Travels with Art Historians

Home at last, after a whole lot of adventures. Apart from the Professor, two Art Historians were implicated, our curator friend from Lancashire, and our  Belgrade correspondent, who has acquired a flat in Trieste. The first port of call was Würzburg, which I came to think of as Land of Cross Lions – the place seemed to be full of heraldic beasties with a lot on their minds and a sense of grievance. The best of all was on a tombstone by the great late-medieval carver Tilleman Riemenschneider, a lion apparently reduced by sheer boredom and frustration to gnawing the top of the shield it was carrying between its paws.  The main attraction which took us to Würzburg was the miraculous Tiepolo ceiling in the bishop’s palace. You can look at it all day and still not understand how it works. The rest of the palace is pretty amazing too, enfilades of rococo splendour heated by porcelain stoves. One of them, a plain black cylindrical affair, was standing on four paws, as if yet another disaffected lion was hiding inside it. We were staying in a rather cheerful hotel, in a fifteenth-century building  with low beamed ceilings and lots and lots of wrought ironwork – the bar and restaurant serving also the purposes of reception desk, office, and family sitting room for some friendly, low-fuss Franconians. The rooms were plain and decent, and breakfast was lavish, ham, Black Forest ham, salami, slicing sausage, cured fish, cold chicken, eight different kinds of cheese, nice bread, and one morning, pastries which must have been left over from the restaurant on the previous night. Mysteriously, no eggs, since just about everything else was on offer. Also, you were left in peace to enjoy it. Würzburg is in a cup in the hills, entirely surrounded by vineyards like fields of green corduroy. It was baking hot, but under the limes in the bishop’s palace garden, it was relatively cool, with the linden blossom giving off a sweet, heady incense-like perfume. We took a bus up to the fort on a height commanding the river which must have been there, in one form or another, since Roman times. A winding journey through prosperous, leafy suburbs with steep-pitched roofs visible through the trees, past hospitals, breweries, and any amount of public statuary, some sweetly rococo and some blockily modernistic. The museum in the old arsenal has a lot of medieval and baroque art, some of it wonderful and some of it quite weird. One of the strangest objects is a sort of mermaid, in the fashionable dress of the fifteenth century, with a prim little smile, afloat in a nest of red deer antlers. There are also life sized garden statues of Arcadian figures dancing and playing musical instruments shaped like animals – a sort of saxophone with a snake’s head, a sheep headed harp, that sort of thing. There is also a no expense spared Jesuit church which has a set of deeply theatrical sweeping white and gold plaster curtains about sixty feet long. Both of the nights we spent there we went to one of those German restaurants which were set up in the middle ages to support a charitable enterprise and have somehow kept going, and ate rather plain but perfectly nice food, with delicious dry, light wines.

