The United Kingdom has experienced two major political crises in the last five years. Brexit and COVID-19 are crises of very different kinds. But they have a significant feature in common whose implications will live with us for a long time. They are milestones in the demise of liberal democracy.   The model which will replace liberal democracy is already emerging. It will be more authoritarian and less dependent on Parliamentary deliberation. It will view our society as a great collective with a single collective notion of the public good, and treat dissent as antisocial, even treasonable. It will be less accepting of the idea that there are islands of human life in which, extremes apart, individuals are entitled to make their own decisions irrespective of the wishes of the state. The defining feature of totalitarian societies is a model of the relations between the state and the citizen in which individuals are first and foremost instruments of collective policy. This once distinguished them from democracies. The distinction will become less important, as formerly liberal societies move closer to the totalitarian model.   The first symptoms of this change were apparent well before anyone had heard of either Brexit or COVID-19. The Pew Research Centre has been tracking attitudes to democracy in different countries for some 30 years. Dissatisfaction with democracy has been rising in advanced democracies for most of that time, especially among the young, and particularly in the oldest democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The UK has one of the highest levels of dissatisfaction in the world, at 69%. Only in Bulgaria and Greece is it higher. Dissatisfaction with democracy does not necessarily imply a preference for some other system. But more disturbing findings emerge from the regular surveys of political engagement conducted in the UK by the Hansard Society. In the 2019 survey 54% of respondents agreed that ‘Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules’, and only 23% disagreed. As many as 42% thought that the government ‘shouldn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament’.   These attitudes are closely correlated to economic performance. People who are dissatisfied with the economy, people who feel economically left behind or pessimistic about the future, are more likely to reject democracy. This is not altogether surprising. Historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic good fortune. Western democracy was born in the nineteenth century, in an age of creative optimism, economic expansion, and European supremacy. Except for two short periods, the United States has enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity, both absolutely and relative to other countries, until quite recently. Britain’s economic history has been more chequered, but the trajectory has generally been upward. In the life of any community, the shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterised by a resort to autocracy in much of Europe. Three-quarters of a century have passed since 1945, years marked by rapid economic growth and exponential improvements in standards of living. But today, the outlook is darker. Most Western democracies face problems of faltering growth and relative economic decline, of redundant skills and capricious patterns of inequality, most of them the legacy of past successes. These trends are likely to be aggravated in the UK by Brexit, and nearly everywhere by COVID-19. Climate change is a future challenge the implications of which are only beginning to dawn on people. Most of the measures proposed for dealing with it involve curtailing economic growth. Economic pessimism generates feelings of disempowerment which tend to discredit democratic institutions.   Against an unfavourable background like this, what will Brexit and COVID-19 contribute to these trends?   The Brexit crisis proved to be a watershed moment for British democracy. The first task of any political system is to accommodate differences of interest and opinion among citizens, so that they can live together in community without the systematic application of force. Democracies operate on the basis that although the majority has authorised policies which the minority rejects, these differences are transcended by their common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process. It is legally and constitutionally possible for a bare majority to take all the political spoils without engaging with the minority. But a democracy which persistently did that would not accommodate differences, but brutalise them. It would cease to be a political community, and could hardly function as a democracy.   For this reason, thoughtful democrats have always recognised that too much democracy is bad for democracy. They have been able to avoid the self-destructive tendency of democracy by spurning the direct decision of contentious issues by the electorate, and opting for representative politics instead. Representative politics are essentially an institutionalised system of compromise. The rigidity of party discipline in the House of Commons means that compromise is rare across the House. But it happens indirectly because political parties have to accommodate a broad spectrum of opinion and interests if they want to be elected. People are naturally averse to compromise about issues on which they feel strongly. They prefer not to engage with the views of those with whom they profoundly disagree. Parliamentary systems force them to do so. Although political parties can exploit a single issue in a moment of national emotion to carry them to power without compromise, in the medium and long term they cannot afford to become ideological sects. If they did, they would move to the margins of politics where they would have limited influence and no prospect of power. This is what nearly happened to the Labour Party in 1983 and again in 2019.   The Brexit referendum of 2016 was adopted as a way of circumventing the Parliamentary process. The theory is that once the answer has been supplied by the majority, it is the answer of the entire community. This notion is both false and profoundly damaging. It is false because the minority still exists and has no reason to alter its opinion simply because it is a minority. It is damaging because it creates a sense of entitlement in the majority, which dispenses them from the need to engage with those who disagree. Referenda have often been used as the tools of tyrants. Napoleons I and III, Hitler, and Putin have all used them as a license to institute authoritarian governments. In Britain, the effect of the Brexit referendum was more subtle. It did not bring a tyrant to power. What it did was to undermine representative politics and prevent it from accommodating differences among our people on one of the most contentious issues of modern times. Since an ability to do that is essential to the long-term survival of a democratic constitution, this has impoverished our politics and destroyed the tolerant conventions by which we had previously been governed.   The natural consequence has been the election of a government with a strong authoritarian streak, characterised by a resentment of opposition and dissent. At what earlier stage in our history would the Attorney General have told the House of Commons, as Geoffrey Cox did in all seriousness in September 2019, that it was ‘unfit to sit’ because it would not allow the government to leave the European Union until it had made satisfactory alternative arrangements? This was not an isolated event, but part of a consistent pattern. Other symptoms of the rejection of our pluralist traditions include: the brutal political purge of the once-dominant Europhile element in the Parliamentary Conservative Party; the threat of revenge against the Supreme Court for its temerity in insisting, in the two Gina Miller cases, on the constitutional authority of Parliament; the overt hostility to the BBC for its alleged failure to share the government’s outlook, coupled with a threat to destroy its financial model; the insistence on filling positions in the government’s gift from the Cabinet to the Trustees of the British Museum with loyalists and placemen regardless of their qualifications for the job, or lack of them; and the contempt for civil servants who dare to give expert but unwelcome advice. These have all been attacks on national institutions which stand for a plurality of opinion. They represent something new and unwelcome in our political culture.   The constitutional baggage carried over from the Brexit debacle proved to be the starting point for the government’s response to the next crisis.   At the root of the problems generated by the pandemic was the public’s attitude to the state and to risk. People have remarkable confidence in the capacity of the state to contain risk and ward off misfortune. An earlier generation regarded natural catastrophes as only marginally amenable to state action. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–21 is the event most closely comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. It is estimated to have killed 200,000 people in the United Kingdom at a time when its population was about two thirds what it is now. The UK government took no special steps to curtail its transmission, apart from isolating the infected and the sick, which had been the classic response to epidemics from time immemorial. No one criticised it for this. COVID-19 is a somewhat more infectious pathogen than Spanish flu, but it is significantly less mortal. It is also easier to deal with because it mainly affects those with underlying vulnerabilities due to age or certain underlying clinical conditions. A high proportion of these people are economically inactive. By comparison, Spanish flu had a particularly devastating impact on healthy people aged under 50. Yet in 2020 Britain, in common with most Western countries, ordered a general lockdown of the whole population, healthy or sick, something which had never been done before in response to any disease anywhere. These measures enjoyed substantial public support.   In the intervening century, something has radically changed in our collective outlook. Two things in particular have changed. One is that we now expect more of the state, and are less inclined to accept that there are limits to what it can do. The other is that we are no longer willing to accept risks that have always been inherent in life itself. Human beings have lived with epidemic disease from the beginning of time. If one can imagine a hypothetical world in which every community had a sterile space into which it could withdraw at the onset of disease, humanity would have become extinct. It would have no natural immunity and would simply be wiped out the next time that a new pathogen struck too quickly or silently for flight.   COVID-19 is a relatively serious epidemic but historically it is well within the range of health risks which are inseparable from ordinary existence. In Britain, bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis were all worse in their time. Internationally, the list of comparable or worse epidemics is substantially longer, even if they did not happen to strike Europe and North America. The average age at which people die with COVID-19 is 82.4, which is not significantly different from the average age at which they die without COVID-19. The change is in ourselves, not in the nature or scale of the risks that we face.   In the first of my 2019 Reith lectures, I drew attention to the implications of our aversion to risk for our relationship with the state. I referred to what I have called, then and since, the Hobbesian bargain. The seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that human beings surrendered their liberty completely, unconditionally, and irrevocably to an absolute ruler in return for security. Hobbes was an apologist for absolute government. In his model of society, the state could do absolutely anything for the purpose of reducing the risks that threaten our wellbeing, other than deliberately kill us. Hobbes’s state was an unpleasant thing, but he had grasped a profound truth. Most despotisms come into being not because a despot has seized power, but because people willingly surrender their freedoms for security. To resist this tendency requires of us a collective restraint and self-discipline, an appreciation of the complexity and interconnectedness of human affairs, and a willingness to resist the empire of fear. Our culture has always rejected Hobbes’s model of society. Intellectually, it still does. But in recent years it has increasingly tended to act on it. The response to COVID-19 has taken that tendency a long way further. I could not have imagined in 2019 that my concerns would be so dramatically vindicated so quickly.    Until March 2020, it was unthinkable that liberal democracies should confine healthy people in their homes indefinitely, with limited exceptions at the discretion of ministers. It was unthinkable that a whole population should be subject to criminal penalties for associating with other human beings and answerable to the police for the ordinary activities of daily life. In a now-notorious interview in February 2021, Professor Neil Ferguson explained what changed. It was the lockdown in China. ‘It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’ It is worth pausing to reflect on what this means. It means that because a lockdown of the entire population appeared to work in a country which was notoriously indifferent to individual rights and traditionally treats human beings as mere instruments of state policy, they could ‘get away with’ doing the same thing here. As I write this, the British government has published an ‘Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’ which identifies China as presenting a ‘systemic challenge to our values’. Liberty and personal autonomy are surely among our most fundamental of those values. They are also essential conditions for human happiness and creativity. Yet we have been willing to jettison them in favour of the Chinese model. Entirely absent from Professor Ferguson’s analysis was any conception of the principled reasons why it had hitherto been unthinkable for Western countries to do such a thing. It was unthinkable because it was based on a conception of the state’s authority over its citizens which was morally repellent even if it worked.   This is not, as many people appear to think, a phase which will pass when COVID-19 disappears (if it ever does). Governments rarely relinquish powers that they have once acquired. Wartime controls were kept in being for years after the end of the war. Some wartime powers continued to be exercised right up to the 1990s. But the problem is more fundamental than that. The government has immense powers, not just in the field of public health, but generally. These powers have existed for many years. Their existence has been tolerable in a liberal democracy only because of a culture of restraint which made it unthinkable that they should be used in the intrusive and abrasive manner in which the government has used its public health powers. Before 2020, it was only culture and convention which prevented us from adopting a totalitarian model. If something is unthinkable until someone in authority thinks of it, the psychological barriers which were once our only protection against despotism have vanished.   In the circumstances, we can hardly be surprised that this fundamental change has been accompanied by a deliberate and persistent attempt on the part of the government to limit Parliamentary scrutiny or any real political accountability. It has issued ‘guidance’ going well beyond its legal powers, and issued ‘orders’ at press conferences which had no legal basis. It has rammed complex legislation through Parliament without serious debate. It has absolved itself from any real Parliamentary control over public expenditure. It has evaded statutory requirements for advance Parliamentary approval on grounds of urgency which are difficult to justify. It has deliberately waited before making supposedly urgent statutory orders until Parliament was not in session. It has taken steps to prevent activities which its own regulations expressly permit, such as visits to doctors and dentists. In many respects, Parliament itself has not been willing to live up to its high constitutional calling.   However, at least as serious as the implications for our relations with the state are the implications for our relations with each other. The pandemic has generated distrust, resentment and mutual hostility. Authoritarian governments fracture the societies in which they operate. The use of political power as an instrument of mass coercion fuelled by public fear, is corrosive. It is corrosive even, perhaps especially, when it enjoys majority support. It tends to be accompanied, as it has been in Britain, by manipulative government propaganda and vociferous intolerance of the minority who disagree. These are the authentic symptoms of totalitarianism.   There is no inevitability about the future course of any historical trend. Social controls can become unpopular. There is an analogy in the fate of food rationing after 1939. It was necessary during the Second World War and enjoyed general public support. Belief in the efficacy of social control was an important part of the appeal of the Labour Party in the general election of 1945 which brought it to power with a huge Parliamentary majority. But people wearied of it over the following years. The insistence of the post-war Labour government on retaining it indefinitely cost it its majority in the general election of 1950 and put the Conservatives in power in 1951. Nevertheless, I am not optimistic about the future of my country. The changes in our political culture seem to me to reflect a profound change in the public mood, which has been many years in the making and may be many years in the unmaking. We are entering a Hobbesian world, the enormity of which has not yet dawned on our people. The Rt Hon Lord Sumption   Jonathan Sumption, The Rt Hon Lord Sumption, is a retired Supreme Court Justice and was the first to be appointed from outside of the judiciary. He is renowned for his lucid and methodical judgments.

