Discoveries in early modern history

Madonna and child by Michele di Giovanni da Fiesole, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, c. 1455

I've always wanted to visit Urbino, the stronghold of the successful condottiere and art patron Duke Federico da Montefeltro since reading Geoffrey Trease's Horsemen on the Hills (1971) as a child. In Italy, his 'pink palace' (actually more of a light-coloured red brick) is famous:

But it's bloody difficult to get to on your own steam - flight to Bologna, two trains and a bus ride from Pesaro. So I booked a tour with like-minded individuals receptive to the opportunity for the explosion of art and architecture this would provide.

He was a focused and ruthless man, an illegitimate son, who made a name for himself as a condottiere, then gained the Dukedom after the death of his half-brother - there is some suspicion he may have been implicated. The famous nose shown in the painting by Piero della Francesca was not natural - he lost an eye in a jousting accident and then ordered surgeons to remove the bridge so he could see better in battle with the one remaining eye. This just shows what a single-minded man he was.

The palace at Urbino is stamped with his personality, via his personal emblems, as is the rather beautiful renaissance palace at Gubbio where he was born. The order of the garter, which he received from King Edward IV, is everywhere.

He was buried in the Church of San Bernardino, just outside Urbino, which was constructed in a similar style to the palace at Gubbio, according to his wishes.

Federico was a great patron of Piero della Francesca, but this altarpiece at the church was looted by Napoleon and ended up in Milan.

Other della Francesca works associated with Federico are no longer at Urbino, having made their way to the Uffizi and other places, but some remain, including the Flagellation of Christ, which is said to refelct (and perhaps atone for) the murder of his brother Oddantonio who is the Christ figure in the painting.

The Madonna di Senigallia is also a star attraction, but impossible to study too closely due to the volume of Italian schoolchildren surrounding it. The Christ child wears coral for its protective qualities.

There is also a rather wonderful portrait by Raphael, known as 'La Muta' because she looks like she wants to say something, but can't:

All Saints Hillesden in Buckinghamshire has everything: a door pockmarked from a civil war siege, which the church survived, while the manor house was burned down by Oliver Cromwell's troops, and (it is said) thirty foreign mercenaries summarily executed. Despite this, quite a bit of old glass survives, including this rather wonderful piece of sixteenth-century Flemish glass telling the story of St Nicholas.

It captures all the bizarre details of the St Nicholas legends, with wonderfully expressive details:

There is a good explanation of what they represent here. Apparently this one above is the devil strangling a boy, who is then revived by St Nicholas.

I'm not sure whether this window was in the church when it was besieged, as another window is testimony to the destruction then wrought:

The 'Hillesden miracle' is the stain behind this statue of the Virgin Mary, which is said to represent the Virgin itself and be irremovable by scrubbing or painting. Rather a nice testimony for a church which is a great survivor.

I'm a great fan of small museums - the variety and value of the objects often impresses. Here you find Roman statuary, giant fossils (of course), medieval artefacts, items relating to social history like this set of stocks and memorabilia of local celebrity, the wonderful Victorian dialect poet the Rev. William Barnes.

But you have to pay attention: I almost missed this delightful late-seventeenth-century stumpwork box, had not a postcard of it caught my attention, followed by the chief curator showing me exactly where to find it, concealed under a cover. It was hard to photograph under a glass case, but I did my best, but postcards taken in optimal conditions still have their place!

I've seen plenty of 18th century chinoiserie in my time, but this room is sometime else - a marrying of the rococo style of the house with vivid European fantasies about China.

I've been to many Palladian mansions in my time, but none matches Stowe. I thought it would be comparable to Stourhead, but its about three times the size: you couldn't really cover it in less than a whole day. The gardens are dotted with all sorts of follies, from the many Greek temples, to the famous Temple of Worthies, to a gothic folly.

You had to buy tickets for the house separately but I'm so glad I did because it is equally stunning. I wanted to go after reading T.B. White's Mistress Masham's Repose which is partly inspired by the grounds. In the book they are secretly occupied by the last remnants of the civilisation of Lilliput and I can see why they would have thought the gardens a country in themselves, requiring treks of several days for little people to explore. When White was writing Stowe was one of many stately homes which had been put up for sale, becoming a school in the early 20th century, and the house White describes is in a sorry state of repair. Not so today when much effort continues to restore it to its former glories.

I wonder whether those schoolboys appreciate it! Spare a thought though for the ordinary people driven from the land for this vast 18th century vanity project - the church was left with no parishioners.

The only women who gets a look-in at the Temple of Worthies.

Amongst several witchcraft charges against Margaret and Gwenllian David of Llangadock in 1656, Margaret was said to have cured sheep with water and earth from Jerusalem and a magic bone, while reciting a charm.

