I have discovered that the manor house we visited yesterday – not officially open to the public and at the end of a long track across fields – is called Sempre Noiva (‘forever new’) and is described by José Saramago in his Journey to Portugal as ‘a fine work of architecture, were it not so over-decorated with inauthentic decorations.   Despite all this, the building itself, dating from around 1500, sustains a sense of proportion resulting from the application of the golden mean to its central structure, a name the gilded youth who flocked there richly merited’:-

On the way back we stopped off at Nossa Senhora da Graça do Divor, a small village just off the main road to Arraiolos, with a sixteenth-century church:-

We stopped to photograph a lichen-covered gate:-

And a track flanked by stones:-

Before turning off down a mud track in search of a fourteenth-century manor house in the middle of fields:-

We were en route for Évora, the dusty, blue-and-white relic of Portugal’s sixteenth-century court, with its well-preserved, but largely reconstructed Roman temple:-

The cathedral has fine carved apostles on either side of the late Gothic portico:-

A good cloister:-

And a very elaborately decorated shrine to the Madonna in the nave:-

Nearby is the Convento de Lóios, now a pousada:-

But what we liked best were the strange, oversize, carved Continents perched on the façade of the Convento da Graça:-

Our first stop was a minuscule seventeenth-century chapel known as the Ante-capela de Nossa Senhora do Livramento on a dirt track off a minor road south of Montemor-o-Novo. It was constructed in such a way as to incorporate a prehistoric dolmen in its structure, as the Catholic church was keen to accommodate surviving monuments of ancient religions:-

The house is surrounded by small plantations of cork trees, which feel prehistoric and may indeed be old, since the life of a cork tree is apparently two hundred years, stripped of its bark every eight or nine years by highly skilled tiradors, working in pairs:-

Am very sad and sorry to hear the news of the death of Drue Heinz, one of the Royal Academy’s longest standing and most exceptionally generous Trustees; but she wasn’t only generous to the Royal Academy, but also to the National Portrait Gallery, which is where I first got to know her and where every year she hosted the Hawthornden Prize, whose choice of winner – conservative, literary – was close to her heart. And to the London Library and many other causes internationally. Every year she would ring up on my birthday. I thought she was immortal and she sometimes seemed it.

We woke up in the heart of the Alentejo, having driven through the cork trees north of Montemor-o-Novo and then down a long, long dusty track to where we are staying in a house more remote than I can remember apart from Transylvania, designed by Manuel Aires Mateus in a style of austere rustic modernism:-

As will be clear from the Comments section of the blog and previous entries, I have got interested in where Kenneth Clark got his ideas about Civilisation since so few are declared in the text.

He was certainly influenced by Burckhardt, whose The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy he read at Oxford as a counterpoint to Ruskin, who was a bigger influence on his prose style.

He was much influenced by Roger Fry, who he met in his twenties, became a friend, and whose Last Lectures he edited; but he was surely more influenced by Fry’s formalism than his attitude (never well developed) towards history.

He was definitely admiring of Aby Warburg, attended one of his lectures in Florence (but misrecorded its date), helped acquire his library for London, and who deeply influenced Clark’s writing of The Nude.

He acknowledges the influence of H.G. Wells.

I have no evidence that he had read Norbert Elias’s Über den Process der Zivilisation which was first published in 1939 and republished in 1969, but Clark was no fool and he would have consulted friends in Oxford in the writing of Civilisation who would have been familiar with Elias’s ideas, if only second hand.

In his opposition between ‘heroic will’ and what he regarded as the more effeminate aspects of Civilisation, I wonder if he was also influenced, if only subliminally, by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, which, like H.G. Wells’s Outline of History was so fashionable in the 1920s, even if Clark, like Gombrich rejected any form of intellectual determinism.

I will rely on Edward Chaney to correct me.

The final stages of a big capital project are exciting, if a bit nerve-racking.   Today, the first work of art has been hung in the basement vaults which turn out to be unexpectedly magnificent spaces, since we dug down in order to improve disabled access;  the trees have been planted in the courtyard between the two buildings and the cobbles are about to be laid;  the sun is shining in the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler galleries at the back of the building;  the Clore Learning Studio is nearly ready for action;  the gold lettering is being applied in the Dorfman Senate Room.    There is only six weeks to go to practical completion and maybe another two to the public opening.

One of the oddities of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation is that almost the only modern writer he mentions is – not Burkhardt, not Norbert Elias (both of whom may have influenced his views) – but H.G.Wells, who is referred to for a distinction between ‘communities of obedience and communities of will’: ‘he thought that the first produced the stable societies like Egypt and Mesopotamia, the original homes of civilisation, and the second produced the restless nomads of the north’ (p.127). The second reference is to the fact that the ‘aggressive, nomadic societies – what he called communities of will – Israel, Islam, the Protestant North, conceived their gods as male’ (p.143). The third time he reveals that he knew him: ‘I remember H.G. Wells, who was a kind of twentieth-century Voltaire, saying that he daren’t drive a car in France, because the temptation to drive over a priest would be too strong for him’ (p.209). He met Wells at Sybille Colefax’s in the early 1930s, but the reference is presumably to The Outline of History, which was published in 1920, when Clark would have been seventeen, intellectually impressionable and sitting his scholarship exams for Oxford, when Wells’ intellectual theorising presumbly left its imprint.