On 9 April 2003, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, in the first month of the invasion of Iraq, a crowd assembled in Baghdad’s Firdos square and tore down a statue of Saddam Hussein. The event was publicized widely, celebrated by many as an authentic expression of popular revolt against tyranny. Soon, however, it became embroiled in controversy as evidence emerged that the event (ultimately accomplished by American soldiers and equipment) was stage-managed by the American military. In all the ensuing debate, to my knowledge, no voices were raised to complain of the destruction of cultural heritage, nor of the erasure of history. Fig 1. Acción de Duelo (Doris Salcedo 2007, candles, approx. 267 x 350ft). Ephemeral public project, Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá 2007. Credit: Juan Fernando Castro. In 2017, following a vote of the city council, a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee was removed from Lee Park in Dallas, Texas (the park’s name was also changed). The removal was preceded—and followed—by vigorous debate, part of a broader dispute in the United States over monuments to the Confederacy, as well as those who owned or profited from slavery, or those who, following Emancipation, perpetrated or profited from racial violence. This ongoing conflict parallels similar arguments taking place currently in Britain and other European countries.   The debate over Confederate monuments pits those who frame their complaints over what they claim is the destruction of heritage and the erasure of history against those who note the historical inauthenticity of the monuments, which were for the most part created not as memorials immediately after the Civil War, but a generation or more later, following the defeat of Reconstruction. They served as ideological and emotional buttresses to the institutions of segregation and disenfranchisement, and the ruthless exploitation then being enforced against Black Americans (the Lee monument dates from 1936). In any case, opponents of the monuments note that these objects portray individuals who fought to maintain an institution that can only be considered one of history’s great crimes—they do not deserve a place of public veneration.   As the debate proceeded in Dallas, one voice spoke in defence of the Lee monument, but from a somewhat different perspective. The art critic for the Dallas Morning News , also an eminent scholar of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, argued not in support of Confederate monuments in general, but rather in defence of the Lee monument in particular and of the artist who created it. That artist, Alexander Phimister Proctor, the critic noted, was a sculptor of public monuments of some significance, and his autobiography and other works demonstrate that he was not a racist. His reputation and his intentions for the Lee monument, the critic argued, merited serious consideration.

One of Adolf Hitler’s favourite musicians was Richard Wagner. His thunderous compositions were meant to instil a violent pride within the listener, with pieces like the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ roaring into one’s ears with bombastic brass and screeching violins. It is fitting, then, that an anti-war film like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now  (1979) chose it to accompany a horrific act of violence, in a scene that involves US military helicopters launching rockets and firing machine guns at a Vietnamese settlement. The scene is emblematic of much of the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s. It is bleak, uncompromising, and deeply cynical, but also indulgent and excessive, revelling in its own glorification of stomach-churning violence.   In Jarhead , his memoir, former US marine Anthony Swofford describes his experience watching the movie during the Gulf War. His platoon would ‘concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals’.[1] In Sam Mendes’ 2005 film adaptation of the book, Swofford and his platoon are depicted singing along to the fascist anthem, cheering as Robert Duvall shoots down Vietnamese people. It is important to note that, within Jarhead , the Apocalypse Now clip is played out of context, separated from the preceding or following scenes. It is through this lack of context that the military can turn an ostensibly anti-war scene into a pro-war experience. ‘Come get some, marines!’, the announcer says after the clip finishes playing. Just like Coppola’s characters, Swofford and his platoon cannot wait to smell napalm in the morning.   ‘There’s no such thing as an anti-war film’, French director François Truffaut once said.[2] According to the New Wave pioneer, the camera turns the world into a spectacle, the horrible into the voyeuristic, reality into construction. It is, in fact, why he refused to adapt 81.490 , a book comprising Alexandre Chambon’s recollections of a   concentration camp. ‘I couldn’t resolve to have characters weighing 30 kilos played by 60[-]kilo extras, for here, the physical, visual and bodily reality [was] too important to be sacrificed’.[3] Truffaut explains the sacrificial aspect of narrative cinema, where one is forced to create a representation of the ‘real’, sacrificing the actual ‘real’ in the process. The concept of construction (or reconstruction) was very much at the core French New Wave’s ethos. A movement focussed on the noticeable arrangement of shots and edits, and spearheaded by Truffaut himself, the French New Wave drew attention to cinema’s artifice with the intention of revealing its hidden truth. When Truffaut saw a film, he saw a beauty in its fakery, a reality within its unreality. Though no match for personal experience, film represented history and life in a manner that stood apart from other art forms.   This aspect of cinema collides with a tragedy as cosmic as war. How does one reconstruct what it feels like to partake in legalised mass murder when armed with nothing but a camera? The anti-war film is nothing new. An early example is Westfront 1918  (1930), GW Pabst’s study of PTSD. War, in its glory and horror, has long been a bedfellow of the cinematic form. Edmund Burke suggested in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful  that there   was a perverse thrill in extricating beauty from violence. Misery is more palatable when viewed through a well-composed camera lens and perfectly positioned lighting. To say that cinema can’t have a destructive aspect does a disservice to the medium. DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation  (1915) was more than just a movie. It was a javelin   aimed at the heart of Black America and must be remembered and condemned as such. But this hate crime on celluloid had its intended effect. What happens when the opposite is true? How can a director contend with the possibility of their message being received not indifferently, but with a rapturous wrongness?   Anthony Swofford contends with this inner turmoil with his journalistic integrity. Sam Mendes does so with his reflexive visual grammar. The opening of Jarhead , often accused of plagiarism, is an intentional copy of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket  (1987). Swofford himself noted that the monstrous drill sergeant (R Lee Ermey) inspired many real-life drill sergeants. This is another example of the dangers of reappropriating art. Devoid of context, an anti-war statement on dehumanisation and abuse produces a manner to aspire to, complete with gendered and racialised jokes. However, there is a contrast between Kubrick’s and Mendes’ shooting styles. Kubrick emphasises the homogeneity of the military boot camp with stable, static, centred framing. Mendes uses an unsteady handheld camera. His intention differs greatly from Kubrick’s. Instead of a portrait of a genericised collective, he makes a statement on the unsteadiness of the drill sergeant in Jarhead . By literally destabilising the camera, Mendes destabilises our perception of both the soldiers and the instructor. He thus calls attention to both the artifice of his visual grammar and the artifice of the sergeant.   We use stories to make sense of our world.[4] Therefore, the lack of narratives around Swofford’s Gulf War turns his and his fellow soldiers’ lives into nonsense. It denies the catharsis that comes with making sense out of something as abstractly horrifying as war. The Gulf War was not given the same preferential treatment by cinema as the Vietnam War. This fact is referenced in Jarhead  when a helicopter passes overhead playing ‘Break On Through (To the Other Side)’ (1962) by The Doors. ‘That’s Vietnam music. Can’t we get our own music?’, moans Swofford in the film. Music is prevalent not just in the Mendes film, but in the history of war itself. Take, for instance, ‘Rock the Casbah’ (1982) by The Clash. The song was written by Joe Strummer with an anti-war intention. However, ‘one thing the pacifist anarchist Joe Strummer certainly never intended was for “Rock the Casbah” to become the anthem of the Gulf War soldiers during Operation “Desert Storm”’.[5] This was a particularly horrifying act of artistic reappropriation. It was more than just an act of disrespect by American ‘imperialists’. It was a desperate attempt to narrativise the unnarratable, using the sentiment of anti-war music to create the opportunity for the dramatic that Vietnam presented. When the war ends and the soldiers celebrate, they dance to ‘Fight the Power’ (1989) by the leftist hip-hop group Public Enemy, oblivious to the irony that they represent that same power.   Art presents a catharsis by narrativising the absurdity of life. Is it possible, then, to create ‘uncathartic’ art? It seems that this is Mendes’s intention with Jarhead , a war film that presents very little warfare, if any. Swofford, and by extension the audience, feels ‘blue-balled’ by the Gulf War—promised adrenaline-fuelled action but presented with monotony. The frustration and lack of release are literalised in Swofford’s inability to masturbate to a picture of his girlfriend. By relating the catharsis of violence to the orgasm (or lack thereof), Mendes links death to pleasure. Boot camp trained Swofford to treat the taking of life as a pleasurable act, but his incomplete masturbation represents a refusal of pleasure. It is a moment in which Mendes shows his intention to create an ‘uncathartic’ war film. Perhaps this is how Jarhead avoids Truffaut’s trap. Can the war film avoid glamorisation by simply refusing to show warfare? Perhaps the considerable loss Jarhead  made at the box office, despite its action-packed trailer, provides an answer. Perhaps audiences were hit with the same frustrations Swofford and his platoon felt. Tricked into expecting the indulgences of cinematic violence, they were instead left with a version of Waiting for Godot  set in the blistering desert. It is through this very lack of release, this intentional frustration, that audiences were taught to reject cinematic depictions of violence. Nobody gets to take their shot. Keshav Srinivasan   Keshav Srinivasan is an MPhil student in Film and Screen Studies at Wolfson College, Cambridge. In the past, he has worked as a filmmaker and writer, writing and directing several short films. After his degree, he plans on returning to America to pursue a career in filmmaking. [1] Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles  (Scribner 2005) 6. [2] Tom Brook, ‘Is there any such thing as an “anti-war film”?’ ( BBC , 10 July 2014) < https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140710-can-a-film-be-truly-anti-war > accessed 19 February 2021. [3] Antoine De Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography  (University of California Press 2000) 162. [4] Frank Rose, ‘The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?’ ( WIRED , 3 August 2011) < http://www.wired.com/2011/03/why-do-we-tell-stories/ > accessed 19 February 2021. [5] Amin Farzanefar, ’25 Years of “Rock the Casbah”: Anthem of US Marines’, ( Qantara.de , 2007) < https://en.qantara.de/content/25-years-of-rock-the-casbah-anthem-of-us-marines > accessed 19 February 2021.

