Cathy's Art Diary

Nice little exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the Reformation in England 500 years since Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Articles to the door of a church in Wittenberg. The show included the gallery’s lovely picture of Cranmer who wrote the Book of Common Prayer and was executed under Mary I. There were also crude portraits of Latimer and Ridley, two of the Oxford Martyrs, painted in the reign of Elizabeth I after the publication of Foxes Martyrs. Other aspects of the story were represented by engravings looking at the Wycliffe, Tyndale and Coverdale bibles, the first part and full transcripts of the bible to be printed in English and engraved portraits of Luther and Thomas Cromwell. Closes on 2 December 2017  

Fascinating exhibition at Tate Britain looking at occasions in English history where art has been destroyed whether for religious, political or aesthetic reasons. The religious section was probably the most detailed and looked three distinct periods, the Dissolution of the monasteries, the reformation under Edward VI and the Civil War. We think of the Dissolution as a destructive phase by actually Henry tended to just remove things that would make him money. It wasn’t until later that we see the wholesale destruction of images because of religious ideology. These displays showed just how much Britain had lost at this time. I think most countries had an artistic golden age, or maybe more than one, and I suspect the late medieval period was one of Britain’s yet we largely ignore it because so little is left. I loved the fragments form the screen at Winchester which were so crisp because they’d been buried rather than weathering, it gave a wonderful view of what the world mus...