Page 59 - Studio International - March 1972

level), the family and the guests from the the reason, perhaps, is the very fact that the
servants, the upper servants from the lower work was unfinished when Klingender died in
servants, and the adults from the children. The 1955. The history was intended to continue
kitchens had to be remote from the dining rooms down to the present century, but the notes which
to exclude the cooking smells, cold food being the author left on the Renaissance and onwards
considered less objectionable than the smell were so scrappy and incomplete that the editors
from roasting or boiling on open fires. A felt it better to summarize them in a brief
leisured class was to be waited on hand and epilogue and to end the main text with the
foot, but neither the servants nor their work Middle Ages.
nor any of the nastiness it produced was to be This gives a unity. Klingender discusses
allowed to obtrude. It is fascinating, for neither extra-European (Asian or African) art to
example, to study the plans of Bear Wood, the any great extent, nor Greek and Hellenistic art
seat of John Walter of The Times (which made in any depth. What he does is to demonstrate
money in those days) and to find how careful the continuity of barbarian art from early
the architect was to ensure that the valets' prehistoric times onwards, and its persistence
staircase gave access to the valets' bedrooms on of feeling. We are led through the shifts of
the second floor without giving access to the meaning and significance from the early
nursemaids' quarters on the nursery first floor, hunters' apprehension of the world down to that
through which it passed. of medieval European man. It is only at this
Girouard skilfully traces a significant point, with the Renaissance, that we come to the
pattern of development through the bewildering beginning of a new, sentimental, sensibility
eclecticism of styles. The period covered by the which had only marginally affected European
book also coincides with the emergence of the art in earlier times.
architectural profession, which was founded More important, perhaps, is Klingender's
formally in 1837. These houses were nearly all demonstration of the importance of animals
the work of the new race of professional in the imagination of so many centuries. That
architects, whose social connections, personal importance has been so much diminished, and
foibles, architectural skills, and aesthetic so altered in emphasis, since the scientific
attitudes or conflicts are portrayed with just revolution and the technological conquest of
the right blend of detachment and nature, that Klingender, had he continued the
understanding. work as planned, would probably have found
By the end of the century the factors which himself dealing with a different and less
brought these buildings into being were significant subject-matter. Animals do not play a
changing fast. Land had already become a bad large part either in the life or in the imagination
investment. The First World War signalled the of most people in our present urban world. We
beginning of the end of cheap labour, and the have reduced them to objects of sentimentality
second finished it off, but demolitions had or to sources of a much less clearly defined guilt
begun in Edwardian times. Had another than that which our hunting ancestors knew.
typically British class institution, the private The book shows us their ancient importance.
school, not found an appropriate habitat in At first they were man's equals, or betters,
these minutely divided buildings, few of them sharing the world with him, doomed with him
would have survived, for they were rarely to the same competitive violence, by which he
capable of adaptation for domestic life in the and they must live, in which one species must
twentieth century. q prey upon another. We see them through the
MALCOLM MACEWAN eyes of Palaeolithic hunters. Many of the cave
paintings and engravings seem to modern
Fauves and peasants sensibilities to be superb works of art. So
Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the perhaps they are. But closer examination shows
Middle Ages, by Francis Klingender, edited by us that the animals are not seen with eyes which
Evelyn Antal and John Harthan. 58o pp with aimed either at detached observation or at
307 illustrations. Routledge and Kegan Paul. capturing the beauty or the joy of animal life.
£12. They are seen with hunters' eyes. The selection,
of angle, of colour, of subject, of mode of
At first sight, Animals in Art and Thought might representation, shows us that we are looking at
seem a somewhat forced category for a major diagrams : how to kill; how to work magic to
and comprehensive work. Do animals occupy make the game fertile and plentiful; how to
so special a place in either art or thought as to placate. Such paintings have a remote
justify singling them out and separating them resemblance, in purpose, to those pleasant
from the mainstream of both ? Is there sufficient drawings one finds in cookery books and in
continuity or consistency in the way people have butchers' shops, in which the body of an ox is
looked at animals, or thought about them, to shown divided up into areas marked 'rump',
make a subject-matter—of animals in the human `rib steak', and so on.
imagination —and to write a history ? Klingender goes on from an introduction
It is one of the qualities of Francis which makes us aware of the overwhelming
Klingender's major, but unfinished, work that importance of animals in the early human
an affirmative answer emerges fairly clearly, imagination to develop his theme in dealing
although it is not a simple affirmation. Part of with the complexity of agricultural-pastoral

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