Leonardo da Vinci is a constant of the Western cultural tradition. We grow up with a vague sense of Leonardo’s achievements, knowing him to be a general titan of art and science. Our cultural attachment to Leonardo, however, has expanded beyond the individual himself. In the mid-sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari writes voraciously about Leonardo in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects . This mammoth   work offers Vasari’s take on the ‘great’ artists of history and his own time, thus marking the birth of art history as a discipline in the West. Vasari enjoys great and lasting political, cultural, and artistic influence. His book is dedicated to the powerful Cosimo de’ Medici, and his Lives discuss and pay homage to well-established Florentine and Roman artists. This political patronage solidifies a precedent of systematic exclusion that we continue to navigate in our own contemporary. Reading Vasari with a critical eye, we understand that his artist biographies conceal just as much as they reveal.   History itself is a creative, authored, and imperfect account of the past. In the essay ‘What Men Saw: Vasari’s Life of Leonardo da   Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance Artist’, art historian Patricia Rubin supports this claim. She writes, ‘Renaissance biography was a commemorative art. Its aim was to preserve and to exalt the names and deeds of worthy men in order to provide examples, both of actions and of their rewards’.[1] The Leonardo that we are introduced to and encouraged to remember is necessarily a mythologised version of Leonardo, prompting us to ask how exactly Vasari codifies the myth of Leonardo through biography, and how we might continuously be rehearsing this myth.[2]   The career of Leonardo, the original ‘Renaissance man’, is too polyvalent and illustrious to digest at once. In this research paper, I will focus on Leonardo the architect, specifically in regards to the Château de Chambord (fig 1). I will consider primary sources such as Leonardo’s own writing on and sketching of architecture, alongside secondary sources which allege his involvement in the design of Chambord. The central question that puzzles art historians is the extent to which the architect Domenico da Cortona relied on Leonardo’s original sketches in his ultimate design and construction of the French château. My objective, however, is not to make any final claims about design origins. Rather, it is to consider the legitimacy of Leonardo’s association with the project, and examine the value we attach to individual achievement. How does the knowledge that the great ‘artist-genius’ himself may have been the mind behind Chambord affect our appreciation of the already awe-inspiring architecture? Does Leonardo’s relation to this architecture necessarily change what we see? To better understand these questions, I will engage with Vasari and Rubin, as well as other art historians such as Anthony Blunt, Ludwig Heydenreich, Patrick Ponsot, and Hidemichi Tanaka. In doing so, I hope more clearly to discern the relationship between Leonardo the myth and Leonardo the architect. Fig 1. Château de Chambord, France. Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0 (disclaimer of warranties included), , via Wikimedia Commons (unmodified). . In his Lives , Vasari endeavours to elevate painting to its rightful place as an honorable liberal art, alongside grammar, rhetoric, and music. To do so, Vasari must distance art from its connection to manual labour and establish it as an intellectual pursuit, associated with divinity itself. Vasari’s affinity for melodrama comes across from the very start of Leonardo’s biography:   The greatest gifts often rain down upon human bodies through celestial influences as a natural process, and sometimes in a supernatural fashion a single body is lavishly supplied with such beauty, grace, and ability that wherever the individual turns, each of his actions is so divine that he leaves behind all other men and clearly make himself known as a genius endowed by God (which he is) rather than created by human artifice.[3]   In the soap opera that is Vasari’s Lives , Leonardo holds star status. Furthermore, Leonardo is an intellectual (‘Vasari’s portrayal of Leonardo, who is presented as a philosophizing artist’[4]). His art is so natural that it creates reality. He is a great man who is the creator and definer of his zeitgeist.[5]   Vasari explains away Leonardo’s inability to finish projects, arguing that it is a result of the artist’s unending curiosity. Leonardo famously only finished a handful of pieces in his career and although Vasari would have desired more completed pieces, he writes: ‘[T]he truth is that Leonardo’s splendid and exceptional mind was hindered by the fact that he was too eager and that his constant search to add excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection [is] the reason his work was slowed by his desire’.[6] As with all biography, the work tells us as much about the author as it does the subject. Vasari and his peers prize a certain heroic individualism and we must read his work within this context. If nothing else, the art historical canon is a study of imperfect practitioners who represent their imperfect realities. History, we are told, rhymes more than it repeats. As we explore the rhythm of the art historical canon, we unearth Vasari’s own biases and eccentricities riddled throughout his life of Leonardo.   Notwithstanding the author’s fingerprints on the work, Rubin argues that Vasari paints a lively picture of Leonardo, as a man we want to know and remember. She asserts that Vasari did ‘know Leonardo in ways that we cannot. Friends and acquaintances of Vasari’s … had known Leonardo and could supply their reminiscences. And there were certainly echoes of Leonardo’s words still to be caught in Florence in the 1520s when Vasari arrived there’.[7] Vasari’s extravagant and sometimes absurd tone is distracting, but Rubin reminds us that under the exorbitant layers lies a certain intimacy with Leonardo. Leonardo’s notebooks offer an insight into the artist’s perception of himself, but Vasari presents us with what ‘men’ saw when they turned their gaze towards Leonardo. Vasari’s contemporary cultural appraisal of Leonardo ‘is a fabrication, not a fiction’. Rubin goes on to write that ‘with Vasari’s biography, Leonardo entered history as a charming, complex and compelling character. He is associated with the highest goals of art and with the marvelous powers needed to investigate them’.[8] In his Lives , Vasari sets into motion the mythical Leonardo, who then marches across history, enchanting and engrossing us right up until the present day.   Complicating the narrative is intimidating and hard, but also enriching and essential. In her influential essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Linda Nochlin writes that ‘when we ask the right questions about the conditions for producing art there will no doubt have to be some discussion of the situational concomitants of intelligence and talent generally, not merely of artistic genius’.[9] Nochlin contends that we must question norms and deeply ponder why they seem natural and set in stone. When we do so, Leonardo emerges from under the shrouded veil of the artist-genius, into the light of a much more complexly interesting artistic and political network of collaboration and cooperation.   The myth of Leonardo casts its shadow across the Château de Chambord, a formidable castle nestled in the French countryside. Built between 1519 and 1547, Chambord is palatial. It is symmetrically bookended by rounded corner towers, with a roof forested by chimneys, turrets, and spires. In his 1952 article ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Francis I’, Heydenreich argues that ‘it is known that in the last years of his life, on the banks of the Loire, Leonardo da Vinci worked out for his royal master—no doubt Francis I’s request—a vast project for the amelioration of the Sologne’.[10] These improvements were to take the form of a château named Romorantin, for the king’s mother. In line with Vasari’s characterisation of Leonardo, Heydenreich describes the artist-architect as ‘the most universal of Renaissance artist-philosophers’, and continues:   This castle of Chambord as it was in fact built—enormous and fantastic—is perhaps the only ‘ideal architecture’ of the renaissance ever carried out. And the singularity of its conception can only be explained by the intellectual cooperation of two minds gifted with similar creative ingenuity: Francis I and Leonardo da Vinci.[11]   All this talk of universality and idealism is simultaneously born out of and feeds into the myth of Leonardo. Heydenreich merges the political and the aesthetic, contending that Chambord’s uniqueness could only be the result of a collaboration between the king (munificent patron) and Leonardo (celebrated artist-genius).   Tanaka, in ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Chambord?’, endeavours to determine what hand Leonardo had in the architecture of Chambord. Much in step with Heydenreich, he writes:   None of Leonardo’s surviving architectural plans is clearly intended for the château. And yet the initial inspiration for Chambord—for its square keep on a central plan, with four round corner towers and a spectacular double spiral staircase at its heart—could hardly have come from an ordinary architect.[12]   Both scholars agree that Leonardo had a hand in the design of Chambord, but they differ in the extent to which they discern this participation.   Heydenreich is convinced that the singularity of Leonardo’s genius establishes his clear and substantial role in the design. By contrast, Tanaka concludes that it is likely Leonardo drew up initial plans for Romorantin and that, after Leonardo’s death, Cortona took them up for Chambord and naturally modified them. Tanaka asserts that Leonardo ‘must have prepared [the plans for Romorantin] in detail, so it is entirely possible that his plans for that palace were closely studied and even adopted by Cortona for the new project replacing it’.[13] Blunt echoes Tanaka’s argument—an argument that emphasizes the layers of cooperative design that went into the ultimate design of Chambord. Blunt, in his seminal book Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700 , expresses skepticism of Heydenreich’s unwavering   commitment to his thesis being based on stirring yet ambiguous evidence. Blunt asserts:   [Heydenreich] maintains that Leonardo was responsible for the conception of Chambord, but the arguments in favor of this view are not quite conclusive. On the other hand, it is certain that Leonardo designed the château which Francis intended to build for his mother at Romorantin, for which drawings survive.[14]   Leonardo died on 2 May 1519, and the planning of Romorantin stopped abruptly. It is likely, however, that Cortona dusted off these drafts when he began his work on Chambord that same year. This possibility of Chambord’s cooperative design does not fit within the bounds of Vasari’s singular definition of greatness: the individual and original genius.   Let us take as an example the attic windows at Chambord. Tanaka postulates that the similarities between Leonardo’s drawings for Romorantin and the actual design of Chambord’s stately windows are no coincidence: ‘A window which Leonardo drew for Romorantin is very similar to an attic window at Chambord, in that both are rectangular and have scallop-shell pediments as well as three ornamental vases’.[15] Tanaka considers it feasible that Leonardo never intended to build the château at Chambord, but that his designs were nonetheless used as a guide to the younger Cortona for his great architectural masterpiece.   As time passes and we move further from the spring of 1519, it becomes increasingly difficult to completely solve this particular Leonardo-related quandary. Over the years, the château has been remodelled and restored, making it harder to trace the genius of Leonardo, if it was there at all in the first place. ‘Subsequent modifications in a more refined French style have obscured the original Italian design … making it all the more difficult to detect the hand of Leonardo’.[16] This possible ‘Frenchification’ of original Italian design (which would correspond with Francis’ efforts to strengthen central power in France and expand the French empire) may explain Blunt’s problems with Heydenreich’s claim. Blunt notes that ‘in its general appearance Chambord is entirely French and still largely medieval. The massive round towers with their conical tops could be matched in any fifteenth-century château’.[17] In this way, capricious history plays games with art historians, who are certain. In ‘Les terrasses du donjon de Chambord: un projet de Léonard de Vinci?’, Ponsot adeptly concludes: ’D’une certaine manière, tous ces constituants mal connus du passage du temps contribuent à rendre plus difficile encore l’interprétation d’une œuvre hors du commun’.[18] (‘In a certain way, all of these little-known elements of the passage of time contribute to making an extraordinary work even more difficult to interpret’.) Because of the uncertain factors of time and memory, it is almost impossible to demonstrate decisively Leonardo’s connection to Chambord.   We always bring ourselves to the act of interpreting. This reality is beautifully articulated by Peter Schjeldahl: ‘I like to say that contemporary art consists of all art works, five thousand years or five minutes old, that physically exist in the present. We look at them with contemporary eyes, the only kinds of eyes that there ever are’.[19] Our attempts to discern any obvious trace of Leonardo in the remarkable Chambord prove fruitless. Because we expect solidity and non-change, that fact the Chambord has been formed and reformed by history surprises us. As Rubin adeptly writes, ‘Leonardo was not only a subject of Vasari’s history. He was subjected to history’.