I have visited the National Gallery countless times — I have been going there since I was a baby — but there is one painting that I always return to. It’s a late Renaissance portrait called The Tailor, by an Italian artist, Giovanni Battista Moroni.
It’s not like the other portraits of the period, because its subject isn’t a nobleman or a wealthy patron. He’s an ordinary working man. He stands sideways on but his head is turned so that he is looking directly at you. Moroni is a very clever artist, and he has composed the painting so that you cannot help but look the tailor directly in the eye. Everything leads to his eyes: the central line of buttons, the light in the top left corner.
Moroni mainly painted religious figures, so it’s thought that this painting might have been to pay the tailor for some work that Moroni couldn’t afford. It would have been very brave of Moroni to treat a “common” subject so directly. The tailor is wearing very plain clothes, and he’s just staring at you, as if to say “What do you want? If you want to paint me, go ahead, but I’m just a tailor. No big deal.” But despite his ordinariness, he ‘s incredibly attractive. In that sense, anybody would find it a beautiful painting, although in the 16th century its lack of symbolism or wealthy display would have meant that no art collector would have wanted it on his wall. Now we value it because of its honesty — its historical and human truths.
The Tailor has everything that I also love about acting — character, honesty, human emotion. It’s not a display of what he would like to be, or how he would like to be seen, it’s just who he is. It’s immediate and gripping.
I used to work at the National Gallery, and my mother lectures there and is an artist herself, so I’ve always been around art. In modern art, I love Grayson Perry’s pots. They show true craftsmanship, which is something that’s missing from a lot of contemporary art. I think people who don’t like art don’t understand it. They think it’s not for them, but actually it’s such a basic, primitive thing. As humans we want to mimic our lives through something else, be it painting or sculpture or drama. Understanding the physical process — the craftsmanship — can help us to understand and enjoy the work.
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We used to go on family holidays to Italy, and now my mother and I go to Venice every year. We both love Italian Renaissance art and Venice is my favourite place in the world. But although I love seeing the Titians and Tintorettos, I have never been inside St Mark’s Cathedral. I’m always too busy exploring the ghetto or the back-streets. I find it much more interesting to see how ordinary people live than to accept what people choose to show you. That’s why I love The Tailor.
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