“Pictures
Of this Italian master and that Dutchman.”
JAMES SHIRLEY: _The Lady of Pleasure_.
To come in the Uffizi upon a Dutch collection, to see the boors of Jan
Steen, the tavern peasants of Heemskerck, the pancake-seller of Gerard
Dou, the mushrooms and butterflies of Marcellis Ottone, is to have,
first a shock of discord and then a breath of fresh air and to grow
suddenly conscious of the artificial atmosphere of all this Renaissance
art. Where it does not reek of the mould of crypts or the incense of
cathedrals or the pot-pourri of the cloister, it is redolent of
marmoreal _salons_, it is the art of the Magnificent Ones. Moroni’s
_Tailor_ marks almost the social nadir of its lay subjects, and our
_sartor_ was no doubt a prosperous member of his guild. There are two
courtesans in Carpaccio but indistinguishable from countesses, in a rich
setting of pilasters and domestic pets. Guido Reni painted his
foster-mother, but it is the exception which proves the rule. And the
rule is that Demos shall appear in Art only as the accessory in a sacred
picture, like the old woman with the basket of eggs in Titian’s
_Presentation in the Temple_, or the servants in the many sacred suppers
and banquetings beloved of Veronese. That the Holy Family itself was of
lowly status is, of course, ignored except here or there by Tintoretto
or Signorelli or Giovanni Bellini, and the wonderful gowns and jewels
worn by the carpenter’s wife, according to Fra Angelico or Crivelli,
would be remarkable even on a Beatrice d’Este or a Marie de’ Medici. Who
would ever think that Raphael’s _Sposalizio of the Virgin_ was the
marriage of a Bethlehem artisan to a peasant girl? Even the carpenter’s
barefootedness—the one touch of naked truth—seems a mere piece of
hymeneal ritual, in face of that royal company of princesses and their
suites, that functioning High Priest. No; insistence on the humbleness
of the Holy Family hardly tallied with the Christianity of the
Renaissance, or even with the psychology of the poor believer, who loves
to dress up his gods as Magnificent Ones and for whom to adore is to
adorn. Aristocracy is the note of Italian painting—the Holy Family
takes formal precedence, but the Colonnas and the Medicis rank their
families no less select. The outflowering of Dutch art was like the
change from the airless Latin of the scholars to the blowy idioms with
which real European literature began. Italian art expressed dignity,
beauty, religion; Dutch art went back to life, to find all these in life
itself. It was the efflorescence of triumphant democracy, of the Dutch
Republic surgent from the waves of Spain and Catholicism as indomitably
as she had risen from the North Sea. Hence this sturdy satisfaction with
reality. Rembrandt painted with equal hand ribs of beef and ribs of men.
The Low Countries invented the fruit and flower piece and the fish and
game piece. That Low Art hails from the nether lands is not a mere
coincidence. Holland was less a country than a piece of the bed of the
sea to which men stuck instead of limpets. Cowper says, “God made the
country and man made the town,” but the Dutch proverb says, “God made
the sea and we made the shore.” ’Twas no braggart boast. The Dutchman
had made for himself a sort of anchored ship, and the damps and vapours
drove him oft from the deck to the warm cabin, where, asquat on plump
cushions with buxom _vrow_ and solid food and stout liquor, he met the
mists with an answering cloud from his placid pipe. And the art he
engendered reflected this love for cosy realities, and found a poetry in
the very peeling of potatoes. No voice of croaking save from the frogs
of his marshes. Let your Leopardis croak ’mid their sunny vineyards, let
your Obermanns sulk on their stable mountains Mynheer is grateful to be
here at all, to have outwitted the waters and dished the Dons. And so
never has earthiness found more joyous expression than in his pictures.
What gay content with the colours of clothes and the shafts of sunshine,
and the ripe forms of women, and the hues of meats and fishes! O the joy
of skating on the frozen canals! O the jolly revels in village taverns!
Hail the ecstasy of the Kermesse! “How good is man’s life, the mere
living.” “It is a pleasant thing to have beheld the sun.” These are the
notes of Dutch art, which is like a perpetual grace to God for the
beauty of common things. And if the painters are concerned so much with
the problems of light, if Rembrandt was the poet of light, was it not
because the Dutchman had always in his eye varying effects of light,
shifting reflections and scintillations in the ubiquitous canals,
kaleidoscopic struggles of sunlight with mist and fog? The Venetians
too, those Hollanders of Italy, are notable for their colour, in
contrast with the Florentines.
Even in the Dutch and Flemish images of doom I have thought to detect a
note of earth-laughter, almost an irresponsible gaiety. Pierre Breughel
paints the _Fall of the Angels_ as a descent to lower forms—the loyal
angels beat the rebels down, and they change as they fall into birds,
beasts, and fishes, into frogs and lizards, and even into vegetables.
There are bipedal carrots, and winged artichokes and bird-tailed
pomegranates. ’Tis as if the worthy painter was anxious to return to the
kitchen, to his genre subjects. Or may we sniff a belated Buddhism or a
premature Darwinism? Instead of a sacred picture we get a pantomimic
transformation scene: metamorphosis caught grotesquely in the act. This
_Fall of the Angels_ seems a favourite Flemish subject—one reads almost
an allegory of Art hurled down from heaven to earth.
The same sportive fantasy frolics it over the Flemish hell. De Vos gives
us a devil playing on the fluted nose of a metamorphosed sinner. In a
triptych of Jerome Bosch, the _Last Judgment_ is the judgment of a Merry
Andrew who turns the damned into bell-clappers, strings them across
harp-strings, or claps their mouth to the faucets of barrels till they
retch. So far goes the painter’s free fancy that he invents air-ships
and submarines for the lost souls to cower in, unwitting of the day when
these would hold no terrors for the _manes_ of erring aeronauts and
torpedoists.
