One of the less well-known activities of Richard Westmacott is that he and John Flaxman together with an assistant called William Pistell were responsible for the display of the Elgin Marbles during the period when they were stored in a ramshackle wooden hut next to the garden wall at the back of Burlington House, where they were housed in 1814 and 1815 after Lord Elgin had to sell his house on Park Lane.   It was here that they were considered for possible acquisition by the British government.   Elgin described how ‘Pistol the marble cutter in New Road near Fitzroy Square, brought them in safety from Piccadilly (Park Lane) to Burlington House;  and is much employed by Flaxman on such occasions’.

I have been gently taken to task by Mark Fisher for not knowing as much as I should about Richard Westmacott who was, of course, not just a major authority on ancient sculpture and advisor to the British Museum, but also a major neoclassical sculptor in his own right.   It’s true.   He was everywhere, designing church monuments, commissioned by the Committee of Taste, producing commemorative statues of Nelson, a huge statue of Achilles in Hyde Park, a statue of George III as Marcus Aurelius, the Duke of York in Waterloo Place, the Waterloo Vase, and, as Mark points out, the pediment sculpture of the British Museum on the progress of mankind to Civilisation.   But does this make him the neoclassical sculptor ?   Certainly a major one.

The prospect of being interviewed by Swiss Public Radio tomorrow about the life and significance of Angelica Kauffman has compelled me to find a bit more about her than I knew already.   What I hadn’t realised was what a huge celebrity she was from an early age across Europe.   The toast of Rome, a member of the academies in Florence, Bologna, Rome and Venice, musical as well as artistic, fluent in English, French, Italian and German, she was persuaded to come to London in 1766 by Lady Wentworth, the wife of the British resident in Venice.   In London, she was admired (maybe loved) by Reynolds, married a bigamist, elected one of the first RAs, and was one of the five artists selected to decorate the interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral.   She was a star !   And when she died, her funeral was organised by Canova and all of Rome turned out in procession.

On Friday night Otto and I went to Joyce DiDonato performing at the Barbican.   I didn’t know what to expect and was unprepared for the force of her voice and the magnificence of her stage presence singing Ravel’s Shéhérazade and then, by special request of the conductor, Alan Gilbert, an encore of Strauss’s Morgen.   It was impossible to match in the second half of the more conventional NYPO orchestra.

It was only on my return from Greece that I discovered, which I should probably have known, that the Royal Academy itself has casts of the Bassae Frieze.   Once the Frieze had arrived in the British Museum in 1815, the Academy commissioned a complete set of casts to be done by Richard Westmacott RA, a neoclassical sculptor who had studied at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, was a friend of Canova, and published An Account of the Arrangement of the Collection of Ancient Sculpture in the British Museum in 1808.   An active RA from when he first exhibited a bust of William Chambers in 1797, he believed that it was better for students to learn to draw from casts than the original.   So, whilst the originals were on display in Bloomsbury, students in the RA Schools would be taught to draw from copies in Somerset House on the Strand.

We had the memorial service today of Sir Philip Dowson, the oldest living former President of the Royal Academy who till recently would loyally attend all the formal occasions, particularly the annual dinner about which he had strong views.   I got to know him in the 1990s when I was Director of the National Portrait Gallery and he was ex officio one of my Trustees.   He would come to meetings, but, more importantly, he chaired the committee for the selection of an architect to design the Ondaatje Wing.   He did this with admirable acumen.   The anonymity of his work as Chief Architect in Arup Associates mean that his work is much less well known than younger big-name architects, but he would have disapproved of the cult of the individual creator.   Otto SS took me on a tour recently of postwar buildings in Cambridge and showed me, which I had never seen, the amazingly brutal zoomorphic structure of Dowson’s Zoology building.   He also did the library at Clare (where he had been an undergraduate) in the 1980s, inserted into Gilbert Scott’s Memorial Court, and the original Maltings at Snape.   It was a good service, with music by Mozart, Bach and Vaughan Williams, an address by Sir Jack Zunz, whose house Philip designed, and another by Norman Ackroyd, remembering that it was under Philip that Burlington Gardens was acquired.

Last night we had the annual Arts, Medicine and Society lecture organised jointly by the RA and the Royal College of Medicine and held at the latter.   It was given this year by Iain Hutchison, the charismatic surgeon in charge of facial reconstruction at the London Hospital, who twenty years or so ago started using the work of an artist, Mark Gilbert, to help patients (and the public) understand their facial disfigurement.  Gilbert’s work was first shown fifteen years ago at the National Portrait Gallery at the same time as the Mario Testino exhibition and has been travelling round the world ever since.   I found it very moving to be reminded of the immense dignity of the sitters, particularly Henry de Lotbinière, a barrister whose portrait demonstrates very clearly how the human spirit can rise above the circumstances of their affliction.

My first event back in London has been to attend the launch of a book by Paul Goldberger, the former architecture critic of the New York Times, about Norman Foster’s approach to building projects which has frequently involved the preservation of the old alongside the creation of the new (at Nîmes, the British Museum, the Reichstag, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston).   The launch was held – very appropriately – at the RA because the design of the Sackler Wing, which opened in 1991, was key to the practice’s approach to how to work within the organism of an historic building.   The answer was not to mimic, or be deferential, but be confident in the contribution of the new to the old.   This may now sound obvious, but at the time was very important in producing a change in attitude not just to old buildings – that they can, and should, evolve – but also to new buildings – that they exist in a continuum and should be treated with equivalent respect.