Morning all. 8.1
And an unexpected trip to Colin’s Cultural Corner!
Yesterday morning I went to Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance at the V&A.
I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it for two reasons mainly; firstly I tend to find the V&A can be overwhelming and also a little dry at times, and secondly I wondered how good an exhibition in Donatello could be if it didn’t mention the other Turtles.
I needn’t have worried as it’s engaging, enlightening and entertaining.
What struck me was how commercial his work was. Much of it was designed in order to be reproduced. Sometimes sculptures were made with a set of moulds which were sold to other artists for their use. Some plates had reverse sides that were for use as glass moulds (which is extraordinary considering the cost of glass at the time). And many of the specific poses he used were clearly copied by other artists.
In fact that ability to copy his work meant that in the 19thC when there was a growth in interest around Renaissance art many contemporary artists copied his style. The V&A posit that as much as 30% of Renaissance sculptures purchased by collectors and museums up to the mid 20thC were in fact 19thC copies.
This exhibition includes some of those copies and often stages them adjacent to the original. It’s very difficult to tell them apart.
What the exhibition does do very well is show how Donatello and his contemporaries would have worked and how he specifically allowed his sense of humour to come through at a time when some of his creations would have pushed boundaries of acceptability.
I’m not sure how long the exhibition is running for but if you feel like a trip to London then book tickets and go.
Photos are here:
Donatello
After this I popped to Bond Street and Sothebys. Many people don’t realise that Sothebys is open to the general public and that they have exhibitions of items in forthcoming sales.
They hang their paintings beautifully and you can get a lot closer to them here than you ever can in a gallery or museum. In fact sometimes you can look behind the frame and see the artist authentication and previous auction catalogue labels.
Yes it’s a place of business and there are folks wandering around whilst talking about bidding on multi million pound items but they encourage “normal” people to come in so that’s what I did.
Specifically I wanted to see the Codex Sassoon. It’s the earliest known complete Hebrew bible.
Dating from around 900 it was written in Tiberius and then sold to a spice merchant who kept it for about thirty years before selling it to another. He then sold it to a synagogue in northern Syria where it remained for a couple of hundred years. They passed it to someone for safekeeping as the synagogue was destroyed. There’s an inscription, actually it’s a curse, saying that be codex be returned once the synagogue was rebuilt which it never was.
There’s a gap in known whereabouts of about 500 years before it pops up for sale in Frankfurt pre WW2. It’s bought by a book dealer and shipped off to the USA. It’s changed hands a number of times and in the 1970s was owned by the British Rail Pension Fund who bought it at sale in Zurich in 73 I think for $150k equivalent and sold it in 78 for $3.8m. That buyer immediately sold it for $4.8m.
Estimate now is $30-50m but it’s likely to go much higher.
The thing which struck me though was the tangible sense of history the codex has. What it’s seen. The events it’s survived. They have each left a mark in the pages as testament.
There’s also the spiritual element. I wasn’t expecting to feel anything spiritual but I did.
It’s really quite the thing to see.
Then I wandered through the rest of the sale rooms and saw many works by the likes of Chagall, Picasso, Pissarro, Warhol, Emin, Schiller, Haring, Henry Moore, Klimt, Munch, Anish Kapoor and others.
Photos (more photos) from Sotheby’s are here
Link
and I'm pretty sure the gypsy girls (iirc) were meant to be passing by when the soldiers sang that song 
