There are many reasons to begrudge the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain this month. The fact that he looks like a conspiring alien hiding inside a badly fitting man-suit immediately disinclines me towards him, although there is a strange mixture of melancholy and mania in his heavy-lidded eyes which I find disturbingly hypnotic. More disturbing, of course, is his implication in the world-wide Catholic conspiracy to cover up endemic child abuse within the church. But it’s not all doom and gloom you know! For the pope comes bearing gifts: the Raphael tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of Peter and Paul, which usually hang from the walls of the Sistine Chapel, have been loaned to the V&A museum to be displayed, for the first time, alongside the artist’s original cartoons, and their delivery to Britain has been timed to coincide with the pope’s visit. But it gets better: the exhibition is free.
And yet the news left me underwhelmed. After all, the cartoons are always on display; as for the tapestries – well, I just can’t get excited about tapestries. Whereas paintings (with a little help from restoration work) seem to age gracefully, their faded hues conferring distinction, like flecks of grey hair on handsome man, tapestries don’t seems to age so much as wither away. There is something wan and tubercular about their paling threads, their once-bright colours succumbing to consumption, too bright still to be considered – as the faded monochrome of an ageing sketch might be – as spectral, they linger in their not-quite-brightness like an etiolated star, the white dwarf of many a country house. Or perhaps I read too much into chromatic decline...
But free is free, and Raphael is Raphael, and certainly if these tapestries are ever going to be actually enjoyed by the public then it will be here in this exhibition at the V&A rather than in the Sistine Chapel, in the hallowed ground of which the phenomenology of viewership is one of fatigued touristic ennui. For before seeing Raphael’s tapestries in the Sistine Chapel you inevitably wander through the Vatican’s superabundance of treasures, carried along with the tide of tourists until you’re numbed into a plodding passive state by aesthetic overload and the incessant dazzling flash of cameras. Eventually you’re spat out into the chapel itself to stand shoulder-to shoulder, cheek-by-jowl with the gawping hordes, everyone craning their necks upwards in agonised admiration of Michelangelo’s sublime ceiling – which, for all its familiarity, for all the expectation and the mad rush and crush of visitors (up to 20,000 in a day!), still fails to disappoint. But as for the tapestries? Only the determined push and shove their way around the outskirts of the chapel to take a peek at where they hang from the walls; only the superhuman are then able to actually take their time appreciating them!
Yet when these tapestries were first made they were considered more precious than Michelangelo’s ceiling. To look at them now, I personally find it difficult to discern this past lustre of theirs. And this is why old tapestries in general fail to excite me: they constitute an unsatisfying lack – an imagine-what-once-was that is somehow devoid of the sublimity which that imagining achieves in the case of architectural ruins. However, for this reason seeing these tapestries next to the cartoons is gratifying, since the paintings (faded though they are) allow one to reconstruct what it was that Raphael was aiming for. But still I found myself more drawn towards the small preliminary sketches of the apostolic scenes than I did the woven wall hangings... The appeal of tapestries apparently eludes me still.
And yet the news left me underwhelmed. After all, the cartoons are always on display; as for the tapestries – well, I just can’t get excited about tapestries. Whereas paintings (with a little help from restoration work) seem to age gracefully, their faded hues conferring distinction, like flecks of grey hair on handsome man, tapestries don’t seems to age so much as wither away. There is something wan and tubercular about their paling threads, their once-bright colours succumbing to consumption, too bright still to be considered – as the faded monochrome of an ageing sketch might be – as spectral, they linger in their not-quite-brightness like an etiolated star, the white dwarf of many a country house. Or perhaps I read too much into chromatic decline...
But free is free, and Raphael is Raphael, and certainly if these tapestries are ever going to be actually enjoyed by the public then it will be here in this exhibition at the V&A rather than in the Sistine Chapel, in the hallowed ground of which the phenomenology of viewership is one of fatigued touristic ennui. For before seeing Raphael’s tapestries in the Sistine Chapel you inevitably wander through the Vatican’s superabundance of treasures, carried along with the tide of tourists until you’re numbed into a plodding passive state by aesthetic overload and the incessant dazzling flash of cameras. Eventually you’re spat out into the chapel itself to stand shoulder-to shoulder, cheek-by-jowl with the gawping hordes, everyone craning their necks upwards in agonised admiration of Michelangelo’s sublime ceiling – which, for all its familiarity, for all the expectation and the mad rush and crush of visitors (up to 20,000 in a day!), still fails to disappoint. But as for the tapestries? Only the determined push and shove their way around the outskirts of the chapel to take a peek at where they hang from the walls; only the superhuman are then able to actually take their time appreciating them!
Yet when these tapestries were first made they were considered more precious than Michelangelo’s ceiling. To look at them now, I personally find it difficult to discern this past lustre of theirs. And this is why old tapestries in general fail to excite me: they constitute an unsatisfying lack – an imagine-what-once-was that is somehow devoid of the sublimity which that imagining achieves in the case of architectural ruins. However, for this reason seeing these tapestries next to the cartoons is gratifying, since the paintings (faded though they are) allow one to reconstruct what it was that Raphael was aiming for. But still I found myself more drawn towards the small preliminary sketches of the apostolic scenes than I did the woven wall hangings... The appeal of tapestries apparently eludes me still.
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