SanArt

For some it’s an ugly, unspiritual perversion of Renaissance art. But mannerism’s eccentric poetry has a rightful place in history

They called it “the manner”. The manner was precious, artificial, convoluted, a bit pretentious, often dry, always unnatural. It was everything that good, healthy, humane art is not supposed to be. And often, it was fascinating.

In art criticism, indeed in daily life, to call something “mannered” is conventionally a negative remark. A mannered individual, a mannered style of address … but when it comes to a mannered or, to use the term that modern art historians evolved from the 16th-century Italian “maniera”, mannerist art, things are not so simple.

Mannerism is one of the most insidious, engaging styles in European history. It appeared quite suddenly in early 16th-century Florence and Rome just as the Renaissance was reaching a climax. In many ways it seems a perversion, a decadence, of Renaissance art. To compare an arch-mannerist concoction of a painting such as Bronzino’s Venus and Cupid with, say, Botticelli’s much earlier Birth of Venus (to juxtapose two ways of seeing Venus) is to see how ornate, how opulent and how much less spiritual art became in 16th-century Florence.

Yet, in my forthcoming book The Lost Battles, I demonstrate how this new style was born out of the geniuses of Leonardo and Michelangelo – it was the afterglow of their imaginations. As afterglows go, it is a fine one. There’s an eccentric figurative and chromatic genius to the art of Jacopo Pontormo, an icy brilliance to that of Bronzino, and in the works of El Greco and Tintoretto, the art of mannerism achieves sublime poetry.

The 16th-century art writer – and mannerist – Giorgio Vasari gave a perfect definition of this style’s originality in his discussion of Michelangelo’s architectural works at San Lorenzo in Florence. In the interiors he built there, argued Vasari, Michelangelo did not follow the classical rule book but took complete “licence”. These are poetic spaces, melancholy architectural self-portraits. Mannered masterpieces.

If mannerism is a detour in the history of art, then it is a detour that leads you down a winding alley to a palace of peculiar delights.

Violence, history, amazing architecture … who needs art galleries when you have the castles of North Wales?

There were no art galleries in North Wales when I was growing up – but there was something better. My first experience of great and awe-inspiring works of art was martial. My paintings were battlements, my sculptures towers.

The castles built by Edward I to rule the Welsh did not strike me as imperial enemies planted in the landscape but as places of imagination and romance. Caernarfon Castle with its polyhedral towers beside the slumbering Straits of Menai was self-evidently a colossus of beauty, an architectural masterpiece whose mathematics of straight lines and sharp angles endures its ruin and mirrors the power of the Snowdonian mountains.

Rhuddlan, more sadly wrecked by Civil War cannon, still has a dignified might as it looks down on its river and across the wide plain towards misty mountains. Best of all, though, and my favourite, was Conwy, whose spiral staircases up and down mysterious towers, wide courtyards where you can play at Robin Hood, and best of all its setting on a craggy outcrop above a roiling rivermouth made it as alluring to me as to JMW Turner.

It’s one thing to praise British cathedrals – but if you live in Wales this military medieval heritage is more local, and it is just as exciting.

Some of the greatest artists and architects have designed fortifications: their genius became part of the story of castles. When you visit a church you are hushed, but in a castle you hear the roar of angry voices and clash of arms. A child is more likely to be inspired by a castle than a cathedral. I was. And perhaps more strangely, less familiarly, castles are rule-breaking, inventive, precocious structures that anticipate modernism in surprising, daunting ways.

The dreamy chateaux of France are after all not what most fortresses looked like. Those of Wales were functional as well as aesthetic. The way Conwy arises from its rock, the way Caernarfon’s clipped geometries rebuff assault, these features were designed for functional reasons but possess a savage beauty. Is Caernarfon gothic? Is Conwy? This arty question seems irrelevant in the face of their sublime aggressive strength. In castles, there are no rules, and no limits to fantasy.

If the party is to reconnect with its soul, it needs to revive the passion for culture that seems to have ended with Michael Foot

Michael Foot was a name I knew long before I was old enough to vote Labour. My dad’s fading paperback copy of the first volume of Foot’s biography of Aneurin Bevan was one of the familiar volumes on the bookshelves at home. I don’t think I knew he was a politician, but I did know he was a writer. Much later on, as a sixth-former, I read his collection of essays Debts of Honour – well-written and sensitive homages; model essays. Foot was the real thing: a cultured radical. But how many of those are left in the Labour Party?

