Baroque! From St Peter's to St Paul's: part 1

The first episode of art critic Waldemar Januszczak's three-part BBC4 documentary on Baroque painting, sculpture and architecture sees him examine the birth of the movement in Rome and Naples at the start of the 17th century. He starts in Saint Peter's Square, designed in 1656-67 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and gives a nice overall summary - "The Baroque was after you. So it threw the kitchen sink at you."

The Baroque started out as the artistic contribution of Catholic Italy to the Counter-Reformation. Lutherans dismissed sacred art as blasphemous. The Catholic Church's reaction, one of the outcomes of the Council of Trent, was to reemphasise the central role of religious art in inspiring faith amongst the masses.

The Baroque was born in Rome with the paintings of Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio (1571-1610), especially those in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo. Caravaggio was the most important religious painter of the Counter-Reformation (in contrast to the typical 20th century view of him as "a knife-mad, predatory homosexual, who went berserk in Baroque Rome"). He was a master of darkness, turning painting into theatre, with tangible, vivid, cinematic paintings. He "made sure that the religious message of the counter-Reformation came after you like a spotlit rottweiler". He created a vivid new religious art that spoke to the people in language they could understand, using ordinary people as his models.

3. Baroque pearls. Portuguese word "barocco" - a misshapen pearl. If Renaissance art is a perfectly shaped pearl, then Baroque art is a misshapen pearl.

Architecture: Baroque is the default architecture of Rome.

Francesco Borromini: bendy architecture; "the Picasso of architecture", "a man of twisted brilliance". Courtyard of the Church of San Carlo in Rome. "Boromini was a rulebreaker by instinct, and that makes him totally Baroque." The church interior itself - "completely crazy". A blunt Greek cross fighting for control with a perfect oval. A perfect bit of geometry underlying apparent chaos. "He builds this exact mathematical basis, and then he just ruffles it up, like someone messing up your hair." A homosexual who later committed suicide.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini: "the undisputed King of Yang" in Baroque Rome. Architect, sculptor, painter, who "charmed the kings and popes". A ladies men. Sant'Andrea al Quirinale. "That's the Baroque for you. It twists this way and that. Always on the move. Like a restless dragonfly." Church filled with rich colour. A very theatrical efect, telling a story of St Andrew's mmartyrdom and ascension into heaven. St Peters itself is a truly stupendous piece of Baroque theatre - Bernini's Baldacchino under the transept. Is it sculpture or is it architecture? "All the dividing lines get blurred." The Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria - Bernini's masterpiece. St Teresa of Avila having an ecstatic vision, an angel piercing her heart with an arrow. A young woman, overpowered by the love of god. Misinterpreted in the 20th century as something sexual.

"The Baroque loved painted ceilings, filling the air around you and above you with remarkable sights was a very Baroque ambition." Difficult to do: "The Baroque however was never afraid of effort. Whatever it took, whatever it cost, the Baroque was up for it." 17th century virtual reality, blurring the divide between the art and you. French Embassy in Rome - the first great painted ceiling of the Baroque age. Formelrly the palace of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. A young painter from Bologna, Annibale Carracci, and his brothers. "Piano nobile of the Farnese Palace" room - a room filled with stories about the mad love affairs of the pagan gods - "a diving orgy of love and conflict, and roleplaying, and naughtiness". Employs a cunning optical trick. Each love affair in its own picture, all the pictures crammed onto the roof, held wonkily in place by an assotment of cupids, nudes and statues. Time and space are being played with by a master scenographer. A huge curved roof.

Jesuit church of Sant'Ignazio - the ceiling painting is the fullest most perfect statement of the Baroque. Celebrates the canonisation of Ignacious Loyola (founder of the Jesuits). Painted by a Jesuit Lay brother from Trento, Padre Pozzo. "A master of illusion. The best there's ever been at making small spaces look huge." Even wrote a book about optical illusions. "A wonderful movie maker, born 300 years early". Included a painted dome, cheap and easy to repair. The roof itself - A flat roof, designed to look like a vertical gateway into heaven, with clouds, architraves and columns. St Ignacious hilself, in the middle, floating up on a cloud, being greeted into heaven by Jesus. The four corners of the earth represented in the corners Asia, Africa, Europe, America. "A rather cheesy bit of Jesuit propoganda". Also: a side room inside the Jesuit College has an illusionistic collonnade, showing the life of St Ignatius. Only look right from one place.