Gwenllian Owen testified that when her face was black and blue from her husband's abuse, Margaret said that, given a band-string or point from his cod-piece, she could make an end of him. Gwenllian refused the offer because he was the father of her six children.

In my last post I complained about the exclusion of anything by women from a book of 100 great portraits. To rectify this, here are some great portraits by women, all of them of women.

The Game of Chess by Sofonisba Anguissola (1555)

This is unusual in depicting women not as sex objects or mothers, but simply having fun, playing a game more usually played by elite men.

Two Women Sewing, Five Feminine Occupations, by Geertruydt Roghman, 1640-1657

An unvarnished series of depictions of women's work, with women often shown from behind.

Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart with her first husband and sister, Joan Carlile, 1648

This painting is at Ham House. The National Trust describes the composition as awkward and 'experimental' but I rather like it, the way the family are depicted with a sense of movement, the resemblance between the sisters, and the shimmering fabrics.

Ragazza con pappagallo, Rosalba Carriera, c. 1730

Female artists often seem to have succeeded in a man's world by carving a specialist niche for themselves. Rosalba Carrera, a Venetian artist, was known as the 'Queen of pastels' which were bought by young men on the grand tour.

Julie as Flora, Roman Goddess Of Flowers by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, c. 1799

Le Brun was famous for her portraits of women, of domestic affection between mothers and children, including Maria Antoinette and her family.

In the Loge, by Mary Cassatt, 1878

This painting famously subverts all the conventions of the masculine gaze in art.

Jour d'été, Berthe Morisot, 1879

As the recent exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery revealed, Morisot is a truly great artist, who took the tools of impressionism, and used them to say something quite different than her male contemporaries, about the limitations of women's position in 19th century society. You have to see the paintings in person because much of her greatness lies in her brush-strokes.

Fine Feathers, by Laura Knight, 1939

I don't really like the idea of rating portraits - surely the joy of portraiture is the infinite variety of people and personalities observed. However looking through the Folio Book of the 100 Greatest Portraits (2004) I found it quite stimulating to appraise what was chosen, the portraits like the Mona Lisa (yawn) that are so famous they have to be included, those I already knew and admired, the ones less familiar to me which the book made me assess anew, and the ones I felt could be foregone in favour of a more wide-ranging and imaginative selection.

The authors seem to be aware of issues of race with some of the best choices being non-white subjects including Joshua Reynolds's 1665 portrait of the Polynesian Omai. But the authors (some of them women, who should know better) hardly seem aware of issues of gender, with not one of the 100 portraits being by a female artist, and a heavy weighting in favour of male subjects. There were too many portraits of monarchs - are the paintings of Henry VIII by Holbein or Charles I by Van Dyke really the most interesting portraits by these artists? I can understand including a portrait of Elizabeth I because her portraits are so distinctive, but I would have liked to see more portraits of ordinary people: Velazquez's little people, or his Aesop, for example, in addition to one of his infantas - as he is the greatest portraitist who ever lived we can justify a wider selection.

Some artists seem to have been chosen simply because the artist was too famous not to be included - Monet and Van Gogh for example - even though their work was not primarily in the portrait genre. Why was the portrait of Shakespeare included, which is not a great work, just a famous subject?

I would hope that the world has moved on in twenty years and that if a similar work were published today it would be more aware of the need for better representation of female artists and subjects: works by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Gwen John and Laura Knight, and one of Reynolds’s imaginative portraits of women like the Waldegrave sisters or Sarah Siddons.

Could do better, but here are six that were selected that I very much enjoyed reading about:

Robert Campin, A Fat Man, c. 1430

The authors identify the subject as a Flemish nobleman Robert Van Massemen (c. 1390-1430). A great painter makes a portrait even of an ugly man compelling. 'Here is a man who is fat but not jolly, and whose vigilant seriousness is very deliberately stated', writes the author of the critique Lorne Campbell.

Piero della Francesca, Federigo da Montefeltro, 1472-3

I've always loved this portrait, which makes it quite clear that Federigo, a powerful condottiere, who transformed his city-state of Urbino, was not a man to be messed with. The extraordinary nose was not natural: da Montefeltro had lost it along with his right eye in an accident, so a profile portrait was essential. Apparently he was even more unprepossessing in real life - his nose was more bulbous and here the artist gives him aquiline features to associate him with the imperial eagle of Caesar. The artist innovates in his use of landscape, here used to signify da Montefeltro's lordship over his domains.

A Lady by Parmigianino, c. 1532-5

I just love the colour scheme 'a harmony of yellows and golds' and what David Ekserdjian calls her 'coolly appraising stare'.

