WEBVTT 00:00:00.489 --> 00:00:03.458 Two years ago, I have to say there was no problem. 00:00:03.458 --> 00:00:07.516 Two years ago, I knew exactly what an icon looked like. 00:00:07.516 --> 00:00:09.871 It looks like this. 00:00:09.871 --> 00:00:12.700 Everybody's icon, but also the default position 00:00:12.700 --> 00:00:16.523 of a curator of Italian Renaissance paintings, which I was then. 00:00:16.523 --> 00:00:20.215 And in a way, this is also another default selection. 00:00:20.215 --> 00:00:24.762 Leonardo da Vinci's exquisitely soulful image 00:00:24.762 --> 00:00:26.062 of the "Lady with an Ermine." 00:00:26.062 --> 00:00:28.605 And I use that word, soulful, deliberately. 00:00:28.605 --> 00:00:30.988 Or then there's this, or rather these: 00:00:30.988 --> 00:00:33.642 the two versions of Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks" 00:00:33.642 --> 00:00:37.918 that were about to come together in London for the very first time. 00:00:37.918 --> 00:00:42.102 In the exhibition that I was then in the absolute throes of organizing. 00:00:42.102 --> 00:00:45.539 I was literally up to my eyes in Leonardo, 00:00:45.539 --> 00:00:47.357 and I had been for three years. 00:00:47.357 --> 00:00:51.779 So, he was occupying every part of my brain. 00:00:51.779 --> 00:00:54.620 Leonardo had taught me, during that three years, 00:00:54.620 --> 00:00:56.468 about what a picture can do. 00:00:56.468 --> 00:01:01.786 About taking you from your own material world into a spiritual world. 00:01:01.786 --> 00:01:04.677 He said, actually, that he believed the job of the painter 00:01:04.677 --> 00:01:09.128 was to paint everything that was visible and invisible in the universe. 00:01:09.128 --> 00:01:13.125 That's a huge task. And yet, somehow he achieves it. 00:01:13.125 --> 00:01:15.896 He shows us, I think, the human soul. 00:01:15.896 --> 00:01:20.342 He shows us the capacity of ourselves 00:01:20.342 --> 00:01:23.770 to move into a spiritual realm. 00:01:23.770 --> 00:01:28.298 To see a vision of the universe that's more perfect than our own. 00:01:28.298 --> 00:01:31.874 To see God's own plan, in some sense. 00:01:31.874 --> 00:01:35.945 So this, in a sense, was really what I believed an icon was. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:35.945 --> 00:01:39.803 At about that time, I started talking to Tom Campbell, NOTE Paragraph 00:01:39.803 --> 00:01:42.354 director here of the Metropolitan Museum, 00:01:42.354 --> 00:01:45.678 about what my next move might be. 00:01:45.678 --> 00:01:48.449 The move, in fact, back to an earlier life, 00:01:48.449 --> 00:01:50.407 one I'd begun at the British Museum, 00:01:50.407 --> 00:01:52.926 back to the world of three dimensions -- 00:01:52.926 --> 00:01:55.158 of sculpture and of decorative arts -- 00:01:55.158 --> 00:01:59.376 to take over the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, here at the Met. 00:01:59.376 --> 00:02:00.816 But it was an incredibly busy time. 00:02:00.816 --> 00:02:04.223 All the conversations were done at very peculiar times of the day -- 00:02:04.223 --> 00:02:07.136 over the phone. 00:02:07.136 --> 00:02:09.200 In the end, I accepted the job 00:02:09.200 --> 00:02:10.573 without actually having been here. 00:02:10.573 --> 00:02:13.125 Again, I'd been there a couple of years before, 00:02:13.125 --> 00:02:15.637 but on that particular visit. 00:02:15.637 --> 00:02:19.729 So, it was just before the time that the Leonardo show was due to open 00:02:19.729 --> 00:02:23.751 when I finally made it back to the Met, to New York, 00:02:23.751 --> 00:02:25.207 to see my new domain. 