National Gallery Page #6

which is also alluded to here

by this distorted skull.

It's an example of anamorphosis.

You look at it full on,

from where you are, it's unreadable,

but from where you are, it reads as a skull.

And we don't know whose idea it was.

Did Holbein say, "Your Excellencies,

why not have an anamorphic skull?

"See, I've made one here,"

and they thought, "Oh, that's good, yeah.

"That'll look really good back

in the chteau at Polisy."

Or had one of these two men

heard about it and said,

"Master Holbein, can you fashion

for us a cunning perspective?"

We don't know.

But all of you know that to put a skull,

which is a symbol of death, into a portrait

is a strange and unusual thing, perhaps.

Certain symbols,

certain objects are multivalent,

they carry manifold symbols.

But not the skull. The skull is always,

is it not, a symbol of death?

So perhaps the reading of this

might be that death is ever present.

Hiding, but ever present.

You never know when it might occur.

And in fact, he didn't make old bones at all.

But perhaps, carried within this,

was a message

which Jean de Dinteville could talk about

when he showed anyone this painting

in his house at Polisy.

Maybe the message was

something like this.

No matter how rich, young -

he was 29, or in his 29th year,

he in his 25th year-

handsome, interested in

and worried about the world you are,

in the end, it all comes down

to the grim invincible,

and the only thing to be considered

in this world is salvation,

represented by

the almost hidden crucifix, top left.

It's a brilliant thing about art,

it encompasses everything.

It's not just about either drawing

or painting, it's about life.

It's about music, it's about film,

it's about philosophy,

it's about mathematics, it's about science,

it's about literature.

Anything you are interested in...

goes into art.

And that's why I became an artist,

and that's what fascinates me.

It doesn't matter what you're interested in,

it can all feed in.

And I want to also talk about how we can

use these paintings in the collection.

Because it might seem to you,

"Hang on a minute.

'We're looking at 17th century,

16th century, 19th century.

'What on earth use is that for us today

in the 21st century?"

Now, I don't make paintings.

I do a lot of drawing.

But I make installations.

So I make things that take over a room

that people can interact with.

And yet, these paintings here give me

a huge amount of inspiration.

And I come in here almost every day.

So I want them to do that for you.

Now, I'm going to be

sort of blunt about this,

because it's important that you know this.

The collection is founded on slavery.

John Julius Angerstein,

who had the nucleus of the collection,

worked for Lloyd's,

who were insurers against slave-boats.

And it's very important that people

absolutely understand

that a lot of the institutions,

whether you're talking Tate,

whether you're talking British Museum,

a lot of these big institutions

are founded from money,

and it's something, obviously,

that should never be forgotten,

and should always be understood.

And also, Britain's

very, very shameful part in that

shouldn't, obviously, be forgotten either.

Let's start first with Stubbs,

the great horse painter.

You look at this portrait of a horse,

and it's hard to imagine that this is painted

by someone that didn't really

particularly train as an artist.

He was largely self-taught.

He established a career first

as a portrait painter,

and as an anatomist,

he studied anatomy at York Hospital,

and ended up actually drawing illustrations

for a new book on midwifery.

So he's already established himself

as an artist in one way,

but then he set himself down

for 18 months in a farmhouse -

this was in 1756-

and devoted that time, a year and a half,

to studying the anatomy of horses.

He was close to a tannery

that took the hides off of them,

and they gave him

the corpses of these horses.

And he rigged up, in this farmhouse,

a great iron bar,

and pulley systems,

and he put planks of wood

underneath the horses' legs,

so that he would suspend them,

literally, from hooks, on the ceiling,

like a piece of meal,

and then would start to go about drawing

all of the muscles that he could see,

and the tendons,

and then he would scalpel away,

and lift away another layer of muscles,

and draw what was underneath,

until he eventually got to the skeleton.

And then he would animate that,

he would draw and write notes.

So this was big news,

what Stubbs was doing.

'Scuse me.

No photos, please. 'Scuse me.

I'm very bad at maths.

I'm very bad at maths.

I was bad at maths at your age,

I'm bad at maths at my age,

and I will always be bad at maths,

I think - I'd like to change.

The reason why I like an

rather than maths -

although they are connected somehow -

is that in art, you can be right

in lots of different ways,

but in maths, you can only really be

right once, otherwise you're wrong.

I do really like that about an.

One of the reasons I wanted to show you

this painting is to talk about saints,

but is also to talk about storytelling.

I think that's really, really important.

Think about the way that a painting,

whether it's this painting -

this is by an artist called Bellini -

or it's Diana and Actaeon, or it's Death

of Actaeon, which we're gonna be seeing,

or it's Bacchus and Ariadne,

a painting has got to tell its whole story

in a single image.

A book or a poem has time.

The one thing that paintings don't have

is time - do you know what I mean?

So a film unfolds over two hours.

You've got time to introduce characters.

You've got time to show

the plot going in and out.

A book, a huge book, can take you

six months to read or longer, can't it?

Can do. Can do.

It means you're living

with the story for six months,

and it goes in and out, it weaves around,

new characters are introduced,

different things happen.

That's got time, too.

But a painting doesn't have time. A painting

has the speed of light to tell you the story.

It has the time it takes to see the painting.

So telling a story in a painting

is incredible skilful.

So I wanna think a little bit more, before we

move on to 'Titian, which we will do soon,

about how this artist tells the story.

What else is in the painting?

Can you think of a reason... Cos in

the actual story, there's no woodcutters.

In the story, there's just St Peter Martyr

and his assistant,

who you can see there escaping,

walking along, alongside a wood,

near Milan in northern Italy,

when they were set upon by assassins.

One assassin killed St Peter Martyr,

and as St Peter Martyr was dying,

he wrote "I believe" in blood on the ground.

Now, he's not doing it in this one,

but there's another version of this scene

in another gallery in London,

a place called the Courtauld Gallery,

where he is writing "I believe" in blood.

It's quite... It's quite gruesome, isn't it'?

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes