Renaissance

‘Hidden beauty is best (half seen), faces turned away.’ So noted a young English painter named Winifred Knights in 1924. Until recently, the power of her own work has been thoroughly concealed. After her death in 1947, indeed even before it, Knights was forgotten. By the 1950s her reputation had sunk so completely that both the Tate and the Fitzwilliam Museum refused to accept one of her masterpieces as a gift. However, artists who disappear into oblivion are sometimes rediscovered — and that is what has happened to Knights, who is now the subject of an admirable exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery. It is, as the cliché goes, a revelation. One of the things it reveals is how English painters continued to love the Italian Renaissance well into the modernist era.

Once, it seems, Sandro Botticelli played a trick on a neighbour. Next door was a weaver who possessed eight looms. He and his assistants kept these in constant use, creating such a judder-ing racket that the poor painter was unable to concentrate on his pictures. Botticelli implored this fellow to reduce the noise, but to no avail. So eventually the artist carried an enormous rock on to his roof, poised so the slightest vibration would bring it crashing through the noisy weaver’s premises. The man then saw reason. You can easily imagine the problem today as you walk down Botticelli’s street, Via del Porcellana. It’s a long, narrow thoroughfare running down to the Arno, tightly packed with three- and four-storey buildings.

When Tom Birkin, hero of J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country, wakes from sleeping in the sun, it is to a vision: the vicar’s wife Alice Keach in a wide-brimmed straw hat, a rose tucked into the ribbon. ‘Her neck was uncovered to the bosom and, immediately, I was reminded of Botticelli — not his Venus — the Primavera. It was partly her wonderfully oval face and partly the easy way she stood. I’d seen enough paintings to know beauty when I saw it and, in this out of the way place, here it was before me.

Piero della Francesca is today acknowledged as one of the foundational artists of the Renaissance. Aldous Huxley thought his ‘Resurrection’ ‘the best painting in the world’. His compositions marry art and science with cool precision and a sophisticated grasp of perspective — he was, after all, a mathematician. But he was only rediscovered in the mid-19th century after centuries of relative obscurity. Following his death in 1492, his artistic achievements faded in the memory and he became known chiefly as a geometer (his numerous writings include an innovative treatise on solid geometry and perspective). This is not wholly surprising.

On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was having a mixed time in Venice: on the one hand, as Dürer explained, he was making lots of delightful new acquaintances, among them ‘good lute-players’ and also ‘connoisseurs in painting, men of much noble sentiment and honest virtue’. However, there was also a very different type lurking in the early 16th-century Serenissima: ‘the most faithless, lying, thievish rascals such as I scarcely believed could exist on earth’. Dürer hints that among these latter were painters, perhaps including some whose works will be seen in a forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy, In the Age of Giorgione.

I remember the shock, like a jolt of static electricity. One day, between taking my degree and beginning my first job, while looking through a 16th-century book about numerology that had once belonged to John Dee in the British Library, I came upon an annotation in his own neat italic hand casting up the numerical values of the letters of his name. The total he wrote down came to 666. John Dee (1527–1609) was a magus, but we must not think that this made him a loony witch. An early Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, teaching Greek, he acquired a reputation for learning in mathematics, navigation and astronomy. But his long pursuit was of something he knew was dangerous and which I am not convinced he always thought licit: angelic conversations.

One day Julia Margaret Cameron was showing John Ruskin a portfolio of her photographic portraits. The critic grew more and more impatient until he came to a study of the scientist Sir John Herschel in which the subject’s hair stood up ‘like a halo of fireworks’. At this point, Ruskin slammed the portfolio shut and Cameron thumped him violently on the back, exclaiming, ‘John Ruskin, you are not worthy of photographs!’ He was indeed smackingly wrong to dismiss her work, as visitors to an exhibition at the V&A celebrating the 200th anniversary of her birth will be able to see for themselves. There are multiple ironies underlying this spat (they happily made up by lunchtime). Ruskin disapproved — officially speaking, at least — of photography.

In April 1501, about the time Michelangelo was returning from Rome to Florence to compete for the commission to carve a giant marble David, a very different sculptor named Tilman Riemenschneider agreed to make an altarpiece in the small German town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Since then, things have not changed much in Rothenburg. Though battered during the war, it has been restored to postcard perfection (or rather turned into a perfect place for tourists to take selfies of themselves against a Disneyesque medieval background). And the Altar of the Holy Blood is still there, in the place for which it was made, at the west end of the church of St James or Jakobskirche. This is a sculpted version of the Easter story both great and strange.

It’s German Season in London, and revealingly the best of three new shows is the one dealing with the most modern period: the post-second world war era of East and West Germany and the potent art that came out of that split nation. In Room 90 is another immaculately presented British Museum show of prints and drawings, focused this time around Georg Baselitz (born 1938). Of the 90 works on display, more than a third has been donated to the BM by Count Christian Duerckheim, the remainder lent by this assiduous collector. The show begins with Baselitz’s contemporaries and I was surprised to find myself quite liking some things by Gerhard Richter, currently the most overrated artist in the world.