The Little Castle at Bolsover was used by William Cavendish, who was a nobleman from
the top layer of society of the Midlands, in the Derbyshire region, as a pleasure house.
And you have this sense that you're entering almost a magical, theatrical space.
Visitors to Bolsover Castle would have entered the anteroom first, and your eye is immediately
caught by this very beautiful temple, a sign of one's spiritual journey to come up to heaven
– virtue embodied.
However then you turn around and here's the first mystery because behind you are these
extraordinary paintings of physical delights, celebrating sensuous, voluptuous, earthly
love.
And the question is what's the role in all this physical pleasure in one's spiritual
journey.
Do you have to give up these earthly delights?
Are they an essential part of the journey?
It's a real puzzle.
So as you enter the hall, you have this really quite dramatic sight of multiple Hercules
fighting these animals.
And I think what's extraordinary about these is that Hercules is right at the front of
the picture, and the vaulting continues into the picture, and it's really a very theatrical
experience, almost as if they're on stage and almost as if the two worlds, the real
world and the painted world are merging.
Hercules tells me that effort is going to be involved on our part.
We can’t just be passive bystanders here.
We’re going to have to think for ourselves, we’re going to have to interpret these paintings,
effort is going to be involved.
Coming into the pillar parlour, we can see that all the paintings in this room are representations
of the senses, and they're all quite similar to the original print sources, after Frans
Floris, apart from Visus, sight, and this one is substantially changed.
On the side of her chair there’s a carving of a griffin and people who knew the family
would know that the griffin was the symbol of the Bassett family, and that was the family
of William's wife, Elizabeth Bassett.
Now your journey continues, you wind up the stairs.
If you take the right direction you end up in this glorious Star Chamber.
And the first thing you see on the walls are images from the Old and New Testament – so
very strong Christian symbols.
However then your eye goes up the ceiling.
Glorious ceiling of stars.
And that puts me in mind of the myth of Hercules who after death was transformed into a constellation
of stars.
So here is a room in which Christian and pagan imagery are wonderfully celebrated and mixed.
By the time you get here having seen the imagery in the other rooms you realise that there
could be something quite playful going on and I think it's very interesting to notice
these two characters in the corner who are in contemporary dress in sort of military
uniforms.
They look as if they're in the gallery of a theatre, looking down on what's happening
below.
Whoever designed this room was very well acquainted with the work one of the most famous thinkers
of the Renaissance, the Florentine philosopher, priest and magician, Ficino.
And Ficino's view is that the Greek and Roman worlds and the Old and the New Testament were
all simply different layers of interpretation of one single ancient true theology.
When you enter William's bedchamber you find two doors – one of them leads to the Heaven
closet – the Christian heaven – and the other one leads to the Elysium closet.
The Heaven closet is a really delightful surprise.
What strikes you is what fun heaven is – it's full of colour and light and dancing and music
and Jesus is dancing and the angels are having a whale of a time.
It looks like you're not going to have to give up physical delights if you're going
to enter a Christian heaven.
And now you walk across from the Heaven closet into the Elysium closet – the heaven of
ancient Greece and Rome.
So whoever designed this room is playing around with the classical notion of a dual Venus
– a heavenly and an earthly Venus.
Because in the classical versions of the story heavenly Venus is very much superior but here
the two seem to mirror each other.
The heavenly Venus is very fleshly, voluptuous, pregnant even.
The earthly Venus looks rather chaste.
Turning to the panels a visitor would once have seen images of what appeared to be flickering
flames.
So the question is, is this an image of celestial fire, purging us of our worldly loves and
lusts, or is this the fire of sensuous physical erotic delight, which itself has a purifying
and transformative effect.
I think it’s the second because I think all the messages from the Little Castle here
tell you that in fact a celebration of physical worldly love is a spiritually cleansing and
magically transformative experience.
So I think through these puzzles that we've seen through seven rooms of decoration, it's
become apparent that we don't have to choose between pleasure and virtue, we don't have
to choose between the classical and the Christian world.
And that there is a sense that in playing roles, in taking on the persona of people
you want to think about or emulate perhaps that we might actually be following our own
spiritual journey and finding our own way to heaven.