Art – Page 2 – the heart thrills

A LITTLE TRIP IN CENTRAL ITALY

Milan, 2 May 2025

As in the case of my previous post, the little trip my wife and I recently undertook in central Italy was kicked off by an article in the Guardian which I read some four-five months ago now (although quite how I got to it I can no longer remember; the article is more than three years’ old). The article was about a fresco by the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca depicting Mary pregnant with Jesus.

It was such a different depiction of Mary when pregnant. The only paintings I know of where we see her pregnant are depictions of the Visitation, the story in the New Testament where Mary goes to meet Elizabeth and both women are pregnant. Here is a nice example of the genre, by Rogier Van der Weyden, where it is clear that both women are pregnant; in many versions of the Visitation, you would be hard put to see that the two are “with child”, as they used to say.

But Piero della Francesca has Mary alone, not doing anything in particular, just resting her hand on her belly. Such a natural pose! I remember vividly my wife doing exactly the same when she was pregnant with our two children.

Charmed by this fresco, I immediately proposed to my wife that we go to see it. She said she was all for it as long as we got some hiking in too. The fresco is held in a village called Monterchi, on the borders of Tuscany. Once I discovered that we would need to get to Monterchi via Arezzo, I proposed that we also visit Arezzo – I had visited the town fifty years ago, my wife never. And then I saw that one of the earlier stages of the Via di Francesco, the Way of Francis, several stages of which we hiked back in October 2023, passed through Citerna, a village across from Monterchi. So then we decided to walk from Citerna to Sansepolcro. Then late in the planning, we discovered that there was going to be a “once in a lifetime” exhibition of Caravaggio, my favourite painter, in Rome. My wife eventually persuaded me that we should tack on a quick visit to Rome, which allowed for an extra day’s hike to Città di Castello, followed by a two-day stay in Perugia (again, visited by me fifty years ago and by my wife never), with a final quick visit to Rome just for the exhibition.

What follows are notes on our little expedition.

Arezzo (population: 99,000)

After taking a Flixbus down to Florence, we rolled in to Arezzo train station in the early afternoon.

I have to confess that I have no idea why I decided to go to Arezzo fifty years ago. I have but one memory of the place: going to a cafe for lunch and being served by a man with a fascinating face, the type of face I see in Caravaggio’s paintings; the lunch was good, too, as I recall. But I remember nothing of what I visited. A bit embarrassing, really.

What we found was a very pleasant old town, built up a slope towards the cathedral.

Here’s a photo of one of the busier streets.

I very nearly missed the town’s artistic highlight, the frescoes in the cappella maggiore in the Church of Saint Francis, by Piero della Francesca (him again; not surprising, really, he was from this part of Tuscany). On the day we set aside to visit Arezzo, the chapel was closed. No problem, we said, we’ll see it tomorrow morning before our bus leaves for Monterchi. Next morning, we were at the church when it opened, but disaster! we were informed that you had to book your visit online, and there were no spaces left. My wife, excellent negotiator that she is, managed to persuade the ladies at the ticket desk to at least allow me in. So I went in and relayed photos to my wife outside via WhatsApp. These photos, scraped from the web, are frankly much better than the ones I took.

Other highlights in Arezzo:

The Piazza Grande

The crucifix by Cimabue in the church of Saint Dominic

The figurines at the entrance of the church of Santa Maria della Pieve depicting the months of the year.

This photo makes it easier to appreciate these delightful little figurines – we see well the depictions of the months of January and February.

Monterchi (pop: 1,700)

The bus dropped us off at the foot of the village, built like so many villages around here on the top of a hill.

We climbed up and over to the other side of the hill, to the old village school, which had been turned into a little museum just for Piero della Francesca’s fresco of the pregnant Madonna. I won’t repeat the photo I inserted earlier. I throw in instead a photo of a reconstruction of what the fresco originally looked like, with Mary in a tent of some sort.

It is indeed a lovely representation of pregnancy. I can understand why pregnant women in past centuries would flock to the chapel which contained it, to pray for a safe and easy birth.

Citerna (pop: 3,400)

After the visit to the museum, my wife and I walked to Citerna, sitting on the top of a high hill on the other side of the valley from Monterchi.

It was a short hike, some 2 km, but steep: the route suggested by Google Maps took us pretty much straight up the hill. What we found at the top was a sleepy little village most of whose residents were old – the fate of so many of Italy’s villages. Internet had informed me that the local church contained a statue by Donatello, although I was warned it was difficult to visit. And so it proved. The church was locked, but there was a note on the door with a phone number to call to arrange a visit. My wife called, but the man who responded told her he was in Ravenna; tomorrow morning, he said, he would be there at 9.45 – or maybe later, he wasn’t sure. Since we were planning to be on the road by 9.00, that was that. The only other thing of note in the village was splendid views of the valley which we would be hiking across the next day.

There was also a stone tablet set in a wall which got me all excited.

It commemorates the fact that Garibaldi and his beloved wife Anita stayed here in July 1849. Theirs was an impossibly romantic story. They met in 1839 in Brazil; Garibaldi was fighting in a number of wars of independence in Latin America. The way my history teacher told the story in my O-level history class (the only thing I really remember of the part of the curriculum on Italian unification), Anita was washing clothes in the river. Garibaldi spotted her through his telescope from the bridge of his ship. He immediately got his sailors to row him over to her. When he reached her he declared to her – in Italian – “you must be mine!” She was already married but somehow or other the husband was dispensed with and they got married. When Garibaldi came back to Italy in 1848 to fight in the various popular uprisings taking place there, she followed him. She was with him in Rome in 1849, when he was defending the short-lived Roman Republic. Together, they escaped as the Republic collapsed in June. Their aim was to get to Venice, but they were being pursued by at least three armies and navies: the French, Austrian, and papal forces. It was during this flight towards Venice that the pair spent a – presumably hurried – night in Citerna. Tragically, Anita died, probably of malaria, in Garibaldi’s arms, near Ravenna in early August. I throw in a photo of the pair.

Back in Citerna, we also came across this amusing sculpture.

Made of scrap metal, it commemorates the pilgrims who pass through Citerna, walking the Via di Francesco on their way to Assisi. It was the route we would be taking the next day, although we would be walking it in the opposite direction, to Sansepolcro.

Sansepolcro (pop: 15,000)

We made our way down the hill from Citerna and then started making our way across the valley which lay between us and Sansepolcro. We were taking small roads across the valley which wound their way across flat fields.

From time to time, we passed groups of pilgrims walking the other way, otherwise we had the road to ourselves. 15 km later we arrived at Sansepolcro.

Having dropped off our rucksacks, we went off to explore. In truth, there wasn’t much to explore, but we did go and see the town’s crown jewel, its municipal museum, which contains this lovely polyptich painted by Piero della Francesca.

I’ve always loved these depictions of Mary as the Madonna of Mercy, where she is gathering up a group of faithful into the folds of her cloak. If I had lived in the Renaissance – and if I had been very rich – I would have commissioned a Madonna of Mercy, with my wife and I, along with our two children, their partners, and their children, all gathered under her cloak.

The museum also contained this magnificent Resurrection by Piero della Francesca.

There is a heart-warming story about this fresco. Aldous Huxley had visited Sansepolcro to see this fresco, and in an essay he wrote in the 1920s he described it as “the greatest picture in the world”. In the summer of 1944, as Allied troops were advancing up Italy, the Royal Horse Artillery took up positions to shell Sansepolcro according to orders received. Suddenly, a Lieutenant, by the name of Anthony Clarke, remembered reading that essay as a teenager. Fearing that the shelling could destroy the fresco, he ordered the men to cease fire. Luckily for him, the Germans had already evacuated the town, so the Allied troops could capture it without losses.

The rest of the museum was so-so, although I was much struck by a very strange fresco tucked away in a back room.

It is meant to represent the Holy Trinity, although this three-headed person looks more monstrous than holy.

Città di Castello (pop: 38,000)

The next day, we made a 10 km hike southwards to Città di Castello. We weren’t following a pilgrim trail, just a route suggested by one of the hiking apps we use. The first half was very pleasant, taking us along back roads and tracks through fields. The second half was less so, having us walk along a busy road and then through what seemed like the interminable suburbs of the town itself.

Once we had found our lodgings and dropped off our rucksacks, we sallied out to see what we could find. As in the case of Sansepolcro, there really wasn’t much to find. But we did discover – to our surprise, I have to admit – that Città di Castello was the birthplace of a fairly well known modern Italian artist by the name of Alberto Burri, and that, with the blessings of the municipality, he had set up a museum containing an extensive collection of his works. The Green Michelin Guide, my go-to source for all things cultural to visit, gave the museum two stars. Well, what the hell, we said, why not.

Well, I can’t say I was super excited by his work. He used materials like tar, iron, plastic, wood, earth, and glue to create his pieces, which I suppose would be defined as abstract art. A site I read had this to say about him: “Alberto Burri was an Italian painter, among the most important of the 20th Century. His techniques anticipated movements like arte povera and nuovo realismo.” The only work in the museum which I could have lived with is this one.

After our visit to the museum, we wended our way to the town’s main drag to have an Aperol Spritz, but not before coming across this wonderful stone tablet set in the wall of the old municipal building.

It was an excellent example of a style of lapidary declamation that I often come across in Italy: wordy, pompous, and often – to me, anyway – incomprehensible, mostly because no punctuation is ever used. Below is my best guess at a translation of what the Socialists of Città di Castello were trying to say back in 1911:

“From the red dawn of the International to the victorious outbreak of proletarian forces, neither persecution nor honours bent the proud soul of Andrea Costa away from the socialist ideals of workers’ rights. Supporter, apostle, in the square, in prison, in parliament.

In the name of he who was the symbol of the noblest faith, the Internationalist group of Città di Castello, dispersed in the lands of exile by violent blasts, remember, honor.

The Socialists”

Perugia (pop: 162,000)

We took a creaky old train, much painted over by graffiti, to Ponte San Giovanni at the foot of Perugia and then a bus up to Perugia itself, high up on the hilltops. The weather had turned and we reached our hotel in the midst of a downpour.

My only memory of Perugia from my previous visit of 50 years ago is a very vague one. It has to do with a museum, the national gallery of Umbria, but has nothing to do with any of the pieces in that museum. My memory synapses just stored away my pleasure at the halls’ minimalist style: undecorated white walls, relatively few well spaced paintings on these walls, uncluttered floors with only the occasional bench to sit on. It is a style that my wife and I have adopted all our lives – although I have sometimes weakened, seeing lovely, and relatively cheap, things to hang on the wall; but my wife has kept me on the straight and narrow. I must admit, it is a strange memory of Perugia to have carried with me all these decades. For instance, I have no memory of the town’s topography. Over the millennia, Perugia has spread over a series of hilltops and their connecting crests, so there are a lot of fairly steep ascents and descents involved in visiting the town. My wife, on her first visit to Perugia, was charmed by this form of urban development and took several photos to record it.

To help the locals (and maybe tourists) to tackle the town’s steep slopes, the municipality has installed escalators at various points. This one passes through the bowels of a fortress built by a pope to keep the Perugians in line.

They rather reminded us of the Central-Mid Levels escalator in Hong Kong – although that one was considerably longer.

The municipality has also rather cleverly readapted an old viaduct and made it into a walkway.

Talking of the national gallery of Umbria, it was a pleasure to (re)visit it. It houses a wonderful, huge crucifix by “the Master of Saint Francis”.

In general, its Medieval and early Renaissance collections are lovely.

The rest of the town delivered a few more pleasurable encounters:

The fontana maggiore place in the town’s main piazza, mainly for its sculpted panels.

The panels were carved by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano (we weren’t actually looking at the originals, which are now housed in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria). The panels depict the months of the year, various allegorical figures, and some other subjects. I show the two panels which cover the months of our two birthdays.

The ornate interior of the abbey church of San Pietro

Rome (pop: 2,760,000)

We took the Flixbus down to Rome, which left us off at Tiburtina station. From there, without even bothering to put down our bags at the hotel, we took the subway to Palazzo Barberini where the Caravaggio exhibition was being held.

It was a wonderful exhibition. Some of the pieces I had already seen “in the flesh”, like this painting, Judith Beheading Holofernes, held in Palazzo Barberini’s own collection.

Others I had only seen in my book of Caravaggio’s paintings. For instance, this one, The Taking of Christ, which currently resides in the National Gallery of Ireland (it was rediscovered a mere thirty years ago!).

And this one, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, from Naples, is now considered to be Caravaggio’s last painting.

In both, one can see self-portraits of Caravaggio, at the back of the crowds, peering over people’s shoulders.

With that, all our visits on this little trip were now over. But not, alas, our adventures, or rather misadventures in this case. On the subway trip back to the hotel, my wallet was picked from my pocket. The money was the least of things. Gone were the credit and debit cards, my residence permit for Austria, my driver’s license, and few other odds and ends.

Back home

We took the bus back to our seaside place. All the way, I was seething inside over my wallet. I decided I should put a curse on the thief. I should do like the ancients, who wrote their curses on thin sheets of lead, rolled them up, and consigned them to a sacred place. The example I give here is one of 130 curse tablets that were discovered at the bottom of what was during Roman times a sacred spring in Bath, in the UK.

I don’t know what particular curse this tablet has scratched on it, but one of the 130 has this to say about the theft of a ring:

“So long as someone, whether slave or free, keeps silent or knows anything about it, may he be accursed in his blood and eyes and every limb, and even have all his intestines quite eaten away if he has stolen the ring or been privy to the theft.”

Hmm, that sounds like a good curse. But actually, I know an even better one, a really hideous one. I won’t say what it is because then it wouldn’t work anymore. I don’t need a sheet of lead, a sheet of paper will do, and I will consign it to one of those offerings boxes they have in churches. Let the thief suffer the torments of hell, for ever and ever and ever!

SAINT ERASMUS AND HIS GUTS

Milan, 18 March 2025

My wife and I recently went to an exhibition at the Gallerie d’Italia, a relatively new museum in Milan which is situated right next to the Scala. The exhibition’s title, “The Genius of Milan. Crossroads of the Arts from the Cathedral Workshop to the Twentieth Century”, didn’t really reveal what the exhibition was about, and I’m not sure I had any better idea after our visit. I think it was trying to show how many non-Milanese artists had come to Milan over the centuries and flourished there, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

In any event, at some point I was suddenly transfixed by this painting, which shows in horrible, gory detail some poor guy having his entrails pulled out of him and wound around some contraption or other.

The painting’s label helpfully informed me that the poor guy in question was Saint Erasmus and he was being martyred. It was clearly a popular subject, because there was another painting just across the way about the same thing.

I’ve mentioned in past posts that early and Medieval Christians loved dreaming up horrible deaths for martyrs, but this one really took the biscuit! What sadistic mind came up with this one? And how did this particular form of torture even cross their mind?! I had, of course, to do some research.

As usual, as written up in the various pious hagiographies which appeared from at least the 5th Century onwards, St. Erasmus’s life seems to be one long muddle. So I’m going to more or less ignore these and sketch out what I think happened, not so much to Erasmus himself as to the legends which clustered around him and to the way he was portrayed in paintings.

It would seem that Erasmus started out as a local saint in the city of Formiae, a Roman port city some 90 km up the coast from Naples. Perhaps he was a bishop there. Bishop or no, there is a good chance that he was martyred in the city during Emperor Diocletian’s campaign of persecution, which ran with differing degrees of intensity from 303 AD to 313 AD. In later centuries, when relics of martyrs and saints became so important, his remains must have been reverently kept by the citizens of Formiae. Probably, too, to bolster the importance of his relics, legends about wondrous deeds performed by Erasmus began to circulate. One of these, which is important for our story, has him continuing to preach even after a thunderbolt struck the ground beside him. By the 5th Century, manuscripts also relating his nasty, vicious martyrdom at the hands of various Emperors were already circulating.

In the meantime, back in the real world, things were not going too well for Formiae. After suffering badly at the hands of the barbarians who flowed into Italy during the death throes of the western Roman Empire, it was razed to the ground in 842 AD by “Saracen” pirates who came from the sea. Its citizens ran – literally – for the hills, and that was the end of Formiae. Luckily, before the city was finally trashed, Erasmus’s precious relics were transported over the bay to nearby Gaeta, which was located on a much more defensible position, as this photo shows, and managed to hold off the pirates.

The relics are held to this day in Gaeta’s cathedral, along with the relics of four or five other saints, in a large crypt built in the early 17th Century.

In the 9th Century, when the relics were transferred from Formiae, and for a few centuries thereafter, Gaeta was a marine republic, like the ones on the Sorrentine peninsula further south, and very much in competition with them. Shipping was the backbone of the city’s prosperity, and the city’s sailors adopted Erasmus – one of Gaeta’s patron saints now that they owned his relics – as their personal patron saint. It seems that they chose him on the basis of that story I mentioned earlier, of him being unperturbed by a lightning bolt hitting the ground next to him. One of the perils which sailors ran (and still run) were violent storms. It’s not surprising that so many of the ex-votos found in churches in port cities have as their subject a sailor who was saved during a storm.

During such storms their boats could get hit by lightning. And so Erasmus became one of the patron saints of sailors. In this guise, he was often associated with the crank of a windlass. This may seem odd to readers, but windlasses were used on boats to pull up or let out an anchor or other heavy weights. The heavy weight is tied to a rope, the rope – maybe threaded through a winch – is wound around a barrel, which sailors turn using a crank (K in the diagram below).

It looks like people simplified everything by just associating the crank with Erasmus.

St. Erasmus’s connection in the minds of sailors to lightning got them to also connect him to another electrical phenomenon which sailing ships were (and still are) subject to. In brief, during thunderstorms, when high-voltage differentials are present between the clouds and the ground, oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air can get ionized around the point of any rod-like object and glow faintly blue or violet. Well, of course, sailing ships in the old days had lots of rod-like objects, like masts or spars or booms, and when conditions were right there would be a faint glow at the end of all these. Here is a print of an old sailing ship with these ghostly “flames” on the ends of its masts and spars.

