Kilpeck and Kempley - small churches that pack a big punch

South Entrance 

I'm not a churchgoer in either the religious or the Philip Larkin sense of the term, but some churches are worth a visit. St Mary and St David in Kilpeck in Herefordshire is a tiny church in a tiny village which will take your breath away. Its Romanesque carvings by masons of the  Herefordshire School date from around 1140 but appear almost surreally pristine in the sharpness of their definition. They are characterful, clever, witty and deeply symbolic, combining realism, fantasy and abstraction in a beguiling and thoroughly modern mix. The tiny triple-arched doorway is supported by double columned jambs carved from single pieces of sandstone. The left side has two helmeted warrior figures turned towards the entrance with weapons raised, almost as if they are guarding the doorway. Above the tympanum which represents a tree of life, there are arches of fantastical figures and beakheads with an angel flying, wings outstretched in the centre. Some 86 corbels mark out the the roofline, each individual, distinctive;  some quirky, some cute, some downright obscene. The famous sheela-na-gig squats laughing at our outrage, ambiguous enough to have been spared Victorian bowdlerism and still a mystery today. A hare and hound cuddly enough to be straight out of a children's story sits alongside man-eating animals, elegantly craved birds and fish and characterful human faces. 

Inside the space is small, sparse, slightly musty despite being well-tended, with plain white-washed walls and a simple three part structure - nave, chancel and apse. The chancel arch is supported by three tiers of figures, unidentified saints or evangelists, possibly including a St Peter holding keys. There are suggestions that they may have been influenced by similarly groups figures on the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, in itself an incredible idea for a tiny church that feels remote today. But it doesn't really matter: the figures' power is in their characterisation and observation, creating each as individuals and giving them a sense of life despite the blank eye sockets. The absolute highlight in this box of treasures are the 'river' vaults  in the apse. They appear to flow form four mouths in the centre of roof, perhaps the four rivers of Eden, their rippling structure defying the solidity of their architectural purpose and perfectly melding naturalism with abstract design.

Detail of  Apostles, St Mary's Church, Kempley Gloucestershire

About 20 miles east lies another remote rural church, St Mary's at Kempley. A plain, and oddly pink-painted on one wall, exterior belies an interior of ghostly faint Romanesque frescoes, long hidden beneath white-wash and now revealed as an echo of what must have been a glorious sight. The church and the earliest frescoes in the chancel date from about 1130 and depict the Apocalypse. On the ceiling, Christ sits in majesty on a rainbow surrounded by angels and the symbols of the evangelists, his hand raised in a blessing that is intended both for the apostles who line the walls, their heads tilted towards him, their hands raised in surprised wonder, and the priests who stood below to administer the Mass. Above the chancel windows, their deep bays exaggerated by foreshortened chequering, sit representations of Jerusalem as the heavenly city. 

The complexity and completeness of this decorative scheme would have been only just visible to the general congregation, but there are fragments of later murals in the nave. High on the wall above the chancel arch and now barely visible, is scene of the three Marys at the tomb; but this is actually the scene reenacted by priests, bringing the Bible to life for their illiterate audience. Elsewhere the murder of Becket, St Michael weighing souls and St Christopher are all visible. Most intriguingly, there is a Wheel of Life, dating from the 15th century: indistinct now, it would have once shown the 10 ages of man from cradle to grave, surrounding a central figure of Christ. The random positioning of these remaining designs, and their spread throughout the nave, suggests that once, on the eve of the Reformation, the whole small church would have been exuberantly decorated.

It is easy to forget, that what we now see as art or history, or as something with spiritual significance, was in the late Medieval period, a piece of total education, designed to bring knowledge, fear, hope and obedience to a population for whom churchgoing was a basic reality of life. What are now quiet rural backwaters, with a musty smell of disuse were active and alive - funerals and christenings, sermons, music, confession, candles. What now remains is a fractional glimpse of that reality. The Kilpeck sculptures would have been painted, their blank eyes drawn in, their costumes coloured - it would have been gaudy, perhaps more like a Hindu temple than a Christian church to modern sensibilities, certainly more like a Spanish Catholic shrine. The Kempley paintings would have been bright and all but overpowering, like a glorious frescoed chapel in an Italian duomo. And what we also forget, is that these churches are a rarity because of the rampant iconoclasm which the Reformation unleashed in England, leaving a terrible legacy of destruction and loss which is somehow swept under the carpet of history. Search out these small treasures and rejoice in the anonymous craftsmen who made them and the society which took pleasure and comfort from such creative beauty.

