Jonathan Keates
Treasure Everywhere
The Global City: On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon
By Annemarie Jordan Gschwend & K J P Lowe (ed)
Paul Holberton 295pp £40 order from our bookshop
On a spring afternoon in 1866, while browsing in the back parlour of a print shop in Bunhill Row, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was drawn to ‘a large landscape with about 120 figures of the school of Velasquez’. This was the kind of establishment in which everything needed to be linked to a famous name in order to get sold, but Velázquez, even ‘school of’, the work decidedly wasn’t. Rossetti liked it enough, however, to take it home to his house in Cheyne Walk, to be displayed amid a clutter of majolica vases, Tudor andirons, Jacobean bed curtains and the occasional wombat on a visit from the exotic menagerie in the garden. Later, having cut the canvas in two, he installed it at Kelmscott Manor, the Oxfordshire house he rented with William Morris, where the bisected artwork remains.
@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Last Tweets