And here is a modern photo of the phenomenon around a clipper ship, the Cutty Sark, moored on the Thames in London.

Well, of course, sailors knew nothing of the physics behind the phenomenon. They interpreted those little flames as meaning that St. Erasmus was protecting their ship, especially since the phenomenon often occurred before the thunder and lightning started. And so the phenomenon become known as St. Elmo’s Fire (Elmo being an Italian corruption of Erasmus).

In a parallel universe, various martyrologies continued to be published over the ages, full of the usual hideous tortures meted out to martyrs. But nothing yet about poor Erasmus’s entrails being pulled out of him. Then, in about 1260, a certain Jacobus de Voragine published his martyrology under the title The Golden Legend. His story about Erasmus recycled many of the tortures covered in previous martyrologies to which the saint had been subjected. But then, Jacobus slipped in a brand new torture. In his words (translated into English by Wynken de Worde in 1527):

“[…] the emperor […] waxed out of his wit for anger, and called with a loud voice like as he had been mad, and said: This is the devil, shall we not bring this caitiff to death? Then found he a counsel for to make a windlass, […] and they laid this holy martyr under the windlass all naked upon a table, and cut him upon his belly, and wound out his guts or bowels out of his blessed body.”

Here is how the scene was depicted in one of the early editions of the Golden Legend (in case any readers are interested, the two fellows on the left having their heads chopped off are Saints Processus and Martinian).

Now, I said at the beginning, how did this particular form of torture ever cross Jacobus’s or someone else’s mind? Well, it has been suggested – and it doesn’t sound improbable – that whoever dreamed it up found inspiration (if that’s the word) from the association of Erasmus with the crank of a windlass. Presumably they assumed that the windlass had to have something to do with his martyrdom. After all, the depictions of many martyrs have them holding the instruments of their torture. Saint Lawrence, for instance, leaning on the grill he was roasted on:

Or Saint Bartholomew carrying the knife with which he was flayed alive.

Or Saint Stephen, balancing on his head and shoulders the stones with which he was stoned to death.

But what could the torture be in Erasmus’s case? Well, what do we humans have that looks like ropes? Entrails! And so this novel form of torture was dreamed up.

Now, Jacobus’s list of tortures inflicted on poor Erasmus is really long: I count 19 in all. Many of them would have made very appropriate subjects for the gory paintings of martyrs so beloved by painters until quite recent times. And yet, the entrails being pulled out on the windlass really caught on; I have to assume it’s because that was the one torture that Jacobus had a picture of in his book. Here’s just a few examples I found on the internet.

This first version is a more sophisticated variant of the picture in The Golden Legend and had added the emperor, “waxed out of his wit for anger”, looking on.

This next version is quite similar, except that St. Erasmus’s bishop’s mitre has now been thoughtfully placed to one side.

In this next one, we’re beginning to get a bit more dramatic.

While this one, by Nicolas Poussin, has pushed the drama levels to stratospheric heights.

Other paintings, perhaps trying to avoid all the gruesomeness of these kinds of paintings, just had a thoughtful-looking Erasmus, dressed as a bishop, holding his crank around which his entrails have been tastefully wound. This next painting is an excellent example of the genre.

This focus on Erasmus’s guts and the acute pain he no doubt suffered having them drawn out had an interesting side-effect. I’ve mentioned in a previous post the Fourteen Holy Helpers who helped Medieval people deal with their physical trials and tribulations – the headaches, or the sore throats, or the epileptic fits, or … they suffered from. Well, Erasmus fit very well into this scheme of things! He was obviously the go-to Holy Helper for cases of stomach and intestinal illnesses.

I related in the postscript to a previous post that in a moment of weakness I had bought a painting on glass of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. All this research has allowed me to identify which of the Helpers in my painting is St. Erasmus. Here he is, with his crank and some of his intestines rolled around it. All this research I do does sometimes have benefits …

ARRESTING FACES

Milan, 28 February 2025

It was freezing cold in Vienna this last month we were there, far too cold for my wife and I to go hiking. So we spent our spare time visiting Vienna’s nice, warm museums. One museum we visited was the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts; I don’t think we’ve been back to it since a visit we made shortly after we arrived here, back in 1998. As the name indicates, we are actually dealing with an arts school, but it has quite a worthy collection of paintings donated to it by various aristocrats over the centuries. It has a particularly good collection of paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and it was one of these that caught my attention, St. Valentine and a Kneeling Donor, painted in 1502-1503.

What a magnificent face St. Valentine has! Not a handsome face at all, but it still had me gazing at it in fascination. A face full of character! If I were to meet this person in real life, my staring at him would probably provoke him into demanding what the hell I was looking at and to scarper before he took a swing at me. His face reminds me of the actor Walter Matthau at his most scowling.

From today’s perspective, what with the saint’s feast day of 14 February being irremediably lodged in our collective memories as the day of lovers, I think many people would be surprised by Cranach’s choice of model. They might have someone more sucrose in mind, like this painting in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome.

But that is to forget that in Cranach’s time, St. Valentine was also the saint to whom epileptics would pray, and in fact down at St. Valentine’s feet in Cranach’s painting one can see a man having an epileptic fit. Perhaps this rugged face fits better a saint who was meant to be dealing with epilepsy.

By coincidence, a few days later, at the Museum of the Lower Belvedere, I came across another painting with equally interesting faces. It is of three saints, Jerome, Leonard, and Nicholas. It is from the late 15th Century, painted by an unknown artist.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, I have a fascination for faces in art. When I visit most collections of Old Masters, after enduring a long series of paintings of classical figures prancing around in sylvan scenes or of various members of the nobility hamming it up in their best clothes, it comes as a relief for me to gaze upon portraits from times past. These are faces I can relate to, faces of people whom I could be seeing on any street corner on any day of the week, just dressed in different clothes. It reminds me that history is not some colourful story in a book but was the lived experience of people just like me.

Most of the faces I gaze on are pleasant; I look, I note, I move on. But sometimes – like St. Valentine’s – they are arresting. There is something about the face that holds my gaze, that makes me stop and look more closely, that makes me wonder what the person was like. Let me use the rest of this post to celebrate some of these arresting faces in art.

A good example is Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor. I am particularly fond of this portrait of him, by Albrecht Dürer, painted a few years after Cranach’s St. Valentine.

It’s another painting my wife and I saw as we took refuge from the cold in Vienna’s museums, this time in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

There are many other portraits of Maximilian, and in some of them he is frankly ugly, like this one of him and his family. With this side pose, his very prominent nose stands out.

Maximilian certainly looks better than many of his successors, who sported the monstrous Hapsburg jaw. It seems to have started with his grandson Charles V, who is in that last painting, bottom centre. It continued down the generations. Here is a portrait of Charles V when young.

In later life, he grew a beard, presumably to camouflage the chin.

But I don’t want to focus on ugly people, even though they are the subject of many, many paintings. So my next candidate for arresting faces is Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. Probably the most well-known portrait of him is this one in the Uffizi, in a double portrait with his wife Battista Sforza.

I prefer this portrait of him, though, where we see him together with his son Guidobaldo.

That is a really interestingly craggy face! It certainly mirrors his life, a man who was a brilliant condottiero but also a very cultured man: in the last painting, he is dressed in armour but he is reading a book, an allusion to his humanist interests. Of course, the thing most people almost immediately notice about his face is that notch at the top of his prominent nose. He lost his right eye in a joust (and probably smashed up the right side of his face in the process; he always had himself painted from the left). To be able to see better with his one remaining eye, especially when fighting, he had the top of his nose cut away. A tough, tough guy …

Staying in Italy, the next arresting face I pull up is that of Lorenzo de Medici, il Magnifico. Of the many representations that were made of him, I choose this terracotta statue, whose brooding look captures me. What dark secrets are hidden there!

Other arresting faces come from Caravaggio. It’s the faces of the secondary characters in his paintings who most draw my eye. A prime example is the Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Look at the weatherbeaten faces of those three apostles! They could truly be fishermen walking the shores of the Sea of Galilee, or indeed any shores anywhere.

Or his Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist. Look at the face of the executioner!

It’s a face which reminds me of Michelangelo’s, another arresting face.

Personally, I’ve always loved this self-portrait, where Michelangelo included himself as Nicodemus in the Deposition, a sculpture I first saw in Florence decades and decades ago on my first trip to Italy.

Michelangelo’s badly broken nose adds to the allure of his face. I read a while back that it got broken after he mocked the drawings of the artist Pietro Torrigiano, who in a rage took a swing at him.

I can’t leave Italy without including a portrait of San Carlo Borromeo, cardinal archbishop of Milan.

His large nose led the Milanese to nickname him Il Nason, Big Nose.

Readers will see that it’s all been men up to now. Indeed, it’s been very hard to find paintings of women’s faces which are arresting: beautiful yes, haughty yes, homely yes, motherly yes, careworn yes, but arresting …

After a considerable amount of searching, I came up with a few examples. This is Mary, Queen of England.

