11Story

19 January 2010

Naval Pillar

 

Design for a Naval Pillar (satirical print). James Gillray (1757-1815). London, 1800 Photograph. Original colour print on paper. 54.6 x 30.6 cm © Trustees of the British Museum 1851, 0901, 1012.

The celebrated caricaturist James Gillray used a public competition for a suitable monument to British sea power, at a time when its future was uncertain, to launch this patriotic satire on some of his country’s conceits. The nation is familiarly personified as Britannia and other values or claims are routinely represented allegorically in human form – Justice, for example, here shown with scales unbalanced. Standing firm against man-made adversity naturalised as storms and the relentless force of the ocean, the nation itself, on closer inspection, appears composed of disparate and perhaps incompatible elements.    As a focus for allegory or commemoration (see the Memorial plaque to the RIGHT), a person never comes up to scratch unless perfected by abstraction. No real person - unreliably changing and changed by circumstances – need apply for the role. Allegory is an apology for animism which modernists let in by the back door. Who can really love Britannia, with no face anyone could care about?

 
 

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