On Wednesday June 27 - I went with my Carol to the Chester Beatty Museum. This museum housed a lifetime of collecting by Sir Chester Beatty. It
was one of the finest collections of rare manuscripts, Bibles, Korans and Asian
artefacts in the world. The Chester Beatty museum was one of the multi-cultural
venues in Ireland - but this was profound multiculturalism - not the rubbish of
contemporary 'identity-art' or the advert bullshit of the media and fashion
world. However, we had not gone to see the permanent collection - we went to
see the Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex
Leicester exhibition - one of this geniuses many notebooks - this one centering
on science, the natural world and water. The Codex Leicester had originally been
owned by the Earl of Leicester but recently been purchased by the Billionaire
Bill Gates – founder of Microsoft. Sad to say it was one of the most boring
exhibitions I have ever seen.
Don't get me
wrong - I thought Da Vinci was not only the greatest draughtsman and one of the
greatest artists who ever lived - he was also the greatest intellectual in
human history. Smug ignoramuses of my day - carped that he painted so little
(only twelve known paintings), that he finished nothing, that many of his ideas
had been already been discovered by other naturalists and scientists and that
many of his inventions did not work. However, frankly I didn’t care a dam! Da
Vinci was one of the last intellectuals who could encompass in his mind all the
discoveries of science and art. By my day - subjects were so specialist that it
would have been utterly impossible for another polymath like Da Vinci to
emerge.
However, I had no
interest in science - or the movement of water – so these works seemed very dry
to me. On the other hand, I knew that anyone interested in Science would have
gone crazy for this exhibition.
The display of
the notebook pages was also highly irritating as well. The pages were displayed
on Plexiglas's so that you could read both sides of the page - all that was
fine. However, the pages were about two foot away from the plate glass display
cases and the lighting almost pitch black. Da Vinci's writing was so crabbed
and small - in Italian and written in mirror writing - that it almost
impossible to say that we had really seen the work at all. Thankfully, there was
a great little catalogue for €20 -that we bought - and it was wonderfully
illustrated.
Seeing these thin
sheets of paper (no more than 72lb and almost transparent in display) - spot
lit dimly in a darkened room – struck me as all a little too theatrical and
similar to the worshiping a religious relic. Of course, these objects had to be
preserved – but there were ways of doing it without ruining the viewer’s
pleasure.
I still to this
day remember when I saw the greatest drawing I had ever seen. It was 1996 and I
was in the National Gallery in London - when I came upon Da Vinci's sublime
preparatory drawing for the oil painting Virgin
and Child with St. Anne, c1508. The drawing was housed under bulletproof
glass - because a few years earlier a lunatic had come into the gallery with a
shotgun and blasted the drawing. The National Gallery’s repair of the drawing
was masterful. This huge drawing (it was nearly six feet by four feet) in
charcoal with white chalk highlights on tinted paper - sent shivers down my
spine. There was more depth and profundity to this drawing than in hundreds of
thousands of other paintings I had seen. Part of the reason for its power was
Da Vinci's maternal complex, which allowed him to express so tenderly - the
love between mother and child.
So of course I
was hoping for the Codex Leicester to have wonderful drawings but there were
few actual drawings embedded in or on the margins of his text and they were too
small. Still to my mind – Da Vinci was the greatest draughtsman in human
history. Michelangelo could have given him a run for his money - but there was
so much more variety to Da Vinci's work - portraits, nudes, religious subjects,
inventions, nature studies, plans for sculpture, cadaver studies, anatomy
drawing and so on - Michelangelo basically drew nothing but the male nude or
male nude transformed into a woman! Dürer certainly had nothing to be ashamed
of - but his work lacked the grace and fluidity of Da Vinci's drawings. Robert
Hughes put it best when he said Da Vinci drew like an angel. Recently Picasso
had also challenged Da Vinci - but I still think that drawing for drawing - Da
Vinci was the best.
Leaving the Da
Vinci exhibition - we went upstairs to the permanent collection room subdivided
between all the world religions. This room was filled with some of the most
moving, technically skillful, devout and heartfelt manuscripts, Bibles, Korans,
Russian Orthodox Icons and Buddha’s. The earliest works were Egyptian Demotic
Text on Papyrus from Ad100! Then there were small fragments of Greek text on
Papyrus dating as far back as AD150-200! If you believed in a God - these were
essential things to visually and spiritually consume - for they recorded the
earliest manifestations of faith in Gods or later one God.
Cave painters had
a Pagan belief in the magic properties of animals and they paid them lavish and
profound homage in their pictures. However, modern religions as we know them
only really began with the Egyptians, Jews, Greeks and Romans followed by the
Christians, Muslims and Buddhists. Personally, I was a nihilistic Atheist and
opponent to organized religion - but even I was profoundly moved by these
religious texts and statuary.
The time
individual pages of these Bibles and Korans took to illuminate was
mind-boggling. Looking around these many works, I was flabbergasted by the
minute detail, sure drawing, rich colour and deep feeling, which these
dignified art works possessed. Anyone who thought that Islam was a brutal and
barbaric religion – should have seen Koran's like these - for what they proved
- was just how much dignity, imagination and disciplines these artists and
devout believers had. Of course in Islam it was strictly forbidden to draw
realistically - so in compensation these Islamic scholars and master
illuminators created rich, dense abstract patterns - reflecting upon the
complexity and yet also the order of the Islamic imagination. The Islamic use
of gold and lapis lazuli was heartbreaking
meaningful. Yet again, I was struck dumb by the minute calligraphy, symmetrical
order and integrity to all of these Islamic designs.
Another category
I loved was the wonderful Jataka painted folding books from Burma (c1800s) -
laid out like a folded accordions. The colours and drawing in these work was so
daring and even avant-garde. The Buddha's in bronze or in prints, or painted
scrolls – were sumptuous and highly reasoned works of great refinement.
So too were the
Indian miniatures but they were also highly complex images - unmistakably
Indian but clearly also influenced by the best and most refined of the West and
Islam.
Finally, I was
intensely moved by a group of about eight Russian Orthodox Icons - painted in
Tempera on inch thick small blocks of wood. The design, subtle and daring
colouring, even naïve drawings of these works made a powerful impression on
me. The sincerity of these artists - was
not in doubt!
However, it got
me wondering if there were any artists in my day - whose work was so intensely
devout, pious and heartfelt. I doubted it. These artists lived in an
uncorrupted world before mass media - and their belief in God was no mere
affectation - it was an obsession. The last great Religious artists in the West
were Georges Rouault in the early twentieth century and Mark Rothko at its end.
In his bitter yet empathic watercolour studies of prostitutes and his stain
glass like oil paintings of Christ - Georges Rouault gave a modern retelling of
the sins of vice, the suffering of women at the hands of men and the passion of
the Christ. In his ethereal early colourful abstracts and later darker abstract
canvases - Rothko was the last painter to believe that art could act as an
intermediary between man and God.
Only their work
struck me shorn of the sick sentimentality, crass decadence, posturing and
jolly spiritualism of my modern ‘spiritual’ world - the type of rubbish spouted
and shown on Oprah. For me Rothko was
one of the greatest religious painters of all time and certainly, no one in the
West had his intellectual probity, anguish, obsession, and idealism. His
depression and final suicide - was like that of van Gogh - no mere accident -
it was the nihilistic summation of a life spent in maddened thirst for meaning,
feeling and intelligent Religious faith.
Overall, the
Chester Beatty collection proved to me what a rich and varied tapestry human
civilization was. It also proved that some of the most timeless and modern art
in the world - was created over a thousand years ago.