Now that is the face of a very determined woman! And determined she was. She suffered through all the travails of her father Henry VIII declaring her illegitimate, banishing her from court, and refusing to let her be with her mother when she died, and, once on the throne, she tried with all her might to bring England back into the Catholic fold.

And this is her half-sister Elizabeth I.

She, too, suffered under Henry VIII, nearly losing her head at one point, and when she was queen had to navigate tempestuous religious factional fighting. She was not a woman to be pushed around.

Perhaps I could add this self-portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi. It’s not a face that necessarily arrests me, but knowing her background – raped when she was young by another painter, tortured during his trial for rape to see if she kept to her story, having to see her rapist’s meagre two-year sentence reversed after a short prison term – I sense a steeliness in her.

I finish with the face of a peasant woman in an early painting by Van Gogh, before he went to Paris. It’s from the Potato Eaters, a really dark painting (literally).

It’s the woman on the far right that intrigues me. I show a blow-up (I’ve also lightened it a bit).

Now that’s an arresting face!

A TOUR OF CHAGALL’S STAINED GLASS WINDOWS

Vienna, 15 February 2025
Updated Sori, 10 March 2025
Updated again Vienna, 14 August 2025

My wife and I have just seen an exhibition of Marc Chagall’s paintings at the Albertina in Vienna (we’re normally not here at this time of the year, but I have to give a course on circular economy at the Central European University). I’m sure it was an excellent exhibition, although in truth what really has stayed with me is the crowds. It was just a few days before the end of the exhibition, so everyone who had been putting off going to see it had piled in. It’s really not possible to enjoy what’s on offer when you have to spend most of your time manoeuvring around other people to catch a quick glimpse of the paintings before your view is obscured by someone’s head. At least it was nice to see the original of a poster we have hanging in our apartment, although it’s depressing to think that the painting probably just sits in a bank vault in Japan most of the time (the label mentioned that it was owned by some anonymous Japanese).

In any event, one of the things I learned as I ducked and weaved through the crowds was that Chagall had, late in his career, designed a number of stained glass windows. Now that intrigued me, because I have a great love of stained glass. I should quickly qualify that statement, though. It is Medieval stained glass that I love, because of its quasi-abstract nature; it’s not the scenes which are depicted in the windows that matter, it’s the sense of being flooded in multi-coloured light. I still remember vividly the first time I saw the stained glass windows in Chartres Cathedral, which my wife and I visited when we lived in Paris in the early 1980s.

I remember just as vividly the first time I saw the stained glass windows in La Sainte Chapelle in Paris, which my sister had taken me to see some ten years earlier.

I don’t find later stained glass windows nearly as interesting, because the scenes in the glass intrude too much and that feeling of being bathed in colour is lost. Just look at the stained glass in the Duomo of Milan, considered “an extraordinary testament to the history of the art of stained glass windows from the early 15th to late 20th centuries”, yet really quite boring.

So, as I say, I was intrigued by the idea that Chagall had designed stained glass windows. His love of colour and the semi-abstract flavour of much of his work suggested to me that perhaps he could do something interesting. Once back home, I began to dig a little, to see where my wife and I would have to go to see his stained glass windows. He designed stained glass windows in Europe, Israel, and the USA. I decided to knock the latter two countries off the list: one day, maybe, we can visit his windows there, but only if we happen to be in the right place at the right time. The stained glass windows in Europe were more promising. By chance, I came across a map that helpfully indicated all the places in Europe where Chagall had designed stained glass windows. Looking at that map, I came to the exciting conclusion that my wife and I could make an interesting 11-day tour of all his European stained glass windows! I will use this post to persuade my wife that this could be an excellent project for the late Spring, when the days are getting long but are not too hot yet.

We would start the tour in Milan. I was initially thinking of travelling by bus and train, as we usually do, but it would be too complicated. So car it would have to be. Our first port of call would be the church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce, located in the village of Passy in Haute Savoie, in France, just on the other side of the Mont-Blanc road tunnel (looks pretty, but I would make sure we would be there after the snow was gone; I’m not driving in any snow).

According to Google Maps, it would take us a little over three hours to get there, so if we set off in the morning we could be visiting the church in the afternoon. It would actually be a good place to start the tour because the church holds the first two windows which Chagall ever designed, back in 1956-57. Truth to tell, there wouldn’t be much to see. The two windows, which are located in the baptistery, are quite nice.

However, as readers can see in this photo, which is an overview of the whole baptistery, they are really quite modest in size.

Of considerably greater interest is the ceramic “painting” on the wall – also by Chagall – of the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea.

In fact, I would say that the rest of the church is probably much more interesting, filled as it is by artworks by other major 20th Century artists: Pierre Bonnard, Fernand Léger, Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Jacques Lipchitz, just to name the ones I’m familiar with. Here is the façade, graced by a mosaic by Léger.

And here is a view of the choir, with what looks to be a magnificent tapestry.

I’m thinking that there is more than enough in this church – even if it isn’t Chagall – to keep us occupied for a couple of hours, so we should probably just spend the night in Passy and leave the next day for Zürich, our next stop on the tour.

According to Google Maps, it would take us four hours to get Zürich from Passy. We would be visiting the Fraumünster.

Chagall designed five large windows for the choir of the church between 1967 and 1970. You can see three of them in the far distance in this photo.

This photo shows the three windows up close (it’s almost impossible to get a photo of all five together since the other two are to the side of these three).

Chagall also designed a small rose window at the other end of the nave, installed in 1978.

I’m guessing that we could easily visit this church in the afternoon and then stay the night in Zürich.

On Day 3, our final destination would be Mainz, in Germany, where we would be visiting the church of Saint Stephen. It would take us a little over four hours to get there, but I’ve noticed that the route which Google Maps suggests would take us via Strasbourg. I’m thinking that we should take the occasion to make a quick detour to visit Strasbourg Cathedral.

It has some fine late Medieval stained glass windows. The rose window is especially remarkable.

We could make an early start from Zürich, plan a late morning visit to Strasbourg Cathedral, and then, after eating what would no doubt be an excellent Alsatian choucroute for lunch, we could continue on our way to Mainz in the afternoon. Once in Mainz, rather than squeezing in a hurried visit to the church of St. Stephen we could just check into the hotel and stroll around Mainz, which seems to have a very pleasant old town.

Day 4 would start bright and early, at the church of Saint Stephen.

Chagall designed nine windows here between 1978 and 1985, the year he died (and further windows were designed after his death by Charles Marq, Chagall’s glassmaker for many of his windows, in Chagall’s style). This photo gives a sense of the blue light which visitors will find themselves bathed in (like in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris).

This photo instead is a close-up of the three windows in the choir, which show Chagall’s inimitable style.

After this bath of blue, we would drive some two and a half hours back south into France, to Sarrebourg, where we would visit the small chapelle des Cordeliers.

Chagall designed five windows for this chapel, although as readers might imagine, looking at the photo of the chapel, it is only one, very large, magnificent window that captures all the attention.

At first glance, the window seems to be made up of an enormous posy of flowers. But as a reader pointed out to me, that posy actually seems to be the Tree of Life that grew in the Garden of Eden. In fact, we see what appear to be Adam and Eve in, or maybe above, the tree. The rest of the window is full of scenes from the Bible. The other small windows designed by Chagall are on the left-hand wall.

I’m thinking that we should easily have the time after our visit to push on to Metz (an hour and a half away) and spend the night there.

The next morning (we are now on day 5), we would visit Metz cathedral.

Chagall designed three windows for the cathedral over a period of ten years, between 1958 and 1968.

But what is perhaps more interesting about the cathedral is that it is stuffed with stained glass – some 6,500 square metres of it – ranging from the 13th to the 20th centuries. I’m sure this will be an interesting place to compare Chagall’s work to earlier stained glass windows. To whet our appetites, I throw in here a photo of a window from the 13th Century.

This window instead was installed in the 16th Century (and those clearly visible figures of saints are now crowding out the colour of the glass).

There’s not just the windows to see in the cathedral, so I’m sure the visit would take up the whole morning. So I see ourselves leaving for our next destination, Rheims, in the afternoon. It would take us two hours to get there, so we would arrive in the late afternoon and be ready for a nice dinner in town (with a glass of champagne, no doubt) after checking into our hotel.

The morning of day 6 would see us visiting Rheims cathedral. The cathedral was very badly damaged during the First World War and – among other things – lost nearly all of its original stained glass windows (some had been taken down for safekeeping at the beginning of the war).

The cathedral chapter reinstalled what it could and decided to replace lost windows. The three windows designed by Chagall and installed in 1974 were part of this renewal effort.

But here, too, we would need to spend some time looking at the cathedral’s other windows, like these two rose windows (which are actually modern windows, installed in the 1930s).

The next two stops in our tour are in the south-east of England, so after visiting Rheims cathedral we would need to head over to Calais and catch Le Shuttle train over to Dover, passing through the Channel Tunnel. We would drive out of Dover to Royal Tunbridge Wells and spend the night there. I’ve read that it’s a nice place to visit, although a bit on the twee side.

