Jean Michel Massing

Jean Michel Massing interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5th December 2014

0:05:07 Born 1948 in Sarreguemines in Lorraine, part of Alsace Lorraine, an area where we are French but also speak a German dialect, which for an art historian is quite useful; I went to the Lycée, one of these enormous schools with probably 1200 pupils; I remember there were twenty-two nationalities and of course we were proud of that; on the line of the Massings I have a kind of spurious tradition that it comes from Maximus because there was a big Roman villa in the village from where the Massings came which is not far from Sarreguemines; linguistically it is right but of course it is not probable at all; in my part of the world there was the Thirty Years War 1618-1648, that is when the Massing are cut; we don't know how to link the pre and post war Massing, but one part of my family comes from there; others are from all over the world; I have a Russian ancestor who came from the Altai mountains together with the Napoleonic troops; I have ancestors who came from Bohemia; one side of my family was working in glass and crystal and in ceramics, because of course Sarreguemines in the nineteenth century was the largest ceramics factory in Europe, as big as Minton and Wedgwood together, and doing the same things but with the German technique and French flair; I think the Sarreguemines "wedgwood" ware was certainly as good as the Wedgwood one; I only knew one grandmother; one grandfather died of illness during the war and the other just after; I had a great-aunt who was quite important, she was a musician and writer without having a career in either; she in some way gave me the sense of mystery telling me Grimm's Tales and so on; one side of my family were small farmers and others, artisans, skilled people who had the secret of red crystal, if that is true; my grandfather switched to selling the ware and that is the start of another story, but he did quite well; my parents went to university; my father was a lawyer and politician; my mother was a Lycée teacher; they were interesting people; they travelled to China during the Cultural Revolution, for example; my parents travelled a lot so when I was twelve I had been to Istanbul and driven in north Lapland on dust roads, invited to stay in Lapp encampments; for my more recent interest in traditional cultures, it is extraordinary to have seen the Meos in Thailand or Lapps before they became tourist destinations; as a French person you were always very welcome at that time; my interest in art came from that period too; we lived in a big house; we had been pillaged during every war - 1870, 1914, 1939; fortunately I had an uncle who was a collector though he died in 1950 and I never met him; we had furniture, paintings, mainly Lorraine late eighteenth, early nineteenth century; we had a library with books from the sixteenth century onwards, wonderful atlases; one of my favourites was 'Le Grand Larousse', the encyclopaedia of the world in many volumes and of course I learnt and was interested; that is the key to everything I have done in my life; I am interested in the unknown and get a bit bored working on things that everybody works on; I like to come with new slices of cultural history, things people haven't been aware of, and I think it comes from this curiosity I got then; it is wonderful for a child to play in a rich library, and my parents went on buying; my mother read Teilhard de Chardin; I don't come from a religious background, I am not even sure that Teilhard de Chardin believed in God, but it is these ideas which were then in the air; one of the great gifts that my parents gave me was an open account in the local bookshop and at the local antique dealer; I started collecting very early; I remember crying when my first collection of cheese boxes was thrown away; one of the first important pieces I bought was in a flea market in Metz in Lorraine; I had gone with my father who had a meeting, possibly with De Gaulle, and I bought the head of the Virgin of around 1400, and probably paid about £10 for it.

9:43:18 My parents were extraordinarily supportive of whatever I was doing; what counted for them was culture and education; in addition to the languages I spoke as a child I learnt Russian from a Princess, a refugee from the Russian Revolution who was living in town; my parents thought it was also a way to give her money but unfortunately she died when I was six; I have learnt a number of other languages since; if you do the sort of reconstruction of material culture and culture that I do of the Bakongo in the seventeenth century, something that people thought was impossible; if you look at sources like the Portuguese Inquisition you can reconstruct it; the Bakongo became a Christian kingdom in the fifteenth century, and depended from Rome so you have Latin and Italian, they depended from Portugal which became Spain at some point; then part of it became Angola and another part, Zaire so you also had French and Flemish; the first anthropologists were Germans and English; Swedish missionaries, such as Karl Laman whose manuscript notes were published in nine volumes, and you need to know a little Bakongo; language is the best thing you can teach a child; I have a sister and two brothers.