[20] In our desperation to loosely attribute art and architecture to Leonardo, perhaps we are asking the wrong questions and losing out on the much more interesting possibility of an interconnected history. Instead of asking whether Leonardo was the architect of Chambord and trying to conclusively trace his singular and genius hand, we could ask how Leonardo’s work and thought contributed to the artistry of others. How were others shaped by the legacy of Leonardo, just like Leonardo, while undeniably talented and remarkable, must have been shaped by the artists before him? I am less compelled by great men than by the societies that cultivate and receive them. Vasari provides us with an intimate, albeit veiled, connection to Leonardo. Cortona’s connection to Leonardo is real and significant. By investigating and acknowledging the legitimacy of other people’s work, we begin to observe a more real image of Leonardo: what men saw and now what people continue to see. Ruairi Smith   In May 2021, Ruairi Smith completed her undergraduate degree in Contemporary Studies and French at the University of King’s College, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, Canada. Next, she will study Art History at the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland. At the time of this publication, she is tree-planting in northern British Columbia—spending her free moments reading MFK Fisher and playing euchre. [1] Patricia Rubin, ‘What Men Saw: Vasari’s Life of Leonardo Da Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance Artist’ (1990) 13(1) Art History 34. [2] Janette Vusich, ‘Leonardo: a legend in his own time’ (lecture, The University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 16 January 2020). [3] Giorgio Vasari, ‘The Life of Leonardo Da Vinci, Florentine Painter and Sculptor (1452–1519)’ in Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects  (first published 1568, reissue edn, Oxford   University Press 2008) 285. [4] Rubin (n 1) 35. [5] Vasari (n 3) 290. [6] ibid 292. [7] Rubin (n 1) 39-40. [8] ibid 43. [9] Linda Nochlin, ‘From 1971: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ ( ARTnews , 30 May 2015) < www.artnews.com/2015/05/30/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists/ > accessed 9 March 2021. [10] Ludwig Heydenreich, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Francis I’ The Burlington Magazine (1952) 94(595) 277. [11] ibid 276, 285. [12] Hidemichi Tanaka, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Chambord?’ (1992) 13(25) Artibus Et Historiae 85. [13] ibid 94. [14] Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700  (Yale University Press 1999) 276. [15] Tanaka (n 12) 100. [16] ibid 85. [17] Blunt (n 14) 15. [18] Patrick Ponsot, ‘Les Terrasses Du Donjon De Chambord: Un Projet De Léonard De Vinci?’ (2007) 3(165) Bulletin Monumental 259. [19] Peter Schjeldahl, ‘The Art of Dying’ ( The New Yorker , 23 December 2019) < https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the-art-of-dying > accessed 20 December 2020. [20] Rubin (n 1) 38.

Fig 1. Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi (Bronzino 1545, oil on panel, 102 x 85cm). Uffizi, Florence. Wikimedia Commons. accessed 14 June 2021. The Petrarchan ideal of beauty runs as a fortified vein through art history’s marble foundation. In his sonnets, the poet Petrarch idealises and idolises his object of desire, the beautiful and moral Laura. It is precisely here, in our reading of Petrarchan poetry, that we find the root of the blond and milky-white female sitter—a European standard of beauty that haunts us to this day. In his 1548 treatise On the Beauty of Women , Agnolo Firenzuola endorses this narrowly particular vision of the ‘beautiful woman’. Firenzuola’s writing stems from and contributes to the apparatus of canonical art history, where our ideals and standards are ratified in male-centric European societies and codified by male-centric European institutions. Agnolo di Cosimo, known to us by his sobriquet Bronzino, paints a strikingly distinguished portrait of a female sitter in his Lucrezia Panciatichi  (c 1540). As I assess Bronzino’s Panciatichi , I am convinced that the painter is under the influence of  Petrarchismo . I am equally convinced, however, that while Bronzino   may not break the conventions of ideal beauty, Panciatichi holds a firm command over her viewership and rejects the role in which she has been cast: object of desire.   In his dialogue, Firenzuola brandishes six essential qualities of ideal beauty. He asserts:   When a woman is tall, well-shaped, carries herself well, sits with grandeur, speaks with gravity, laughs with modesty, and finally exudes the aura of a queen, then we say, ‘That woman seems majestic; she has majesty’.[1]    Although majesty is a moral quality, rather than a bodily comportment, I am nevertheless able to picture Panciatichi fulfilling these majestic criteria. Bronzino paints Panciatichi centred and symmetrically upright—evenly lit as she refuses to be swallowed up by her shadowed surroundings. Along the balanced plane, to the sitter’s left and right, stand Roman columns, a nod to the order and rationality of antiquity. Within this grand setting, there is a certain grandeur in her posture and the symbols of wealth she wears. Panciatichi is draped in rose satin and burgundy velvet. The artist’s careful use of shadow creates delicate textural folds and shapes a delightfully luxurious puff and a fashionably rumpled sleeve. The manner in which she is dressed reflects not only Panciatichi’s social status but also her moral virtue. We gaze at an elegant, charming, and graceful sitter, imagining that she does indeed speak with gravity and laugh with modesty.   Bronzino’s smooth brushstrokes lend a balance and clarity to Panciatichi’s face. Her hair, tightly pulled back, is coloured in step with Firenzuola’s decree that ‘the proper and true color of hair should be blonde … tan, tending toward a darker hue, and two brush-strokes of this will be enough for us’.[2] The artist also matches the litterateur’s colour palette in Panciatichi’s lips. Her mouth is symmetrical, proportioned to the rest of her face and ‘hemmed by Nature with two lips that seem to be of the finest coral, like the edges of a most beautiful fountain’.[3] Below stretches her ivory neck. It is almost unimaginably long: ‘one likes a throat with very delicate skin, slender, long rather than short’.[4] Here, Bronzino inhabits Firenzuola’s ‘one’, further universalising the arbitrary female ideal.   We travel down the rounded slope of Panciatichi’s shoulders, along the contoured pleats of her dress, and our eyes rest finally on her hands. Her left hand sits lightly at the rounded edge of the armrest and discloses a wedding ring. Bronzino’s care in painting his sitter’s fingers meets Firenzuola’s criteria: ‘Fingers are beautiful when they are long, straight, delicate, and slightly tapering toward the end, but so little as to be scarcely perceptible’.[5] Panciatichi’s right hand keeps her spot in a book, a gesture which reminds me of Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait , where Anguissola too paints herself holding an open book. I am all too aware that Bronzino’s Panciatichi is likely in the midst of reading a prayer book, and the painter wishes to signal her religious piety. Still, I am happy for my Anguissola association. For just a moment, the unintending Bronzino is excluded from a secret that I hold with Anguissola and Panciatichi.   I keep returning to Panciatichi’s eyes. Bronzino opts to paint her facing the viewer, instead of in profile. Painting in profile is a common tool with which artists emphasise the female sitter’s modesty. Thus, Bronzino initiates our intense and intimate relationship with Panciatichi. There is a severity to her expression, an unflinching stillness that demands our attention and respect. Although the painting is a closed composition—Bronzino hems in his sitter on the canvas—I have the unshakable feeling that she is gazing out from the strictures of the ornate gold frame beyond me. In his privileging of sight, Firenzuola unsurprisingly prizes the eyes above all else. He writes that through the eyes ‘in which the noblest and most perfect of all the sense resides, through which our intellect gathers, as through windows of transparent glass, everything is visible’.[6] Panciatichi’s eyes are alert but she glazes past us viewers. If Bronzino’s goal is to render his sitter’s eyes ‘windows of transparent glass’ where ‘everything is visible’, he falls short. The beautiful Panciatichi does not shirk our judgemental attention. Rather, she subtly eludes her viewership all together. Her gaze incites a brief moment of insecurity: in our innate introversion as viewers, we are left feeling uneasy. Ruairi Smith   In May 2021, Ruairi Smith completed her undergraduate degree in Contemporary Studies and French at the University of King’s College, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, Canada. Next, she will study Art History at the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland. At the time of this publication, she is tree-planting in northern British Columbia—spending her free moments reading MFK Fisher and playing euchre. [1] Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women (first published 1548; Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray trs, University of Pennsylvania Press 1992) 41. [2] ibid 41. [3] ibid 28. [4] ibid 60. [5] ibid 67. [6] ibid 26.

1. The fish are alright   Historically and presently, the United Kingdom has identified and presented itself as a maritime nation.[1] Fisheries, historically a significant source of employment, cultural identity, and economic output, are a vital component of the UK’s seafaring character. Amidst the decline of other British coastal industries, fishing, also in a state of ‘managed decline’,[2] is perhaps the UK’s final remaining material link to this maritime heritage.   Our article posits that the interplay of fishing, national politics, and British international affairs over several centuries engendered a fishing iconography rooted in place, power, and identity. Fishers, fishing communities, and the political class gained differing utilities from this iconography. Even as the industry’s size and productivity has declined (to 0.02% of the economy)[3] and knowledge of fishing’s adverse environmental impacts has become widespread, fishing iconography remains germane to major events in contemporary British politics.[4] We use EU membership generally, and Brexit specifically, to highlight how conceptions of national identity influenced by the fisheries-politics-law nexus can ‘bite back’ to shape the activities of a political class instrumental in affording fisheries this power in the first place.[5]   Brexit is an example and an outcome of these interlocking forces. Since the UK joined the European Union in 1973, fishing policy challenged key British constitutional principles, and precipitated UK-European conflicts. This fomented pro-Leave rhetoric and ultimately directed the course of Brexit (2016-20) and the Transition Period (January-December 2020). Yet Brexit may also prove to be a critical juncture in fisheries policy, as it offers the UK an opportunity to break from perversely subsidised and unsustainable path dependencies that defined EU-era UK fishing policies.[6]   We proceed as follows. §2 articulates a historical and material foundation for British fishing iconography, arguing that it arose from the fishing communities’ socio-economic and political activities to become part of British national identity writ large. We characterise this as a romanticised national iconography of fishing as a noble, distinctively British profession. In §3, we consider the implications of this by examining how fishing iconography was effectively deployed by sections of the British political elite to capture national attention during the referendum campaign, before assessing how fishing directed political events during Brexit. Having evaluated the past and present of British fishing, §4 turns to the future. Building on previous work by marine scientists, we highlight pathways to recast extractivist fishing iconography as an iconography of flourishing marine ecosystems conserved in service of public welfare interests.[7]

auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant (To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.) —Tacitus, Agricola Despite having a democratic constitution, Belarus has never been a democratic country, before or after the 2020 presidential elections. This has not stopped the authorities stating otherwise.   Alyaksandr Lukashenka came to power amid post-Soviet nostalgia and maintained the rhetoric of a ‘welfare state’, insisting that prosperity is more important than respect for civil rights. Continuity with the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic became a part of the official discourse. After coming to power in 1994, he initiated the restoration of Soviet symbols as the official symbols of the Republic of Belarus—they replaced the historic white-red-white flag and the ‘Pahonya’ coat of arms, which have been state symbols since 1991.[1] Soviet-style administrative and ideological structures, including the KGB, continue to function in the country.   A period of press freedom began following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it ended in late 1994 when Lukashenka, who had just come to power, began to interfere in the work of the media. At that time, a lot of newspapers printed blank spaces instead of the report of MP Siarhei Antonchyk on corruption in the circles of the new president. The presidential administration banned the report’s publication in state-owned media, which had previously enjoyed fairly major editorial freedom.[2] Since then, the government has aimed at limiting press freedom, constantly tightening legal restrictions on the activities of journalists and the media. The Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) appeared in 1995 to address precisely these government actions, since the Soviet-tradition Belarusian Union of Journalists was unable to defend independent media representatives.

