(jazzy music)
Female: Here we are in the Tate looking
at a beautiful painting by Edward Burne-Jones
called King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid from 1884.
Male: It's a really tall painting.
Female: It's very vertical.
I was thinking about that just as we were standing here,
and how unusual that verticality is in art history,
although there's another painting of similar
verticality next to it by Burne-Jones
called The Golden Stairs.
It made me wonder what it was about that kind
of verticality that appealed to him.
Male: The vertical format really allows him
to do some interesting things compositionally.
It allows him to stand the lance up on
the right side of the canvas,
and it allows for this interesting kind of movement,
I think, with our eyes upward.
I sort of step into those stairs
and then I travel up the length of the male body,
through his gaze to her and then up again
to the figures at the top.
Female: Who direct your gaze again back down
to the beggar maid.
The story here is that we have King Cophetua,
an African king, who has not been interested
in women until he's met this very, very
beautiful woman who is a beggar.
Here he's shown seated at her feet.
He's removed, I think significantly, removed his crown,
and he's holding it in his hands.
His shield and lance are rested on that right side.
He looks up at her,
and she looks out at us.
She doesn't return his gaze.
Male: It's a wildly interesting subject,
because it's really about the power of love
and the way it trespasses over social structures.
What would that have meant in the 19th century?
Female: That's a good question.
This is very much a kind of ideal, romantic image,
a kind of chivalrous, Medieval image.
Male: Absolutely.
It seems very chaste in that way.
It's a pretty quiet painting.
Female: What's striking me is the space itself.
Are those stairs, I mean those are stairs,
but what kind of odd stairs lead up
to essentially nothing at the top of the stairs?
Male: It's just this enclosed space.
Female: It's almost like stairs that kind of
form a throne at the top.
Male: It is like a throne,
or almost like a little alter.
Female: It made me think that one of the things
that appealed to him about the narrowness
of the shape of this canvas is the way
that he can compress the space
and make it not a kind of perspectival space.
It is a space, that makes sense,
but one that's sort of crowded and cramped.
and rather mysterious.
It reminded me a little bit
of Northern Renaissance painting.
Male: Interesting.
It's almost like a little bit of a stage
for this enactment.
Female: There's so much gold here.
It contrasts with, of course, her plainness, right?
Male: Yes.
Female: And the simplicity of what she's wearing.
We can see her poverty in very stark contrast
to the wealth of the palace where the king lives.
Male: But what that does is it means
that because she has no artifice, it's her
natural beauty, her innate beauty that we look at
and that is meaningful to him.
I think in that is importance of moral aspect.
That notion that one has to look beyond
artifice and really recognize true beauty,
I think, is critical.
It seems to me that would have been
important to these artists.
Female: Absolutely.
I think that idea of recognizing that truth
lies beyond the material world
with all of its visual appeal.
It's sort of a little bit like Burne-Jones
is giving us something that draws our eye
almost as much as she does, but she wins.
All that gold is wrought and engraved.
It's almost like we're being tempted.
It's like a moral dilemma for the viewer,
drawing our eye to it.
You want to get up close to the painting
and look at all those details
that are in that gold that's glistening.
But then we have this sort of idea
of truth and beauty that are more important
than the things that appeal superficially to the eye.
Male: So that king really functions for us as the lead.
He's taken off his crown.
He looks past that and sees her.
We are, in a sense, to do the same.
Female: I think that kind of moral aspect
to that rings very true as a Victorian painting;
that little lesson that's here about what's important.
(jazzy music)