After Würzburg, we loaded ourselves into trains and went to Innsbrück, via Munich, right up in the Alps, with dusty-turquoise mountains towering halfway up the sky. It wasn’t quite as lovely as we remembered – our last visit was in September, when it was full of rather elegant middle aged Italians in cashmere and pearls, whereas in July it was full of the more wholesome varieties of International Youth doing healthy stuff – but being youth, barging about like herds of bullocks, and the beer and pizza end of the town was pretty crowded. Fortunately, the things were were wanting to see ourselves didn’t interest them in the slightest. We visited the folk museum – which on the whole provoked the reflection that the combination of Catholicism, a tradition of finely detailed woodcarving, and long winter evenings can produce some pretty exotic results – the art gallery, stuffed with bad modern art and good baroque, where I found a perfectly stunning ivory and ebony group of St Michael and Lucifer, another, life size, St Michael smiling in a way that suggests an angelic sense of humour might not quite be yours, a large painting of the Spanish Armada (day 6), viewed from the Spanish point of view, and a very beautiful still life of a book on a cushion under a curtain, with that trome l’oeil quality of implying that someone has just that moment got up and walked out of sight. Then we went to several more churches, and Schloss Ambras. This contains an extraordinary Hapsburg wunderkammer. Where to start. There is the Hairy Family, i.e. a whole dynasty of wolf-persons in brocade, an authentic portrait of Vlad Dracul, an astonishing boxwood sculpture of Death taking a triumphalist pose which makes him look like a seventies guitar hero, sculptures in coral, mother of pearl, ivory, tortoiseshell, a pair of thigh length riding boots with toes which look as if they were designed by Magritte, an inexplicable natural curiosity which is a magnificently antlered deer skull completely grown around by an oak tree so that the antlers protrude on either side (given the length of time this would take I suspect this of being a pagan religious object caught out of its time), and any amount of objects whose pointlessness is matched only by the difficulty of producing them. We staggered out into the hard white sunshine, and when we saw a peacock apparently attempting to buy picture postcards, we  felt past being surprised by anything. From Ambras, we went on an even more exotic mission via the Postbus, which took us on a three quarter hour journey on hairpin roads up through little mountain village cascading with red and pink geraniums, and spat us out at Halle, where we were in search of something even stranger, which we had heard of: the Stiftskirche with the stiffs. This turned out to be even weirder than we thought it was going to be, and reduced even hardened baroque-users to speechlessness. There were two catacomb (i.e., early Christian) saints conventionally bestowed as a pile of bones behind glass with an elaborate black and silver frame, a third, however, was in a ‘sleeping beauty’ glass casket, wearing full Hapsburg ceremonial dress. Then there was a sort of glass bookcase full of skulls, each of which was veiled, wearing a golden wreath with or without silver lace, and resting on an embroidered silk cushion. Where they fitted into any known pattern of Catholic cult was utterly obscure. Goodness knows what’s going on there. We had a drink to recover our nervous tone, and got a bus back down to Innsbruck. Food was nice here too. Breakfast was even more magnificent than in Würzburg, with a terrific display of fruit (rambutan, grenadillas and passion fruit were among the offerings) and superb air-dried ham. We had dinner at the Stiftskeller, in a room thirty feet high with seventeenth-century statues on the walls. At this point, we bid goodbye to one art historian, and entrained for Trieste, via Venice/Mestre, to meet the other.

The Brenner Pass is stupendous, with mighty works of civil engineering spanning the gorges on spidery legs, and views down Alpine valleys with lonely little villages and charging, opaque, meltwater rivers. The train was late, but we managed to catch our connection, which bumbled along the Adriatic coast and tipped us out at Trieste to meet our friend from Belgrade. It was even hotter in Trieste than it had been in Innsbrück. After a long time in Aberdeenshire, I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to have nights as hot as day, the buildings made secretive by shutters closed against the sun. Our friend, fortunately, rejoices in air conditioning. Trieste’s a neoclassical town, on the whole. Like Edinburgh, there is an Old Town on a hill with a medieval street layout winding up to the (Roman) citadel – unlike Edinburgh, though the street plan is ancient, the buildings are nineteenth-century and later, apartment blocks, handsome for the most part – and a New Town on flat ground, laid out on a grid pattern by, in Trieste’s case, the Hapsburgs. The mix is Italian, Austrian, Slovene, and Jewish, an interesting place. Food is mixed; there is a splendid Neapolitan pizzeria, but local gnocchi are Austrian potato dumplings at heart, and the sweets tend to pine nuts, chocolate and rum, and don’t taste Italian at all. There are Greek, Jesuit, Serbian and Anglican churches, and a great big synagogue. The catholic cathedral is palaeo-Christian in origin, with two apse mosaics (Mary Theotokos and Christ Pantokrator) which are apparently twelfth-century Venetian, but utterly Byzantine in style and looking much older, and other interventions, medieval, baroque and modern, making a surprisingly harmonious whole. On either side of the entrance door are solemn busts of fifth-century worthies, presumably the local wealthy Christians who paid for the church: similarly, the façade of the Serbian Orthodox cathedral is proudly ornamented with the names of the local merchant princes who paid for it. Some things don’t change. One of the nice things we did was to go on a brisk little bus-like boat to an outlying town – a fresh and cool excursion after the heat of the city, which revealed a whole other Trieste of massive container ships, gantries, and mysterious industrial operations. A group of three giant vessels had Turkish names and Istanbul as home port, and a terrible old rust bucket like a floating knifebox had apparently come from Ghent. Names which evoked the whole commercial networks of the late middle ages. After dinner, one can walk in the square and along the mole, watching light glittering like sequins on the sapphire water. Youngsters sit about in the dusk, in pairs or groups, looking at the sea, and the warm air is full of quiet talk and laughter, over the gentle shushing and slapping of the waves. One night a boy was sitting leaning against a bollard playing his guitar, all alone, serenading the Adriatic.