Becky Shaw is a Senior Associate at Boodle Hatfield in the firm’s art law and commercial litigation teams. She has worked on cases including  The Creative Foundation v Dreamland Leisure Limited and Others  [2015], one of the first cases to look at ownership of street art and what it means for property laws. In this interview she talks about why she and Rebecca Foden set up the  Art Law & More blog, what working through the pandemic has been like for the art world, and what emerging from it could look like.   Rebecca Foden is a Senior Associate at Boodle Hatfield. Although her practice spans many aspects of commercial litigation, she has achieved professional recognition in her work in art law, including working on the Caravaggio case  Thwaytes v Sotheby’s [2015]. In this interview, she discusses setting up the blog  Art Law & More , the changes the pandemic has wrought on the art world, and why sharing this information not only with professionals but the public at large is important.   Becky Shaw and Rebecca Foden, senior associates at Boodle Hatfield, are highly experienced art lawyers. Shaw has worked on the return of the Banksy mural  Art Buff  to Folkestone. Foden specialises in art litigation, and was involved in the well-publicised Caravaggio case Thwaytes v Sotheby’s .   Boodle Hatfield was founded in 1722, but its respectable heritage has not stopped it innovating. Shaw and Foden founded the Art Law & More  blog, and during the pandemic it has let their firm stay   in contact with the wider art scene. Shaw and Foden have both written long-form legal pieces for their firm’s website, but when I spoke to them on Zoom, they emphasised how the shorter, less technical nature of blog posts lets them publish more often and on more topics. The blog, along with its Twitter and Instagram accounts, has let them connect not only with people looking for legal information, but also with artists, auctioneers, collectors, students, and casual browsers.   Shaw recalls that they were inspired by similar blogs, like the Art Law Report  blog run by American firm Sullivan & Worcester.[1] However,  Art Law & More  focusses on English cases and news, and features   specialist contributors from the art world. These include museum professional Rachel Feldman and art historian Jasmine Clark.[2] Contributors write up much of the news section, but also contribute wonderful extras. For example, the ‘Strawberry Hill Treasure Hunt’ series followed art historian and provenance researcher Silvia Davoli as she prepared the eccentric Strawberry Hill House, built by Horace Walpole, for the ‘once-in-a-lifetime exhibition’ ‘Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill’.[3] Walpole had a large furniture collection, but it had not been seen since it was disassembled and sold in 1842. The 2018–19 exhibition gathered its components and reunited them with Walpole’s house. Art Law & More  provides information for any readers who believe they own furniture from Walpole’s collection, and the posts from the series will interest both future researchers and casual browsers.   The blog’s Instagram page has been used to advertise Boodle Hatfield’s arts sponsorships. For example, the firm has funded a prize for the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair since 2019.[4] In 2020, the firm was able to present it in person, but in 2021 it had to do so online, and its established online platform became very useful. The Art Law & More  Instagram showcased the prints, including Maite Cascôn’s Tricksters Tree I , and the blog published interviews with printmakers shortlisted for the prize, including Virginia Bridge and Jake Garfield.   The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the art world. Rosie Adcock, another member of Boodle Hatfield’s art law team, was seconded to the Royal Academy’s legal team and has continued to assist them remotely with pandemic-related issues. Shaw is a trustee to the De Morgan Foundation, an independent charity that displays and cares for the works of husband and wife William and Evelyn de Morgan. William De Morgan was a member of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts circle, while Evelyn is best known for her spiritual, feminist Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Like many other art organisations, the Foundation had money problems as a result of the pandemic: it struggled to secure loans, and it was forced to cancel exhibitions. However, it was helped by ticketed online talks, which gathered speakers and viewers from all over the world.   Similarly, Art Law & More  let Boodle Hatfield maintain its connections when in-person and informal meetings became impossible in March 2020. It did so through a series of interviews with notables of the commercial art world, called ‘A View from the Market’. The interviews have become a time capsule from ‘Lockdown One’, especially from April and May 2020, and Foden has enjoyed seeing whose predictions were the most accurate. For example, Sarah Hardy, curator-manager of the De Morgan Foundation, predicted that the digital art audience will remain powerful after the pandemic.[5] It is highly international, and its members have been able to appreciate culture more in the pandemic than they would have otherwise. Her prediction is probably accurate.   Online platforms have never been more important than during the pandemic. Jet-setters have found themselves grounded, and interior decorating and auction houses have provided a source of entertainment. One of Foden’s clients has had unprecedented success selling soft furnishings and antique rugs. Online auction technology has advanced rapidly, but smaller auction houses have struggled, and even Christie’s has cut archive staff.[6]   The decrease in travel has dramatically reduced footfall in Mayfair, a hub of small galleries. The area’s exorbitant rents had already forced out the twenty-first-century art gallery Blain Southern in February 2020.[7] How many more will go under when the furlough scheme ends and Mayfair rents return? The market has been innovative in response to these challenges. Many galleries have discovered the value of online sales during the lockdowns, and many are considering whether rent, once an assumed cost of a business, is necessary. Yet for many people, looking at artwork on a screen or attending an exhibition on Instagram will never match doing so in person. Foden visited Cromwell Place, a stretch of townhouses in South Kensington that offers short-term exhibition spaces to rent. Such spaces are a compromise between the isolation of the online experience and the high costs of a permanent physical base.   Despite these successes, we look forward to the return of in-person exhibitions and interactions. These are foundational to the world of art law. However, even once normality has in some form been restored, spaces like Art Law & More  will prove new necessities. Esmee Wright, the interviewer, is a final-year undergraduate in Modern and Medieval Languages at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, specialising in medieval French and Russian. She has written and edited for a number of student and professional publications, focusing on the arts. [1] See ‘Art Law Report’ < https://blog.sullivanlaw.com/artlawreport > accessed 1 March 2021. [2] See ‘Contributors’ ( Art Law & More ) < https://artlawandmore.com/home-2/contributors/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [3] ‘Strawberry Hill Treasure Hunt’ ( Art Law & More ) < https://artlawandmore.com/category/strawberry-hill-treasure-hunt/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [4] Woolwich Print Fair, ‘Prizes’ < https://www.woolwichprintfair.com/prizes > accessed 1 March 2021. [5] ‘A View From the Market—Q&A with Sara Hardy, Curator-Manager at the De Morgan Foundation’ ( Art Law & More , 23 April 2020) < https://artlawandmore.com/2020/04/23/a-view-from-the-market-qa-with-sarah-hardy-curator-manager-at-the-de-morgan-foundation/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [6] Anna Brady, ‘Christie's closes access to historic archive due to staff cuts’ ( The Art Newspaper , 11 February 2021) < https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/dealers-and-academics-mourn-suspension-of-access-to-christie-s-huge-archive > accessed 1 March 2021. [7] Anny Shaw, ‘Blain Southern goes into administration as artists reveal debts owed by gallery’ ( The Art Newspaper , 25 February 2020) < https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/blain-southern-artists-reveal-debts-owed-by-closed-gallery > accessed 1 March 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more than 176 million confirmed cases and over 3.8 million confirmed deaths. These numbers are likely dwarfed by the true rates of infection and death, which will remain unknown well into the future and will likely never be fully elucidated.[1] During this time, several countries have vied for the unhappy honour of being the worst affected by the pandemic, including Italy in early 2020, the United States through 2020 and early 2021, and most recently India in April and May of 2021.   The emergence of highly effective vaccines in late 2020 and early 2021 suggested some relief might be on the horizon. The optimism proved to be somewhat short-lived, as questions of vaccination and vaccine availability (not unanticipated, but now real) arose. India provides perhaps the most dramatic example: despite the initiation of vaccination programmes, India suffered a devastating second wave of infection and death in 2021 that eclipsed the relatively mild first wave of 2020.   With this second wave appearing to recede, and other parts of the world cautiously reopening, one of the most pressing questions related to the pandemic is surely whether we can exploit this respite and vaccinate as many individuals as possible, to delay or dampen future waves of SARS-CoV-2 infection. With this in mind, we can consider the total human population as either vaccinated or unvaccinated. Every individual whose status changes from unvaccinated to vaccinated represents a further step in controlling the pandemic. The unvaccinated group can in turn be divided into subpopulations of individuals who are involuntarily unvaccinated (for instance, because of being immunocompromised or lacking access to vaccines) and individuals who remain unvaccinated by choice. The latter group—comprising those unvaccinated by choice—may shortly become the main barrier to achieving the long-awaited herd immunity. The herd immunity threshold for any infectious disease is usually substantially lower than 100% population immunity. If vaccine- hesitant individuals can be persuaded to seek vaccination, it may be possible to acquire some form of herd immunity without needing to engage in the vastly more daunting task of persuading vaccine refusers to seek vaccination.[2]   In this essay I would like to examine some of the sources of vaccine hesitation I have observed amongst friends, family, and acquaintances in India. It would be preposterous to claim to speak ‘for Indians’ or provide a view on ‘the Indian experience’. Rather, I relate some instances—largely from my own experience of the pandemic in India— to illustrate the types of vaccine hesitancy that might be operating in India and elsewhere in the world. My hope is to frame my observations in such a way that they may be amenable to more rigorous survey studies that could elucidate the distribution of these attitudes. My general point is that there are numerous types of vaccine hesitation, and many of these differ quite dramatically (in kind and not just degree) from the beliefs characterising the anti-vaccine movement.

