Michael Prodger

The best way to view some of the world’s greatest works of art is to go nowhere near them. Like other celebrities, the most famous paintings are hard to get close to and there are few less spiritual experiences than being cattle-prodded as part of a crowd through an overpacked exhibition. You may visit in the hope of communing with legendary art but, as often as not, gallery-going is anti-contemplative. While there is no way of replicating the experience of standing in front of a masterpiece, technology can at least allow you your personal space. Take Google Art Project, for example, a collaboration between the omnivorous internet search company and 151 museums, galleries and collections in 40 different countries.

Catherine the Great was born neither a Catherine nor with any prospects of greatness. As Sophie Frederica Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst she was a minor German princess with modest expectations, but when the Empress Elizabeth of Russia chose her to be the consort of her nephew and heir, the Grand Duke Peter, Sophie’s and Russia’s fates were transformed. In 1744 the 15-year-old Sophie arrived in her new country, converted to Orthodoxy, changed her name to Catherine and set about becoming history’s ultimate self-made woman. She was to rule Russia for 34 years and turn it into a global power. She overhauled Russia’s economy, foreign policy, legal system and education; she expanded its boundaries and encouraged its arts and sciences.

Alongside his distinguished career as a painter, Howard Hodgkin has also long been a collector of note. As a schoolboy at Eton he was given to bouts of running away but while briefly in situ his art master, Wilfrid Blunt (the brother of Anthony), borrowed a 17th-century Indian painting of a chameleon from the Royal Collection to enliven a lesson and Hodgkin was hooked. He started buying Indian pictures then and has continued ever since. ‘My collection has nothing to do with art history,’ he says. ‘It is entirely to do with the arbitrary inclinations of one person.’ It is a method that has, nevertheless, resulted in one of the world’s great collections of Indian art.

Tony Hall tells Michael Prodger about how he transformed the Cultural Olympiad into the London 2012 Festival The most obvious gift possessed by Tony Hall, or Baron Hall of Birkenhead to give him his proper title, is for cleaning up an almighty mess. When he joined the Royal Opera House in 2001, after a long career at the BBC where he had been director of News and Current Affairs, the place had just chewed through five chief executives in four years. Under his aegis turnover has more than doubled, the number of new operas performed is up, and he introduced £10 student tickets while lowering its reliance on the government grant. However, when he was asked in 2009 to take over the running of the Cultural Olympiad as well, the mess he faced was of even more Augean proportions.

Claude Gellée (c.1600–1682), known as Claude Lorrain, started life as a pastry cook and despite turning his attentions from pies and patisserie to painting he never lost his love for confection. Although he is revered as the father of the landscape tradition and was hailed by Constable as ‘the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw’ there is precious little that is natural in his paintings. Claude instead mixed his pictorial ingredients — a tree, a ruin, a river — just as he had his butter, flour and eggs and whisked up poetry-frosted views that delighted the delicate palates of his noble patrons.

Hieronymus Bosch had a distinctive view of our debased humanity, most distinctly expressed in his paintings of Christ’s Passion, says Michael Prodger Carl Jung described the painter Hieronymus Bosch as ‘the master of the monstrous...the discoverer of the unconscious’. He was, however, only half right. While it is true that Bosch has no peers as a conjurer of phantasms and grotesques, he was no proto-psychologist: he was a man of his times. Bosch lived c.1450–1516 so his times were the late Middle Ages and there was no such thing as the unconscious then — there was the Bible. All human behaviour, good or ill, could be ascribed either to God or to the Devil. And, in Bosch’s worldview at least, the Devil was in the ascendant.