The next morning (at this point, we are in day 7 of our tour), we would take a 15-minute drive to All Saints Church in the neighbouring village of Tudeley.

All twelve windows of this small church were designed by Chagall, between 1963 and 1978.

But it is the East window that stands out.

By mid morning, I reckon we would be on our way to our next destination, Chichester cathedral, which it would take us an hour and a half to reach.

Chagall designed one window in the cathedral, between 1975 and 1978.

It is quite a modest-sized window, and as far as I can tell is tucked away in a corner. The remaining windows in the cathedral don’t look particularly interesting, being mostly Victorian. There are a few other things to see. But, all in all, I think we would be finished quite quickly.

We would now need to go back to France. Looking at Google Maps, I’m thinking we should drive to Portsmouth (a mere 20-minutes’ drive from Chichester), catch a late ferry to Cherbourg, and spend the night there.

The next destination, la Chapelle du Saillant, is a full day’s drive from Cherbourg. Rather than do one long drive, though, it would be nicer to break the trip about half way. Looking at the map, I’m therefore thinking that on day 8 we could make a stop-over at Tours, on the Loire river, where we could usefully spend the afternoon visiting the cathedral.

It has some splendid Medieval stained glass windows.

Day 9 would then see us driving down to the chapelle du Saillant, a three and a half hours’ drive from Tours.

We would visit the chapel, all six of whose windows were designed by Chagall between 1978 and 1982.

But it’s only two windows which are worth seeing, the window in the choir and the occulus above the door; the other four are just grisaille.

Our visit would be quite quick, and then it would be on to the next location. By rights, if we were to really visit all the places where Chagall designed windows, that should be Moissac, near Toulouse. But the church there has only one window by Chagall and it’s really small. On top of it, Moissac would be quite a detour. So I’ve made an executive decision: our last destination on this tour would be the Marc Chagall National Museum in Nice.

That being said, Nice would be too far away to reach after our visit to the chapelle du Saillant. Looking at Google Maps, I’m thinking that we could drive to Rodez, about two and a half hours’ away, and spend the night there. We might even be able to squeeze in a visit to Rodez cathedral.

It has little Medieval glass, lost over the ages. On the other hand, it has some remarkable windows which were installed some 15 years ago.

Day 10 would bring us to Nice. That’s still a five hours’ drive from Rodez, too long a drive to then follow up with a visit to a museum. So I’m thinking that we can take our time getting there – maybe take a side trip to Avignon or Aix-en-Provence on the way – and arrive in Nice in the evening.

Which brings us to day 11 with its visit to the Marc Chagall National Museum.

The museum is actually primarily a collection of Chagall’s paintings.

But it does have four, very large, Chagall windows. They grace the museum’s auditorium.

Anyway, given that the germ for this tour was planted in an exhibition of his paintings, it would be a satisfying closure of the circle to see some of his windows against a backdrop of his paintings.

I reckon we could “do” the museum in a morning. So after a quick lunch, we could head back to our starting point in Milan. It’s a three and a half hours’ drive, manageable in an afternoon.

Well, I think this would be a very enjoyable little trip. But have I done a good enough job to persuade my wife? We shall see.

POST SCRIPTUM 10 March, 2025

Well, we’ve just come back from a weekend trip to Nice, where we visited the Chagall museum. Very beautiful! But it looks like the big trip I’ve been proposing is out. We’ll use the salami approach instead: whenever we happen to be going close to one of these windows we’ll go and visit them. Such is life …

THE GROUP OF SEVEN

Milan, 13 January 2025

My wife and I were recently listening to an article from the New York Times about an Egyptian immigrant to New York, by the name of Armia Khalil. Mr. Khalil had been an artist in Egypt. He liked to create pieces that echoed the country’s ancient artefacts. He did so using tools he had created that were similar to those used by the Ancient Egyptians themselves. Of course, when Mr. Khalil arrived in New York, with a suitcase crammed with his tools but with hardly two nickels to rub together, he didn’t have the luxury to use them; he needed a job. But he didn’t want any old job. He wanted a job that brought him close to art. So he applied over and over again for jobs as a museum guard to the city’s many museums; he reasoned that at least this would allow him rub shoulders with art all day. Finally, after six years of trying, he managed to unhook a museum guard job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Readers can read (or hear) the rest of his delightfully heart-warming story in the original New York Times article, if they can get around the paper’s firewall. If not, they can visit his WordPress blog – it gives me great pleasure to advertise a fellow WordPress blogger.

Mr. Khalil’s repeated attempts to be hired as a museum guard to get close to art brought back fond memories for me. Because I had tried to do the same many, many years ago. It was January, I was 18, I was staying with my parents in Ottawa for five months until the beginning of June, I needed to find something to do. Whenever I had spent the holidays with my parents, I had always found the time to visit Canada’s National Gallery. This is the building I used to visit, back in the early 1970s, although I see it has now moved into a sparkling new building somewhere else in Ottawa.

I found the time I spent there most soothing. I thought, why not spend my five months in Ottawa, sitting on a chair in the Gallery’s exhibition rooms and admiring the art around me? So I got myself an appointment with the head of the guards and arrived promptly for the interview. It was in a dreary, windowless office somewhere in the basement of the building. He was sitting at his desk, flanked by one of his guards. He invited me to sit down. He looked me over. Then, with great frankness, he told me why he doubted that I was right for the job. He pointed out that I was much more educated than the other guards, so had I thought about what my social interactions with them would be like? (the implication being, no doubt, that I would be awfully lonely during the working day, with no colleagues to really speak to). Did I not think, he continued, that I was far too young to get stuck in what was, at the end of the day, a pretty boring job? His basic message, I felt, was that it was best to be ignorant, probably stupid, and old before accepting a dead-end job as a museum guard. His side-kick nodded throughout this analysis, which was sad because at the end of the day his chief was talking about him. Thinking about it now, he could have been describing Mr. Bean working at the Royal National Gallery in London, in the film Bean.

My interview was terminated with a final parting shot. The chief pointed to my fashionably long hair and regretfully informed me I would have to cut it, to conform to the short-back-and-sides style sported by the (male) guards. Crestfallen, I left without a job. Unlike Mr. Khalil, I did not try other museums or art galleries in Ottawa.

It was actually just a couple of rooms in the National Gallery that I would particularly have wanted to sit in as a guard, using my time to admire the paintings. They were dedicated to the Group of Seven, a coalition of Canadian painters who came together from shortly after World War I to the early 1930s. They were looking for a style of landscape painting that was distinctly Canadian and modern. To my mind, they succeeded brilliantly, with Lawren Harris being the jewel in the crown. His iconic painting, North Shore, Lake Superior, painted in 1926, is in the National Gallery.

But he painted many other wonderful paintings. Here is a selection. This first painting, Northern Lake, is from around 1923, early on in the Group of Seven’s life.

This painting, from around 1924, is another whose subject is Lake Superior: Pic Island.

At some point in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Harris went to Canada’s far north and even to Greenland. The results of these expeditions were a long series of almost abstract paintings of great beauty. I show only three here. The first two hang on our walls in Vienna in the form of prints (I am not, alas, rich enough to be able to afford an original Lawren Harris).

This one is titled Lake and Mountains, from 1928.

And this one is Mt Lefroy from 1930.

The final painting I show from Lawren Harris is Icebergs, Davis Strait, also from 1930.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in later decades Harris veered off into abstraction. I haven’t followed him there; abstract art is not really my thing.

While I particularly admire Harris, the paintings of the other members of the Group of Seven are not be sniffed at. I give one example for each of them.

Franklin Carmichael, Wabajisik Drowned Lake, from 1929.

A.Y. Jackson, Barns, from 1926.

Frank Johnston, The Fire Ranger, from 1921.

Arthur Lismer, Pine Wrack, from 1933.

J.E.H. MacDonald, Algoma Waterfall, 1920

Frederick Varley, Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay, from 1921.

After all these years, I still don’t know if I would have enjoyed spending five months next to the paintings of this group of artists, or if I would have been bored to tears by the company of my fellow guards, or both. For any readers who might be asking themselves what I did end up doing those five months, I can reveal that I went to work for the YM/YWCA. I replaced a guy who had to go on a long sick leave, so it was a perfect fit. My job was to hand out stationary to the staff and to print the various flyers which they produced. I became a dab hand at offset printing, even if I say so myself – a skill, alas, I was never able to put to good use again.

THREE WISE MEN

Milan, 6 January 2025

Today is 6 January, the day of the Epiphany! The day when the Three Wise Men arrive in Bethlehem to find the Child Jesus. Momentous event! In the words of St. Matthew’s Gospel (I cite the King James version)

And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.

Or, as the Christmas carol puts it

Three Wise Men
We Three Kings of Orient are,
Bearing gifts we traverse afar,
Field and fountain,
Moor and mountain,
Following yonder Star.
Refrain
O Star of Wonder, Star of Night,
Star with Royal Beauty bright,
Westward leading,
Still proceeding,
Guide us to Thy perfect Light.