Donatello's 'Judith and Holofernes'

Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, c1455. Palazzo Vecchio Florence

If you ignore the crowds around the replica of Michelangelo's David in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, there is an abundance of other great sculpture, but the one that doesn't catch your eye is perhaps the greatest of all. Donatello's Judith and Holofernes (in replica) looks small, insignificant, almost unappealing, sandwiched as it is between the two colossi of David and Ammannti's Neptune fountain. It's bronze surface appears dingy and weathered in comparison with their gleaming whiteness; the patina makes it difficult to focus on the subject matter, and the complex composition with its restless surface would surely be better seen on a level, rather than positioned high up on a plinth. The work itself has an introspection, a centripetal dynamic, which is no match for the 'look at me' nudes on either side. Take time to head into the Palazzo Vecchio and look at the original. Take time to imagine how it would have once looked, gilded, standing in the Medici garden alongside Donatello's own version of David.

There is a quiet radicalism about this sculpture which is easily ignored by a 21st century viewer. The base is a cushion, on which Holofernes sits, his weight rendered visible in the sag beneath him. Donatello had used the device before: his St Mark (c.1411-13) stands on a small and obviously rather firm pillow, but the effect there is tentative. Here the yielding softness is palpable and the realism is taken a stage further with the positioning of Holofernes' leg dangling limply over the side of the plinth. It's a deliberate attempt to break the barriers between reality and art, an invasion of the viewers' world, like Mantegna's swags of fruit and architectural framing. Time and again in his reliefs Donatello showed that he was interested in the illusionistic possibilities of perspective to create naturalistic space, playing with the full range of depths which the relief surface allowed, but this is all the more striking for being in 3D. Whereas fifteenth century painters stuck a tentative saint's toe towards the viewer, Donatello shoves a whole limb through the sculptural fourth wall. 

The tight, columnar composition is deceptively simple, and only really appreciable in the round. It manages to combine a strong vertical emphasis, which begins with Holofernes' limp arms, with a downward spiral from the tip of Judith's sword; suggesting both the act of killing and the future death whilst showing neither. The complex drama of the whole narrative is explicit in the entwined bodies, with Holofernes positioned between Judith's legs and her fingers almost delicately entwined in his hair. But Donatello's Judith is neither the bloodthirsty assassin nor the eroticised princess that most artists chose to portray. She is chaste, veiled, swathed in draperies which almost hide her body; take away the sword and she could be Mary cradling a dead Christ. There are plenty of early Renaissance tropes here: an idealised male nude, extravagant detail (the pendant on Holofernes back), Latin inscription and a complex symbolism which has given art historians plenty to hypothesise about. But they remain secondary to the figures and their treatment.

Judith and Holofernes illustrates why Donatello is so good: narrative and character are what matter to him above all else. Every piece by Michelangelo is primarily a triumph of the artist's skill; every Donatello is about making the subject breath. David (c.1440s) as a beautiful young boy trying to grasp the enormity of what he has done; Zuccone (c.1423) and Jeremiah (c.1423) as men prematurely aged by the burden of their prophecy; perhaps most famously The Penitent Magdalene (c.1455) emaciated, haggard, yet eyes burning with belief. Even in the early Santa Croce Crucifixion (c.1409), generally agreed to be by Donatello, and according to Vasari's gossipy version, ridiculed by Brunelleschi as resembling a 'ploughman'; even here you can see an attempt to show a real man in pain. Wood, bronze or marble, relief or statue Donatello pushed the boundaries - technically, emotionally and aesthetically. And he pushed them so far that you have to look forward all the way to Rodin at the end of the 19th century to find another sculptor with the same range and psychological depth.

Beauty and Horror - Howardena Pindell: A New Language at Kettle's Yard (until 30 Oct 2022)

Howardena Pindell's exhibition at Kettle's Yard asks a lot of its visitors. You begin lulled by lyrical beauty: large evocative canvases of floaty coloured dots that reference Seurat and seem to position themselves and their creator safely within the framework of 20th century abstract expressionism. At this stage, you are unaware of the significance of the circle to Pindell - a blunt childhood awakening to the realities of segregation. But even as the story is told and the exhibition unfolds, the beauty remains. Her 'white-washed' collages of circles retain an optimism: in their insistent variety, the colours still visible, poking triumphantly through the surface, their texture suggesting an unstoppable, organically bubbling momentum. Yet you end the exhibition, trapped in a metronomic tick of leaden dread, listening to a faltering yet determined account of atrocity after atrocity. Is the shift just too great?

