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Robert Griffiths Hodgins (South African 1920-2010) THE FIRE IN THE BORGO oil on hessian PROVENANCE Gifted by the artist to the current owner 60 by 80cm Robert Hodgins: The Fire in the Borgo 1976-86 (oil on hessian, 60 x 80 cm) There were often fruitful interactions between colleagues in Fine Arts and Art History at Wits. One of those occasions in the mid-1970s involved Robert Hodgins undertaking a demonstration of oil technique for my class of Art History students who were studying Renaissance and Baroque painting. He had covered an old canvas with hessian to provide a textured ground, and set about applying his oils with verve. He showed them how to build up painterly passages and impastos, and how different paint marks could create different effects: linear cross-hatching on drapes, impressionistic flickering flames and smudges of smoke and shadows, the tonal contrasts of chiaroscuro, and how whites were never pure white. This was accompanied by a witty running commentary, and Robert couldn’t resist poking fun at one of the historical paintings the students were studying, Raphael’s grandiose and mannered Fire in the Borgo in the Vatican Stanza dell’Incendio, which celebrated how the ninth-century Pope Leo IV had miraculously extinguished a raging fire in the city. But in Robert’s work there were no virtuoso posturing figures in the foreground and no distant papal miracles. The bystander – presumably a prelate because of his red cardinal’s cap, perhaps even Raphael himself, so much in the pope’s favour that he was reputedly about to be elevated to cardinal at the time of his early death in 1520 – looked on helplessly, the firelight flickering across his face, as the colonnades blazed. The painting was set aside after the class, but a decade later Robert surprised me with a gift of the completed painting. He said that the abandoned canvas had intrigued him and he had gone back to the half-finished painting and continued working on it over the years: it had become even more fluid in its application as he completed it, integrating the different elements and transforming them into his hallmark style. And the Renaissance topic had acquired overtones more closely related to Robert’s work of the 1980s, with multiple layers of meaning. The cardinal had developed a sinister quality, not unlike some of his Ubu characters, but perhaps also suggesting another historical figure in an imperial pre-papal Rome – a malevolent Nero watching while the city burned. -Elizabeth Rankin January 2016