Wow! The Antony Gormley view of the world
For a new book, Martin Gayford joined the British sculptor to seek out the greatest monuments on the planet
‘Look!” said Antony Gormley, “The splicing of the figures is genius! The female figure begins to look as if she belongs to the air, you begin to think maybe he’s just caught her as she was flying past!” We were in the middle of Florence on a bright spring afternoon, looking at The
Rape of the Sabine Women, an amazingly complex, convoluted 16th-century marble carving by Giambologna.
It stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi, to one side of the Piazza della Signoria, in a place that any visitor to the city will pass. I’d walked by this masterpiece many times, and glanced at it quite often, but I’d never seen it as I was then: through the eyes of a sculptor. That was the point of the exercise.
The conversation that Antony and I had that day was part of the preparation for the book we published this autumn:
Shaping the World. Many of the ideas that came to our minds as we stood in front of works by Michelangelo, Donatello, Ghiberti and Verrocchio (as well as Giambologna) found their way into the final text. The result isn’t a travel book – it’s more a two-person exploration of the history of art from the remotest eras of prehistory 2.5million years ago up to 2020. But it has much travel embedded in it.
A year or two before, we experienced another great work of modern sculpture together but, so to speak, at a distance. My wife Josephine and I were in Romania. The main idea of our trip was to visit the high meadows of the Carpathians in full early summer bloom – which were spectacular. But we noticed that while staying in Sibiu we were within reach, just, of Brancusi’s modernist monuments in the town of Targu Jiu.
These are high on the list of works that historians, artists and critics all mention but hardly anyone (in the British art world at least) has actually seen. Even when you are in Romania, they are a little inaccessible: it was a long drive, an 11-hour round trip, but well worth it.
The most celebrated of Brancusi’s masterpieces there is the Endless Column. It consists of 17 and a half repeated elements made of iron, rhomboid and chunky, suggestive of a crystal or a massive bead. They stretch up and up into the sky, the most important being the one at the top – the half – because it suggests the meaning of the whole.
It is a highly paradoxical thing: a solid three-dimensional representation of time. This is a sculpture of infinity. That’s one reason why, like a lot of good art, it’s hard to photograph. You get a picture of a long, thin object sticking up in the air. But the crucial point when you are standing near it is the way it soars up and up. In fact it’s a little under 100ft high, but its delicacy makes it seem much more.
As we stood beside it, the column appeared to be heading for outer space. In the end, Josephine made a short film of it on her phone, scanning upwards, which conveyed the experience better. I sent it to Antony, and a minute or two later he gave a oneword reply: “Wow!”
Together or separately, at one time or another, Antony and I have seen the majority of the monuments, carvings and castings we talk about (and would perhaps have managed to visit one or two more if the final stages of work hadn’t taken place during lock-down). The importance of standing in front of the thing itself, and for that matter walking around it, looking up at it or gazing down, all of these were part of our point.
The thing about sculpture, as opposed to a painting or other picture, is that it’s out in the world. Consciously or unconsciously, you measure your own scale against the size of the size of this thing, whether it is a human figure or an abstract form. In the case of the Endless
Column, it is very tall. In the case of the reclining Buddha at Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, it’s strikingly wide: almost 46ft.
The latter represents Buddha at the moment of entering Nirvana; that is, in mortal terms, dying. It was carved out of a natural outcrop of granite in the 12th century. And to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the material is the message – or part of it, at least. The swirling veins of granite, like ripples in water, have been revealed by wind and rain over time. This wasn’t what the makers intended, originally it would have been covered in paint and stucco and housed in a shrine, but it is beautiful.
Josephine and I saw it early in 2019, nearly 50 years after Antony had first seen it. It was listening to him talking about this amazing work – he describes it as “sublime” – and the impact it had had on him as a young person made me want to see it. The result was one of the most delightful journeys we have ever undertaken, a tour which took in not only Polonnaruwa but also the wonderful Buddhist city of Anuradhapura, strewn with stupas – some almost as large as the pyramids of Giza.
