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.