above everything were denied her. Two years after the death of the Duke
of Savoy, Philip, the only son of Maximilian, brother of Margaret,
husband of poor Dona Juana, who was destined to a life of madness,
Philip, Archduke of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, King of Castile,
another of the promising princes of Christendom, died at the age of
twenty-eight, leaving five children, with another shortly to be born,
and amongst them was the seven-year-old Charles, the heir of the world.
At the solemn obsequies in the Cathedral of St. Rombaut in Malines (the
same whose tower is now shattered by Prussian shells), at the end of the
mass, the King-at-Arms of the Golden Fleece cast his baton
[Illustration: THE TOWER OF ST. ROMBAUT, MALINES]
along the pavement and cried three times in a loud voice: “Le Roi est
mort!” Raising it again he cried again: “Vive don Charles, par la grace
Dieu, Archiduc d’Autrice, Prince des Espagnes!” and without a pause a
herald continued, raising his great banner from the ground, “de Bourbon,
de Lostric, et de Brabant”; and a second, “Comte de Flandres,
d’Arethorys, de Bourgone, Palatin d’Haynault, de Hollande, de Zelande,
de Namur, et de Zutphen!” and a third continued the long list, and a
fourth, the last ending: “Marquis du Sainct Empire, Seigneur de Frise,
de Salins, et de Malines!”
So the future Lord of the World entered into his inheritance at the age
of seven, and as always, without a murmur or a protest, Margaret left
her oratory, turned from her slowly rising shrine, and went into
Flanders to be guardian for the future Emperor, to train him for his
task, and meantime to administer for him one of the most turbulent, if
rich and beautiful, dominions of his patrimony.
Bruges and Ghent were too uncertain in their temper as the result of an
uncontrolled guild system and its inevitable democracy, inorganic and
chaotic. Moreover, Margaret herself had been educated in Malines by her
grandmother, Margaret of York, widow of Charles the Bold, so to Malines
she came with four of her little nephews and nieces, and was received
with great rejoicing, taking up her residence in a very splendid palace,
the Hôtel de Savoy, portions of which still remain and are used as a
Palais de Justice.
Malines in 1507 was a very different city from that of to-day; as we
could have seen it a year ago with its narrow and winding streets, its
fragments of old ruins, its little gabled houses, we loved it for its
quaintness and its modest picturesqueness which formed a kind of foil to
the vast tower of St. Rombaut, lifting like a truncated obelisk above a
low plain. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was, like the
other great cities of Flanders and Brabant, a place of palaces and
gardens, a courtly and splendid city, rich, busy, magnificent. In the
night of the “Spanish Fury” in Antwerp it is of record that amongst
other proud buildings, five hundred palaces of marble or chiselled stone
were destroyed, and this gives some idea of the nature of the other
cities that rivalled and exceeded Antwerp in magnificence. Malines, when
the Duchess Margaret took up her abode there, was no village of dark and
dirty little streets, but a city of palaces, far finer than London, or
even Paris, and a fitting residence for a princely court and for the
future Emperor.
The new Regent made it more magnificent than ever; it was a time when
five centuries of mediæval culture were blooming in beauty and great
learning, and the beneficent qualities of the early, or Christian
Renaissance, were uniting with all that had come from an epoch whose
term had already arrived. In Italy the Renaissance had rotted into a
poison, but the virus had penetrated only a little way into the veins of
Europe. The Papacy was rotten to the core, the Medici were cloaking
their pestilential tyranny and their glorification of material gain in
the fine vesture of learning and æsthetics. Machiavelli was dethroning
Christian ethics and substituting efficiency in its place, but the
Christian Renaissance was still fighting its losing battle through
Cardinal Cusa, Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus. Dürer, Holbein, Hans Sachs
were giving a new glory to at least two of the arts in Germany, and as
yet Luther was no more than a threat, Wolsey a rising star whose
balefulness was not apparent, Calvin unheard of, Henry VIII a splendid
prince shortly to be proclaimed “Defender of the Faith” he was so soon
to cast down into the mire.