12:37:05 I first went to the local school where my best friends were gipsies; I went poaching hedgehogs with them and we cooked them in a clay ball, I loved that; I was a little bit eccentric and everyone's friend; I went to just one school, the Lycée in Sarreguemines, from the age of six until about seventeen when I did the Baccalaureate; the primary and senior school were in the same building, so a big school; at twelve I had two main interests; one was a painter, an expressionist who knew Oskar Kokoschka, and I once met Kokoschka with him but too early to remember much about it; the other interest was archaeology; I started excavating when very young; the first time I was stopped excavating was when I was six years old with my little brother; we had discovered a book by Émile Huber on an excavation he did, which was in my parent's library; we went off on our bicycles and started excavating there and were interrupted by the police who had been told that there was excavators on the site; by twelve I was excavating in a rather serious way with a friend, Jean Schaub; I later co-edited the Festschrift in his honour, and even when at Strasbourg University; I would often come back for the weekend; the second excavation we started is now the Parc Archéologique Européen Bliesbruck-Reinheim which employs a number of archaeologists; it's on the border with Germany and on the German side was found the tomb of the Celtic princess of Reinheim and the biggest [Celtic] gold torque that was ever found; so we created the Bliesbruck site; I still have a link with it and eight big volumes have been published on the excavations there; I co-edited one but also did a few articles on it; I love these side interests.

16:37:04 On music, I never got much of an education on the practical side because I did Latin, Greek, and those kinds of things, but I had a good education on the listening side; Sarreguemines is not far from Saarbrücken, and even from my school which was a normal State school, we had buses going to the opera, concerts and ballet there; my parents wanted to do everything once, so we went to Salzburg to the Mozart festival; we went to Bayreuth to the Wagner festival and after the first few hours we decided not to speak a word of German there; it was in 1958 and it was still oppressive; the last pop concert I went to was Jimi Hendrix which shows that I do not go often to such concerts; for classical music I have very little time as I am working every evening; we hope to catch up when we retire when we will probably spend quite a few months in Provence, not far from Avignon where there are music festivals; our taste is eclectic; I love opera and when I was at the Warburg Institute in London 1974-7, we went whenever we could; there was a Festival of Islam with the most extraordinary Arabic music from the whole Islamic world so I have an interest in oriental music, Sufi music and so on; a nice thing about music and art is that one can enjoy it at very different levels with the same intensity; with films I like eccentric rather than the ordinary sort of American film and Cambridge doesn't always offer that.

20:50:05 On sport, I skied quite well until about twenty when I had problems with my knee; I never played competitive games apart from maybe tennis as a child, but we didn't even have a sports ground in my school; there was a courtyard which wasn't even straight and it had two basketball nets on either side, but don't think anybody ever played there; but then, in some ways I am a country boy; I could catch hedgehogs and fished and hunted.

22:16:11 I didn't have much of a religious background though we were notionally Roman Catholic; of course, in my grandmother's village there were saints everywhere and I knew every saint; culturally I got a religious education; my mother's religion was Teilhard de Chardin which is not exactly what people call religion; certainly in my family there was some interest in revolutionary theology as it was a way to create political change; so it was not for the religion but what they could do in South America; for example, my parents gave money to fund the unionisation of miners in the silver mines in Bolivia; the contacts were Redemptorists and sadly ended in wells with stones over them; my parents were quite progressive in their ideas; as a child I may have believed but I am not a person driven by religion, although I am interested in it and study it; I have seen more churches, and more Indian temples and mosques than most people; when you go to such places you show respect and of course as a scholar you try to recreate; when I worked on the late mediaeval visual culture I had to have some understanding of how people lived it; if you read devotional books you get an awareness of cultures and can think it, but in a very detached way; so having the basis of a Catholic education you have the idea of burning in hell even if you don't believe in it; for me, when I die, there will be nothing; we live in spirit and our spirit will be our publications.

