I have a book recommendation for you. It is a short book, under 120 pages long – the author, Hisham Matar, barely wastes a word – but for this reason, and indeed in this case, short is often good. My son has a nice line on it – he reads a lot of books, but he tells me that he has never read a book which is too short. Anyway, the book is called A Month in Siena (a city in Northern Italy, if you are unaware) and it takes a pretty unusual starting point. The author, originally from Libya, but whose family had to flee the country to the UK, is 19 years old when his father is kidnapped by the Libyan authorities and taken back to Libya. He never sees him again. Shortly after the kidnap, and for reasons he cannot explain, he became interested in the great artists of the Sienese School of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries – to such an extent that he goes to visit the National Gallery in London every day during his lunchbreak to look at one painting at a time. Initially, he chose one painting per week – just to stand in front of for his whole lunch hour, to take in, and try to understand over five consecutive days. He noticed how his understanding changed each hour he was there. As the years went by, he found himself visiting the same painting for a month, or even a year. Eventually, about 25 years after he first visited the National Gallery, he decided to go to Siena itself to see a few artworks which he had always wanted to see – and A Month in Siena is about his visit.
The book is a truly lovely reflection upon life in general – it covers a lot of themes in a short period of time, as the author’s mind wanders across his own life and the lives of the artists he describes – and it is beautifully written. However, the real fascination for me was this desire to select a painting to study and to look at it for many hours, before moving on to another painting. I found this quite difficult to envisage, not least these days when everybody seems to be so pressed for time, but given that Hisham Matar did create the time to do this, what would he get out of it?
I wonder what is the longest any of you have spent with a work of art? Not creating your own, which I know many of you spend hours on, but in standing with somebody else’s in a gallery? Maybe you have sketched for an hour or two in the National Gallery on a school trip or in the holidays; but have any of you simply stood with one? The closest I have got to this is with two works of art, one very famous which I rediscovered when I was away in Florence, and another which I saw for the first time in October – and I perhaps therefore just scratched the surface of what Hisham Matar was describing. The famous work was Michelangelo’s sculpture of David in the Accademia in Florence, now over 500 years old. I had seen this once before, 25 years ago, and it remains the one piece of art I could go back to every day if I had time. I spent half an hour wandering around and around it in amazement when I was 30 years old, and I was half expecting to be disappointed by it 25 years later – but not a bit of it. It is utterly mesmerising. If it had not been for the fact that I was with three other people, I would happily have stayed all afternoon.
You do go through a range of thought and emotion when you spend time with this sculpture, and you can begin to understand why Hisham Matar stood with them for so long. First there is simply the craft – the statue is set in a rotunda, so you can walk around and around it, and indeed get very close to it. The detail of musculature, veins, bones, the smoothness of the skin, the proportions are all not only phenomenally executed, but also provoke thought. Why are the head and the right hand enlarged, for instance? Then there is the scale. It is huge – over five metres in height. It is an awesome sight. The reason for this was that it was originally designed to stand at the top of the town’s main cathedral; but when the town leaders saw the finished version, they agreed unanimously that it could not be wasted that far away from view. Then there is the subject matter. Over the past century or so, and progressing on from an apparent obsession with Hercules, David had become a symbol of Florence’s ambitions and success. The Biblical story of David and Goliath has the giant Philistine Goliath challenging the Israelites to send out a champion to fight him in one-to-one combat. The young, teenage David is the only one to volunteer. He wears no armour and takes with him just a slingshot – and kills the giant, and armoured, Goliath with a single stone, before cutting his head off with a sword. Florence fancied itself as a David of sorts, a small state being brave, thinking large and achieving the impossible; and many sculptures and paintings depict David – but, until this statue, he was depicted as the victor, standing above the severed head of Goliath. Now Michelangelo depicts him just before the duel, furrowed brow on an enlarged head, deep in thought, the deadly stone hidden in his enlarged right hand – as if to emphasise the intelligence and the cunning of David, and by extension of Florence itself. And so, instead of the roof of the cathedral, the statue ended up outside the front door of main administrative building in the main square in Florence, standing there as a symbol of Florentine power. But finally, as you stand there opposite David, there is a flood of other thoughts about humanity generally, beyond the nature simply of collective power. How did a man sculpt such perfection? How did he spend three years almost without sleep on one extraordinary project? What drove him? Why did he depict the moment before the duel? What does it say about us? Why does it speak to us today? Why would I happily spend a day with a piece of rock? Why do I feel, rather oddly (but like so many others), that I have a relationship with it?
Michelangelo’s David is the most famous sculpture on the planet. But my other story isn’t – and I will be brief. It is a painting by Titian called The Sick Man. (At least, it was finally attributed to Titian as recently as 1975 and it was given the name ‘sick man’ on account of the fact that the man had quite a white face and a melancholic look.) I literally bumped into this painting on the way round the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and it stopped me in my tracks. I revisited a couple of weeks later, just to see it again. I love it, although it is relatively unknown in a gallery of star exhibits. Not only is it clearly a masterpiece in its skill and execution, but it forces so many questions about its enigmatic subject, about life and death, about time and space, that a whole range of possibilities and thoughts blossom in your mind as you look at it. There is something slightly disturbing about it, but at the same time something beautiful and even hopeful.
So, back to Hisham’s book, A Month in Siena. I wonder what you would make of it? It is worth a try. Art is, quite literally, all around us; and life is so much better if your mind is opened to it. Almost everybody listens to some music or other and gets some appreciation from it – but when you realise Art is just as prevalent, then it opens your eyes to the world around you.
Lastly, and somewhat coincidentally, seeing as I wrote this assembly when I was in Florence, an exhibition opened on Saturday at the National Gallery entitled ‘Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300‒1350’. It ends on 22 June. So read the book first, then go along to have a look!