In the domains of Margaret of Malines the afterglow of Catholic culture
was still golden and gracious, and while she defended the interests and
the welfare of the principality she held in trust with a vigour and a
persistency that threw into the shade the lesser abilities of her male
predecessors, she made of her city a new centre of learning and
righteousness. Here came Louis Vives and Adrian, Archbishop of Utrecht,
later the Pope of a year who, had he lived, might have reformed the
Church and made the Protestant Reformation innocuous; Erasmus of
Rotterdam, that engaging character who could have matched and worsted
Luther, and done his work better than he, had he possessed the sincerity
and the consecration of a martyr; “Cornelius Agrippa,” Massé, Everard,
Molinet, Renacle de Florienne, and other lesser lights. Mabuse, Van
Orley, Coxcie came as painters to produce the altar-pieces and portraits
desired by the Regent and her court; composers and musicians sought her
patronage, for she had a passionate love for music of all sorts and
wrote many poems and songs which they set after the fashion of the time.
Her interest in architecture was intense, and she made Rombaut
Keldermans her court architect, charging him amongst other things with
the completion of the vast tower of the church of his name-saint, begun
by his direct ancestor Jan in 1452. This was a famous family of master
masons, Jan, with his brother André, Mathieu, Antoine, and later Antoine
II, Rombaut, and Laurent. The designs for the completion of St.
Rombaut’s tower and also for a great Hôtel de Ville are still preserved,
and in vision one can see them carried out by and by in a new and
regenerated Malines under a new and regenerated civilisation. As a
matter of fact, the stone for St. Rombaut’s spire was already cut and on
the ground when the fortunes of Flanders changed, and in 1582 it was all
seized by the Prince of Orange, and carried away to build a new town at
Willemstadt. During Margaret’s regency, the great Cathedral of Ste.
Gudule at Brussels was built, the good part of the Ghent Hôtel de Ville,
the belfry of Bruges, the spire of Antwerp, as well as innumerable other
great works that perished at the hands of the Spaniards, the Calvinists,
and the French devils of the Revolution.
As a collector of books, pictures, works of art of all kinds she was
indefatigable. In her own house, which was a true palace of art, were
Van Eycks, Memlings, Van der Weydens, Dierick Bouts, most of which
succumbed long ago to ignorance and vandalism. There were priceless
tapestries without end, sequences of six or more: The Life of Queen
Esther, the Story of the Three Kings, of the Earthly Paradise, of
Arcadia; La Cité des Dames, the History of the Cid, of Alexander, of St.
Helena. An inventory of the palace art still exists and reads like a
story out of the Arabian Nights; we here find catalogued wonderful
carpets and rugs; armour inlaid with gold and silver; caskets, clocks,
vases of precious metals, carved and engraved gems, precious marbles,
jasper, ivory, alabaster, chalcedony; gold-and-silver plate set with
precious stones. As for her private library it was a treasure-house and
a student’s sanctuary. There were one hundred and fifty vellum volumes
illumined with colours and gold and bound in velvet, gilded leather,
metal studded with gems; there were three editions of Aristotle, four of
Livy, with the works of Ovid, Seneca, Cæsar. There was a large
collection of theological and moral works, decretals and digests in
Latin and French, the works of St. Augustine, Lives of Saints, Bibles,
missals, breviaries, books of hours, Gospels, Testaments. Froissart was
there, with all the old Arthurian romances, as well as the “Golden
Legend,” “Le Livre de Tresor,” “le Mirroir du Monde,” “le Mirroir des
Dames”; books on hunting, falconry, chess, fashions. All these were
illumined manuscripts, but printing was already an industry, and what
Margaret had in this line we can only guess, as this particular
catalogue is gone.
It was in this wonderful palace, set in the midst of many other palaces
in a rich and courtly city, where the streets were always full of the
pageantry of the iridescent mingling of an ending mediævalism and an
unfolding Renaissance, that Margaret lived for a quarter of a century,
training the little princes and princesses, administering the very
complicated affairs of her state, defending it against aggression,
composing its internal differences, giving aid to the sick, the
suffering, and the disquieted in mind and soul, conversing with the
philosophers, poets, and theologians she had drawn from many sources,
and all the time keeping architects, painters, sculptors, craftsmen busy
in adding to the wealth of beauty already superabundant in the
Netherlands.
