Forget Oil of Olay. In order to feel really young again, go on a college course. Last week was the grand finale of my studies in art history at the Courtauld Institute, at which, observant readers may have noticed, I have been plugging away for the past year. And indeed, when the final exams came round, verily there was the queasy stomach of the A-level student.
Yet history of art 2004-style is very different from when I was revising it for A-level back in the mid-1980s. There are certain things you are not meant to say in the 21st century. For example, it's the Arnolfini Double Portrait now, in the National Gallery, not the Arnolfini Wedding. The Renaissance did not start with a bang in Tuscany, but was a gradual, pan-European event that could just as easily have started in the 12th century. The Dark Ages were not at all dark, but kept the light of classicism aloft until Michelangelo et al arrived on the scene. Vasari was a bit parochial, and the Mona Lisa might not have happened without art from the Netherlands to show Leonardo da Vinci the way.
The Courtauld offers students a chance to revise all these fondly held beliefs, and many more. Progress, moreover, is demonstrated not as a Marxist notion of thesis/antithesis, but more as a kind of aesthetic relay race through the ages.
Sadly, once in the exam hall, the old spirit of revolution/counter-revolution reappeared with venom. I suppose it is very tricky to write a decent question paper without having a bit of dialectic to jump off. I might be very wrong about this, might have completely misunderstood the aim of the examiners and will fail the course horribly. It's always a possibility.
Anyway, the highlight of the week was the famous Survey Exam, wherein we hapless graduands sat in the darkened Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre for three hours of slides that purported to "survey" 2,500 years of art masterpieces, largely from the west. For the most part, the show was a double act, with slides coming up every 22 minutes in contrasting pairs, A and B. The game was to identify, date and compare A with B.
We kicked off with a weedy, Byzantine-esque fresco depicting the Deposition (the A team), with Giotto's magnificent Deposition on slide B. So what could you do? In the olden days, you would have simply said that slide A was pants, and slide B was where the future lay. But because we now know that approach is frowned upon, at the Courtauld anyway, this was no good. One was left constructing a somewhat specious argument which suggested that although slide A was really rather wonderful, slide B actually had the edge.
On we went, down through the centuries, with Durham v Laon Cathedrals, Perugino v Bellini, Rubens v Caravaggio. All were on pretty equal terms. All, that is, except for (the Victorian moralist) Frith v (the radical impressionist) Monet, both of whom painted great station interiors - Frith's Paddington all women in bonnets, Monet's Gare St Lazare all light and steam. Frankly, here, one had to say that slide B left slide A standing.
I'm awaiting my results, but I'm not too worried. A week beforehand, one of the lecturers gave us a rather jolly pep talk. "Every year," he said, "an inordinate amount of rubbish gets written in this examination. Usually everyone manages to pass."