Green Shoots

We seem to be getting somewhere with the lawn. We were in Aberdeen all day and though we didn’t see anything when we left, somehow returned to see a fine, adolescents’-whiskers green fuzz over the bare brown veldt, which is very good news. Our Tromsø friends are taking charge, and are, as is their wont, making things better with concentrated intelligence: we have planted up the big pots outside my study with begonias (evicting them from various blue pots about the place), and very fine and grand they look too. Planting up these pots has been a headache because the tulips were hugely late, and by the time they had died down, the South, because it has been on a more normal schedule, had gone over its season so we couldn’t buy bedding plants (the pots were full of white begonias last year, which was nice, but the begonias may be really quite fruity) Our absolutely-un-Doubtful-Guests also undertook to cook for us, so we came home from a day in the Vinegar Works to the welcome sight of someone else bustling about with potatoes and things. Meanwhile, we have a bit of welcome progress on matters personal – by recommendation, we went to a jolly physiotherapist in the course of our Aberdeen day, who has diagnosed my mysterious ankle problem (which has had me limping for two months) and told me what to do, and has a firm theory about the Professor’s iffy knee joint, which includes acquiring a bicycle: because he’s been compensating all over the place, he needs to be re-balanced, and since the only way you can ride a bike is by being in balance, this is a succinct way of taking relevant exercise. It makes perfectly good sense. He has had a pang of regret for the nice oldfashioned Dutch bike left outside a shop in Leiden when we were in the process of moving back, due to the absolute state of distraction induced by the move, but perhaps there are still bikes with handlebars in the right place, fewer than 10 gears, and no fibreglass or carbon components whatsoever …. though in the world of today it may be quite a bit to ask for.

Not letting the grass grow under our feet

This spring, Barry the Great sadly but decisively pronounced the lawn to be beyond recovery. He weedkilled it, as a first step to reseeding; the idea was then, once the grass was dead, to rotovate it. This, unfortunately, didn’t work, and after we got back from the Deep South, a nice and smiley bloke called Bill turned up with a digger the other day, and scraped it, producing a pile of moss which looked like the Great Wall of China. It is still more unfortunate that what with one thing and another, this mighty effort, followed by the deployment of 80 kilos of grass seed (I think) has coincided with the first patch of really nice weather this year. We have therefore had to get a sprinkler, because unless the ground is damp the seed will dry up and die. We’re not on the mains: though our water supply is, thank goodness, now working, since it’s a gravity-fed system, it enters the house under no great amount of pressure, and the sprinkler refuses to lob the water any great distance. I spent yesterday beetling in and out every twenty minutes to move the damn thing. The lawn has now been fairly thoroughly sprinkled, which is just as well, since the weather gods show no sign of wanting to help. The whole exercise was a cause of great rejoicing to little birds, who seemed to think that the whole exercise constituted providing a shower bath for their entertainment. Various people are drifting in and out: we’ve given up apologising for the lawn, and are concentrating on damage limitation, viz., re trying not to to track too much mud into the house. The ex-ambassador has just left, another friend came to lunch, someone else, whom we know only as a correspondent, is turning up this evening, and tomorrow, the friends from Tromsø arrive, to great and general rejoicing – they will mind the beasties while we go on our travels next week – we’ll be visiting Würzburg, Innsbrück, and Trieste – but we will have the pleasure of their company for a few days first. We were sorting out our journeys last night: the plan is to fly to Köln and take trains on from there, which is mysteriously a lot cheaper, and as on previous occasions, Deutsche Bahn was no trouble at all, nay, lucid and informative. Then there was the little question of Innsbruck to Trieste. Now, there is a good way of doing this, but Deutsche Bahn doesn’t admit to it – the Munich-to-Venice Intercity 86 which seems in some bizarre fashion to do its business by stealth. The Professor got there in the end, via the Trenitalia website, but compared to the Deutsche Bahn, it had a certain Alice in Wonderland quality. Not least because, though the train starts in Munich and traverses Austria before ending up in Venice, you can only pick up your ticket from a designated ticket machine, in Italy. Fortunately the railway station at Innsbrück are all that is helpful, so we will get them to sort this snafu out for us, but really, it makes you wonder.