Flanders and Brabant have always been fortunate when women ruled in the
place of men and never more so than under Margaret of Malines. She
guarded with the most jealous care every just interest of her people,
beating at the outset Henry VII of England in a diplomatic contest, but
later refusing to marry the thrifty monarch (“They have tried to marry
me three times, but my luck is bad.”), bringing Charles of Guelders to
rights, aiding in the defeat of France by her father and young Prince
Henry of England at the Battle of the Spurs, but on the whole
maintaining an unwonted peace.
Not for a thousand years had there been a time more momentous than the
years of Margaret’s regency; more complicated in its conflicting
currents, more amazing in its possibilities and in the ideas that were
brought forth. The Renaissance was in the saddle in Italy, riding the
Church and society to their fall; in Germany Protestantism was claiming
and fighting for the succession, while France was following Italy in its
progressive corruption, England still standing firm behind her Channel
cliffs that seemed so well to defend her against spiritual as well as
physical invasion. All things were changing, a new era was establishing
itself, but Maximilian was not content to see the old depart without a
struggle, nor was his son Charles when he succeeded him. In the
voluminous correspondence that has been preserved between the Emperor
and his Regent of the Netherlands there is an astounding letter which
reveals the almost insane lengths to which the imagination could go in
these overstimulated times; in it Maximilian confesses that he has a
great scheme for the redemption of Europe and it is this: he, himself,
is to be made a kind of coadjutor to the Pope (Julius II, then ill),
whereupon he will surrender the Empire to his son Charles, and then when
Julius shall die, be made Pope in his place, thus uniting all spiritual
and temporal power in the persons of the Hapsburg father and son!
He wouldn’t have made a bad Pope, this shrewd, crusading, idealistic
Maximilian, certainly he would have been a better than the Alexander VI,
Julius II, Leo X type then in vogue, and the vision of Maximilian in the
chair of Peter, with Charles V the temporal lord of the world, is
stimulating and provocative of speculation as to what might have
happened. However, it all came to nothing; Julius recovered, and was
succeeded in 1513 by Leo X, who reigned furiously for eight years and
then died, to be succeeded, not by Wolsey, who was exerting every
diplomatic and pecuniary agency to gain the prize, not by a Cardinal of
the Medici or the Colonna, but by an obscure recluse, Adrian, sometime
Archbishop of Utrecht, a gentle professor at Louvain whom Maximilian had
discovered and sent to Malines to help educate the future Charles V, and
who had since been immured in Spain as Cardinal of Tortosa.
It was one of those kaleidoscopic phenomena that gave an exceeding
vivacity to the age. Into the midst of a line of Popes distinguished for
their highly developed and quite artificial taste, their rapacity and
simony, their persistent nepotism and their serene profligacy, came
suddenly a shy, ascetic student, pious, austere, and simple. Into the
Vatican of an Alexander VI and Leo X he came with his old Flemish
housekeeper, to the horror of the curia, and, we may believe, the
sympathetic amusement of the angels. For a moment it seemed as though
the ideal of Maximilian was to be attained by more orthodox methods.
Adrian VI set himself to the task of reforming not alone the curia but
the whole Church; to regenerate Catholicism on Catholic lines, defeat
Protestantism in its own field, restore peace to the world. Destiny,
however, is not to be escaped; the world had busily made its bed and in
it it was destined to lie. One by one each young and righteous prince
had been taken away by death before he could set his lance in rest
against the common enemy, and now the anomalous Pope was denied his
self-appointed task. In less than two years he was dead, Clement VII
reigned in his stead, and the world, having taken a long breath of
relief, went on very much as before, to its inescapable destiny.
When he was fifteen years old Charles formally took over the government
of the Netherlands and four years later he was elected to the Empire,
becoming Charles V, but Margaret still remained at the head of the
Council of Regency of the Netherlands. In the wars between the Emperor
and Francis I, the Netherlands escaped as the fighting was elsewhere,
and their peace and prosperity remained practically unbroken. In the end
Margaret crowned her career by initiating and completing the “Ladies’
Peace,” which resulted in the treaty of Cambrai. Francis I had already
been completely beaten by the Emperor, renouncing his claims over
Flanders and Artois and promising to keep the peace, but he promptly
broke all his engagements and had to be beaten again, very thoroughly
this time, with further disastrous results to the remains of Christian
culture, for Clement VII had joined with Francis against the Empire, and
Rome was stormed and sacked by the lawless troops of the Constable of
Bourbon, unfortunately killed in the assault, amidst appalling scenes of
murder, arson, and pillage, when untold wealth of ancient art was
utterly destroyed. The whole war was a scandal on the name of decency
and more than Margaret and the other decent women could bear, so she
proposed to the Emperor that she should undertake to make peace, and
actually succeeded in doing so, with the aid of Louise of Savoy, mother
of King Francis, Marguerite of France, Queen of Navarre, and Marie of
Luxembourg, Countess of Vendôme.