Naples: where the baroque learned to scream and howl. The second biggest city in Europe after Paris. A Spanish colony. Half a million people squashed into slums. Caravaggio turend up in 1606 for YEAR, on the run after murdering his tennis opponent. His art grew darker. The Pio Monte della Misericordia, home church of the Misericordists. Paintings by Caravaggio, including the Seven Acts of Mercy, the greatest religious painting of the 17th century. Bury the dead, clothe the naked, help the sick and infirm, visit those in prison, feed the hungry, offer shelter to pilgrims, give something to srink to the thirsty. "One Baroque tornado of a composition".

Giuseppe Ribera - the Little Spaniard. Bearded women. Macabre. The Cabal of Naples, with Corenzio the greek and ...

The House of Saud

Episode 2 of The Frankincense Trail sees Kate Humble in Saudi Arabia, gaining unprecedented access to some of the most notable grandsons of the kingdom's founder Abdul Aziz al Saud.

First up, she gets to meet Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the 22nd richest man in the world. Prince Al-Waleed is the founder and chief executive of the Kingdom Holding Company, which own large chunks of some of the world's most famous companies. Kate gets to interview him at his company HQ in Riyadh, the Kingdom Tower. Then it's off in an cortege of bulletproof limousines (the prince sitting up front on his mobile phone, sealing business deals) to the prince's city resort on the edge of Riyadh to pick up his 4th wife, 27 year old Princess Amera. They all head off two hours into the desert to attend a traditional tribal gathering, where the prince distributes hundreds of thousands of dollars to his needy tribesmen. "Islam in practice", as he calls it.

Next she meets his cousin Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud - the "most qualified pilot in Saudi Arabia", as well as the first Royal, first Arab and first Muslim in space. Prince Sultan takes her for a private flight in his glider along the Asir Mountains.

Prince Bandar - head of the wildlife and conservation ministry, then introduces Kate to his camels.

The House of Saud.

Najran. Known in ancient times as Al-Ukhdood, this oasis was an important stopping point on the Incense Route. In AD 524 it was the scene of a massacre of the entire native Christian population by the king of Jewish Yemen (Himyar), Yusuf As'ar Dhu Nuwas.

Shibam

I'm watching the BBC travelogue The Frankincense Trail, where Kate Humble follows the overland route of the ancient frankincense traders from Oman to the Mediterranean. She passes through the ancient Yemeni city of Shibam, the "oldest high-rise city in the world", with mud brick apartment buildings reaching as high as 11 storeys.

Later she crosses the Haraz mountain range to the capital Sana'a, passing medieval mountain fortresses, like the following, nameless one:

Iran and Britain

Summary of a 2009 BBC4 documentary on the history of the relationship between Britain and Persia/Iran, presented by Christopher de Bellaigue, a British writer living in Iran.

This programme presents a brief history of relations between Britain and the country which we nowadays call Iran but which was traditionally called Persia. In particular, the aim is to explain why, even after 30 years of almost complete mutual diplomatic isolation, the popular Iranian attitude towards Britain remains one of mistrust.

In the early 1600s, when Shakespeare was writing about the Shah Abbas (1571-1629, reigned from 1587), Britain and Persia were equals on the world stage. By the late 1800s however, Britain was the greatest imperial power in the world, and Persia was a poor country whose sole significance was that it formed a buffer zone between the British empire to the east and west and Russia to the north. Britain needed to prevent what it saw as a weak Persia from falling into the hands of the Russians, since it was an important part of the overland communication route between Britain and India.

One of Britain's tactics in controlling Persia was to foment popular support for liberal democracy as a counterweight to the Shah's influence. This resulted in the constitutional revolution, where the Shah backed down and allowed the creation of a parliament. However, the situation was completely altered by the treaty of alliance between Britain and Russia in 1907, brokered by France to counter the growing influence of Germany. This led to Persia being carved up between the British and Russians into 'spheres of influence', and when the Russians forced the suspension of the Persian parliament, the British made no objection. The liberal democratic movement in Persia felt they had been betrayed by Britain.

The discovery of oil in southern Persia in 1908 transformed Britain's political interest in the country. Production was controlled by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later to become British Petroleum), in which the British government had a majority share. By the end of the First World War, Persia was one of Britain's most important strategic assets, and with the collapse of Russia into revolution and civil war, the entire country came under British influence. The Anglo-Persian Agreement, negotiated by the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon (1859-1925), led to Britain taking over the running of Persia's armed forces and the exploitation of its economy. Persia was not a colony of Britain, but neither was it independent. Britain offered tacit support to the bloodless coup in 1921, which saw the pro-British army officer Reza Khan (1878-1944, reigned 1925-41) seize power. Reza went on to crown himself Shah in 1925, establishing a new dynasty, and rebranding the country as 'Iran'.

