Roman Diversions

 

When exactly does intrusive press reporting stop being a gross violation of personal privacy and become something else- a historic document or even art?    And at what point does ephemeral press photography destined for tomorrow’s tabloid front page or next week’s magazine exclusive turn into the product of an artist’s eye and consciousness?   I found myself musing on these questions (without, I must admit, finding an entirely satisfactory response to them) while catching another exhibition just before it closed.

The show in question was at the Estorick Gallery (regular readers will know this is a favourite place).  Entitled “The Years of La Dolce Vita”, it highlighted the photography of Marcello Geppetti and, to a much more limited extent, that of Arturo Zavattini.  Zavattini was Fellini’s chief cameraman on the eponymous film (and many of his other productions) and his photos offer a behind the scenes view of its making.  In many ways it’s a rather unrevealing affair; Zavattini was, after all, part of the “company” and it’s reasonable to assume that all the photos were taken with the full knowledge and consent of those depicted.  Even “off duty” moments of relaxation during the shooting are pretty tame.

Geppetti was a rather different, and more complex, kettle of fish.  He had started out as a conventional news photographer with an ambulance chasing streak whose first moment of fame had come covering a fire in a hotel on the Via Veneto in Rome (ironically later to be the core of the café society immortalised in “La Dolce Vita”) and never stopped covering “hard” news stories throughout his long career.  This side of his work is only tangentially referenced in the Estorick show with a shot of Robert Kennedy visiting Rome just weeks before his assassination.    His fame, however, rests on his role as the most prominent and talented of the pack of photographers dedicated to snapping the comings, goings and excesses of the film stars who passed through Rome in the decade or so from the mid 1950’s to the mid 1960’s when the major Hollywood studios shipped their stars over to the Eternal City to make movies there.  He’s sometimes taken as the model for the Paparazzo character in Fellini’s film (and hence, indirectly, the man who gave a particular style of intrusive photo-journalism its name).   This is a slight exaggeration- the character was a composite of several celebrity chasers active at the time, of whom Geppetti was just the most successful and notorious- but he certainly acted as a technical advisor on the film and put in a cameo appearance. 

The primary reason Geppetti’s subjects were in Rome was economic.  Hollywood studios couldn’t transfer the profits they were making from European markets back to the US due to exchange control restrictions.   Rome had top class production facilities at Cinecitta (a legacy of Fascist era investment in the film industry which had never been fully used before war came) along with talented cameramen and film crews who cost a lot less to hire than their American counterparts.   Italy offered lots of wonderful locations to film in and a touch of the exotic for American audiences.   In this context it made perfect sense to spend the cash blocked in Europe to make films which, with luck, might make profits in the US.   From an Italian perspective, hosting American film makers kept facilities operational which would otherwise have struggled to survive on the basis of purely domestic demand and paid for studio upgrades which the domestic industry could not have afforded.  While Italian film makers may have resented the American presence only the most dogmatically Communist entirely rejected the spin-off benefits it brought; indeed Italian directors were often very happy to take advantage of the presence of authentic Hollywood stars and include them in their casts.   Italian (and indeed other European) performers were only too pleased to take parts in US-made films and Italian audiences lapped up the products of the Dream Factory.  If the gritty Neo-Realism of the immediate post war years had ever had a mass audience in Italy, this had largely evaporated by the mid 1950’s in favour of more escapist fare.       Inevitably the quality of the works produced in Italy under those circumstances was very variable; it was no doubt symbolic that one of the last major productions created in this period, just as changing rules on taxation and currency convertibility began to undercut the economic rationale for this approach to film making, was the monumentally expensive and loss-making “Cleopatra”, which indirectly provided Geppetti with one of his iconic (and most profitable) photos.

For American stars, shooting in Rome had many attractions.   The dollar went a long way in what was still at heart an impoverished semi-rural country, though one changing fast under the impact of post-war industrialisation; one could live even more lavishly than in Beverly Hills at limited cost.   The social life was every bit as lively as back home, with the opportunity to rub shoulders with genuine(ish) aristocrats if that was one’s inclination.   Above all, there was a certain air of freedom and room for transgression.   In Rome the stars were at one remove from the rather suffocating conformism of 1950’s America which affected how even film idols were expected to present themselves to the public.   There was the opportunity to let hair down and take risks.   The downside of this apparent freedom was embodied by Geppetti and his colleagues.  The studios were far less able to manage media coverage of their key assets than they would have been in the US and the apparently insatiable Italian appetite for gossip and pictures of the stars, fed by a whole sector of magazines aimed at a mostly female audience, meant that they could hardly set foot out of doors or have a banal dinner in the local trattoria without the accompaniment of flash bulbs.   It probably wasn’t much comfort that their Italian colleagues faced exactly the same ordeal. 

