eeping Tintoretto here

WILL IT BE possible to save for the nation a magnificent painting which has been described by Mr John Thompson, director of Tyne and Wear County Council Museums, as "probably the most impressive art treasure in the North East"?
He is referring to the fabulous picture by Tintoretto of "Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet" which has hung in St Nicholas Cathedral ever since being donated in 1818 — long before this huge former parish church had achieved cathedral status — by Sir Matthew White Ridley.
The cathedral is having to sell the picture, but into the breach has stepped the National ArtCollections Fund with an offer of a quarter of a million pounds toward the purchase of the picture by Newcastle, with £100,000 being put up by Tyne and Wear County Council.
The NACF is the nation's major art charity dedicated to assisting our national collections, whether in museums, galleries or National Trust Houses. Working from its offices at 20 John Islip Street, London SW I, it depends on the generosity of its members and of the public. For about 80 years it has helped over 300 museums and galleries to acquire works of art which might otherwise have been lost to future generations in this country.
This remarkable and huge picture — it is nearly six yards wide — is, nowadays, believed to be by the hand of the master himself, with only limited studio assistance. The asking price is £765,000 — modest by modern standards.
Peaceable
SOME tend to think that the United Nations Organisation is a waste of money and time. They may be right. They look back with cynicism to the day, 40 years ago yesterday, when a Charter was adopted by 51 founder nations with the inspiring call of peace, justice and freedom for all.
Today there are 159 member nations representing 4.5 billion people, virtually the world's population. Before bewailing the fact that the United Nations has "failed", however, it is worth considering the fate of its predecessor the League of Nations. Since 1945, we have had 40 years of peace, taking the world as a whole, whereas only
20 years separated the two great wars.
Ah, one may say, but there have been innumerable local conflicts in every part of the globe during these four decades, whereas things were more peaceful in the twenties and thirties. But were they?
Paul Johnson, a normally reliable informant, says in his History of the English People (p.384) "In the 1920s the world seemed at peace . . . The League settled minor disputes; there were no major ones."
And yet the emerging state of post-1918 Poland was, in next to no time, at war on several fronts; against the Ukraine, against Germany, against Lithuania, against Czechoslovakia and against Russia.
The Polish-Soviet war, in fact, ended only in 1920 with a massive defeat for the Russian forces and the establishment of a greatly enlarged Polish state.
The League had meanwhile to take, as its basis for future peace, the Treaty of Versailles, described by the Labour leader Philip Snowden, as "not a peace treaty but a declaration of another war."
And so it proved to be, by way of violations of peace in the Rhur, (by France), in Manchuria (by Japan), in Abyssinia (by Italy), and in Spain by one of its
own generals.
No more moderate or Catholic, and even Conservative, Republic can be imagined than that which, in a bloodless revolution, took office in Spain in 1931. But within a short time extremist right wing elements had successfully subverted this Republic from within, provoking a violent and disastrous reaction from the extreme left and opportunistic intervention by Soviet Russia.
These facts were carefully kept out of the English Catholic papers in the thirties, though it was not only Catholics who failed to see that Spain, as of 1936, had become the cockpit for a trial of strength soon to burst on the world and bury the poor but well meaning league of Nations.
The war, when it came, at least saw a neutral Spain presided over by an unsentimental political genius who reduced Hitler almost to tears.
How strange the ways of paradox.
New `Domesday
ONE OP THE Western world's three most famous books is Domesday. It stands third only to the Bible and the Koran.
But, unlike those others, it is one of the world's least read books. The reason, in part, is that its three million words are in highly abbreviated Latin and have been previously of interest only to scholars and historians.
Yet Domesday is unique and no other nation has a comparable 900-year old record of its past, landholder by landholder, village by village, manor by manor.
Hence the importance of the publication yesterday by Hutchinsons of The Domesday Book: England's Heritage, Then and Now.
1 was amazed that the price was only £14.95, for this is a sumptuous volume giving the first full interpretation of the famous original, and presenting a long overdue opportunity for the ordinary reader to rediscover, in our century, the England of the Domesday survey.
It is splendidly produced with copious illustrations in black and white and full colour.