1941: Russia and Britain preemptively invaded Iran, to protect the oil fields from the Germans. Reza Shah had become unpopular by this time, so he abdicated and went into exile. His son, Mohammed Reza, took over, and always blamed the British for his father's downfall. By this time, Abidan was the largest oil refinery in the world, with 2000 British expatriates and 75000 Iranian staff. Tensions rose however as the Iranians felt excluded from senior roles in the firm. 1951: Mossadegh became PM. He wanted to remove foreign influence (including British influence) from Iran, and make the country properly independent. He passed a bill nationalising Iranian oil. The oil company retaliated by closing the Abadan refinery. Britain tried to undermine Mossadegh, and even came close to military intervention. They then persuaded the new US president Eisenhower that the Mossadegh government was a threat to both UK and US interests, since it would lead to a communist takeover. The US then organised a coup in 1953 (led by CIA-sponsored mercenaries) to unseat Mossadegh. General Zahedi became the new PM. Oil production was divided up between British and American companies, with 50% of the profits going to Iran. Shah Mohamed slowly assumed absolute power. In 1959 he undertook a state visit to the UK. Oil revenues led to a dramatic expansion of Iran's economy. 1973: the Shah, as head of OPEC, doubled the price of world oil. Britain's response was to sell as many arms and tanks to Iran as possible, to offset the oil price rises. As the economy grew, the gap between rich and poor got wider, and Iran's religious traditions were ignored. The Shah made sure all opposition was brutally repressed. The Shah became upset with the BBC World Service, which broadcast news about popular discontent which Radio Iran censored. The Shah tried to persuade the British government to intervene in the management of the BBC. The Iranian government particularly resented BBC reporting the words of Ayatolah Khomeini. Dec 1978: chaos in Iran. Majority of people against the Shah. He fled Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to assume power. Relations between Britain and Iran became almost completely estranged. Even now, after a generation of mutual isolation, the notion of the 'hidden hand' of the British lingers on in Iranian popular consciousness (i.e. 'Uncle Napoleonism'). Presenter: Christopher De Bellaigue (a British writer and journalist living in Iran) Director: Neil Cameron 2009

Vienna: City of Dreams

My notes on the BBC 4 programme Vienna: City of Dreams, where 'Joseph Koerner (Harvard University) explores the art, architecture and music of fin de siecle Vienna'.

At the close of the 19th century, Vienna, ancient fortress city turned capital of the vast, multinational, 'antiquated' Hapsburg Empire was 'politically the last bastion of medieval Europe'. It was also a hotbed of 'freethinking', its cafés full of 'artists, visionaries and political revolutionaries'.

Vienna was also the home of the 'greatest interpreter of dreams the world had ever known', Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), for whom dreams were the 'road to the primal urges of the human psyche'. Freud was a medical doctor treating 'nervousness' in patients (mainly Jewish women) who exhibited incapacitating physical symptoms without being physically sick. Freud pioneered the 'talking cure', where the patient is made to 'remember and re-remember' to get at the truth of the matter, while the analyst remains silent. He argued that we never forget our past - it returns in the form of 'haunting dreams and crippling symptoms', for both individuals and cultures. 'What we cannot remember, we are doomed to repeat'.

In the late 19th century, the emperor finally got round to having the city's medieval walls demolished in order to build a great boulevard, the Ringstraße built, serving as an interface between the growing suburbs and the old town. This is where the bourgeoisie erected their cultural institutions (the Burgtheater, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Naturhistorisches Museum and the opera) and their political institutions (the Rathaus and the imperial parliament). The Ringstraße was the setting for the 'golden age' of Vienna.

In golden age Vienna, architecture was taken very seriously - the architect of the opera house (constructed 1861-9) killed himself after the building was panned by the critics. The first building on the Ringstraße was a great imperial monument, the neo-gothic Votive Church (constructed 1856-79), built on the site of a failed assassination attempt in 1853 on Emperor Franz Joseph by a Hungarian revolutionary. The Ringstraße is a mishmash of inconsistent architectural styles, from renaissance to Graeco-Roman to gothic, all built at the same time - it 'evokes' different histories and styles but is itself 'without' a history or a style. For example, the Flemish-gothic Rathaus (1872-83) is based on the fantasy that 19th century Vienna is like one of the great late medieval powerhouses of northern Europe (like Bruges or Antwerp). But the building is much bigger than anything that medieval people themselves actually built, and the real-life counterparts of the sturdy medieval craftsmen featured in the stonework were imperial bureaucrats, capitalist speculators and the vast proletarian poor.

13.00: Leopoldstadt - Jewish Vienna.

