Titian at the National Gallery - Love, Desire, Death

‘Death of Actaeon’ (about 1559-75), the National Gallery, London

The National Gallery have organised an astonishing exhibition - Titian - Love, Desire, Death, that  unites all six paintings, in a series that Titian referred to as the 'poesie', for the first time in over 400 years. Ironically, the exhibition opened in March 2020 just as the Coronavirus restrictions prevented the public from visiting; a shocking event that perfectly demonstrates the cruel and capricious way in which the Gods play with our lives. 

'Danaë’ (about 1551–3), The Wellington Collection, Apsley House

The scene is based on the story of the Princess Danae recounted briefly by Ovid and at greater length by Boccaccio. She was isolated in a bronze tower following a prophecy that her firstborn would eventually kill her father. Although aware of the consequences, Danaë was seduced and became pregnant by Zeus / Jupiter, who, inflamed by lust, descended from Mount Olympus to seduce her in the form of a shower of gold.

‘Venus and Adonis’ (1554), Prado, Madrid

Venus tries to stop her lover from departing for the hunt, fearing—correctly—that he would be killed. The mood of sensuality, conveyed by the beautiful depiction of Venus, seen from the back, enhances the viewer’s sense of the tragic end to this story, expressed through their exchanged glances and the frightened Cupid. 

     ‘Diana and Callisto’, (1556–9) National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland

The nymph Callisto was the favourite of Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt. Jupiter, king of the gods, noticed her beauty and disguised himself in order to seduce her. Titian has painted the moment Diana forces Callisto to strip and bathe after hunting and discovers her pregnancy.

‘Rape of Europa’ (1559–62) from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

This is the story of the abduction of Europa by Zeus / Jupiter. Europa is sprawled helplessly on her back, her clothes in disarray. In the myth, the god assumed the form of a bull and enticed Europa to climb onto his back. Once there, the bull rode into the sea and carried her to Crete where he revealed his real identity. Europa became the first Queen of Crete, and had three children with Zeus. The painting depicts Europa on the back of the bull, just off the shore of her homeland.

‘Perseus and Andromeda’ (probably 1554–6), The Wallace Collection, London


Perseus and Andromeda is perhaps the most dramatic of all of these paintings. Andromeda is shown chained to a rock as a sacrifice to appease the sea monster, who had been sent by Neptune to punish her mother for claiming that she and Andromeda were more beautiful than the Nereids. The hero Perseus swoops down to rescue her, his powerful vertiginous descent contrasting vividly with her passive vulnerability.

Diana and Actaeon

This painting portrays the moment in which the hunter Actaeon bursts into where the goddess Diana and her nymphs are bathing. Diana is furious and turns Actaeon into a stag, who is then pursued and killed by his own hounds, a scene Titian later painted in 'The Death of Actaeon' (see below)

'Death of Actaeon’ (about 1559-75), the National Gallery, London

This is the sequel to Titian's Diana and Actaeon showing the story's tragic conclusion, which approximately follows the Roman poet's account. After Actaeon surprised the goddess Diana bathing naked in the woods, she transformed him into a stag and he is attacked and killed by his own hounds.

The paintings are inspired by stories taken from Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses' and other classical works and were almost all painted for Prince Philip of Spain (later King Philip) over 10 years from about 1551 to 1562.

Ovid's poems provided Titian with tales from a world where capricious and cruel immortals play havoc with the lives of men and women. The paintings all have themes of seduction, disguise and power.

Click here for the National Gallery Facebook page where the two 'Diana' painting are discussed

Click here for the fascinating BBC programme which discusses the exhibition 

See also Favourite Writings - Ovid 

And finally, I can't resist adding another similar painting, 'Bacchus and Ariadne' by Luca Giodarno, that hangs in the Herbert Gallery and Museum, Coventry. 