Italian art even in the childish grotesqueries of its Inferno never
falls so low as this freakish farrago. One cannot help feeling that the
Italians believed in hell and the Netherlanders made fun of it.
One of these extravaganzas of Bosch has drifted to Venice, though this
_Temptation of St. Antony_ (of which there is a replica in Brussels) is
also attributed to Van Bles. The nude ladies coming to the saint with
gifts are most unprepossessing, and what temptation there is in the
whirl of carnival grotesques I cannot understand. No doubt some allegory
of sin lurks in these goblin faces, with their greedy mouths full of
strange creatures, and in this great head with black-tailed things
creeping in through eye and mouth, with frogs suspended from its
earrings and a little town growing out of its head. Such uncouth
ugliness has no parallel in Venice, unless it be a German Inferno with a
belled devil. From such puerilities one turns with relief to the coldest
and stateliest conventions of High Art.
And yet Dutch art and Italian are not wholly discrepant the link, as I
have said, comes through the minor figures of religious scenes, or even
occasionally through the major. A Dutch homeliness lurks shyly in the
background of Italian art, and at times appears boldly in the
foreground. From one point of view nothing could be more Dutch than the
innumerable Madonnas who suckle their _Bambini_. Nor do their haloes
destroy their homeliness. The peasant girl of Tintoretto’s
_Annunciation_ in S. Rocco wears a halo, but neither that nor the angel
bursting through the crumbling brick of the door can prevent this scene
from being a Dutch interior with a cane chair. Realism, smuggled in
under the cloak of religion, is none the less realism, and when Moretto
shows us the _Bambino_ about to be bathed by mother and nurse, and
paints us a basket of belly-bands, he has given us a genre picture none
the less because rapt saints and monks look on in defiance of
chronology, and, perched on a bank of cloud over a romantic landscape,
angels sing on high. Even as early as Giotto the nurse who presides at
_The Birth of the Virgin_ is washing the baby’s eyes. Very curious and
realistic is the pastoral study which Luca Cambiaso styled _Adoration of
the Shepherds_. And in Veronese, for all his magnificence, and in
Carpaccio, for all his fairy-tale atmosphere, and above all in Bassano,
for all his golden glow, we get well-established half-way houses between
High Art and Low. Under the pretext of _The Supper in Emmaus_ Bassano
anticipates all Dutch art. Here be cats, dogs, plucked geese, meat in
the pan, shining copper utensils scattered around, the pot over the glow
of the fire, the rows of plates in the kitchen behind. What loving study
of the colour of the wine in the glasses of the guests, and of their
robes and their furs! These things it is that, with the busy figures
behind the bar or stooping on the floor, fill up the picture, while the
Christ on a raised platform in the corner bulks less than the
serving-maid, and the centre of the stage is occupied by a casual eater,
his napkin across his knees. If this sixteenth-century picture is
Venetian in its glowing colour and its comparative indifference to form,
it is Dutch in its minuteness and homeliness.
The same love of pots and pans and animals glows in _The Departure of
Jacob_, with his horse and his ass and his sheep and his goats and his
basket of hens, and even beguiles Bassano into attempting a faint
peering camel. But not even the presence of God in a full white beard
can render this a sacred picture. It is, however, in his favourite theme
of _The Animals going into the Ark_ that Bassano brings the line between
the sacred and secular almost to vanishing point. Although Savonarola
preached on the Ark with such unction, as became the prophet of a new
deluge, the just Noah himself seems the least religious figure in the
Old Testament, perhaps because—after so much water—he took too much
wine. There is even a tradition recorded by Ibn Yachya that after the
Flood he emigrated to Italy and studied science. At any rate Bassano
always treated him as a mere travelling showman, packing his animals and
properties for the next stage. In a picture at Padua Noah’s sons and
daughters are doing up their luggage—one almost sees the labels—and
Noah, with his few thin white hairs, remonstrates agitatedly with
Shem—or it may be Ham or Japhet—who is apparently muddling the boxes.
A lion and lioness are treading the plank to the Ark, into which a Miss
Noah is just pushing the leisurely rump of a pig, which even the lions
at its tail fail to accelerate. Countless other pairs of every
description, including poultry, jostle one another amid a confusion of
pots, wash-tubs, sacks, and bundles, the birds alone finding comfortable
perching-room on the trees. Mrs. Noah wears her hair done up in a knot
with pearls just like the Venetian ladies, and a billy-cock hat lies on
one of the bundles. In his _Sheep-shearing_ (in the Pinacoteca Estense
of Modena) Bassano throws over all pious pretences and becomes
unblushingly Dutch—nay, double-Dutch, for he drags in agricultural
operations and cooking as well as sheep-shearing.
But it is in Turin that Bassano’s Batavianism runs riot. For his
market-place is a revel of fowls, onions, prezels, eggs, carcases,
sheep, rams, mules, dogs gnawing bones, market-women, chafferers, with a
delicious little boy whose shirt hangs out behind his vivid red
trousers. And his _Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan_ is an extravaganza in
copper pots and pans; and yet another market masterpiece is an inventory
of all he loved—butcher’s meat and rabbits and geese and doves, and
lungs and livers, and gherkins and melons, and cocks and hens, and
copper pans and pewter spoons, and a cow and a horse and an owl and
lambs, all jostling amid booths and stalls on a pleasant rustic
background as in a Tintoretto Paradise of luscious paintabilities.