Late 19th century Viennese artists were trained at the conservative Academy of Fine Arts, where they underwent a rigorous training in the styles of every historical era. They were expected to have encyclopaedic knowledge of the past, repressing the present moment. This repression came to a head during the building of the University (1877-84). Progressives demanded a modern building, suited to being a temple of science and reason. But the building was constructed in an Italian renaissance style, because that was where the university had its historical roots. They employed the most spectacular young painter in 1890s Vienna to paint a ceiling cycle representing the academic faculties - Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). However, the paintings that he came up with were totally different to the conventional Ringstraße style, much more enigmatic and sexually explicit. Klimt's paintings provoked outrage among the conservative university professors and among the popular press, and were ultimately never put in place.

Klimt subsequently helped found the Secession in 1897, and used this new institution as his public stage. When it came to constructing a permanent home for their work, the Secessionists came up with one of the most radical departures in architectural history - a 'windowless temple of art', 'a white space in which art can appear in a pristine environment'. The building (popularly known as the 'cabbage head' because of its characteristic dome of golden leaves, and built in 1897-8) was designed by the young architect Joseph Olbrich (1867-1908). The facade was inscribed with the Secessionist creed - "der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit". Members of the Secession chose to rebel against the backward-looking, 'historicist' approach of their teachers, celebrating the 'new'. Its interior was an exhibition space, not a museum, with movable walls, used to exhibit painting, sculpture and the applied arts. Klimt's vision was of a humanity, fallen prey to carnal pleasures, but ultimately redeemed by artistic genius, embodied by Vienna's demigod, Beethoven. Klimt's most important subsequent works were portraits, represting his 'retreat from the public to the private in the face of savage criticism'.

Viennese cafés were the 'nerve centre' of the city's cultural avant-garde, home to literary circles like the Jung-Wien. The real-life hero of this cult was the poet Hugo von Hoffmanstal (1874-1929), whose poetry was the sensation of literary Vienna in 1891, especially when the author turned out to be a 17-year-old schoolboy rather than an ageing aristocrat - 'Might experience itself be just a dream?'. Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was a Jewish writer, with roots in Leopoldstadt. Influenced by Freud's 'talking cure', he pioneered the 'inner monologue' (or 'stream of consciousness') technique, to get inside the minds of his characters. Schnitzler also kept a careful record of all his orgasms, reflecting a 'clinical approach' to his sexuality. He explored the 'facades' of Viennese society - the bourgeois facade and the hidden world of sexual exploitation of poor women ('süsse Mädel').

The sewer system (memorably featured in the film The Third Man) was the underbelly of golden age Vienna. Due to a local housing shortage, it was home to thousands of people. They recycled metal, bones (for making glue) and grease (for making soap) from the sewers and sold them to factories to buy cheap alcohol.

The Ringstraße also featured the so-called 'red palaces' - opulent apartment blocks built in the 1880s for the wealthy bourgeoisie to rent, with shops and offices on the ground floor. Unlike the townhouses of the aristocrats, the symbols are abstract - the bourgeois renter is a 'private individual' rather than the public heir to a long and distinguished history. Indeed, it was the bourgeoisie who invented the very concept of 'privacy'. A good example of these is Otto Wagner's (1841-1918) art nouveau style apartments (1898). These eliminated the traditional distinctions between the storeys (rich at top, poor at bottom), except for the basic distinction between public (shops at street level) and private (apartments on upper floors). The facade consists of ceramic tiles decorated with flower motifs, and is hence weatherproof.

Otto Wagner was Vienna's great city planner, who understood architecture in 'total terms'. His most ambitious project was designing Vienna's urban railway. He was one of the first people to understand that transport is the key to modern city life. For example, Hernals station in the Vienna suburbs was designed by Wagner. The details (lighting and tiles) introduce efficiency, rationality and beauty into the everyday lives of commuters. The proportions are unrationally, uneconomically generous - to make people happy when they go to work. Wagner's vision was 'democratic' - he expected everyone to use his railway, and even built a pavilion-like station near the emperor's country palace (in 1899). The emperor only used it once - during the opening ceremony.

The parliament building was built to represent all the empire's peoples, in a city with absolutely no democratic tradition. Thus, the architects turned to ancient Athens for their inspiration. There were eleven different languages and no translators, so parliament was 'an embarassing babble to its supporters'. However, parliament was popular theatre for the Viennese, who queued up for hours to watch the spectacle, including a young Adolf Hitler. Hitler came to the conclusion that the German 'master race' had ceded too much power to the other peoples of the empire. He went on to obliterate parliamentary democracy.

