Renaissance Siena: Art for a City at The National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing until 13 January 2008. Admission charge
Often it is just one picture or object that makes an impression. Among the paintings from Siena is a small wooden panel depicting the Annunciation – it is full of animation, like a dance.
As the angel’s right hand beckons to Mary, she almost turns away, the slant of her body suggesting awe and deference, yet at the same time her left hand is open in acceptance. The other hands of each figure are poised in relation to each other, on either side of an invisible boundary that divides the picture down the middle (though the starkness of the effect is softened by the perspective of the pillars, and landscape). It is a moving image of the juxtaposition of two worlds and of communication that breaches them.
The Annunciation by Francesco di Giorgio (about 1470-2)
An American's Passion for British Art: Paul Mellon's Legacy at the Royal Academy in the Sackler Wing until 27 Jan 2008.
A small section of the exhibition is devoted to ‘Blake and Other Visionary Artists’ where some works by Samuel Palmer can be found. ‘The Weald of Kent’ (circa 1834), shows the dark outspreading branch of a venerable tree that frames the gently rolling countryside below, with its pattern of fields outspread below, like a promised land. It puts me in mind of the words of the seventeenth century mystic, Thomas Traherne, who in his ‘Vision Of Childhood’, records:
‘The Corn was Orient and Immortal Wheat which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from Everlasting to Everlasting. …….The Men! O what Venerable and Reverend Creatures did the Aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And the young Men Glittering and Sparkling Angels and Maids strange Seraphic Pieces of Life and Beauty!
Indeed in ‘The Harvest Moon’, a team of villagers gathering in the corn, appear like an angelic host as the moonlight reflects white on their clothes. In the 1830s, while living in Shoreham in Kent, Samuel Palmer, along with other enthusiasts for Blake, was one of the self styled ‘Ancients’ who loved to roam at night by moonlight, and his paintings from this period, heavily worked in watercolour, gouache and india ink reflect a magical vision. This is one of the Shoreham pictures though not the one in the exhibition.
A Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star by Samuel Palmer
What a surprise it is to encounter a work in tempera, on a copper engraving plate, just a few centimeters in size,by William Blake. A lady is depicted, a smooth grey tree trunk behind her, while before her stands a powerful, muscular, white horse: it seems to take place in an ancient land, a mysterious vision seen with the inner eye.
Also on display is a rare copy of the ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience', open at the title page, freshly tinted by Blake with watercolour washes-one can feel the love that went into it’s making: ‘Piper, pipe that song again’.
From The British Library Blake Archive