26:03:18 At school I did a lot; our school was from 8am to 12pm and 2-5pm; there was no school on Thursday except when older when you had four hours school; there was school on Saturday morning and afternoon too when you were younger; there was a heavy load of work - Latin, Greek, two languages, maths, physics, and I did the Baccalaureate in philosophy; something always fires you - natural history, for example learning that when a frog moves and still has reflexes without a brain, it makes you reflect on quite a few things; I was always fascinated by history, and also oral history; our library at home was very rich in books on Lorraine and popular beliefs and I went to the places where these had been recorded; of course, it was often too late but not always; I went to a fountain near the Herapel, a big Roman site, where small sculptures of toads had been found which had been left there by women with gynaecological problems; I went to see whether I could find any more but sadly not; I could always complement such interests by things in our library; I was much more influenced by the painter I mentioned than by any teacher at school; I spent my time in his studio and painted; he had a wonderful library on art and was extraordinary in conveying what art is about; this was at a time when there were not so many books around so it was also a library for me to use which complemented those in our own library; we had books on Picasso, for instance, so were not just looking backwards.

29:56:19 University for me was an enormous excitement because I sometimes got bored at school and was quite good at truancing; when I had enough points to go up a class I just skipped the last weeks; I went to Marseilles, jumped on a boat, and went to Algiers or Tunis, then to the Sahara which I loved; of course I had to convince my parents and my siblings that I had good reasons for going, and if they most agreed then I could go; I went to see the rock paintings of the Tassili, on the Hoggar, I went to the Fezzan, to all these places; it was very easy to hitch-hike then because nobody did so; you would arrive in Tunis, jump on a train to the south, go to the Libyan border; this before Gaddafi in the time of king Idris when the Tunisians ran the transport system there; went to Chad; wonderful to be in a truck in the desert; they stop at night, they have water, you have couscous and so on; I spent a bit of time with the Tuaregs which was quite extraordinary too; I went to Strasbourg University and everything I had dreamed about I found there; I studied archaeology and art history, but the university allowed you to do everything; there were people teaching Byzantine art, were interested in Afghanistan, Egyptology, so I did all these things; I knew Greek but was going on to work on patristic texts for St Anthony so I did some Patristic Greek and so on; I loved the seminars on the history of religion; I remember hearing [Marten Jozef] Vermaseren speaking about the Mithra cult in the Roman world; I was never fascinated by the obvious but the clashes; how was it that you had an oriental cult that reached Lorraine, and of course the answers are through the Romans and so on, but at that point these things were new to me; I remember there was Fahd doing a course on Arabic divination and I was always interested in the occult in a scholarly way; when I arrived at the Warburg, one of my first articles was on astrology, on a book of comets, for example; I studied languages I didn't know, some at evening courses, and this allowed me to read quite fluently in several languages; I loved that period; I did three years there and then there was the Maitrise Spécialisée, and I worked on the temptations of St Anthony; the altarpiece [by Grunewald] in Colmar is an extraordinary work, one of the great masterpieces of world art, in one of the most visited museums in France; I had read [Erwin] Panofsky and his three levels of understanding works of art; if you look at it today it seems a bit naive, but at that time it was something that nobody had written about so it is extraordinarily important in the context of history of art; there was always the problem of what was the third level; the first level was analysis and identification of different things in a painting, the second the identification of themes and iconography, the third reflecting the ideas of the time; with the St Anthony altarpiece, the first level is various things in the composition, the second level is St Anthony being attacked by devils, but then there is this extraordinary third level; it does not merely illustrate the text itself but is a painting on the problem of the illnesses which the saint was curing – the St Anthony's fire; then what I could