Monday 21^st November 2011

I’m sure the Leonardo Exhibition brought it on. He’s showing in London at the moment and I was there with Aunt Lavinia.

Somehow Leonardo fused an idealising tendency with a habit of minute observation. He even went in for anatomy. His paintings are astonishing visions of perfection but utterly real at the same time.  That is their strange power.

They are visions of love with roots of some kind in science, measurements, the painstaking recording of facts about muscle structure, the behaviour of skin and the layout of bones.

So what is love? Often have I said, ‘Love is knowledge.’ As you know, Poor Little Rich Gays tend to Jane Austen. It is most attractive that, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth reverses into love with Mr Darcy through knowledge of everything that’s wrong with him. Although his humiliation and recognition of his errors is a turning point in the love-story, it is a mistake to think he is changed for good. He will always be on the haughty side, inclined to judgement, heavy going at parties, in a word, shy. Elizabeth will furnish all the liveliness and sociability. Mercifully, like my own love-interest, Lord Arrowby, he can be teased. From time to time his more sober outlook will save Elizabeth from some excess or other.

On the other hand, there is Byron. Have you ever read Don Juan? I don’t expect so. There’s a very trying bit when the eponymous protagonist (hardly hero, in fact just a boy) gets ship-wrecked and embarks on a dreamy affair with a maid of Turkey. They can’t speak of course, owing to barriers of language, but we’re given to understand words would only have ruined their glorious communing with the sea-shore.

At least the Romantics had the decency to admit that their vision of love was completely impossible in the real world, would be ruined by marriage and was ideally realised through the death of both parties.

Poor Little Rich Gays have little time for any of this. In love, their hearts are engaged but their heads are not lost.

Love is knowledge. Well, it must be more than detailed observation or mugging for the accountancy exams, however much knowledge engenders love. Perhaps love is the opposite of boredom, a marvellous freedom in which what is already known is forever discovered anew but also added to.

So love shows horror as well as beauty. Poor Little Rich Gays, supremely, know this.

Whatever love is, it reveals the truth, it does not build illusion.

Leonardo: Lady with an Ermine. Conveyed to London from Krakow for the Leonardo Exhibition of a Lifetime