Catholicism
Marina Vaizey
The second instalment of this three-part series on the history of Spain (from the BBC in collaboration with the Open University) told a tale that is probably still relatively unfamiliar in the Anglophone world. That’s despite the fact that one of its star turns was the financing by that fervently religious 15th century Iberian power couple, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, of the legendary voyage of Christopher Columbus. Their own relationship was dramatic, too: the young, ambitious and highly intelligent teenage Isabella had turned down no fewer than seven aristocratic aspirants Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Helen Edmundson’s The Heresy of Love may be set in 17th century Mexico and follow the conflict between strict religion and personal development, but its theme of a woman denied her voice by a surrounding male hierarchy retains real contemporary relevance. First staged at the RSC three years ago, the dramatic strengths of the work shine through in this new Globe production, which reminds us most of all of Edmundson’s confident craft and limberness of language.Her subject is the life of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (Naomi Frederick, excellent), one of the first major writers of the Spanish- Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The St Luke Passion I heard last night was my second sung Passion of the day. The first was in a parish church as a central part of the liturgy of the day on Good Friday: nothing too fancy, as befits an amateur choir, the words of St John as set by Victoria amid shining plainsong. We stood for the 30-odd minutes it took to sing, dropping briefly to our knees at the moment of the Lord's death. The St Luke Passion was on a different scale: in the majestic space of King's College Chapel, performed by full orchestra and three choirs, and packed out with the massed Great and Good of Cambridge, who Read more ...
fisun.guner
This is work that wears its heart on its sleeve. That’s what gets you in the end in this big retrospective of the work of Niki de Saint Phalle. The French-American artist, who died aged 71 in 2002, is probably best known for two very different bodies of work: her Shooting paintings, the series of collaborative performances in which she and others blasted paint-filled polythene pouches with a rifle, creating chance-based abstract paintings as the sacs burst over the white-plastered canvases they were attached to; and her exuberant Nanas, a nimble, tippy-toed troupe of gargantuan women, fat- Read more ...
Florence Hallett
What does it mean to be a great artist? Is it enough for your work to be admired, studied, emulated and quoted by contemporaries and subsequent generations, or is the value of art judged by a more complex set of criteria? By considering the extent of Rubens’ influence on artists from Rembrandt to Klimt, the Royal Academy is having a go at skinning a very old and troublesome cat: the elevation of Rubens from gifted confectioner to worthy Old Master.In examining why Rubens should be given a place at art’s top table his work is explored thematically and compared with paintings, prints and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The ebullient presenter, writer and director Waldemar Januszczak opens his enthusiastic and proselytising hour-long film on Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) by reading out a series of disparaging quotes from other artists. William Blake thought Rubens’s shadows looked like excrement, that Rubens was a fool and his paintings were slobberings. Picasso thought Rubens was gifted but unusually nasty, whilst Thomas Eakins also thought him the nastiest painter, and Byron referred to his infernal glare of colours. Januszczak can even be pretty disparaging himself, discussing Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Written in the 16th century, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists continues to underpin our understanding of the Renaissance, and its author is blamed, often with some justification, for a multitude of art historical anomalies. But there can be little doubt that Vasari’s omission of Giovanni Battista Moroni, a fine painter of portraits and religious subjects, has been instrumental in the disappearance of this artist from the Renaissance halls of fame.Celebrated in his own lifetime, Moroni’s reputation dwindled after his death but revived in the 19th century, when his work was collected Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Gay cinema in Poland is emerging slowly, for understandable reasons, which makes Malgoska Szumowska’s accomplished, if somewhat traditional drama In the Name of something of a ground-breaker. Not least because its story is centred around the country’s most established institution, the Catholic church, putting the subject of homosexuality squarely into the national debate. Interestingly, and encouragingly, the film topped local box office results for its opening weekend last autumn.It has a very different setting from the more sophisticated urban milieu of last year’s other gay film from Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In Irish mythology, a stray sod is an enchanted piece of grass that, if stepped on, leaves a person feeling disorientated and lost, even in familiar surroundings. Although there's no reference to this in Tommy Tiernan's new show, Stray Sod, there's plenty of self-knowing stage Irishness – even, briefly, Oirishness – as he delivers a riveting 80 minutes of comedy that's a sort of state-of-the-nation address about his home country.Tiernan won the 1998 Perrier (now Edinburgh Comedy) award in 1998 for an intricately woven and beautifully delivered tale based on his Irish Catholic childhood; Read more ...
Nick Hasted
What goes on in some homes would scare the sturdiest horse. Take Anna (Maria Hofstatter), whose daily routine might strike some serial killers as pathological. Semi-naked self-flagellation and circuiting the house on bleeding knees is the least of it. “Sexual wildness destroys”, a kitchen homily reminds a woman whose desires are buried in punishing Catholicism. But when paraplegic Muslim husband Nabil (Nabil Saleh, pictured below with Hofstatter) reappears demanding his conjugal rights, anyone’s faith would shake.Paradise: Faith is the middle film of a trilogy by Austrian director Ulrich Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Early on in Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene, John le Carré remembers Greene telling him that childhood provides “the bank balance of the writer”. Greene remained in credit on that inspiration front throughout his life, even while he struggled financially in his early writing days with a young family; later in life, too, he lost everything to a swindling financial adviser – the move to France was to avoid the Revenue.Greene went to Berkhamstead School, where his father was headmaster, and was bullied, not least for the assumption that he was a spy for paternal authority (the spy Read more ...
David Nice
"You know that I am as sincere in my faith, without any messianic screamings, as I am in my Parisian sexuality," declared Francis Poulenc, who died 50 years ago this January at one with his God and his cheerful, not exclusively but mainly gay, promiscuity. Alas, the Revd Richard Coles and Anne Atkins, nearly scuppering all the joy of the CLS's mini-festival finale in a “discussion” before the concert proper had even begun, didn't seem to know at all .Having proposed some sort of imaginary tussle between God and sex for the soul of our lovable Frenchman, the two went off at a waffly, self- Read more ...