Picture galleries outside London: The Christ Church Gallery, Oxford

Contemporary Review, Feb, 1997 by Donald Bruce

Although the front of Christ Church is the most dramatic in Oxford, the entrance to its picture gallery is backstage, through a dignified sort of rabbit-hole at the end of Blue Boar Street. The warren inside is neat, spacious and plain enough not to distract attention from the pictures. There is nothing redundant here. A simple niche at the entrance is crammed with information and postcards of pictures actually in the collection. The scholarly but summary catalogue by James Byam Shaw, is still in print and may be bought or consulted here. The closing time, 5.30 p.m. every day from Easter to September, is one hour and a half later than at the Ashmolean Museum. A stout walker can spend an hour at Christ Church after being urged out of the Ashmolean by its clock-watching attendants, who form little parties of visitor-drovers shortly before four o'clock.

The collection started with the bequest of 184 paintings, many of them now dispersed or in store, by General John Guise, who had fought alongside Marlborough at Oudenade. Horace Walpole called him 'a very brave officer but apt to romance, and a great connoisseur'. Since he was often gullible in his purchases, chiefly of seventeenth-century Italian masters both true and supposed, he was often taken in by other romancers. In spite of that, he acquired and left to his former college authentic works by Lotto, Tintoretto, Veronese, Annibale Carracci, Domenichino and Zuccarelli. Lord Ilchester, a nineteenth-century diplomat based in Italy, presented thirty-nine other pictures, mostly works by Tuscan primitives, but including a magical Filippino Lippi. Two nieces of the tempestuous poet Walter Savage Landor added twenty-six panels by other early Italian painters from the collection gathered during his fourteen years in Florence. Like Guise, Landor was a credulous collector. The final accretion was Sir Richard Nosworthy's bequest of 1966, which included two landscapes by Salvator Rosa. Because of the individual tastes of its benefactors, the gallery is of special interest in its delectable waywardness: its devotion to two centuries, the fifteenth and seventeenth.

Amongst the earliest pictures are nine panels cut, with ten others, out of a large panorama of the desert fathers, painted at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The dismembered work was painted by an unidentified Tuscan artist, possibly Neri di Bicci, the son of Bicci di Lorenzo, whose picture of St Nicholas of Barri is in the Ashmolean Museum. If that is so, Neri di Bicci inherited his father's miniaturist dexterity, but in such a diffused work could hardly hope to match his trim coherence of design. The panels at Christ Church were once owned by Landor. The others are widely dispersed. It does not seem that the lives of these gregarious hermits were as secluded as they intended them to be. As they peer out of holes in their huts, caves and hollow trees, as they fish, cross rivers on inflated goatskins, converse with skulls or lie naked in thorn bushes, they are steadily visited by angels, assaulted by devils, fed by ravens and befriended by lions.

The other Saint Nicholas, St Nicholas of Tolentino, the vegetarian Augustinian preacher who once, according to a moving legend, embraced an effigy of Christ on the Cross and found his embrace returned, is depicted in a panel attributed to Francesco Botticini, who was Neri di Bicci's pupil before Botticini entered the studio of Botticelli. The saint's broad rapt face, and his grip upon the red-covered gospel clasped to his black habit, have something of the fervour of Botticelli, to whom this pupil's paintings, such as The Palmieri Altarpiece, which hangs at the head of the grand staircase of the Sainsbury Annexe in the London National Gallery, have in the past been assigned.

A panel by Filippino Lippi, another of Botticelli's pupils, represents a wounded centaur on an enigmatic sea-shore fringed with trees rooted in rocks. The picture may be perceived as an allegory rather than as a myth. The centaur has been shot through the hoof by an arrow: a painful but probably not fatal wound. There is a drawing by Filippino of Nessus and Deianira in the Stockholm National Museum, but Hercules shot the centaur Nessus through the heart, not the hoof, when Nessus tried to abduct Hercules's wife Deianira. In one of his mad fits Hercules shot his old mentor, the centaur Chiron, but again not through the hoof, but in the knee. An allegory, especially in fifteenth-century Florence, was necessarily cryptic. There are some clues, although these are obscured by one's ignorance both of Filippino's intention and of the precise marital deviations of the House of Medici at that time. Possibly it commemorates one of the irregular amours of his patrons, Lorenzo and Guiliano de Medici. The centaur wanders by the sea, sacred to Venus. He may represent human passion, as in the Uffizi Pallas and the Centaur by Filippino's master Botticelli, in which the centaur is subdued by the goddess of Reason. The arrow was in fact fired by Cupid, who reposes on the ledge of a rock on the foreshore. In a nearby cave a female centaur nurtures her young. Bewildered, the centaur peers at the bolts in the ornate quiver he has taken from the tiny troublesome god. As Sir Philip Sidney puts it in Astrophil and Stella: