A brush with the Old Masters
For her new show in Tuscany, Emma Sergeant was inspired by Leonardo, Stubbs and the Palio, the Siena horse race
Iwas on my knees, my nose four inches away from The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting was about to appear in the great Leonardo da Vinci show curated by Luke Syson at the National Gallery in London in 2011. The competition with the other pictures would be stiff and the National Gallery’s Leonardo had to look its best. The light from the skylights at the top of the museum was unforgiving.
What interested me were the contours of paint underneath the finished surface. Had he changed his mind? Had he worked and reworked the picture, trying to create the perfect tension between Mother Mary, Jesus, Saint John and an angel? I saw ridges of paint indicating abandoned versions of Mother Mary’s outstretched hand. I felt relief that such a great master and I had something in common, even if it were only vacillation.
The same cannot be said about Whistlejacket by George Stubbs, painted in 1762. When I was a child on walks with my parents, we used to stop and peer through the orangery windows of Kenwood House and look at this extraordinary painting of a rearing horse.
When I started drawing and painting horses from life and from my imagination, I went to look again at Stubbs’s masterpiece.
Close inspection of the background colour shows that it is undisturbed by the reworking of the rearing horse. Stubbs must have painted from his imagination, armed only with his knowledge of anatomy and the understanding of the soul of the horse. I felt humbled.
Modern masters such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach court indecision. Their style depends on reworking observations from life. I am part of this tradition. There are few feelings more liberating than to turn the picture upside down and start again. The seductive texture of the previous attempt
beckons and the addiction to palimpsest begins.
I have always been fascinated by Uccello’s painting The Counterattack of Micheletto da Cotignola at the Battle of San Romano in the Louvre. At the centre of the picture is Micheletto, the soldier who fought for the Florentines against the Sienese at the Battle of San Romano, outside Florence, in 1432. His face is fine-featured and sensitive. His snarling, black horse reveals the true menace of Micheletto. Rider and horse are caught in a decorative web of lances and armour.
The human drama of the battle lives in a few details, a pair of eyes seen through a knight’s visor, an equerry looking down while he adjusts a stirrup, a bugler and a profile of a foot soldier shouting as he runs behind the knights who are charging with their lances down. The sense of pattern from the lances, shields, stockinged legs and horse livery is bold and oriental in the use of red and gold. Every time I see this painting, I feel dark and muddled, as was once said of my work.
When Michelangelo was little more than 21, he carved a pietà, which stands in St Peter’s, in Rome. It is so lifelike, but also full of loss and love. When I was 21, I painted – to quote the late Brian Sewell – ‘an extremely dark and muddled composition’. It won the National Portrait Gallery portrait painting prize.
I painted this triptych at the Slade in an experimental mood. It was the first time I had prepared my own gesso (a white paint mixture). Bert and George in the Slade’s craft rooms made the panels.
That joy of painting on my gesso must be similar to what a skier feels gliding down virgin snow. I had no thought of composition, nor was I inhibited by the ghosts of my Renaissance masters. After nearly two years and endless reworking, the painting resolved itself. This picture took me from student to professional artist. Perhaps I should have planned more and painted less. But this is where I follow the Auerbach school, and let the image develop a life of its own.
Not that I am a modernist, as the artist Michael Craig-martin can testify. He had the misfortune to be sitting next to me some years ago. He said, ‘Isn’t it marvellous that the boundaries of art have been blown wide open?’
No, was what I thought. Sadly, the art establishment still likes low-skill anarchy and the pursuit of revolution continues.
Art must capture the magic and tragedy of being human; it must touch the spirit. That’s what I see happening when I look at some of the great works of art like the Lascaux cave paintings, the lion hunt from Ashurbanipal’s palace or Freud’s portrait of Auerbach.
In August 2015, a friend, Nick Zoullas, invited me to Siena to see the Palio – the great Sienese horse race – and be inspired. The procession before the race is a living Uccello. The jockeys ( fantini) gallop bareback, in little more than silk pyjamas, around a sloping, shell-shaped square. It is difficult to watch and breathe at the same time.
Each of the seventeen contrade (districts) within Siena has its own heraldry and laws. They all have museums to display their costumes and Palio collection. The Tartuca Museum is a modern jewel designed by Andrea Milani. So I was extremely honoured when the Tartuca contrada asked me for a picture to hang in the museum.
I returned to London wondering what would be suitable for their collection. Leaning against my studio wall easel was an unfinished triptych which I had started six years previously. I was feeling increasingly ‘dark and muddled’, as the picture resisted my every attempt to finish it.
The panels had been prepared with layers of gesso and white-gold leaf. The first panel was the only one that I had resolved so far, with a rearing horse in profile. Thanks to the inspiration of the costumed parade before the Palio, I was inspired to finish the remaining panels. It was as if the triptych had known all along where its destiny lay.
Tartuca welcomed my triptych with a moving talk by Anita Valentini, a Florentine curator and art historian. She seemed to understand my work better than I did. Afterwards, a passing Englishwoman, unknown to me, put her head through the museum door and asked, ‘Emma Sergeant, what are you doing in Siena with this enormous picture?’ I think she would have been better off asking the triptych.
At the time, there was a mood in Siena to start a cultural festival that would bring activity to the city, other than the Palio mania. Tartuca took the initiative and booked me for its first contemporary show and my first retrospective exhibition, starting this month. There will also be a festival involving other museums and the music school. I hope that this is just the beginning of a long friendship with the inspiring and implacable people of Siena – and Italy, whose peerless art remains my touchstone.