PUGLIESE BAROQUE 4: BRINDISI


I had to visit the little town of Grottaglie, which has fifty traditional pottery workshops making a mixture of ornamental ceramic and tableware. It amazes me that these artisan businesses survive in Italy’s prosperous modern economy and that so much tableware is still made by hand, thrown on the wheel.

From Grottaglie we intended to travel by bus to Ostuni. It took two hours to find out where the bus departed from (the hotel receptionist apologised that “Everything is complicated in Italy”) and when we found the place, the bus didn’t come after a two-hour wait. So we opted for the easier trip by train to Brindisi, air conditioned as well – my British readers need to be informed that in late September it is 30 degrees in Puglia.

Brindisi has been almost written off by our guide book, which warned us that parts of it were “seedy”, and I expected little from a major seaport. But it has considerable charm and history in its pleasant waterfront, the fine Duomo and the two ancient columns that marked the end of the Appian way (only one remains in the city, the other was donated to Lecce.) It was also reputedly the place of Virgil’s death (below).


The inside of the Duomo has a refreshing simplicity after the extreme richness of the churches of Lecce, but the outside was beautifully lit at night (top). And we liked the frontage of Santa Teresa, glimpsed through olive trees as the cloud bubbled up before a thunderstorm (below).

PUGLIESE BAROQUE 3: GALLIPOLI

Not the Gallipoili in the Dardanelles, but Gallipoli in Puglia, though both were in Magna Grecia and both names are of Greek origin.

The centre of the small, cramped old town on a promontory is like the Southend-on-Sea of Puglia, nothing but tourist shops, tourist restaurants and a tourist information bureau that doesn’t want to give you any information. In most cities, the smart districts are in the centre and the periphery is either tatty or commercial, but in Gallipoli, it’s the historic centre that’s tatty and the smarter streets are around the marina and the sparkling sea and the Corso Roma, which was deserted when we arrived during the siesta on Saturday afternoon and packed during the passiagata, which continued till well after midnight.

But plonk in the middle of the fritto misto shops and souvenir joints is the grand duomo in the Baroque style of Lecce. Typical of Pugliese cities, the street is too narrow for you to see the facade, which extends over the roof line of the church in a high, ostentatious parapet, and I’ve had to use the image from Wikipedia because I couldn’t get into position for a decent photo. It’s also hard to find out much about the history of the cathedral, but the architect is said to be Giovan Bernardino Genuino, known as Vaspasiano.

PUGLIESE BAROQUE 2: LECCE

We came to Lecce, the major town in the heel of Italy, on a slow train from Martina Franca and found a room in the Palazzo Bernadini, presided over by Isabella Oztasciyan Bernardini d’Arnesano, professor of Greek studies at the university.

Lecce developed so rapidly in the late 17th century that it has a unity of design and its streets of honey-coloured churches and palazzi would make it a good film location. But that’s not surprising because the streets and squares of Lecce were conceived as a location for performance and display.

The large Duomo square, almost completely enclosed, had a defensive function but it is also a stage, with an elaborate set finished by Guiseppe Zimbalo, architect of many Lecce churches, and is made for ecclesiastical and civic performance. Each high Baroque church in the city competes with the next to make the best impression with its extravagance, splendour and the degree of elaboration of its façades and altars.

In art, whatever can be done will be done. If the artist has the soft Lecce limestone to work in, he can carve it any way so that it writhes, boils and bubbles. Columns are twisted and the twists are decorated with animal and plant forms and putti and the decorations gilded. The intention of this art, to surprise and overawe, is still achieved as the visitors gasp and Wow! before snapping the preposterous façades of Zimbalo’s Santa Croce and Duomo.

PUGLIESE BAROQUE 1: MARTINA FRANCA

We are travelling by bus and train in Puglia. The approach to Martina Franca, through the workaday modern streets, wasn’t promising. We’d just been to Alberobello, whose little houses with pointy roofs, the famous trulli, are all presented in pristine whiteness for tourists, with trulli models, trulli teatowels and trulli fridge magnets, and the scruffy indifference to us in this place was a refreshing contrast. Through the great arch opposite St Anthony’s church we were in the once rich 18th century town.