Cast of Thousands

Today has been replete with incident, not to say, interventions from Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan'l Whiddon, Harry Hawke, and Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all. At quarter to eight, someone rang up –  à propos of a singularly bad mannered driver who swooshed past on loose chippings at 50 miles an hour yesterday, and threw up a pebble which made a hole in the windscreen – a bloke retained by our insurance company looking for directions, who was proposing to turn up and fix it with some kind of magic polymer. We were subsiding dozily once more, when fifteen minutes, later someone else turned up from the insurance to check if the first guy had been in touch. Ten minutes after that,  a general suspicion of heavy machinery suggested that clearing off the lawn had been resumed, and that we might as well get up.  Half way through the morning, our plumber’s A team appeared, much to our relief (the middle aged, competent ones, not the laddies with the heavy tattoos) and began looking into the water situation. Shortly after, so did the windscreen man who had meanwhile driven from Dundee. Then someone else entirely turned up to clean the windows – which, fortunately, is achieved using water he brings with him using a sort of pressure hose system. The digger driver, meanwhile, was roaring to and fro methodically destroying the lawn. The dog was in seventh heaven, since all of them in turn said, 1) ‘I see you’, 2) ‘what are you saying?’, and 3), ‘are you smelling my doggie?’, all of which adds up to labradoric bliss even without the surreptitious handouts which so frequently follow upon these ritual utterances. Then Tony turned up to clean the house, which the continued absence of a water supply made just a bit complicated; however, there are such things as hoovers and irons in the world so he was persuaded to get on with stuff even if he could not pursue the regular sequence by which he sets store. Meanwhile, the plumbers reappeared from distant explorations, with a complex narrative about silt, and investigated our UV water filter. This is the inmost layer of defence after the settling tanks, and it turned out to bear a distressing resemblance to an elephant sized used teabag (though I do assure sensitive readers that the UV treatment, which is actually the important bit, is not thereby rendered ineffective). However, clearly it had been copping a good deal more fine silt that it was designed for, and so we rushed off into town to get a replacement. I don’t like to be too definite but they have all gone away, we do seem to have water, and both the hot and cold tanks are full. Jolly, jolly, jolly, good.

And then some other stuff

We were just quietly rejoicing in being home, nothing much going on, etcetera, when the water supply went pear shaped. There is some fluctuation in the supply coming into the house, a topic on which I am not inclined to venture an opinion, which in the course of yesterday night actually dwindled to zero. Just at the moment, we have water where it comes into the house, the kitchen sink, and there is currently no water in either the cold or hot water tanks, and because we had to go into the university today, it’s not been that easy to get people to the house and doing the right thing – we did think we had got someone in place in case the plumber arrived before us, but as is more or less inevitable, this went wrong, there was a gap in coverage, and the plumber duly arrived in it, as they do. Meanwhile, out in the garden, we have had a cheery chap with a digger removing the lawn: he’s two thirds of the way there and there is a ten foot high pile of moss with occasional fragments of grass, which will all become compost, or something. It looks like death, and all in all, this is not country life at its most glorious. We are promised a plumber tomorrow morning. On the other hand, though, my utterly beautiful blue iris has come out – it’s a fine deep blue iris sibirica with a silver edge to the petals, which I’ve forgotten the name of. Not in itself the answer to our problems, but definitely something in the other pan of the scales, as it were.