Gabriele Finaldi and I are speaking on the phone so I can’t see the painting he is describing, but I start to feel that I too love Titian’s 1514 Noli me tangere just from listening to him articulate the things that move him most about it. I have asked him which painting in the National Gallery’s collection most speaks to him as a Catholic. Polite, utterly unpretentious and highly articulate, he seems genuinely pleased to have been asked the question.
“It is a wonderful balletic rendition,” he explains, “of that Gospel episode where Christ seems almost to be pirouetting as he moves away from Mary Magdalene, who seems desperately wanting to keep hold of him, with that beautiful landscape behind.
A picture that talks so much about love and loss and wanting to be united with your beloved. It is both beautifully human and beautifully spiritual at the same time.”
Finaldi has been director of the National Gallery since 2015, having come from the Prado in Madrid, where he was deputy director of collections and research. A former curator at the National Gallery, he knows the paintings thoroughly and makes a point of walking the length and breadth of the building every single day. It is a routine he takes very seriously because it reminds him of his responsibilities as the guardian of the nation’s pictures.
“There’s a sense of wonder that these extraordinarily precious objects, which are often no more than a few brush strokes of paint on a piece of cloth, are containers of such profound meaning. They belong to us. We can use them as focuses of study, conversation, reflection and even of prayer.”
He says he has a small epiphany almost every time he does the circuit. That particular morning he had come across a picture by Jan Miense Molenaer, which portrayed some children playing a concert, including a child with a couple of spoons banging on a metal helmet. Looking at it you can hear the fun the children are having, he says. “It is a constant source of joy walking around the gallery, not just the pictures, but also seeing the children looking around and enjoying themselves.”
The routine also allows him to speak to staff and hear any concerns, and occasionally to direct an oblivious member of the public to the lavatory.
Finaldi’s background is academic as you might expect – he has a doctorate from the Courtauld Institute of Art – but he also has an extra edge, that of being able to look at art through the lens of his Catholic faith, something he is acutely aware of.
“The Catholic background and formation certainly made me familiar with the traditional subject matter of Western European art,” he says. “It allows you to have sympathy with what these pictures are trying to do which is to engage people’s belief, but also to act as focal points for the community. There’s a lot about Christian art in the gallery’s collection that is about creating community and dealing with the deep and important things in life. It’s about relationships, family, faith, suffering – all of those things are there in the pictures.”
The son of an Italian father and a half-Polish, half-English mother, Finaldi grew up in Catford, south London, one of eight siblings raised in the faith. He is now a father of six himself and in the Italian tradition has moved back to the same area to be close to his family, many of whom now live on the same street. “If you look out of the window, you’re bound to see a Finaldi walking by,” he says, and I think I can hear a smile forming through the receiver.
He too is bringing his children up as Catholics and believes that there is nothing quite like a beautiful painting to spark a child’s religious interest. “The Catholic faith is an image tradition,” he says. “So often it’s easier to look at a picture and talk about it than to explain a passage of complex Scripture. The visual image is hugely important in transmitting deep human and Christian value.”
With a name like his, it is easy to forget that he is also part Polish, an element of his background which he has started to explore recently. As a result, under his directorship the gallery has acquired some art from outside the traditional Western canon. In fact, the gallery is now preparing for an exhibition of paintings by the 19th-century Polish painter Jan Matejko in the summer of 2020.
Matejko’s most famous painting is of the astronomer Copernicus who is portrayed observing the heavens from a balcony by a tower near the cathedral in Frombork. Finaldi is planning to bring the painting over for what will be a singular exhibition of an important artist who is hardly known outside his own country. “It will give us a chance to say something about Poland in the 19th century and about the wonderful paintings being produced outside Western Europe.”
Plans are also afoot for the first major British exhibition of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, the most celebrated female painter of the 17th century, which will also take place in the summer of 2020.
Later in the year there will be a show to mark the 500th anniversary of Raphael (“The artist of perfect beauty and harmony, who painted for the popes,” he says.)
Finaldi is clearly a busy man, which would explain why he was unable to meet me in person on this occasion. “So where does the director of the National Gallery go next?” I ask him.
“At the end of the day I hope to go home and have dinner with my children. I can’t think beyond that.”
Olenka Hamilton is the Catholic Herald’s supplements editor
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