Azure skies and inhuman horrors: Titian's Poesie

Beneath the ground-lapis blue, a man catches a goddess at her toilet and will be transformed into a stag, to be ripped apart by his own hounds, while women are penetrated by a shower of gold (some think that's lovely, I'd still call it rape), chained to a rock to be devoured by a sea-monster until a hero arrives, carried off in a 'rape' by Jupiter/Zeus in bull form.  There's still such sensuousnss and beauty in some of Titian's richest canvases for Philip II, who clearly wanted quite a lot of female flesh. The series is a counterpart to the earlier canvases Titian painted for Alfonso d'Este's Camerino. Back in 2003, we doubted if the National Gallery could ever excel itself in its reuniting of the three canvases Bacchus and Ariadne - of course one of the glories of the NG's collection - The Andrians and The Worship of Venus from the Prado; plus Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods with additions by Titian, courtesy of Washington's National Gallery of Art). But it just has, in another once-in-a-lifetime (or once-ever). All six paintings which may never have graced a single palace room of Philip's are in one splendid gallery, with the earlier masterpiece plus others visible beyond.

Actually there are seven, and I'm a bit confused as to which is the odd one out: the late Death of Actaeon with its very free brushwork, another National Gallery fixture, or Danae from Apsley House? There's also a lot of confusion around whether this is the most 'real' of the many versions, but I'll take it from my great pal Claudia Pritchard, writing in The New European with splendid reproductions gracing her article, that it is, since she's read the catalogue and I haven't. Certainly looks much better for the clean, though apparently it's not the full canvas.

My own pics will have told you that I did get to see the miracle - in fact, on the last day before the National Gallery closed indefinitely, 18 March. I cycled into town and out; J took the tube.Most rooms were empty and we weren't expecting many folk in the exhibition, but there were. Not so many as to make it impossible to avoid the two-metre distancing which we were already taking on board then. I nearly forgot in the thrill (unanticipated, because I hadn't done my homewortk) of seeing the one I'd never encountered 'live' before, The Rape of Europa (1560-2), normally to be seen in the neo-Renaissance setting of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

The eye first hits on the best azure sky of the lot - valuable crushed lapis lazuli the pigment, of course - and then to the pink drape that Europe clutches as the bull spirits her away from the shore. I didn't know this when I visited, but the painting had a major restoration in Boston; our friend Jill, picture restorer at the NG, spent three blissful days at the Museum where she was able to see work in progress (for her own most remarkable recent work, see the post on the Mantegna-Bellini exhibition). The sea-life along the bottom part of the picture is wonderful when you get up close, too. It couldn't be more of a contras to the sombre hues of The Death of Actaeon.

I like it that the picture, given one of the two widest unbroken walls to itself, is complemented by the most damaged work of the seven, the earlier (1554-60) Perseus and Andromeda, always a welcome site in the sumptuously revamped long gallery of the Wallace Collection.

We did have an earlier chance to see the two great mythologies with obvious symmetries markig them out to be hung alongside each other, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, before they were rotated between the National Galleries of Scotland and London, but there was fresh cause to wonder here.

And finally, the original Venus and Adonis (on the right below and up top) is, of course, infinitely superior to the National Gallery copy, which can be seen next door.

We've seen the perspective down to the top Titians with Parmigianinos to the left; here's another great masterpiece, The Vedramin Family venerating a Relic of the True Cross (1540-5, possibly reworked in 1555), hanging on the wall the other side of the exhibition room next to the late Tribute Money.

We also wanted to pay homage to Holbein as J had read, and I had just embarked on, the final instalment of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. In which Master Hans appears again to work on the quadruple full-length portrait mural for Whitehall Palace; destroyed, but here was half of it in cartoon form (Henrys VIII and VII), on loan from the National Portrait Gallery while it undergoes renovation.

Well, all galleries are shut now; who knows when they might reopen? But imagination and a good collection of art books at home are sustaing us now. As for Mantel's crowning glory, what a masterpiece, and praise be to this period for the time to take over savouring it. I'm glad The Arts Desk was patient with my slow reading of it; this is the result.

Outside the Gallery, central London felt all wrong. Some have rejoiced in the empty spaces, and Trafalgar Square as a landscape with few figures is certainly unusual,

but the West End is made to teem with life; never again will I curse those crowded narrow pavements of St Martin's Lane and Charing Cross Road. There were still a few tourists about - the Chinese were the first we saw to wear facemasks -

and 'pavement artists' had chalked in expectation of offerings - not great art, of course, yet topical - but were nowhere to be seen.

We quickly gave up; I had a coffee and a bun in Ole & Steen - handwash at the door and on the counters, all cakes carefully covered - and then cycled home. Haven't been into the centre of town since then, and not been on anything more than two wheels for seven weeks. Oddly, I don't mind for now. And the distancing must be maintained for a good while yet, though our disastrous government has once sent out weak signals which will up the death count again.

