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Köln and Bonn

— Thirtieth birthday treat: a weekend by train to two German cities and a marvellous art exhibition.”

For my thirtieth birthday, J had organised a surprise trip. This time, unlike so many others, she managed to keep the details a perfect secret for three whole months.

Köln (Cologne)

When work started in 1248 on the Kölner Dom – better known to anglophones as Cologne Cathedral – few of the craftspeople would have expected it to remain unfinished for over six centuries.

The thirteenth century was a high point for Gothic cathedral architecture. Laon had just been finished, Reims and Chartres were under reconstruction. Durham and Rouen were already half complete, Notre Dame de Paris and Strasbourg were well on the way and foundations were laid at Amiens.

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Köln and Bonn

I turned 30 and J managed to organise and then keep a special surprise secret for three whole months!

The Köln project however was destined to stall, like its contemporary at Beauvais and those of later periods at Valladolid, Sagrada Familia, St John the Divine.

Work progressed relatively smoothly for over two centuries until what appears to have been “a lack of money and interest” meant that tools were downed for almost four centuries.

The crane erected on the south tower, which appears in famous medieval paintings such as Memling’s Legend of St Ursula, could still be seen in the late 1800s, when massive civic fundraising saw the Dom finally completed, 632 years on.

Bonn

Local hero Konrad Adenauer was designated Mayor of Köln after the war in 1945. He was soon dismissed for alleged incompetence, though he later managed to run West Germany competently enough for fourteen years.

Under Adenauer’s leadership, West Germany rebuilt itself rapidly, eventually dominating the western European economic sphere. The Chancellor helped his own region, installing his government and civil service in Bonn to the surprise of many Germans.

Though Berlin is now once more the capital of reunified Germany, Bonn retains considerable government business and thus its starchy character.

A curious place, then, to find an extraordinary exhibition of paintings and drawings by the painter Amedeo Modigliani.

Source: modigliani-foundation.org

Questa specie d’amore

Modigliani, who verily personified the Candle That Burns Brightest, died poor, sick and largely unrecognised in 1920. This tragic Italian, ever aloof and dissipated by alcohol, left behind an huge number of works that have since been scattered across the globe.

And tragedy, left by the Greeks, enjoyed by the Romans and adopted by the Italians, is never far from the eyeless faces of Modigliani’s figures.

In his nudes, the undulating beauty of line accentuates a peachy softness in the shading of the cheeks, the hips and the breasts. In his figures, there is simplicity, piety and just a hint of priggishness.

His faces are rarely so carefree, never so relaxed. In them there is the animation of life itself: love, infatuation, fear, vulnerability: the myriad shades of thought and personality.

One of Modigliani’s models once said that the artists never asked for a particular pose: he would just paint what he saw.

And the artist, who distilled all his own emotions into his paintings, whose frenzied activity hastened his end, he surely saw everything.