National Gallery Page #18

is Florentine.

And, of course, you know...

and now you have...

It... it's a difficult picture

to find a place for, actually...

- Yeah.

- ...In the gallery,

- And there is an argument to be made...

- Yeah.

And I think, you know, in a way it works,

and you show him, you know,

together with Verrocchio, with his teacher,

and, you know, side by side...

But, yeah...

- Yeah.

- It doesn't sing as nicely.

- No.

- It did sing downstairs.

The only things...

Well, the constructive thing, how...

how Leonardo... evolution...

- Yeah, how...

- ...is completely different.

How it moves into a different direction.

If you put in relation

with his old Florentine friends...

- Yeah. Yeah.

- ...that is quite a struggle, but actually,

is a contrast, the way of seeing the hang,

the display of our own, that is...

I think it's quite strange.

But there's something quite nice

about this being situated in the comer,

because you enter the Sainsbury Wing,

and you kind of meander

throughout the rooms,

and you discover the Leonardo

in the comer,

almost as if you discovered

a little kind of grouping in the cave...

- Which I think is quite nice.

- Mm.

Yeah.

Mm-hm.

One receiving, over.

In 'Titian's letter, he says,

"I am painting...

"Diana Surprised by Actaeon,

"and... and Actaeon..."

The word he um is "lacerated",

by his own hounds.

So originally, these two pictures

would have been the pair

that he wanted to send to King Philip.

This painting remains in Titian's studio,

it was never finished by Tahitian,

and is bought from his studio

after his death.

So he decides not to do this,

and instead, he produces...

- This one.

- Diana and Callisto as the pair.

- So he has two...

- Completely different.

Yes, different, but they both show Diana

as taking vengeance on... on a mortal,

on a...

And the mom... and also, the moment of...

Interestingly,

they're kind of opposite pictures,

because here, the pregnant nymph

Callisto is being exposed,

and Diana realizes she's pregnant.

Here, it's Diana who's being exposed

and who is... by Actaeon.

Here, there is a female victim of Diana,

and here, a male victim.

Erm...

They probably hung opposite each other,

so we've tried to suggest that

by putting them a bit differently.

But we also want people

to see this with that.

- This picture we acquired 25 years ago.

- From?

From Lord Harewood.

It was in England?

In England. Earl Harewood

had the painting from Lord Darnley,

who... whose great-great-great-grandfather

purchased it at the Orleans sale.

Mm.

How it got to the Orleans collection,

it got to the Orleans collection because...

it was one of the pictures that...

from...

The Queen of Sweden acquired it

on her way to Rome...

I think. Yes.

That's... that's the best explanation.

And then, these pictures

were actually presented from...

by the Spanish crown to,

I think, a French ambassador,

who... who was acquiring them

for the Regent of France,

who was, of course,

a very, very great art collector.

Painted in the 1550s,

sent to Spain, stay in Spain until...

A couple of hundred years.

And then go to France,

into a semi-royal collection

of the Duc d'Orleans.

And then to England.

I'm very fond of the Duc d Orleans, and...

- Well, he was a good guy.

- Yeah.

He was also, you know, a...

he was an amateur cook.

- Yeah?

- You know, he loved...

he was one of the first

very, very princely or noble people

who is known to have

liked to do his own cooking

- and experiment with cooking.

- I didn't know that.

What he did after dinner

is a different matter.

- Yes, a common habit.

- But I think it's nice he was a cook.

Yeah. Anyway. But he loved... Also, we know

he liked arranging his own paintings.

- OK.

- But what amazes me about him

is that when he got the great collection

of the Queen of Sweden, from Rome,

he took ten or 15 years to negotiate.

He then hung...

He... he wanted to see the paintings...

Obviously, he would have new,

French frames made for them.

Of course, cos everyone would do that.

But before he had the frames made,

he wanted to see them in the frames

which that...

"cette grande Princesse",

the Queen of Sweden, had seen them in.

And I think that's fantastic.

Right, OK.

I'm going to read a poem

called Callisto's Song.

Callisto was the nymph

who was then turned into a bear,

who ended her life flung up

into the heavens as a constellation.

She became the Great Bear.

So, in order to write her poem in her voice,

I had to imagine

how a constellation might sound.

So on the page, visually,

I've translated her noise,

her song as a star,

into every word being

divided by an asterisk.

So it looks like a constellation.

In my head,

I feel if I could read it as I hear her,

there would be kind of white noise,

star... crunching, crackling noises

between every word.

But I can't really do that, so probably

the most you'll hear is a little syncopation.

Callisto's Song.

stars stars stars stars

andIammadeofthemnow

looking down on myself then

a colorito woman yes

that was me

in my red sandals

the great outdoors curtained

golden embroidered

and heatshimmer

above blue mountains

nothing vertical

not even the plinth

and no speech no names then

just a cry

as the busy body nymphs

stripped me

because we all had

rounded bellies then

but nine months gone so

my navel curved like a gash

and o so noticeable among

all the diagonals

and everyone

looking a 'different' way

looking a lot

especially the goddess

her arrow-arm pointing

bow-mouth strung

and dogs crouched because

they sensed consequences

and gods arriving and doing

what gods do upstairs

and the artist's finger loaded

and the paint alive

alive with stars

stars stars stars stars

So can we start off by talking about the...

the painting?

Diana's such a powerful... figure.

Oh, she's female...

but full of fire and strength.

She's very intriguing.

Her reaction to Callisto is fascinating,

because... because Diana is, of course,

the goddess of chastity.

She's actually faced with another female

at the kind of maximum

moment of fecundity.

So there's a tension

and a kind of fury in Diana

that you feel goes beyond

anything that Callisto's done.

Because, after all, in... in a sense,

Callisto's been raped.

And now, in this revelation,

she's raped again,

by the pointing finger.

So... it's...

I think it's the dynamic of these different

sides of femaleness, of womanhood,

that come through in the story

as Titian tells it.

If you like, every poem is a kind of...

crude translation of something else.

Our poems... our poems never,

never reach what we want them to.

You know, we're always, in a way,

hampered by language.

And that's what's wonderful.

Yeats talks about

the fascination of what's difficult.

And the fact that language isn't perfect,

the fact that when I say the word "hand",

it is not my hand,

is really beautiful and poignant to me,

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