How could Diana’s sons allow this awful effigy?
IT’S easy knowing that Princess Diana was blessed with sons rather than daughters. For there’s no way that a woman, let alone a loving daughter, would sanction the pathetic excuse of a likeness that after four years of anticipation has just been put on public display in Kensington Palace. Apart from the look of grim resolve, utterly alien to Princess Diana, that is etched in the bronze face, the frumpy, short-waisted and middle-aged figure is completely wrong.
Diana was long, lean and svelte and only 36 when she died. And if we know anything at all about the troubled princess it’s that even had she lived to 100, or as old as she is depicted in the statue, she’d have gone to her grave as a size zero because aside from her humanitarian work, nothing was more important to her than staying in shape.
The paparazzi followed her every day to the gym for shots of her in Lycra shorts and trainers while, as a devotee of the colonic irrigation fad, she showed her determination not to carry one ounce of material more than was strictly necessary.
Once the ink was dry on her divorce, she was determined to show off her washboard stomach and innate elegance in a series of figure-hugging dresses that left little to the imagination.
ASTATUE of her arrival at the Serpentine gallery on the night Prince Charles confessed on television that he had been unfaithful, in her iconic ‘revenge dress’, would be more in keeping with her megawatt charisma than this awful effigy of a woman in ugly shoes with an oversized belt accentuating her thick waist.
And what’s with the three children around her instead of representing the two sons who were the apple of her eye?
Diana famously fancied herself as the queen of people’s hearts, not Mother Courage, let alone a female pied piper of Hamlyn.
Perhaps it’s just as well that Kate Middleton wasn’t in attendance for the unveiling lest she emit a shriek of horror at the towering monstrosity that is meant to depict her mother-in-law. Or unleash a stern ticking off to Princes Harry and William for being too absorbed in their sibling rivalry to notice how their gym bunny mother was betrayed.
But there was not a whimper of protest from the Spencer clan either. True, appearances don’t seem to be on the radar of these stinking rich aristocrats who possibly feel that looking nice is for the common people.
Diana’s sisters, Jane and Sarah, were never exactly oil paintings, but the former looked as if she was caught pruning the roses in the conservatory when her London lift arrived, while flatfooted Sarah had a plaid coat thrown over her shoulders as if she was off to milk the cows.
Their brother, Charles Spencer, is now well on his way to acquiring his late father’s bulbous eyes, plumpness and florid complexion. Alive or dead, it has to be said
that time has not been kind to the Spencers.
The fiasco highlights a problem with classical statues, which is that while sculptors can make slave owners and colonisers who raped, murdered and pillaged indigenous people across the globe look noble and commanding, representing the softer more empathetic side of humanity is often beyond them.
THE bronze likeness of Ronaldo at Madeira airport was branded as ‘horrifying’ while the effigy of the late Terry Wogan in Limerick captured nothing of his twinkling wit and affability and led to calls that it be melted and recast. Knowing this, perhaps the attempt to represent Diana’s compassion and maternal spirit was bound to backfire and the artist would have had more success capturing her as a modern-day Joan of Arc, a brave and resolute figure who stood in visor and flak jacket about to traverse a minefield in her crusade against them.
Diana the campaigner, fist metaphorically in the air, may lack credibility but it may be a better fit for classical bronze statuary than the complex mixture of vulnerability and strength that characterised her.