00:02:25.207 --> 00:02:29.150 To see what European sculpture and decorative arts looked like, 00:02:29.150 --> 00:02:33.941 beyond those Renaissance collections with which I was so already familiar. 00:02:33.941 --> 00:02:36.938 And I thought, on that very first day, I better tour the galleries. 00:02:36.938 --> 00:02:38.390 Fifty-seven of these galleries -- 00:02:38.390 --> 00:02:43.246 like 57 varieties of baked beans, I believe. 00:02:43.246 --> 00:02:49.367 I walked through and I started in my comfort zone in the Italian Renaissance. 00:02:49.367 --> 00:02:51.288 And then I moved gradually around, 00:02:51.288 --> 00:02:54.390 feeling a little lost sometimes. 00:02:54.390 --> 00:02:57.443 My head, also still full of the Leonardo exhibition 00:02:57.443 --> 00:03:01.465 that was about to open, and I came across this. 00:03:01.465 --> 00:03:09.395 And I thought to myself: What the hell have I done? 00:03:09.395 --> 00:03:12.748 There was absolutely no connection in my mind 00:03:12.748 --> 00:03:15.847 at all and, in fact, if there was any emotion going on, 00:03:15.847 --> 00:03:18.216 it was a kind of repulsion. 00:03:18.216 --> 00:03:21.454 This object felt utterly and completely alien. 00:03:21.454 --> 00:03:26.917 Silly at a level that I hadn't yet understood silliness to be. 00:03:26.917 --> 00:03:29.116 And then it was made worse -- 00:03:29.116 --> 00:03:30.961 there were two of them. 00:03:30.961 --> 00:03:34.100 (Laughter) 00:03:34.100 --> 00:03:37.067 So, I started thinking about why it was, in fact, 00:03:37.067 --> 00:03:39.523 that I disliked this object so much. 00:03:39.523 --> 00:03:43.329 What was the anatomy of my distaste? 00:03:43.329 --> 00:03:46.797 Well, so much gold, so vulgar. 00:03:46.797 --> 00:03:50.651 You know, so nouveau riche, frankly. 00:03:50.651 --> 00:03:53.564 Leonardo himself had preached against the use of gold, 00:03:53.564 --> 00:03:56.999 so it was absolutely anathema at that moment. 00:03:56.999 --> 00:04:02.427 And then there's little pretty sprigs of flowers everywhere. (Laughter) 00:04:02.427 --> 00:04:05.946 And finally, that pink. That damned pink. 00:04:05.946 --> 00:04:08.842 It's such an extraordinarily artificial color. 00:04:08.842 --> 00:04:12.370 I mean, it's a color that I can't think of anything that you actually see in nature, 00:04:12.370 --> 00:04:15.458 that looks that shade. 00:04:15.458 --> 00:04:19.198 The object even has its own tutu. (Laughter) 00:04:19.198 --> 00:04:21.558 This little flouncy, spangly, bottomy bit 00:04:21.558 --> 00:04:23.593 that sits at the bottom of the vase. 00:04:23.593 --> 00:04:25.966 It reminded me, in an odd kind of way, 00:04:25.966 --> 00:04:28.065 of my niece's fifth birthday party. 00:04:28.065 --> 00:04:32.587 Where all the little girls would come either as a princess or a fairy. 00:04:32.587 --> 00:04:34.468 There was one who would come as a fairy princess. 00:04:34.468 --> 00:04:36.890 You should have seen the looks. 00:04:36.890 --> 00:04:38.583 (Laughter) 00:04:38.583 --> 00:04:41.925 And I realize that this object was in my mind, 00:04:41.925 --> 00:04:44.865 born from the same mind, from the same womb, 00:04:44.865 --> 00:04:50.089 practically, as Barbie Ballerina. (Laughter) 00:04:50.089 --> 00:04:53.611 And then there's the elephants. (Laughter) 00:04:53.611 --> 00:04:55.757 Those extraordinary elephants 00:04:55.757 --> 00:04:58.481 with their little, sort of strange, sinister expressions 00:04:58.481 --> 00:05:03.778 and Greta Garbo eyelashes, with these golden tusks and so on. 00:05:03.778 --> 00:05:05.554 I realized this was an elephant that had 00:05:05.554 --> 00:05:11.287 absolutely nothing to do with a majestic march across the Serengeti. 