Gaudenzio Ferrari has the same love of sheep, and these, with horses and
dogs, force their way into his pictures. The Bible is an encyclopædia of
themes, and even had any subject been wanting, apocrypha and sacred
legend would have provided it. For his pet lambs Ferrari goes to the
copious broidery on the Gospel, and his _Angels predicting the Birth of
Maria_ is really a study in sheep on the background of a domed and
towered Italian city. Giotto too had attempted sheep, though they are
more like pigs, and dogs, though they are elongated and skinny; his
camel with grotesque ears and a sun-bonnet one can forgive.
The lives of the saints supplied other opportunities for “Dutch”
pictures in the shape of miracles at home. Titian himself stooped to
record the miracle of putting on again the foot which the man who had
kicked his mother cut off in remorse. And in the same Scuola of the
Confraternity of St. Antony at Padua you may see the neglectful nurse
carrying safely to its parents at table the babe she had allowed to
boil.
And yet despite all these manifold opportunities, no Italian seems quite
to get the veracious atmosphere of the Dutch and to achieve the dignity
of Art without departing from the homeliness of Nature. No Italian has
brought Christ into the street so boldly as Erasmus Quellinus in that
picture in the Museo Vicenza in which a girl with a basket of live hens
on her head stops to watch the fat Dutch baby sleeping in its mother’s
arms. Despite the unreal presence of adoring saints in the crowd, there
is here a true immanence of divinity in everyday reality. The
sixteenth-century Italian Baroccio did indeed depict a Dutch
peasant-feast in his _Last Supper_ in the cathedral of Urbino, with its
bare-legged boy cook stooping for platters from a basket and its dog
drinking at a bronze dish, but its homeliness is marred by the hovering
of angels. Realism unadorned is essayed by Fogolino in his _Holy Family_
in Vicenza, with the carpenter’s shop, the rope of yarn, the hammer;
with a boy Christ in a black tunic saying grace before a meal of boiled
eggs, pomegranate, and grapes, washed down by a beaker of red wine; with
the Madonna bending solicitously over him, her wooden spoon poised over
her bowl; but, alas! the whole effect is of a cheap oleograph.
But then Fogolino was not a great painter, and it would have been
interesting to see a superb craftsman like Paul Veronese try his hand at
homely nature, unadorned by great space-harmonies and decorative
magnificences. As it was, he had the delight of a Dutchman in dogs and
cats, copper pots and jugs, and earthen pans and groaning tables and
glittering glasses, and these it is which fascinate him, far more than
the spiritual aspect of the _Supper in the House of the Pharisee_, so
that even when he wishes to paint the soul of the pink-gowned Venetian
Magdalen, he paints it through a little bowl which she overturns in her
emotion at kissing the feet of Christ. This is why meals are the prime
concern of Veronese, obsess him more than even his noble pillared
rhythms and arched perspectives. How eagerly he grasps at _The Marriage
of Cana_ and _The Disciples at Emmaus_ and _The Meal in the House of
Levi_, with which that hold-all of the Bible supplied him! Spaces and
staircases, arches and balconies and lordly buildings, all the palatial
poetry of Verona, with its fair women and rich-robed men—these are his
true adoration, and he paints, not Jesus, but the loaves and fishes.
Nay, it may almost be said that unless there be food in the picture
Veronese grows feeble, and must have pillars at least to prop him up.
See, for example, his _Susannah and the Elders_, with no trace of food
and only a wall to sustain him. When the Biblical cornucopia was wholly
depleted of its food-stuffs, he had to forage for manna, especially when
the need of decorating a monastic refectory was added to his own passion
for provender. One of his discoveries was _The Banquet of Gregory the
Great_, which is in the Monastery of the Madonna del Monte outside
Vicenza, and which is based on the legend that Gregory invited twelve
poor men to eat with him and Christ turned up as one of them. But
Christ, who is removing the cover from a fowl, is less striking than
Paul Veronese himself—who stands on the inevitable balcony with his own
little boy—and at best a mere item in the rhythm of pillars and
staircases and sky-effects. Nothing brings out the defect of Veronese as
a religious painter so clearly as a comparison of his _Disciples at
Emmaus_ with Titian’s. Titian too gives us fine shades of bread and
fruit and wine, and even a little “Dutch” dog under the table; Titian
too plays with pillars and a romantic background. But how his picture is
suffused with the spirit! These things know their place, are absorbed in
the luminous whole. A certain blurred softness in the modelling, a
certain subdued glow in the colouring—as of St. Mark’s—give mystery
and atmosphere. The food is, so to speak, transubstantiated.
Even Moretto’s _Supper at Emmaus_ (in Brescia) is superior to
Veronese’s, though his Christ in pilgrim’s cockle-hat and cloak has to
the modern eye the look of an officer with a cocked hat and a gold
epaulette.