Gaspard
Born a King on Bethlehem plain,
Gold I bring to crown Him again,
King for ever,
Ceasing never
Over us all to reign.
Refrain

Melchior
Frankincense to offer have I,
Incense owns a Deity nigh:
Prayer and praising
All men raising,
Worship Him God on High.
Refrain

Balthazar
Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;—
Sorrowing, sighing,
Bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.
Refrain

Three Wise Men
Glorious now behold Him arise,
King, and God, and Sacrifice;
Heav’n sings Hallelujah:
Hallelujah the earth replies.
Refrain

The Three Wise Men are, of course, important characters in our annual crèche. Ever since Christmas Day, they have been travelling across the furniture of our living room, on their way to Bethlehem. This year, I have had them accompanied by a retinue worthy of their rank.

I found the figurines of the retinue in a box where they had been carefully stored away by my mother-in-law many years ago. It seemed a pity not to bring them out into the light of day. I think it all looks pretty impressive! (But we have to do something about the camels; I’ve been telling my wife for years that we need to find some more camels, one camel simply isn’t enough. And we have to get a statue to replace the kneeling Wise Man; kneeling before the Baby Jesus is OK, but he can’t be on his knees the whole trip to Bethlehem …).

Here, we can see the tail-end of the cortege.

I added the birds because they were also in the box. A bit odd, but why not? Maybe the Wise Men were like St. Francis, they were listened to by the birds (boy, are we going to have fun when we set up the crèche with our grandson, possibly grandchildren, in a few years’ time! Who knows what interesting additions we could come up with!).

And now the Three Wise Men have arrived at the manger and are adoring the Baby Jesus!

This scene of the Adoration of the Magi has been painted over and over again by European artists. I pick here just one of the many offerings. It is by the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes, who painted it in about 1470.

In truth, though, I prefer the rendering of the Three Wise Men in the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna.

Dressed as they are as Persians, wearing the Phrygian cap which Romans seemed to think all Persians wore, they fit better with what the Gospel of St. Matthew had to say: “behold, there came wise men from the east”. Now Matthew didn’t actually say how many Wise Men there were, but pretty quickly most Christian sects settled for three, one for each gift. Matthew also didn’t say how old they were, but clearly by the time these mosaics were laid down it was generally agreed that they represented the three ages of Man, so we have one old one, one middle-aged one, and one young one. It was only later that it was decided that they also represented the three races known to Europeans: the Europeans themselves, the peoples of the Middle-East, and the peoples of Africa. Paintings of the Magi are some of the earliest representations of Black people in European art. Here is a lovely example from an Adoration of the Magi by Hieronymus Bosch.

Painters don’t seem to have been much interested in what was happening to the Three Wise Men on their way to Bethlehem. But T.S. Eliot, in his poem Journey of the Magi, did try to imagine what the trip was like. I cite here the first twenty lines of the poem.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Compared to this description, our Three Wise Men have had it pretty easy: nice, warm living room, easy travel across the furniture, respectful entourage …

As told in St. Matthew’s Gospel, the arrival of the Three Wise Men was like a poke in a hornet’s nest. In Jerusalem, they asked, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” Matthew goes on, “When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And … he demanded of them where Christ should be born. And they said unto him, In Bethlehem … Then Herod … said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.” But, Matthew tells us, after giving Jesus his gifts, “being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.” He goes on, “behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt.” The Flight to Egypt was also a popular theme for European painters. I show one example, by my favourite painter, Caravaggio, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, where one of the painter’s luminous angels is playing music on a viol to soothe Mary and Jesus in their slumber (the music held by Joseph is readable; it is a motet by the Flemish composer Noel Bauldeweyn dedicated to the Madonna, with a text from the Song of Songs, Quam pulchra es, “How beautiful you are”; nice touch).

Alas, Herod was not a man to be crossed. Matthew tells us, “Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.” This Massacre of the Innocents was, too, a popular theme for European artists. I show here an example of the genre by Peter Breughel the Elder.

I’m actually being a little economical with the truth. This is really a copy of Breughel’s painting, by his son Peter Breughel the Younger. The original was once owned by the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II. For some reason – queasiness? – he had the dead children painted over. This copy retains the dead children.

Quite by chance, just before Christmas, we stumbled across a very sophisticated crèche, in a place called Baggio, which once was a village but then got swallowed up by Milan some 150 years ago. There, in the crypt of a church, over the last forty years or so, dedicated local volunteers have created 58 scenes from the Bible, with the Nativity being the central scene. Some of the scenes have running water, others have moving figurines, … it’s very impressive. Here is a shot of the first scene, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (with a delightfully slithery snake in the tree).

Here is one of Moses and the parting of the waters of the Red Sea.

And here is a shot of the central scene of the Nativity.

As I say, very impressive … although I will admit to having been just a teeny-weeny bit jealous. We’ll soon be packing away the crèche and its figurines for another year, but I’m already thinking how we could expand the offerings next year. Running water and moving figurines is a bit beyond me. But maybe Herod in a palace in Jerusalem? The Massacre of the Innocents? Some “snow” for the Wise Men to trudge wearily through? At least let’s fix the camel problem!

SAINT TECLA

Milan, 18 November 2024

Ever since 2016, when I wrote a post about Saint Radegund I’ve been meaning on and off – more off than on, I should say – to write a post about Saint Tecla, as part of my sub-category of posts on obscure saints whose names still dot the European landscape; in this particular case, a small road behind Milan’s Duomo is called after her. The last post in the series, from this summer, was about Sankt Ilgen. Two days ago, at the end of a hike which my wife and I did on Lake Como, I came across a church dedicated to Saint Tecla, in the village of Torno. It’s not a particularly interesting church. This is what the exterior looks like.

And this is a view of its interior.

Quite honestly, the view from the church’s door across Lake Como is more interesting.

Nevertheless, I took my bumping into this church as A Sign that I should finally get my finger out and write this post.

So who was this Saint Tecla? (and by the way, I prefer to use the Italian – and Spanish and Portuguese – spelling of her name rather than the English Thecla) Let me start by inserting a photo of a 6th Century mosaic portrait of her which graces the Basilica Eufrasiana in the town of Poreč in Istria, in Croatia.

For any of my readers who are interested in early Christian mosaics and have never visited the Basilica Eufrasiana, I suggest that you do so. I throw in a couple of photos of the mosaics there to whet their appetite.

Readers with good eyesight will see that the portrait of Saint Tecla is one of the portraits on the inside of the arch, to the right.

Given her great popularity in Christian Orthodox religions (probably much greater now than it is in Western Christian religions), I also throw in a photo of a depiction of her in a manuscript produced for the Eastern Roman Emperor Basil II in the 11th Century.

Of course, neither of these portraits is from life. And in fact, there is a good chance that Tecla never had a life – the Roman Catholic church quietly dropped her from its official Martyrology back in 1969, which normally occurred because there was a lack of historical evidence that the saint or martyr in question ever existed. But let us put this cavil aside, and see what her various hagiographers had to say about her.

Tecla was believed to have come from Iconium in the Roman province of Galatia (now Konya in the modern country of Türkiye). The story goes that when St. Paul passed through Iconium on his second missionary journey, Tecla was transfixed by his sermons. Here is the scene depicted in an altar carved in the 15th Century for a chapel in the cathedral of Saragossa in Spain, but which now resides in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters. That’s Saint Tecla at the the window of her house. Note the man (I think) stroking his chin pensively down at the right; a nice touch.

Unfortunately, Saint Paul seems to have lost his head. No worries, let me throw in a photo here of a fresco of St. Paul’s head, recently uncovered through the clever use of a laser-based technology, in a 4th Century catacomb named after St. Tecla, in Rome. This, I read, is the oldest extant solo portrait of the Apostle. I’m intrigued by the very pointy beard; I have never imagined Paul with that kind of beard.

Continuing on with Tecla’s story, she declared to her mother Theocleia and her fiancé Thamyris that she was abandoning her marriage plans and would join Paul. Both Theocleia and Thamyris were alarmed at this attempt at independence and decided to drag both Paul and Tecla before the city governor. Paul was merely sentenced to scourging and expulsion, but Tecla was to be burned at the stake. Turning again to that altar which once resided in Saragossa’s cathedral, we have the scene sculpted in alabaster. The sources say she was stripped naked, but that clearly didn’t play well with the sculptor and/or the donor.

Miraculously, a storm blew up, which doused the pyre. Personally, I would have put her back in gaol, built another pyre, and had a second go. But no, she was freed, whereupon she joined Paul, cut off her hair (I always find it interesting that hair is considered – by male authors? – such a sign of femininity, the cutting of which signifies renunciation of physical attraction), and followed him. And off they went to Antioch in Pisidia (nowadays called Yalvaç). There – even without her hair – she drew the lascivious attention of one Alexander, a nobleman of the city. He attempted to take her by force, but she fought him off, tearing off his cloak and knocking the coronet off his head in the process, much to the amusement of the townspeople. Seemingly, then, Alexander attempted this rape of Tecla, for that is what it seems to have been, in public, which is a little odd. Or maybe the writer of the story wanted to show the arrogance of power.

