Still Life With Vegetables

[klward]

The Greats: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland

An exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, viewed 9^th January 2016.

When I stepped into the final chamber, it was like a swarm of some glittering, humming insects clinging to the left hand wall. It drew me to it and there I stood with my friend Laura, gazing at a rendition of poplar trees beside a river. No deeper topic or focus, no great range of shades and those primarily green and blue. Yet I could not take my eyes away. It felt as if Poplars on the Epte, painted by Claude Monet in 1891, was rewiring my optic nerves.

There is nothing quite like seeing a work of art in the original. This is because no matter how carefully a print or photograph was taken, whatever pains were expended on the colours and tonal qualities, the paper stock and scale, it bears a relation to the original similar to that which canned fruit or vegetables bear to fresh. I find it's the same with music: no matter how much I love a recording, it is still canned music. All those glorious coffee table books in my library are canned art. This exhibition was a farmer's market.

I have never been to the National Gallery of Scotland. Neither, it seems, have I managed to see much Monet. And it was far from the only treasure in this compact yet wonderfully varied display, that commenced with a tiny piece of parchment on which Leonardo da Vinci had sketched a dog's paw. Some wonderfully curly dog with big, strong toes: a hunting hound, I have no doubt.

On the end wall of the same room was Mars, Venus and Cupid by Paolo Veronese, dated "about 1580". This was the wall and, in addition, clearly a studio piece with the models draped in textured fabrics and posed against a backdrop as lively as any stage set and bearing no little resemblance to 1890s photographic portrait. There was another dog, a little spaniel playfully mauling the child god, but the difference between this and the da Vinci could not have been more marked. Moreover, the tension between large and small, vision and composition, ran through the exhibit like currents.

Here, the third in a row of tiny frames, was Man and Woman Seated at a Table, dated 1640 by Ferdinand Bol. With quick, broad strokes of black and brown ink, he captured all the mystery and intimacy of this nocturnal scene: the smouldering fire, the dancing shadows, the hanging lamp and the two figures colluding. Across the way and back in 1621, Van Dyck presented us with the as yet unmarked body of Saint Sebastian, stretched near to life-size against a tree as his persecutors hunched and grimaced, every fold of cloth and starting muscle a study in latent homoeroticism. Two pieces of similar size, a Velasquez and an El Greco, lit up the rest of the chamber with sheer static electricity. The Velasquez, with all his supernal detail and texture, showed us An Old Woman Cooking Eggs. The El Greco was entitled Fabula, or Boy with a Monkey. The stresses existing between these too - Velasquez's warm domesticity and the distorted faces and shimmering lividity of the El Greco - were palpable.

A little further on, and two portraits generated another kind of energy. At my first sight of Jan Lieven's Young Man in Yellow (1630), it was all I could do to not cry out "Not us, oh king! Not us!" But it seemed to turn its mystical gaze upon Franz Hal's portrait of Pieter Verdonck. This irascible-looking gentleman raises an ass's jawbone as if such scrutiny offends. This jawbone is the weapon of Sampson, the Christian bible's answer to Conan the Barbarian. But far from this being a spiritual connection, the inscription on the frame translates as "This is Verdonck, that outspoken fellow, whose jawbone attacks everyone."

Amongst the towering triptychs of Boucher and Watteau, where shepherdesses are arrayed with all the care of French princesses, were more tiny treasures. A Piranesi! A Blake! Giovanni Battista Piranesi produced his Carceri d'invenzione, his Imaginary Prisons series in the 1750s and 60s, based upon the visions he experienced during a fever. This seething ink sketch was a seed for those etchings of endlessly retreating stairways and arches that are credited with inspiring Walpole's The Castle of Ontranto, and thus the whole of gothic literature. Blake is Blake, and paints the super-heated plasma of the universe even when depicting God writing upon the tables of the Covenant (1805). But what is is the secret of John Cotman's A Pool on the River Greta? What mystery infuses The Black Bull of Edward Arthur Walton? Both these paintings are ostensibly natural scenes of perfectly ordinary subjects, although one imagines painting a bull to not be without its dangers. But something seems to be trapped above the pool, twisting its trees and watercourse out of true, or else an occlusion of space conceals some gateway to another realm. The black bull standing upon his hill is likewise no ordinary beast but a symbol. It has the look of those allegories of alchemy, with their red birds and white lions.

Around the corner, and Sir Joseph Paton contrives to have it both ways. It takes Laura and myself some little time to work our way to the front, for no matter where The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847) hangs, it is always surrounded by an enraptured crowd pressing in closer and closer.

"Come my lord, and in our flight

tell me how it came this night

that I sleeping here was found

with all these mortals on the ground!"

Over the supine bodies of the mortal lovers, the entire court of Faerie revels around the King and Queen. The canvas is huge, but the detail extends to figures on the scale of fingernails. One could spend hours, I am certain, picking out the countless little narratives and erotic tableaux, the references to other events of A Midsummer Night's Dream. But that would be both greedy and extremely bad for the neck. Thus, I can only point you towards the faerie knights in the bottom left, battling the ferocious owl chick while close by, their less belligerent sister tickles a field mouse into ecstasy.

There were other paintings: Rembrandts, Gainsboroughs, Cezannes, so many! But I have spent long enough in these chambers, so beautifully lit, and Laura's new shoes are starting to rub. So it time now to retrace my steps for one last look at Botticelli's The Virgin adoring the sleeping Christ Child. I adore Botticelli, an idea that would no doubt have horrified the man who turned away from his own art through fear of God. No matter what gallery, even in the Louvre, his works leap out at me from the walls. This one holds all his lucent magic and I cannot tell you why.

Why should I quibble the artifice of Boucher, where every leaf is curled to effect, and embrace Botticelli's care for every blade of glass? The unparalleled clarity of his colours, the translucent pink of the flower petals and azure of the Madonna's robe, contribute; the details of the braid at her neck and the veils falling across her delicate features. The composition, with its ruined Roman arch, could be one of Veronese's backdrops, but does not look it. Perhaps there is something in the sheer simplicity of every shape that our optic nerves recognise, with or without rewiring, as perfect. The Florentine Renaissance was a time and place when people believed they could potentially see everything, and some of them saw such beauty as can both start and finish an exhibition.

It's good for the health, this viewing of originals. So long as you do your neck exercises and wear old shoes, it is fresh vegetables for the mind and one of the best ways to spend a summer afternoon that Sydney can presently offer. Otherwise, I'm afraid it's off to Edinburgh for you!





The above detail of Poplars on the Este by Claude Monet, 1891, was taken from the exhibition media pack, downloaded from the website of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Seriously, it's nothing like it.