Margaret’s work was apparently finished. All her brother’s children had
been guarded, educated, and married, Eleanore to the King of Portugal,
Isabelle to the King of Denmark, Marie to the King of Hungary, while
Ferdinand who had been educated in Spain had married Anne of Hungary and
received from his brother, the Emperor, the throne of Austria, to which
were added Bohemia and Hungary after the great beating back of the Turks
from Vienna in 1529, since King Louis, husband of Marie, had lost his
life in the terrible disaster of the battle of Mohacs in 1526, when for
the moment the Moslems had been victorious and had threatened all Europe
from the field where 20,000 had laid down their lives in a vain attempt
to stem the heathen tide.
As for her imperial nephew Charles, he was now the unquestioned head of
the Holy Roman Empire and leader of Christendom; on February 24, 1530,
he was solemnly crowned by the Pope, in Bologna, with the Iron Crown of
Lombardy and the crown of Charlemagne. Peace of sorts, had settled on
Europe, and it was a peace of Margaret’s own making. The Lutheran heresy
was sullen and threatening, but thus far there was no actual violence.
There was a pause in the ominous progress of events, and tired,
apprehensive Margaret determined to resign her charge to the Emperor,
who was coming from his crowning to visit her in Malines, and retire to
one of the convents she herself had founded. She had earned the peace
she desired, and a greater peace, which was accorded her by the grace of
God, for on November 30, 1530, she died from an overdose of opium given
her by her physicians in preparation for an operation that had become
necessary, owing to an injury to a foot which had not been properly
treated.
She died as she had lived, thoughtful for others, generous, meek in
spirit, sincerely and devotedly a Catholic. All the Netherlands mourned
for her as a righteous and able governor and, after the imposing funeral
services in Bruges, she was carried through the snow, along the road she
had followed on her wedding journey, thirty years before, to the church
at Brou, where she was placed by the side of the husband, who had been
hers for so few years, and for love of whom she had built the most
beautiful shrine in Europe.
The church at Brou is the last of Gothic art, and Margaret of Austria,
by the love of her people, Margaret of Malines, was the last of the
great and righteous and pious women of the age that had made this art
its own.
With the passing of Margaret, Malines ceased to be the capital of the
Netherlands, but for compensation in some sort it was made an
archbishopric; and though its great palaces have passed with its glory,
the hoarded art and the
[Illustration: A DETAIL FROM THE CHURCH AT BROU]
marvellous library of the Regent gone to feed the fires of sacrilege or
enrich the galleries of the uttermost parts of the earth, though its
wealth is no more and throngs of finely clad burghers and merchants no
longer enrich its winding streets with the pageant of a wedded
Mediævalism and Renaissance, out of this ecclesiastical aggrandisement
has come in these later days a new honour to Malines; for when war and
pillage again swept it with the flames of hell, it was the Cardinal of
Malines, Archbishop Mercier, who dared to stand forth and defy the
spoiler, while shaming his too-cautious ecclesiastical superior,
weighing, vacillating, counting costs and profits in the midst of his
buzzing curia.
The Heart of Europe, pierced by the sword and shedding the life-blood
that had coursed for a thousand years through the arteries of the world,
knew that the hour of the eternal question had come, that the clean
division between right and wrong had been cut by the sword, that once
more the Voice had gone forth: “He that is not with Me is against Me,”
and that there was no longer place on earth for the emasculate, the
neuter, in the catchword parlance of the time, the neutral. Peter
shuddered and hesitated on the throne of the Fisherman; great nations
outside the widening ring of fire counted the cost and dreamed
day-dreams of arbitration and pacification, but once again Malines
spoke, as in the past, with the tongue of the past--and of the future.