In any event, Alexander felt greatly injured in his aristocratic pride and had her dragged – yet again – in front of the city’s governor for assaulting a nobleman. This time, the governor condemned her to be thrown to the wild beasts (as an aside, I have to say that hagiographers of the early Christian martyrs all seem to have been working off the same playbook; martyrs were either burned at the stake, tortured in hideous ways, thrown into rivers with heavy weights around them, or thrown to wild beasts, or some combination of these). Interestingly, the women of Antioch rose up as one against the sentence, although it changed nothing (I think the hagiographers’ intention was to intimate that Tecla was a natural leader of women).

And so she was paraded through the streets of Antioch, stripped of her clothes (again), and thrust into the arena. The men in the crowds were baying for blood, the women were weeping for poor Tecla (taken by the spirit of the story, I have added this bit; as far as I know, none of the hagiographers said it, although they do make clear that the women in the crowd were rooting for Tecla). Miracle! Some of the wild animals (female) protected her from other (male) animals. A lioness was especially active in defending Tecla. We see the scene here in a 15th Century altar from the chapel of the Cathedral of Tarragona in Spain (in passing, I should note that Saint Tecla is the patron saint of Tarragona). In this case, the sculptor had no problems making Tecla at least half naked. Note all the animals lying meekly at her feet. I like, too, the crowd pressing in to see what’s happening.

At this point, the story gets somewhat muddled for me. Reading between the lines, and giving my fervid imagination free rein, I’m guessing that the organizers of this spectacle had thought up the idea of having a large vat in the arena full of ravenous seals. They must have thought they could throw the remains of Tecla, once she had been ripped to pieces by the wild beasts, into the vat (although I wonder if seals would eat human remains; but hey, what do I know?). But Tecla had other ideas. She had asked Paul to baptize her, although for some reason he had temporized. Standing in that arena, surrounded by wild – but currently meek – animals, she decided that before she died in that arena, she would baptize herself. Note once again her streak of independence: baptizing yourself?! impossible; only men can baptize people! Nevertheless, she threw herself into the vat. The altar in Tarragona’s cathedral gives us once again a vision of this scene.

I’m not sure what has happened to the arena and its crowds, we seem to have a more sylvan scene. I also get the impression that the sculptor had no idea what seals looked like, he seems to have come up with a bunch of eels. But le’s not niggle, because another miracle occurred! The vat was struck by lightning, which killed all the seals – but of course not Tecla.

All these miracles were too much for the governor. He ordered her clothed and released her to the rejoicing women of the city. She returned to Paul, “wearing a mantle that she had altered so as to make a man’s cloak” (an important phrase for future generations of some women, who looked to Tecla as an example of breaking the eternal glass ceiling for women). She went on to convert many people, including her mother, to Christianity, and then retired to a cave near Seleucia (today’s Silifke) where she lived for many decades. This is the exterior of the cave.

And this is a shot of its interior, which has been turned into a church.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that there is a rival story that Tecla did indeed spend her last years in a cave, but in the small town of Maaloula in what was then the kingdom of the Nabateans, close allies of the Romans, and in what is now Syria. It seems a far more dramatic site, and has a Christian Orthodox church and nunnery built next to it.

The site, alas, has fallen prey to modern religious wars. ISIS fighters invaded Maaloula in 2013, going on a rampage against Christian people and buildings, destroying all religious sites in the town. 3,000 fled the city, leaving only Muslims and the nunnery’s forty nuns. Twelve of them were kidnapped, and after negotiations were release in 2014. The nuns were dispersed and were only able to come back to the town in 2018. Horrors continue to be committed in the name of religion …

There’s further bits and pieces to Tecla’s hagiography, but I’ll skip them. Given the story, it’s a bit of a mystery why Tecla was such a popular saint. As far as I can make out, her popularity rested on the fact that she offered early Christian women a strong example, equal to, not subordinate to, men. She offered a female equivalent to the – male – Apostles; she went around converting people just as much as Paul did. She threw off the bonds of what was a strongly patriarchal society – she broke off an engagement arranged by her family, in fact she turned her back altogether on marriage; she didn’t wait to be baptized by a man but just did it herself; she took to the road without a protecting male presence (although she seems to have had to pretend she was a man in order to do this). The Church Fathers, notably Ambrose of Milan, lauded her for her virginity – but I always suspect this approval of virginity by the Church, since it always seems to be tied to retiring from the world into a nunnery and being Wedded to Christ; the idea of being in this world on equal terms with men was anathema to the Church (and to society more generally). I suspect she could easily be the patron saint of this new B4 Movement coming out of South Korea.

Well, I’ll leave readers with a somewhat more modern take on Saint Tecla by El Greco, in his late 16th Century painting “The Virgin and Child with St. Martina and St. Tecla”. It was painted for the Oratory of St. Joseph in the city of Toledo, but is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

We will, of course, immediately recognize Tecla because of the lioness which is protecting her. She also, rather oddly, is holding a martyr’s palm – oddly, because she actually was never martyred. One of the many strange things about Tecla.

SANKT ILGEN

Vienna, 10 September 2024

It had to happen. On our latest wandering across the Austrian landscape, this time in Styria, my wife and I came across yet another obscure saint, Saint Ilgen. This good saint had given his – or was it her? – name to a village located in the similarly named Ilgental, the valley of Ilgen, along which we were walking to get to the jump-off point for our three-day hike around the Hochshwab. I throw in a photo of the jump-off point, the Bodenbauer inn. As readers can see, it’s a popular place.

And here are a couple of photos of the mountains we climbed over.

But now, settled in the train back to Vienna, I have had the time to investigate this mysterious Saint Ilgen. My first inkling of who we might be talking about came about this morning, as we walked back through the village of Saint Ilgen. I noticed a small shrine on the side of the road that I had missed the first time we came passed through the village.

For readers whose sight, like mine, is not quite what it used to be, the writing above the statue says, in German, “Saint Aegidius pray for us”. Ah! So Ilgen was probably the same as Aegidius! A little bit of train-based internetting has confirmed this.

Aegidius was a name that rang a bell. And indeed, a little bit of e-riffling through my past posts has confirmed this. Last year, I had come across Saint Aegidius when researching another obscure saint, Saint Veit, whose name my wife and I would quite often come across on our wanderings across the Austrian landscape. Saint Aegidius, like Saint Veit, was one of the fourteen Holy Helpers who Medieval Europeans turned to, to deal with life’s many miseries. Here is a photo of those Holy Helpers from a chapel in Baden-Württemberg. Saint Aegidius is in the third row from the top, the second from the right, wearing a monk’s brown tunic but holding a bishop’s crozier. I only know this because I blew up the photo enough to be able to read the names helpfully added to the base of each statue. Readers will notice that the statue is decked out in very much the same way as the statue in the photo above. This was no doubt the standard way of depicting the saint.

I don’t know why the saint was called Aegidius, because most Medieval Europeans didn’t call him that. The British knew him as Giles, and many other Europeans knew him by variants of that name. For instance, the French knew him as Gilles – as we shall see in a minute, he was a French saint. And since our story starts in Austria, I feel I ought to mention some of the German variants: Jillies, but also Gilg or Gilgen which in some places – like that valley which my wife and I had been walking up and down – morphed into Ilg or Ilgen. So I shall drop Aegidius and continue with Giles.

Who exactly was this saint Giles? Quite honestly, I’m not sure he ever existed. But the story put out by the monastery of Saint-Gilles, which lay between Nîmes and Arles in the south of France and whose tomb the monks claimed to have in their church crypt, was that he was a hermit who in the 7th Century AD was living a saintly life in the thick forests around Nîmes. His only companion was a female deer, to whom he was very attached. One day, hunters of the local king – or maybe the king himself – were pursuing the deer, which ran to Giles for protection. Giles put himself between the hunters and the deer and got wounded in the hand by an arrow. Full of remorse for having wounded such a holy man, the king gave him land and money to build a monastery, which Giles proceeded to do. He then became its first abbot, leading the monastery until his death, carrying out miracles etc. along the way. There are other, more fanciful details in his hagiography, but I’ll leave it at that. Here, we have a painting by an unknown, possibly French, possibly Dutch, painter from about 1500 depicting our good saint.

We see him protecting the deer, with the arrow in his hand and presumably the chastened king kneeling at his feet.

Saint Giles was one of the Medieval Europe’s most popular saints. As far as I can make out, this can be traced back to the fact that the monastery of Saint-Gilles was strategically placed at the crossroads of a number of pilgrim routes. One of the branches of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, used by pilgrims from Provence and northern Italy, passed by the monastery. I throw in a map of the three main routes in France for the Camino de Santiago. The one which passed by Saint-Gilles is the bottom, maroon-coloured, one.