Antony has a highly unusual CV. After studying archaeology, anthropology and history of art at Cambridge, he set out on a four-year peregrination through India and Sri Lanka, spending lengthy periods in Buddhist monasteries. Then, concluding monkhood wasn’t for him, he came back to Britain and went to art school.
At this point, most career counsellors would have been in despair, but in fact Antony was following the right path: one just right for him and perhaps nobody else. Soon he became well-known, then famous and eminent, one of the most celebrated sculptors alive. His experiences of Eastern religion, and before that, Roman Catholicism followed by the avant-gardes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries all fed into the book.
My own, personal reason for undertaking the project was self-education. Actually, that’s usually the motive for writing a book. You hope other people will benefit from it, but at minimum you hope to learn something yourself.
After writing a biography of Michelangelo – and decades as an art critic – I felt I knew lots about Western sculpture, but was conscious that there was a whole world beyond – India, East Asia, Africa, the Americas – that I needed to explore. So as soon as the idea that became
Shaping the World was formed, Josephine and I set out on a series of trips: to Tamil Nadu and Japan as well as Sri Lanka and Romania. We travelled in time too, in search of early art; Burgundy for Romanesque carvings, to Brittany to see the standing stones of Carnac – which Antony, the perfect sculptural
‘Antony has the insights that only making such monuments yourself can give’
guru and writing-partner, insists we should think of as sculpture too.
He has the insights that only making such monuments yourself can give. For example, in the past both of us had made the astonishing journey up Mount Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro, to see Christ the Redeemer on the summit. To get there you travel up from Copacabana beach-level up though a zone of rainforest, before you stand at the feet of the colossal figure, created by Paul Maximilien Landowski in 1931.
At different times, we’d both done that, but Antony was in the almost unique position of having conceived something similar. “It does an amazing job, mainly achieved by siting,” he remarks in the book. “How many great conurbations have a 2,300ft peak rising from their centre?” He goes on: “I am prepared to forgive it its sentimentality because it does something for the whole city. It says: ‘We are open to the world, we know where we are going, we have confidence, we have protection’.” Then he makes a jump to one of his own bestknown creations: the Angel of the North
(1998) which towers above the A1 and the main London to Edinburgh railway tracks as they approach Gateshead.
Antony’s Angel, like the Rio Christ, has become the emblem for a huge, densely populated place. When in September and October lockdown measures were imposed on the North East and North West, more than one cartoonist used Gormley’s work as visual shorthand for the whole region. In just over 20 years it has come to stand for the entire North of England.
In our book he says: “I didn’t have Christ the Redeemer in mind when I was making the Angel of the North, but I think there is a connection: something in the arms spread out wide that is deeply paradoxical. It is about the Crucifixion, but it is also about acceptance. And therefore, in a way, about an openness to everything that happens.
“My pride in the Angel of the North is based on the fact it’s a totemic object for a community that had been told it had no future, no relevance anymore because of the end of coal mining and shipbuilding. Here was a figure that managed somehow to say, ‘hang on a minute’. We don’t make ships that plough the high seas, but we can make this thing that stands in space and declares our abilities and our confidence in our own future.”
As it happens, on a less far-flung journey to Northumberland and Hadrian’s Wall during the relative freedom of last summer, we passed the Angel, rising over the landscape in much the same way – though less imperiously – as the statue of Hadrian which was apparently once placed at the mouth of the Tyne.
What I’ve learnt from this collaboration is that what Antony does every day is part of a tradition that stretches back deep into the past, and extends to almost every inhabited part of the world. It has taken me on many journeys and, with luck, when the world opens up, there will be more to come.
We describe the remarkable prehistoric site of Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey, for example, a sort of Anatolian Stonehenge, but thousands of years older and with carvings of animals, insects and plants. Antony and I thought of going there, but its location was (and still is) close to a war zone. Maybe one day we’ll stand there in reality.