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Articles> Inside Cambridge: Sir Anthony Caro
Are you welcome in God’s house? Christ’s College has a gate. A big scary gate. As beautiful and grand as it is, it does nothing to dilute the impression that the Colleges are elite spaces closed to public consumption.
Generally, however, access is possible and worthwhile. The architecture at Christ’s is the most instantly notable attraction, ranging from the 15/16th century buildings in First Court to Sir Denys Lasdun’s New Court, a controversial Modernist addition in 1966-70; imagine a Tenerife holiday resort mutated with a typewriter.
It is in the far left hand corner of First Court, however, that a true gem is located.
Christ’s College Chapel lacks the ostentatious grandeur of the Chapel at Kings College, but in its place is a stillness and serenity. This is architecture in the service of religion, providing the perfect spatial context for calm prayer. The austere Anglican charm of choral evensong at Christ’s illuminates the power of the chapel. Voices in layered liturgical harmony resonate through the space and through your body. It’s an experience of, to use unfashionable terminology, pure beauty. This is music at its best, an abstraction of self leading to spiritual transcendence. Personal belief is irrelevant; the psychological mechanics of this process can’t fail to arrest you. There is no art better suited to dealing with this aspect of religion. The unique strengths of music are its ability to deal with the abstract, to express and take us to the aspects of the self beyond the flesh.
Not all aspects of Christianity deal with the ethereal. The Crucifixion and the Deposition revolve around flesh, and are therefore fundamentally human themes. As such it is not music which is best suited to express these themes; it is far too tangible a subject. This is sculpture’s domain; an art whose independence is founded on the expression of form, the relation of an object to its surrounding space and of an experience in the round. It is an art which exists to play with solidity, weight and physical substance. How lucky Christ’s is, therefore, to have a sculpture which tackles this subject.
Sir Anthony Caro’s The Deposition sits wonderfully in the antechapel at Christ’s. It melts into the architectural setting and stands powerfully with assertion. This may seem like a paradox, but harmony is found due to the manner in which the tarnished metal relates to the wood panelling of the space and autonomy due to the sheer weight and dynamism of the piece.
The piece clearly borrows from the paintings of the same subject by Rembrandt, Rubens and Caravaggio. It shares with all three a drama of movement and an incredible sense of pathos. In all cases the relation of form to space is crucial. For the three painters Christ’s falling body is carefully positioned in a vertical space. The centre of gravity rests around the half way point of the paintings’ height, setting up a semantic relationship which describes the narrative of the Fall.
The descent of the body is the central narrative facet of the Deposition. Caro displays this through a series of folded sheets of metal, which curve around a solid vertical axis; the cross. The sheer weight of the metal and the rhythm of the curves create a sense of inevitable descent. The stillness of the sculpture does not impede the movement, but rather provides the structure against which it is created, ensuring that the narrative has both drama and permanence....
This is only a small part of the article.
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Christ’s College is on St. Andrews Street, Cambridge CB2. Tom de Freston is a contemporary history painter and art historian based in Cambridge. His work can be seen at www.tomdefreston.co.uk. For more information contact him on tasd2@cam.ac.uk
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