00:05:11.287 --> 00:05:16.782 It was a Dumbo nightmare. (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:05:16.782 --> 00:05:19.628 But something more profound was happening as well. 00:05:19.628 --> 00:05:21.057 These objects, it seemed to me, 00:05:21.057 --> 00:05:25.366 were quintessentially the kind that I and my liberal left friends in London 00:05:25.366 --> 00:05:27.901 had always seen as summing up 00:05:27.901 --> 00:05:30.740 something deplorable about the French aristocracy 00:05:30.740 --> 00:05:32.912 in the 18th century. 00:05:32.912 --> 00:05:35.701 The label had told me that these pieces were made 00:05:35.701 --> 00:05:38.412 by the Sèvres Manufactory, 00:05:38.412 --> 00:05:41.637 made of porcelain in the late 1750s, 00:05:41.637 --> 00:05:44.768 and designed by a designer called Jean-Claude Duplessis, 00:05:44.768 --> 00:05:46.964 actually somebody of extraordinary distinction 00:05:46.964 --> 00:05:49.441 as I later learned. 00:05:49.441 --> 00:05:54.249 But for me, they summed up a kind of, 00:05:54.249 --> 00:05:57.663 that sort of sheer uselessness of the aristocracy 00:05:57.663 --> 00:06:01.136 in the 18th century. 00:06:01.136 --> 00:06:03.602 I and my colleagues had always thought 00:06:03.602 --> 00:06:06.558 that these objects, in way, summed up the idea of, 00:06:06.558 --> 00:06:08.922 you know -- no wonder there was a revolution. 00:06:08.922 --> 00:06:13.465 Or, indeed, thank God there was a revolution. 00:06:13.465 --> 00:06:15.224 There was a sort of idea really, that, 00:06:15.224 --> 00:06:17.897 if you owned a vase like this, 00:06:17.897 --> 00:06:21.621 then there was really only one fate possible. 00:06:21.621 --> 00:06:25.685 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:06:25.685 --> 00:06:30.349 So, there I was -- in a sort of paroxysm of horror. 00:06:30.349 --> 00:06:34.309 But I took the job and I went on looking at these vases. 00:06:34.309 --> 00:06:37.840 I sort of had to because they're on a through route in the Met. 00:06:37.840 --> 00:06:40.472 So, almost anywhere I went, there they were. 00:06:40.472 --> 00:06:43.241 They had this kind of odd sort of fascination, 00:06:43.241 --> 00:06:46.259 like a car accident. 00:06:46.259 --> 00:06:48.983 Where I couldn't stop looking. 00:06:48.983 --> 00:06:51.205 And as I did so, I started thinking: 00:06:51.205 --> 00:06:55.733 Well, what are we actually looking at here? 00:06:55.733 --> 00:06:59.064 And what I started with was understanding this 00:06:59.064 --> 00:07:02.616 as really a supreme piece of design. 00:07:02.616 --> 00:07:03.713 It took me a little time. 00:07:03.713 --> 00:07:05.151 But, that tutu for example -- 00:07:05.151 --> 00:07:08.273 actually, this is a piece that does dance in its own way. 00:07:08.273 --> 00:07:09.915 It has an extraordinary lightness 00:07:09.915 --> 00:07:12.430 and yet, it is also amazing balanced. 00:07:12.430 --> 00:07:15.905 It has these kinds of sculptural ingredients. 00:07:15.905 --> 00:07:17.544 And then the play between -- 00:07:17.544 --> 00:07:22.156 actually really quite carefully disposed color and gilding, and the sculptural surface, 00:07:22.156 --> 00:07:24.431 is really rather remarkable. 00:07:24.431 --> 00:07:27.261 And then I realized that this piece went into the kiln 00:07:27.261 --> 00:07:30.651 four times, at least four times in order to arrive at this. 00:07:30.651 --> 00:07:33.705 How many moments for accident can you think of 00:07:33.705 --> 00:07:35.209 that could have happened to this piece? 00:07:35.209 --> 00:07:37.771 And then remember, not just one, but two. 00:07:37.771 --> 00:07:42.036 So he's having to arrive at two exactly matched 00:07:42.036 --> 00:07:44.548 vases of this kind. 00:07:44.548 --> 00:07:45.954 And then this question of uselessness. 