MikePadgett.com

At the National Gallery

— London's National Gallery is free and packed with masterpieces. Almost makes me wish I lived or worked nearby. Almost.”

J and I have threatened to visit the National Gallery (and London galleries in general) for some time now, missing out on Hopper and Lempicka into the unfortunate bargain.

Finally, after such an uncharacteristically prolonged prevarication, or perhaps just laziness, we made it last Saturday, accompanied by J’s sister, and it was certainly worth an hour on the train with an unruly child kicking the back of your seat.

The National Gallery was not as large as I expected but that was a definite plus. We tended to avoid the middle sections that included Romanticism, Baroque and Rococo. At present there is a special exhibition dedicated to Peter Paul Rubens, but as with our last trip to the Royal Fine Arts Museums in Brussels, I still find all the swirling decoration of the Baroque style unpalatable.

The NG’s Quattrocento and High Renaissance collection is excellent. Early on in your wanderings through the western wings, you cannot help but be bowled over by Leonardo’s extraordinary Virgin and Child with St Anne. Perhaps the very fact that it has never been finished lends it such allure. St Anne’s face is truly luminescent.

Of the many highlights to be found deeper into the western wings, Agnolo di Cosimo’s (known as Il Bronzino) marvellous, allegorical “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” (shown below) strikes a particular resonance now a few days later. Angular, busy and beautifully coloured, the painting has a charm that few paintings surpass.

I had been looking forward to the Gallery’s one half of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, a work that was truly seminal in its efforts to render perspective and immerse the viewer in the climactic battle between the Florence, its enemy Lucca and the latter’s allies. It did not disappoint, and the scale of the painting is awesome.

Other paintings I could now happily see in life rather than the pages of a book included Bellini’s “Doge Loredan”, Antonello da Messina’s “Saint Jerome In His Study”, Dieric Bouts’ “Portrait Of A Man”, Canaletto’s “The Stonemason’s Yard”, “Sunflowers” by Van Gogh, Caravaggio’s “Supper at Emmaus”, Van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Marriage”, Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” with the weird skull, and “Portrait of a Young Woman” by Rogier Van Der Weyden.

These were just a few, of course, that we enjoyed during a great day on the whole.