Charles I: King and Collector is a tremendously well-presented and toughly thought-out presentation of 140 works that represent only a fraction of the original royal art collection in number but are so well chosen that you really feel you’re getting an education in what the original collection was about.
Early and late Renaissance art, Baroque art, portraits, allegories, Roman art, statues and medallions, tapestries, beautiful pictures of te king and his family — these works were amassed over a period of nearly 25 years, from the moment Charles was crowned in 1625 to his execution in 1649. Agents did all the work, something like modern dealers, part hustler and part connoisseur, always a bit doubtful if they would ever be paid.
Charles is the focus either directly or indirectly. He is the glorious figure: even more glorious than Julius Caesar
presiding over Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar (c.1485-1506). This multi-part Renaissance masterpiece consists of nine enormous canvases that depict a victory procession culminating in a scene of chariots and elephants. Charles acquired it as part of a job lot from the House of Gonzaga in Lombardy. (It was a last-minute addition and he had no idea it was coming.)
He commissioned fabulously luxurious tapestries from a tapestry factory he started-up himself at Mortlake, then just outside London. The greatest of these were based on large-scale sketches for paintings by Raphael, which Charles owned. All their symbolism of piety and vigilance, borrowed by Raphael from Pliny’s Natural History, seems to apply to Charles.
The appeal of the many portraits of the royal family by Charles’s court painter, Anthony Van Dyck, lies in their surprising variety and colour richness, and the amazing sense Van Dyck might be giving the same flickering luxurious impermanence to nature as he does to the individuals he shows in it.
Van Dyck would be impossible without his teacher and employer, Rubens. Rubens’s 1629 epic allegory of war and peace — shown in the exhibition in a dazzling confrontation with a Roman 2nd-century statue of a crouching nude Venus — magnificently summarises everything Van Dyck does. The Rubens is full of shimmering light and fat flesh, swirling circular arrangements of fabric, metal and fruit, and seems like a dream and a pageant, and a classical sculpture garden come to colourful sweaty life, all at once.
The free loose brushstrokes of both these Flemish painters ultimately come from Titian
in the 16th century. They were interested in his compositions that seem to have been arrived at via decisions that are hardly decisions at all but more like half-conscious impulses. Just as they exaggerated Mantegna’s own exaggerations of composition in antiquity (or what Mantegna imagined it to be, having little to go on but fragments and ruins), they also exaggerated Titian’s sense of a painting that seems to have life breathed into it because of ruffled surfaces and merged borders between objects. You can’t tell how all the balances are working, only that a unity of many complex events is absolutely there
Van Dyck’s rich, heavy yellow fabrics with their complicated sheen are a bit different when you reflect that the Duchess of Cambridge buys her clothes at Next and ever since Queen Victoria British royalty has become ever more petit bourgeois. From one perspective, paintings of royalty by Van Dyck — like the paintings of allegorical classical divinities, leering satyrs and stately plump goddesses of wisdom by Rubens — are fusty old relics of a dead past. From another, however, they are full of philosophical potential. They can make you free just by looking at them. Their content of imaginative transformation is the lasting thing.
Those painters had the job to come up with metaphors for then current attitudes. Today we relate to the beauty of their depictions of bodies and nature, the uplifting effect of many complex illusions sustained in all their variety in a single unifying composition. The compositional deliciousness in Mantegna, exaggerated and altered in certain ways by a chain of artists through time from Titian to Van Dyck, is applied to propaganda imagery exalting the Stuart royal family. Everything that looks good in a Van Dyck picture of Charles on horseback 10 feet high supports the idea that the king actually is good, the almost ultimate good next to God
Bodies and nature, as well as illusions and skill, are just as interesting now as they were then. We’re the same human creatures, after all. But we have a different concept of social life. Our heads are full of Modern Art and Surrealism. We’re aware of all sorts of social emancipatory processes that have occurred. We might be anti-royal or ready to sing the national anthem at the drop of a hat. No one minds either way.
Indifference was the one impossible factor on January 30, 1649, when the king was executed on the steps of the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace. Rubens’s murals of the Apotheosis of James I, commissioned by Charles 20 years earlier, were one of the last things he saw before he died.
Roman, Aphrodite ('The Crouching Venus'), second century (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017)
Charles I’s collection had contained more than 1,500 paintings, 500 sculptures and many hundreds of works in other media, and the sale under Cromwell raised £185,000 for the new English Republic, an astonishing sum for that period. As we know from the movies, it doesn’t matter to the impressive power of art if people featured in it are quite short in real life. But it’s a striking fact that Charles measured less than 60 inches, head to feet.
Van Dyck’s numerous portraits of this doomed little sprite, assembled together here for the first time in 350 years, make him seem, to us, both timeless and miraculously large. Whether it’s Charles seen in the same picture from three different angles, for famous Italian sculptor Bernini, to work from, like a modern publicity photo, or sitting with his wife Henrietta Maria and their children in a palace, or communing spiritually with her in a poetic artificial landscape, he is the same regal weird being. He glows with super powers, his hair and beard are full of magic energy, his sunken eyes communicating nothing much.
Charles I: King and Collector is at the Royal Academy, W1 from Saturday until April 15