There’s a tendency now to regard Geppetti as an unjustly neglected artist on a par with the great photo-reporters like Capa or Cartier-Bresson.    I’m not totally convinced by this, at least on the basis of the exhibition (and fully recognising that Capa and Co undoubtedly also took a large number of pretty banal photos alongside the iconic works they’re remembered for).     Geppetti undoubtedly had an eye for people and could take some striking and very thought-provoking images.   Take the example at the top of the page.  A very young and very sexy Brigitte Bardot, out and about in Orvieto north of Rome (I assume on location) turns her back on a wall of press photographers and police to give us a dazzling smile.  It’s a beautiful meditation on fame and media coverage, creating a sense of intimacy between us, the viewers, and the star; there’s a sense that she’s sharing a moment of amusement at all the fuss her presence has created and that she’s allowed us (via Geppetti) privileged access denied to the common herd of snappers in the background.  It is perhaps revealing, however, that she isn’t actually looking into Geppetti’s lens either.  It’s also notable that this photo, which must surely have been created with her collaboration and consent, doesn’t really fit into the stereotype of his work as a photographer of the unexpected and unguarded moment, zig-zagging through the Rome traffic on his motor scooter with a camera specially adapted so that he could shoot on the move if need be (as when he caught Anita Ekberg at the wheel of her Mercedes below) or gatecrashing events to catch the stars at play.

 

The photos in the show which did fit that stereotype were a bit of a mixed bag.   Some are wonderfully strange, like the image of Frank Sinatra and an unidentified heavy coming out of a theatre in full evening dress; pop-eyed, they look as if they’ve seen a ghost or something equally disturbing.  There’s something faintly menacing about the shot, subliminally playing into the sulphurous, Mafia-linked, side to Sinatra’s reputation.   Sophia Loren looks bored to distraction by the company of Carlo Ponti (though he must have improved his conversational skills eventually, given that the couple were to enjoy many years of married life together).  Michelle Morgan causes a  traffic jam by losing her shoe on a Roman pedestrian crossing (surely taking her life in her hands relying on Italian drivers to obey the rules of the road-unless, of course, the shot was carefully staged).   Audrey Hepburn, stylish as always, takes her equally stylish pooch for a walk in a bustling Roman street. 

 

Most, though, are pretty uninteresting.   There are, after all, only so many ways you can take photos of people drinking in a bar or sitting down in restaurants for a meal, even if there might be a bit of slightly predictable comedy to be had at the expense of foreigners struggling to come to terms with spaghetti (Jane Mansfield clearly hadn’t picked up the knack when Geppetti shot her and her husband Mickey Hargitay in a Roman restaurant).  

 

There may well have been contexts which made these photos “work” in journalistic terms but are now accessible only to those well versed in the life and times of the stars concerned- I can see that who was dining with whom might have been very hot news for the gossip sheets of the day, for instance- but they weren’t really spelled out in the exhibition.  Equally there’s only so much interest to be derived from seeing Hollywood stars of the 1950’s and 60’s behaving like “normal” tourists in Rome, eating ice creams or towing bored teenage children round the sights.   It would also have been helpful to have some sense of how the photographs were presented in the magazines which bought them- this was, after all, photography created for a very specific market.   Were all the shots in the show published- and if not, what might that say about shifting views of what makes a “good” photograph?

Perhaps my viewing of the exhibition was influenced by knowing that it was curated by Steven Gundle.  He’s an academic historian with an interest in topics like the use and abuse of glamour and feminine beauty in Italian society since 1800, on which he has published serious academic tomes.  More relevant to this exhibition, however, was a much more “popular” book called “Death and the Dolce Vita”, which examined a murky and never properly elucidated murder case involving a young Roman woman whose body was washed up on a beach near Ostia Lido (Rome’s local seaside resort).  The rather bungled investigation spiralled off in all directions, drawing in members of the arty Roman cafe society who also mingled with the foreign stars, louche Roman aristocrats with big titles and little money, dubious property developers with links to the Fascist past and so on.   There were political overtones (one of the suspects was the wayward son of a prominent figure on the left of the ruling Christian Democrat party), allegations of sex and drug orgies involving the rich and famous and, inevitably, claims of cover-ups and conspiracies.  It’s an interesting book, but (at least in my view) rather weakened by pages and pages of rather gossipy stuff about the cinematic milieu which Geppetti was snapping.   The young woman whose death is the nominal focus of the book was a cinema fan and there were some links between the list of suspects and that world but in truth they’re pretty tenuous and much of the material on Hollywood stars in Rome looked as if it had escaped from another book with even fewer academic pretensions.  

