Sunday Dec 17. Wandering. Ferrara.

Yesterday evening I took the train to Ferrara, and today I visited three of Ferrara’s museums.

Among the loveliest things I saw were some illustrated manuscripts. The Cathedral museum has a room set up to display 14 antiphonaries and 8 graduals, a rare, almost complete set of choir books with settings of Gregorian chant for every day of the year. A Bishop, who must have been a very wealthy man, paid for their production, which took almost sixty years, from 1477 to 1535. (The printing press arrived in Italy in 1464, but it took quite a long while to completely supplant the illustrated manuscripts).

The books are huge as they were designed to be read by several singers at the same time. The parchment was brought from Germany and the colours and gold from Venice. We know the names of the people who worked on them. Most of the ordinary lettering was done by a monk named Evangelista Tedesco. He must have spent most of his working life on this project. The illustrations were by a variety of people, with several by Jacopo Medici, the most famous of the illustrators working in Ferrara at this time. Jacopo Medici seems to have had a fascination with monkeys, as I found four just on the book pages that were open to view!

A Christmas scene

And St George and the dragon.

I’m surprised at how often St. George appears in Italy, having always thought of him as very British (he is the patron saint of Britain). He was born a Greek and became a Roman soldier. Alas and alack, he came to a very sad end in 303 AD as this huge 16th century tapestry woven in Ferrara for the Este family shows; tortured on the wheel, immersed in boiling oil and finally beheaded. Legend has it that over the course of seven years he survived twenty different forms of torture. The first telling of the encounter with the dragon, who terrified the

people of Libya, comes in an eleventh century story.

I saw so much… here is a series of medieval thirteenth century sculptures done in Ferrara showing the months of the year in a very realistic fashion. As a sometimes foot sore pilgrim, I’ve been wondering about medieval footwear. Here are some answers!

And here on some surviving fifteenth century frescoes is a later fashion in clothing.

Can you see the monkey in the next photo?

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Sat Oct 4. London.

19 days walking on pilgrimage paths for a total of 395 km or 245 miles on foot (not that arduous - an average of 20.7 km per day, and lots of ‘rest days’ staying put in one place). All of that undone in 1.5 hours on a Eurostar train. I’m not entirely sure what conclusion I’m drawing from that comparison, but I’m back where I started, in London. On my way to my lodgings (I’m staying in a Buddhist retreat centre) I decided to visit the first visitable place to cross my path, which turned out to be the Foundling Museum. Horrified by the sight of infants being abandoned on 18th c London streets, a prosperous seaman, Thomas Coram, spent 17 years raising awareness and funds, as well as obtaining royal permission to build London’s first children’s charity. Opened in 1739, the Foundling Hospital continued its work until the 1950s, and actually is still active as a non-institutional resource, under a different name. Here is a photo of it in 1935. So many similarities to ...

Fri Oct 3. Lille.

I had a lovely day in Lille. In fact, all my days on this trip have been lovely! In the morning I went to the very large Palais des Beaux-Arts. This museum holds the largest collection of works of art of any French institution outside Paris. The collection started at the time of the French Revolution as the works of art of the nobility and of the church were confiscated, and continued on apace due to various enthusiastic municipal governments. By 1892 the collection was so large and important that the Palais, its current house, was constructed in the centre of town. The first fun aspect was the recent work of the Swiss artist Felice Varini who used the museum’s interior as his canvas. The oldest works of art are in the ‘basement’, beautifully displayed. Look at the marvellous three dimensionality of this (flat) marble plaque sculpted by Donatello (c 1435) showing Salomé dancing for the head of John the Baptist. And modern technology brings statues alive by giving them back t...

September 5

I landed at Heathrow this morning at 6 am, a very inconvenient time to get a room and rest! But my student residence accommodation includes a common room with handy couches for a short snooze. The neighbourhood abuts on Regent’s Park, complete with gorgeous flowerbeds. The Queen Mary’s rose garden in Regent’s Park. My neighbourhood wandering took me to the Wallace House which used to be one of the homes of the marquesses of Hertford. The Hertfords were fabulously rich, mainly from extensive land holdings, and in the 18th and 19th centuries avid art collectors. They obviously had Trumpian home decorating tastes. Here are two of their many clocks, all of which need frequent ‘fine tuning’, it appears. I particularly liked two 18th c British paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds in their collection: Mrs Carnac and the hauntingly strange Strawberry Girl.

Celia Walks

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