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of BB. Clark later said: ‘His whole approach was entirely new to me, my knowledge of the German language was incomplete, and at the end of three hours I felt I had been riding in an intellectual Grand National. But it changed my life and I am eternally grateful.’19

      Clark was deeply impressed by the possibilities this iconographical approach offered. It was particularly relevant for the interpretation of Renaissance art, with its dual freight of Christian and Classical symbolism. He began to ask very different questions in front of works of art. Until this point he had been preoccupied with the Berensonian questions of connoisseurship: when and where was this picture painted, and by whom? He now started to think more about the function of a work of art: why was it painted, what does it represent, in what circumstances was it painted, and above all, what does it mean? He later claimed that the chapter on ‘Pathos’ in his most admired book, The Nude, is ‘entirely Warburgian’. But in the end aesthetics were too important for Clark ever to be an ardent student of iconography, and the elucidation of detailed symbolism came to bore him.

      Clark’s approach to art history was a synthetic and evolutionary affair, containing many elements, beginning with the poetic and descriptive literary inheritance of Hazlitt, Pater and Ruskin. He could already see the limitations of Roger Fry’s analysis of design (or formalism), but we can still detect this influence when he came to write his book on Piero della Francesca. The residual artist in Clark was focused – in a rather French way – on the creative process, and why artists did things in a particular way. Years later he was to tell one correspondent: ‘If my work has any value this is because I write from the point of view of an artist, and not as an academic.’20 He did not give up connoisseurship, and went on playing what he called ‘the attributions game’ – this was to cause him much trouble in future at the National Gallery. He was never to spend much time in archives, and once claimed that in the field of Renaissance art ‘the study of archives has made relatively little progress since the 1870s … and if these heroes of the first age of accumulation are seldom remembered today, except by the writers of footnotes, it is because posterity draws a distinction … between architecture and a ton of bricks’.21 This attitude would raise eyebrows within the profession.

      The most unexpected element of Clark’s art history came from books he read in German – what he described as the historical interpretation of form and composition by Wölfflin, and Riegl’s study of the art-will.22 They brought a rigour and an analytical approach to Clark’s work that is seen to best advantage in The Nude. German art history freed Clark from the world of Edwardian connoisseurs and Bloomsbury. Finally, there was his new-found Warburgian interest in symbols and subject-matter; but he was sometimes critical of this approach if taken to extremes, where the crudest woodcut might be as valuable to study as a Raphael painting. He distrusted philosophical and metaphysical approaches to art history, and always steered clear of dogma, quoting Giovanni Morelli, who ‘loved to tease the professors who, “preferring abstract theories to practical examination are wont to look at a picture as if it were a mirror in which they see nothing but the reflection of their own minds”’.23 Clark told a teenagers’ radio programme that the qualities of a good art historian are ‘imagination, sympathy, responding to works of art, knowing how to use documents and telling the truth’.24

      While in Rome, Clark had one other unforgettable experience: a sight of the strange, rarely seen, very late Michelangelo frescoes in the Cappella Paolina in the Vatican. These represent the Martyrdom of St Peter and the Conversion of St Paul, and reduced Clark to an uncomprehending loss of words. Jane broke the silence: ‘They are tragic.’ The sight of these frescoes haunted Clark for the rest of his life, and they became the centrepiece for his 1970 Rede Lecture, ‘The Artist Grows Old’.

      Clark was starting to spread his wings across the art world even before the Italian exhibition. When a group of art historians that included Herbert Read, W.G. Constable and Roger Hinks suggested a History of Art Society to publish original books on the subject in English, Clark was proposed as the secretary. But, as he wrote to his mother, they all had different aims: ‘Constable is for scholarship, Read for philosophy, I for history,’ adding, ‘Personally I see no public that will swallow any chaff of German scholarship … I had a taste of pure scholarship last night, when I attended a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, and it will do me for years. I would rather go to church.’25 In fact, Clark himself was about to face the limitations of British interest in intellectual German art history when he gave two lectures at London University on his heroes, Riegl and Wölfflin. It was a chastening experience, as he told BB: ‘They cost me infinite pains & were complete failures: only twenty people in a vast hall & of the twenty 15 were elderly ladies recruited by Jane. They neither heard nor understood a word, & my chairman greeted me at the end with the words “You don’t really think Riegl a serious writer, do you.” So ended the first effort to spread the gospel in Great Britain.’26

      With the Italian exhibition behind him and the abandonment of Florentine Drawings, Clark needed a new project. ‘I was prevented from dispersing my faculties,’ he wrote, ‘by [an] offer from the newly appointed librarian at Windsor Castle.’27 Owen Morshead was an unusual courtier – scholarly, funny and affectionate, he was much admired by George V because he had won both a DSO and an MC in the war. He had been impressed by Clark on his visits to the library to inspect the drawings (‘he has an austere quality of mind’, he told a friend28), and took an avuncular interest in his career. He had proposed the librarianship of the House of Lords to Clark, suggesting, ‘I think your wings must have to be clipped a bit.’29 Now Morshead offered Clark the chance to catalogue the extraordinary collection of Leonardo drawings in the Royal Collection. As Clark wrote: ‘This was one of the most important assignments that could be given to a scholar, and it is almost incredible that it should be handed to an unknown amateur of 25 with no standing. Owen Morshead took a big risk.’ ‘But,’ he added, ‘I think it came off.’30

      Clark published his first article on Leonardo, an essay in Life and Letters, in 1929.31 This has two characteristics of all his later writings on the subject: the importance of understanding the wider intellectual interests of the man, and the necessity to demythologise him. He started work at Windsor the following year, and his catalogue took three years to complete. The mammoth task of researching and cataloguing six hundred drawings by the most diverse of all Renaissance artists should not be underestimated. There was virtually nothing to help him except a few unfinished nineteenth-century notes. It has never been established how the Leonardo drawings came to be at Windsor, but they were in the collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, in the early seventeenth century, and by the end of that century are recorded in the Royal Collection.

      Clark’s catalogue was eventually published in 1935 by the Cambridge University Press, in a lavish edition for which Clark was paid fifty guineas. The Leonardo catalogue has always been his most admired work amongst the scholarly community. For the Leonardo specialist Martin Kemp, it set ‘the British standard for such publications’, within an attributional framework that has ‘stood up to sustained examination incredibly well’.32 Whenever critics have wanted to question Clark’s standing as a serious art historian, his defenders have always pointed to the Windsor catalogue as evidence of his ability to produce impressive scholarship on one of the most complex and difficult assault courses the discipline can offer. Clark himself modestly called it ‘my only claim to be considered a scholar’.

      Meanwhile, the Clarks were so miserable in their Westminster house that they travelled as much as possible. They visited the hotel at Sospel, which was failing

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