Professor Hedgehog's Journal

Bambini

Posted on 13/10/2016 by carolinemmurray

Anyone who spends any time mooching around art galleries cannot fail to be struck by the quite remarkable ugliness of many infant Jesuses. I’m not talking about the extreme stylisation – derived from the Byzantine tradition – of Virgin and Child in late medieval paintings, but of the more realistic renderings of the Renaissance and beyond, where serene, beautiful and recognisable adult humans are adoring a distorted grotesque. It makes one wonder if any sixteenth-century Italian artist ever saw an unswaddled baby. Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Cambridge, History, London, Museums and Galleries, Venice | Tagged bambini, Fitzwilliam Museum, National Gallery, Padua, religious paintings, Virgin and Child | 10 Comments

Object of the Month: October

Posted on 06/10/2016 by carolinemmurray

I came across this fragment in the online catalogue of the Fitzwilliam Museum while looking for something else. Ha! Corinthian, I thought, in my ignorant way, but it isn’t: it’s sixth-century BCE Clazomenian, as classified (no. 7 in the Tübingen Group) by the great Professor R.M. Cook (brother of the equally distinguished Professor J.M. Cook), whose lectures I recall attending in the old Classical Archaeology Museum in Little St Mary’s Lane, Cambridge, before the library and the casts were whisked off to modernity and Sidgwick Avenue, and the building reverted to Peterhouse. Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, Art, Cambridge, Classics, Museums and Galleries, Natural history | Tagged gorgons, Greek pottery, mythology, Odysseus, Oedipus, sirens, sphinxes | Leave a comment

A History of Gardening in England

Posted on 29/09/2016 by carolinemmurray

The author of this work, Alicia Amherst, was subject more than most to changes of nomenclature. Her father was William Amhurst Tyssen-Amherst (1835–1909). His father was William George Daniel-Tyssen, but in 1852 both father and son had taken the name Tyssen-Amhurst by royal licence. The son then, again by royal licence, changed the surname to Tyssen-Amherst in 1877, but dropped the Tyssen part when he was made Baron Amherst of Hackney in 1892. (Incidentally, the family was related only distantly to the Amherst who was Governor-General of Bengal and whose wife had a pheasant named for her.) Continue reading →

Posted in Bibliography, Botany, Gardens, London, Natural history | Tagged Alicia Amherst, gardening, history of gardening, London parks and gardens | 1 Comment

Object Of The Month: September

Posted on 23/09/2016 by carolinemmurray

For one reason and another (one being the Christmas craft fair events for charity, which are looming), I am busier with knitting at the moment than usual. Hedgehogs and Christmas puddings are lining up unseasonably early, though I guess I am simply following the retail trend whereby there seems to be Hallowe’en Stuff everywhere, and the mince pies with November sell-by dates cannot be far behind.

March of the hedehogs.

I wish I was quicker – I have friends who knit so fast that their needle tips are a blur – or better able to multitask, like Mrs Poyser in Adam Bede, who liked knitting best of all her many tasks as a farmer’s wife, ‘because she could carry it on automatically as she walked to and fro’. Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, Exploration, History, Museums and Galleries | Tagged Dutch whalers, knitting, Spitsbergen, Svalbard | 3 Comments

The King’s Faithful Servant

Posted on 16/09/2016 by carolinemmurray

Rustat Road in Cambridge is where, in a former century, one used to go and pay one’s water rates to the Cambridge Water Company. I haven’t been able to find a picture of the building online, but I have a dim memory of an impressive brown-brick edifice with lots of dark wood in the entrance hall, to which one cycled over the Hills Road bridge and down Cherry Hinton Road, to avoid the extra cost of a stamp. The building had a lot of space around it, which couldn’t of course be allowed to happen, and by at least 2005 (probably earlier) it had been demolished, to be replaced by apartment housing and a small-business unit. Continue reading →

Posted in Biography, Cambridge, History, London, Uncategorized | Tagged Cambridge, Charles II, Chelsea, Grinling Gibbons, Jesus College, Royal Hospital, Tobias Rustat | 10 Comments

Plant Of The Month: September

Posted on 12/09/2016 by carolinemmurray

Bramble or blackberry, friend or foe? I can afford to regard the bramble as a friend because I don’t have any in my garden. Another (human) friend, who is slowly reclaiming an overgrown allotment, reports that brambles (along with nettles and convolvulus, which are less delicious) are her best crop this year. It is telling that the RHS website has a page on ‘Brambles and other woody weeds’, which urges that ‘prompt action can prevent problems and using the right methods lightens the work of dealing with thickets of robust weeds’. As John Gerard remarked in his Herball (1597), ‘The bramble groweth for the most part in every hedge and bush.’ Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Botany, Gardens | Tagged blackberry, bramble, Rubus species | Leave a comment

Details, Details …

Posted on 05/09/2016 by carolinemmurray

In the Eremitani Museum in Padua the other day, I was struck (as so often) by some of the details in the paintings on display as much as by the overall effect of a particular composition. Take this clog (left), for example, cast off by St Jerome when he returned to his well-appointed cave after a bit of outdoor meditation. One can almost see him wiggling his toes as he settles down to another stretch of writing. Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, History, Museums and Galleries, Venice | Tagged Accademia, art, Carpaccio, Cima da Conegliano, Hieronymus Bosch, Titian, Venice, Veronese | Leave a comment

Il Primo Orto Botanico

Posted on 03/09/2016 by carolinemmurray

The Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, set up by a decree of the Republic of Venice in 1545, is the oldest in the world. Well, actually, the University of Pisa founded its in 1544, but it moved site twice, and has remained in its present location only (!) since 1591, whereas the Padua garden has remained in the same place for over 450 years, and its architectural layout has remained broadly unchanged. (One assumes that the most potent, grave and venerable Signiors decided that anything that Pisa did they could do better – except making a tower lean, obviously.) Continue reading →

Posted in Botany, Gardens, History, Natural history, Venice | Tagged biodiversity, botanic gardens, Padua | 8 Comments

The Dotterel

Posted on 27/08/2016 by carolinemmurray

I was dining at the Reform Club the other night (not something that happens to me particularly often). I didn’t get to see Alexis Soyer’s legendary kitchens – do they indeed still exist? – but we did take coffee in the library, where my eye was directed (thanks, Chico!) to Birds Britannica, by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, which I’d never looked inside before. Fate guided the book to fall open at the page which described the dotterel. Continue reading →

Posted in Cambridge, History, Natural history, Uncategorized | Tagged Birds Britannica, dotterel, James VI and I, plover, Royston | 3 Comments

Object of the Month: August

Posted on 22/08/2016 by carolinemmurray

The apotheosis of Nelson was already well under way in 1836, when one George Gunning, of Frindsbury in Kent, presented a snuffbox to the Fitzwilliam Museum. Books, prints, portraits, medals and ceramics preserved the great naval hero in the public eye: and the ‘new street from Charing Cross to Portland Place’ which the architect John Nash had begun in 1812, and which transformed the cityscape, was officially named ‘Trafalgar Square’ in 1830 (though Nelson’s Column was not installed until 1843 nor the Landseer lions until 1867). Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Biography, Cambridge, History, Museums and Galleries, Uncategorized | Tagged cabinet of curiosities, Countess Mengden, Fitzwilliam Museum, George Gunning, mourning tokens, snuffbox, Viscount Nelson | 8 Comments