DOUBLE BILL

© Royal Academy

Have I told you yet that I was a museum fiend? In fact, I have been known to time a trip to France so that I could go to a particularly interesting exhibition in the Louvre. So today, I decided to be greedy and I went to the Royal Academy of Arts, to see not just one exhibition, but two. You can never have too much of a good thing!...

Well, the day kept its promise. To be perfectly honest, I kind of knew what to expect, at least as far as one of the exhibition was concerned: I had seen Byzantium 330-1453 a few months ago when it opened, and I had been bowled over. The splendors of Byzantium, at a time when the Western world was plunged into what is dubbed "the dark ages", are legendary, but I had failed so far to realise the width and breadth of their achievements, especially from an artistic standpoint, and how much Christianity, and in particular the Great Schism, had changed that part of the world. The wealth of exhibits on display is quite staggering, from monumental doors to jewelry and paintings, from marble and ivory to enamels and fabric, from everyday objects to ceremonial garb fit for a queen. Leaving the exhibition, I felt (again) very much like Yeats, whose poem Sailing for Byzantium is quoted in the first room:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Incidentally, these beautiful words have inspired a song to the artist Lisa Gerrard, and I feel that she too has managed to capture the majesty and melancholy of these Lords of the Christian Orient, standing guard over the edge of the civilised world...

© Runmode

The Andrea Palladio: his life and legacy exhibition was focusing not quite so far away in the East, but it was steeped in the same Greek and Roman roots. What was impressive there, was to see that the harmonious lines of Palladio's buildings, so pure, so simple, were the result of a very conscious and methodically researched effort to modernise architecture. Ironic, since he drew his inspiration from the works of antiquity, but how visionary! In fact, two centuries later, English architects would copy Palladio's works for the benefit of wealthy patrons who had seen Italy during their Grand Tour.

As you look at those majestic "villas", and let your mind be carried away to the Venitian countryside where they can be found, you may dream of wealth and drowsiness again, of the elegant "far niente" of a priviledged few. In fact, Palladio's buildings were designed to save the somptuary costs of their predecessors, replacing for instance most of the marble with stucco-covered bricks. And some of them were originally very busy farms, whose elegant wings were hiding very prosaic storage rooms. A very modern approach...

I think you've guessed that it was a very good day, and that I heartily recommend either, or preferably both, of these exhibitions (be quick though, the Byzantium one closes in a couple of weeks). The only disappointment was tea in the cafeteria of the Royal Academy: dry scone, tiny amount of indifferent clotted cream and jam. They also had cucumber sandwiches, but the waitress advised against ordering one of those... Luckily, with Fortnum & Mason on the other side of the road, chances are you won't have to make the same mistake.