Galleries

Wanting to use this blog more, I have proposed a pair of rules to myself. First, not to use the Internet at all while writing. To avoid looking at notes or books is a target of opportunity, something I managed in this instalment but might not always. Second, to write as quickly as possible with as few revisions as possible, following Nietzsche’s advice that deep thoughts are best had like a cold bath: quick in, quick out. As you can see, where I am quoting roughly from memory, I will adopt the Renaissance style of putting quotations in italics. Here actual quotation marks would feel misleading, as what I write will likely be inaccurate or even partially invented. I do this not (I hope) in a showing-off kind of way (because really my memory of the few books I do get round to reading is poor) but to encourage a kind of thinking which reflects the supple contours of memory, eroded into shape by time, not predictable lines of googled perfection.

My initial thought for a topic was the ‘the gallery’: now, of course, a building in which one looks at paintings, but originally a long room with many windows, often used for walking, and especially for ladies to avoid the sun while exercising. The word’s etymology is unknown, but it may come from ‘Galilee’, Jesus’s birthplace, which came to refer to the entrance hall of a church: perhaps because the church progresses towards Jerusalem.

On the English Renaissance gallery I can’t better Lena Orlin’s chapter on ‘Galleries’ in Locating Privacy in Early Modern London, about how the sixteenth-century gallery was, perhaps counter-intuitively, the most private room in a house. Because walls were thin, a conversation would be far less likely to be overheard in a visibly empty garden or gallery than in a smaller, more obviously sequestered room. In another sense, however, the gallery was a house’s most public room, the place one would be most likely to take visitors to walk or sit, converse, and to admire views of the garden or other curiosities. It was the placement of interesting objects, including emblems, sculptures and other art works, which gave the gallery its modern meaning, so that by the time Marvell wrote his poem ‘The Gallery’ in the early seventeenth century, the primary activity associated with this room was viewing paintings.

Three aspects of the gallery’s origins might be taken as surviving into the modern gallery. One is the association with walking, expressed in elongated rectangular forms. There is, it seems to me, no particular reason the viewing of paintings should not be regarded as a properly sedentary activity, and modern galleries could be structured as a series of viewing stations. Instead, the placement of chairs in galleries tends to feel awkward: benches are uncomfortably exposed in the middle of the room and too far away from the art. The use of temporary fold-out seats in galleries confirms that there is no proper place for the chair here. These are rooms for walking.

Another continuity is that paintings tend to be framed and placed in a manner which suggests a strong continuity with the windows which would have lined the fifteenth and sixteenth century gallery (a continuity exploited in many Dutch interior paintings, with their open doorways and windows providing frames within the frame). This opens onto the final way in which the gallery is recognisably similar through history: these have always been rooms in which attention is diffused outwards. Unlike the kitchen with its stove or the living room with its hearth, the gallery lacks a centre, and invites the occupant to look away from the house, whether that’s towards the garden, or a painting.

This makes the gallery a useful symbol for the concentration of knowledge, a room which assembles together material from distant places and makes it accessible and immediate. Francis Bacon wrote that our world did not have through-lights in it, until this age of ours and our fathers, comparing the circumnavigation of the globe with a gallery with windows placed on each side (‘our age’ being the seventeenth century: this is Sir F.B., scientist and lawyer, not the overrated artist of wailing pontiffs). Many have, in some ways rightly, become sceptical of Bacon’s world-taming project, and sceptical too of the gallery as a centre for knowledge of the whole world, evident in the calls for museums to return their artifacts to the places from which they were purchased, plundered or pillaged.

With a deft swerve around this political quicksand, I note that I did encounter an example of this centralising tendency closer to home. The sleepy Oxfordshire village of Steeple Aston possesses one of the finest examples of medieval embroidery in the country, a cope which would once have been worn as a priestly vestment, but was long ago cut up into small pieces (to serve as altar-cloths, among other uses), and lent since about 1900 to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Sensible, of course, to allow more people to view it by placing it just off the Brompton Road. But its finery would surely look impossibly grander in its original setting, placed next to the book display raising money for a new roof and barely-lit by slim gothic windows, than in a museum where it has to compete with replicas of Trajan’s Column (so tall they designed the whole central gallery around it—and it still has to be displayed in two halves!) and Michelangelo’s David.

These churches were once nodes of beauty scattered throughout the countryside, richly-adorned by local people who preferred for God’s house to be richly adorned rather than their own, as Eamon Duffy has described in The Stripping of the Altars. Now their contents are stripped out and adorn galleries where they can be seen, not used. It is fit that the gallery was originally a room for walking because the result is precisely pedestrian: look for a moment, read the caption, move on. The gallery is a room of passing-through, built for spending time, not for dwelling.

A question which has occurred to me as I have passed through various buildings is: how do I pay attention to this? I don’t mean this question in the way that almost every opinion piece seems to ask it, as in, how do we recover our attention from the devices which get between us and deep, cold-bath thought (the answer to this—turning them off, putting them away—being obvious but hard to heed). I mean instead that to pay attention to a poem, book, painting or film requires a concentrated gaze, the same gaze taking the art-work as a whole while also being able to pause over details. I can say with certainty whether I have seen a book or watched a film, though for me there is the odd exception of Pasolini’s Theorem, which I just cannot remember whether I have seen or not. Whether I have seen a painting is less clear, as it is ambiguous whether or not seeing a picture on the screen really counts, but still one has a sense of taking in the work as a whole. When it comes to experiencing a building, however, it is hard to even find the proper word. ‘Been to’ does not imply any level of imaginative or intellectual engagement, but ‘seen’ feels narrow. Here, the most focussed kind of attention can feel the most misguided. To walk around a church as if it were a gallery furnished with arresting details is to treat it as something other than what it was built to be.

Ben Jonson might have it right in ‘To Penshurst’, where the folly of extravagant building is contrasted with the wise humility of mere dwelling in a place effortlessly imbued with history. Of course not all of us have the good fortune to live in places effortlessly imbued with history, but we nonetheless imbue histories into places we know all the time. The impossibility of pinning down whether I have experienced a building, or what word to use about it, reflects something about all art: to think that I have ‘read’ The Ambassadors just because my eyes have passed over all the words is as foolish as the traveller saying he has ‘done’ Vietnam because he saw a few temples and drove a moped drunk over a mountain. The great novels, poems and paintings, like the great buildings, are shy creatures. To know them well requires dwelling, acquiring a shared history, developing an acquaintance: a line from a poem coming to mind at just the right moment, a building becoming not just a place but a place where something happened. Next time I’m in a gallery, I’ll stop for longer.

A detail from the Steeple Aston cope, V&A Museum, London