History by Design

One of the many tasks on my to-do list back on October 1^st, the official start-date of my new European Research Council (ERC) grant, was to procure a logo for the project, called The Jagiellonians: Dynasty, Identity and Memory in Central Europe. After some rather wobbly back-of-the-envelope sketches, it became clear I would need professional help, so I ran a small competition among the fine art students at Oxford’s Ruskin School to design the project logo.

It has been a stimulating challenge to distil the project and its mammoth 16-page research proposal into a single snappy image. The design brief given to the Ruskin students had to explain the ideas and questions behind the project to artists and designers, rather than academic historians – to tell the story of the Jagiellonians not with reference to historiographies and grand narratives, but through images, of tombs, heraldry, castles and sixteenth-century printed family trees, their tendrils packed with kings and queens.

In the end, I chose a design by Evie Kitt. Evie’s logo sets out the project key word ‘Jagiellonians’ clearly and elegantly - important as it is a long word, a Polish-Lithuanian-Anglicised hybrid, a term unfamiliar even to many scholars working on the early modern period. The key feature of Evie’s logo is the initial ‘J’. This ‘J’ resembles a letter from a Renaissance illuminated manuscript in Central Europe, circa 1500, when the high gothic illumination style was reaching its zenith, and floral, botanical motifs were a key leitmotif. The Jagiellonians were important patrons of this style, as shown in their splendid gilded, floral prayer books and missals. Evie’s J is however not a painted initial, but appears as if it has been carved out of red marble. Red ‘marble’ (hard limestone), excavated from mines near Esztergom in Hungary, was a prestige artistic material in early modern Central Europe, used in Renaissance palaces and tombs by Jagiellonian monarchs in both Buda and Cracow. Hungarian red marble is also a reminder that Jagiellonian history is not just about Poland and Lithuania, but a wider regional phenomenon.

The crown topping the J is a fairly self-explanatory reference to the Jagiellonians as a major royal dynasty, but also arguably one of the only symbols the project can safely use. The symbols employed by the dynasty themselves, from the 14^th to 16^th centuries – a mounted rider (pogon, pahonia), double cross, white eagle – have enjoyed a complex afterlife in Central Europe. The ‘pogon’, for example, which features prominently in many Renaissance depictions of the dynasty, is today one of the official symbols of the very politically different states of Lithuania and Belarus. You can buy ties and cushions with the Belarussian patriotic ‘pahonia’ online. The ERC project is intended as a new international study of the dynasty, which transcends local, national and nationalist perspectives, so these traditional, heavily resonant, politicised images present a problem, even if they were originally owned (or appropriated) by the Jagiellonians. That is why the Jagiellonians logo had to reinvent the dynasty’s visual foot-print from scratch, to re-imagine and reconfigure it. I think Evie has done a great job of this; now we have to wait and see what colleagues, and wider audiences, in Central Europe make of this visual digest of the project, and of what it is hoping to achieve.

Sitting with Pictures

Nesterov's Blessed St. Sergius of Radonezh, Russian State Museum.
© Andy Freeberg, reproduced with permission.

This weekend’s Guardian magazine carried a feature on the photographer Andy Freeberg, and his images of Russian art gallery attendants, Guardians of Russian Art. When I wander around art galleries, the attendants, sat on their little stools, staring into the middle distance, appear unsmiling and fantastically bored. So it was interesting to read that the attendants photographed by Freeberg talked to him passionately about their jobs – one woman, it was reported, came back to the gallery on her days off to continue looking at the paintings, while another commuted for hours to the job she loved.

Freeberg’s photos of the attendants sitting, silent and still, in front of the paintings they guard are gently humorous, but I also found them moving, and they made me think of historians. Freeberg is interested in how gallery attendants might come to look like the paintings they guard all day. I sometimes wonder if historians, like dogs and their owners, also gradually come to resemble the periods they study, or at least take on some of their characteristics.

In particular, however, the attendants in Freeberg’s photos give off a sense of contemplating, sitting, and being with the art objects they have responsibility for. That reminds me of historians in archives, who spend hours a day (also on uncomfortable chairs) in the presence of their documents, listening for voices, simply being with the past. So perhaps art attendants in world-leading galleries, and historians huddled over their sources behind the doors of archives, have a certain kinship, a kind of bearing witness to the endeavours, labours and lives of others, which leave many people baffled or unmoved. 

Two Renaissance Europes

Last month, I travelled to Warsaw to see one of Central Europe’s international blockbuster exhibitions of 2012/13 – Europa Jagiellonica 1386-157: Art and Culture in Central Europe under the Jagiellonians. The show grew out of an art historical research project at the University of Leipzig in the early 2000s, and opened in Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic last spring. From there, a convoy of trucks packed with Renaissance art took the exhibition to Warsaw, and in January it will move onto Potsdam in Germany.

The aim of the exhibition is to showcase the depth of artistic talent, and extent of elite artistic patronage of Renaissance forms, in Central Europe in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. The first few galleries focus on the Jagiellonian dynasty themselves, who by 1500 ruled Lithuania, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary. They are represented through their portraits, pearl necklaces, initials carved in red marble, the vestments of a dynastic cardinal. The second part of the exhibition (in Warsaw, rather confusingly, housed in a completely different venue) is a great treasure chest of gilded gothic altarpieces, illuminated manuscripts, monstrances and jewelled reliquaries from Prague, Zagreb, Cracow, Bratislava and Buda. As a curatorial and diplomatic feat, bringing all these objects together is an epic achievement. The lack of any narrative about Jagiellonian Europe and its culture/s does, however, feel like a missed opportunity.

What most struck me about Europa Jagiellonica, however, was just how starkly our histories of Renaissance Europe are still stubbornly split into two – in the English-speaking world, research and teaching focus overwhelmingly on France, Italy, the British Isles, Iberia and the Holy Roman Empire. In Central European museums and textbooks, however, there is a completely different narrative focused on dynasties like the Jagiellonians. I spend a lot of my professional life explaining (and perhaps apologising for) this state of affairs – saying it is due to linguistic barriers; to a traditionally inward-looking focus among Central European historians, and to an anti Central-Europe prejudice among many western historians who assume the region is by definition marginal. But sometimes, when I stand in front of the maps like those in Europa Jagiellonica, which show that the Jagiellonians, who are regularly omitted from English Renaissance textbooks, ruled over a third of continental Europe, c. 30% of today's EU, my patience does rather give way to exasperation. It is over 20 years, a whole generation, since the end of the Cold War. You wonder, for all the talk of European integration since 1945, how long we will have to wait for a joined-up, unified account of Europe’s early modern past. And in the meantime, the Jagiellonians and their lands and peoples linger on the margins of our historic consciousness, alien, exotic and fairy-tale like, less like the flesh-and-blood Tudors than like royalty from a medieval fantasy epic, such as Game of Thrones.

Chimeras and Cats

Etruscan Chimera of Arezzo, in the Archaeological Museum of Florence.
Photo by Eric Parker

One of my favourite history-book opening lines is found in Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s Millenium, where he imagines a future inter-galactic museum, in which the display case labelled ‘Earth’ contains only a piece of medieval chain mail and a Coca Cola can.

I felt a similar, but less nihilistic, frisson at the Royal Academy’s current Bronze exhibition. I was expecting not to like it, because some reviews (in common with reviews for the National Gallery’s blockbuster Leonardo last year) had remarked on the ahistorical style of the curating. Rather than arranging objects by time and place, we were warned, the Royal Academy has anarchically mixed then up by theme, placing works by Anish Kapoor alongside ancient Greek statues dredged up off Sicily.

In the event, I found the exhibition, with its disregard for time and space, to have  a huge dose of historical sensibility, in a mind-broadening, paradoxical and strangely moving way. A life-size Renaissance bronze boar on a bed of flowers did indeed share a room with a Picasso monkey, made from toy cars, and a fine cat from 7^th century BC Spain. There were bronzes from societies which I admit to never having heard of, such as the Hallstadt and Nuragic cultures. This radical juxtaposition of objects forces the viewer to read the apparently familiar in new contexts – a 17C Christ statue, for example, looking identical to its neighbour, a bronze Bacchus. By putting medieval Sri Lankan, Renaissance Italian, ancient Greek and 20C American sculpture alongside one another in this egalitarian way, Bronze shows up how Eurocentric and West-focused our history syllabi still are – the exhibition is a very good prospectus for the ever-more trendy discipline of global history. In particular, however, it was humbling to be reminded of the vastness, depth and heterogeneity of the human past. Bronze was like stepping into a glittering, celebratory version of Fernandez-Armesto’s display case at the end of the universe, and a painful reminder of how very little of that past any one individual, or even any given History Faculty, can really hope to master.

