Since it’s raining in Portugal, I thought I would check when it was that Aby Warburg gave the lecture that Kenneth Clark heard at the Biblioteca Hertziana (as Edward Chaney correctly said, in Rome, not Florence) which so changed his approach to art history. The answer is given in an article by Elizabeth Sears in an article in the Burlington Magazine on Clark’s correspondence with Gertrud Bing. It took place at five o’clock on Saturday 19th. January 1929 and lasted two hours. In a BBC broadcast in 1948, Clark described Warburg’s manner: ‘When he read a passage from Savonarola, one felt that one could hear the Frate’s high, thin, passionate voice ringing in the vaults of the Duomo; when he read a verse from Politian, his voice became courtly and fantastical’; and in one of his letters to Bing, he described how ‘the Warburg lecture did liberate me from the two chief influences of my youth – the ‘pure aesthetic sensation’ of Roger Fry & the attribution game’. This is presumably partly why (pace the Burlington Magazine’s current editorial), Clark’s approach to art in Civilisation was as much historical, including music, as conventionally art historical (and, equally, I don’t see why Schama’s training as a historian precludes him from having well developed critical and interpretative skills when writing, as he often has done, about art).

We went on a short expedition to the local winery at Monte da Ravasqueira, just north of Arraiolos, which has made me more interested in the pattern of land ownership in the Alentejo.   We were told yesterday that many of the big estates were broken up after the Revolution in 1974, but this obviously survived, complete with its well maintained outhouses, collection of carriages and shop selling their own label wine:-

We spent the afternoon in the late 1960s splendours of the Gulbenkian Museum, originally planned by Kenneth Clark at the back of the National Gallery, but lost to London because of hostility to Gulbenkian’s tax arrangements.

A bas-relief of Princess Merytites:-

An ebony funerary head:-

An ornamental New Kingdom spoon:-

The priest Ameneminet:-

A piece of Ottoman velvet from Bursa:-

A case of Mamluk glass bottles:-

And Iznik tiles:-

More velvet:-

On to medieval French ivories:-

And St. Catherine by Rogier van der Weyden:-

Carpaccio’s trees (evidence of Venetian multiculturalism):-

After all the talk of Civilisation(s), it’s a pleasure to see such a wide-ranging collection which demonstrates so clearly the cross-fertilisation of cultures across the medieval Middle East.

For those people who think that I should have bought Elvas plums (Ameixas d’Elvas) in Elvas, it looks as if they are easier to buy in Fortnum and Mason: a delicacy perfected by the nuns of the Alentejo, made from greengage plums, introduced to England alongside port and enjoyed by the Duke of Wellington at his banquets, the plums are apparently harvested in July and then cooked and soaked in vats of sugarcane spirit for six weeks before being packaged up in beautiful round wooden boxes as a Christmas treat. At least it will be easy for me to get a box when I’m back in England. I have a feeling that Leila sells them as well.

The more I read about Catherine of Braganza the more interesting she becomes: normally treated as dreary and uninteresting besides Charles’s many mistresses, as well as boringly pious, she brought her own Portuguese singer with her and employed Giovanni Sebenico, a Croatian composer, as Master of the Italian music of her chapel at St. James’s. When he left London in 1673, he was replaced by Giovanni Battista Draghi, who continued to work for her until her return to Portugal in 1692. These Italians apparently influenced Purcell, whose first trio sonatas were published as ‘a just imitation of the most Italian masters’. So, we owe her more than just tea and marmalade.

Close to the border with Spain and with a frontier castle, we visited Elvas.

The church of Santa Maria de Alcáçova, on the site of a mosque:-

The back of the church of the Dominicas, with its carved heads:-

The main square, facing on to the old Cathedral:-

And back streets full of coats-of-arms:-

We went to Vila Viçosa, the sixteenth-century palace built by the Dukes of Braganza, where Catherine of Braganza was born in 1638 and where she played blind man’s buff;  but the palace had no disabled access, so instead we explored the streets of the town:-

It is hard to convey how unspoilt this part of the Alto Alentejo is:  a large agricultural estate which has been preserved for generations without much change in the basic arboriculture by the Rodrigues family.   I keep remembering a comment by my old English teacher that we have lost the ability to hear silence, which means silence out to the distant horizon without aeroplane, car or machine, more unusual than one might think.   I don’t know if my photographs in any way convey it:-

Staying in the Alentejo has got me interested in relations between Catherine of Braganza and Charles II, who she married in 1661, leaving the great palace of Vila Viçosa, east of Estremoz, and bringing with her, according to the terms of her marriage treaty, 2 million cruzados (although this was never entirely paid), Tangier and Bombay. She set up court at St. James’s Palace, where a Catholic chapel was made available for her and, rather amazingly, established a convent known as The Friary in 1665 occupied by Portuguese Franciscans. In 1671, she moved her entourage to Somerset House and Charles II seems constantly to have considered the possibility of divorcing her, as many encouraged him to do, as she was both heirless and a Catholic. But he never quite got round to it. She attended him in his final illness, commissioning a bust of him after his death, and falling into ‘a profound depression and melancholy’, before returning to Portugal in 1692, where she was, for a short time before her own death in 1705, Regent.