Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating online lecture from Christ’s College, Cambridge looking in detail at a medieval cup in their collection linked to their founder, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Mary Franklin, honorary keeper of the college’s plate, outlined her current research on the cup starting by looking at its original owner, Duke Humphrey, son, brother and uncle of Henry IV, V and VI and how its iconography links to him and the Lancastrian cause. We then looked in detail at the plants shown on the cup and their symbolic meanings from oak leaves to Forget-Me-Nots. She discussed an unidentified leaf which she speculated could be Rocket or Moonwort both of which could bring subtly different interpretations of the work.   She also discussed how cups like these would have been used at feasts and their role in showing magnificence , defined as “fitting expenditure on a great thing”. I had seen the cup in the British Museum’s Medieval Women exhibition but did revisit the show after this talk and felt I...

Fabulous exhibition at the British Library looking at the lives of Medieval women. I studied Medieval history at university, a long time ago, and how I wished we’d had this exhibition. It was full of wonderful stories and new people to discover. I’ve been twice now and got just as much from it the second time around. I liked the way it was divided into sections on private, public and spiritual lives. The private section looked at domestic life and had a number of displays on women’s health. Spiritual lives included nuns as well as Joan of Arc and her signature had to be one of the highlights of the show. I think my favourite section was the public one which looked at queens and what agency they had focusing on those who became regents and women as patrons of the art. There was also a display on working women such as a notary Juliet Durer from Lubeck and Alice Claver, a silk weaver in London. And my favourite object was Christine de Pisan’s “City of Women” showing women doing b...

Fascinating online lecture form the London Art History Society discussing medieval wall mosaics. Liz James from the University of Sussex took us though the practicalities of producing wall mosaics in the Medieval period using the works in the apse of the Church of Panagia in Kiti in Cyprus as a starting point. She briefly took us though the image but the talk mainly asked questions about how they got there and tried to answer them with observation and logical thinking. How do you design a building which is going to take the weight of a mosaic? How do you get the tesserae to the building site? Do they arrived coloured or does the artist have to do that? She acknowledged she might not have the answers but presented a starting point for thinking about the topic. It was a refreshing and exciting approach to art history.

Interesting online lecture from the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at an exhibition they have put on in Paris at the Hotel de la Marine. James Robinson, Keeper of Decorative Art and Sculpture at the V&A explained how the subtitle of the show was “When the English Spoke French” and how he use that as a starting point to readdress the links with the continent in the Medieval period. He took us through the themes of the show from monastic ties, how dynastic marriages spread styles, English exports and the role of trade. All of these were illustrated with great images of the objects they had lent and the exhibition lay out. He included good details about many of the objects and I can’t wait to revisit them when they return home.

Interesting online discussion from Medieval Art Research looking ecology-related museum practices. Heather Alexis Smith from the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St Louis talked us through a recent exhibition she had curated “ The Nature of Things: Medieval Art and Ecology 1100-1550 ” which looked at how medieval art objects relate to the natural world. She explained how they looked at how art making affected environments both temporarily and permanently and at how the environment affected the production of art influenced types of work and imagery. The show was arranged by type of environment forest, earth, field and quarries. Julia Perratore from The Cloisters in New York then discussed measures the museum are taking to aim to be carbon neutral including a recent test geothermal well which has proved to be a viable project. She also talked about work to interpret the collection emphasising environmental issues starting with the Saint-Guilhem-Le-Desert cloister from a Benedictine mona...

Comprehensive and enjoyable  online course from HistFest on Medieval art from the 6th to the 14th century. Over four weeks Janina Ramirez led us though this period via recorded lectures and live Q&A sessions. I think the course had run before with the same lectures but the format worked well and the Q&A sessions were lively and interactive. Ramirez was very approachable and welcomed new ideas.   She encouraged those with questions to turn on their video screens leading to some fascinating conversations. She started with the Dark Ages, which she doesn’t want to be called that, looking at how Christian art started to leak into England both from the Roman and Celtic traditions. She talked about the imagery of intertwined animals and the complex riddles used both in art and literature leading up to the Normal Conquest. Post Conquest we looked at the rise of the artist from anonymous craftsman to a period we see more individualism in society and art. Despite this bein...

Fabulous online course from ARTscapades looking at Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts. Lead by Sally Dormer, Director of the early years V&A course, over two weeks we covered over 1000 years from the 4th to the 15th century however this was cleverly broken up to give an overview plus a rough chronological structure. Week one started with an excellent look at how a medieval book was made from making the manuscript or writing surface, through the covers and the production process. We discussed who the makers were and the whole thing was illustrated with some wonderful contemporary images where possible. We then moved onto early books made for the Carolingian and Ottonian Holy Roman Emperors in the 9th and 10th centuries. I didn’t know these works and the talk introduced me to a wealth of new images and ideas such as the attached image of Charles the Bald. In week two we turned to the look specifically at monastic books which allowed us to focus on English production in the 1...

Fascinating online lecture from the Churches Conservation Trust looking at how love and marriage were reflected in medieval tomb monuments. Jessica Barker from the Courtauld Institute took as her starting point The Arundel Tomb in Chichester Cathedral which shows a couple holding hands. Although this is a 19th century reconstruction she felt this is how it would have originally have looked as there are many other examples of this around the country. She discussed a number of these and suggested that the hand holding was not a romantic gesture but a sign of a legal contact as often the women had bought land to what were controversial marriages. She also looked at tombs reflected ideas of marriage at the time giving two examples of brass memorials to merchants which give heavy emphasis to the children born to the marriage as a sign of a life well lived in the absence of rank and wealth. I liked the section which discussed two tombs commissioned by women, the wonderful Alice Chauce...