Leonardo's Polish Connection



Lady with an Ermine, Leonardo da Vinci
Czartoryski Museum, Krakow
(or, Dama z gronostajem)



This is another ‘picture’ blog, because as well as getting to the London Art Fair last month, I was also able to see the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition before it closed last week. Within the exhibition’s story of two self-made men - the illegitimate Tuscan boy who became a celebrity genius in his own day, and the unscrupulous usurper who became Duke of Milan – there was an unexpected Polish twist. Many reviewers declared Leonardo’s painting of the duke’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani (The Lady with the Ermine, 1489-90) to be the exhibition’s highlight, and this was the image used in all the National Gallery’s advertising materials. The portrait had been lent by the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow, with the permission of Prince Adam Karol Czartoryski. At the Forum on Early Modern Central Europe, a seminar I co-convene in London, we recently heard a great paper by Agnieszka Whelan on the patronage and collecting of the 18C Polish noblewoman Izabela Czartoryska. It was her son, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, who purchased Leonardo’s Lady with the Ermine in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century. It was exhibited in the family’s Polish and Parisian houses during the Partitions of Poland, and Cecilia Gallerani later travelled to Kraków when the city offered premises to house the Czartoryski collection. She was still there in 1939, when the canvass was man-handled by German occupiers, and thereafter she was appropriated by the post-war Communist government as state property.

Looking at The Lady with the Ermine – at the slightly creepy rodent, and Cecilia’s trademark enigmatic stare into the middle distance – we can on the one hand see a story of the Duke of Milan, his teenage mistress, court painter and the reinvention of the portrait genre. But this painting also tells a more modern story, of 19C Polish émigrés drumming up support for Polish independence by demonstrating the impeccable taste of Polish aristocracy, of nationalism, Fascism and Communism. So standing in front of The Lady with the Ermine, I thought of Leonardo, but I also thought of Izabela Czartoryska and the ways in which this Renaissance masterpiece reflects Polish – as much as Florentine or Milanese – history. In that sense, it is a pleasingly European painting.

A White Horse and an Open Book




'Peaks, Passes and Glaciers'
Veronica Bailey, 'Hours of Devotion' series (2007).
With kind permission from Veronica Bailey and Giles Baker Smith

  One of the highlights of late January every year – ever since I accidentally ended up with a free ticket as a graduate student – is the London Art Fair. It is one of the biggest such shows/sales in the UK, with dozens of top galleries and dealers exhibiting works from Lowry to Damien Hirst in the glassy, multi-tiered space of the Business Design Centre in Islington. This year, amidst the hundreds of photos, collages, sculptures and paintings on display, two images struck a chord with me as a historian, as works of art which captured something of the experience of researching the past.

The first was History Painting by the Australian-based artist Giles Alexander (on the website, it’s the last picture in the scroll-through gallery). In oil and resin, it’s an oval image showing an Uccello-like scene from a late medieval battlefield, all handsome horses and men in fancy hats. The painting is in the shape of an eye, and the central pupil-section shows a fragment of the scene perfectly in focus, homing in on what looks like the slaying of a commander on a white mount. Beyond the pupil, however, the entire image is foggy and out of focus. This reminded me somewhat of writing a historical monograph –  you try to hold assemble a great panorama of evidence and arguments in your mind’s eye, but for much of the process it all feels a bit out of focus and vague. It’s only when you’ve hit upon your central argument, which can make sense of the evidence, that (ideally) the moment of clarity descends and you feel you can really see the historical landscape.

