In this week’s TLS – a note from the Editor

There have been many great British art collectors, Angus Trumble writes in
this week’s TLS, but those seeking to discover exactly how many and how
great have often found obstacles in their path. Key-jangling housekeepers,
out-of-date inventories and minimal labelling all impeded those
investigating Britain’s collections in the centuries before public museums
opened our eyes to what was truly here. The story told in James
Stourton and Charles Sebag-Montefiore’s new book is as much about
shipping agents as it is about aesthetes. There was a lordly collector of
Van Dyck who owned “twelve whole-lengths, the two girls and six
half-lengths” without leaving any more information about what precisely
these paintings might have been and whether they genuinely were by Van Dyck.
There are many sad reminders of how much great art left Britain in the “sale
of the century” that followed the execution of Charles I.

In the four years in which Savonarola controlled Florence, any paintings that
depicted pagan scenes might be part of public fires, blazes of luxury goods
in city squares, perversions of the Italian carnival that were designed, as
Bernard Manzo explains, “to make anarchy itself subservient to Christ”. He
is reviewing Donald Weinstein’s “quizzical” biography of Savonarola, priest
of purity and penitence, a man who took on the Borgias, died in flames of
his own and left a legacy that is shared today among many shades of
Christianity and none.

Rooms in art galleries are normally rectangular. Peter Thonemann this week
cites a Soviet city planner who used to link private ownership to
right-angled walls and circular structures to Communism. Thonemann notes the
lack of angles in pastoral societies and the steep decline in British
roundhouses after the Roman invasion. But he is not sure that a preference
for round buildings reflects “a
fundamentally more egalitarian mindset”.

Stanley Weintraub describes how Bernard Shaw came to write less about art
galleries and, under the byline Corno di Bassetto, more about music.

Peter Stothard