Mercier of Malines spoke for God and his own people, and for the
righteousness that is eternal, as four centuries ago spoke Margaret of
Malines.
XI
THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS
The history, the principles, the motives, the methods of that mode of
art which expresses itself in pictorial form are involved in more error
and misrepresentation than happens in the case of any of its allies. For
this the nineteenth century, and particularly the Teutonic nineteenth
century, with its inability to understand art in any form save that of
music, is chiefly responsible. Every effort has been made to isolate it
as an independent form of art, to confine it to “easel painting” on
panel or canvas, or to wall decorations conceived after the same fashion
and on the same lines, to reduce it to certain schools and individuals
and localities; in a word, to make it a highly specialised form of
personal expression, like lyric poetry or theological heresy. This is to
miss its essential character and deny its primary function.
Painting is the use of colour and the composition of lines and forms for
sheer joy in this particular kind of beauty; for the honouring of the
most honourable things; for the stimulating of high and fine human
emotion; for the symbolical (and therefore sacramental) expression of
spiritual adventures and experiences that so far transcend the
limitations of the material that they are not susceptible of
intellectual manifestation. Painting is primarily and in its highest
estate an ally and an aid of architecture, as are also sculpture and (in
a less intimate degree) music, poetry, and the drama, all working
together for the building up, under the inspiration of religion, of a
great stimulus and a great expression. As a thing by itself it fails of
half its power, but, like all the arts, it can be used in this way,
though indifferently and only within certain limitations. To say,
therefore, that painting as an art began with Giotto or Cimabue or
Duccio, is absurd; there was great painting long before them, and some
of it reached heights even they could not attain. Of course most of it
is gone, vanishing with the destroyed or remodelled buildings, where it
worked intimately with architecture, scraped off by “restorers,”
whitewashed by iconoclasts, done over by easel painters, so it is hard
to judge it justly, but a few fragments remain in France and Italy that
give some idea of its original power and beauty.
Similarly, illumination is not a handicraft or an industrial art; it was
frequently great art of a very distinguished quality, and so was the
painting of carving and sculpture, an art not disdained by the Van Eycks
themselves. From the earliest beginnings of the Middle Ages there was
great painting, and the Duccios and Massaccios and Memlings only added
to it certain different, and not always admirable, qualities, while
devising novel methods that made possible novel modes of expression.
And here enters another misconception that has done much harm: the Van
Eycks did not invent oil painting, if by the phrase is meant the oil
painting of the nineteenth century. This, the use of mechanically ground
pigments already mixed with an oil medium, is a trick hardly more than a
century old, and is a time-saving device for the obtaining (which it
does not succeed in doing), at the least expenditure of time and
thought, of the effects originally produced by the old method that held
from the time of Hubert Van Eyck down to that of Sir Joshua Reynolds.
This old method consisted in dividing the work of a painter into three
stages--drawing, modelling, colouring--each of which had to be done
laboriously and to perfection. After the picture had been drawn
completely and in every detail it was modelled in a thick underpainting
of impasto with its varied reliefs and textures, and then the colour was
applied; successive coats of _transparent_ pigment, one imposed on the
other, each being allowed to dry before the next was put on. The result
was, amongst other things, that depth, resonance, and transparency of
colour that mark the great painting of the past and are absolutely
unobtainable by the use of the opaque and muddy pigments squeezed out of
collapsible tubes. In this earlier method there was no short road to
success; a painter could not sweep in his broad masses of paint with a
few masterly strokes, masking his lack of proficiency in drawing by
daring and theatrical brush work, and making amends for his opaque and
unbeautiful colour by a stunning exhibition of a delusive chiaro-oscuro.
Everything was built up laboriously and conscientiously; it was
consummate craftsmanship, with much in common with stained glass,
orfèverie, and even with architecture. No wonder a painter’s training
frequently began with a goldsmith; it demanded the most exquisite and
conscientious craft and there was no substitute that a public trained
in eye and quick in appreciation could be induced to accept. Temperament
was no excuse for incapacity; daring brush work made no amends for lack
of competence; for once painting was on a par with the other arts, and a
painter was as much a master of craft, and as rigidly held to its
highest standards, as a musician or a master builder.