The second image which stood out for me as a historian was a photograph by Veronica Bailey, entitled Peaks, Passes and Glaciers. It is part of a 2007 series called Hours of Devotion, for which the artist photographed Victorian books from the reading room of Coutts Bank. Her image, of the work standing upright and partially open, its fanned pages facing the viewer, conveys not just the materiality of the old volumes historians consult in research libraries, but their sculptural, architectural and tactile quality as objects. Giles Baker Smith (an Oxford history alumnus himself) has written that Bailey’s images stand ‘as a bold visual testament to the enduring power of the book as a resource of learning, as a cultural mirror and as an aesthetic entity in its own right’. Looking at these photos, I could almost smell their pages and feel their dust on my fingertips. Sometimes artists can tell us things we only half-realised about our own work, its tools and processes.

Paperwork




Bureaucratics: Reproduced with kind permission from Jan Banning

  While idly leafing through a UK national newspaper over my lunch this week, I saw a photograph which made me freeze in the middle of my bagel. It was from a project called Bureacratics, by the photographer Jan Banning, which is currently showing in a Dutch gallery, but which you can also see on-line or in book form (to see the full collection, click on Bureaucratics). To create Bureaucratics, Banning talked his way into hundreds of government offices across the world, from Yemen to Russia, and photographed bureaucrats at their desks.  He says that the project is “the product of an anarchist’s heart, a historian’s mind and an artist’s eye”.

The image which so struck me was a photograph of Sushama Prasad, assistant clerk at the Cabinet Secretary in Patna, India (above). This is a photo to induce a moment of horror in any historian. We see Ms. Prasad sat at a battered and bare desk, in front of large wooden cabinets. On top of these are piled hundreds upon hundreds of aged bundles of paper. They form a grey sea of unfiled, utterly chaotic, visibly decaying bureaucratic paperwork. This is precisely the sort of thing research historians see in bad dreams – sources there in tantalising abundance, yet virtually unusable, because they are utterly disordered and unsearchable. The sight of apparently rotting official papers, sources on the cusp of oblivion, is equally distressing – it reminded me of a Polish ecclesiastical archive in which I was handed 15C episcopal letters so damp, I had to wipe my hands after using them. Banning’s photograph brings home what historic documents look like in their ‘natural state’, if left to run wild like a garden. It makes stark too how much artifice and on-going human intervention there is behind an archive, where archivists have imposed (or maintained) an order on/in the paperwork. Ms. Prasad’s office, in this striking shot, is a kind of anti-archive, a dark place in the historian’s imagination.

Picturing History

Clio, in The Allegory of Painting,
by Johannes Vermeer

          I recently bought a copy of Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s book The Past Within Us: Media, Memory and History (2005), which explores how history is currently represented in school textbooks, novels and cartoons. What initially struck me about this book was its cover. Against a neutral beige background, there are a dozen photographs mounted on wooden sticks, as if they were placards at a protest march. Each photo shows an upraised arm with clenched fist – black arms, arms in uniform, arms in what look like Edwardian ladies’ sleeves. I find it interesting, in books which deal with ‘History’ in general, how publishers choose to depict history itself as an abstract. In this case, the publishing house Verso seems to have decided that history is about struggle and protest, about human limbs raised in anger, perhaps as a wider symbol of human agency.

            When I dutifully read E.H. Carr’s What is History? (1961) as an A-Level student, I remember being slightly depressed by the cover, which showed a pile of books in a very dark and dusty library, possibly accompanied by a clock. The message seemed to be that history was very serious, sombre (and dry) stuff. The latest edition of Carr’s classic is snazzier, but more puzzling – a Magritte-style giant eye, with a cloud-scattered blue sky instead of an iris. What’s the message here? The historian as all-seeing? History as the story of human witness? Another standard book which students feel they should read before coming for an Oxford history admissions interview is Richard J. Evans’ In Defence of History (1997). An early edition of this showed a cheerful, colourful collage of Mao, Stalin etc., as if suggesting that ‘History’ is ultimately about the crazy men who make things happen on a colossal scale in big countries. More recent editions of Evans’ book simply have a photograph of what looks like a firework display over Berlin’s Brandenburg gate, presumably a snapshot of the German reunification celebrations in 1990. Here, ‘History’ is represented by a spine-tingling, tangible, self-consciously important moment of the recent past.

