Concerning Evolution

The Fitzwilliam no doubt thought that, as Cambridge's main museum, they really ought to do something to mark the Darwin bicentenary. However, they're not a museum of science, and anyway, that side of the man's life was already likely to be covered by larger institutions. So they hit on the idea of doing something on "Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts". The exhibition (entitled "Endless Forms") proves that it was a pretty good idea.

It starts with a small room of scientific sketches and illustrations, largely tied up to the Beagle voyage and Darwin's early education, which is mostly just a palette-cleanser - although it told me that Darwin got to attend a lecture by John Audubon in Edinburgh, which I hadn't heard before - and then one enters a bigger room and the fine arts stuff cuts loose, not least with a rather good portrait of the man that I again hadn't seen before. The main theme at this point, though, is basically art in relation to deep time and nature; Victorian painters looking at landscapes through eyes educated by new (though sometimes pre-Darwinian) insights of geology and paleontology. Seen in this light, the paintings here, mostly seemingly innocuous if often romantic landscapes, reflect a time of transformation - a fact only emphasised by the presence of a couple of attempts to paint scenes from just before or just after the biblical Noah's flood.

Other themes follow: "Struggle for Existence" (artists' responses to the whole Victorian social-pseudo-Darwinian "life is tough" idea, complete with a Landseer fighting stags painting), "Animal Kin" (mostly about Darwin's studies of emotional expression in humans and animals, and making the interesting point that Landseer's emotion-laden paintings of animals, which seem so drippy to modern eyes, may actually have embodied the then-radical Darwinian idea that humans and animal had more in common than people liked to think), "The Descent of Humankind" (illustrations of past-Darwinian Victorian anthropology, sometimes veering into uncomfortable areas of racial stereotyping, but also including one fabulous, quite modern-looking 19th century bust of a beautiful African woman that must surely have seemed downright shocking in its day), "Darwin, Beauty, and Sexual Selection" (a slightly tentative and uncertain look at the ideas about beauty and feminine influence which arrived in art from Darwin's work on sexual selection, but hey, you get a rather strikingly odd Tissot to look at), and "Darwin and the Impressionists" (yes, it seems that some of the Impressionists read Darwin; I can't see that his direct influence was huge, but there was evidently some). There's also a small display of photos of portraits of Darwin himself at different ages, showing that (a) he looked grumpy sometimes in his early middle age, and he knew it, and (b) he matured into the downright Leonardo-esque image of the bald sage.

And boy, the curators have been busy with this show, presumably calling in some favours as they went. There are paintings and sculptures from all over, chosen to illustrate the themes but often fascinating in themselves. For a free exhibition, it's stunning. Highly recommended.

Icons and Relics

The last day of the year, and back to London for some more exhibition-catching-up.

(And passing posters which reminded me that I'll almost certainly miss the V&A show about post-war design completely. Darn. But... Is that a topic I can overly regret missing?)

Anyway - morning was Darwin at the Natural History Museum. Yep, good stuff - starting with "one of the most important samples in the history of science" (not that I can tell the difference between two slightly dissimilar dead mockingbirds, but Darwin could, which is why he's probably the greatest naturalist in history - everything else ultimately came from that). There wasn't a lot here that any acceptably well-read person wouldn't already know, by the definition of "acceptably", but there was a lot to see nonetheless. The fully furnished study from Down House was a nice touch, though there wasn't a lot else to give a feel for the man's life, apart from a lot of letters. Just one warning; low light levels (no doubt for good reasons), and a lot of casing structural bars throwing shadows over the labels.

Byzantium at the Royal Academy was better presented from that point of view, despite having much stuff that requires at least as much gentle care. That's the big thing about this show; it's kind of necessary to visit, because it includes a variety of things that you'd otherwise have to travel several thousand miles across three or more continents (and a war zone or two) to see, sometimes in obscure museums, sometimes to ancient monasteries tucked away up biblical mountains. I gather much of this material may never travel again, and I think one room held about 10% of the world's supply of Byzantine micromosaics. Very once-in-a-lifetime.

So... Right. For a thousand years, there was a rich pocket civilisation in the eastern Mediterranean which drew on classical influences and in turn demonstrably influenced the Renaissance. But, honestly, it still feels as alien to me as medieval Japan or India - maybe more so. The exhibition does its best to show that not all icons are they same, that the classical influence was important, that some Byzantine art was secular; but in the end, there's only some much exquisitely carved ivory and lustrous gold leaf that a person surely needs.

Still, a good end to the year. (And the Royal Academy cafe does a mean cream scone, too.)