Goya not

Last week we thought to Goya, thought to Goya without booking in advance. So we turned up at the National gallery at around 1100 on a weekday morning, to find long queues and what looked like an uncomfortably crowded exhibition. We decided to pass in favour of a spot of jigsaw hunting, that is to say hunting down pictures of which I had done the jigsaw.

We failed on the Garafalo of reference 1, it having been moved from its last known home in the basement, presumably on account of the building work evidenced by the complex scaffold outside.

But we did find the ambassadors of reference 2 and we did find the adoration of reference 3. The former reminding me of the carpet used as a table drape in the recent performances of Henry IV Part I and the latter seeming oddly subdued in tone. At this point we branched out into art history, as exemplified by the rooms in the middle fifties. Rooms in which there seemed to be trouble with, for example, connecting heads to shoulders - and with the folds of cloth.

I suppose part of the interest in cloth arose from richly coloured cloth being a marker of wealth, so something which patrons wanted to flaunt, something with which one wanted to clothe objects of veneration and something which came to be of interest in its own right. How does one capture the seemingly random folds of cloth in a realistic and interesting fashion? An interest which has survived to our own time, at least in this part of Epsom. But a trick which the master of the St. Bartholomew altarpiece had not mastered in his early work - late fifteenth century - snipped from the National Gallery web site and include above. In the gallery. in the flesh, as it were, the folds around the right (as viewed) hand arm looked particularly odd. An example of the way that the brain can learn, from observation, how cloth should fold, without necessarily being able to articulate what is wrong when it is wrong. The wrongness is hidden in the connections of the millions of neurons which look after the folding of cloth and statistics do the business without the need for grammar. Further musings on this fascinating subject to be found at reference 4.

As it happened, we noticed something of the same sort a couple of days later. A chap was walking along the platform at Epsom station and there was clearly something wrong, something odd about the way that he was walking. Inter alia, the rhythm of his steps was all wrong.  But more than that we could not say: the brain could compute oddness, but could not display its reasons. I associate now to a chap whom I used to know who made a living out of the fact that neural networks could be quite easily trained to be very good at spotting odd behaviour, behaviour which needed preventitive maintenance attention, in complex machines at Heathrow airport. Again, the network would know that something was wrong, but would not know what was wrong; that bit you had to do for yourself.

We also noticed the elaborate chairs in which some of the saints were placed. Mostly elaborate wooden chairs, but which very much reminded us of the niches in the Lady Chapel at Ely, older than these paintings by getting on for two hundred years. Perhaps they were already anachronisms by the time of these masters. The heritage speak of their day.

While Tura's muse (to be posted next) reminded me of the sort of thing that the writers of fantasy novels and fantasy computer games go in for now. A reference forwards rather than backwards in time.

Out to wander down Whitehall, to wonder outside the Houses of Parliament about whom the large black Mercedes saloon, allowed inside the security perimeter, might belong to. The person whom I took to be the chauffeur would not tell me, would not even tell me that he was not allowed to tell. Perhaps foreign, perhaps diplomatic, as my understanding is that important politicians of our own get driven around in British flavoured cars.

Bused ourselves to Vauxhall for lunch at the Estrela Bar. Some opted for what turned out to be an excellent lemon sole, grilled, while I settled for a substantial portion of a stew involving some sort of bony beef, some red beans and some rice, served in my own private saucepan. Taken with the bread and olives with which we started, a substantial lunch indeed. Washed down with a half bottle of the entirely satisfactory house white called 'Encostas do Bairro '.

PS: despite the interest in 'The Virgin and Child with Musical Angels' evinced above, I was not able to recover it from the excellent online catalogue maintained by the National gallery on their website. I had, for example, already forgotten that the picture was topped with a round arch and it took a further visit to the gallery yesterday to get things straightened out.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/jigsaw-2-series-2.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/jigsaw-7-series-3.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/jigsaw-9-series-2.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/abstract-expressionism.html.