Karl Lueger (1844-1910) was Vienna's most popular mayor, commemorated to this day in countless statues and street names. He was responsible for inventing the 'jews' as a popular enemy - the capitalists and bankers oppressing the little man, and the avant-garde artists scandalising petit-bourgeois sensibilities. He famously said: 'I decide who is a jew'. Lueger was not an extreme anti-semite, but he made jew-hating 'mainstream'.

The Leopold Museum features works by Klimt's scandalous successor, Egon Schiele (1890-1918), who eroticised the art of drawing itself. Schiele was the most obsessive self-portraitist of the 20th century, in the way he painted himself naked, viewed in a mirror, with particular focus on his exposed genitals. The curator of the collection is the artist Peter Weibel, who himself scandalised Vienna in the 1960s, by for example inviting passers-by to fondle his girlfriend's breasts from inside a box attached to her chest. Weibel tells how Schiele mastered the technique of 'nervous lines' - shakey lines caused by the artist's nervous excitement as he approached the genital area of his model, and also his foregrounded use of armpit hair - at that time, a woman opening her armpits was a 'promise of sexual pleasure'. Schiele often used prebuscent girls as models; in fact, he was jailed for corrupting minors. But then as now, 'bad publicity was better than no publicity' - in 1900 Vienna, breaking taboos made people famous.

Michaelerplatz punctuates Vienna's old city, and includes the Baroque entrance facade for the Hofburg, the old imperial castle. The city authorities tore town some of the old buildings and commissioned a 'firebrand architectural critic', Adolf Loos (1870-1933), to design a new structure. Loos had written that 'ornament is a crime' and dismissed the Ringstraße as a 'paper facade'. He wanted to do away with the deceit of using poured concrete nailed on to the front of a building as a substitute for marble or stucco ('the twin monsters of falsehood and bad taste'). He used expensive materials (wood, stone, metal, glass, leather) for his interiors and used them simply, thus bringing out their sensual appeal, 'foreshadowing all the best of modern design'. The emperor hated the Loos house, with its unornamented facade ('windows without eyebrows'). This house represents the birth of the modern in Vienna, rather than Klimt or Schiele - 'representation stripped bare', the 'blank canvas or zero point of Austrian modernism'.

This point in time is perfectly represented by the house Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for his sister, with its 'obsessive functionality' (bare light bulbs, no carpets or curtains). Wittgenstein's philosophy was centrally concerned with 'establishing the narrow limits of what it can saw and what it can do'. His first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, made him the most influential philosopher of the modern age. He sought to describe what the world looks like to a completely isolated individual. He tried to explain how the mind, through language, can possibly reflect the world, using the powerful tools of modern logic. He strips language bare, demonstrating that there are certain concepts which cannot be put into words (god, art, history). They are unsayable and meaningless. Language can only refer to facts. Everything else lies outside of language - 'That whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.'

Ethnic hatred, assassination of Franz Ferdiniand, WWI and WWII.

In 1938, Vienna had 96 synagogues (all but one completely destroyed during Kristallnacht). In 1900, 220,000 Jews in Vienna (10%). Barabara Timmermann (Vienna Walks)

Gerhard Roth. ('Vienna's great chronicler of silence')

Vienna was where the classical style of music was born. It was also here that this legacy was 'shaken to the core' Arnold Schönberg, 'liberated dissonance' or 'transformed music into noise'. Caused a literal riot in the music hall in 1913 at the premiere of ??. 'Strictly anarchic, atonal music'. Influenced Kandinksy.

Steinhof, Otto Wagner's church, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirche_am_Steinhof

The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries II

Notes from episode 2 of a BBC4 series on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Notes from episode 1 are here.

After focusing on a new realistic approach to painting sacred scenes and scenes from modern urban life, the Pre-Raphaelites turned to a new approach to landscape painting, featuring a microscopic examination of the natural world, with closely observed scientific fidelity (following the ideas of John Ruskin). Landscape painting had been traditionally executed in the studio from sketches. John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt used the newly established train system to get out of London into the countryside, along with all their paints and easels and canvasses.

John Everett Millais' Ophelia (1852):

This painting breaks a number of established 'rules' - for example, the river flows (counterintuitively) from right to left, rather than the traditional left-to-right. Many of the featured flowers come straight from Shakespeare's text, and are painted in exquisite, botanical detail. The backdrop was painted in situ in Surrey, and the figure of drowned Ophelia was painted in the studio, with Elizabeth Siddal in a big bath of water. Unlike his earlier controversial works, this painting was highly acclaimed.

William Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd (1851):

This painting was painted on top of a white background, rather than the traditional dark foundation - to try and capture the luminosity of nature under the bright sun. Minute details were painted with a very fine brush - every blade of grass and every eyelash.

John Everett Millais' Portrait of John Ruskin (1854):

Ruskin commissioned Millais to paint his portrait against a Scottish landscape. There is no horizon, which was itself an innovation in landscape portraiture. The painting focuses on the detail of the rock on which he is standing, with geological detail. Millais fell in love with Ruskin's wife Effie, who was still a virgin after 5 years of marriage. They married in 1855, and the relation between Millais and Ruskin never recovered. Ruskin diverted his patronage to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who continued to embrace medievalism, rather than the realism of the other Pre-Raphaelites.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice: Dante Drawing the Angel (1853):

William Holman Hunt's Our English Coasts (1852):

This was painted at Hastings on the Sussex coast, with careful depictions of the geological formations of the collapsing coastline (influenced by Charles Lyell's great work on British geology). The sheep assembled on the brink of the cliff are a "metaphor for what is going on in Britain at this time", i.e. fear of a resumption of the Napoleonic Wars, with Napoleon III recently established on the French throne. The tiny steamship in the background emphasises the modernity of the scene. One sheep is caught in the brambles, appealing to the viewer for help. The painting is painted at the end of the day (see the lengthening shadows), adding to the ominous atmosphere.

Close associate Ford Madox Brown's Pretty Baa-Lambs (1852):

The entire scene is painted out-of-doors (including the models, probably for the first time in painting), ensuring consistent conditions of light. Many of the details of light and shade (e.g. coloured shadows) are also innovative. This painting was not executed according to the 'rules', but by fresh, new observation.

Ford Madox Brown's An English Autumn Afternoon (1852-55):

This is the view from the back window of Brown's cottage in Hampstead. It doesn't look like any landscape painting ever made before, with its panoramic perspective and microscopic detail. It is both deeply objective and deeply subjective. The canvas is shaped like an eye. This 'immediacy of vision', almost photographic, is a property of all the Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Some facts about Heathrow Airport

From the first episode of the BBC4 TV series 'The Secret Life of the Airport':

1. The original airport was built (in the late 1940s) with six runways (each about one mile in length) in a star of David form. This was because contemporary airplanes needed to take off into the wind, in order to gain lift. The two east-west runways were extended during the early 1970s, and the other runways were removed to allow for terminal expansions or turned into taxiways
2. The three original terminal buildings were built during the 1950s and 1960s at the centre of the airport, i.e. within the internal hexagon. Tunnels were built under the runways to allow access. One of the flaws in this design was lack of space to build carparks - the original architects had assumed that air travel would always be reserved for the rich, who would be driven to the terminal buildings by their chauffeurs. Terminals 4 and 5 were built later outside the original star, on the south and west of the airport respectively.

How the Celts saved Britain - Salvation

Episode of 2 of Dan Snow's new history programme How the Celts Saved Britain, where he "blows the lid on the traditional, Anglo-centric view of history and reveals how the Irish saved Britain from cultural oblivion during the Dark Ages". My summary of episode 1 can be found here.

Mid-sixth century: The former Roman province of Britannia had reverted to an uncivilised (i.e. illiterate, pagan, iron-age, inward-looking) patchwork of warring Anglo-Saxon tribes, ruling over the native Britons. In contrast, Ireland was a civilised (i.e. literate, christian, technologically advanced, outward-looking) society, dotted with monasteries. The Irish/Gaelic kingdom of Dalriada was based at Dunadd in present-day Argyll, and the rest of Scotland was dominated by Picts.

563: Twelve Irish monks sailed from Ireland to Dunadd, led by Colum Cille (later known as Saint Columba, 521-597), a rising star of the Irish church (and descendant of the high kings of Ireland). Columba intended to spread the christian faith in Pictland, and to this end he asked the king of Dalriada to give him a piece of land to build a church. He was given the little island of Iona, on the western edge of Scotland.

Iona was to become the 'Westminster Abbey' of early medieval Scotland, a place where religious and political power came together. As a mark of this, Columba blessed the new king of Dalriada, Áedán mac Gabráin (d. 609) on Iona, in a christian ceremony. Iona also become the main cultural centre for Celtic christianity - It was on Iona that the Book of Kells (a lavishly illustrated copy of the four gospels) was created, one of the great achievements of western art.

In the late 560s, after the church on Iona was complete, Columba set out along the Great Glen, to start converting the Picts. He confronted King Bridei (d. 585) at his fortress near Inverness, impressing him with his christian 'magic' (for example, chasing off the Loch Ness monster!). Over the course of time, the Picts became christianised and subsumed into Gaelic culture and language, thus forming the race of the Scots (see the Aberlemno standing stones in Angus).

