercedarians, an organisation dedicated to ransoming Christian captives from captivity in the North African emirates commonly known as the Barbary States).   Both enjoyed an enormous vogue in 18th and 19^th century Europe- reflected in the systematic looting of their work during the French occupation of Spain in the Napoleonic Wars.  Both rather fell out of favour as the 19^th century wore on- too much part of the religious culture of Counter-Reformation Spain and at the same time too sentimental for more modernist tastes which tended to prefer the more apparently “secular” Velasquez while valuing El Greco above the lot.  Both have however seen their reputations rise somewhat in more recent times.

Obviously there are major differences.   For one thing, Murillo seems to have been responsible for Zurbaran’s final relocation to Madrid, at least indirectly.  As I pointed out in my earlier piece about the Murillo show, Seville was a city under enormous strains by the late 1640’s.   Plague carved a swathe through the population; while the majority of those who died were the impoverished slum dwellers who figure in Murillo’s genre works, it carried off many of the better off as well, including Zurbaran’s son Juan (himself a rising artist specialising in still lives).   Patronage dried up as the economy tottered under the impact of war, high taxes and disease- and Murillo’s well-connected workshop increasingly cornered what market remained.   Zurbaran’s style also seems to have been going out of fashion by the late 1640’s; certainly when he relocated to Madrid his style shifted towards smaller, much more “conventional” paintings- and became a lot less distinctive, at least in my view.   It’s interesting that even before he moved north Zurbaran had become increasingly dependent on painting more or less speculative cycles of work aimed at the colonial market in the Americas- presumably a rather less sophisticated audience.

There are also obvious differences between the two artists in terms of content.   Though Zurbaran did a number of works which projected sacred events into contemporary interiors (various paintings of the child Jesus and his mother at home- images which imply that St Joseph was a carpenter with a very successful business indeed, able to afford the comfortable lifestyle of a prosperous senior guild master), he never went outside into the mean streets of Seville to create genre works.  His output was almost entirely religious- there is only one, rather unconvincing, secular portrait in the Brussels show and very few secular works of any kind.   It’s tempting to think that this may reflect something of the man’s personality and conclude that he was a much more overtly devout individual than Murillo.  He was certainly much less given to promotion though self-portraits.  No securely indentified self-portrait of Zurbaran survives and it’s revealing that the main candidate for that role is the work at the top of this piece, depicting St Luke contemplating the crucified Christ.  This is a strange piece in many ways, playing all sorts of games with depiction and reality.   The painter carries his palate, half way between a saintly attribute and the practical working tool of the jobbing artist sizing up his next commission, but there’s no easel or canvas in sight.   What is our role, as spectators to the encounter?  And where are we- at Calvary or in the imagination of the artist, inspired by the intensely visual devotional culture encouraged throughout Catholic Europe from at least the 15^th century?

The slightly strange lighting effects and the extreme attention paid to the fabric of Christ’s loincloth are typical of Zurbaran’s most distinctive work.    His love of deep light and shadow effects reflects the influence of Caravaggio even if Zurbaran’s reverent depiction of saints in ecstatic contemplation of the infinite is far removed indeed from the Italian painter’s habit of placing events from sacred history in the nether world of the taverns and slums of his own time.   The influence must have come indirectly; Zurbaran never left Spain in his life and I suspect he would have been as likely to see Flemish art of the so-called “School of Light”- also deeply influenced by Caravaggio- in Seville as any works by the man himself.  At times the lighting effects are so extreme that depictions of saints become almost abstract, as with St Francis below.   The saint’s face is so deeply shadowed by his hood that he’s scarcely identifiable as an individual at all, while the light flows round the fabric of his habit and reflects off the skull he is meditating upon.  This is perhaps an extreme example of its genre- other depictions of St Francis (including one in the National Gallery in London which has always been a bit of a personal favourite of mine) show a little more face and his later works are far less “radical” in their simplification of the composition- but none the less interesting.  Perhaps its very radicalism helps to explain why Zurbaran’s style began to fall out of favour even in his lifetime, forcing him to paint much more conventional pieces later- there’s a lovely (and maybe a bit too-good-to-be-true) story of a Zurbaran painting being discovered during the 19^th century in a convent attic to which it had been banished because the nuns found it too scary to hang in the church.