The same route could of course be used in the opposite direction, and indeed was so used by Spanish pilgrims going to Rome. At Saint-Gilles they could either go overland through northern Italy or they could sail to central Italy, embarking at a port located close the monastery. French pilgrims, and Northern European pilgrims more generally, on their way to Rome also often used this marine route. The same with pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, who would frequently pass through Rome first. I mention all of this because I want to use this occasion to see if I can’t persuade my wife to do some hiking in this part of the world. To whet her appetite, I insert a photo here of a pensive hiker near the Col du Mont Genèvre, which pilgrims from northern Italy would have crossed. I’m sure we could find a hiking trail which would take us down the French side maybe as far as Sisteron.

But back to Saint Giles. I don’t think I’m being too cynical if I suspect that the good monks of Saint-Gilles, watching all this pilgrim traffic going by, felt the need to more effectively tap into the riches it represented. They therefore created the backstory of Giles the saintly hermit, with the requisite tomb and relics, et voila! Pilgrims began to stop at the monastery’s church to pray and leave a few pence in the offerings box. Of course, the pilgrims also needed places to stay and eat, so a small town sprang up around the monastery to service these (and no doubt other) needs, giving the monastery another source of income via tithes, taxes, and whatnot.

Over the next few centuries, the fame of the monastery of St-Gilles grew to such a degree that it became an important pilgrimage destination in its own right, up there with with Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. It’s not surprising, then, that Giles was such a popular saint – and that so many boys came to be called after him.

Of course, with all this pilgrim traffic the monastery grew rich and powerful, and large building programmes were undertaken. But, as Giles the Hermit could have told them if he had ever really existed, all power, all riches are transitory. The fashion of pilgrimages passed and the port silted up, so the monastery’s main source of income dried up. The number of monks dropped off, so those large monastic buildings were half empty. And then vicious religious wars were fought, with Huguenot forces burning the monastery buildings to the ground. Whatever was left of them were razed during the French Revolution. Only a few mouldering remains are left.

The Abbey church, although also badly damaged a few times, has remained. Here we see the beautiful Romanesque portico.

While here we have the interior, where the gothic style has begun to intrude.

And here we have the crypt, where the Saint’s tomb – rediscovered in 1865 – is located.

Maybe I could persuade my wife to make a quick visit to the church after we’ve hiked down from the Col du Mont Genèvre …

And the name of the goodly hermit, once so popular? Well, I’m afraid it has dropped way down in the rankings. In the UK, only 8 baby boys were given the name Giles in 2023. In France, it was slightly better, with 50 little Gilles being registered. As for the German-speaking lands, Ilgen seems to be only a surname these days. Like the hermit, the name seems to have retreated far, far away from human societies.

I guess that means my wife and I will have to leave future sightings of the name to our wanderings across the face of Europe.

LIME TREES TO SHOE POLISH

Milan, 11 June 2024

What is the matter with me?!

Over the last few days, we’ve been passing down alleys of lime trees.

The trees are all in flower – this one was covered with them.

The flowers fill the air with their scent, I breathe it in … and I am reminded of shoe polish.

No-one under the age of 40 will remember a world where most of the shoes we wore were made of leather. As I look around the subway carriage where I’m writing this, I can only see one pair of leather shoes among perhaps 70 pairs of feet. I, on the other hand, being well over the age of 40, still remember a time when we mostly wore leather shoes – and remember the concomitant joys and anguish of shoe polishing. At my boarding primary school (prep school in British parlance), a specific period of every week was set aside for shoe polishing. We all had to go to a room dedicated to this task, where we picked up a cloth – to spread the polish – and a brush – to put a high gloss on our shoes – before getting to work. As I picked up the tin, there was that ineffable smell of the polish. That was the joy – or at least the pleasant sensation. No doubt it was caused by the solvent which the manufacturers used to keep their polish pasty. After the spreading of the polish on my shoes came the vigorous polishing. That was the agony, as my arm very soon began to ache. But I couldn’t slow down, there was always a master on hand to bark at me to put my back into it. And then came again the joy, as I admired my well-polished shoes glowing on my feet. Of course, I have no photo of this weekly exercise. I did find this photo, though, which will give readers a sense of what it was like – although the boy in question looks to be enjoying it far too much.

After the passage of so many decades, I can’t remember the brand of polish we used. I’m guessing it was Kiwi; that was certainly the brand that my English grandmother used, and it seems to have been the most popular brand in the UK.

In passing, I should say that I learned to my surprise that Kiwi was originally an Australian brand (and was given its name by the owner to honour his wife who hailed from New Zealand). Merely another example of my unconscious Euro-centric biases …

Old brands of consumer products always have me searching for the posters they used in their advertising campaigns. I find these old posters a fascinating sub-genre of popular art. In another life I would have been an avid collector of old posters. In this case, though, I didn’t find any really scintillating Kiwi posters online. The best I found was this one.

Not so in the case of a now extinct brand of Italian shoe polish called Taos, manufactured by the now also extinct company Edoardo Pessi. Look at this lovely poster! It’s a riff on the fact that the biggest purchaser of Pessi’s shoe polish was the Italian army.

In a rush of enthusiasm, I throw in photos of a few more posters for Taos and other Italian shoe polishes.

At this point, I have to admit to having played a very small part in Edoardo Pessi’s demise. It was early on in my career as an environmental consultant. My company was hired by the multinational corporation Sara Lee (now also extinct) to carry out an environmental assessment of the Pessi factory. Sara Lee was in negotiations to purchase Edoardo Pessi, and the idea was to figure out what environmental liabilities Sara Lee might also be buying and bring down the purchase price by a corresponding amount. This is the factory where I carried out my assessment.

I don’t think I’m giving away any trade secrets when I say that there were some problems with underground tanks leaking solvents (out in the back yard there, next to that sliver of lawn; I remember it well). I guess a couple of 100,000 dollars were knocked off the purchase price because of that.

In any event, the purchase by Sara Lee went through. But it was really just an exercise in asset stripping. Quite quickly after the purchase, Sara Lee concluded that this factory had no future – which made a lot of sense; I mean, look at it, hemmed in as it is on all sides by houses. So they closed the factory down. But they didn’t shift operations to an industrial site on the outskirts of town as they could have done. Instead, the packed all the equipment off to their other factories, they laid off the workers, and sold the land to a developer, who proceeded to raze the factory to the ground and put up some swanky apartment buildings in its place. Sara Lee even stopped making the Taos shoe polish – who polishes their shoes anymore? (and they already owned Kiwi; one shoe polish brand was more than enough).

Well, all of this, although an enjoyable little trip down Memory Lane, still doesn’t explain why, when I breathe in the scent of lime tree flowers, I think shoe polish. The mysteries of olfactory chemistry …

NOTES FROM THE SEASIDE

Sori, 21 May 2024

It’s flowering time for the rockrose. This is a lovely flower that we come across at this time of the year on our hikes close to the sea.

Wikipedia tells me that the plant is typical of the Mediterranean maquis. And indeed, we tend to find it on the dry, stony slopes giving directly on the sea, particularly where the Monte di Portofino plunges down into the sea.

The plant’s formal botanical name is cistus salviifolius, and as readers can see from the photo above its leaves are indeed quite sage-like (salvia in Latin – and in Italian). Its formal Italian name – the one you use when you’re with the urban elites – is cisto femmina; I can see where “cisto” comes from, but what is feminine about this plant? Mystery. More interestingly, ordinary Italians – country folk and such like – call it scornabecco. The Dizionario Treccani – the Italian equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary – tells me the word is derived from scornare, to unhorn or to break horns, and becco, a name for a ram: so, ram unhorner. As I look at this small plant with its pretty flower, I can’t quite imagine how it got that name. Another mystery. Perhaps it can grow into a tough, tangled bush, which rams can get their horns caught in and broken off. Here is another photo of the plant, which is looking more bushy and tangled.

All this makes me think of the story in the Bible, of Abraham and his son Isaac. Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac when an angel stops his hand; I leave the original text take up the story: “[The angel] said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.” This gives me an excuse to throw in a photo of a painting of the scene, by my favourite artist Caravaggio.

Wikipedia also tells me that the plant is drought-resistant and likes sunshine. A perfect candidate for our terrace here! The sun can beat down mercilessly, especially in the summer, and we are away for long periods and so we cannot ensure a steady supply of water. It was for these reasons that decades ago my mother-in-law planted various succulents in a couple of vases on the terrace wall; they have survived all these years.

They may have survived but as readers can see they’re rather modest, boring even. For many years now, my wife and I have wanted to complement them with something a little more cheerful. Rockroses might be just the thing! I must nose around the local florist, to see if they sell packets of rockrose seeds. If not, just before we flee Italy for the summer (it really gets too hot here), we’ll go for a hike on the Monte di Portofino and collect seeds from the wild.

And what vase to put them in? Someone down in the village has this magnificent vase outside their front door.

After we were let out from the first Covid confinement, and finally were were able to travel down to the sea again, my wife asked the owners of that vase where they had bought it. Armed with this information, she had sent the manufacturers an email, requesting prices, delivery times, etc.. They never replied, we assume because of all the disruptions caused by Covid. We’ve never tried again, but I’m thinking that, now that I have an idea of what we could plant in that vase other than succulents, I should egg her on to have another go. Because that vase would really look magnificent on our terrace wall.