by It may be the most famous leg drop in modern screen history as he doubles down during the opening credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Now it has been revealed that his inspiration is a 16th century painting in the National Gallery.
“In the late sixties I would come to the gallery to steal ideas – some from paintings and by buying posters and memorabilia of characters I liked,” says Python member Terry Gilliam. “I then went home to create a really silly animation.”
In a documentary to celebrate the gallery’s 200th anniversary, which drops this weekend, Gilliam tells how Bronzino’s Allegory of Venus, Cupid and Folly created his descending bare foot. Gilliam, who later directed films including Brazil and 12 Monkeys, noticed Cupid and a dove in the lower corner of the painting.
“It looked like his foot was about to crush the unsuspecting bird. I thought it would make a nice punctuation – a sudden stop to what was going on. Cupid’s foot made it even better because it’s better than being crushed by love,” he told the Telegraph.
Gilliam is one of 16 people – some celebrities, others gallery employees including director Gabriele Finaldi and retail assistant Joshua Pell, and the general public – who talk about their favorite painting in My National Gallery, which will be released in about 300 cinemas since the first one. week of June.
Claudia Winkleman, presenter of Strictly Come Dancing, Traitors and The Piano, tells how her father, Barry, raised her as a teenager every weekend after his divorce from journalist Eve Pollard.
“So my love for art came from my wonderful father. But we would only look at one picture each visit and for about 40 minutes. We’ll come back there next week, and so on,” Winkleman said. She chooses Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, not because of its religious expression but because “it’s so humane. I also see it as something else in a hectic life.”
Princess Eugenie, the younger daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, has also gone for a religious work – the Madonna of the basket by Correggio. She refers to “the ethereal Madonna”. Eugenie, another Art History graduate like Winkleman, who now works in a Mayfair gallery, relates “a mother looking after her young child, struggling to wear her jacket. I recently had my second child and I know that feeling.”
Gilliam’s former colleague in Python, Michael Palin, perhaps unsurprisingly as a railway enthusiast, chooses Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed.
“It shows the birth of the railways,” says Palin, presenter of the BBC TV series Great Railway Journeys. “But Turner also represents the countryside, counterbalanced by the train. It’s a real story, where you feel that the New World will win.”
For children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson it was the Impressionists who first attracted her when she was raised by her father as a youngster.
“The Umbrellas by Renoir in particular. Such a joyful work. I have also known for a long time one young woman in the painting, who looks rather working and has red hair. Many years later I created Hetty Feather, who had the same social status.” The book was then made into an excellent television series.
Six of the 16 interviewees state that a parent or grandparent is a young person.
“It’s such a formative experience,” says Ali Ray, the film’s co-director. “It’s so much more that so many secondary schools are no longer educating their students, much less being able to study art history.”
For Peter Murphy, however, it was a visit to the National Gallery in the mid-50s that changed his life.
Born in Liverpool and now a piano teacher based in London, Murphy suffered a serious drink and drug problem in the 1990s and Noughties while working on Channel 4’s Eurotrash.
“Dealers would come into the office with heroin and crack cocaine,” says the now 69-year-old. Things got even worse after his mother died when he was 42 – a mother who took him away when her sister was born although she brought him back when he was four. “I felt worthless. I went mad. It also cost thousands a year.”
One day in 2009, after yet another visit to Narcotics Anonymous in Soho, Murphy entered the National Gallery. “I’ve been there before but this time I got drawn to a blue colored painting. It was Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow.
“Very quickly I was touched by the peace and tranquility of this Virgin and child. I am not religious although I was raised by a very strict Catholic father. When I saw the Madonna it made me think ‘Mummy’s house’.”
It was a Damascene moment. Murphy made the trip there every day for more than 12 months to see the painting. It helped him quit drinking and drugs. In the following years he went several times a week, and still does to this day, for the benefit of the picture to stay clean and sober.
“Painting gives me inner peace. And, thankfully, the gallery is free. I feel like I belong here. It’s my club. It is my National Gallery.”