            Perhaps because of my Renaissance interests, I’m quite attracted to the classical and early modern tradition of representing History through the figure of Clio, the muse of History, who dwelt along with all the other muses with Apollo on Mount Parnassus. One of the main images on the Oxford History Faculty website (soon to be revamped) shows Clio as painted by the Dutch painter Vermeer (d.1675) in his Allegory of Painting: a young woman in a blue-grey dress, with a wreath on her head, and a book in her hands. A young woman with a book in her hands is as good, and provocative, a symbol as any for representing our study of the human past.

Nativity Scenes

At this time of year, I usually receive through my door a collective Christmas card from my area’s local churches, which typically takes the form of a series of nativity scenes executed in felt-tip pen and crayon by school children. What strikes me about this card – coming as it does after 8 weeks of teaching an intensive course on the Italian Renaissance – is how the imagery, composition and basic colours of these drawings by children in 21^st-century, officially Protestant England are in their essentials identical to the Nativity scenes painted in 15^th century Tuscany by Botticelli, or Piero della Francesca, or Ghirlandaio or even the reliably unconventional Leonardo. There is a stable, a woman in blue and a small infant in the middle of the image; there may be any combination of animals, shepherds, monarchs and angels around the margins of the scene.

It might seem self-evident to us that a Nativity scene should look like this, but that in itself is testament to how powerful and embedded this iconography is. What interests me is how the pictorial conventions of the medieval and Renaissance church, which set out for artists how depictions of the Nativity should look, have been transmitted to modern English classrooms, across the centuries and across the confessional divides created by the Reformation. Presumably these children, in drawing their Christmas card, did not have reproductions of Florentine Old Masters propped up in front of them. I imagine they have picked up the archetypal Nativity composition from children’s books, Christmas cards and decorations, cribs or even theatre (an important form of religious education in Renaissance Italy, as it happens), i.e. the Nativity play, but I’m only guessing. I’ve been reading Dana Arnold’s Very Short Introduction to Art History, an excellent digest of the core conceptual problems and current controversies in that discipline, in preparation for a new course I’m teaching next term.  She poses the question: when we see a painting of a woman holding a baby, how do we know it’s a representation of the Madonna and Child, and not just ‘any’ woman holding ‘any’ baby? The school-children’s Nativity drawings show, in apparently secularised 21^st century Britain, how resilient, deep-seated and widely diffused the imagery of western Christianity still is; how  iconography is apparently set to outlast mass adherence to traditional doctrinal belief.

Breughel for the People?

This week I was pleasantly surprised to receive in the post an A3 colour reproduction of The Road to Calvary (1602) by Peter Breughel the Younger (but just possibly by his much more famous dad). The Art Fund sent it as part of their current campaign to raise £2.7M, in order to keep the Brueghel on display in Nostell Priory in Yorkshire, and save it from auction and possible export. (You can see the picture here: www.artfund.org/procession).

The poster is arresting and rich in detail, if not exactly cheerful – there is an intricate seventeenth-century cityscape, a distant windmill, mounted soldiers with Habsburg standards marching Christ up to a very hilly Calvary, and scores of figures milling about. The accompanying letter from the director of the Art Fund points out that the precise meaning of much of this detail is controversial and slightly mysterious. Is it a commentary on the tensions in 17C Dutch society? An allegory of the Dutch Revolt against Habsburg rule? The letter then invites the reader/potential donor ‘to form your own [historical?] interpretation of the painting.’

I baulked slightly at this line, just as I was a rather thrown to be asked, in the Battle of Bosworth museum, for my personal opinion/judgement on the meaning of key archaeological artefacts recovered from the site. I myself have no killer insight into the Brueghel painting, but I did at first worry that the Art Fund invitation was a little silly – is the opinion of ‘everyman/woman’ really by implication as valid, or as useful, as that of an art historian who specialises in early modern Dutch art and has a formidable grasp of the context, genre and painterly oeuvre? But then I remembered what I say to the Somerville History Freshers when they arrive in Oxford (but not this year, because I’d lost my voice!) – don’t be afraid to challenge the historical experts you read, because as non-specialists you (potentially) bring a panoramic and fresh perspective, and can see things that a specialist who has spent 20 years immersed in their chosen field can perhaps no longer see. So, let’s wait and see if any of the Art Fund’s members come up with an iconoclastic, radical interpretation of Brueghel’s lively but gloomy panorama. In the meantime, I’m going to pin up the poster on the notice board outside my tutor room.