Oliver Cromwell missed a trick. Instead of selling Charles I’s masterpieces,he should have nationalised themThe exhibition of Charles I’s art collection that opens on Saturday at the Royal Academy of Arts in London is stupendous. It represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see much of the work amassed by the only British monarch to have had serious artistic taste. There are noteworthy works by Titian, Holbein, and Correggio and Dürer – and the magnificent series by Mantegna,the Triumphs of Caesar, that normally occupies a distant orangery at Hampton Court. There are also rooms of portraits of Charles by Van Dyck so that, and at times,the watery gaze of that ill-fated monarch seems inescapable.
For all its splendour, the exhibition is also peculiar. whether you came from another planet – or from a state of historical ignorance – you would never know that the aesthetics it celebrates are those of a disastrous, and autocratic ruler whose reign ended in bloody civil war. A panel in the final room merely states that he was executed in 1649 (for tall treason,it might have added). The title Charles I: King and Collector is disingenuous; it is all “collector” and no “king”. Leaving the grandeur of his royalty and delicacy of his taste untempered by a fuller account of his rule is itself a political statement. One does not have to be parti pris to find it strange that art should float so free from the context of its amassing.
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Source: guardian.co.uk