'It is a virtuoso reinterpretation and expansion of Titian's famous painting of 'Bacchus and Ariadne' which is now in the National Gallery, London. It tells a story which was popular in classical times and in the renaissance. Theseus had killed the Minotaur and escaped from the Labyrinth by means of a ball of string given to him by Ariadne. He took Ariadne off with him in his ship but (this is where the painting begins) abandons her on the island of Naxos. She holds the string and gazes at his vanishing sail, but behind her Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry arrives to comfort her.' The story is further immortalised in Richard Strauss's semi-comic opera, 'Ariadne Auf Naxos' 

See also 'The Lasting legacy of Ovid'

A Brief History of Plagues

1918 - waiting to receive patients in the US

We have become so accustomed to being protected from serious illnesses by advances in public health and medicine that we no longer remember that devastating epidemics have ravaged us many times over the centuries. The Black Death in the C14th is thought to have killed half the population of western Europe, and the 'Plague Pits' on St Catherine's Hill outside Winchester still attest to its virulence. The 'Spanish 'Flu (actually from Kansas) of 1918-9 killed about 40m people and the 'seasonal' 'flu that strikes us every winter carries off about the same number of people worldwide, but because of its low toxicity (0.1%) and predictability, it's not classified as an epidemic.  

The closest I have come to a plague was the SARS epidemic of 2002 in Asia which killed about 800 people before being contained, a very small number compared to the historic plagues and even with Ebola, which has killed about 11,000 since first being identified in 1976. The Swine 'flu of 2009 was far more virulent, killing between 150,ooo and 575,000 people worldwide.

It's interesting to learn that a respiratory disease epidemic was listed as one of the top five threats to the UK population in government studies prepared in 2104-5, but this doesn't seem to have resulted in much forward planning (as in the stockpiling of PPE and ventilators).  Bill Gates's amazingly prescient TED Talk in 2015 should have also alerted the government to stockpile the obvious equipment like ventilators, but of course there are no votes in being prepared.

This piece from a professor of Classics is an interesting history of the devastating plagues that ravaged the ancient world.

Thucydides and the plague of Athens

The coronavirus is concentrating our minds on the fragility of human existence in the face of a deadly disease. Words like "epidemic" and "pandemic" (and "panic"!) have become part of our daily discourse.

These words are Greek in origin, and they point to the fact that the Greeks of antiquity thought a lot about disease, both in its purely medical sense and as a metaphor for the broader conduct of human affairs. What the Greeks called the "plague" (loimos) features in some memorable passages in Greek literature.

 Pericles Funeral Oration on the Greek 50 Drachmai 1955 banknote. Picture: Shutterstock

One such description sits at the very beginning of Western literature. Homer's Iliad, (around 700BC), commences with a description of a plague that strikes the Greek army at Troy. Agamemnon, the leading prince of the Greek army, insults a local priest of Apollo called Chryses.

Apollo is the plague god - a destroyer and healer - and he punishes all the Greeks by sending a pestilence among them. Apollo is also the archer god, and he is depicted firing arrows into the Greek army with a terrible effect:

Apollo strode down along the pinnacles of Olympus angered

in his heart, carrying on his shoulders the bow and the hooded

quiver; and the shafts clashed on the shoulders of the god walking angrily. ...

Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver.

First he went after the mules and the circling hounds, then let go

a tearing arrow against the men themselves and struck them.

The corpse fires burned everywhere and did not stop burning.

About 270 years after The Iliad, or thereabouts, plague is the centrepiece of two great classical Athenian works - Sophocles' Oedipus the King, and Book 2 of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides (c.460-400BC) and Sophocles (490-406BC) would have known one another in Athens, although it is hard to say much more than that for a lack of evidence. The two works mentioned above were produced at about the same time. The play Oedipus was probably produced about 429BC, and the plague of Athens occurred in 430-426BC.

Thucydides offers us a description of a city-state in crisis that is as poignant and powerful now, as it was in 430BC.

Thucydides writes prose, not verse (as Homer and Sophocles do), and he worked in the comparatively new field of "history" (meaning "inquiry" or "research" in Greek). His focus was the Peloponnesian war fought between Athens and Sparta, and their respective allies, between 431 and 404BC.

