National Gallery Page #17

whether I like it or not.

But I certainly think it's one of the most

fascinating paintings in the National Gallery.

It's very, very extraordinary.

Thank you very much.

Part of the appeal

of Vermeers paintings,

and other paintings

like them in the 17th century,

is that they create an ideal world,

an ideal image that is seductive,

and absolutely pleasant to look at.

You're drawn into the beauty of it.

I think it's not just us in the 21st century

that the painting has that impact on.

I think it was exactly the same

in the 17th century.

Pan of that, of course,

is in the way in which Vermeer paints.

He has an absolutely unique style

that somehow finds a balance

between realism and abstraction.

From a distance, even a short distance,

you're struck by how realistic this is.

You think, "Oh, wow" you know,

"That woman, I wanna step closer

and get to know her."

But as you get closer,

just like Impressionist paintings,

that sense of realism

dissolves into abstraction,

and it remains forever elusive,

again, creating a barrier

between our world

and this ideal world

represented in the paintings.

I think that is intentional

on Vermeer's part,

to emphasize and to maintain

the perfection

of the world that he's created.

It's also,

as so many of Vermeer's paintings,

a very ambiguous painting.

Because of the woman's restraint,

because of the absolute regularity

and almost austerity of the composition,

it's hard to tell exactly

what the painting is about,

what might be going on in this painting.

Art historians can go on endlessly

about the symbolism

of the painting in the background,

and, you know, the angle of this

and the juxtaposition of that.

But how do we know that that's entirely

what Vermeer had in mind'?

And, of course, you know,

as any other an historian,

I've written, you know,

"This means this, this means that,"

but there's always an element of ambiguity,

a question there

that I firmly believe is absolutely intentional

on the part of the best artists,

because it's designed to keep you intrigued,

to keep you coming back,

to keep your attention on this painting,

and each time you come to the painting,

depending on your mood,

who else is in the room,

what you had for lunch,

it's going to look slightly different,

it's going to appeal to you,

you're going to engage with it

in an entirely different way.

It's a very, very interesting

relationship between his painting technique

and the things that we value and prize

about Caravaggio.

The immediacy of the effect of the models,

the dramatic lighting,

a lot of the things

he does in his working practice

as well as the application of paint,

are all kind of inextricably bound

with what we treasure in them.

So I'll start off with

Boy Bitten by a Lizard.

The main thing I'd like

to convey about this picture

is to get you to understand a little bit about

how he's using his priming, his ground,

that's the layer he puts on the canvas

before he starts painting the figure.

In this case, it's a kind of rich

kind of bricky red-brown colour.

This is something that he's exploiting, then,

in the subsequent build-up of the paint.

The brown colour is left exposed,

quite deliberately,

to help him evolve

the modeling of the flesh tones.

Bellori, an important critic writing

in the 1670s,

was already writing about this,

how he leaves the ground exposed

to give the middle colours

of the flesh painting.

And you can see that in the shadow

and sort of around the breast,

in the shadowed part of the cheek,

the shadowed part of the hands,

and quite a lot of the drapery painting

is essentially the ground colour.

And it's a very economical

way of proceeding,

because once you establish the figure,

you use the ground,

you can put a very thin, translucent

brown colour to push the shadows back,

and then,

when you build the lighter colours up,

when you're mixing the light coloured paint

and putting it on top of a darker ground,

it gets very opaque very quickly.

And so it's extremely economical.

I mean, the dark grounds are things

that were evolved

and used more and more frequently in Italy

throughout the 16th century,

particularly in north Italy,

where he was formed.

And I think, however, that he managed

to exploit this technique

and kind of make it his own

and bend it toward his purposes

in a very characteristic way.

We, with Renaissance paintings,

have the ability, generally,

to look with infrared reflectography

and see evidence of initial drawing.

And that's based on, say,

a carbon-containing charcoal or something,

drawn on top of a light ground,

and so you... the contrast is something

we can pick up with infrared.

Now, with these pictures, traditionally,

with the dark ground,

and whatever kind of paint

that might have been used to draw,

you really don't see anything

with that technique.

So it's always been a great mystery

about Caravaggio.

Did he draw'? And in what sense

did he do preparatory drawing?

Because we don't have, really,

drawings on paper.

He's playing a bit of a game with you about,

you know, what skill is and what craft is

and how speedy and confident he was.

There's a kind of... seemingly,

a taste or a desire to look,

to have that kind of sprezzatura,

the brio, the ability to do something,

to knock it off very confidently.

But, like many things in Caravaggio,

what may seem...

what is indeed revolutionary

is still grounded in a very careful

and considered use of his materials,

and somebody who always, whatever

the sordid details of his personal life,

somebody who always was in really

fantastic control of his materials

and understanding

of how the paint worked.

So I think that's the thing

I'd like to leave with you.

What's going on, here?

What's happened in my absence?

In your absence.

Well, we've done a bit of a rehang,

as you can tell.

Yeah, definitely.

It's changed a lot, actually.

I think there's only two or three pictures

that haven't actually moved.

Yeah, but I mean, the...

- Yeah.

- We basically had to do it

to find a spot

for The Virgin of the Rocks.

- Yeah.

- And here it is, now.

And what do you think?

I was thinking

that it looks strange, actually.

That's changed a lot from before.

First reaction is something that...

I think it's visual. No? Isn't it? It is, er...

- Well, it's interest...

- It's another...

another world of colour,

you know what I mean?

It's a completely different world.

We saw it downstairs in the exhibition,

how nicely it worked with the other,

later Milanese pictures,

and that the composition

may be Florentine,

but the whole painting is Milanese.

Ah... Ya,

there is a theoretical issue,

that, as you said, it's a Milanese painting,

but also visually, I think that is

something a little bit puzzling, isn't it?

You know, also, because, even

if the drawing probably is Florentine...

Well, the idea, the composition

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