Platinum Queen: This Week In Art Restoration Mishaps, A Historic Clock Tower In Prague

 

This Week In Art Restoration Mishaps, A Historic Clock Tower In Prague

"The 600-year-old Orloj, ... one of Prague's most famous landmarks, is at the centre of an embarrassing row amid claims that an artist endowed it with likenesses of his friends and acquaintances in an expensive restoration project, possibly as a joke." - The Guardian

June 3, 2022

In 2018, the iconic Orloj astronomical clock that has been the centerpiece of Prague’s Old Town Square for more than 600 years, was unveiled to the public after an extensive £2.1 million ($2.6 million) restoration. But one of its central paintings, a depiction of the months of the year as zodiac signs, doesn’t look right.

‘What Is Mark Wahlberg Doing There?’: An Artist Gave Prague’s Iconic Orloj Clock a Disturbing 21st-Century ‘Restoration’

In his 18-page complaint, Milan Patka argues that the artist hired to restore the work, Stanislav Jirčík, has diverged so far from the original as to replace some of faces with likenesses of his own friends, and in other cases changed the ages, genders, and clothing of the figures. In one case, a scene depicting a man with auburn hair in a green coat transformed into a man with jet black locks and a new bushy mustache; a dog in the scene that was once a black mutt, is now a brown-and-white shepherd.

A figure from the original painting, at left, and the new restoration, at right. Courtesy Prague City Hall.

Ben Okri: three sonatas for a Queen The acclaimed poet writes specially  to mark the jubilee

I

She’s done the most difficult thing, 

Lived a life of myth 

Inside a life of flesh 

Been a symbol to millions 

While being a woman to herself 

Shaped the contours of an age 

While seeming small on the stage 

Held the hand of a nation 

While it went through ambiguous transitions 

Been on the face of coins and notes 

While dealing with a family flawed as all are 

Been the fairytale figure in our children’s dreams While the nation was often ragged at its seams 

It’s hard enough to manage 

The balance of a life 

And to be the stabiliser of millions 

In times of glory and of strife 

II 

 Sometimes I catch a glimpse 

Of her at a window 

Or holding that severe 

And maternal expression 

That often calms the nation 

Or sometimes in a horse-drawn carriage 

Trotting past on a commemorative day 

I catch the wave of her hand 

And wonder how she’s held It together all these years 

Never showing doubt 

Or faltering, or falling down 

Beneath the despair of the times Or giving up, or not being able 

To rise up to her duties 

For some reason or other, 

And I think that there’s Something greater than duty 

That drives her 

And holds her up, 

In that slowly fading, 

Always glimmering throne. 

And it’s something to do 

With power, and something 

Also to do with the mysterious Destiny of a people 

Who need the symbol of a crown 

To grasp what they can be 

And what they can do 

On the dim roads of history 

Where sometimes a symbol Helps a people rise 

And stay risen 

While all around 

Darkness prowls 

The boundaries of lands 

That toil and yet do not thrive. 

III 

Once I sat down to lunch 

With her and saw from close up 

The mystery of that flesh Inside the fairytale. 

Like all our wise mothers 

She understands time, 

Understands that things Are wrought day by day, 

With steadiness, 

With steeliness, 

Wearing down rocks 

With the patience 

Of constant rain, 

Keeping to a manageable vision, 

Holding the emotions firm,

Rising each day to do the job 

You’re called to, with calmness, And a quiet humour, 

Seeing through the bluster 

Of men who talk but do not last 

And grasping that time 

Is like one’s children 

That one attends to 

With care and love 

And toughness. 

It’s with such humility, 

Such unseen fierceness 

Of will that with 

A barely perceptible smile 

She has wielded 

The sceptre of these isles 

And been an unlikely pillar Among the leaders of the world For seventy eventful years. 

Far more than being a queen

She’s done the most difficult thing, 

Inside a life of flesh 

Lived a life of myth.

A history of majesty from Cecil Beaton’s coronation portrait via Warhol and Freud to a postcolonial image for the platinum jubilee

Royal portraiture walks a tightrope between accessibility and remoteness, depicting a monarch with whom we identify yet who remains mysteriously other. Omofemi’s is the picture for the moment; its fusion of politics and fantasy is the bargain underpinning all art of royalty.

Two Queen Elizabeths meet, fantastically, across half a millennium in jubilee week on London’s New Bond Street. The first is a mask-face, encased by an auburn wig, encircled by a spiky lace ruff, an allegory for the sun and its benevolent rays. Her hand on a globe, her boned, pearl-studded gown stiff as armour, Elizabeth I in the Armada portrait (1588) is the most famous representation of female power in western art. 

Serene, impenetrable, the still point of a turning world, she commands not only empire but the elements: buffeted ships on stormy seas, to her left, reach victory in calm waters on her right. But her own body has vanished within a panoply of symbols. Splashing gaudy blocks of lilac and purple across silk-screened photographs in his Reigning Queens series (1985), Andy Warhol understood icons: the potent mix of instant recognition with individual unknowability. His pop art “Elizabeth II” in candy colours, repeated like postage stamps, flatters and updates the royal brand.

The Queen’s portraits: a potent mixture of politics and fantasy across 70 years