(Hampton Court Palace, until 30 September 2012)
First things first. What a great title. Who could resist that? And then there is the poster, plastered across the Underground, which has been cleverly designed to show bare skin, unbound hair and rumpled sheets, without outraging the modesty of Tube bosses (who banned the comparatively inoffensive nudity of the Royal Academy’s Cranach poster back in 2008). Beauty, lust, power, debauchery and a day out; what could be better?
(Wallace Collection, London, until 16 September 2012)
Precisely focused both in historical period and subject, this exhibition gives a glimpse of the social culture of swordsmanship that existed in Europe between about 1550 and 1610. It traces the development of the rapier from the broader, shorter swords of the early Renaissance and late medieval period. This wasn’t just a stylistic development: it heralded a completely different approach to the handling of the sword.
(The Queen’s Gallery, London, until 7 October 2012)
We’ve been well and truly spoiled for Leonardo this year and it’s only six months in. There has been the blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery, the exhibition in Turin at the same time, the Louvre’s show based around The Virgin and Child with St Anne, the touring exhibition of Leonardo’s drawings around Britain in celebration of Prince Charles’s 60th birthday, and now this show of his anatomical drawings at the Queen’s Gallery.
★★★★
The three books in Linda Proud’s Botticelli Trilogy provide a powerful, moving and life-affirming insight into Renaissance Florence. Essentially they are three instalments in the same book, so it makes no sense to speak of them individually: they need to be read and appreciated together. Following the life and career of Tommaso de’ Maffei, the books begin with his boyhood and his journey to Florence, where he earns his living as a scribe.
Yesterday in the centre of London it was almost 28 degrees (Celsius) and 10,700 people were crowded around me on the starting line, including (at the front of the pack) international athletes like Mo Farah, Jo Pavey and Paula Radcliffe. I had never run a race before and the atmosphere at the start was electrifying. I was somewhere near the back of the pack, along with the other charity runners and people dressed as dragons, dogs and superheroes. My parents had warned me that the family honour would be dented if I was beaten by anyone dressed as a rhino.
★★★★ ½
Like many other people (the vast majority of the British public, it seems), I thoroughly enjoyed Wolf Hall and was thrilled when I heard that Hilary Mantel was writing a sequel. I’m pleased to report that Bring up the Bodies offers another satisfying dose of Elizabethan intrigue and treachery, told in Mantel’s strikingly pared-back prose. She focuses not on sets, costumes and locations, but on the events that unfold, the relationships that form and fade between the members of the court, and the man who stands to one side, watching and weighing them.
★★★★
This is the third book I’ve read by Alan Hollinghurst, the others being The Line of Beauty and The Swimming Pool Library. Like those two novels, this book was beautifully and lyrically crafted. It occurs to me that Hollinghurst is particularly good at representing the allure of closed circles to outsiders. Those circles can be social, as we see in the third part of this book, when middle-class Paul finds himself in the charmed circle of Mrs Jacobs and her family. They can also be circles of friendship or love, like the relationship between Cecil and George at the beginning of the book, of which innocent Daphne wants so much to be a part. But at what cost do we join such circles?
★★★½
I went over to the dark side recently and treated myself to a Kindle. In my defence, it was mainly a matter of expedience. Being a fast reader, I suffer the consequences of long train journeys or business trips. Things reached a peak when, during a visit to Germany, my copy of World Without End weighed more than the rest of my hand luggage put together. Rather than heave enormous books around Europe, just in case I run out of something to read, it seems much more sensible to have multiple e-books at my fingertips. And so, for my first Kindle experience, I lighted on Madeleine Miller’s Song of Achilles, which promised to indulge my fascination with the myth cycle of the Trojan War.
★★★
In his Booker Prize winner from 2011, Julian Barnes plays with notions of memory and history. When the narrator Tony receives an unexpected bequest, he is motivated to reexamine his past, specifically, his friendship with his brilliant schoolmate Adrian, and his youthful affair with the demanding Veronica. In doing so, he discovers that his neat memories of events are far from true, and that the consequences of these two relationships are still playing themselves out in the present.
(National Portrait Gallery, until 28 May)
I haven’t seen many exhibitions recently, so I was grateful when a more efficient friend invited me along to see the Lucian Freud: Portraits exhibition at the NPG. I must find an opportunity next week to see Hockney at the Royal Academy before that closes, because we’re lucky to have retrospectives of Britain’s two great modern artists barely a ten minute walk from each other. The two artists were friends, as well as contemporaries, so it should throw an extra interesting light on both.
The Idle Woman 