show was that they were not just trying to kill the saint but also to take his attributes as they are the devils which bring the illnesses that the saint is protecting against; so I discovered a whole level to explain this painting in the context of the hospital system and so on; of course it was looking at that point at iconographies that not many people had looked at; today these things are much more obvious than they were; I really got fascinated as it is very rare that you find a painting where its obvious subject is not its real meaning; the Maitrise Spécialisée was very substantial, three volumes I think; also at this point I was fascinated by a publication by Aby Warburg on one side and Richard Forster who had studied Die Verleumdung des Apelles, the Calumny of Apelles, which is this extraordinary Greek allegory; abstract ideas shown in human form so you have the bad judge between Ignorance and Suspicion and Calumny dragging the Innocent behind her, Deception and Deceit are pushing Calumny, and at the end comes Repentance at the discovery of Truth, so it is an allegory also of justice; I was really fascinated by this article in the great German tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with a knowledge of both Greek and Latin texts and vernacular traditions; I started to become interested in which way an image can transmit a text and the difference between the two; of course personification is a way of giving a form to an abstract idea; I discovered a world which had not been studied and became my doctoral thesis at Strasbourg; I also worked on it at the Warburg as I discovered a lot of texts; when I work on something I always try to get material from everywhere; you can then see what translation was used, how images conveyed sometimes an allegory detached from the original text, all these were things that I got interested in and I wrote a big book on it; this also led me to show that there were still quite a lot of works, the meaning of which was not known; one example is a painting by Lorenzo Leonbruno called 'Allegory of Fortune'; there is a large number of personifications in it, there is the Calumny of Apelles at the bottom, but who are all these figures? after a lot of work I discovered it was based on a dialogue on a fake classical text written by Alberti himself, he forged this Latin translation, Virtus Dea, about the story of Virtue who comes to see Jupiter complaining about the adversity of Fortune; even Jupiter the greatest god cannot oppose fortune, so he says he cannot help her because he had to paint the wings of the butterflies; this allegory of course is based on this text; so that was an extraordinary moment when you still had works of this kind where we didn't know the subject matter; I found a few, and somebody like Elizabeth McGrath found many more; now most of those are identified and it’s a case of finding something extraordinary, a really new document, as accessibility to everything is so much greater than it used to be; I always worked in wonderful libraries; I came to England because of the Warburg Institute library; I always travelled a lot to see what I needed to see, but when I was a student there was hardly a book that had colour reproductions; so I was very lucky in a wonderful way to see the fields developing; I remember when I came to the Warburg, as I had worked a bit on astrology, I identified the iconography of an Islamic manuscript; today you have journals who deal with these things; I was at the beginning, I still keep an interest, still look at the journals even if I don't read them systematically, but that was really exciting to see the field developing in a wonderful way; I came to the Warburg in 1974-7 as a Council of Europe Higher Education Fellow; I was really lucky as there were two people from every European country in any other country; at that point there was someone at the Warburg from Denmark; I knew Frances Yates quite well, also D.P. Walker, and Gombrich whom I knew best; he was an absolutely formidable person; he was grounded in the classical tradition, he could quote anything you wanted, and in debate he was extraordinarily impressive; he could tell a philosopher where he was wrong about Aristotle and so on; however, his main interest was music; he was a cello player and his wife was a professional musician; he made the great breakthrough by linking the history of art to experimental psychology, explaining why different people in different times work in the same way; a lot of people after him tried to come with new big ideas, but I am afraid he made the last extraordinary contribution to explain creativity; I was in awe of him; he was on the jury of doctoral defence and was impressive even there.