Thucydides' description of the plague that struck Athens in 430BC is one of the great passages of Greek literature. One of the remarkable things about it is how focused it is on the general social response to the pestilence, both those who died from it and those who survived.

The description of the plague immediately follows on from Thucydides' renowned account of Pericles' Funeral Oration (it is important that Pericles died of the plague in 429BC, whereas Thucydides caught it but survived).

Thucydides gives a general account of the early stages of the plague - its likely origins in north Africa, its spread in the wider regions of Athens, the struggles of the doctors to deal with it, and the high mortality rate of the doctors themselves.

Nothing seemed to ameliorate the crisis - not medical knowledge or other forms of learning, nor prayers or oracles. Indeed "in the end people were so overcome by their sufferings that they paid no further attention to such things".

He describes the symptoms in some detail - the burning feeling of sufferers, stomach aches and vomiting, the desire to be totally naked without any linen resting on the body itself, the insomnia and the restlessness.

The next stage, after seven or eight days, if people survived that long, saw the pestilence descend to the bowels and other parts of the body - genitals, fingers and toes. Some people even went blind.

Words indeed fail one when one tries to give a general picture of this disease; and as for the sufferings of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure.

Those with strong constitutions survived no better than the weak.

The most terrible thing was the despair into which people fell when they realised that they had caught the plague; for they would immediately adopt an attitude of utter hopelessness, and by giving in in this way, would lose their powers of resistance.

Lastly, Thucydides focuses on the breakdown in traditional values where self-indulgence replaced honour, where there existed no fear of God or man.

The whole description of the plague in Book 2 lasts only for about five pages, although it seems longer.

The first outbreak of plague lasted two years, whereupon it struck a second time, although with less virulence. When Thucydides picks up very briefly the thread of the plague a little bit later, he provides numbers of the deceased: 4400 hoplites (citizen-soldiers), 300 cavalrymen and an unknown number of ordinary people.

Nothing did the Athenians so much harm as this, or so reduced their strength for war.

Modern scholars argue over the science of it all, not the least because Thucydides offers a generous amount of detail of the symptoms.

Epidemic typhus and smallpox are most favoured, but about 30 different diseases have been posited.

Thucydides offers us a narrative of a pestilence that is different in all kinds of ways from what we face.

The lessons that we learn from the coronavirus crisis will come from our own experiences of it, not from reading Thucydides. 

But these are not mutually exclusive. Thucydides offers us a description of a city-state in crisis that is as poignant and powerful now, as it was in 430BC.

• Chris Mackie is a Professor of Classics at La Trobe University

Thoughts of Others on Social Distancing and Lockdown

Social Distancing

“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. They listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

"And the people healed and in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

"And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed."

~Kitty O'Meara

Lockdown

Yes, there is fear.
Yes, there is isolation.
Yes, there is panic buying.
Yes, there is sickness.
Yes, there is even death.
But,
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other across the empty squares, keeping their windows open so that those who are alone may hear the sounds of family around them.
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know is busy spreading fliers with her number through the neighbourhood that the elders may have someone to call on.
Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples are preparing to welcome and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary.
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting.
All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way.
All over the world, people are waking up to a new reality
To how big we really are.
To how little control we really have.
To what really matters.To Love.
So we pray and we remember that
Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
Yes there is isolation.
But there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes there is panic buying.
But there does not have to be meanness.
Yes there is sickness.
But there does not have to be disease of the soul
Yes there is even death.
But there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe. 
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic
The birds are singing again,
The sky is clearing,
Spring is coming,
And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul
And though you may not be able to touch across the empty square,
Sing.

By Fr Richard Hendrick, IrelandMarch 13 2020

"What is the Corona/Covid-19 Virus Really Teaching us?

I’m a strong believer that there is a spiritual purpose behind everything that happens, whether that is what we perceive as being good or being bad.

As I meditate upon this, I want to share with you what I feel the Corona/Covid-19 virus is really doing to us:

1) It is reminding us that we are all equal, regardless of our culture, religion, occupation, financial situation or how famous we are. This disease treats us all equally, perhaps we should to. If you don’t believe me, just ask Tom Hanks.

2) It is reminding us that we are all connected and something that affects one person has an effect on another. It is reminding us that the false borders that we have put up have little value as this virus does not need a passport. It is reminding us, by oppressing us for a short time, of those in this world whose whole life is spent in oppression.

3) It is reminding us of how precious our health is and how we have moved to neglect it through eating nutrient poor manufactured food and drinking water that is contaminated with chemicals upon chemicals. If we don’t look after our health, we will, of course, get sick.

4) It is reminding us of the shortness of life and of what is most important for us to do, which is to help each other, especially those who are old or sick. Our purpose is not to buy toilet roll.

5) It is reminding us of how materialistic our society has become and how, when in times of difficulty, we remember that it’s the essentials that we need (food, water, medicine) as opposed to the luxuries that we sometimes unnecessarily give value to.

6) It is reminding us of how important our family and home life is and how much we have neglected this. It is forcing us back into our houses so we can rebuild them into our home and to strengthen our family unit.

7) It is reminding us that our true work is not our job, that is what we do, not what we were created to do. Our true work is to look after each other, to protect each other and to be of benefit to one another.

8) It is reminding us to keep our egos in check. It is reminding us that no matter how great we think we are or how great others think we are,
a virus can bring our world to a standstill.

9) It is reminding us that the power of freewill is in our hands. We can choose to cooperate and help each other, to share, to give, to help and to support each other or we can choose to be selfish, to hoard, to look after only our self. Indeed, it is difficulties that bring out our true colors.

10) It is reminding us that we can be patient, or we can panic. We can either understand that this type of situation has happened many times before in history and will pass, or we can panic and see it as the end of the world and, consequently, cause ourselves more harm than good.

11) It is reminding us that this can either be an end or a new beginning. This can be a time of reflection and understanding, where we learn from our mistakes, or it can be the start of a cycle which will continue until we finally learn the lesson we are meant to.

12) It is reminding us that this Earth is sick. It is reminding us that we need to look at the rate of deforestation just as urgently as we look at the speed at which toilet rolls are disappearing off of shelves. We are sick because our home is sick. 

13) It is reminding us that after every difficulty, there is always ease. Life is cyclical, and this is just a phase in this great cycle. We do not need to panic; this too shall pass.

14) Whereas many see the Corona/Covid-19 virus as a great disaster, I prefer to see it as a *great corrector*

It is sent to remind us of the important lessons that we seem to have forgotten and it is up to us if we will learn them or not."

It’s a big eye opener all of this, isn’t it 

We are finally realising money has no value.

Your amazing job is no longer an amazing job, your expensive clothes now have no worth and no one gives a shit how you look anymore.

Your big house is just 4 empty walls like everyone else’s. 

Your nice car is running on 4 tyres, the same as everyone else’s. 

We are finally seeing who the important people are, the ones who make a difference to our lives and are doing the crucial jobs we need. 

Shop workers ✔️
Care workers ✔️
Medical staff ✔️
Emergency services ✔️
Farmers ✔️
Lorry drivers/delivery people ✔️
Cleaners ✔️
Refuse workers ✔️

These people are the ones who keep our country ticking over, the core of our daily lives, the people who regularly go unnoticed and are often frowned upon but keep working hard, generally on a low income.
People constantly look down on them and gloat that they earn more money than them.

But what worth does your money have now?
How secure is your job in the real world when we take a step back to reality?

I’m proud of all of these people, they don’t earn enough for what they do, and they’re never appreciated for what they contribute.

Be kind to them, thank them, go out your way to tell them what an amazing job they’re doing.

Could you imagine how shit this would be without them??

Be thankful, I’ll be happy to buy them all a drink if we come out the other side

"We fell asleep in one world, and woke up in another.

