THE Prince of Wales has chosen Tuscany, home of the greatest Renaissance Masters, for an exhibition that highlights the Royal Family’s artistic aspirations over five generations by displaying his watercolours alongside those of Queen Victoria.
The show at Sansepolcro, the birthplace of Piero della Francesca, also includes paintings by Prince Albert and Princess Louise, Victoria and Albert’s fourth daughter, who was the first member of the Royal Family to attend art school. It was opened last night with a glittering Renaissance theme gala dinner attended by most of Tuscany’s aristocracy, including Count Gaddo della Gherardesca, the Italian companion of the Duchess of York, and Marchesa Bona Frescobaldi, on whose estate near Florence the Prince has often stayed.
The exhibition features lithographs of Prince Charles’s landscapes, including Balmoral, Sandringham, and Greece, the fruit of his recent Mediterranean holidays with Camilla Parker Bowles. Sansepolcro, near the Tuscan border with Umbria and the Marches, is a shrine to Piero della Francesca, the 15th century Master revered for his extraordinary precision, emotional power and use of light. Many art lovers follow the Piero della Francesca Trail through Umbria and Tuscany to Sansepolcro, a pilgrimage recorded in John Mortimer’s “Chiantishire” novel, Summer’s Lease.
Ralph Griffiths, the British Consul in Florence, said that the choice of Tuscany emphasised the Royal Family’s, and Britain’s, long-standing love affair with Tuscany, which Queen Victoria had visited three times. Oggi magazine said that in choosing Sansepolcro the Prince, while acknowledging that his own talent was more modest, was linking himself to a painter who was “not only one of the greatest artists of Italy and the Renaissance, but of all time”.
Christie’s, which is to auction the lithographs for charity when the exhibition ends, said that, like Piero, Prince Charles was “a truly special artist”. Anna Hunter, publisher of the Prince’s lithographs and owner of the Belgravia Gallery, who is co-organiser of the exhibition, said that she was “astonished and delighted” to see railway stations from Bologna to Arezzo festooned with banners urging Italians to see the Prince’s work in Piero della Francesca’s home town.
The Prince began to paint in the mid-Eighties, initially under the pseudonym A.G. Carrick — A.G. from Arthur George, two of his names, and Carrick from the Earl of Carrick, one of his titles. He confessed last year that he did not think his paintings were much good, adding: “I don’t think I have been very successful.”
But Ms Hunter said that the Prince was part of a traditional link between painting and engraving that also included Dürer, Turner and Picasso.
Last year the art critic Brian Sewell, asked to judge paintings by celebrities “blind”, said that Prince Charles’s were “old fashioned” but had been “painted by somebody who knows techniques and draws quite precisely”. Sales of the Prince’s work have raised £3million for charity over the past ten years.
Oggi said that the watercolours revealed “the psychological side of a prince we know largely from the gossip columns through the saga of his marriage to the tragic figure of Diana and his relationship with Camilla”. It quoted him as saying he loved drawing cypress trees, which often dominate the skyline in Italy, because their sombre darkness “leads one into the landscape”. Lorenzo Vincenti, Oggi’s art critic, said that although the Prince was now “free to be at the side of his beloved Camilla”, his paintings showed that he was haunted by “solitude, anguish and sadness”.
Attilio Brilli, an art expert at Sansepolcro, said the Prince had invited comparisons with a Renaissance Master once before when he held an exhibition of his work at Urbino, the birthplace of Raphael, in 1990. Professor Brilli said that the Prince used watercolour “sensitively and luminously” in the manner of great 19th-century watercolourists such as David Roberts or John Ruskin.
“He has all the qualities to become a professional painter,” Professor Brilli said. “But he is almost certainly the last heir to the artistic tradition of the House of Windsor. I doubt whether his children, who have been brought up in the computer age, will ever know the pleasure of sitting down with a paintbrush.”
Dante Trefoloni, the Italian organiser of the exhibition, said the Prince had indicated that before it closed he would visit Sansepolcro to attend a conference at the end of this month on the Grand Tourists of the 18th century.
Anna Hunter said that Victoria tended to paint her children and dogs. She said Prince Albert had been a marvellous artist. Victoria (Vicky), the Princess Royal (and later the wife of Frederick III of Germany) sold her lithographs to raise money for the families of soldiers in the Crimean War.
The exhibition, notwithstanding its inclusion of work from the Hanovers, is called Prince and the Landscape: Lithographs from the House of Windsor. It is at the Palazzo Inghirami in Sansepolcro from today until October 6.
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Search on for Diana fountain designer(Yahoo: Reuters)
LONDON (Reuters) - A worldwide search for a design team to create a three million pound fountain in Hyde Park in memory of Princess Diana will be launched next week.
The Royal Parks Agency said on Friday that the winning designers should aim to "delight the eyes, stimulate the senses, enhance the surrounding ecological habitats, and evoke the spirit of the princess".
Diana, ex-wife of heir to the throne Prince Charles, was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997.
The fountain will be built on the shore of the park's Serpentine lake, along the Diana Memorial Walk. It is expected to be completed by the summer of 2003.
The memorial has been commissioned by the Diana Memorial Committee, headed by finance minister Gordon Brown.
Royal Parks Chief Executive William Weston said the memorial should reflect "the public's emotional response to Diana".
"Whatever the final form, the design must be fresh and imaginative, drawing inspiration from the princess herself, the place, the landscape, and especially the essential qualities of water, movement, reflection, playfulness and its role as a life-giving element," Heston said.
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