But Veronese is not the only Italian who would have been happier as a
lay painter. I am convinced that some of the romanticists of the
Renaissance were born with the souls of Dutchmen, and these, as it
happens, the very men who have not worn well; a proof that they were out
of their element and gave up to romance and religion what was meant for
realism. Take Guido Reni, the very synonym of a fallen star, the
_Aurora_ in Rome, perhaps his one enduring success—though even here
Aurora’s skirt is of too crude a blue, and there is insufficient feeling
of mountain and sea below her. His portrait by Simone Cantarini da
Pesaro shows him with a short grey beard, a black doublet, a lawn
collar, and a rather pained look—there is nothing of the _Aurora_ in
this sedate and serious figure. And better than either his violent
Caravaggio martyrology or his later mythologic poesy I find his
portraits of his mother and his foster-mother; the mother in black with
a black turn-down collar, a muslin coif, and grey hair thinning at the
temples, and the foster-mother a peasant woman with bare and brawny
arms. The _St. Peter Reading_ in the Brera is also a strong study of an
old man’s head. Moroni had the good sense or the good fortune to shake
himself almost free of religious subjects and to produce a _Tailor_ who
is worth tons of _Madonnas_, but even he did not utterly escape the
church-market, and when one examines such a picture as his _Madonna and
Son, St. Catherine, St. Francis, and the Donor_ in the Brera, one
rejoices even more that an overwhelming percentage of his product is
pure portraiture. For the holy women in this picture are quite bad; St.
Francis is rather better, but the real Moroni appears only in the smug
donor who prays, his clasped hands showing his valuable ring. Here, of
course, the painter had simply to reproduce his sitter. As much can be
said of Garofalo and many another religious painter, whose “Donors”
often constitute the sole success of their pious compositions.
Lorenzo Lotto, too, should perhaps have confined himself to portraiture,
if of a fashionable _clientèle_. His pretty _Adoration of the Infant_
might be any mother adoring any infant. Near it—in the Palazzo
Martinengo in Brescia—Girolamo Romanino has a frightful fresco in the
grand manner, and quite a good portrait of an old gentleman; which
suggests that Romanino too should have avoided the classic. There is an
altar-piece of his in Padua which, although by no means devoid of
beauty, confirms this suggestion, for the Madonna and Child lack
character and originality, and are infinitely inferior to the Dutch
painting of the robes. The whole composition, indeed, glows and has
depth only in its lower and more terrestrial part, including in that
term the little girl angel who plays a tambourine below the throne.
Bronzino was another victim to his pious epoch, though he emancipated
himself almost as largely as Moroni. His _Madonna_ in the Brera is
remarkable for the secular modernity of the Virgin’s companions. On her
right is an ultra-realistic old woman; on her left Bernard Shaw looks
down with his sarcastic, sceptical gaze.
Even the Netherlanders who had had the fortune to be born free would,
after their wander-years in Italy, come back as Italians and paint in
the grand manner. Hence the religious and historic Van Dycks which
compare so poorly with the portraits, hence Rembrandt’s fat _vrow_ as
Madonna, hence the Lenten attempts of Rubens to bant.
AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE: WITH A GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN
FALLACIES
Touching is that quaint theological tree in the cell of sainted
Antoninus in San Marco, upon whose red oval leaves grow the biographies
of the brethren. They lived, they prayed, they died—that is all. One
little leaf suffices to tell the tale. This brother conversed with the
greatest humility, and that excelled in silence. A third was found after
his death covered with a rough hair shirt (_aspro cilicio_). In the holy
shade of this goodly tree sits St. Dominic, separating—as though
symbolically—the monks on his right from the nuns on his left.
_Naïveté_ can no further go. And, indeed, if one were to regard the
_naïveté_ and forget the sweet simplicity, there is much in the mediæval
world that one would relegate to the merely absurd. The masterpieces of
Art have been sufficiently described. What a book remains to be written
upon its grotesques!
The word is said to derive from the arabesques found in grottoes or
excavated Roman tombs; those fantastic combinations of the vegetable and
animal worlds by which the art of Islam avoided the representation of
the real. But by the art of Christendom the grotesque was achieved with
no such conscientious search after the unreal. Nor have I in mind its
first fumblings, its crudities of the catacombs, its simplicities of the
missal and the music-book, its Byzantine paintings with their wooden
figures and gold embroidery. I am not even thinking of those early
Masters whose defects of draughtsmanship were balanced by a delicious
primitive poetry, which makes a Sienese Madonna preferable to a Raphael,
and the early mosaics of St. Mark’s more desirable than the
sixteenth-century work that has replaced them. The grotesque lies deeper
than unscientific drawing; it mingles even with the work of the most
scholarly Masters, and springs from the absence of a sense of history or
a sense of humour. That the Gospel incidents should be depicted in
Italian landscape and with Italian costumes was perhaps not unnatural,
since, as I have already pointed out, every nation remakes the Christ in
its own image—psychologically when not physically. Even the Old
Testament was de-Orientalised by Raphael and his fellow-illustrators.
Bonifacio Veronese, for example, put Italian hills and music-books into
_The Finding of Moses_, and his Egypt is less Eastern than the Venice he
lived in. But that the fancy-dress Bible should include also Doges and
Cardinals and Magnificent Families, and that a Tintoretto in everyday
clothes should look on at his own _Miracle of St. Mark_ or a Moretto
come to his own _Supper at Emmaus_, this it is that lifts the eyebrows
of a modern. One can permit Dominican friars to witness _The Incredulity
of St. Thomas_, or Franciscans to assist—as in Marco Basaiti’s
picture—at _The Agony in the Garden_. These holy brethren are at least
in the apostolic chain; and in the latter picture, which is becomingly
devotional, the scene is suggested as a mystic vision to justify the
presence of these anachronistic spectators. But how is it possible to
tolerate proud Venetian senators at _The Ascension of Christ_, or to
stomach the Medici at the building of the Tower of Babel? It is true
sacred subjects had become a mere background for lay portraits, but what
absence of perspective!
