Gilding and age are no criteria for quality

‘Gilding and age are no criteria for quality’ is what I didn’t write in the book for comments after the much-touted  exhibition ‘Paintings from Siena’ (basically 14^th and 15^th century) at the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Central Brussels. It would have stood out too much from the general flow of thanks and adulation.

On past performance I was, to be honest, not surprised, and had only bought tickets because a Russian business contact was to be in town. He was late (the pilot’s window in their plane cracked and they turned back to Moscow), so I went alone. BOZAR does not have its own permanent collection and is reliant on travelling exhibitions. Basically the pattern seems to be to do a series of good wall texts and fill in between with anything they are ready to give you. We had the same thing with a Zurbarán exhibition two years back. The text was excellent (I translated the English) but the choice of pictures was miserable.

I do sometimes wonder how closely people look at these pictures. Yes, some were good (I had no pencil with me to write down the names), and one of two were very good, but a good half of them were below the standard of our own icon-painting studio. I think of the scene of the Last Judgement by Giovanni di Paolo which nicely filled a wall, but none of the apostles in it I would have given a lift to if they had been hitch-hiking, a scruffy, ugly lot. Strikingly, by 1300 the sense of the iconic, brought in a century before by Greek painters fleeing Constantinople, has gone: by iconic I mean faces or figures you look at and they take you through to something beyond yourself, where you ought to be rather than where you are. A remarkable face of Christ in Sano di Pietro's Death of the Virgin was an exception, along with a couple of other male figures by (?) Martino di Bartolemmeo. Some of the other depiction was technically masterful, but it went no further than that.

I had an hour to waste, so I visited the sister exhibition: 'Focus on Rubens': Sensation and Sensuality’ in the other part of BOZAR. What they had done was to take 6 different themes out of Rubens, including ‘Force’, ‘Lust’, ‘Poetry’, include one Rubens work on the subject, and throw in any paintings they could find on these subjects. Sensational, no (specially not a 16.30 on Sunday afternoon), sensual occasionally. More an ignominious hotchpotch and an attempt to make an exhibition on the cheap. Yes, some painters I was happy to see, including fellow-countrymen Landseer, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence. But really a mix and a muddle.

And for EUR 21 for the two exhibitions together, just too expensive.