Enlightening online talk from the Churches Conservation Trust looking at images of the Annunciation in English churches. Canon Jeremy Haselock, Vice Dean of Norwich Cathedral, led us through some of the problems of depicting the Annunciation and how Medieval artists overcame these including the lack of description of the scene in the bible, the delicacy of depicting the event while still maintaining the purity of the Virgin Mary and what emotional response to give Mary.   He also talked about the cult of the House of Mary both in Loreto in France and Walsingham in Norfolk, both buildings or copies of the building in which the Annunciation was said to have taken place and both great centres of pilgrimage.   Most interesting was his description of an English iconographic phenomena, which I had not come across before, the Lily Crucifix which combines the lily of the Annunciation and a crucifix as it was said that the date of the Annunciation and the Crucifixion fell on the ...

Fascinating online tour from London Art Week of an exhibition at Sam Fogg looking at Medieval women as the subject and makers of art. Jana Gajdosova, Medieval specialist at Sam Fogg and Alexandra Gajewski   of Burlington Magazine took us round the show with four brief videos of the installation then picked out specific images to highlight themes. I loved the image of St Avia shown here which would probably have been set in a wall and fascinated to hear about Shrine Madonna’s which open up down the chest to reveal an image, often a Trinity, and fell out of fashion due to the theological contradiction that them implied the Virgin came before all aspects of the Trinity not just the son. They kept mentioning a previous round table discussion which I found on the Sam Fogg website which involved the two speakers from the talk plus Jeffrey Hamburger from Harvard University and Madeline Caviness from Tuft University. This talked more about the themes involved including the idea of who...

Fabulous exhibition at the British Library looking at the Anglo-Saxons. I studied this period at school and university and anything you could want to be there was as well as lots of new discoveries. I moved from object to object remembering things I had long thought I’d forgotten. The show was nicely organised chronologically around the main kingdoms as they came to prominence the around broader themes of language and literature, the church and conquests. It was a nice touch to end with the Domesday Book treating it not as a tool for Norman conquest but as a reflection of the excellent land records which had been kept by the Anglo-Saxons. My old “Were the Norman’s innovators?” essay plan came flooding back! There were so many highlight’s it’s hard to pick a few but here goes! How about Cuthbert’s bible, the earliest European bound book, which looked as fresh as if it had been made yesterday as it had been in Cuthbert’s coffin. Alternatively the Codex Amiatinus, on loan fro...

Delightful talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival looking at British Cathedrals and illuminated manuscripts. Simon Jenkins talked about his recent book on cathedrals taking us on a rough chronological trip through their architecture with wonderful photographs. His lack of believe sat oddly with his love of the buildings. To me the life of a cathedral is so moulded by the worship that has gone on there over the centuries that, whether you are Christian or not, that must be part of its soul. When asked what he would do with the buildings his answer was somewhat vague and seemed to imply a glorified community centre. Christopher de Hamel talked about his book about discovering illuminated manuscripts. His talk was wonderfully quirky and fun with random pictures of dogs thrown in between the wonderful ones of illuminations, so he won me over easily! His love of the subject came across and he was full of fascination detective stories.

Stunning exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum of medieval English luxury embroidery work. I’ve always been fascinated in this period in art because of studying medieval history at university. My degree didn’t really look at the visual arts and was very document based, but I’ve realised since how much you can learn about a group of people by looking at their art. It’s difficult to see much English art of this period because the reformation and Cromwell destroyed so much of it. A lot of the embroidery that has survived was actually from abroad. This work was very highly prized and a lot was commissioned by the Popes to give as gifts. It was fascinating to look at where works had been lent from. The pieces in this show were stunning. From the first piece you see the “Bologna Cope” I was hooked. This piece was in near perfect condition and beautifully displayed so you could study the iconography of it in detail. It had the birth of Christ round the edge and the Pa...

Fascinating exhibition at the British Library looking at Magna Carta, 800 years after it was issued, focusing on how and why it was written and the effect it has had since around the world. I studied medieval history both at A Level and university so the first section of exhibition was like meeting old friends I’d forgotten about long ago! The range of material the curators had managed to bring together was stunning from a 1213-14 pipe roll with the earliest depiction of Beckett’s death, Mathew Paris’s map of Britain even the slippers of King John’s first Archbishop of Canterbury. I found the section on King John and Magna Carta itself most interesting and was amazed to see early drafts of it and to be reminded that it was actually annulled by the Pope within weeks of being issued. It was a nice touch to include a facsimile of John’s tomb and fun, but grizzly to also have his teeth! The later sections on how the Magna Carta was used were also really interesting includ...

Wonderful exhibition at the British Museum examining devotional objects from medieval Europe in particular reliquaries. It was like falling into a jewel box! I liked the fact it put the objects in context but also acknowledged them as beautiful and sometimes ground breaking objects. Having done a course at the Courtauld earlier this year on early Christian images it was wonderful to see the early items and see how iconography developed. In amongst the gold there were some wonderfully touching items such as St Cuthbert’s personal travelling altar, a really direct connection to the saint. However my favourite items have to be the reliquary for the Holy Thorn with tiny gold figures rising from their graves on the bottom and small gold apostles up the edge. Reviews Times Guardian Daily Telegraph Evening Standard