Having read Gundle’s book (on sale in the Estorick bookshop at the time) it was tempting to see the exhibition as being in some sense the “show of the book” even though the rather sketchy interpretative material provided in the galleries and the catalogue never mentioned the case and none of the photos had any obvious links to it.   There were rather oblique references to the “dark side” of the world Geppetti covered but in truth there wasn’t much visible evidence of this in his photos, for fairly obvious reasons.   Even a skilled gatecrasher like Geppetti would presumably not have obtained access to a really heavy duty sex and drug orgy- and if he had, he had too much of a sense of self-preservation to take photos there as (a) it would have been highly dangerous to do so and (b) there would almost certainly have been no market for them in his usual press outlets.   The Italian magazine press might have been more overtly intrusive and willing to print certain stories than its US counterpart but there were clear limits to its coverage.  Marital infidelity and wild parties in nightclubs were one thing, serious criminal behaviour or such taboo activities as gay sex were quite another.   A little transgression added to the glamour of the beautiful people whom Geppetti photographed; he wasn’t in the business of probing much deeper.

As a result there was very little that could overtly be put under the “stars behaving badly” rubric in the show.  The fact that everybody seems to be smoking certainly doesn’t count- though it is a nice reminder of how societal attitudes have shifted over the past half century or so.   I don’t think Raquel Welch dancing on the table on-set under the amused eyes of Marcello Mastoianni counts either, fun shot though it is.   

 

Of course the context point made earlier comes into play here; it isn’t necessarily immediately obvious that they are behaving badly without background information which the news stories these photos would have been slotted into would have provided.   Take one of Geppetti’s most notorious photos below.   In some respects it’s very forward looking- the use of long lenses to spy on people would now be regarded as one of the core concerns over intrusive press coverage but was something of a novelty in the 1960’s.   The victims here- Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, taking a break from shooting “Cleopatra”- would probably have been unhappy at being photographed in a private moment at the best of times; what made this photo so scandalous was that both of them were married to other people at the time and its appearance on magazine front pages in Italy and beyond caused a huge scandal as both marriages came messily apart in public.  One could see this as the foundational image of a whole style of celebrity journalism which is with us yet- and (at least here in the UK) is part of wider arguments over privacy legislation and press regulation.

Beyond that, however, the nearest thing to misbehaviour on camera in the show was a series of photos of various stars getting into noisy disputes with photographers, in some cases to the point of physical assault.  The most bizarre of these involved Anita Ekberg sallying forth from the villa she must have been renting armed with a bow and arrows to confront the press pack.   In fact it’s so bizarre that it’s very tempting indeed to suspect that it was staged.

 

This left me musing on just how many of the supposedly candid shots taken by Geppetti were actually done with the knowledge and consent, however grudging, of the subjects.   Some very obviously are- I’m sure Mickey Hargitay didn’t make a habit of carrying Jane out of restaurants when the cameras weren’t there, for instance.    On the other hand, they can’t all have been but (the long lens Burton and Taylor one apart) it’s very difficult to tell just from looking at them- even the assaults might have been staged (being walloped by a star probably didn’t damage a photographer’s career while punching a snapper on the nose made the star look like an ordinary human being, especially if it was done to “protect” a lady).   In the ultimate analysis Geppetti was an insider, even if he was probably regarded by many of the stars he photographed as a bit of a pest whose attentions you had to tolerate for career reasons.  He was obviously welcome on set.  In other words, you weren’t going to get anything seriously subversive of the movie industry and its stars from him.    The whole modernisation process which Italy was going through- socially, culturally, economically- in the years of La Dolce Vita was hugely controversial and the cinema industry was a lightning conductor.   Damned for its American overtones on the Communist left, blasted as destructive of Italian morals on the Catholic right and sneered at as hopelessly vulgar by intellectual and cultural elites.   Very little of these critiques found their way into Geppetti’s work- or indeed Fellini’s film, which (as the more perceptive contemporary critics noted) mostly reserved its barbs for soft targets and to a considerable extent played to attitudes which it claimed to satirise.    If Geppetti did hold a mirror to a very specific sub-culture at a very specific time, it was a rather less overtly critical one than is sometimes suggested.

As far as the questions posed at the beginning are concerned, I suppose the passage of time does make a difference; it’s hard to be offended over intrusion into the lives of people many of whom are now dead, especially as it’s likely that in many cases they were consenting victims.   There is a legitimate historical interest in Geppetti’s work as the record of a specific, long departed, moment in the history of cinema and even to some extent of Italian society.   I’m less persuaded of the higher claims made for his work in purely artistic terms, even if he took some very fine individual photographs.  It was still worth putting the exhibition on at the Estorick, though….

 

 

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.