ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL

I was engaged recently in the melancholy duty of “de-cluttering” our Athens house, which is a polite description for removing all my accumulated nostalgia, cherished but underused furniture, dated objects of various sorts and all those things the family consider Mum and Dad’s old tat. I made a habit of buying a guide book/brochure of places I had visited in Britain and Europe and they occupied shelves and shelves. They were long unread and indeed untouched, so they had to be dumped in the communal skip, (though I kept back a handful) - to the relief of the family and the house could breathe again!

An organized De-clutter

This exercise stimulated thoughts about how we follow our interests and travel to odd places, maybe away from the beaten track. I have had friends whose love of spectator sport has made them globetrotters. They cross continents to see a rugby or cricket test-match and World Cups trigger off a frenzy of enthusiasm – often soon disappointed – as they moon about venues in Japan, South Africa or Sochi.

Other friends were fanatical anglers and tiring of the imperishably gentle joys of the rivers Dee, Don or Ythan in my native Scotland, they pursued rod-stressing rainbow trout in New Zealand or sockeye salmon in Alaska, competing perilously with ravenous brown bears!

The open banks of the Ythan

For my part, on starting to work in London, my interests were first stimulated by David Piper’s excellent Companion Guide to London (1964) and by John Betjeman’s writings on the City of London Churches. Piper extolled the virtues of The Wallace Collection and Rococo art, while Betjeman introduced me to the joys of church-visiting, an unexpected activity for a then-militant card-carrying atheist!

                                              Fragonard’s The Swing, the essence of Rococo

St Bartholomew the Great, City of London

Church visiting took me all over England, guided especially by sage Alec Clifton-Taylor and soon introduced me to many splendours in Europe. One of my favourites is The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by the van Eyck brothers in St Bavo’s, Ghent, an astonishing altarpiece, replete with medieval devotion.

 

Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432) 

My pursuit of Rococo drew me to what became my favourite Rococo church, Ottobeuren Abbey;

Resplendent Ottobeuren in Bavaria, South Germany

On entering Ottobeuren for the first time, I was literally rooted to the spot. Elaborate statues of saints, fine proportions, the whole place exuding praise, joy and celebration. Other beauties in this area include Die Wies and Vierzehnheiligen, unmissable pilgrimage shrines.

Greece had not figured on my radar in my callow youth. Then I married the lovely Grecian goddess Betty in 1969 and I have visited (and even lived in) Greece every year since. Although I love the many ravishing Classical sculptures and sites like the Acropolis and Delphi, I became particularly interested in Byzantium and its legacy. The celebrated Christ the All-Judging (Pantocrator) in the monastery of Daphni, near Athens, underlines the unforgiving nature of Byzantine theology. But oddly, the finest Byzantine site outside Constantinople itself is in the former outpost of Ravenna, Northern Italy, where churches and mausoleums have been lovingly preserved.

Pantocrator at Daphni

  

                                                   Mosaic, San Vitale, Ravenna

 You may think I am a modern fellow – I dress like any 80-year-old and I confess to drinking the in-cocktail this summer, Aperol Spritz, and enjoying it. But my passions are mainly medieval, leavened by some Rococo frivolities, and no amount of de-cluttering will eliminate those memories from my eternally grateful mind.

 

SMD

3.07.23

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2023