It would be an interesting excursion to trace the steps by which the
objective conception of a picture—true to its own time and place—was
reached, or the evolution by which singleness of subject was substituted
for exuberance of episodes and ideas, till at last Art could flower in a
lovely simplicity like that of Simone Martini’s _Annunciation_. You
shall see St. Barbara throned at the centre of her anecdotal biography,
or the Madonna della Misericordia sheltering virtues under her robe,
while her history circles around her. Even when the picture itself is
simple and single, the predella is often a congested commentary upon the
text, if, indeed, it has any relevant relation to the text at all. What
can be more charming than the little angels round the throne of the
Madonna in Benaglio Francesco’s picture in Verona—angels with golden
vases of red and white roses, angels playing spinets and harps and pipes
and lutes and little drums and strange stringed instruments that have
passed away! But what can be more grotesque than the predella of this
delightful picture, the Entombment and the saints with the insignia of
their martyrdom (hammer and tongs and fiery braziers), and the cock that
crew, and the kiss of Judas!
In a picture by Lorenzo Monaco at Florence the Virgin and St. John raise
Christ out of his tomb, and above are not only a cross and the
instruments of martyrdom, but a bust and floating hands, while spice
vessels figure below.
To a modern the mere treatment of God the Father suffices to create a
category of the grotesque, even though His head has usually the
venerable appearance of the aged Ruskin and He is kept a discreet
kit-kat or a half-length. But Fra Bartolommeo in Lucca paints Him at
full length with His toes on a little angel and a placard in His hand
bearing the letters alpha and omega. And Lorenzo Veneziano parts His
hair neatly in the middle.
Our catalogue of grotesques is swollen by the explanatory scrolls and
inscriptions of the early pictures; by the crude religious allegories,
in which devils gnash teeth when Virtue routs Temptation; by the
political cartoons at Siena—of Good and Bad Government (though these
are more primitive than comic); by the literal genealogic trees—like
that of Jesse in St. Mark’s, or on the stone door-posts of the
Baptistery of Parma; by the Tree of the Cross in Florence, which shoots
out branches with round leaves containing scenes from the life of the
central crucified figure, and supports a pyramid of saints and
celestials; by the devices of symbolism for representing abstract ideas
or identifying saints. All haloes are proleptic even from childhood, and
a martyr and his passion can never be parted. Those poor martyrs, what
they suffered at the hands of painters without a gleam of humour!
’Twas not till I had found out for myself that the overwhelming
preponderance in Art of the _Crucifixion_, the _Descent from the Cross_,
the _Entombment_, and the _Pietà_ were due in no small measure to the
opportunities they afforded of painting the nude figure, that I
discovered why St. Sebastian was the most popular of all the saints,
exploited in every other sacred picture, and—naked and unashamed—the
almost inseparable attendant of the Madonna when she sits in saintly
society. The superiority of his martyrdom at the hands of a troop of
archers to other paintable forms of death leaps to the eye, for the
arrows must be seen quivering in the target of his naked figure, though
I have seen this pictorially precious nudity marred by such a plethora
of arrows—as in the Opera del Duomo at Florence—that the saint is
become a porcupine. The grim humour of the situation lies in the fact
that St. Sebastian recovered from his arrows to be subsequently clubbed
to death, but this deutero-martyrdom is hushed up by the Italian
painters. To add to St. Sebastian’s sufferings at their hands, he has
been made a plague-saint and his invaluable nudity haled into
plague-pictures and plague-churches, as by Bartolommeo Montagna, who
turned his arrows into the metaphoric shafts of the Pest. Not that I can
blame the Italian painters. If I had ever been inclined to underrate the
artistic significance of the nude, I should have been converted by the
full-dressed angelets of Borgognone’s _Gesù Moriente_ in the Pavian
Certosa. These delicious little creatures were once without a fig-leaf,
but at the Father Superior’s protest they were clad in belted tunics and
skirts, thus becoming squat little figures whose wings burst comically
through their clothes. What might have been a masterpiece is thus a
grotesque.
But if St. Sebastian must go sempiternally branded with arrows, like a
British convict, it is St. Lawrence who has the clumsiest symbol to drag
about. He and his gridiron are as inseparable as Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza. Often it stands on end and seems the iron framework of a bed.
Like his halo, it is with him long before his martyrdom, as it
accompanies him to heaven. Only once in all Florence do I remember
seeing it in its proper place—under the grilling saint—and then he is
turning his other side to the flame in true culinary Christianity (“Jam
versa: assatus est”). The artist has spared us nothing except the towels
with which the angels wiped his face, and these may be seen at Rome in
S. Giovanni in Laterano. St. Stephen is also heavily burdened with the
stones that still keep falling on his head. In Bernardo Daddi’s frescoes
in S. Croce they stick to him like burrs. St. John, transformed to an
angel, contemplates his own (haloed) head on a platter, as if thinking
two heads are better than one. Lucy keeps her eyes in a dish. St.
Bartholomew holds his skin. St. Nicholas—the patron of commerce and the
pawnbroker—is known by his three golden balls. Even families had their
symbols, and the Colonnas, the complacent Colonnas, had themselves
painted as soaring heavenwards at the last trump, each with a small
column rising from his shoulder—literal pillars of Church and State.
