Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

Catching Up: Doing Art 5

Lusieri
We probably wouldn't have gone to this exhibition at all, if Alice hadn't got that aforementioned Friends membership. It had a very lengthy and slightly offputting title: Expanding Horizons: Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape. But since it was in effect free, we went along anyway, and were pleasantly surprised. Which just goes to show!

Hirst's For the love of God!

Alice says I have to clarify what it shows. It shows, ummm, you should always give Arty Things a go, whenever you can. After all, even Damien Hirst, of notorious fame, proved to be much more interesting to us than most of our aquaintances led us to expect. Maybe we should write that up retrospectively. One day.

Did you notice, by the way, that Lusierei has the same first two names as Piranesi, whom we covered in the previous post! Alice thought she'd made some bizarre mistake at first, til she checked it out. Most odd. Call your child "Giovanni Battista" and he'll turn out to be a famous artist? Just try it out on Google, and you'll be pretty surprised!

Bay of Naples (detail)

Well, I'm not a great fan of landscape paintings - I'd rather go and see it, or a good photograph, or a film which features the place. But Alice reminded me that photography and movies are a relatively modern invention. So Lusierei's meticulously created pictures (mostly in pen, ink and watercolour) need to be viewed in that light. I thought this Naples panorama was really interesting because you could see the joins where he'd put six whole sheets of paper together. It was simply huge. And full of lots of detailed figures and boats.

View of Rome

His trees were likewise incredibly realistic. You can't fault his skill, even if you're not so keen on the results.

There was a delightful quote from the travel journal of Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo, in 1793.

Altho' we had made a resolution ... not to purchase either Painting or Antique, as being an expense of which there is no end, I thought I might indulge myself ... [in one of Lusieri's Mount Vesuvius eruption pictures] taken from his windows at Pausilippo. How else could such a monumental event have been recored back then?

Reassuring to note, too, that even over 200 years ago, tourists had trouble keeping their resolutions about not spending too much on souvenirs!

What we found particularly interesting was to learn that Lusieri led Lord Elgin's team of draftsmen, sculptors, and architects in Greece and Turkey. Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, of course, is famed for having taken the Elgin Marbles away from the Parthenon. And Lusieri took part in cataloguing and packing them up! They're now in the British Museum. It's still much debated whether they were "rescued" from decay or "stolen" from their rightful owners.

This painting  of Lusieri's shows a "double urn" they found in a tomb near Athens. See details about it by the (English) National Gallery.

The bronze inner vase contained some burnt bones and a sprig of myrtle made of gold. And the exhibition also included the original urn and the sprig (borrowed from the British Museum) for us to compare. Wow, I say. The gold was so wonderfully bright and beautiful.

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