I hate to be a party pooper. If Gordon Brown’s political renaissance continues and he holds the line at the general election, I will be ready with the champagne. I’ve never voted for any other party and never will. But what happened, please, to the culture and learning that once flourished on the British Left? Where is the Labour passion for poetry and language that Foot epitomised?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I can’t think of a single convincing book or article on an artistic, literary, musical or architectural theme that a leading and current Labour politician has published since 1997. I can’t picture anyone in the cabinet who has a prominent passion for Keats – or even Bob Dylan, for that matter. They all seem completely cultureless. There may be a lot of economic learning in New Labour, but a zeal for the arts (as opposed to a desire to be associated with fashionable art) is nowhere to be found.

I’m not accusing them of lacking taste. I’m accusing them of lacking soul. Art, in the end, is the vehicle of feeling: Foot had deep feelings that he could perhaps express better by writing history and criticism than he could by leading the party. And surely the philistinism of the Blair and Brown years has been a reaction against what might have seemed the impotent intellect of old Labour.

But please: if the good news holds and Labour really does have an electoral future, let’s bring books – and passion – back into it. The history of our working-class ancestors is what makes many of us vote Labour; and we get at that through poetry, because it is a feeling.

The internet may be taking over from the printing press, just as Dürer’s timeless engraving Melencolia I spelled the end for medieval scriptoria, but let us remember that print is beautiful

In the exhibition Michelangelo’s Dream, currently at the Courtauld Gallery in London, the beauty of print is exemplified by Albrecht Dürer’s timeless engraving Melencolia I. The curator was not content to use just any copy of this great print: that selected is one of the finest that exist, and in its microscopically refined use of black ink you can see how majestically artists were able to exploit what was still a new invention in the early-1500s to create beautiful objects.

A book, too, is a beautiful object – and I write with my own just back from the printers. For just as artists were quick to discover the aesthetic possibilities of printing, so were the makers of books. Some might say the advent of the printed book brought a devastating loss of beauty in the culture of the word: for centuries, medieval monasteries had created the spectacular visual treasures that are illuminated books. And yet, the printed book rapidly found its own standards of elegance and authority through the labours of great publishers such as the Aldine Press in Venice and Frobenius in Basel.

Printing was as revolutionary as the internet is now when Dürer created his Melencolia I, and it too had victims. Those medieval scriptoria were doomed, and those who clung to the handwrittern and painted word would be eclipsed. Critics of today’s new communications see the aggression of bloggers as a vice of the digital age, but what about the aggression unleashed by the printing press? The resources of new technology that let Dürer create Melencolia I were soon being exploited to create vicious religious prints portraying the Pope as antichrist.

The printing press democratised knowledge, and with democracy came spite, libel, destruction and violence. But it also brought a new beauty into the world, and every book that has ever been published, every sheet of a newspaper blown along the street, is part of that beauty.

Interactive art is gaining ground – but whether it’s Spencer Tunick’s nudes or Antony Gormley’s plinth, no masterpiece was ever created by committee

The rise of interactive art seems to make sense in our digital age. It seems only right that art, too, should twitter. And so the noughties saw the rise of art that involves real people – as many of them as possible. Spencer Tunick and Antony Gormley led the way in persuading volunteers to strip off or be cast in plaster, or stand on a plinth and be webcammed.

Some forms of interactivity are obviously good for art, as they are good for society. The more democratically ideas and information are shared, the more accessible art will be. Sites that allow artists to promote themselves without going through the rituals of the art world are great because for every dud who gets publicity through alternative channels, there is also the chance of raw genius sidestepping the institutions that force art and artists to conform to fashion and supposed good taste. In theory.

So democracy is great – except when it shapes the actual work of art. I do not believe a great work of art has ever been created by communal consensus, let alone by multiple editors. There will never be a wiki-masterpiece. This is because art, if it has any value at all, is the product of deep and often rationally incommunicable perceptions, and to try and explain or share those perceptions in a communally created artwork will negotiate and re-edit them to banality.

But, I hear you roar, there are obvious objections to that claim. What about devised theatre and the films of Mike Leigh? But the reason Leigh’s pieces work so well is that talented actors are doing the interaction: what you are seeing is not a democratic free-for-all but an elite. Good art is the product of talent. All the forces in our culture that weaken our belief in talent deny this fundamental fact, but it always returns to haunt us.

Participatory art is a denial of talent. It panders to a cosy lie, that everyone is equally able to create worthwhile art. What chance have we of nurturing those rare wonders in our midst, the born artists, if we claim this infantile right to put on a badge that says “artist”?

