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Thursday 4 December 2008

Whisper or scream

Robin Holloway attends the Spanish premiere of Helmut Lachenmann's Little Match Girl

As you enter the exhibition, there, in front of you, sits the Holy Grail of British architectural historians — Inigo Jones’s copy of Palladio’s I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (Venice, 1601), held in Worcester College Library.

This is the book Jones took round Italy on his grand tour with Lord Arundel in 1613. Like a Michelin Guide freak, he marked it with his own notes, scribbled in a minute hand in fading brown ink. You can still make out his ultra-precise calculations — ‘The Abbaco is a quarter of the height of the Capitol ...The Capitol is high on the diamiter.’

Calculations had to be precise and done on the spot because there were no correct classical buildings at home for Jones to work from once he got back to England. His best source to create the first accurate architecture in this country since the Romans left 1,200 years before was this battered old guidebook — the Queen’s House in Greenwich, the Banqueting House on Whitehall, the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace ...they all grew out of this book.

More modern tastes are also catered for. There’s the original manuscript, owned by Campion Hall, of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called his ‘terrible sonnets’ in his 1885 Dublin Notebook. Balliol has lent Robert Browning’s manuscript of Fifine at the Fair (1871); written, he said, ‘to show merely how a Don Juan might justify himself, partly by truth, partly by sophistry’.

Bibliophiles will be excited by all this; but so will those interested in art. There’s a bewitching little picture of an angel healing St Cuthbert’s knee — a rather minor miracle, I’d say, right up there with the saint that sorts out hangnails — in the 12th-century manuscript of Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, written in the 7th century.

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