On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

Author:Laura Cumming
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473556508
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

9

Icarus

The first image my mother ever owned, as a new student heady with freedom and hard-won post office shillings, was Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It was only a plate detached from an art book. But in those days such reproductions, which were printed separately and glued in by hand, might be so large and perfectly made that an old-master volume was like a miniature museum for those who would never see the originals. My mother took a scalpel and carefully filleted the plate from the page – they were tactfully attached by one edge only, as if asking to be prised free – and mounted the Fall of Icarus on cardboard. Later, we had many images in our house this way, from Fra Angelico’s Annunciation to Piero della Francesca’s diptych of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, he with his shattered nose jutting like a ledge, she with her complicated Catherine wheel of ribboned hair, a dream of misty hills between them. I first saw Dutch landscapes and images by Degas and Manet through liberated plates like these, and have always loved Manet’s portrait of Zola sitting at his desk with a large book on one knee, the wall behind him dense with black-and-white reproductions of works by Velázquez, Japanese watercolours and indeed Manet’s own Olympia, the painter giving his tacit blessing to the humble prints that anyone – even great writers – might tack up.

The Brueghel was in colour, golden with the last glow of that setting sun on the blue horizon, far away across a shimmering green sea. This immense expanse of light, flooding from near to far, gives an almost cosmological character to the painting, illuminating the curve of the turning earth and sending shadows into the field’s ridged furrows, so sharp they look as if they could be plucked like the strings of some outlandish instrument. The soil is hard, parched and brown, but spring’s greenness infuses the landscape, sheep are beginning to find something to eat and a partridge settles fatly on a bough. No other painting has ever made me feel so keenly alive to the idea that this high round world, lit by the sun, is the very same place where our ancestors once trudged and ploughed and fished the very same seas, in their queer medieval costumes; that we may change but the scenery does not.

For no matter how strange those shoes, with their clodhopping toes; no matter how odd the pleats of the ploughman’s tunic or the plump knickerbockers of the shepherd staring gormlessly up at the heavens, this is a world we know (at least as far as the stately galleons); a northern landscape through which you or I might clamber even now. An airy globe where the seasons come and go forever, and a horse’s backside looks just the same across half a thousand years, this timelessness will turn out to be part of the picture’s highly original narrative. The scene ought to look as medieval

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