00:07:45.954 --> 00:07:50.913 Well actually, the end of the trunks were originally candle holders. 00:07:50.913 --> 00:07:54.663 So what you would have had were candles on either side. 00:07:54.663 --> 00:07:57.219 Imagine that effect of candlelight on that surface. 00:07:57.219 --> 00:07:59.951 On the slightly uneven pink, on the beautiful gold. 00:07:59.951 --> 00:08:02.697 It would have glittered in an interior, 00:08:02.697 --> 00:08:05.779 a little like a little firework. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:05.779 --> 00:08:09.431 And at that point, actually, a firework went off in my brain. 00:08:09.431 --> 00:08:12.266 Somebody reminded me that, that word 'fancy' -- 00:08:12.266 --> 00:08:15.376 which in a sense for me, encapsulated this object -- 00:08:15.376 --> 00:08:19.422 actually comes from the same root as the word 'fantasy.' 00:08:19.422 --> 00:08:22.038 And that what this object was just as much in a way, 00:08:22.038 --> 00:08:24.490 in its own way, as a Leonardo da Vinci painting, 00:08:24.490 --> 00:08:26.697 is a portal to somewhere else. 00:08:26.697 --> 00:08:30.892 This is an object of the imagination. 00:08:30.892 --> 00:08:37.701 If you think about the mad 18th-century operas of the time -- set in the Orient. 00:08:37.721 --> 00:08:44.200 If you think about divans and perhaps even opium-induced visions of pink elephants, 00:08:44.200 --> 00:08:47.501 then at that point, this object starts to make sense. 00:08:47.501 --> 00:08:51.557 This is an object which is all about escapism. 00:08:51.557 --> 00:08:54.754 It's about an escapism that happens -- 00:08:54.754 --> 00:08:56.775 that the aristocracy in France sought 00:08:56.775 --> 00:08:58.561 very deliberately 00:08:58.561 --> 00:09:03.129 to distinguish themselves from ordinary people. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:03.129 --> 00:09:05.093 It's not an escapism that 00:09:05.093 --> 00:09:08.960 we feel particularly happy with today, however. 00:09:08.960 --> 00:09:11.945 And again, going on thinking about this, 00:09:11.945 --> 00:09:15.119 I realize that in a way we're all victims 00:09:15.119 --> 00:09:17.130 of a certain kind of tyranny 00:09:17.130 --> 00:09:19.151 of the triumph of modernism 00:09:19.151 --> 00:09:21.877 whereby form and function in an object 00:09:21.877 --> 00:09:25.282 have to follow one another, or are deemed to do so. 00:09:25.282 --> 00:09:28.246 And the extraneous ornament is seen as really, 00:09:28.246 --> 00:09:31.266 essentially, criminal. 00:09:31.266 --> 00:09:34.417 It's a triumph, in a way, of bourgeois values rather than aristocratic ones. 00:09:34.417 --> 00:09:36.240 And that seems fine. 00:09:36.240 --> 00:09:43.697 Except for the fact that it becomes a kind of sequestration of imagination. 00:09:43.697 --> 00:09:46.387 So just as in the 20th century, so many people 00:09:46.387 --> 00:09:48.375 had the idea that their faith 00:09:48.375 --> 00:09:51.057 took place on the Sabbath day, 00:09:51.057 --> 00:09:52.431 and the rest of their lives -- 00:09:52.431 --> 00:09:56.409 their lives of washing machines and orthodontics -- 00:09:56.409 --> 00:09:58.441 took place on another day. 00:09:58.441 --> 00:10:02.209 Then, I think we've started doing the same. 00:10:02.209 --> 00:10:05.541 We've allowed ourselves to 00:10:05.541 --> 00:10:07.898 lead our fantasy lives in front of screens. 00:10:07.898 --> 00:10:11.880 In the dark of the cinema, with the television in the corner of the room. 00:10:11.880 --> 00:10:15.958 We've eliminated, in a sense, that constant 00:10:15.958 --> 00:10:20.886 of the imagination that these vases represented in people's lives. 