Juan de Pareja, c. 1650, Diego Velázquez

Ever since I read I, Juan de Pareja (1966) by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño, I have loved this portrait. He was Velazquez's assistant and and eventually became an artist in his own right. At a time when most black people were shown as servants and slaves in a subservient position to their masters, their presence merely a signifier of their owner/employer's exalted status, here is a proud, independent man; only the great artists Velazquez and Rembrandt were seemingly capable during this period of acknowledging the dignity and humanity of black people as subjects in their own right.

The Condesa de Chinchón by Francisco Goya, 1800

I already knew and liked this portrait, but I didn't realise what a sad story is represented here. Maria Teresa was a cousin of the King and at 17 was obliged to marry the court favourite and womaniser Manuel Godoy, rumoured lover of the Queen. She is shown pregnant with the child Godoy hoped would consolidate his ties to royalty, who turned out disappointingly to be daughter. Godoy was said to have dismissed her as 'pathetic and indifferent', but she had the last laugh, gaining her freedom in 1808 following the Napoleonic invasion, when she repudiated her husband and went to live alone with her daughter. As Xavier Bray remarks 'Goya's masterpiece captures her fragility and endearing sensitivity', concealing perhaps, just a hint of steel.

Shon-ta-yi-ga (Little Wolf, Iowa) by George Catlin, 1844

Catlin's Indian Gallery was dedicated to 'rescuing from oblivion the looks and customs of the vanishing races of native man in America'. The portraits toured in Europe and caused a sensation, with fourteen Iowas, including the subject, accompanying the exhibition. Catlin makes striking use of bold colour, red 'the colour of blood, the colour of life' (Baudelaire).

When Mike Freedman emailed me in December asking me if I would be interested in recording a podcast for his 1984 Today! podcast on all things dystopian, I was intrigued by the concept of thinking about my historical period, the 1640s and 1650s, in this way.

How did the strictures of the real puritan regime of mid-17th century Britain compare with the fictional worlds of the books I read in my youth: 1984, Brave New World of course, but also John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and the particularly depressing outlook of John Christopher (born of his experience of WWII brutality) in The Death of Grass, The Tripods series, and The Prince in Waiting series.

There were certainly incidents I have come across that strike us today as dystopian: the execution of women (but not men) for adultery; the rise in witch hunting; clergy being stoned, beaten or killed during church services; a church full of listeners threatening to drown a baptist preacher; a raped woman being sent to prison for fornication, actors whipped for performing a play at Christmas. But it seems to me that we would understand the concept of dystopia in a different way to people of the 17th century. Everyday early modern life, by its prevalence of death and violence, and the use of capital and corporal punishment, its restricted hierarchies of status and gender, would seem highly dystopian to us in many of its aspects. For people living in the 17th century though this was considered normal, and individual misfortunes often rationalised as God's will. We only have to read early modern diaries like those of Nehemiah Wallington or Anne Fanshawe to reveal life events that many of us today would recognise as tragic: few expected to have all their children survive or to live to seventy. What many contemporaries would have found more dystopian was the sense that the world during and after the civil wars was 'upside down' or, as Andrew Marvell put it, its 'disjointed Axel' was cracking, undergoing an unprecedented degree and pace of change in religious practice, government and law, the sense that the tree of government and order had been cut down at the roots from everything they had previously known.

We ended up in the curious position of recording the podcast in a break from wrapping Christmas presents two days before Christmas from my rented Christmas accommodation in Bath with unreliable broadband signal. During our conversation, Mike asked some great questions, which I sometimes found difficult to come up with a ready answer to, the actualities of historical experience generally being more complex than the simpler monomaniac ideologies of dystopian fiction. One question I found most intriguing, derived no doubt from Mike's experience of interviewing many others on this topic, was the extent to which the creation of dystopias often originates in the desire for its opposite, an idealistic belief amongst those in power that they have a system for making the world better. The puritans of the 1640s thought that if they could just properly reform the Church of England, and have it have it singing on the same hymn-sheet as Presbyterian Scotland or Calvinist Geneva, everything would become more perfect and God would smile on them. What they didn't expect was to unleash all sorts of new ideas to challenge the Godly programme and prevent the implementation of orderly reform. They should have paid more attention to what was already going on in New England. They also consistently denigrated as irreligious and ungodly those with more traditional views on religion, and as a result undervalued the latent power of conservative resistance to change. Consequently they found themselves attacked and resisted on both sides, and ultimately defeated.

Unique apostle roof at Bere Regis church, Dorset, including a rather creepy head of Bishop Morton, who commissioned it.