It seems wrong to criticise Fire/Rope/Water, a piece so powerful, so personal and so long and hard fought-for. It is meant to be uncomfortable and it is. But I sat worrying that I was uncomfortable for the wrong reasons; that here I was, a white woman, watching the same suffering that the white watchers in the images were revelling in. I wasn't sharing their sentiments, but I was still somehow complicit in a horrendous cycle of voyeurism which stopped the mutilated bodies becoming individuals, and preserved them forever as victims. The video, like a lot of Pindell's overtly political art, potentially suffers from overkill. The metronome, the voice, the sound of pauses and pages turned, and the final, seemingly endless roll call of names, is more than powerful enough. The images are too much.

The same can be said of works like Diallo where the circles reappear, now large, spread across the canvas, 41 gaping holes. They are accompanied by images of four guns, two names, key words - none are needed. Those stark wounds, white bone and red flesh through black skin shout loudly enough, or rather they resonate through the silence, like a constellation in the sky, to an ongoing, unspeakable, incomprehensible brutality. Pindell is at her most effective when she is at her quietest. Canvas, ripped and roughly resewn has a textural echoing of poverty and punishment, of homespun and much mended sackcloth, of flayed skin and half healed wounds. Works are pinned to the wall, unframed, objects more than images, rough and irregular, like maps of unknown continents; amoebic, organic, tangible and emotive. Alongside sit small, carefully calligraphed lists and tallies which suggest the commerce and bureaucracy of the slave trade and, like the overpainted chads, an indefatigable desire to restrain and rule. But equally, the hair-thin fragility of the script already fading on the page speaks to the ultimate futility of those systems of control, as the words and numbers dissolve and shift into abstracted pattern. 

Pindell has spent a lifetime fighting, campaigning and overcoming, first within the art world itself, then in a wider political sphere. She can be forgiven for getting angry and being blunt. But what really hits home is the quiet determination. So appreciate it in the range of work, the variety of media, in her resolute refusal to be pigeon-holed. You hear it in the pauses and the page turns, you read it in the spidery scrawl of innumerable numbers, and all those thousands of collected chads. And most of all you feel it in the creativity and the beauty and the hope which she can conjure up. Horror hits hard in the exhibition, but the beauty lingers. 

Canova in the news

There's been no great fanfare for the bicentenary of Antonio Canova's death. His sculpture is too sweet, too pretty, and, in its representation of women, sometimes too problematic for contemporary taste. Despite considerable publicity this summer, the newly rediscovered sculpture of The Recumbent Magdalene, didn't sell at auction. It was a great story. A commission for British Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, it was one of the artist's last works, which passed to Liverpool's brother in 1826 and then to public auction in 1852. Somehow its authorship became forgotten and when it was next sold in 1938, it was simply 'a classic figure' bought to decorate a garden. A great story, but not enough to persuade someone to part with upwards of £5 million.

Looking at the sculpture you can see the problem. Images of Mary Magdalene have always tended towards the carnal, but with the bare-breasted torso, the semi-reclining posture, the swoon of the eyes and the parted lips, this wears its religious role very lightly. According to Canova she was 'almost fainting from the excessive pain of her penitence' but it feels disturbingly sexualised. Bernini's interpretations of religious ecstasy, for instance his Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, in the Alteri Chapel in San Francesco a Ripa in Rome (1671-4) would surely have been in Canova's mind. But they come swathed in writhing draperies, head covered, so that the features are almost disembodied, the expression detached from the flesh. The Magdalene, in contrast, fits better with The Sleeping Endymion Canova produced for the Duke of Devonshire at the same time. Erotic myth rather than religious image.

In many ways, The Recumbent Magdalene gives the wrong impression of Canova, who spent much of his career producing cool, precise Neoclassicism. Works like the Three Graces (1814-17) idealise Beauty as asexual perfection, a physical embodiment of intellectual and moral propriety; and others were a deliberate emulation of classical precedents. His Perseus takes the Apollo Belvedere and moves it forwards; his Theseus and the Minotaur (1782) riffs off The Boxer at Rest; his portrait of Pauline Bonaparte recasts her as Venus. This academic interest in the classical world is also deeply unfashionable and Canova's work is too easily represented as a kind of fan-fiction. 

Given this lack of interest, it is admirable that Venice in Peril have committed time and money to the conservation of Canova's memorial in Santa Maria dei Frari Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. The design is his own, originally intended as a memorial to Titian, and work was carried out by his students, who completed the project in 1827. The pyramid composition with its open doorway to death and surrounding figures had previously been used by the artist in his design for the tomb of Maria Christina of Austria. Here the figures include a sleeping Genius, a Venetian winged lion and Painting and Architecture represented as mourning women; all are positioned to draw the eye towards the central blackness. And it is the crisp formality of the pyramid with its stark, black rectangle which looks radical even today. Surprisingly pagan its Christian setting, surprisingly modern for its early 19th century date. Looking at the memorial, Canova seems less of a historical has-been, and more as someone who should have their art historical status restored.

Raphael at the National Gallery (until July 31 2022): Just too Perfect

Raphael, Alba Madonna, c.1510, National Gallery of Art Washington

Raphael was a legend in his own lifetime: died on Good Friday; labelled 'divine' by Vasari in his Lives; part of the High Renaissance Holy Trinity. If Leonardo was the brains, and Michelangelo the brawn, then Raphael was the beautiful soul. Until the mid-nineteenth century his status as the artist to which all others aspired was unchallenged, but perfection can be stultifying. And Raphael's place on the pedestal made him an easy target. For a post-Romantic world, Michelangelo's heroic struggles and personal dramas were more inspiring; and Leonardo's inquisitiveness and mystery started to intrigue long before Dan Brown. Raphael fell by the wayside: too safe, too conservative, too apparently effortless. 

So, the National Gallery's exhibition, a belated celebration of the 500th anniversary of his death, has a difficult job. It's a blockbuster with a small 'b', overshadowed in scale by the Rome version which can still be seen on screen, and hampered by the inescapable fact that many of  Raphael's best works are on walls as frescos, or simply unloanable. The curators haven't tried to be clever. The Rome show quirkily worked backwards from his death, but this is a straightforward presentation of the artist's whole oeuvre from the obvious (Madonna and Childs, portraits) to his drawings, tapestry designs and architectural plans.  Neither is it over-curated: the recent Hogarth exhibition at Tate Britain turned what was essentially an extensive retrospective into a diatribe against eighteenth century prejudice with a spurious nod towards Europeanism thrown in.  The National Gallery gives us a good exhibition. But is it enough? Or rather, in the post-truth, post-beauty world in which we live can Raphael ever be enough? 

Raphael, La Fornarina, 1518-19, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica 

It's not a coincidence that most reviews pick up on the image of La Fornarina (1518-19), his lover who obtrusively wears the artist's name on a bangle. On the one hand, the image presents us with an insight into Raphael the man, who famously, according to Vasari, died from a surfeit of love: it allows us a glimpse of a less-than-divine human. On the other, it lets critics to discuss whether this possessive labelling is counterbalanced by the woman's coolly assured expression as she regards both artist and viewer. What La Fornarina really shows is Raphael's portrait mastery, that uncanny ability to capture physical likeness and breathing naturalism. National Gallery-goers are perhaps too familiar with his portrait of Pope Julius II (1511-12): sunken, grasping, an old man swamped by his finery and his office, clinging onto the chair for dear life. But the roomful of portraits here is dazzling in its variety. 

Varied too are the images of the Madonna and Child, Raphael's bread and butter, churned out with the help of his vast studio but always inventive and innovative. Raphael clearly valued quality control and never cheapened his brand. Yet it is difficult, in a secular world, to interact with the perfect embodiments of motherhood and wise-beyond-their-years infants. The balance, the control, the carefully composed colour blocks, and, to be honest, the sheer quantity of them, all create distance rather than involvement. You start to long for a jarring note, an imbalance, a misjudged colour. Today we want something more than beauty, we're suspicious of perfection, we don't believe in truth.

It seems churlish to complain about genius. If you look beyond the images, or read the catalogue, Raphael was both a genuine prodigy and a workaholic. He was also very good at playing the system: integrating the skill-set of Leonardo and Michelangelo, by fair means or foul, into his work, employing the best artists in his studio, working with tapestry designers and printmakers. He must have been good at pressing the flesh, keeping in with the Papacy who held all the power in Rome, and becoming an antiquarian and architect to do so. Look at his drawings and wonder at the skill, the softness, and the sheer love of observing and recording humanity. But that exuberant ability is smoothed out in the paintings. Is there, in the end, something a bit corporate about them? For me, this was a surfeit of Raphael.

Not Just a One Trick Pony - Canaletto at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum (until 7 Jan 2023)

Grand Canal Looking east from Palazzo Bembo to Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi,  mid 1730s, Woburn Abbey (Wikipedia Commons)

Canaletto cornered the early 18th century market in views of Venice, producing endless variations on a theme of canals, buildings and figures which enthralled British art lovers. The duke of Bedford, whose collection is showcased in the exhibition at Worcester Art Gallery, stacked them three high on his dining room walls at Woburn Abbey. George III hoovered up fifty paintings in 1762. Any Grand Touring aristocrat worth his salt would have brought one home, and there are still plenty in public collections throughout Britain.  You might expect, therefore, that a roomful of Canaletto's might be familiar and a bit repetitive. You couldn't be more wrong. The Worcester exhibition is both startlingly unexpected and endlessly interesting.

The most striking thing about these various Venetian vedute is that they are not holiday brochure picture postcards - this is not a world of Mediterranean blues and sunlight water, it's not populated by brightly costumed, picturesque young ladies and local colour. Nor are they architecturally detailed cityscapes despite their precise topography. Canaletto sees Venice through an atmospheric haze which softens the blue sky and gives every scene a unifying and nostalgic calm, and an almost sepia-tinted warmth seeping through from the reddish-brown grounds he used. For canvasses often dominated by sky and water, these paintings have none of the cool clarity that we see in Guardi or Bellotto's work. The effect is to age Venice, giving a dusty patina to a city which was long past its heyday, even in the 1740s. But it also ruthlessly matter of fact: Canaletto refuses to romanticise and his Venice is never so much a city of courtesans and carnival, than of market traders and fishermen.

He carefully and consciously maintains this calm, pseudo-naturalism in his use of figures and incident: there is nothing overly dramatic, nothing that attracts the eye. Larger foreground boats act as visual stepping stones directing our gaze into the painting. Piazzas become chessboards on which a complex game is played out by figures in isolated groups, showing us their backs, anonymous under hats, often barely more than suggestive dabs of colour: all with the aim of moving our eye round the canvas. Architecture is never detailed enough to dominate, the greatest churches and palazzos just part of the staging of these precisely choreographed scenes.

You can lose yourself in this calmness. The only frustration of the exhibition are the rails which stop you getting up close to the picture surface. As it is you lean precariously inwards, drawn to details - dogs, washing hung out of windows, men tiling a roof. None of it's real, of course, the worst injustice would be to treat Canaletto's work as some kind of social history record. Much is made of his painting from life, but it's life carefully chosen and manipulated: these are never random snapshots. And it's the artifice, the inventiveness which is so endlessly appealing -  that was where his skill really lay. He was also a master of the receding vista: subtle shifts of angle, roofline, sun and shadow, chimneys and pinnacles for height, glimpses of bridges, suggestions of spires and campaniles. The big open foregrounds funnel back with exaggerated perspective drawing your eye ever deeper into the painting.

The exhibition loses its way a little when the story moves to Britain. Canaletto followed his market and settled in London in 1746, recreating Venice on Thames. But an odd shift occurred in his work: almost to overcompensate for the duller English skies, his palette becomes brighter, sharper. Lighter underpainting and an increasingly obsessive use of white highlights give these paintings an artificial jauntiness, an almost rococo prettifying. The second room also tries to contextualise Canaletto's place in British landscape art - too great a task for a handful of paintings. There is a frankly laughable capriccio by William Marlow from the end of the century in which St Pauls is jarringly transported to a Venetian canal. It's all unnecessary. The Woburn pictures are enough in themselves. It might be easy to dismiss Canaletto as just a one trick pony - but, as this exhibition shows, it was a helluva trick.

Cornelia Parker - a Little Less Conversation? at Tate Britain (until 16th October 2022)

Cornelia Parker's art is beautiful, wonderous, mysterious, intriguing. It's also annoyingly and intrusively over-explained. There are plenty of exhibitions where you leave feeling it would have been better not to read the captions, but that's usually because of preachy, pretentious curation. Here the artist herself is the annoying voice in the room which simply refuses to let you just look. The process - both mental and physical - is clearly important to her, but is it, should it be, more important than the finished work? She seems determined to cut out the crucial third figure in the triangle - the viewer - who is given so little room to look, interpret and engage that the works themselves are somehow lessened and deadened. 

