Pigeons in the Prado

I've blogged before about my preference for museums that tell a clear story.  I just don't have the patience (or the creativity?) to form my own narrative from disconnected, poorly explained objects.  So I was really excited recently to visit two museums in Spain that, in their own very different ways, presented a fully formed idea with originality and panache.  This post is about the first of them: the Prado.

I know what you're thinking: unified vision? in an art gallery?! True, at their worst (let's face it, most of the time) they are just walls of paintings with little explanation - rooms full of canvasses only connected by the fact that the people who painted them came from the same country.  But from November to April the staid corridors of Spain's greatest gallery were subject to an invasion of curiosities.

If it hadn't been for the death of Charles III in 1788 and the subsequent Peninsular War, the Prado building would have housed the royal cabinet of natural history.  That was all the excuse Spanish artist Miguel Ángel Blanco needed to raid Madrid's natural history museum, which conserves what's left of the monarchy's collection of hunting trophies and other curiosities, and scatter 22 items in thought-provoking spots around the massive gallery.  Thus in a simple but startling way he recreated the royal Wunderkammer of the 18th century.

He clearly had a lot of fun doing it.  What would spice up Dürer's Adam and Eve? A serpent skeleton!  What would offset the witches in Goya's Great He-Goat? Two toads, a bat skeleton, a moose (really) hoof, and some brimstone!  And of course he couldn't raid the Spanish royals' hoard of stuffed animals without taking at least one bull - this imposing specimen graced Rubens' Rape of Europa.

But even these obvious juxtapositions, because so unusual in an art gallery, were thought-provoking.  It was perhaps a no-brainer to put a narwhal tusk alongside Varotari's Orpheus and the Animals, but it was still powerful in raising the historic cultural associations of unicorns and the natural material that was traded across the world in support of those myths.

And there were more subtle allusions too.  A glowing review in the Times Higher Education singled out the tiny albino sparrow perched high above the massive Las Meninas. Blanco imagines it outside the window looking in at the royal court - its placement so high up complemented the airy composition of the painting.

Blanco had written explanatory labels for each pairing, explaining why he had chosen the object to accompany the painting and what features of each he was trying to draw out.  These plaques were not intrusive - anyone wanting to construct their own narrative was free to do so - but they provided a starting point for visitors to think through the juxtapositions.

I loved how this exhibition made me look and look again at the paintings, forcing me to consider not only their subject matter but also their cultural connotations, both at the time they were produced and today.  How many still lifes full of meat have we admired, without thinking of the animals that died to fill the larders of the seventeenth century?  Blanco chose a squab to accompany a painting by Juan Sánchez Cotán; his bodegón has been thought austere, but it was opulent compared with the spare skeleton of the pigeon chick alongside it.  What are we to make of the fact that the hanging pheasants are somehow more beautiful in two-dimensional death than the vestiges of the chick that never reached full maturity?

So Blanco still left plenty of questions unanswered.  But by taking a clear premise - putting the natural historical collections of the royal family back alongside their more familiar art collections - he told a simple story very well, making me think much more deeply about the Prado's artworks and their significance.

What about the second museum, I hear you ask!  Come back soon to hear all about a tiny treasure in Burgos!

Penguins Might Fly

• Can an object be artistic and scientific at the same time?  
• Can art have a place in science museums?  
• Why do museum object labels matter?

These questions are the subject of this post, which was prompted by a visit I made recently to the Bell Pettigrew Museum at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland.

The Bell Pettigrew is the University's zoology museum: "a rare survival of a Victorian teaching museum, and wonderfully atmospheric", according to their website.  It's a small, attractively laid-out place, well worth an hour or so of your time.  But I was surprised to find, among the usual bones, some paintings.  This is the first one I saw, in the case dedicated to flightless birds:

The collage-painting depicts a moa, an animal that has been extinct for more than five hundred years.  Here's what the label underneath says:

Male moa (Dinornis giganteus) in breeding plumage (left) guarding its harem of foraging females in the dense subtropical forests of the Oparara Valley
Paul Bartlett

Now, I have no idea how much is known about the breeding plumage, foraging habits or mating practices of this animal, which was wiped out over 300 years before the arrival of European settlers in New Zealand.*  What I am interested in is the authority of the museum label underneath the artist's impression.

In the nearby Penguin case, there's another picture by the same artist.  You shouldn't have any trouble reading the label this time:

The penguins look rather like they're flying (perhaps they're imagining that they are).  But despite the clear impressionism (small-I and big-I) of this painting, I didn't feel the same discomfort as when I saw the moas.  Why not?  It must have been the label.  The first label, with its impressive Latin binomial nomenclature and technical-sounding words like "breeding plumage" and "foraging females", adopts the authoritative tone of a museum curator.  The second is an incomplete sentence: not at all surprising for the title of a work of art, but obviously not sufficient as the label for a museum object.

The obvious questions are: Who is the artist?  What is his level of expertise?  Fortunately the Penguin case also included a brief biography.  Paul Bartlett studied for a PhD in animal behaviour at St Andrews, before becoming a full-time artist.  According to the biography, "he continually strives to find innovative techniques and styles in which to depict his subjects whilst retaining an element of authenticity."

I found this reassuring and, at the same time, worrying.  The artist whose work is displayed in this museum of zoology clearly has both the expertise and the desire to create authentic depictions of animals in their natural habitat, something that may potentially augment the enjoyment and learning opportunities of museum visitors.  But what does "an element of authenticity" mean?

There's also an obvious difference between painting animals that can be seen in countless videos and photographs, and those that are extinct.  For the latter, artistic licence must surely be tempered by a sense of responsibility.  I was reminded of the paintings of Édouard Riou, the young Frenchman who illustrated Louis Figuier's La Terre avant le déluge (1863).  For this monumental work of popular natural history, Figuier commissioned Riou to produce some attractive engravings.  Riou responded with some hugely vivid but also hugely imaginative works of art, like this one.    

Iguanadon and Megalosaur enjoy mutual chomping

La Terre avant le déluge was an instant bestseller, shifting 25,000 copies in the first two years.  Riou went on to work as an illustrator for Jules Verne.  And his illustrations had a huge effect on the way dinosaurs were - and are - imagined (don't forget, no human ever saw a living dinosaur, but we like to think we have a pretty good idea about how they might have behaved).

In the Bell Pettigrew, it's fairly clear that the moa pictured are extinct (though it might have been helpful to include that on the label).  And we can probably be sure that, despite what appears in the collage, its breeding plumage didn't incorporate printed text.  But it does make you wonder about the authority of museum labels.

I'm not arguing that we should go back to having unlabelled, uninterpreted, unconnected skeletons lined up in cases.  But I'm not sure there's a place for artistic licence in zoology museums either.

*I will note that, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, only "two species of Dinornis are considered valid, D. novaezealandiae of the North Island, and D. robustus of the South."  Another website, the excitingly-named carnivoraforum.com, states that D. giganteus and D. robustus are the same thing - two birds that were long considered separate species have recently been identified as males and females of the same species.  But according to nzbirds.com, "Dinornis giganteus lived in the North Island of New Zealand and D. robustis in the South Island ... The species Dinornis giganteus and Dinornis struthoides are now placed in the synonymy of Dinornis novaezealandiae."