Da Vinci At The Chester Beatty Museum - Dublin - Ireland
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girlfriend to the Chester Beatty museum. This museum houses a life
time of collecting by Sir Chester Beatty. It is one of the finest
collections of rare manuscripts, Bibles, Korans and Asian artifacts in
the world. The Chester Beatty museum is one of the most multi-cultural
venues in Ireland - but this is profound multui-culturalism - not the
rubbish of contemporary 'identity-art' or the advert bullshit of the
media and fashion world. But we had not gone to see the permanent
collection - we went to see the Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Leicester
exhibition - one of this geniuses many notebooks - this one centering
on science, the natural world and water. Sad to say it was one of the
most boring exhibitions I have ever seen.
Don't get me wrong - I think Da Vinci was not only the greatest
draughtsman and one of the greatest artists who ever lived - he is
also the greatest intellectual in human history. Smug ignoramuses
today carp that he painted so little (only twelve known paintings),
that he finished nothing, that many of his ideas had been already been
discovered by other naturalists and scientists and that many of his
inventions did not work. But frankly who cares! Da Vinci was one of
the last intellectuals who could encompass in his mind all the
discoveries of science and art. Today subjects are so specialist that
it would be utterly impossible for another polymath like Da Vinci to
emerge.
However I have no interest in science - or the movement of water - so
these works seemed very dry to me. On the other hand I know that
anyone interested in Science would go crazy for this exhibition.
The display of the notebook pages was also highly irritating as well.
The pages were displayed on Plexiglas's so that you could read both
sides of the page - all that was fine. But the pages were about two
foot away from the plate glass display cases and the lighting almost
pitch black. Given too that da Vinci's writing was was so crabbed and
small - in Latin and written in mirror writing - made it almost
impossible to say that we had really seen the work at all. Thankfully
there was a great little catalog for e20 which we bought - and it was
wonderfully illustrated.
Seeing these thin sheets of paper (no more than 72lb and almost
transparent in display) - spot lit dimly in a darkened room - struck
me as all a little to theatrical and similar to the worshiping a
religious relic. Of course these objects have to be preserved - but
there are ways of doing it without ruining the viewers pleasure.
I still to this day remember the day when I saw the greatest drawing I
have ever seen. It was 1996 and I was in the National Gallery in
London - when I came upon Da Vinci's sublime preparatory drawing for
the oil painting Virgin and Child With St. Anne c1508. The drawing was
housed under bullet proof glass - because a few years earlier a madman
had come into the gallery with a shotgun and blasted the drawing. The
National Galleries repair of the drawing was masterful. This huge
drawing - it is nearly six feet by four feet - in black, brown and
white chalk - sent shivers down my spine. There was more depth and
profundity to this drawing than in hundreds of thousands of other
paintings I have seen. Part of the reason for its power was Da Vinci's
maternal complex which allowed him to express so tenderly - the love
between mother and child.
So of course I was hoping for the Codex Leicester to have wonderful
drawings but there was few actual drawings embedded in or on the
margins of his text and they were too small. Still to my mind - Da
Vinci is the greatest draughtsman in human history. Michelangelo could
give him a run for his money - but there is so much more variety to Da
Vinci's work - portraits, nudes, religious subjects, inventions,
nature studies, plans for sculpture, cadaver studies, anatomy drawing
and so on - Michelangelo basically drew nothing but the male nude or
male nude transformed into a woman! Durer certainly has nothing to be
ashamed of - but his work lacks the grace and fluidity of Da Vinci's
drawings. Robert Hughes put it best when he said Da Vinci drew like an
angel. Recently Picasso also challenged Da Vinci - but I still think
that drawing for drawing - Da Vinci is the best.
Leaving the Da Vinci exhibition - we went up stairs to the permanent
collection room subdivided between all the world religions. This room
was filled with some of the most moving, technically skillful, devout
and heartfelt manuscripts, Bibles, Korans, Russian Orthodox Icons and
Buddhas. The earliest works were Egyptian Demotic Text on Papyrus from
Ad100! Then there were small fragments of Greek text on Papyrus dating
as far back as AD150-200! If you believe in a God - these are
essential things to visually and spiritually consume - for they record
the earliest manifestations of faith in Gods or later one God.
Cave painters had a Pagan belief in the magic properties of animals
and they paid them lavish and profound homage in their pictures. But
modern religions as we know them only really began with the
Egyptians, Jews, Greeks and Romans followed by the Christians,
Muslims and Buddhists. Personally I am a nihilistic Atheist and
opponent to organized religion - but even I was profoundly moved by
these religious texts and statuary.
The time individual pages of these Bibles and Korans took to
illuminate is mind-boggling. Looking around these many works I was
flabbergasted by the minute detail, sure drawing, rich colour and deep
feeling which these dignified art works possessed. Anyone who thinks
that Islam is a brutal and barbaric religion - should see Koran's like
these - for what they prove - is just how much dignity, imagination
and discipline these artists and devout believers had. Of course in
Islam it is strictly forbidden to draw realistically - so in
compensation these Islamic scholars and master illuminates created
rich, dense abstract patterns - reflecting upon the complexity and yet
also the order of the Islamic imagination. The Islamic use of gold and
lupus lazeri was heartbreaking meaningful. Yet again I was struck dumb
by the minute calligraphy, symmetrical order and integrity to all of
these Islamic designs.
Another category I loved was the wonderful Jataka painted folding
books from Burma (c1800's)- layed out like a folded accordions. The
colours and drawing in these work was so daring and even avant-guard.
The Budda's in bronze or in prints, or painted scrolls - were
sumptuous and highly reasoned works of great refinement.
So too were the Indian miniatures but they were also highly complex
images - unmistakably Indian but clearly also influenced by the best
and most refined of the West and Islam.
Finally I was intensely moved by a group of about eight Russian
Orthodox Icons - painted in Tempera on inch thick small blocks of
wood. The Design, subtle and daring colouring, even naive drawings of
these works made a powerful impression on me. The sincerity of these
artists - is not in doubt!
But it got me wondering if there were any artists in our today who's
work is so intensely devout, pious and heartfelt. I doubt it. These
artists lived in an uncorrupted world before mass media - and their
belief in God was no mere affectation - it was an obsession. The last
great Religious artists in the West were Georges Rouault in the early
twentieth century and Mark Rothko at its end. In his bitter yet
empathic watercolour studies of prostitutes and his stain glass like
oil paintings of Christ - Georges Rouault gave a modern retelling of
the sins of vice, the suffering of women at the hands of men and the
passion of the Christ. In his ethereal early colorful abstracts and
later darker abstract canvases - Rothko was the last painter to
believe that art could act as an intermediary between man and God.
Only their work strikes me shorn of the sick sentimentality , crass
decadence, posturing and jolly spiritualism of our modern world - the
type of rubbish spouted and shown on Oprah. For me Rothko was one of
the greatest religious painters of all time and certainly no one in
the West had his intellectual probity, anguish, obsession, and
idealism. His depression and final suicide - was like that of Van Gogh
- no mere accident - it was the nihilistic summation of a life spent
in maddened thirst for meaning, feeling and intelligent Religious
faith.
Overall the Chester Beatty collection proves what a rich and varied
tapestry human civilization is. It also proves that some of the most
timeless and modern art in the world - was created over two thousand
years ago.
My Website - www.thepanicartist.com