Fig 1. Sacred and Profane Love (Titian 1514, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. . The sacred’ and ‘the profane’ might sound, at first, like the sorts of technical terms intelligible only to theologians and religious scholars. On closer inspection, however, it appears that they mean vastly dissimilar things to people from many different walks of life. Not only do the words ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ appear in the titles of numerous paintings and orchestral and choral compositions, showing that the relationship between the two has been a topic of interest for artists and musicians alike, but the dichotomy has also been the subject of lengthy written treatments by anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers. The sacred-profane opposition is often considered to have its origins in the work of Scottish orientalist and Old Testament scholar William Robertson Smith, who lived during the second half of the nineteenth century.[1] Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, both students of Émile Durkheim, were among the earliest thinkers on the continent to build upon Robertson Smith’s research into the sacred and the profane, and indeed Durkheim’s ideas about how the two were interrelated, a subject covered in his groundbreaking 1912 study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , were profoundly influenced by the work his pupils had previously undertaken. Since then, British anthropologists Jack Goody and Edward Evans-Pritchard, and the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade have been some of the many academics to have investigated the sacred-profane opposition.[2] In more recent years, the phrase ‘sacred and profane’ has occurred in the names of everything from podcasts to documentaries on the Lakota Sioux.[3]   But although Robertson Smith may have been responsible for popularizing the dichotomy, in no way should we suppose, as Jan Bremmer does, that the opposition only originated around 1900. There is good evidence to suggest it had existed long before that. Lindsay Mann observes that the sacred-profane opposition underlies much of John Donne’s metaphysical poetry.[4] Moreover, Gregory Nagy has argued that, although the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus might seem worlds apart, what unites them is the logic of the sacred and profane.[5] Perhaps we should regard Nagy’s arguments with a degree of suspicion, however, since in neither Sappho’s nor Alcaeus’ poetry is the opposition between the two made explicit. It might be argued that such a distinction is implicit. But, even if this were the case, one could object to this mode of interpretation on the grounds that, rather than examining these poems in a manner sympathetic to the contexts in which they were composed, we are instead looking at them through the distorted lens of our modern scholarly preoccupations. We have no idea as to how residents of Archaic Lesbos conceived of sacredness or profaneness. Furthermore, it seems inevitable that, whenever one undertakes to reduce the content of a poem or other work of literature to a straightforward binary opposition, one ends up overlooking much of its richness of language, complexity, and profundity.   Literature aside, several paintings and musical compositions have also made use of the sacred-profane dichotomy as a structuring device. Amongst those artists and musicians to have taken inspiration from the relationship between the sacred and profane are: Claude Debussy, composer of the 1904 Danse sacrée et danse profane ; Benjamin Britten, whose last major choral composition, from 1974-75, was the Sacred and Profane  song cycle; and the Baroque painter Giovanni Baglione,   best known nowadays for his rivalry with Caravaggio and for his painting Sacred Love and Profane Love , which exists in two versions, exhibited in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie and Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica respectively.   Britten   The question remains, what makes one piece of music more ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’ than the next? In the case of Britten’s song cycle, a lot of it has to do with the lyrics. Britten selected and set to music eight short medieval poems, dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It is believed he discovered the texts in Reginald Thorne Davies’ 1963 book Medieval Lyrics: A Critical Anthology ,[6] which was published a few years before Britten began work on Sacred and Profane . Scholars have chosen to divide up the ‘lyrics’ (another word for song) into two groups, the secular and the religious. This is because collections of medieval lyrics, such as those housed in the Harleian Library, are known to have included both secular and religious songs. Secular lyrics frequently had an instrumental accompaniment and formed the basis of many popular songs, including drinking tunes like the ‘Song of Lewes’. Religious lyrics, on the other hand, did not always have an accompaniment and were generally written for liturgical use. The ‘profane’ songs in the collection (nb here, ‘profane’ is being treated as roughly synonymous with ‘secular’) discuss topics such as love between man and woman, the joyousness of springtime, and the arrival of winter, while the ‘religious’ songs (which we might, in turn, call ‘sacred’ lyrics) concentrate on Christ’s Passion and, in particular, his crucifixion; in fact, the seventh lyric, Ye that pasen by , is written from the perspective of Christ as he gazes down from the cross, and urges onlookers to contemplate his suffering and sacrifice.   Debussy   If, then, the poems that Britten uses provide the key to explaining his collection’s title, what are we to make of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane ? The two dances are joined together to form a single movement, lasting approximately ten minutes in total. Writing to Manuel de Falla in 1907, Debussy referred to the distinctive ‘colour’ of each of the dances, comparing the ‘gravity’ of the one with the ‘grace’ of the other. With the opening bars of the danse sacrée , Debussy is said to be creating an atmosphere of ancient   religiosity, an effect he achieves through a combination of almost medieval harmonies and chant-like phrases in the strings. It has been suggested that he is endeavouring to reproduce the sounds and character of Roman or Classical Greek music, and that he writes the harp part in such a way as to deliberately evoke that instrument from antique times, the lyre. The danse profane , on the other hand, is of a decidedly exotic character. In French, the adjective ‘profane’ often comes with connotations of earthiness and sensuality, and we cannot fail to be struck by the more ‘impressionistic’ and lush style of the second dance. The harp line, here, is especially redolent of Spanish music. It is also interesting to note in this context that the cross-strung harp is believed to have originated in Renaissance Spain. Along with the sea, Spain was one of Debussy’s great loves; its bright colours and rich, expressive music intrigued him. Many of the composer’s other works, as well, show signs of having been influenced by Spanish music, such as the piano piece La puerta del vino  and the three movements of Ibéria  (the second of Debussy’s three Images pour orchestre ).   But where did Debussy get the idea to write one dance which was ‘sacred’ and another that was ‘profane’? Does his familiarity with the sacred-profane dichotomy suggest that the opposition was more widely known about than we might initially expect? Or did the inspiration to write a piece about the ‘sacred and profane’ come from somewhere else, somewhere other than the intensely academical works of Durkheim and Robertson Smith? Perhaps Debussy was struck by a painting he had come across, maybe one that was even in Rome at the same time as he was living at the Villa Medici, where he stayed for a period of two years during the 1880s. Ultimately, this is pure speculation—to my knowledge, there is no evidence linking Debussy’s two dances with either Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love or Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love . What this   article aims to highlight is the possibility of a connection between Debussy’s composition and one or both of these paintings. The Galleria Borghese, where Titian’s work is displayed, did not open until 1903, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, where one version of Baglione’s painting is exhibited, did not start welcoming visitors until 1893, so in both cases the establishment of the gallery postdates Debussy’s residency at the French Academy in Rome.   But perhaps—yet more conjecture—he found out about them some other way. This is not impossible, nor is it inconceivable that seeing the painting(s) inspired Debussy to write a composition to do with the sacred and profane. In fact, we know for certain that one piece of music Debussy wrote, the symphonic suite Printemps , was inspired by his experience of seeing a painting by the Italian Renaissance master, Sandro Botticelli. The painting in question, Botticelli’s Primavera , graced the walls of the Villa Medici during the years when Debussy lived there, and it made such an impact upon the composer that he undertook to capture, using music, the exuberance and vitality of the characters represented on Botticelli’s canvas. Given Debussy had already used this painting as a source of inspiration for one of his compositions, what was there to stop him from using other paintings as further sources of inspiration? Of course, what this thesis of mine fails to establish is that it was a painting  that provided the inspiration for the title of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane .   Baglione Fig 2. Sacred and Profane Love (Baglione 1602–03, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. . It remains for me in the concluding part of this article to sketch some of the major interpretative theories about Titian’s and Baglione’s ‘sacred and profane’ paintings. Baglione was, in addition to being an accomplished draughtsman and painter, an art historian. His 1642 book on the lives and times of artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Le Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori et Architetti , which contains biographies of Caravaggio, Carracci, and Orazio Gentileschi, among others, also has an entry about Baglione himself. There he explains how he made for Cardinal Giustiniani ‘two paintings of two Divine Loves, holding under their feet the profane Love, the World, the Devil, and the Flesh’.[7] This might be taken as concrete proof that the titles which the two paintings go by nowadays were the ones the artist always intended his artworks to have. It is commonly believed that Baglione meant Sacred Love and Profane Love  to be a response to Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit . Orazio Gentileschi’s deposition from the libel suit that Baglione later brought against Caravaggio certainly seems to suggest Baglione set out to rival Caravaggio so as to curry favour with the Giustiniani. Although we are hardly able to take Gentileschi’s testimony at face value,[8] not least because the information he gives is often imprecise or categorically wrong, we cannot doubt that Baglione was consciously imitating aspects of Caravaggio’s style, such as his dramatic use of chiaroscuro and the abruptness of presentation. Baglione’s painting has also been read as a visual accusation of sodomy against Caravaggio. The devil in the bottom left-hand corner of the Rome picture has frequently been identified as a caricatured portrayal of Caravaggio (nb we might observe how, by contrast, the face of the devil in the Berlin version is turned away). It could be, therefore, that Baglione is drawing attention to Caravaggio in more than one way, and in neither instance is he being particularly subtle.   Titian   If we turn from Baglione’s to Titian’s painting, the difference could not be more striking. While Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love  is an agonistic painting, conceived as a retaliatory response by one artist to the work of another artist, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love  was commissioned to mark the occasion of a grand, aristocratic marriage, that of Niccolò Aurelio, chancellor in the city government of Venice, and Laura Bagarotto of Padua. An overview of some of the different interpretations of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love  will suffice to show the multiplicity of scholarly approaches to this most enigmatic of paintings. Walter Friedlaender drew attention to the connection between Titian’s work and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili ,[9] a romance by the fifteenth-century writer Francesco   Colonna. He hypothesized that the seated figure on the left of the painting was Venus, and the standing one on the right was Polia, a figure from Colonna’s narrative, who has recently joined the service of the goddess of love. Erwin Panofsky argued that the two women represent the Twin Venuses of Neoplatonic philosophy,[10] who personify transient and eternal love respectively. Eugene B Cantelupe, in turn, asserted that Titian’s painting is an exploration of the dual nature of love in Platonic philosophy and Christian doctrine. He believed Sacred and Profane Love  to be ‘an allegory of pagan-Biblical love’[11] and highlighted the complex symbolism of much of the painting’s iconography. For instance, Cantelupe regarded Adonis, whose sarcophagus we see in the painting, as a pagan prefiguration of Christ, in that just as Christ returned to life, so Adonis was resurrected, after having been killed whilst out hunting. Both Christ and Adonis, therefore, can be viewed as symbols of rebirth and eternal life.   The task of deciphering the meaning of Titian’s painting is made infinitely harder, however, in view of the fact that Sacred and Profane   Love  was not even the work’s original title, in all probability. The first mention of the painting occurs in a poem of 1613, where it is listed as ‘Beauty Adorned and Beauty Unadorned’. We cannot even be certain whether this was the name Titian used to refer to his work. What, then, is contained in the title of a painting? It is more than just a label. It is a description of that painting’s subject matter. Nor is it just that, for, as Paul Barolsky notes, ‘description is never mere description’, it is also implicitly interpretation.[12] So much of our understanding of Titian’s painting hinges on the particular title we use to describe the work. Not much is ultimately knowable or definite about Sacred and Profane Love , apart from the circumstances surrounding its creation. But in many respects this is what makes it such a captivating artwork. We must try our best to make sense of the painting’s complex imagery but, without the parameters of interpretation suggested by the work’s original title, the title given it by the artist, we can afford to be much freer in our ‘reading’ of the picture than might otherwise be the case. Who the two women in Titian’s painting are meant to be, no one knows. But what arguably matters just as much is who people think  they are. And the fact that we are still asking these questions, and still discussing this painting centuries after it was made, goes to show what a timeless and fascinating work of art Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love really is. Matthew Sargent   Matthew Sargent is a third-year undergraduate in Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Among his diverse interests are Greek historiography, literature, and political thought. He was the joint recipient of the 2020 Porson Prize, for Greek verse composition. He hopes to do an MPhil at Trinity, focussing on leadership theory and paraenetic discourse. [1] Jan N Bremmer, ‘“Religion”, “Ritual” and the Opposition “Sacred vs. Profane”’ in Fritz Graf (ed), Ansichten griechischer Rituale: Geburtstags-Symposium für Walter Burkert  (BG Teubner 1998) 25. [2] ibid 28. [3] Jack Goody, ‘Ritual and Religion: The Definitional Problem’ (1961) 12(2) The British Journal of Sociology 142; Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion  (Oxford University Press 1965); Mircea   Eliade, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion  (Willard R Trask tr, Harcourt 1959). [4] Lindsay A Mann, ‘Sacred and Profane Love in Donne’ (1986) 65(4) Dalhousie Review 534. [5] Gregory Nagy, ‘Lyric and Greek Myth’ in R. Woodard (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology  (Cambridge University Press 2007). [6] Christian Damon Stirling, ‘A Study of Britten’s Unaccompanied Choral Cycles’ (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2015) 106ff. [7] Maryvelma Smith O’Neil, ‘Giovanni Baglione - Seventeenth-Century Painter, Draughtsman and Biographer of Artists’ (DPhil thesis, Oxford 1992) 42ff. [8] ibid 44. [9] Walter Friedlaender, ‘ La Tintura Delle Rose (the Sacred and Profane Love) by Titian’ (1938) 20(3) The Art Bulletin, 320-1, 323-4. [10] Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks  (University of California Press 2000) 78. [11] Eugene B Cantelupe, ‘Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love Re-examined’ (1964) 46(2) The Art Bulletin, 224. [12] Paul Barolsky, ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ (1998) 17(3) Notes in the History of Art 25.