These symbols, and many others less grotesque, disappear either with the
gradual obscuration of the legends or the development of purer artistic
ideas. There is another kind of symbolism, which may be called the
shorthand of primitive art, and which may be studied in the archaic
mosaics of St. Mark’s. Egypt dwindles to a gate (as though it and not
Turkey were the Porte). Alexandria is expressed by its Pharos. Trees
stand for the Mount of Olives. There is much of the rebus in these
primitive representations. The Byzantine symbolism of St. Mark’s reaches
its most curious climax in the representation of the four rivers that
watered the Biblical Garden of Eden by classical river gods. The palm
branch as the shorthand for martyrdom is a more congruous convention. In
the mosaics of S. Vitale in Ravenna, Jerusalem and Bethlehem are
expressed by towers, in Sant’ Appolinare Nuovo a few Roman buildings
stand for Classe. In a Venetian painting ascribed to Carpaccio,
Bethlehem is spelt by palm-trees and a queer beast tied to one of them,
probably meant for a camel.
A more pretentious form of symbolism lies in the allegory proper, but
even when the painting avoids the grotesque, the meaning is often
hopelessly obscure. Such popular pictures as Botticelli’s _Spring_,
Titian’s _Sacred and Profane Love_, and Paris Bordone’s _Lovers_ are
still unsolved puzzles, and perhaps only the more satisfactory for that.
But allegories that are enigmatic without being beautiful are merely
bores. Such are the two pictures of the school of Lazzaro Sebastiani in
Venice, in which a company of figures holding scrolls is perched in the
boughs of a tree, looking at a distance like a full orchestra. Both of
these pictures come from monasteries, and are therefore to be presumed
sacred. And in one of them Adam and Eve are unmistakable under the tree,
with mice and lizards gambolling around them, so that the tree must be
the Tree of Life or of Knowledge; but who is the youth who stands
beneath the other tree in a strange city of spires and towers and plays
on a golden ’cello, while a maiden offers him an apple? Such
intellectually faded pictures illustrate clearly the limitations of
painting as a medium for intellectual propositions. But the most lucid
of allegories or symbolisms has its own peculiar pitfalls. Luca Mombella
introduces into a _Coronation of the Virgin_ a figure of “Humilitas” who
is magnificently attired and wears pearls in her hair, while Montagna’s
_Nestor Victorious over the Vices_ (in the Louvre) proves that most of
the Vices are at least devoted mothers, for they burden their flight by
snatching up their satyr-like brood.
But these confused or unintelligible allegories are far preferable to
symbolisms which are perfectly decipherable yet perfectly repellent,
like Giovanni da Modena’s fresco in S. Petronio which shows us Christ on
his cross agonising between two female figures, one bestriding a
full-maned lion (the Catholic Church) and the other riding blindfold on
a goat (Heresy). The lion has four different feet—a pedal man (St.
Matthew), a pedal ox (St. Luke), an eagle’s claw (St. John), and a real
foot (St. Mark). The blood from the side of Christ flows into the
chalice held by the Church, and in the middle of the stream is formed
the wafer. The four ends of the cross turn into hands: the upper hand
opens with a key the gate of Paradise—strangely like a church; the
lower hand opens Hell with a winch; the right hand blesses the Catholic
Church, the left stabs Heresy. Garofalo has a vast but still poorer
fresco of this sort in Ferrara, brought from a refectory. Each arm of
the cross branches into two hands engaged in much the same occupations
as in the Bolognese fresco save that one hand crowns Wisdom. The foot of
the cross also turns into hands, the right holding a cross towards
Limbo, the function of the left fortunately faded. It is refreshing to
turn from such geometrical symbolisms to the meaningless flower-patterns
of F. dei Libri, in which Crucifixions, cherubs reading, satyrs blowing
brass instruments, and _putti_ playing citharas or puffing at bagpipes
are interwoven with wriggling snakes, contemporary poets and
ecclesiasts, and shaven monks performing service.
This, of course, is the conscious grotesque, like the borders which
Girolamo dei Libri put round a serious picture of the Magi—vignettes of
other scenes, hands of donors, floral patterns and scutcheons with
strange ramping beasts.
To the deliberate grotesque belong, of course, the stone beasts that
crouch before the old cathedrals, the griffin of Perugia, and the
heraldic beasts of Tura. I should have added Raphael’s dragons to the
same category were it not that though deliberately drawn and though
delightfully grotesque, they are mere representation of an object that
happens to be grotesque in itself, and this is no more the artistic
grotesque than the portrait of a beautiful woman is necessarily the
artistic beautiful. There is a deal of movement, spirit, and invention
in these great worms of Raphael, and every individual St. George, St.
Michael, or St. Margaret is handsomely provided with an original and
unique dragon, each with an elegant precision of fearsome form. But
Raphael drew with equal hand and the same loving seriousness a monster
or a Madonna.
Equally conscientious is the Medusa’s head once ascribed to Da Vinci,
with its carefully combed snaky locks and its frogs and bats and toads.
Carpaccio’s dragon has far more fun in him, for all his grisly litter of
skulls and skeletons.
And I like Vasari’s dragon in his _St. George_ in Arezzo, with its
spitting double tongue and its half-eaten man, and the gorgeous dragon
on a piece of majolica in Urbino, into whose mouth St. George is driving
his spear, and the fierce-clawed, winged dragon of the spirited
Tintoretto in the National Gallery, and above all the dragon of Piero di
Cosimo’s _Andromeda_ in Florence, with that delightful curling tail and
that broad back on which Perseus can stand securely while delivering his
stroke.
But the deliberate grotesque without fun—this, I confess, is a note in
Italian art which I find disquieting. For into this polished and
palatial world there intrudes at times a touch of something sinister,
cynical and mocking, as though the artist, constricted by pompous
conventions, sought relief by sticking out his tongue.