Harmonious and humane, the sculptures of this lost African city have a greatness that any civilisation would recognise

In his television series Civilisation, the great Kenneth Clark speaks of Raphael. Standing in the Raphael rooms in the Vatican, he admits that on first sight they can seem insipid, and quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds, who acknowleged the same problem. Reynolds warned his students that when they finally reached Rome they might find Raphael’s frescos disappointing, but urged them to persevere until they did find them beautiful and moving. It’s a lovely moment – you half expect Clark to say he finds Raphael a complete bore. But he doesn’t. “Well,” he says with a beatific smile, “I’ve spent a lifetime doing just that. And can I tell you it is worth it.”

Recently, in responding to other comments posted here, I wrote that art is soft stuff, demanding a subjective response. That is true, in part, but it is not the whole truth. The more correct statement would be: most art that we encounter demands a subjective response from us, which is very much a product of our reaction; but there is a type of art whose greatness pre-exists and survives us, and whose authority makes our like or dislike of it seem irrelevant.

This kind of art is classic art – classic because it seems to exemplify such clear values, to address such fundamental cognitive faculties, that its merit is absolute, and a failure to be moved by it is, essentially, our own failure.

I found myself thinking this yesterday, not in the Raphael rooms, but in the exhibition Kingdom of Ife, which opens next week at the British Museum. The art of this medieval city in west Africa has all the qualities I call classic. It is deeply in love with harmony, proportion and beauty. It is also humanely observed and crafted with genius. Yet I found myself wondering: will it be that easy to enjoy these sculptures in a crowded gallery, and will the aesthetic grandeur of Ife grab everyone as intensely as it deserves to? And what I have to admit is: it doesn’t matter. The highest art has a godlike disdain for our passing moods.

Then I noticed a nice detail. The British Museum’s own superb example of a brass head of a ruler from Ife was bought for it by … Kenneth Clark. The same man who spent a lifetime looking at Raphael instantly appreciated this. Of course he did. He knew a classic when he saw one.

Artists and writers – and me – are gathering at the Swedenborg Society in London to celebrate the philosopher who inspired Blake and Coleridge

The ancient typewriter sits motionless, and above it hangs a stormcloud of language. In another case nearby in the bookshop of the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, London, annotations written into one of the visionary thinker Emanuel Swedenborg’s books by the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge are annotated in their turn.

These objects have been selected, and prose poems in response to them written, by Iain Sinclair, one of the participants in Swedenborg House: Fourteen Interventions, a site-specific exhibition at one of central London’s most atmospheric venues. Just across the road from a Hawksmoor church whose spire is eerily modelled on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, this old building has been opened up from top to bottom – literally, into the basement – by Sinclair and other connoisseurs of its vibe. Jeremy Deller shows a London video; Bridget Smith, silent recorder of London places, has taken a picture of the Swedenborg Society’s characterful public hall. And everywhere, you come across Sinclair’s objects, including an eccentric looking basket in the basement – a cousin, he suggests, of the Wicker Man.

As part of this event, I too will be giving a talk here, on 4 March. It’s entitled The Visions of Leonardo da Vinci (and a Memory of His Childhood), and I hope it will resonate with the building and the countercultural history it embodies as effectively as the exhibition does. If you are a Sinclair fan, the texts and choices of his on display may strike you as a materialisation of one of his London-saturated essays in a real London place and time, and his event tonight with Brian Catling is bound to be memorable.

But why are so many artists and writers participating in an event to mark the 200th anniversary of the Swedenborg Society? The clue is in those annotations by Coleridge. Swedenborg’s ideas influenced the Romantic movement and, above all, Blake, whose argument with Swedenborg is preserved in his masterpiece The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

So, come along on Thursday and let’s have an argument – for, as Blake says, “without contraries is no progression”.

Rumours of our death are greatly exaggerated. In an age of cultural overload, it’s up to critics to fight for those all-too-rare examples of great art

It is the job of a critic to reject the relativism and pluralism of modern life. All the time, from a million sources, we are bombarded with cultural information. A new film or the music of the moment can enter our minds regardless of quality and regardless of our interest. In fact, in this age of overload, indifference is the most likely effect of so many competing images. If we do make an aesthetic choice it is likely to be a consumerist one, a passing taste to be forgotten and replaced in a moment.

You think I’m joking? A Single Man, Lady Gaga, Avatar, Invictus, David Mitchell’s new quiz show and Martin Amis’s new novel are swimming in my mind alongside Gordon Brown’s tantrums even though I haven’t seen, read or consciously listened to any of them. In this garbled sensorium we call a culture, criticism is more necessary than ever. Don’t listen to the voices that tell you criticism is dead: they are sent by the devil.