Suddenly Disney is out of magic,
Paris is no longer romantic,
New York doesn't stand up anymore,
the Chinese wall is no longer a fortress, and Mecca is empty.

Hugs & kisses suddenly become weapons, and not visiting parents & friends becomes an act of love.

Suddenly you realise that power, beauty & money are worthless, and can't get you the oxygen you're fighting for.

The world continues its life and it is beautiful. It only puts humans in cages. I think it's sending us a message:

"You are not necessary. The air, earth, water and sky without you are fine. When you come back, remember that you are my guests. Not my masters."

NGS Evening at Hazelby House June 2019

The NGS Party at Hazelby House

The NGS held a marvellous party at Patrick and Gabby Hungerford's Hazelby House on a beautiful June evening. I had not seen the garden before but was astonished at its perfection. The photos can attest that there wasn't a leaf out of place and there was superb garden statuary and sculpture to make even Travers Nettleton weep.

One of the tranquil pools at Hazelby

Beryl Williams 1949 - 2020

Beryl Williams was a dear friend for thirty years, who I got to know from the days when she managed a shop in the Royal Exchange to her life in Fethiye (Turkey) to which she emigrated in 2004 to ease her MS. She was a wise, bright and beautiful soul, and leaves a loving family of her daughter Amanda and Kirsty and son Paul and their offspring, as well as Peter, a former London insurance broker who she lived (and sailed) with for the last 12 years.

Beryl Williams on her boat in Turkey

The Story of the Raphael Seat

The Raphael Seat and brick piers

The Raphael Seat is, in fact, a large piece of sculpture, and now occupies the space in which for some time I had intended a sculpture or garden feature to stand.

The upper lawn area has always lacked a focal point - the Tang horse is off to the side under the tree and is easily missed and the quince tree is not yet ancient enough - and I had originally thought that some kind of sculpture such as a piece from Rachel Bebb's Garden Gallery would be perfect. But the cost was always much more than I wanted to spend. I did consider buying an old stone bench but those with age such as sold by Travers Nettleton at Garden Art were also prohibitively expensive,

I was, therefore, delighted to be directed to Haddonstone, the makers of good quality pressed stone garden ornaments, and there find a sculpture with an interesting provenance as well as being on sale. The seat in question was a 'Raphael' seat designed by Bob Haddonstone in the 1980s for the Drapers' Livery Company, so-called as it has Raphael drawings in bas relief on the back panels. An exactly similar seat (on four Drapers' Ram's bases) stands in one of the courtyards at Drapers' Hall today and given the family's long links with the Drapers, this provenance was an added attraction.

The area for the seat to stand required some preparation, as it weighed half a ton (but came in pieces on three pallets) and so Brian Dibley put in a concrete base topped with old York stone flags. Imagining the seat in place I also thought that it would need some additional masonry support, and decided to put in two brick piers topped by old stone caps that would reduce the dominance of the seat and also frame the view under the hazel tree in both directions. The result can be seen at the top of the page.

The seat covered with pond silt to encourage wethering (May 2020) 

At the moment the seat stands out too much due to it being so white, but when it has weathered to a decent patina, it should look as if it's always been here.

Hannah Arendt on Lies and Propaganda

When I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels purged Jewish and leftist artists and writers, he built a massive media infrastructure that played, writes PBS, “probably the most important role in creating an atmosphere in Germany that made it possible for the Nazis to commit terrible atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities.”

How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterwards. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F-Scale (“F” for “fascism”), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type

Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member... is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism... is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements":

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”---writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy---including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.... Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”

Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting”:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end---is being destroyed. 

The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveller to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.”

“We too,” writes Jeffrey Isaacs at The Washington Post, “live in dark times"---an allusion to another of Arendt’s sobering analyses—“even if they are different and perhaps less dark.” Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism from research and observations gathered during the 1940s, a very specific historical period. Nonetheless the book, Isaacs remarks, “raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead.” Arendt's analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow. This, she suggests, would be a mistake.