The fascination for the interplay of light and fabric, as well as an almost tactile enthusiasm for depicting the fall and folds of clothing, are also marks of Zurbaran’s style.   The dazzling white of the habit of the Mercedarian brother below illustrates this aspect nicely.   The colour is surely too good to be true in a world without  detergents or washing machines and reliant on natural fabrics (leaving aside the theological issue of whether a religious order vowed to personal poverty really ought to have been spending money and effort on keeping their habits gleaming white); no doubt the symbolism of purity is important here but one senses that Zurbaran’s love for depicting fabric goes some way beyond this.   

 The love for clothing and fabrics can be seen in the large format paintings of mostly rather obscure female saints which he produced for the colonial market like St Casilda below (for the record, St Casilda was, according to pious legend, the daughter of an 10^th century Moorish ruler of Toledo; she did good works, converted to Christianity and lived as a hermit to the age of nearly a hundred).   These saints are invariably sumptuously dressed young women dressed in Zurbaran’s fantasy of what the height of fashion in the remote past would have looked like.   In some ways they’re rather odd depictions, more like court ladies than holy women, and cast an interesting sidelight on how devout Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic imagined the court of Heaven.   

Perhaps the strangest works probably produced for the colonial market (though they don’t appear to have got there) are the set of paintings of Jacob and his twelve sons.   These ended up in Auckland Castle in north east England, purchased (apart from one which found its way to another stately home and had to be replaced with a copy) by the then bishop of Durham in the early 1750’s- supposedly as some kind of act of regret for the failure of Parliament to pass Jewish emancipation legislation.   They had a moment of celebrity in 2011 when the Church of England thought about selling them and they were purchased by a millionaire banker with roots in the region who then set up a trust to ensure their preservation in Auckland.   There seems to be a lot of uncertainty over their pre-Auckland history and they’re certainly not what you’d expect to find on the walls of an episcopal residence in northern England (though presumably the Old Testament subject matter made them acceptable in Protestant circles allergic to saintly ladies).    Four of the works made their way to Brussels; Asher can be seen below.   The commission allowed Zurbaran to give full rein to his fantasies; the figures are remarkably varied in look and clothing (the sense that each son is already the leader of a specific tribal grouping with very diverse looks and customs is quite strong), all set in a strange imagined classicising landscape.  

I have to admit that I found Zurbaran’s work very uneven in quality and degree of interest.   I’ve already mentioned that his later works don’t do it for me, and I’m afraid (as with Murillo) I can only look at a limited number of Immaculate Conceptions before my eyes glaze over (Zurbaran’s handling of this theme became increasingly formulaic over time anyway).  A lot of his more ambitious compositions look stiff and clunky and he was very hit and miss when it came to depicting people, particularly young women- his Virgins are all too often pudding faced and insipid and his angels rather too chocolate box for my taste.  Of course “Zurbaran”, in common with almost all 17^th century painters, was a workshop rather than a single artist and a substantial if unspecified part of many of his works would have been painted by assistants but (at least to my eye) he seems to have had more quality control problems than some.  Maybe he took on rather too many commissions, just possibly the process of scaling back optimistic 18^th/19^th century attributions has not gone far enough with his oeuvre.  Maybe it’s just a matter of personal taste and the lack of a shared religious faith; his depiction of the Lamb of God as a very literal young sheep bound and ready for slaughter, its special status marked by a faint halo, is undoubtedly very effective but strikes me as faintly creepy.   A devout Christian would perhaps see it rather differently.  

One area which got a bit of coverage in the Brussels show but where I’d have really liked more was Zurbaran’s qualities as a painter of still lives.  Unlike his son, who produced rather typically overblown baroque specimens of the genre, full of piles of over-ripe fruit and rather blatant allegories, his still lives tend to be very restrained.  Many of them concentrate on jars or other bits of humble household ware- the example below could almost be an ancestor of the works of Giorgio Morandi which I’ve written about before.     

How far these works were meant to be free-standing pieces is unclear; certain items and even complete compositions appear as minor parts of bigger works (as with the piece below) so perhaps they were preparatory sketches.   Whatever their status for Zurbaran, they’re wonderful little windows into the lived reality of 17^th century Spain.