A series of beautiful geometries of folded paper burnt with a poker are lengthily, exhaustingly linked to the Turin Shroud and the death of Edward II. A brief, well-thought title could have suggested the same ideas without labouring the point. As it is the works' elegant fragility, which resonates in so many ways from a memento mori, to burning books, to Mondrianic abstractions, is strait-jacketed and you feel almost guilty for not toeing the artist's line of thought. Sawn-up Sawn-off Shot Gun (2015) speaks for itself - we don't need to know that the artist contacted the police to acquire it and that it was actually used in violent crime. Even the meticulously long-winded description of blowing up and reconstituting the garden shed in Cold Hard Matter: An Exploded View (1991) seems superfluous: the installation, with the detritus of suburban banality suspended in splendid bare-bulbed illumination is more than enough. Instead, the precise recorded factuality of it starts to eat way at visual impact - the toy trains and wellies become too obvious, too considered.

Parker sometimes gets carried away with her own ideas. Island (2022), a greenhouse, daubed in chalk from the cliffs of Dover, standing on tiles from the Houses of Parliament, lit by a pulsating bulb, piles too many disparate ideas into the frame. The painted glass itself is enough, visually effective, thought provoking: the greenhouse is as evocative of Little England as the garden shed. Her best pieces are simpler. The flesh-like tent of Remembrance poppy off-cuts, the flattened brass instruments throwing mournful shadows on the walls in Perpetual Canon (2004): these are the visual memories that you take away from the show. 

At her best Cornelia Parker is an alchemist, creating from destruction; representing the cracks, the negatives, the spaces through which life has fallen. At her best she captivates, silencing you with a shadow, a breath of movement. At her best, there's no need for words.

Not just a Fruit Fetish – the Weird and Wonderful World of Carlo Crivelli at Ikon, Birmingham (until 29 May 2022)

 

St Catherine of Alexandria, c.1491-4, National Gallery London

There are cracks everywhere in Carlo Crivelli’s works; beautifully rendered trompe l’oeil fissures in rocks, masonry, even the earth itself. Perhaps he was just recording the reality of life in Italy’s earthquake-prone Marche. Perhaps they are symbolic of worldly imperfection like the oversized fly that is plaguing his St Catherine of Alexandria (c.1490s). Ironically, they also foretell his own fate, for Crivelli slipped through the cracks of art history, ignored by Vasari in his famous Lives, and side-lined ever since. Ikon Gallery’s small but jewel-like exhibition aims to redress the balance. Director Jonathan Watkins is a self-confessed Crivelli fan, who, thanks to generous loans from the National Gallery and a £150,000 grant from the Ampersand Foundation has created ‘Shadows on the Sky’, an exhibition as weird and wonderful as Crivellis it shows. Relieved of Renaissance context, exhibited like a contemporary artist on spacious white walls and placed in conversation with a Susan Collis installation, Crivelli is revealed, not as a conservative dead-end, but as playfully, cleverly experimental.

The show positions him as a 15th century Magritte and there’s plenty of surrealism in his work, not just the tromp l’oeil, but perspectival exaggerations, inexplicable shifts of scale, gravity-defying bowls and, yes, his famous oversized fruit. Whilst Tate Modern is exploring ‘Surrealism beyond borders’, this show reminds us that the tropes of the movement also extend beyond time. Crivelli might be exploring the souls of his viewers rather than revealing the secrets of his own psyche, but his art still has the power to make us question reality and rationality. In The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele (c. 1489) a swag of fruit, scaled to the viewer, ‘hangs’ from an implied frame. So far, so familiar: a typical early Renaissance exploration of Alberti’s theory of painting as a window. But Crivelli goes one better. The fruit casts a shadow on the sky of an otherwise naturalistic landscape; the artist undermines his own illusion. The friar’s vision, too, is a solidly rendered foreshortened pendant, from which the Virgin and Child thrust forward almost as if they’ve forced themselves through this painted world from a more real one beyond.

