by The National Gallery in London is 200 years old on Friday, but what makes it so special? Founded in 1824 when public fine art museums were in their infancy, it differed from rivals such as the Louvre (founded 1793) and the Prado (1819) because they inherited royal collections. In contrast, the National started from scratch and has deliberately built up the world’s most systematic corpus of European paintings. In that same thoughtful spirit, the gallery and the Guardian have set out a timeline of 20 masterpieces. Here are five of them to take you on a journey through 600 years of insight, sensitivity and genius.
A young woman sits on a cushion on the floor, her back against a chest, head in a book. Every detail is so relevant, from the silk and fur of her clothes to the way her nappy eyes focus completely on the illuminated manuscript. She could be studying in a cafe, narrowed eyes against the blaring modern world. But this was painted almost 600 years ago in medieval Europe without much science, technology or geography. Christianity shaped that Europe and is the heart of this painting.
Of course, it’s the Bible she’s reading. And she is no ordinary woman but Mary Magdalene, who was imagined in the middle ages as a reformed sex worker who followed Christ and was among his mourners. Next to her is the pot of ointment with which she anointed his feet. This character, which is worldly and spiritual, helped the medieval church to attract ordinary people, especially women. And Van der Weyden’s realism increases that presence. The technical skill with which he paints the visible world was unheard of only a few years before. Suddenly, in the 1430s, Flemish artists began creating mirror oil paintings of real people in real space.
You might think he would be happy to show off his miraculous skills. Instead he uses them to go on the invisible and inward. Reading religious texts was a way of cultivating private devotion in 15th century Europe. Communities of religious minds, known as Beguines, grew up in northern towns and were sometimes regarded with suspicion. Van der Weyden lets us see this woman’s eyes moving beyond the words, but her thoughts are a secret between her and God.
The 16th-century art chronicler Giorgio Vasari tells how people queued outside a church in Florence to see an unfinished work by Leonardo da Vinci even though it was only a “cartoon”, a full-size sketch on joined sheets of carton paper. Typically, he never finished the painting. This may be what they saw. It is Leonardo’s only surviving cartoon, and the only attraction on permanent view among the National Gallery’s 2,600-plus paintings.
Could it be a portal into his psychological secrets? Sigmund Freud thought that the two women were like a combined double mother. Born in Vinci, Tuscany, in 1452, Leonardo grew up with a stepmother and it is difficult to say whether he even knew his unmarried birth mother, Caterina di Meo Lippi. Whatever you think of Freud, it’s quite right that the intertwining forms of Mary and her mother, Anne, whose head seems to be floating from Mary’s shoulder, have a frank quality.
It is strange, too, that Áine has deep, hollow eyes like a death’s skull. This could be interpreted theologically, as foreknowledge of the fate of the death of the infant Christ. But in the Leonardo painting in the Louvre with which she is closely related, Anne smiles. Would Leonardo have moved her if he had finished this painting? It is typical of the greater freedom he takes in his drawings, where he can experiment with wild ideas. His imagination flowing smoothly in every soft line of smoke makes this one of the most hypnotic masterpieces in the National Gallery – or anywhere in the world.
We are used to the idea of royal portraits. But the Venetian republic, a city-state that lasted more than a millennium, had no monarchs. Instead, he had chosen a dog that was supposed to be a symbol of the community as Leonardo Loredan does so well here. He is in Venice. This enduring polity liked to call itself “La Serenissima” and features don’t come much calmer than those of Loredan.
The slightest smile excites her golden flesh, warmed by the sun from an open window, while he still keeps his bright eyes to watch Bellini: you get a powerful sense here of someone pretending to be himself even though Loredan’s position is as relaxed as so undramatic. He seems completely at ease with himself inside his sensitive old skin. Bellini embraces every wrinkle: age is shown here in such a senior political figure as strength, a mature wisdom about him.
It’s a shame Joe Biden can’t hire Bellini. Although modern US presidents rarely succeed in uniting the entire nation, Loredan is associated with Venice and its commercial dominance of the Mediterranean world. He wears a glittering top with a floral pattern influenced by the Ottoman Empire. Loredan’s clothing, including her curvy doge hat, reflects the comfort Venice derived from its eastern trade over the centuries. La Serenissima’s wealth and stability will continue, this portrait assumes, for thousands of years.
A woman reflects herself in a tall mirror – in French called a psyche. Is she looking into his psyche? Or is she judging the social face she has to present to the world? In the watery pool of her reflected face we see the gap between a 19th century woman’s true self and the control of her public image. As the novelist George Eliot said at the time he painted this, “the human mind is so much neater than the external tissues that make it a sort of blazon or clock face”.
This is one of the National Gallery’s newest acquisitions, bought this year as part of its anniversary celebrations. But this is not the first appearance here of Eva Gonzalès, who also stars in a portrait by her teacher Edouard Manet dedicated in 1917 (jointly owned by the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin).
Gonzalès trusts the truth in this quiet and inspiring picture. One thing she seems to have shared with Manet was a passion for the 17th-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, whose ironic realism both emulated. Gonzalès is squaring up to Velázquez here. As French art sought to capture the ambiguities of modern life in the late 1800s, painters were struck by the cool, sophisticated way this master summed up the entire social world of imperial Spain. If you want to see the link you can do so at the National Gallery, as this woman studying herself in the mirror has the same fractured identity as Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, which gazes grimly at looking glass.
Modern art, one might say, began with this flowering tree. In 1888 Vincent van Gogh, an unemployed, self-taught artist in his mid-30s, got off a train in Arles, France. He was raptured. The intensity of the Provençal sunlight and the brightness of its fruits and flowers filled him with joy and hope. He rented a small house and believed that it could be a consideration for artists to work together in harmony and shared social beliefs. But faith in what? Art, God, utopia? These sunflowers express his ideal, in its immensity and desperation.
Van Gogh painted a series of Sunflowers to decorate the Yellow House while he was waiting for Paul Gauguin, the first – and only other – artist to persuade him to join. The National Gallery has the largest one. It is the ecstatic release of a person who feels that they have finally found a purpose. The bold signature of Vincent’s first name in blue on the rustic vase shows complete unity with this painting, his sense of finally putting his most wonderful self on canvas. Vincent’s emotions cannot be separated from his brushstrokes. Objective reality is different here: the precise representation of the material world that dominated European art from the room of Rogier van der Weyden to the mirror of Eva Gonzalès has given way to the fusion between the self and the world.
Of course, sunflowers look like this, don’t they? No, they are not made of paint, like Van Gogh’s burning flowers. Each yellow and brown detail is a statement of artistic freedom and independence due to deeply dug folds and ridges and tufts of color. I am these sunflowers, I am these sunflowers. Knowing how it ended, we can not notice that the flowers are not fresh enough. Their wilting curls in the Mediterranean heat seem to be disappearing; the great false centers are melancholic signs that Jerusalem will not be built here after all.
