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THOSE familiar with the sayings of Marcus
Porcius Cato, the elder (234-149 BC) - and which reader of The Scotsman
is not? - will recall his comment on statuary in the Roman empire: "I
would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have
one."
Take it from me, a keen observer of sculptural body language,
that the late Donald Dewar, the putative father of the Scottish nation,
tireless driving force for devolution, the original, genuine Scottish
Executive First Minister, keen antiquarian book collector and famed fish
finger fancier, would have been of the same austere opinion.
I congratulate the sculptor, Kenny Mackay, on his 9ft high bronze
of a man who stood head and shoulders, physically and intellectually,
above so many political posturers and sermonisers at The Mound. He has
clad our dour Donald in a suit, at once formal to indicate sartorial
appropriateness to his high office but carefully rumpled to show that
Scotland has a plethora of pressing needs.
The facial expression is pure, vintage Dewar. It is a mixture of
earnestness, officiousness, suspicion, mild indigestion and gloom,
perhaps at hearing of yet another upsurge of schism and doubt among
ever-complaining MSP ingrates at the rising cost of the Holyrood
parliamentary pagoda. As such, it could provide a salutary stony glare
to discourage perspiring shoppers in their tracks from overheating the
economy as they pass the statue, placed in Glasgow’s new Buchanan Street
precinct.
The statue shows Dewar as a man of solid substance, not style,
but the troubled frown, suggestive of someone trying to repair a watch
with boxing gloves, indicates a peeved, studious politician who, if
alive and dumped in the area would, with a look that spoke volumes, be
likely to ask: "What am I doing in this place of conspicuous capitalist
consumption? Get me out of here and take me to the nearest antiquarian
bookshop."
It would have been, perhaps, more fitting for our much-respected
and, even, loved Donald if the statue had been placed in the precincts
of the new parliament building with a message on the plinth aimed at
representatives of envious nations, "Look upon my work, ye mighty, and
despair." Alas, a glorious opportunity has been missed and Edinburgh,
the natural home of statues in the land of mountain and flood, where it
is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them and the
weather-eroded and frozen-stiff citizenry, has been deprived of a green
and glowering but well-executed addition to the capital’s monumental
mass.
The Dewar work, on a 3ft plinth has already proved an
irresistable magnet for those madcap monument mountaineers whose life
seems dedicated to planting traffic cones on the illustrious,
statue-sculpted heads of the great and the good.
Edinburgh’s pigeon-parking statuary straightforwardly commemorate
public benefactors, the military and royalty, but a comparatively-recent
work, erected beside a West End fin-ance house, showing a rider
frantically grappling with a high-rearing horse, is enigmatic but
possibly indicates galloping inflation checked by bank rate adjustments.
As a diligent statue watcher, I can reveal that the
representation of David Hume, Scottish philosopher, historian and
economist, erected only a few years ago at Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket, has
been the target of revellers lacking Hume’s high-minded imperatives.
It has been crowned several times with the conic cap of low
comedy, thus imparting an unexpected air of rakish insouciance to an
otherwise austere image. Considering that Hume is toga-clad and situated
in the wind-grieved environs of the High Street and George IV Bridge, it
would have been more fitting to have covered the author of A Treatise of
Human Nature and a five-volume history of England, as well as other
works of weight, with an anorak, scarf and woolly hat.
Although Edinburgh has statuary riches, it is my belief that too
many people deserving of such commemoration are ignored. Alongside
social reformers, public benefactors and literary luminaries, we should
have statues of relevance to our daily lives depicting nurses, teachers,
people struggling for existence in sink estates, overburdened mothers,
cycle-and-car-endangered pedestrians and the typical Scottish taxpayer
bowed with rents and rates and the rising costs of keeping body and mind
in working order.
Modestly, I see it looking a bit like myself. If it appears, I
would await the accolade of the traffic cone with confidence. |
