Nicholas Penny

In the early years of the 16th century a Vatican official called Angelo Colocci, who had graduated from curial abbreviator (responsible for internal memoranda) to apostolic secretary (poised below the coveted position of domestic secretary, or Papal p.a.), took to prowling around the small shops and market stalls of Rome in pursuit of the heavy, polished lumps of basalt that were used by tailors and weavers to press cloth. He had noticed that some were inscribed and that they seemed to be of a regular size. Traders in antiquities got to know of his peculiar interests and a dealer hailed him one day with the offer of a brass ball. He bought it, saw that there were silver letters set into it, and soon realised that he had in his hands a standard Roman pound weight, and that the other lumps were related to this one. This was a great moment for Colocci, who was planning a treatise on ancient weights and measures. He never wrote it, however, leaving only copious, but very confused, notes – he may have devoted too much time to pursuing his career in the Vatican or to parties with his cronies – but achieved a great reputation in the scholarly world despite this, chiefly for his expertise on the length of the Roman foot.

John Richardson is one of those gossips who knows – or at least knows about – everyone. For example (on page 118, to be precise), Marie-Laure (1), Maurice Bischoffsheim (2), the Comtesse de Chevigné (3), the Duchesse de Guermantes (4), the Marquis de Sade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte de Noailles (7), an anonymous gym instructor (8), Igor Markevitch (9), Diaghilev (10), Nijinsky (11), Maurice Gendron (12): I was the daughter of 2, an immensely rich Belgian banker, and the granddaughter of 3, who was said to be the model for 4, and was also – would you believe it? – the great-great-granddaughter of 5. She contemplated marriage with 6, opted for 7, but discovered him in the arms of 8 – whose sex is unspecified in the haste to explain that she was herself soon in the arms of 9, the ‘somewhat feral-looking composer’ who had been the ‘last great love’ of 10 and later married the daughter of 11. The ‘feral-looking’ composer (9) was expensive but gave her a taste for musicians, which explains her imprudent elopement in the middle of the war with the ‘faun-like’ cellist (12).

Most great Old Master paintings have been sold several times at public auction over the last three centuries, many have been sold more frequently and only a few have escaped auction altogether, usually by passing through some other form of public sale or by changing hands privately. I thought this was common knowledge but in Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class Robert Lacey assures us that there had never been a ‘tradition of selling … classic, museum-quality masterpieces at auction – at Christie’s or anywhere else’ before the end of the First World War, when Sotheby’s and Christie’s became rivals in auctioning Old Masters. His book is intended for those who watched the sale of the Windsors’ possessions on Channel 4 last year and much emphasis is placed on the novelty of selling the sherry glasses and cuff-links of celebrities – bits of the ‘brilliantly flawed lifetimes’, as he puts it, of the dreadful Duke and Duchess.

This useful, well-balanced and at times enthralling history of the Tate Gallery was commissioned for its centenary. It more or less coincides with the obsequies for the Gallery as we have known it and with the baptism – by marketing experts, one supposes – of TGBA and TGMA, twin offspring of the deceased, dedicated to British art and modern art respectively, and already known as Millbank and Bankside. The institution has in fact often changed identity. It began by being British but took on a North American look. The dust-jacket shows the austere lonic Portland stone sculpture hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope was subsequently chosen as the architect of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and was also responsible for the design of the Duveen Gallery for the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum (not, as Spalding claims, destroyed in the Second World War but damaged and re-opened in 1962). The hushed temple in the heart of the Tate was for sculpture which had to be lent by the V&A.’‘

In the centre of the most beautiful painting by Correggio in the Louvre there is a knot of flesh as intricate and lively as a swimming octopus. It consists of the left hand of the Virgin Mary delicately supporting the slightly smaller right hand of Saint Catharine, while the much smaller hand of the infant Christ tenderly picks out the Saint’s ring finger. This is a miniature example of an effect at which Correggio excelled: actions inspired by a sentiment of breathless intensity are somehow endowed both with angelic grace and with a formal complexity which is delightfully difficult to disentangle.