Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Veronese, Giorgione and Titian
The first room you come to from the Sainsbury Wing is the vast Wohl Room (room 9),
containing mainly large-scale sixteenth-century Venetian works. The largest of the lot is
Paolo Veronese
's lustrous
Family of Darius before Alexander
, its array of colourfully clad
figures revealing the painter's remarkable skill in juxtaposing virtually the entire colour
spectrum in a single canvas. Less prominent in this room are two perplexing paintings
attributed to the elusive
Giorgione
, a highly original Venetian painter, only twenty of
whose paintings survive. Here, too, at opposite ends of the room, are all four of Veronese's
erotic
Allegories of Love
canvases, designed as ceiling paintings, perhaps for a bedchamber.
More Venetian works hang in room 10, including
Titian
's consummate
La Schiavona
,
a precisely executed portrait within a portrait. His colourful early masterpiece
Bacchus
and Ariadne
, and his much gloomier
Death of Actaeon
, painted some fifty years later,
amply demonstrate the painter's artistic development and longevity.
The Virgin and
Child
is another typical late Titian, with the paint jabbed on and rubbed in.
Bronzino, Michelangelo and Raphael
In room 8,
Bronzino
is strangely disturbing
Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time
is a classic
piece of Mannerist eroticism, once owned by François I, the decadent, womanizing,
sixteenth-century French king. (Incidentally, Cupid's foot features in the opening
animated titles of
Monty Python's Flying Circus.
) Here too is
Michelangelo
is early,
unfinished
Entombment
, which depicts Christ's body being carried to the tomb, and
the National's major paintings by
Raphael
. hese
range from early works such as
St Catherine of Alexandria
, whose sensuous serpentine pose is accentuated by the folds
of her clothes, and the richly coloured
Mond Crucifixion
, both painted when the artist
was in his 20s, to later works like
Pope Julius II
- his (and Michelangelo's) patron - a
masterfully percipient portrait of old age.
Holbein, Cranach, Bosch and Bruegel
Room 4 contains several masterpieces by
Hans Holbein
, most notably his
extraordinarily detailed double portrait from the Tudor court,
he Ambassadors
-
note the anamorphic skull in the foreground. Among the other works by Holbein is
his intriguing
A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling
, and his striking portrait of the
16-year-old Christina of Denmark, part of a series commissioned by Henry VIII
when he was looking for a potential fourth wife. Look out, too, for Holbein's
contemporary,
Lucas Cranach the Elder
,
whose
Cupid Complaining to Venus
is a
none-too-subtle message about dangerous romantic liaisons - Venus's wonderfully
fashionable headgear only emphasizes her nakedness.
Next door, in room 5, hangs the National's one and only work by
Hieronymus Bosch
,
Christ Mocked
, in which four manic tormentors (one wearing an Islamic crescent moon
BORIS ANREP'S FLOOR MOSAICS
One of the most overlooked features of the National Gallery is the mind-boggling
floor
mosaics
executed by Russian-born Boris Anrep between 1927 and 1952 on the landings of
the main staircase leading to the Central Hall. The
Awakening of the Muses
, on the halfway
landing, features a bizarre collection of famous figures from the 1930s - Virginia Woolf appears
as Clio (Muse of History) and Greta Garbo plays Melpomene (Muse of Tragedy). The mosaic
on the landing closest to the Central Hall is made up of fifteen small scenes illustrating the
Modern Virtues
: Anna Akhmatova is saved by an angel from the Leningrad Blockade in
Compassion
; T.S. Eliot contemplates the Loch Ness Monster and Einstein's Theory of Relativity
in
Leisure;
Bertrand Russell gazes on a naked woman in
Lucidity
; Edith Sitwell, book in hand,
glides across a monster-infested chasm on a twig in
Sixth Sense
; and in the largest composition,
Defiance
, Churchill appears in combat gear on the white cliffs of Dover, raising two fingers to a
monster in the shape of a swastika.
