AND ANOTHER THING
Italy's new revolution in art: the triumph of blonde over grey
PAUL JOHNSON
Ihope the Queen enjoyed her state visit to Italy this week, and especially her sojourn in the Quirinale, the enormous palace built on the highest of Rome's seven hills, which has been the residence of Popes, kings and now presidents. It is never open to the public and I was lucky to be taken round it recently. Its wonders include a twin-pillared oval staircase, which Mascherino, the original architect, made elegantly shallow so that Pope Gregory XIII could ride his horses up to the third storey — just the thing to appeal to our queen — and a chapel as big as the Sistine, charmingly decorated by one of my favourite painters, Guido Reni. Paul V had a hidden box there, and by removing a dainty plug in the wall he could listen to the malicious chatter of his cardinals. The big marble throne room has some of the most Ingenious illusion-painting I have ever seen, mainly by Tassi, which is an encyclopaedia of political incorrectness. While I was there an orchestra was rehearsing, and experts were repairing the tapestries and dusting down the chandeliers in preparation for the royal visit — all very cosy.
This peep at the Quirinale's secrets was part of a jaunt which Rocco Forte and his sister Olga organised for a few friends to mark the birth of their two magnificent new hotels, the Savoy in Florence and the Russie in Rome. We enjoyed a private tour of the Uffizi, including bits of it I had never seen before, and another of the Sistine Chapel, taking the opportunity to poke into all kinds of obscure corners of the Vatican. The Kirov Orchestra, under their fierce Conductor Valery Gergiev, gave us a special performance of The Firebird. We had an evening party at the 16th-century villa out- side Florence, owned by the Ferragamos, who make my shoes and Margaret Thatch- er's handbags, and in Rome Prince Ruspoli entertained us in his palace on the Corso, where we dined in the vast painted gallery of Jacopo Zucchi. The weather was perfect, brilliant sunshine and perfumed zephyrs from the Alban Hills, and, thus encour- aged, I contrived to do five watercolours, all of which 'worked'. I can't remember a week when I have been so happy.
The great thing about topographical drawing is that it obliges you to study exact- ly, and so understand, architecture. I sat in the Piazza del Populo to paint its obelisk fountain and the twin churches which frame the entrance to the Corso. It has now been cleared of traffic and for the first time I grasped the elegance of its early 19th-cen- tury facelift by Valadier. The sheer quantity and quality of the art on display in Italy never fail to amaze me. On the Piazza del Populo is the back door of the parish church of St Mary, which opens into a world of beauties. I went there to see Car- avaggio's two masterworks, 'The Conver- sion of St Paul' and 'The Crucifixion of St Peter', which hang facing each other in a side chapel. But on my way to them I was detained by the delectable scenes from the life of St Jerome with which Pinturicchio adorned the Della Rovere Chapel, by another chapel designed and embellished by Raphael and his friends, and by much work of the great Bernini on the columns and structure of this church. He also altered the west end, on the travertine side, whose design by Andrea Bregno is the first Renaissance façade in Rome. To see the Caravaggios properly I went on to the altar, but this set off the security alarm, and when the sacristan finally arrived, he said, 'Oh, but you are missing the finest thing in this blessed church.' He pulled back a curtain and took me behind the high altar where I found a simple and perfect apse, designed by Bramante. I had visited this church at least twice before and had never seen this fine-cut architectural jewel. So it always is with Italy: the visitor is glutted by the con- tinual feast. One needs not just weeks but months, years indeed, of leisurely study and careful contemplation to absorb what is there.
I sat in the debris of the Forum to draw the arch of Septimus Severus, and the hill and buildings of the Capitol behind it. I love drawing columns, especially ruined ones, and delight in contrasting the ice-and- ivory sheen of the marble with the warm ochres and umbers of the mediaeval build- ings forming the background. I sat near an inscription referring to Julius Caesar, and soon I was surrounded, pressed upon and almost suffocated by an ant-regiment of Japanese visitors who prevented me from seeing what I was drawing and upset my water-bottle. But as an itinerant dauber who has sketched in odd half-hours all over the world, I am used to such treatment. Afterwards I discovered I had sat in the spot from which John Ruskin drew an iden- tical view of the Forum in 1841. It had changed scarcely at all in 160 years and I was glad to see that my version, though less accurate, would bear comparison with his.
In Florence I sat inside the sculpture gallery known as the Loggia dei Lanzi in order to draw the Piazza della Signoria. I framed the drawing on the right with a dark, writhing mass of shadowy bronze limbs, and discovered, on closer inspection, that this was 'The Rape of Proserpine' by Giambologna, an artist I greatly admire and thought I knew a lot about, since I pos- sess the authoritative two-volume catalogue of his works. But there it was: I had discov- ered a new treasure, at the end of a long life constantly punctuated by visits to Italy. Again, in the Piazza della Repubblica, alongside the triumphant archway of the 1880s, which is not much admired (though I love it) I found, and put into my drawing, one of the best lamp-standards I have ever seen, even in Italy — a miracle of wrought iron in Victorian rococo. It beats even those three-light standards in Venice. The Italians have always delighted in fine street furniture: it is characteristic of their atten- tion to detail to get everything, not just the main elements, of an artistic conception absolutely right. Hence to appreciate this unique country, not just 'the garden of the world', as Byron called it, but its art gallery too, you have to learn to look for the mun- dane devices and routine exercises in craft which underpin the great art.
In the princely Ruspoli house, for exam- ple, what struck me most was the staircase and its loggias, furnished with painted benches. It was designed by Martino Longhi, using motifs and colour-schemes of grey and white first introduced by Brunelleschi and Donatello in the old sacristy of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, then grandly expanded by Michelangelo in the library he built there. I noticed the same theme recurs in the recently redecorated part of the Quiri- nale. Only the Italians, the world's most gift- ed nation in art, could make grey the tint of opulence. But their ladies will not tolerate it on their polls. When I first went to Italy, 53 years ago, it was a nation of young brunettes and iron-grey matriarchs. Now they are all blondes, irrespective of age, class and — I almost said — sex. Botticelli would have been delighted. It is Italy's latest triumph of art and the biggest aesthetic revolution since the reintroduction of perspective in the 14th century.
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