The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele, c.1489, National Gallery, London

But Crivelli is not just about oddness. As his Victorian enthusiasts appreciated, he was lover of craftsmanship whose paintings zing with colour, detail, texture. His Venetian roots ran deep: he never abandoned Byzantine gold and followed Vivarini in exploiting three-dimensional pastiglia. You can only imagine how the panels would look glinting in candlelight, shining through incense filled gloom. He relishes rich damasks, intricate rugs, the precision of a peacock’s tail, a carnation, a glinting pearl. Detail piles on detail, a surfeit of visual sensation which creates a better than, fuller than, more beautiful than life, world; a visual heaven to which the faithful aspire and which the saints already inhabit. There’s an International Gothic eye for elongated line: Byzantine fingers pluck at serpentine folds, immaculate curls frame alabaster-skin faces. But Crivelli is no head in the sand has-been; he has Mantegna’s love of classical decoration and overhyped perspective.

St Roch, c.1480, Wallace Collection London

Britain is blessed with Crivellis, thanks mainly to a buying spree by the National Gallery in the 1860s, and he was a prolific artist. The small, sparse show in Birmingham gives the opposite impression. You can take your time and get up close in a way which their normal hang in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery doesn’t allow; and the vast, glorious, jaw-dropping Annunciation with St Emidius (1486) is hung so low you could almost walk into it. Take time to get to know Saint Roch (c.1480), normally relegated to a dark corner of the Wallace Collection. With careful tempera hatching, Crivelli creates detail and character: the hollowed cheeks and drawn skin, the plain pilgrim’s grab and yet underlying breeding and elegance; the hand raised in surprise and wonder as he reveals plague wound from which he has been cured. But these works were never intended be seen in splendid isolation. Most are hacked up altarpieces, meant to be crammed together between elaborate gilt, figures interacting, jostling for attention in competitive martyrdom. Their religious intensity, already dimmed by a secular world, is further reduced by the clinical setting. It’s a small quibble. Crivelli is a joy, and Birmingham, at present suffering the prolonged closure of its art gallery, is enjoying his presence.

Willem Maris: Definitely Not Grey

Milking Time, undated, St Louis Art Museum

Willem Maris (1844-1910) was a Dutch artist, one of three brothers who were all associated with the late 19th century Hague School of painting. These artists initially took their cue from Barbizon landscapists like Theodore Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet - artists who sought to represent the countryside and rural life as accurately as possible. Although they also clearly followed a long Dutch tradition of rural landscape which can be traced back to the 17th century. The figure engaged in the task in Maris' Milking Time could easily have stepped out of a Millet canvas, hunkered down in anonymous labour amidst countryside which steadfastly refuses to engage in the picturesque. 

However, the Hague artists' palette of greys, greens and blues and their cool, even lighting had more in common with the work of French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage, and in this sense the Hague School fits into a wider group of much neglected late 19th century landscapists. Bastien-Lepage's Naturalism was popular in France at the time but doesn't sit easily in an art historical narrative which foregrounds Impressionism. Lepage painted plein air, and his loose brushwork and occasionally awkwardly posed figures seem superficially impressionistic, but he had no interest in modern subject matter, in colour theory, or in promoting himself as an artistic radical. The same could be said of artists like George Clausen in Britain, of the so-called Glasgow Boys in Scotland, and of the Hague School painters in the Netherlands. 

Willem Maris' work has the characteristic grey-green palette which led to him and the other Hague artists being nicknamed the Grey School, but the superficial monochrome is broken by vigorous brushwork which reveals complex and often surprisingly vivid colours. Increasingly this sketchiness created a sense of atmospheric haze which gives his paintings a calm lyricism, and the strong sunlight of his work becomes increasingly diffuse. 

Calves at at Trough, 1863, Kunstmuseum, The Hague

Maris' early work often involved groupings of multiple figures and animals foregrounded within a characteristically flat, big-skied Dutch landscape.  Later, his focus shifted to smaller, more intimate and primarily animal based compositions, including a large number of images of ducks. The big horizons give way to introverted corners of nature, the sky barely visible through complex lattices of leaves and branches, or even completely absent as he seeks out a ground level, creature-eye viewpoint. 

Ducks Alighting on a Pool, c.1885, National Gallery, London

Ducks, c.1864, Burrell Collection Glasgow 

The subjects may seem inconsequential, but the painterly effort which Maris puts into these works is considerable. His brushwork is decisive, varied and complex, layering pigment and exploiting impasto to create a dense patchwork which suggests transience of light and movement, yet remains surprisingly calm. Judging by the number of his works in British collections, he was obviously once a sought after artist. He surely deserves to be better known again.