Caesar in Rome

Triumphs of Caesar: VII the Corselet Bearers  Andrea Mantegna, 1485-95

© Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace

My first encounter with  Mantegna's work was an engraving from his Triumphs of Caesar series, reproduced on the cover of an Italian exercise book in a department store in Rome in 1960.   In provincial England much of life was still utilitarian: everyday stationery and exercise books were undecorated, and notebooks had plain paper or card covers.   I was also amazed to buy my postage stamps over a formica counter printed with Italian Renaissance drawings,  and brought back these lovely laminated  notebooks with their art pictorial covers as souvenirs.   This one shows Trajan's column in Rome in the background, with its equestrian statue of Trajan on top, not as either Julius Caesar or Mantegna would have seen it, but as it would have appeared after Trajan's death in AD 117. Mantegna would have been recreating this view from historic accounts and surviving antique sculptures, for Trajan's statue disappeared before he was born. (It was replaced by a statue of St. Peter in 1587.)

These world famous paintings were bought by Charles I for the Royal Collection, along with other great Italian Renaissance works of art, in 1629, and their home has been at Hampton Court Palace since.  They are displayed separately from the other art treasures in the Palace, in triumphal sequence in the Orangery, and should not be missed.

The opsimathic reader

"That the Queen could readily switch from showbiz autobiography to the last days of a suicidal poet might seem incongruous and wanting in perception.  But, certainly in her early days, to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice.  For her, there was no such thing as an improving book.  Books were uncharted country and, to begin with at any rate, she made no distinctions between them.  With time came discrimination, but apart from the occasional word with Norman, nobody told her what to read, and what not.  Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath -- who were they?  Only by reading could she find out.  

It was a few weeks later that she looked up from her book and said to Norman: 'Do you know that I said you were my amanuensis?   Well, I've discovered what I am.   I am an opsimath.'

With the dictionary always to hand, Norman read out: 'Opsimath: one who learns only late in life.' "

The Uncommon Reader  Alan Bennett