Every now and then a writer comes along and makes you realise – oh jeepers, this is how it should be done. I’m reading Albert and the Whale, by Philip Hoare, at the moment, and it’s slow going because every other page – oh jeepers.
There’s so much to talk about, and this isn’t really the place. Instead, let me tell you about this one thing. Albert and the Whale is a book about Albrecht Dürer, one of those artists I’ve always avoided because their work is so vast and so varied that I wouldn’t even know where to start. Maybe this is where to start, Dürer’s St Jerome of 1494, one of his first paintings. A saint in the wilderness. But don’t worry about that. The picture is small. Turn it over. And on the back?
On the back is what Philip Hoare calls “a galactic event”. A star, “radiating orange-red rays, careering through the perpetual night.” Jerome and then this glimpse of a violent universe, a comet, a meteor, a Newtonian horror.
What’s it doing there? What mattered more to me when I read this section is that it is there at all. Oh gosh, paintings have a reverse, a verso. It’s obvious – it would be startling if they didn’t, from a geometry point of view – but it feels like a surprise.
A while back I read in the Guardian about an art exhibition called Verso. The work of a Brazilian artist named Vik Muniz, Verso is a bunch of facsimiles of famous paintings. But not the paintings themselves: the frames, the backs of the paintings. I am fascinated by frames, and about how the importance of frames has changed over the course of history, but that’s a discussion for another day. In Verso, you go into the gallery and these famous paintings are all hung facing the wall. “The Mona Lisa has a note reading “this way up”, Rembrandt’s Lucretia is screwed together with car parts, and Matisse’s The Red Studio is covered with chicken wire.”
This hidden world! Perfect stuff for a game, right? But what kind of game?
At first when reading about Verso I remembered an episode of the old kids’ cartoon Mask in which the goodies go to Paris to foil a plan by the baddies. The baddies seem to be robbing the Louvre, but when the goodies get there, none of the paintings have been stolen. They’ve just been turned around so the backs can be photographed, and on the backs are a map!