Quite a memorable concert last night of a long-established choir, nearly all men, from Bellagio singing Italian folk songs in the Anglican Church of the Ascension in Cadenabbia, mostly dating from the wars which were obviously a feature of this heavily contested area, including the 1848 War of Independence and the partisans of the Second World War. Strangely moving.

We had lunch high above Lake Como, on the hills above Lenno:-

There were five-hundred year old olive trees:-

I did not know that the Villa Carlotta on Lake Como, very close to where I am staying, contains one of the great collections of work by neoclassical sculpture.

The Marble Room on the ground floor is dominated by Venus and Mars by Luigi Acquisti:-

The frieze by Thorvaldsen.

Next door is the Muse Terpsichore by Canova (1811):-

In a small room, there is a large collection of cameos. Opposite is a room dominated by Canova’s Palamedes (1803-1808):-

Then on the opposite side is Cupid and Psyche, an early copy done in the 1830s:-

The whole place is remarkably well preserved, thanks to Giovanni Battusta Sommariva, a politician and collector, and the fact that it was taken over by a foundation in 1927:-

I was pleased to see Rowan Moore’s long and complimentary review of the new Tower Hamlets Town Hall in yesterday’s Observer: he, like me, admires the way it combines the characteristics of the old hospital building with the new requirements of local democracy. Façadism generally has a bad name, but on this occasion feels a sensible re-use of so much of what was there before:-

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/apr/23/tower-hamlets-town-hall-review-an-old-hospital-immaculately-stitched-up?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I have never previously been to Lake Como, a long pencil-thin lake surrounded by mountains, stretching up to the Alps and running parallel to the southern part of Switzerland. It was beloved of nineteenth-century travellers and so is surrounded by late nineteenth-century villas and palazzi.

So, I woke up this morning with a view across the lake to Bellagio:-

And a distant view of the mountains beyond:-

I’m very sorry to read of the death of John Newman, the architectural historian and former Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute (1989 to 1994).   When I was doing a PhD. at the Warburg, I was encouraged to take Newman’s classes at the Courtauld which were a very good discipline.   He had been a school teacher at Tonbridge School and remained, in some ways, a school teacher – very precise, scholarly, intellectually broad ranging, unpretentious.  He had been Pevsner’s driver as a mature student and went on to do the two volumes of Kent, not once, but twice, models of their kind.  I liked him and owe him a debt of gratitude.

I have never previously seen the Roubiliac statue of Isaac Newton in the ante-chapel at Trinity, as grand a piece of commemorative sculpture as I’ve seen. Newton had died in 1727, so it is long posthumous, a deeply impressive piece of memorialisation, conveying all of Newton’s intellectual authority, not least by its placing:-

I went to the memorial service for Duncan Robinson at Great St. Mary’s.

What came across was how much he managed to do. While an Assistant Keeper, then Keeper at the Fitzwilliam, he taught a course on early Italian painting, wrote a book about Stanley Spencer, served on the Arts Council, wrote a catalogue about Morris and Company in Cambridge and was Director of Studies at his old college, Clare. At Yale, he obviously entertained a host of people while director of the Yale Center for British Art and, incidentally, saved me from death from cerebral meningitis. Then, coming back to the Fitzwilliam, he managed to do a double act as Master of Magdalene, something only M.R. James has done before him, whilst still teaching and doing a great deal of entertaining. He did it all with apparent ease, combining hospitality with administration.

Anyway, Cambridge gave him a good send-off, including an exhibition about his life and work in the new gallery in Magdalene, which he sadly never saw.

Just to clarify my previous post.

After looking at the plans for developing the station, I went outside to look at the reality of its impact.

These, strangely, are the 1980s, heritage additions which would be totally swept away:-

This is the Victorian hotel. Everything which is blue in the photograph would be filled by a brand new tower block built on top of, not adjacent to, a historic listed building:-