Sure enough, after a mostly mild and sunny week, the Good Friday holiday dawned with low, featureless skies weeping a steady drizzle that made any prolonged time outdoors a bad idea. So much for my idea to drive to the Cotswolds to see a garden ablaze with tulips. Instead, it was in to London to check out a few new special exhibitions that seem to have been designed with me in mind.
"Baroque 1620-1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence" is running at the Victoria and Albert until 19 July, while a couple of miles away at the Tate Britain you can wallow in eight galleries devoted to Van Dyck until 17 May. While most people may think doing both in one day is a bit much, it is actually quite a logical pairing. Van Dyck was the most significant painter of the early English Baroque, and the people portrayed in his remarkable portraits would have been living through and shaping the early years of the movement so gloriously profiled at the
V&A.I started with Van Dyck, familiar territory for any fan of English country houses or royal palaces. Though he died in his early 40s, Van Dyck's output was staggering, and now graces the walls of most of these places. He seems to have painted absolutely everyone who was anyone in Charles I's court. With good reason: Rarely has a painter combined so beautifully the ability to capture the personality of the sitter with a flattering skill at making them look fantastic. If we are to take Van Dyck seriously, the aristocracy of England in the 1630s and '40s were a magnificently good looking bunch, men swaggering with confidence, women oozing sexuality, both dressed in lavish costumes that shimmer off the canvas. Of course, reality was quite different.
Van Dyck was, quite simply, a fabulous PR man. He started with a core of truth and then improved it, breathing glamour into everything he touched. Neither Charles I or his queen, Henrietta Maria, made much impact in person. He was short and delicate, she was plain with buck teeth. Yet Van Dyck turned them into elegant, courtly superstars. If there's one painter I could bring back from history to capture me on canvas, this would be the man. Sadly, the spin he put on the royal family, the dashing cavaliers and their ladies ultimately didn't do much good. This silken world of privilege collapsed in the civil wars, and a great many of the people depicted went on to die in battle or lose the wealth and position they were so confidently showing off.
The audio guide does a great job of telling the stories of all the sitters, explaining Van Dyck's stellar career and putting it all in context. Particularly effective, I thought, was the last two rooms of the exhibit, which showed how Van Dyck influenced all the portraitists who came after him. This is a real delight of a show, offering both lavish and fascinating stuff to look at AND a story that puts it all together.
Baroque at the V&A is even better. It's often claimed that this was the first truly global art movement, starting in Rome as art and architecture to add appeal to the counter-reformation but quickly spreading around the world. The show aims to prove this point, bringing together items from Europe, the Americas and even Asia. The exhibit shows how paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture, religion, music, theatre and gardens all complemented each other to create a single style. It's lavish, bombastic, emotionally wrought and ornate. You'll need a lie-down in a quiet, white room by the time you emerge. It all is, as the artists intended, a bit overwhelming.
Highlights come thick and fast. There's a pietra dura cabinet with garlands of fruit so detailed that the shining seeds of a pomegranate are visible inside the split fruit skin. One gallery re-creates a nobleman's cabinet of curiousities, stuffed full of small objects d'art rich with detail. There's a gaudy, gold-encrusted altar shipped all the way from Mexico, and a remarkably ornate set of goblets, candlesticks and other religious paraphernalia from Brazil. A state bed with pristine original hangings stands next to extraordinary solid silver furniture and accessories. There are fascinating opera and masque costumes, architectural models, a lady's sled and a children's garden carriage. It is, quite literally, a treasure trove that goes on and on.
All this is beautifully augmented by films and music. That child's carriage sits beneath a large screen that sweeps you through the baroque gardens of Versailles. The architecture section features a wall with rolling images of the best of Roman baroque exteriors. Music is present throughout the exhibit (and can be downloaded from the show's excellent web site), changing from secular to religious and back to match the displays. Particularly fascinating is the opera section, which shows off stage sets, exquisitely-wrought musical instruments and costumes while a video shows an authentic production of a 17th century performance.
This is precisely the well-rounded exploration I was hoping for earlier in the year when I was disappointed in the Byzantium exhibit. It's an approach at which the V&A excels, and they've really outdone themselves here. I suspect I may need to see the show again before it closes. As any Baroque artist could have told you, once is not enough.
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