The other day I wrote that Michael Haneke is not just a good film-maker, but a great one. Apparently, not everyone agrees. But if we can’t stand back for two seconds from the rush of new films and new stars, to acknowledge the genuinely worthwhile and insist on its specialness, where will we be? I say it again: Haneke is a contemporary great, and a study of his films is worth 50 trips to the cinema.

I believe this to be the very function of criticism. Real criticism is not about distinguishing good from bad; it is about distinguishing good from great. There’s plenty of terrible art around, but it usually finds its level in the end. The curse of our time, in the arts, is mediocrity and ordinariness: the quite good film that gets an Oscar, the OK artist who becomes a megastar. Truly remarkable art is rare and to see it when it comes, to fight for it, to hold it up as an example for the rest – that is the critic’s true task.

An Austrian gallery’s decision to allow orgies alongside its prized Beethoven Frieze is entirely in the spirit of fin-de-siècle Vienna

Inviting a sex club to hold orgies and display related paraphernalia in the Secession Building in Vienna is a fitting homage to the art of Gustav Klimt. The Secession, one of the first great pavilions of modern art, is permanent home to Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, his most ambitious surviving work, lovingly restored and enduring as a dream-like hymn to Wagner and Mahler (and Beethoven, I suppose), as well as to the power of the unconscious.

Although Klimt created the frieze to celebrate the exhibition of a statue of Beethoven by Max Klinger, his visual symphony is very much a Beethoven conducted by a Wagnerian – perhaps by Klimt’s contemporary Mahler himself – in its empty, ethereal spaces and golden crescendos. It’s a Beethoven become chaotic, a public art become disturbingly intimate.

Nothing the Austrian swingers get up to here – visitors to the Frieze have to walk through a temporary sex club – would have shocked Klimt, or, for that matter, his contemporary Sigmund Freud. These makers of fin-de-siècle Vienna were completely uninhibited. But it’s probably true that Klimt has become so acceptable and popular that an injection of perversity to awaken visitors to the danger and daring of one of his great works is a timely idea.

Indeed, the taking-for-granted of Gustav Klimt is what is really at issue here. Is it the backlash from all those thousands of posters and cards of The Kiss that have been sold over the decades? If you think Klimt is all gold dust and hype, you should look at his eerie square landscapes of beech forests. His opening of art to the inner eye – a kind of psychic Impressionism – is one of modernism’s great breakthroughs.

Where he led, the swingers follow. I only hope the love lives being played out near the Beethoven Frieze are less catastrophic than the relationship between Art Garfunkel and Theresa Russell in Nicholas Roeg’s disturbing film, Bad Timing, which is set in Vienna and uses Klimt’s paintings as a backdrop. Viennese moderns believed in the power of desire. But – as Freud made clear and as psychoanalyst Art Garkunkel finds to his cost in Bad Timing – they never said it was the road to utopia.

It was when 20th-century British artists stopped trying to be modernists that they started to create honest, significant work

What with Henry Moore at Tate and Paul Nash at Dulwich Picture Gallery, it seems the art of 20th-century Britain is enjoying an unexpected revival. Obviously, coincidences like this are just coincidences. But… makes you think, dunnit.

British art from the years 1900 to 1950 is unlikely to be found in huge quantities in many museums of modern art you visit around the world. The Moore show is at Tate Britain and not at Tate Modern: in his lifetime, had the two museums been divided, he’d have been at Modern. But nowadays, Francis Bacon is the first British artist of the 20th century who seriously holds his own in international collections. I’m sure lots of people will put me right on this one, but it’s my strong perception.

British art in 1930 is arguably comparable in quality with American art at the same moment: both countries were outside the avant-garde swim of continental Europe yet both had artists who created original homegrown interpretations of modern art. In the 1940s both took off for themselves, in radically divergent directions – while American painters and sculptors discovered an inner voice of abstraction, Britain found itself in existentialist figurative painting.

Of course, there were British abstract artists, before and after the 1940s, but they so often seem brittle and precious. I can’t keep awake in the pre-war abstraction room at Tate Britain. In the room that has paintings such as Kossoff’s Man in a Wheelchair, I feel I am seeing actual art.

It was as if, in the early 20th century, British artists put on modernist clothes but felt terribly uncomfortable in them. When Evelyn Waugh satirises British art deco in his novels, I suppose nowadays we’re supposed to shudder at his snobbery – but don’t you recognise the chilly British version of the international style he’s mocking?

When the British stopped trying to be modernists their art became more honest, more real and more significant – from the 50s painters to Gilbert and George to You Know Who. Our artists are better at living in this world than they are constructing utopias – and perhaps that speaks well of them, and us.