Leonardo—whatever Mona Lisa’s smile may mean—kept his grotesquerie for
his caricatures. But other of the Masters were less discriminating. This
something of enigmatic and perturbing—perhaps it is only the acute
Renaissance consciousness of the skeleton at the feast—I find most of
all in Crivelli—Venetian soldier, as he once signed himself—whose rich
lacquer work has had more attention than this diablerie of his. Nobody
else touches the grotesque so consciously, dares to give us such quaint,
ill-drawn angels as those in his _Madonna and Child_ in Verona, with
that bird-pecked _giardinetto_ of fruits over the Virgin’s head, and
Christ in a gold frock as in some Byzantine mosaic. The microscopic
Crucifixion is perhaps no more incongruous with the subject of this
picture than its landscapes seen through arches, its chivalry and pomp
of horses. But one cannot help feeling that Crivelli had a grim joy in
perching that vulture on the large gaunt tree. And in his Brera
_Madonna_, in which St. Peter holds two heavy real keys, gilded and
silvered, he gives the celestial doorkeeper a crafty ecclesiastical
look, while his St. Dominic looks sawny. Even his baby Christ is cruelly
squeezing a little bird. There is a leer in the whole picture. The
accident of juxtaposition has accentuated the wilfulness of Crivelli’s
grimace, for in the Brera there are two _Madonnas_, side by side, yet at
the extreme poles of his genius. In the _Madonna della Candeletta_ we
have beauty unalloyed. The tiny candle standing at the foot of the
Madonna’s throne strikes, indeed, a note of bizarrerie, but it is
beautiful bizarrerie, and the Madonna, marvellously robed and embowered
in fruit and leaves, who is offering a great pear to a charming Child,
is less the Mother of God than a crowned queen of faery with an infant
prince in a golden robe and a golden halo, and less a queen with a
prince than a wonderful decorative pattern, a study in gold and marble
and precious stones and brocaded gowns, broidered, rich-dyed, and
fantastic with arabesques. And beside this poem hangs the other
Crivelli, a gaunt crucifix with ugly, contorted figures of the Madonna
and St. John. And it is sardonic humour, not _naïveté_, that has turned
_his_ St. Sebastian (in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli) into a porcupine.
But even Giovanni Bellini, with his sense of restful perfection and
unity of theme, cannot resist putting in microscopic accessories that
only catch the eye from anear, as into his green-throned _Madonna and
Child_ in the Brera he introduces a horseman, two men talking by a tree,
a shepherd, a flock of sheep, and, strangest of all, a shadowy ape
crouching on a tomb which bears his signature: “Johannes Bellinus.” What
is the significance of this shadowy ape? What mockery of the theme, or
of humanity, or of himself, was here shadowed forth?
And that even more sinister ape in Tura’s _Virgin supporting the Dead
Christ_—what does he here? The mother, seated on the tomb, holds the
poor bleeding figure as though it were again her baby. They are alone,
they and the thieves and the cross; other men are moving away, bearing a
ladder. The picture is complete, a grim, solemn, soul-moving unity. Why
then did Tura, that master of the conscious grotesque, throw in that
grinning monkey on that strange fruit-tree? Was he, who lived to see the
Borgian Pope become the Vicar of Christ, suggesting sardonically what
quaint sequels of orgiastic splendour, what pride and lust of life, were
to spring from this tragic sacrifice?
A less perturbing monkey looks on with other creatures at _The Creation
of Man_ in a Venetian picture now in Ravenna. A red-girt, blue-mantled
Deity floats over a huge recumbent Adam, whose thigh he touches, while
the monkey, eating an apple, appears to follow with interest the next
phase in evolution, when fruit would be forbidden.
Apes appear again in Fogolino’s _Adoration of the Magi_ in Vicenza;
squatting below the castled rocky ways and mountain-bridges, over which
winds the great procession with its beautifully caparisoned horses.
These apes, like the ape on the elephant’s back in Raphael’s treatment
of the same theme, might be merely designed to suggest the East, were it
not for the disconcerting, mysterious, lobster-red, sprawling wings?
What further note of discord do we catch here?
But it is in the unconscious grotesque that Italian art is richest. I
have already shown some of the trap-doors that lead to it, but to
enumerate them all is impossible. There are so many ways in which humour
can be absent. Perhaps one might generalise as a source of the
unconscious grotesque the convention dating from the Byzantine period
which expresses souls as small swaddled dolls. See, for example, Paolo
da Venezia’s _Death of Mary_, where, by a seeming inversion of _rôles_,
Christ flies up to heaven with his mother-doll. Perhaps, too, all
pictures connected with stigmata or vernicles are foredoomed to farce.
There may be a noble way of expressing this material transference, but I
have never seen one. St. Veronica receiving on a handkerchief a head
with neatly parted hair is prosaic if not comic, while St. Francis
receiving the stigmata is simply ludicrous.
In a picture in the Museum of Vicenza the kneeling saint is apparently
flying a kite by red strings passing through holes in his hands and
feet. The seeming kite is really a small winged nude figure, feathered
at head and feet like a cock—the six-winged seraph of the _Legenda
Trium Sociorum_ that bears the crucified figure,—red strings passing
through corresponding holes in his head and feet. The treatment of the
same scene by Giotto (in the Louvre) gives this kite-like appearance to
Jesus himself.
Even more absurdly geometrical is Gentile da Fabriano’s handling of the
theme at Urbino, five strong red cords passing to the saint’s breast,
hands, and feet from an eight-winged figure on a cross, naked to its
waist. It is a relief to find these Euclidian lines absent from the
representation in the church of Assisi itself, though it is only in
seventeenth-century painters like Sisto Badalocchio in Parma or Rochetti
in Faenza that the stigmata are transmitted from a celestial glory or
down a broad ray of golden light. Macrino d’Alba at Turin shows the
saint receiving the image of a praying Christ on a slate with a golden
frame, and this image has the tonsured head of a monk!