Down in England, an attempt was already being made to reintroduce christianity. In 597 Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) sent a mission, led by the Benedictine monk Augustine of Canterbury (d. 604), to the Kingdom of Kent to meet King Æthelberht (560-616), who had married a christian Frankish princess, Bertha. This was part of Gregory's imperial ambitions to reassert centralised Roman control over western European christians, and in particular to counteract the influence of the (self-governing) Irish monasteries. Æthelberht himself converted to christianity, and mission moved on to London (in the Kingdom of Essex), building St Paul's church (on the site of the present-day cathedral). However, the mission failed to make any further inroads into Anglo-Saxon Britain, and ended up being thrown out of London after 20 years or so.

In 634, King Oswald (604-642) returned to Bamburgh as King of Northumbria, the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. He had spent the previous 18 years in exile in Ireland and Iona, where he had become a christian. Determined to turn Northumbria into a christian kingdom, he brought with him a young monk from Iona, called Aiden (d. 651). Aiden, the last of the great Irish missionaries, established the first church on Lindisfarne in 635. This was the nucleus from where Irish priests would spread the christian message across the north of England, building churches as they went (including Escomb in County Durham and Hexham Abbey, both built largely from recycled Roman stone).

Wilfrid of York was a monk trained at Lindisfarne, and one of the first to travel to Rome to meet the Pope. He went on to be instrumental in establishing written law in England, as well as establishing centralised Roman control over the English church, causing tensions with the Irish monks of Lindisfarne. Things came to a head in Bamburgh in 663, involving a clash over the correct date of Easter. King Oswiu came from the Irish tradition, his queen was from Kent and followed the Roman tradition, where Easter Sunday was one week behind. The king and queen couldn't have sex until Lent had finished, thus triggering a marital crisis! In 664 the king convened a synod at Whitby Abbey to settle the date of Easter once and for all (as well as to resolve the concomitant power struggle in the English church). This synod pitted Wilfred against the Irish monk Colman, Aiden's successor as Abbot of Lindisfarne. As a result, the king decided to join the European mainstream, probably for political reasons. Colman and his monks returned to Iona in a huff, with the remains of Saint Aiden. This was a fatal blow to the prestige of the Iona and the Irish monasteries, later symbolised by the massacre of the Iona monks by the Vikings in the late 8th century, bringing the great age of Irish christianity to a bloody end.

The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries

Notes from episode 1 of a BBC4 series on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group founded in the revolutionary year of 1848 by three young painters from London's Royal Academy - John Everett Millais (1829-96), William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82, the bohemian son of a political refugee from Italy). The group set out to overturn the prevailing dogma of the art establishment ("lazy, predictable and boring"), in particular the rules of composition derived from the renaissance Italian painter Raphael. In doing so, they shocked the London art world, attracting unprecedented levels of negative criticism (for example from Charles Dickens).

The Pre-Raphaelites' early paintings involved the controversial application of a bold new realism to sacred subjects, in an attempt to 'restore meaning to art'.

John Everett Millais' Christ in the House of his Parents (1850):

This painting was painted to shock, deliberately breaking the accepted rules of composition, in particular the 'pyramid structure' copied from Raphael. In addition, there is an audacious, almost blasphemous, realism (wrinkles, dirty toenails, sunburn, protruding veins etc.), which was a complete break with the customary idealistic approach to representing saintly religious figures.

William Holman Hunt's A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1850):

This painting is modelled like a Roman relief sculpture, with everything foregrounded, rather than the traditional Raphaelite pyramid. The use of apertures to show secondary scenes in the background harks back to 15th century paintings.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850):

This painting portrays the Archangel Gabriel as a 'corporeal', wingless young man (naked under his gown) thrusting a lily stem at Mary's womb, symbolising the moment of the immaculate conception. The accepted rules of perspective are abandoned - the space is 'foreshortened'.

The PRB then moved on to painting insalubrious subjects from modern urban life, fully ten years before the French Impressionists did the same. These often involved the role of women in society, at a time when women outnumbered men.

John Everett Millais' Mariana in the Moated Grange (1851):

This painting is inspired by a poem by Tennyson, and explores women's dependence on marriage. Mariana's dowry has been lost at sea, and she has thus been abandoned by her fiance Angelo, forced into a nunlike existence. An image of lassitude, boredom, ennui, and sexual frustration.

William Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1853):

This painting explores the role of the kept woman, and the increasing visibility of prostitutes in urban society. One important point is that this is a 'portrait' of a prostitute (modelled by real-life prostitute Annie Miller) rather than a 'caricature'. The back wall has a mirror reflecting the door to the garden, i.e. we are presented with the 'whole view'. Key features are the discarded glove on the floor, the fact that she has just jumped out of his lap as if in sudden realisation of her situation, the cat under the table imitating the pose of the man with respect to a bird trying to escape.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Found (185?):

This painting was modelled by Rossetti's mistress, Fanny Cornforth. It depicts a prostitute at the end of the road, a former country girl laid low by a life of urban vice. A countryman has come up to London to take his calf to market and spots his former sweetheart, who recoils in shame. Key features are the calf trapped under the net, on its way to be slaughtered, and the intertwined hands of the two protagonists.

Although the PRB had achieved their aims of reforming British art, they were still critically damned, and their work didn't sell. But then John Ruskin, the trusted Victorian art critic (and suspected paedophile!) came to their defence, in a supportive letter to the Times. This marked a turning point in the Pre-Raphaelites' fortunes.

Episode 2 here.

How the Celts saved Britain - A New Civilisation

Summary of the first episode of Dan Snow's new history programme How the Celts Saved Britain, where he "blows the lid on the traditional, Anglo-centric view of history and reveals how the Irish saved Britain from cultural oblivion during the Dark Ages".

At the start of the 5th century, the southern part of Britain had been under Roman rule for 300 years. The Roman superpower had brought civilisation to iron-age, pagan Britain - centralised political authority, towns, roads, commerce/trade, money, technology, art, literacy/books, law and christianity. The Roman garrisons protected the Britons from their unruly, uncivilised, pagan, iron-age, tribal, illiterate, uncultured neighbours - the Picts in the north on the other side of Hadrian's Wall, and Irish across the sea to the West.

With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the consequent departure of the Roman legions from Britain, anarchy and lawlessness returned (i.e. the 'Dark Ages'). During the ensuing chaos, a 16 year old British christian boy from the area around the Severn estuary, named Patrick (390-460), son of a deacon and grandson of a priest, was captured by pirates and sold into slavery in pagan Ireland (called by the Romans 'Hibernia', or 'Land of Winter'). For six years, he worked as a shepherd in the west of Ireland, with only his christian religion for comfort. After his escape, he returned to Britain, only to discover that his homeland had changed beyond recognition, and centralised political authority had disappeared completely. Patrick chose to return to Ireland, inspired by a dream to bring the christian faith and civilisation to the pagan Irish.

At the time, the Ireland was still under the influence of the pagan religion that once had held sway over all of western Europe - a religion, presided over by druids, of sacred trees, woods and lakes, of animal and human sacrifice. Patrick set about converting the Irish to christianity, reinterpreting their traditional beliefs in christian terms, in the face of hostility from the native druids. Sacred places were turned into christian alters, traditional festivals were coopted.

Patrick then decided to directly confront both the 'high king' of Ireland, and the chief pagan priests, by lighting a fire at the Hill of Tara during the Beltana festival. The king was so impressed by Patrick's christian message (and presumably by the accompanying gifts of literacy and culture), that he converted. Thus was Patrick's christianisation of Ireland cemented.

Back across the Irish Sea, the British had employed continental Germanic mercenaries (Angles, Saxons, Friesians and Jutes) to protect them from the invading Picts. Unfortunately, the pagan mercenaries decided that they liked the look of Britain and they decided to stay, taking over the land and throwing out the Britons (or forcing them to adopt Anglo-Saxon language and culture). Thus the last vestiges of christianity, literacy and civilisation was forced to the western peripherary of Britain, to Wales and Cornwall.

Meanwhile, christianity had transformed Ireland. Monasteries appeared all over the country, little islands of modernity and technological innovation, built of stone and mortar, with hospitals and libraries. During the sixth century, Irish monasteries were the only places in western Europe where literacy was still practised, and manuscripts were being produced in scriptoria. This social and cultural revolution brought with it new contact between the Irish monasteries and their counterparts in North Africa and the Atlantic seaboard, providing the springboard for the re-christianisation of western Europe. Irish monks went on to found monasteries all over Europe, e.g. Luxeuil (founded 585), Bobbio (founded 614), St Gallen (founded 719). Ireland's monasteries formed the cradle of a new European civilisation, "every bit as great as Rome's".

See also: Hadrian's Wall, Vindolanda fort, the Groans of the Britons, West Stow Anglo-Saxon village, Croagh Patrick, Kevin of Glendalough (498-618), Glendalough Monastery (the 'Monastic City'), Nendrum Monastery, velum, the Stowe Missal.

Episode 2 here.