ARTS Travellers' tales
BRYAN ROBERTSON
a white-washed church at Santo Dom- .() high in the hills of New Mexico, is an specially extravagant Spanish colonial altar- leee. For some time its brilliantly coloured rofusion, aggressive in impact, holds the eye nd distracts attention from the floorboards, hich are lightly polished and bleached oney-gold in tone: the rest of the interior is kite, severe, and unadorned. The boards
e divided into sections and it is surprising see, gradually, that each one is decorated di an incised line tracing the shapes of ears f wheat, grains of corn, leaves, flowers,. irds and insects. It is a shock, later, to learn at every 'section' of the floorboards is the p of a coffin and you are walking over the ently dead: everyone who dies in this Iage is allowed a period of time inside the urch before re-interment at a communal rial ground. Gazing at the floor, with its lightful wealth of detail, it is hard not to nk of the cycle of nature of which we are part, as well as individual lives: the climac- altar-piece takes on a new dimension. Elsewhere, half-buried in the jungle near temples at Angkor, is a huge sculpted 't, fragmented from a Buddha effigy. This miry lout is also continuously enveloped incised lines depicting the beasts, birds, ewers and insects of the universe and, again t differently, one is forced into con- ousness of nature, the cosmos, life and ath, and the concept of a deity as well as imprint in that nature over which it im..*; uses order.
At the Tate Gallery now is the most elatory spectacle of its kind that I can all seeing in London: The Elizabethan age, devised by Roy Strong. Inspired' concept, installed with the most scrupu- s, unassertive taste, the exhibition is so ed with startling convergences of style d manner, figure and • identity, artifice nature, shadow and substance, that my eller's tales sprang compulsively to mind. subject of the show is English painting hich in this case means portraiture) from 1620, or from the death of Holbein to advent of. Van Dyck. Dr Strong has nted his material, for the greater part ire unknown to the English public, as a live with an evocative context so that ms are devoted to specific themes and : 'Elizabethan and Jacobean Chivalry', loriana', 'Elizabethan and Jacobean elancholy', and so on. There is a sarily disruptive interlude of 'Broker's ages' to show the destruction of art which panied the Reformation.
English painting of the period as a whole at once confined to the iconographic Aline of portraiture, and unleashed,. ergised, by its stylistic possibilities. Di ong has matched this contraction and ex- sion perfectly by the grouping of pain- es (with other relevant works of art and me simple explanatory devices) in a sei, me of rooms which both catch and nsmit, from one section to another, their arate nuances of mood and individual ap- °aches to technique in terms of personal h and manipulation of colour, tone, and
The consistent. spell-binding glory of the hthition is the coincidental array of
clothes, stuffs, and the astoundingly varied and intricate detail of contrasted patterns and textures. The sheen of silk, soft lustre of velvet, metallic heaviness of brocade and density of fur are spattered with the small glowing accents of pearls, the flash and glitter of stones, the rasp of gold thread. But these are merely the basic elements which combine together to form a positive attack of independently piercing visual fanfares, so amazing in structure and flamboyant con- tour are these huge ruffs and collars, bodices, caps, cuffs, sleeves, doublets and skirts. They achieve a grandiose life of their own, not as a mere dress parade but in a marvellously inventive series of abstract variations, billowing out and thrusting up from each spotlit hand, neck and head. The fantasies devised by Fellini's designer, Piero Gherardi, for the personages in Webster's The White Devil at the National Theatre are mild com- pared with the reality of Elizabethan and Jacobean costume.
The linear patterns in the materials, cover- ing the wide field from pastoral motifs to more abstractly ornamental emblems, are as strong in associative resonance as the incised lines on that floor in New Mexico or on the foot in the Cambodian jungle. This is an ex- otic exhibition : alive with cross currents of shape and meaning. Floating above the en- tire, prolix occasion, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, is the persistently elusive English face.
For if we do not enjoy a climate but suffer weather, so the English face refuses to con- form structurally to type but is moulded more fitfully and at finer extremes by the vagaries of character, the modifying hazards of health. Racial diversity can be taken for granted; the head-on facial collision between Celt and Anglo-Saxon is scarcely deflected by dilutions from nearby sources, where the oppositions of flesh and bone are better integrated, as in France or Germany. Sometimes foxy, sometimes bland, the English face appears to dissolve specific features in a narrow gamut of expressions, however distinct their mood. Often sensitive, intermittently and discretely proud, the predominant note is still that of reticence. a guarded awareness. You leave the exhibition without any identifiable recollection of thin or bulbous noses, gaunt or podgy cheeks: what remains is all complexion, and attitudes to life. And the artist works always as a shaping intermediary : each painting bears his trace.
Steven van der Muelen's treatment of Lord and Lady Lumley in 1563—purpose- fully fleshy faces staring out from a dark sobriety of clothes and modest props—is circumspect compared with the hieratic blaze of rich costume that sweeps below the -pale, sharply knowing mask of his painting of the Countess of Sussex c. 1565. The character of Lady St John of Bletso, standing beneath a golden-leaved oak tree with, behind her, one of the 'earliest landscapes in English painting', is as withheld as the way in which her long black cloak is caught up in her hands, as gentle as the warm orange light in the late afternoon sky : it is hard to know where the personality
of the artist, William Larkin, ends and Lady St John's character begins. More pointedly, as you leave the galleries it is impossible to overlook the conspiracy between hat. fetither, foliage and soft hair merging with sky and clouds in Robert Peake the Elder's portrait of Lady Elizabeth Pope.
But it is easy to be somewhat pretentiously 'literary' about these enthralling paintings: what is so admirable about Dr Strong's catalogue is the self-restraint with which—as in the projection of the paintings on the walls and their lighting and backgrounds—he has denied himself the luxury of aesthetic judgments or surmise of any kind: all is plain fact and concrete information. His great tome, devoted to Elizabethan and Jaco- bean portraiture, The English Icon (published by Routledge and Kegan Paul for. the Paul Mellon Foundation at ten guineas). is equally exact : a scholar's original researches into a phase of English art which has always been as dimly considered by posterity as it was denigrated in its own time.
And yet Dr Strong's evidence, set down so objectively but with such pioneer thrust in this beautifully produced book, cannot quite suppress sympathy for his subject. It comes shining through the historic exhibition at the Tate, which Edith Sitwell would have so loved, illuminated by imagination as well as knowledge. The printed image in a book and its relevant text has a circumspection with which the living work of art has practically no connection. If Dr Strong's intentions as a recorder are keenly disciplined, the impact of his exhibition on our awareness is far less modest.
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