Michael Sandle RA is a sculptor and one of Britain’s foremost living artists. He is an outspoken critic of many facets of today’s art world, and has ruffled feathers in Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. He left the Royal Academy of Arts in protest in 1997, but was called back and has been referred to as ‘the living soul of the RA’. His artistic focus is on war, death, and destruction.   CJLPA : Your family home was bombed during the Second World War. Do you have any recollections of this? Has this incident affected you throughout your childhood and has it found its way into your work?   Michael Sandle : I remember very clearly the Second World War blitz on Plymouth when I was aged four to five years old. I wasn’t frightened or suffering any hardship and never saw a dead body, but I remember picking up my mother’s panic as we ran to the shelters. One was an Anderson shelter in a neighbour’s back yard and the other one was a large concrete one not far up the hill from Warleigh Avenue, where we lived. My mother claimed that we were machine-gunned as we were running to the larger one up the hill—could be embroidery on her part, although there was a row of holes in the zinc coal bin and shrapnel in our backyard. The thing that sticks in my memory the most is that after we had moved to the comparative safety of Bodmin (because my mother decided it was time to get out of Plymouth—she was right as our house got bombed) is that she had occasion to go back to Plymouth by train and she took me with her (I’d say this was sometime in 1942). As the train came into Plymouth station my mother pointed through the carriage window and said, ‘Look, Michael—that is where we used to live’. There was hardly a building left standing and I have never ever forgotten this scene of devastation. I am convinced that these memories are behind my interest in war as a theme and my interest in aerial warfare in particular. However, as the reverberations from the First Word War are still being felt as it was the beginning of slaughter on an industrial scale, and the fact that the Second World War brought about increased scientific and technical advance which has changed the lives of so many people, you would have to be rather dim not to recognise war’s importance and its obscenity.   CJLPA : War and destruction form a recurring theme of your work. I am intrigued by your design of the Belgrano Medal  from 1986, showing Margaret Thatcher with the inscription ‘imperatrix impudens’, which translates as ‘shameless empress’. The medal shows the Argentine Navy cruiser Belgrano  as it sunk, having been hit by a Royal Navy submarine  HMS Conqueror  in the Falklands War, with the loss of 323 lives. Who commissioned the medal and for what purpose?   MS : The Belgrano Medal , or ‘Medal of Dishonour’, was influenced by the superb German medallists of the First World War, such as Karl Goetz, in the British Museum. I saw an exhibition of these biting and extremely powerful medals and decided to try and do one myself. I then decided it would be a medal of dis honour. I did not know at the time that the American sculptor David Smith had also seen much earlier these very same German medals in the British Museum too and had decided to make some medals himself, which he also called Medals for Dishonor . They did not go down too well in America. For my medal, which had been commissioned on behalf of BAMS [the British Art Medal Society] by the then-Curator of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, Mark Jones (he said I could do whatever subject I liked) I decided on the sinking of the Belgrano , which seemed dishonourable to me—Margaret Thatcher with her arrogance was like a red rag to a bull to someone like me. There were questions raised about this medal, and Mark Jones could have been in a lot of trouble. However, he went on to be the Director of the V&A and is now Sir Mark Jones. Incidentally, a counter-medal was made against mine by a proponent of the Falklands War. Fig 1. Belgrano Medal—A Medal of Dishonour (Michael Sandle 1986). Courtesy of Michael Sandle. CJLPA : I love your 1999 proposal for the ‘Animals in War’ memorial, which sadly was not chosen as the final memorial for the location in Park Lane, London. It would have been a powerful public monument. Has it since been built in another location, or would you still go ahead with it in another location if the opportunity should arise?   MS : I put my heart and soul into the ‘Animals in War’ proposal but, like many competitions in Britain, I thought it was ‘stitched up’. The organisers appeared to have decided that David Backhouse was going to win as he was allowed to re-submit, which is normally unheard of, after seeing my proposal, which had a mule carrying a screw-gun going up some steps (I always do a lot of research)—so what does the Animals in War Memorial have but a mule going up steps with a screw-gun on its back! I have been shafted on two other occasions, I might add. In Germany you are not allowed to put your name on anything submitted, in order to limit favouritism, and the submissions are judged purely on merit. If another city or country even wanted to have my proposal realised, I would of course be delighted. Fig 2. Animals in War (Michael Sandle 2000, maquette wood and epoxy, 75 x 75 x 75cm). Courtesy of Michael Sandle. CJLPA : I remember when I first saw your sculpture at the Royal Academy Summer Show, titled Iraq—the Sound of Your   Silence  (2009, carved limewood), a Madonna-like mother holding a bandaged baby with a bag over her head. It was like nothing I had seen before. Can you talk a little about this incredibly powerful work?   MS : Iraq—the Sound of your Silence is only the second wood carving I have ever attempted. The first was as a 16-year-old studying at the Douglas School of Art on the Isle of Man. It was a small relief in elm wood and the subject was Pegasus. I wanted to do a more ambitious carving in limewood because I came to admire the German medieval masters when I was living and working in Germany. The subject—a mother holding a bandaged, wounded child—came from an image I saw on the internet which jumped out at me, and I had previously drawn the Iraq Triptych , pillorying Blair, which had on the right-hand panel a drawing of the British soldier Corporal Payne beating hooded detainees, whom he called his ‘choir’ because of their cries and to amuse his mates. He beat one of his victims to death. Anyway, in my Iraq sculpture, I deliberately gave it a resonance with a pietà as I find organised Christianity staggeringly hypocritical—as I do most politics, particularly when it comes to foreign policy.   This sculpture was one of the most taxing works I have ever attempted; it took ages to do. Originally, it was going to be something quite different when I started it in Germany, many years before the invasion of Iraq, as it was going to be another work based on Kali, the Hindu goddess of love and revenge. However, I left Germany, brought it to my studio in Devon, divorced my wife, and moved the unfinished mass of wood to my London studio. After seeing photos of the horror unleashed in Iraq, it suddenly became crystal clear what I had to sculpt, and Kali was no longer my subject. I had already made a sculpture related to her anyway, called the Queen of the Night . Fig 3. Iraq—The Sound of your Silence (Michael Sandle 2009, limewood, 180 x 140 x 90cm). Courtesy of Michael Sandle. CJLPA : Regarding art and social media, the huge number of artworks out there, what can one make out of that? The world of art has changed enormously since you taught at Karlsruhe (1980-99). What do you make of the chaos and speed with which the art world is moving, and its identity with the market? When art schools now take their references from the market, is there hope that we’ll ever come out of this?   MS : When I started off my career as an artist there weren’t as many artists or galleries—Winston Churchill might well have said, ‘Never in the history of mankind has so little art been made by so many!’ I was once asked by a journalist from The Times  for a quote about the work of the German artist Thomas Schütte, which was on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square at the time. I replied with, ‘It would look better outside of Specsavers’, which was duly printed. I got a wonderful email from an artist from ‘up north’ who said, ‘Thank God for you, Mike, standing up for us mortals against the blizzard of shite masquerading as art’—blizzard of shite indeed! Anyway, what I loathe about the present-day art world is how the artists I grew up with have been totally forgotten. Who talks of Frank Brangwyn or of Dame Laura Knight or of Muirhead Bone, for example? They could all draw. Terry Atkinson, who was a colleague of mine, said some time ago (but it is still relevant), ‘What matters today is how well you draw badly’.   It is not all doom and gloom—there are some real artists around, who are not part of the mainstream but don’t get much notice from the media because they are only interested in ‘celebrity’ artists who have come to the fore by the machinery of the taste-makers who decide what is in—not unlike a form of cultural Stalinism, where the rules are arbitrary but absolute. I am a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist and I think the West is decadent. As Gore Vidal opined, we are living through the decline of the American Empire. With advancing age, I seem to have developed the mindset of a taxi driver when I look at a lot of contemporary art—‘Do you call this rubbish art?’ I think to myself, ‘My two-year-old daughter could do better’. There are, though, two artists who have my greatest respect. They are Giles Walker, who is a brilliant animatronic sculptor and a scathing critic of post-Brexit, post-Thatcherite Britain; and Tim Shaw, who is an equally scathing commentator on the dystopian society we live in.   CJLPA : You were obsessed with the fear of death as a child. How does memory play into your work?   MS : My work is all about memory—in a nutshell it is about sex and death. It is true, too, that I was very obsessed with death as a child.   CJLPA : You call yourself a pessimist, distraught over the state of the world, yet you have a happy disposition. Is that because in spite of the way things are going in the world, you find yourself to be happy to be alive and in the company of people?   MS : I have already said I am a pessimist, but I do love my friends and would not want to be a hermit. I am very lucky with friends—the only downside is that as you get older you lose them through death, but I have a lot of younger friends too.   CJLPA : Are you a Romantic?   MS : Am I a Romantic? I suppose so but maybe I am too conflicted to be one—I am pathologically lazy most of the time and ridiculously neurotic. I think real Romantics would have to be surer about themselves. Alexander (Sami) Kardos-Nyheim, the interviewer, is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of CJLPA .