Every church, nobleman, banker and merchant created a very fine front to his house to make an impression appropriate to his wealth and importance, whose grandeur could only to be properly admired from the other side of the big square; only there are very few squares, big or small, and the wonderful Baroque doorways have to be squinted at from the opposite side of the narrow alleys in which they’re squashed. Here are a few.

HATFIELD HOUSE

 

parterre east garden

I last visited the gardens of Hatfield House when the late Dowager Marchioness, Mollie Wyndham-Quin, presided over them. She was an inspired gardener and a significant garden historian until her death, aged 94, in 2016. The West Garden, which looks good in spring, was past its best the other day, not just because of the late season but also, I thought, because of the loss of that guiding hand. The East Garden, which is not always open to the public, still has reminiscences (above) of the Stuart garden of Robert Cecil, though a photo of the garden taken in 1895 (below) shows that the modern parterre is softer, greener and less labour-intensive than it was a hundred years ago. I also liked the Dutch garden with its peaceful pond (bottom, right).

old parterre

IMRE MADÁCH SQUARE

After writing about Zoltán Boboreki-Kovács’s sculptures in my last post, I tried to find out something about the building they decorate.

It’s part of Imre Madách Square, a Budapest city led development designed by Gyula Wälder and commenced in 1937. The Square leads to a grand arch and on either side are matching apartment blocks. Kovac’s reliefs are cut into travertine facings on the south block (shown with a marker in the picture).

Wälder is said to have adapted Baroque forms to modern developments, though I can’t see that in the Madách Square development. Early in his career he designed sections of the Wekerle Estate, an Arts-and-Crafts style development influenced by the English garden city movement. His historicism drew criticism from his contemporaries and from architects of the socialist period, but Madách Square is now a protected development and is pleasantly pedestrianised.

STREET ART: ZOLTÁN BOBOREKI-KOVÁCS

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When we visited Košice, Slovakia, a few years ago, we heard Hungarian spoken in the street, and on a walk in the hills encountered a family picnicking over a bogrács, a typical Hungarian cauldron. Košice was once Kassa, part of the kingdom of Hungary, and was one of the areas lost at Trianon after the First World War.

Public art can be an exciting introduction to a previously unfamiliar artist. The Story of the Old Kent Road introduced me to Adam Kossowski, and an unsigned cartoon in a river boat on the Danube opened to me the fascinating world of Pál Molnar-C. In Budapest a few weeks ago, I stopped to look at a heroic piece of relief sculpture (above) on a building in Károly körút, just opposite Deák Ferenc tér, which I took, from the modernity of the building and the style of the work, to be a piece of Socialist Realism celebrating Communist power and the harvest, a remnant of Hungary’s fifty years under Soviet rule. It was unsigned, and so I thought that this interesting and neglected bit of artistic flotsam, marred by modern graffiti, would forever remain a mystery to me.

However, when I posted a picture of it on Facebook, Peter Langh, who owns Gallery 567 in Budapest, told me that that artist was Zoltán Boboreki-Kovács and that the sculpture represented the annexation of Upper Hungary following the First Vienna Award – part of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and taking in Košice/Kassa. So, obviously not Socialist Realism. But its idealized figures, its juxtaposition of the maternal, the bucolic and the military, its strong faces and dramatic gestures, all indicate how similar nationalist art and communist art can be.

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Boboreki-Kovács (19007-92) trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, and in Rome, and was associated with the Szolnok Artists’ Colony, where he became interested in sculpture. Wikipedia says of him that he created realist monumental sculptures, that his compositions were closed and block-like, and that his art was characterized by pure forms and folk styles. At first he worked in in stone, then switched to bronze and wood. He also created sculptures for buildings. He left Hungary for South Africa after the war and his heroic style changed under the influence of modernism, abstraction and African art. His Hungarian Calvary (1941)(above) in the Farkasrét Cemetery is still in the style of his Re-annexation tableaux (below).

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