46:32:17 I came to Cambridge in 1977 as an Assistant Lecturer and as such you could only get a fellowship when you got tenure, especially in a small field like mine, but I was a director of studies in King's; I replaced Virginia Spate, a fellow of New Hall, who became Power Professor at Sydney; I became a Fellow in 1982; my appointment committee was chaired by Edmund Leach but I did not know anyone in Cambridge; at that point the world was different from now; my student have had the most influence on me, but I love the College as it is; I remember when I first came a college was new to me, I was not used to these big halls and you think that everybody knows each other and is looking at you; I quickly adjusted to it, and I suppose I was closest to Nick Bullock as we were in the same faculty - Architecture and History of Art - but I don't think there is a Fellow with whom I have not had wonderful discussions; to discuss with Bernard Williams, for example, was a frightening pleasure as he was such a formidable person; you were careful and evaluated every word but I learnt an enormous amount from him; there was also Martin Rees; I admire the elegance with which scientists can tell you what they are doing whilst we in arts and humanities take so many more words to explain, and we are not working on the cosmos; I have not come across this college system anywhere else; here it is stimulating and not just getting bits of information; you meet people in College; there is one right now with whom I may do a joint project; when somebody working on DNA projects and an art historian find common ground, that is what a college should be about; what I found exciting when I first came was the Research Centre; we were looking for difficult subjects, for example chaotic mathematics; I was an elector then and remember that it wasn't even clear if the topic existed; this is what I love because in research you have to take risks; if you fail you fail, but if you succeed, these are the real breakthroughs; Cambridge should be a bit more like that again; now it is a problem because if you work on the topics of tomorrow it may later have a big impact but not at the moment that you do it; it is easier to get a job if you follow trodden paths; in France you have places like the Grandes Écoles, C.N.R.S., College de France, and so on, but this is a residential university and I live seven minutes by bicycle away from it, and that is its strength; I see lunch in college as a key time to see people and discuss, both with Fellows and students, important topics such as the recent landing on a comet; I once did an article on the star of the Magi in Giotto's 'Nativity'; there was an article in Nature on Halley's comet which is was thought to be; I decided to write an article in German in which I showed that Halley's comet was not there at that time, nor was there much evidence that it was properly seen; I looked at the mediaeval terminologies of comets and discovered one called Miles which had the same form and colour - red and gold turning to yellow - and that it announces the end of great empires and the beginning of even greater ones, like to Old Testament heralding the New Testament, and Christ’s arrival; then I found that Cecco d’Ascoli mentioned Miles comet with regard to Christ so it had nothing to do with Halley; my error was to publish in German because nobody ever read it; this is a real problem with language because a large number of [British] students who come to Cambridge don't have any foreign languages anymore; what will they do in the world? how many Chinese learn English and how many English learn Chinese?

56:09:15 I enjoy all types of teaching although we are the most understaffed department in the university; when I was Head of Department we had a student-teacher ratio of 1:25, but even then I never gave up teaching; I give lectures and seminars and while I was Head of Department I supervised eighteen undergraduate students a week; I think teaching is very important; now we have a part 1 and part 2 we really attract the best students; a large number of them go on in art history; I take MPhils, PhDs and so on - I had eleven PhDs at the start of the year; I love teaching and think it is in some way addictive because our students are so good; also they are from all over the world, probably more so than in other fields; a number come from intellectual backgrounds so have been to museums, and know other languages; I have had students who have done work that nobody could have done before; one such - Berthold Kress, who was not at King's - did a PhD on the apocalyptic writings of Paul Lautensack; the book has just come out in a wonderful publication by Brill; nobody could read these texts and even the bits they could read, couldn't understand; he did, and it is of course the last great unstudied document of the Reformation; Lautensack was in contact with Luther, so an important figure; he was mad, apocalyptic, but with extraordinary drawings and diagrams; I had another student, in King’s, Susanna Berger; she did her PhD on the extraordinary images, mainly prints but also drawings recorded by the students, which were used for the teaching of philosophy in Paris around 1600; a wonderful study; my students work on many different things but I only take people when I know the field; divination interests me and I had a student working on Persian divination in India; she was American but knew Spanish and French and for her MPhil I made her learn German; however she also knew Sanskrit, Hindi and Gujarati as she was of Indian origin, and her major was Persian and she knew some Arabic; now she is at the Metropolitan [Museum of Art].

1:00:22:02 When I was about sixteen I got really fascinated by Afghanistan because I had read [Joseph] Hackin's book on archaeological research in Afghanistan about the treasury of Begram, now an infamous American base; in the treasury were found ivories from India, lacquers from China, glass and bronzes from the Mediterranean and Iran; I was also fascinated that at the Shosho-in in Nara, Japan, were Roman objects; I started looking at Rome beyond the borders, and this intercultural research was crystallised in the commemoration of the discovery of America by Columbus in the National Gallery in Washington in 1992; they thought they would do an exhibition of world masterpieces, but I suggested they do an exhibition showing the links between cultures at the time, and how that curiosity led to navigation along the coast of Africa and the discovery of America; this became the extraordinarily rich first part of the exhibition; I also did the relationship between cultures of the rest of the world and American culture; I was fascinated to see that these links had not been studied; I started looking at the early images of the Amerindians and discovered in a drawing by [Hans] Burgkmair Montezuma's shield; I discovered a well-dressed Tupinamba Brazilian showing Indian artefacts; then I looked at the collections; there were people in Basel who knew they had a Tupinamba mantle, and somebody like [Alfred] Métraux had done an article, but that was a time to make sense of all that; the exhibition had extraordinary objects like that two metre, sixteenth-century Tupinamba feather mantle; I became interested in how people saw these objects and what they reflected; I worked on cartography, thinking about what maps meant to the Spanish when realizing how little they knew of the world; a Mappa Mundi was a map of the seas and represented trade potential for a nation like Spain or Portugal rather than the globe as we would see it in terms of land mass; this led to other exciting developments; what I discovered was that in 1992 a lot of these areas had not been studied or if they had been, there was still a lot to be found; one example is that there was an extraordinary production of ivories in Sierra Leone done for the European market with the coats of arms of Portuguese, and I discovered the Book of Hours from which all these motifs were taken; it had been published in Paris between 1509 and 1511 by [Thielman] Kerver, the earlier and later productions lacking some of the illustrations; there are eighteen religious scenes on the Sierra Leone ivories, all in this Book of Hours; what does it mean that suddenly you has this extraordinary production which lasted for about 30-40 years, and then nothing; of course that raises much larger questions such as why did things really happen; at that point the Menil Foundation contacted me about a project on The Image of the Black in Western Art; the first volumes on classical antiquity, middle ages, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been published about twenty years before but they had never managed to finish the series; they asked a few people to contribute to it but I was one of few survivors; I did a whole volume on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; this was an extraordinary project because it was on the image of Africa and who were all the Africans; this was on black Africans; I did an article on an Elizabethan idea of The Washing of the Blackamoor, and traced it from antiquity, in poetry and pictures, as an indelible stain in satirical cartoons, to pub signs and soap advertisements; it gave me an extraordinary image of the development and the various readings of such a topic; I was warned that in America people would be more worried by my article; but it was published in the Warburg Journal and did raise some interest; I did have the backing of the Menil Foundation, a French foundation funded from oil exploration; living in Texas had given them a strong sense of outrage at the segregation in America and encouraged them to support black freedom movements; they gave the Carter Menil Prize to Mandela in prison, and financed the Anti-Apartheid movement through Swedish foundations and so on; mine was quite a touchy subject but if you want to condemn racism you have to study it; I knew Martin Bernal who wrote Black Athena, and he was delighted when I gave the Glanville Lecture in Egyptology on Egyptian and East African headrests; I also had an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum on this topic at that time; what that showed was the continuity from c.2750 B.C. to the twentieth century, not of just an object and a function, but all the specific forms; in the nineteenth century in Sudan you had headrests you could almost have taken for Egyptian ones; my lecture went beyond that as I think I really showed for the first time an absolute continuity between Egypt and West Africa; I showed it in archaeological terms in the excavations of the Garamante in Libya; these are not well-known, but lead us to the Dogon, or the Tellem, and to West Africa; Martin was delighted because this was really afrocentrism as he saw it, covering the whole of Africa.

1:14:01:18 Now I am working on the Pacific; I am always looking for interesting topics and this is in my home town Sarreguemines; when I go home I go to the museum, to my old excavation, and to the archives; I am in an area where there were a lot of missionaries who went all over the world; one of them went to New Guinea and the Gilbert Islands; of his time in New Guinea, not much is recorded but there is a lot of material there on the Gilbert Islands; this is before Arthur Grimble; his name is Nicolas Hamann and he was trained as a carpenter and was interested in the material culture; he recorded things and made drawings; the first time I gave a paper on it was about some objects he had collected from the island and writing the story of them; he takes a white shell ornament, gives its name, and tells you who wears it, where, when, with which atmospheric condition, and with which magic spells; nobody else recorded that; when I gave my paper to the Pacific Arts Association, [Christian] Kauffman from Basel suggested either I had invented it or they didn't have anything like it for any other culture; unfortunately the Gilbert Islands had a poor [material] culture, they were basically nude except when they fought; then they had cuirasses made of fibre, probably based on European ones but who knows what; fighting was their most pleasurable activity, so much so that at one point one group decided to exterminate the other one; this led to England being asked to take over the islands; so these are extraordinary papers and it is a pleasure to write on them and important to do so; the Gilbert Islands are now known as Kiribati and will be the first country to disappear under the sea; the highest point on all the islands is only six metres above sea level; already a large number of people live in Suva and Auckland, and in fact the Government of Kiribati has bought an island in Fiji to resettle the people when necessary.

1:18:05:17 I am not a ‘collector’ as such, but collect seriously in the same way as I do an article; I try to reconstruct fragments of a material culture, mainly of Africa; some of my treasures are Zulu beaded scarabs, extremely rare, ephemeral; the very sad thing is that there are very few places in the world where you see a serious display of African art; how many rooms in the British Museum or glass cases in Cambridge or Oxford? When you think that this continent is as big as Europe, the USA and a few more together; I am interested in early African art but not untouched by Western cultures; I work hard but I have incredibly interesting research to do; you learn all the time; I like looking at things that others have not looked at and finding interesting information; I think it is difficult to work on two books on different subject at the same time; I have just finished an article on a Jesuit, Jerome Nadal, his late sixteenth-century book, and another volume of illustrations, and the influence of these prints in sixteen- and seventeenth-century Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, in Europe from Spain to Poland, but also in Persia, Ethiopia, India and China, and a bit even in Japan; I always have works which take me a long time to do - it took me eighteen years to do the enormous volume on the 'The Image of the Black', but of course I published other things at the same time; it took me so long as once you have found Africans represented in art you then want to know who they are, to identify them and find names; there are all kinds of dead ends but often you find wonderful information; one of the aims of this project was to show the diversity; they were not all slaves, some were at court; in the Barlow Collection there was a wonderful portrait by [Jan] Mostaert which was bought by the Rijksmuseum, of a black courtier with a golden badge, identified by [Ernst van den] Boogaart as Christophle the Moor; a lot of those at court were important people, not just pages and servants, but soldiers, philosophers, a whole range of people; in 1518 you had a Congolese who was a bishop in Portugal which a lot of people forget; for the Menil this was important because the work was meant to give dignity to African [Americans] at a moment when, especially in America, some people really equated a person of African origin with a slave which is unacceptable.

1:24:22:04 I have been married for forty-five years; my wife, Ann, is American and is a painting conservator and studied in America, France and Germany; she taught at the Hamilton Kerr Institute at Cambridge; we met in 1968 but travelled for a year in Asia in 1969 looking at temples, museums, art, the tribal cultures, etc. and I think it was the best thing we ever did; it was a time when nobody travelled around; we were in Angkor Wat for six weeks and because of the Vietnam war there was not one tourist, only a few French archaeologists who sometimes gave us lifts for faraway temples; it developed my interest on the links between cultures but also led me in further directions; the Internet has affected the way I work though it is not a good thing to think that everything will be found there; the best thing is when you use it in ways beyond the obvious; for example, there is an area which has transformed it; there are times when there is a Latin inscription and you know it could be Horace, but now it is easy to find it on the Internet whereas it would have taken time in the past; once I published on an extraordinary penitential cabinet in an English church; it was a late Medieval tradition in which you had in front of you there a mnemotechnical hand with various sins on which to meditate; it was very worn and with friends from the Warburg we partly reconstructed the inscription; later I looked for it on the Internet and found that the image was linked to the text of a manuscript, unpublished, but online, at the Huntington Library; extraordinary, but that is how it is.