Rebecca Salter is a painter. She is President of the Royal Academy of Arts, the first woman in the role. She has a strong interest in Japanese woodblock prints.   Past and present leaders of the Royal Academy of Arts come together here to discuss the role and power of art in today’s world, and the difficulties and responsibilities of running an institution seen as the country’s cultural trendsetter. These conversations raise questions of ethics, artistic merit, and political compromise. CJLPA : What do you think about the current state of the world, and art’s part in it?   Rebecca Salter : I think for quite some years the art world has been becoming increasingly global and increasingly aware of its carbon footprint. It is predicated on massive growth and prices going up and up and up. I think what will happen now may change that—it will be more difficult for art sellers, probably for a while. So I think the money circus will slow down slightly. I hope it’s a good time to reassess.   CJLPA : Do you think that the pandemic will increase people’s interest in seeing art in person?   RS : I think so, partly because it will increase people’s interest in actually making, housing the made, and the whole process. Because people have had a huge amount of time on their hands, many have found themselves doing things which they never thought they would—making things. So I think there will be more of an interest in the physical object, and also that we will be so fed up with online by the end of the pandemic that we will just want to see the real thing.   I think we have realised there is a difference in seeing an object online. It’s a substitute for now, but nothing can beat the actual experiences of the object. In the object, you can feel the traces of the artist’s hand and as a result of that you can, to some extent, enter their head. I think we lose a lot of that when we look at things online.   There’s a Japanese term which translates to ‘your eyes sit’. It describes the difference between actively looking, on the one hand, and seeing, on the other. Your eyes relax so much that you almost disappear into the artwork because you’re no longer actively scanning it, you’re just ‘being’ with it.   CJLPA : Arts funding: a public or a private affair?   RS : As President of the Royal Academy—which of course gets no government funding—I think it’s a combination. We’re quite lucky in this country as we have a mixed model, wherein some places get government funding and are topped up with private funding. What’s going to happen after this I don’t know, because the government will be looking to reduce its support in all sorts of areas of life. One worries about the arts, because people always make the argument that they are not important and we don’t need them in the way we need roads and hospitals. I would argue that a country without any kind of cultural sector would be so impoverished it wouldn’t be worth living in.   CJLPA : The arts make life worth living in lots of ways.   RS : Exactly. But when you’ve got very difficult decisions to make, it’s not easy to make the case for arts funding when you’ve got schools, and hospitals, and paying back all this money we’ve borrowed over the pandemic. That’s going to be the crunch. Being more optimistic about it, I think that—again, during lockdown—people have recognised the value of the arts sector. So many arts organisations, including the Royal Academy, put stuff online very, very quickly. You could argue that by doing that—and by doing that for free—all the arts organisations contributed to the mental wellbeing of the country.   Nobody has figured out how to monetise the online offerings, because we’ve been effectively just giving them away for free. Just asking people to donate? But if more of what you do goes online at some point—and this is a question that comes up the whole time— how do you monetise art? I’m not sure anybody’s got the answer yet, but I also think that people who are fairly wealthy and are able to support the arts have, again, realised the importance of the arts during lockdown. One can start to have confident conversations with philanthropists, or potential philanthropists, about how they could support the arts. Because people during lockdown look to values in life and in organisation more closely than they might have done before, they want to support organisations that have values they agree with and they think are important.   CJLPA : In a revolution, statues tumble. Are we witnessing a revolution?   RS : I’m not sure whether I’d call it a revolution, but I think it’s always helpful to look at things again and reassess things. There are some truly egregious examples where statues should be tumbled, but in many cases I think it is much more important to have really good conversation about objects and their interpretation. I think if you’re not careful, the tumbling doesn’t actually achieve very much, except for taking something away. What you really want to do is add to the quality of the debate.   Look at how history has been interpreted. The Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition that has just opened at the National Gallery is incredibly interesting. For a long time, Gentileschi was sidelined almost completely in art history. There were some concerns that she was being exhibited at the National Gallery as a sort of token woman. But there is no way you could go around that exhibition and think she is a token woman. Her painting is unbelievably powerful, and by rights should have been in the canon right from the beginning. The exhibition wasn’t just run because she was a woman. She’s at last taken her rightful place.   CJLPA : How do you feel, being a woman in the art world? I know it’s a lot better recently, but I saw in Tate the posters of the Guerrilla Girls, and I thought about how they were making art not so long ago. I was always into art and drama. They are always labelled as very feminine subjects, whereas men are put towards maths and sciences. Some things have changed, but the art world is still quite male-dominated, for example in terms of salaries.   RS : There still are some very uncomfortable statistics about the art world. All the highest-paid contemporary artists are male. When I was at art school the gender split may have been close to 50–50, but I was never taught by a woman. All the teachers were men, and this applied to my cohort too. Courses with predominantly women are emerging, but there are still fewer women teaching, fewer women as career artists, and the statistics are very odd.   I fear it’s going to get worse. You need to spend some part of your week working for money, and then you need to find time to work on your art. The real pinch point is when you introduce children into that mix. Then, it becomes almost impossible, unless you’ve got an other half who is doing half the work. Quite a few of us older women Academicians don’t have children. Some of the younger ones do but it’s quite a struggle.   CJLPA : Planning your time is quite difficult as an artist, because you have to be immersed in what you’re doing.   RS : Yes, it’s tricky and time consuming. You can’t shortcut it and say, ‘I’ve only got an hour’. But there are more women, and we’ve elected more women at the Royal Academy in the last ten or so years, so the balance is changing.   CJLPA : You were the first female President. Congratulations!   RS: Thank you! It only took 252 years, but we got there in the end. Shockingly, the Royal Academy had two female members when it was founded in 1768, but then the next woman was elected in 1936. That tells you what the nature is of the organisation. Of course, the irony is that—as so often happens— it’s a woman in post when all the sweeping up has to happen, which of course is what’s happening with the pandemic. I get to do all the hard work.   CJLPA : Institutions such as the Royal Academy are the shapers of taste. How did you view this responsibility during your time as President?   RS : I think the Royal Academy might be flattered to think it is a shaper of taste, really! The wonderful thing about the Royal Academy is that it is independent and can do what it wants, money permitting. So even though it has ‘Royal’ over the door, and is in a rather grand place on Piccadilly, there is room to be radical. But I think taste is probably shaped virtually now. I suspect the real world just piggybacks on.   CJLPA : Surely the Royal Academy has a big influence?   RS : Well, it depends on which bit of the Royal Academy. Is it the exhibition we just had on Picasso, or is it the Summer Exhibition? They are very different: one is a scholarly, curated exhibition and the other is really a celebration of creativity. I don’t think the Summer Exhibition shapes taste in any meaningful way now. I think it used to. There’s a hilarious film on YouTube of the Summer Exhibition in 1976—everybody is chain smoking, the women are wearing hats and pearls, and the men are all dressed up in tweeds. But a few hundred yards away you’ve got the Sex Pistols. The Royal Academy really lost touch around this time. But I would argue we’ve moved a long way since then. You can look at the most recent artists we’ve elected, people like Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, and David Adjaye. It’s a very different place.   CJLPA : So do you think it has become more ‘with the times’?   RS : Yes. One of the tricky bits was that when you’re elected as an academician, you’re elected in a category: painting, sculpture, printmaking, or architecture. For an awfully long time, people were saying, ‘Well, what do we do with photographers?’, or, ‘We can’t have photographers because we don’t know where to put them.’ But now Isaac Julien can get elected as a Painter. It’s just a label.   CJLPA : In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected the works of Courbet, Manet, Pissarro, Jongkind, and Whistler. Today’s great art contests, such as the RA Summer Show, are sometimes viewed not as competitions but as lotteries. Do you think there is a risk of great works falling through the cracks? And might there be scope, as there was in 1863, for a Salon des Refusés?   RS : I think the nature of the Summer Exhibition has changed slightly. Back in the old days, there was a consensus about what should be hanging in the Royal Academy, but now for the last six years, maybe more, there’s been a curator coordinator. We’ve had Michael Craig-Martin and Grayson Perry, and this year it was Jane and Louise Wilson. Every year now the Exhibition has a slightly different vision, because the coordinator and committee are different each year. It’s just a reflection of the particular angle of that year’s committee, so it’s not quite as black and white as ‘in’ or ‘out’ and those ‘out’ are cast into darkness. It just means, ‘Not this year but maybe next year.’ Before I was elected, I submitted to the Royal Academy and never got in once.   CJLPA : Was it the same when you applied—that they were still changing curators?   RS : When I was putting in work, I think it was possibly still with a fixed academy view, but it just goes to show that not getting into the Royal Academy doesn’t mean very much if you end up as the president! So it is very different, it’s not really a shaper of any great   taste as it was in the past. Being refused I think is really just ‘try again   next year’ when it’s a different committee.   In the year that Grayson Perry did it, which was our anniversary year, the fact that he was the coordinator shaped the kind of work that was submitted. A huge number of people painted portraits of him, which of course the next year wouldn’t get in at all. Whereas Grayson took them all in because it was quite entertaining to have a wall full of portraits of Grayson. So it’s a much more complex relationship than it was before, because everybody looks at the committee and thinks, ‘OK, I might get in this year because they like the kind of work I do.’ It’s shaped by the committee that we put together, really. It’s not monolithic as it was before.   CJLPA : How do you view your place in the discourse of contemporary art?   RS : I’m in a slightly odd position. When I left art school, I went and did my postgraduate in Japan. This was considered very eccentric in 1979 because everybody wanted to go to New York. I’ve never regretted going to Japan. It was extraordinarily valuable to look back at your own culture, and European culture, through the eyes of a very different culture. It taught me many lessons about one’s narrow assumptions and interpretation of the world. Western perspective, for example, is just the way we choose in the West to represent the world on a flat surface. In Japan and China, they do it in a completely different way. These different visions of the world have been hugely enriching for me.   I was always fascinated by Japan and just wanted to go, though I’m not quite sure why. I got a scholarship and went. Japanese art was what I was drawn to, but I didn’t know much else about Japan, because in those days you didn’t really. Partly it was that things were economically really bad here in the early eighties, whereas Japan was booming. Also, by then I’d learned the language, and once you’ve done that it seems like a waste not to go back! I spent six years there in the end, two in university, and I go back as often as I can.   CJLPA : Has Japan inspired your art?   RS : Yes. When I was there I thought about my work in Japanese, because I lived with Japanese people and had mostly Japanese friends. This was really powerful, and I still do it sometimes. For much of my stay I hardly spoke English at all. When I came back to England, I couldn’t really talk or think about my work in English because it had been ‘created’ in Japanese. It’s like I’ve got two circuits in my head: every now and again when I’m working, I think about the work in Japanese because it can unlock things. My experience in Japan was very valuable indeed. Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin, the interviewer, is a Fashion and Arts & Culture writer, editor, and stylist interested in exploring the intersection of fashion, performance, and identity. Currently, she serves as the editor for The COLD Magazine  where she works across the art and fashion departments, attending key industry events like London Fashion Week, editing and writing features. She is also the External Arts Relations Officer at CJLPA , focused on cultivating partnerships with arts institutions and supporting editorial projects in both visual and performing arts.