Answers to questions, concerning, it may well be, one's own family, apart from many of wide sociological interest, can now he answered.
But it is a big hook. Coffee table in size if not in spirit. All we need now is a pocket edition to take around on travels.
That would be a boon indeed, and perhaps will come next.
Saunders Lewis
THE LATEST edition of the review Planet — sub-titled "The Welsh Internationalist" contains an evocative description of a sad scene in Cardiff:
" 'What's going on then?' A passing Cardiffian eyed the dark suits streaming into the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Charles Street.
" 'They're burying 'im,' said her companion, 'that selfgovernment fellow. 'Im it was stirred it all up, bombs and burning and that.'
" 'Oh, them and their selfgovernments,' said the other, turning an impatient back on the whole affair. 'Don't have nothing to do with us, thank goodness.'
And yet it was a kind of state funeral that they were watching. Saunders Lewis was dead . . . (But) it was the state funeral of one who had set out to create a state and failed." (He had formed Plaid Cymru in 1925).
Is this fair to the great man who died last month, and of whom an appreciation appeared in our paper? To take the question further, Planet also prints the transcript of a television interview with Lewis, first transmitted by the BBC on May 19, 1960.
The interviewer, Aneirin Talfan, asked "Was not one of the reasons for your failure, perhaps, that through your conversion to the Church of Rome, in one way or another, you made it impossible for yourself to be able to understand or to sympathise with Welsh life as it is at present?"
Lewis's reply was "I don't think 1 stopped understanding Welsh life by turning to the Church of Rome. But 1 think I alienated Welsh people from me and made them suspicious and afraid of me because I became a Catholic:" Pressed further about the reasons for his "journey to Rome", Lewis said "I became a Catholic not because anything in the social philosophy of Catholicism appealed to me in the least, not at all. 1 became a Catholic for one terribly simple reason, that I believe that in the Catholic Mass,. God is worshipped as he should be worshipped by men and women. And that is the only reason I became a Catholic."
drawing (reproduced here) was made by Richard Huws and first appeared in the magazine Heddiw (and now appears in the November edition of Planet) felt that the attitude of Welsh people, particularly at the time he had become a Catholic, made it impossible for them to accept a Catholic as a political leader.
"I acknowledge that at once," he said. "But I don't think it estranges me from Wales, nor from the Welsh nonconformists tradition."
One often wonders if any serious thought was ever given to the setting up of a, Welsh College in Rome to train men for the priesthood in Wales. I was asked about this the other day, but did not know the answers.
Others may.
Crib competition
I GATHER that no Catholics are among the many entrants to the first ever National Nativity Competition which is being organised by the Anglo-Celtic Society of Nativitists.
The organisers, themselves Catholics, naturally have found this strange. But it is still not too late as the last day for entries to arrive is November 22.
The competition, similar to many long familiar in Catholic countries, is a new venture for Britain and Ireland and offers much in potential return on an imaginative or Original entry in the form of a "Nativity," which could be a crib or any other representation of the nativity scene.
The competition is for anyone, professional or amateur, who feels that he or she can interpret the Christmas story in some art form of personal choice.
There is also scope for a "computer-generated image" sponsored by EPSON UK who will award a colour plotter (plus a junior section with a dot matrix printer) for the prize.
Be (incredibly) the first Catholic to enter this unusual but, I would have thought, fascinating competition. You have only to send some photographs (from 2 to 6) for the preliminary judging, having received an entry form and full particulars from Society of Nativists, 64 Severn Road, Cardiff CFI 9EA. To obtain the latter, write to this address enclosing a 17p stamp.
A selection will be made from the photographs on December 6 and finalists will be asked to send their finished artistic products for a final judging at the John Paul II Conference Centre, Talbot Street, Cardiff on December 23.
My apologies for last week's picture of Reynold's Robinson, of whom I had meant also to write in connection with Calvinism, becoming confused with the portrait of Calvin, temporarily hanging in the Huguenot exhibition. The latter is the property of Lord Radnor. head of an illustrious, originally Huguenot, famil#'. (The headline, moreover, will have worried French scholars, having been spotted, alas, too late for emendation).