Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
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Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
It was discouraging to find, two weeks after Terence Hodgkinson's death on 4th October, that the man often described as 'the best director the V. & A. never had' was accorded precisely two lines in the newly-published official history of that museum.' Terence, whose modesty was legendary, would not have been in the least surprised. In later years he used to say with only a hint of regret that he supposed his name was by now completely forgotten in South Kensington. How untrue that was. Fortunately a clutch of well- informed and affectionate obituaries have recorded his achieve- ments.2 THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE is only one of a host of British institutions to have its own particular reasons to be grateful to him for his selfless sense of duty, sagacity, far-sightedness, kindness and unerring grasp of principle.
St Mary Peribleptos was one of the most celebrated monasteries of Byzantine Constantinople.1 Its grandeur was referred to by Russian, Armenian and western European travellers alike, and it has recently been termed 'the greatest building effort of the Middle Byzantine period in ecclesiastical architecture'.2 The potential importance of this church to the history of art and architecture has often been stressed,3 but it was long believed to be irretrievably lost.
One of Boris Anrep's mosaics in the north vestibule of the National Gallery in London depicts T.S. Eliot contemplating Einstein's famous mathematical formula e=mc2 (Fig. 12). The ancient medium in which Anrep chose to depict the alliance of modern poetry and modern science provides an appropriate emblem for the early twentieth-century fascination with Byzantine art.' Eliot's own work contains just one reference to Byzantium. It occurs in the poem of 1920 in French, 'Lune de Miel', in which two unhappy and uncomfortable newlyweds pass through Ravenna. Eliot contrasts the couple with the Byzantine figure of St Apollinaris - stiff and ascetic ('raide et ascetique') who is walled up in the crumbling stones ('pierres ecroulantes') of his church, 'which still holds . . . the precise form of Byzantium' ('tient encore... la forme precise de Byzance'),2 and in a rapid series of sharp images Eliot contrasts the fretful irritations of daily life with the cool, austere 'geometric' art of Byzantium.
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