11Story

22 January 2010

Hollar

 

Memorial plaque to Wenceslas Hollar. George Vertue (1684-1756) writer, Frantisek Belsky (1921-2000) sculptor, P J Bentham (fl. 1977), designer. London, 1977 Photograph. Original bronze, aluminium, Portland limestone or composite similar. 84 x 68 x 2 cm © John Brewster. Reproduced by kind permission of the photographer

Most memorials record details of a person or event to be commemorated and leave the rest to the beholder and posterity, as if memory registers only assertion. Memorialising portraits commonly share this habit but are usually less affecting than the private memories held by survivors. Perhaps their main merit is durability.    The memorial illustrated here, in Southwark Cathedral, is to the great artist and draughtsman Wenceslas Hollar, a refugee from Bohemia who died in poverty in the city he helped document. So far from being assertive, this memorial is doubly self-effacing, which paradoxically makes it more memorable than most. If the sculpted head of Hollar in bronze relief, based on a two-dimensional self-portrait, conveys how he looked, it attracts less attention than the striking epitaph by his 18th century admirer George Vertue, which refers only to his work.   The words invite the perverse reflection that if Hollar’s achievements do indeed last longer than the plaque itself then there was no point in making it.

 
 
 

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