00:10:20.886 --> 00:10:24.922 So maybe it's time we got this back a little. 00:10:24.922 --> 00:10:27.272 I think it's beginning to happen. 00:10:27.272 --> 00:10:28.538 In London, for example, 00:10:28.538 --> 00:10:30.687 with these extraordinary buildings 00:10:30.687 --> 00:10:33.678 that have been appearing over the last few years. 00:10:33.678 --> 00:10:36.081 Redolent, in a sense, of science fiction, 00:10:36.081 --> 00:10:38.195 turning London into a kind of fantasy playground. 00:10:38.195 --> 00:10:43.049 It's actually amazing to look out of a high building nowadays there. 00:10:43.049 --> 00:10:44.853 But even then, there's a resistance. 00:10:44.853 --> 00:10:49.189 London has called these buildings the Gherkin, the Shard, the Walkie Talkie -- 00:10:49.189 --> 00:10:52.494 bringing these soaring buildings down to Earth. 00:10:52.494 --> 00:10:56.574 There's an idea that we don't want these 00:10:56.574 --> 00:11:01.435 anxious-making, imaginative journeys to happen in our daily lives. 00:11:01.435 --> 00:11:04.703 I feel lucky in a way, 00:11:04.703 --> 00:11:07.251 I've encountered this object. 00:11:07.251 --> 00:11:09.692 (Laughter) 00:11:09.692 --> 00:11:12.994 I found him on the Internet when I was looking up a reference. 00:11:12.994 --> 00:11:15.888 And there he was. 00:11:15.888 --> 00:11:19.202 And unlike the pink elephant vase, 00:11:19.202 --> 00:11:21.175 this was a kind of love at first sight. 00:11:21.175 --> 00:11:24.031 In fact, reader, I married him. I bought him. 00:11:24.031 --> 00:11:27.895 And he now adorns my office. 00:11:27.895 --> 00:11:31.436 He's a Staffordshire figure made in the middle of the 19th century. 00:11:31.436 --> 00:11:36.242 He represents the actor, Edmund Kean, playing Shakespeare's Richard III. 00:11:36.242 --> 00:11:38.695 And it's based, actually, on a more elevated piece of porcelain. 00:11:38.695 --> 00:11:40.849 So I loved, on an art historical level, 00:11:40.849 --> 00:11:45.509 I loved that layered quality that he has. 00:11:45.509 --> 00:11:48.002 But more than that, I love him. 00:11:48.002 --> 00:11:49.680 In a way that I think would have been impossible 00:11:49.680 --> 00:11:52.292 without the pink Sèvres vase in my Leonardo days. 00:11:52.292 --> 00:11:55.509 I love his orange and pink breeches. 00:11:55.509 --> 00:11:58.259 I love the fact that he seems to be going off to war, 00:11:58.259 --> 00:12:02.691 having just finished the washing up. (Laughter) 00:12:02.691 --> 00:12:05.168 He seems also to have forgotten his sword. 00:12:05.168 --> 00:12:07.787 I love his pink little cheeks, his munchkin energy. 00:12:07.787 --> 00:12:10.978 In a way, he's become my sort of alter ego. 00:12:10.978 --> 00:12:13.279 He's, I hope, a little bit dignified, 00:12:13.279 --> 00:12:18.453 but mostly rather vulgar. (Laughter) 00:12:18.453 --> 00:12:21.671 And energetic, I hope, too. 00:12:21.671 --> 00:12:26.826 I let him into my life because the Sèvres pink elephant vase allowed me to do so. 00:12:26.826 --> 00:12:28.394 And before that Leonardo, 00:12:28.394 --> 00:12:33.500 I understood that this object could become part of a journey for me every day, 00:12:33.500 --> 00:12:36.245 sitting in my office. 00:12:36.245 --> 00:12:39.234 I really hope that others, all of you, 00:12:39.234 --> 00:12:40.809 visiting objects in the museum, 00:12:40.809 --> 00:12:43.263 and taking them home and finding them for yourselves, 00:12:43.263 --> 00:12:47.577 will allow those objects to flourish in your imaginative lives. 00:12:47.577 --> 00:12:49.130 Thank you very much. 00:12:49.130 --> 00:12:53.013 (Applause)