Gouda's glass

St John's Church (St Janskerk), Gouda is the only ecclesiastical building in the Netherlands to have truly weathered the onslaught of the Reformation - and, indeed, to have continued to build on the extant symphony in glass after the church was assigned to the Protestants in 1573. It's also one of the few churches of cathedral-like proportions in the country (the longest at 123 metres) to present so harmonious a whole; consecrated in 1510 after the destruction of its predecessor by fire in 1438, it had to be rebuilt again following another fire in 1552, preserving its structure but giving a finer spatial effect with the removal of every second pillar.

Some 57 windows, many of vast size, make up the drama, with an additional seven Passion windows placed in the Van der Vorm chapel coming from the Monastery of the Regulars in Gouda. These are the most rewarding to see at close quarters; I'll hold off from overburdening this entry with them since they'll come in useful around Easter time. Let me just slip in a taster of one of the four faithful dogs accompanying the donors in the lower portions of these windows.

Earlier, Catholic donors featured in the bigger glass dramas include Philip II of Spain and Mary Tudor featured in the bottom left here looking on at the Last Supper.

This, like many of the finest scenes, is painted by the supreme master Dirck Crabeth (c.1505-1574). His work essentially began with the central east window of the church's Saint baptizing Christ (pictured up top; more of the windows around the choir to come).

Perhaps his most obviously impressive work is the saga of Judith and her beheading of Holofernes, made in 1571 after his own design; the window was donated by Jean de Ligne, Count of Aremberg, and his wife Margaretha van der Marck..

Dirck's younger brother Wouter 'illustrated' the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon a decade earlier, in 1561.

So to the series of eleven scenes from the life of John the Baptist interwoven with the birth and growing-up of Jesus. They mark the progress of the ambulatory from north-east to south-east, with Christ as Redeemer and figures of the Apostles in the upper lights made by Crabeth's studio.

 
Odd one out, style-wise, of the lower glories is this Annunciation, a late (1656) replacement for the original of 1559 which was blown out. Instead of the usual donors in the bottom third are the arms of Holland and Gouda. Got to love the clouds, though.

Wouter Crabbeth's work on the Adoration of the Shepherds has some nice touches, like Joseph in red holding a coal-pan.

and in the second plane (difficult to see at this size) women tend to the child near a fire.

Here's 12-year-old Jesus in the temple by Digman Meynaert and Hans Scrivers, Antwerp glaziers. In the lower part, donor Abbot Petrus van Suyren kneels before the Madonna and Child.

For some reason I don't seem to have caught the windows flanking the central glory which make up the great triptych, other than the splendid representation, below 'John the Baptists Preaching', of donor Robert van Bergen, with St Benedict behind him, kneeling before Christ in glory surrounded by symbols of the Evangelists.

 But here at least is the full baptism scene with Georg van Egmond, its donor, kneeling below

and a detail of Christ in the river Jordan with John the Baptist's outstretched right hand above him and the dove from the light-ray above that.

Next window along going south-east, also by Dirck Crabeth, is 'Jesus's First Preaching', with the donor Cornelis van Mierop and his patron saint St Vincent complete with millstone, shards and fire.

'John the Baptist reproves Herod' is by an unknown Antwerp master, dating from 1556, the same year as the Dirck Crabeth triptych,

with equally piquant details like the bear on a chain beneath Herod's right foot.

Many of the later, post-Reformation, windows tend to be secular in theme, starting with the Capture of Damietta presented by the city of Haarlem, whose soldiery are supposed to have distinguished themselves in this Crusade campaign.

The depiction of the Maid of Dordrecht resorts to classical motifs for the lady herself under a little temple (though with a Dutch fence below) bearing the arms of the town in her right hand and a palm branch in her left

while I rather like the angels holding up the cartouche

and, closing in further still, the bunches of grapes and other fruits at the bottom.

Further donations from Delft and Leyden inevitably include familiar Dutch features.

The glass does rather divert one from the other glories of St Janskirk - not least (though you take it in from various angles) the avowedly very fine 1736 organ by Jacob Francois Moreau.

We didn't really leave ourselves enough time for full exploration of modest Gouda, but at least we sampled the delights of the Cafe Central, which stretched back much further than its modest facade suggests and had a wooden Virgin on the bar to hold still in the midst of all the bustle,

admired the tapered Gothic elegance of the Stadthuis in the middle of the marketplace

 

and observed the relief of cheese-weighing on the 17th century Goudse Waag from the other side of the skating rink.

Then it was briskly to the station to take a train to sophisticated Utrecht, where we were to meet up with J's godson Frankie and a friend of his. More on that in another chronicle.