And what can be quainter than the six-winged cherubs who hover round the
Madonna in a picture of the Botticelli school at Parma? Two of their red
wings are spread, the second pair crossed like legs, and the last pair
crossed over the head, making a sort of pointed cap. The faces attached
to these wings are mature, as of elderly, clean-shaven barristers.
Another comical circle of these seraphs, a few with blue wings, tends to
spoil a charming fifteenth-century _Coronation of the Virgin_ in
Florence.
Martyrdoms, too, are a rich mine of the grotesque, as witness the
boiling of St. John in the National Gallery, with its accessories of the
bellows and the blowpipe, and God lifting the saint bodily up to heaven.
In the exhilarating frescoes of Montagna in the church of the Eremitani
at Padua, St. James’s hair, which is yellowish throughout, turns black,
apparently, under the horror of an impending mallet, despite that his
halo seems like a protective plate of yellow armour. A very gay and
pleasing picture this.
Another source of the grotesque is the angelic aeroplane. In an
_Adoration of the Shepherds_ by Francesco Zaganelli in Ravenna three
wingless angels employ cherubs to bear them aloft, balancing themselves
upon the winged heads. One needs a cherub for each foot, the second
places both feet upon the same head, the third, expertest gymnast of
all, maintains himself upon one foot. Another primitive aeroplane may be
seen at Ferrara, in _The Assumption of St. Mary of Egypt_. St. Mary
rises on a platform supported from beneath by a series of nude and
clothed angels, to the amaze of a worthy signor walking in the field of
strange palms amid quaint green buildings. A rabbit, a pigeon, and a
bird continue absolutely indifferent to the phenomenon.
In a Carpaccio in the same town the cherubs fly, three heads together,
like a celestial molecule. In Zacchia da Vezzano’s _Assumption of the
Virgin_ at Lucca she rides on cherubs. There is an angelic aeroplane in
a painted relief at San Frediano in Lucca, and in Guido Reni’s
_Immaculate Conception_ at Forli (where the Virgin stands on a leaf on a
cherub’s head), and in Lippo Lippi’s picture at Prato of the Madonna
handing down her girdle to St. Thomas. Zuccari Taddeo in the Pitti uses
the angelic aeroplane to carry up Mary Magdalen, who is further provided
with a number of fussy heralds and _avant-coureurs_. Marco Antonio
Franceschini in the Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini of Genoa likewise
carries up the Magdalen on the backs of angels, her familiar hair
streaming over her familiar breast. Raphael’s _Vision of Ezekiel_
suggests to the profane, God the Father holding up His arms as if to
start a flying competition.
But when every generalisation is made, it is the individual genius for
blundering that opens up the most spacious vistas of humourless humour.
Byzantine art affords, of course, the most naïve illustrations. In the
sarcophagi of the Christian emperors at Ravenna you may see sheep eating
dates from tall palms. In the mosaics of the vestibule of St. Mark’s you
may see humanity unconcernedly drowning in the Deluge. Some, it is true,
are whirled helplessly on their backs, but others are quite apathetic
among the blue, curly waves. Noah looking out of the little folding
doors of the Ark is as quaint as in the mosaics of Monreale Cathedral in
Sicily. In the ancient church of S. Zeno at Verona there is an
eleventh-century fresco of the _Resurrection of Lazarus_ in which the
bystanders hold their noses—a poetic touch that was repeated in later
treatments of the theme.
In the Scuola of the Confraternity of St. Antony at Padua, Domenico
Campagnola has a fresco, _A Hungry She-Ass adores_ _the Eucharistic
Sacrament by a Miracle of the Saint, in order to convert a Heretic_. In
vain are heaps of green stuffs and corn spread and baskets tendered her
and piles of beans; the ass, on her front knees, adores the Eucharist on
a priestly table, so that even the baby lad is wrought up to adoration.
One is irresistibly reminded of Goethe’s landlady at Rome calling him to
see her cat adore God the Father like a Christian, when it was licking
the beard of the bust, probably because of the grease that had sunk into
it. In the same Scuola there is a representation of the saint’s
preaching which liberates his hearers from an approaching rain-storm.
People all around are flying to get out of the rain, not knowing that
the saint’s sermon is dry. There are charming figures of mothers and
children in the audience which atone for the unconscious humour.
But when one considers the libraries written on Italy, it is strange
that that book on her grotesques should be as yet merely an impious
aspiration, and that nobody has mocked even at those horrid little
waxworks that represent the plague-stricken. Meseems the blessèd word
“Renaissance” has hypnotised student and pleasure-pilgrim alike, but
some day an irreverent refugee from the Renaissance will gather up the
threads I but indicate. In that delectable volume of his there will be a
chapter on the camel.
For the advent of the camel marks the faint beginnings of an historic
and geographic sense, and stands for all the fantastic wonder-world of
the East. Strange that the Crusades or Venice’s Eastern Empire should
not have earlier awakened the comparative consciousness. But the East,
with its quaintness and its barbaric colour, broke very slowly upon the
culture of Europe—Victor Hugo had to rediscover it even for modern
France. Despite Altichiero’s pig-tailed Tartars, it was not till the
Byzantine Empire was destroyed in 1453 and the Turks were firmly
established in Europe that the Christian world became really aware that
the East was a world of its own. That conquest of Constantinople, from
which the blessèd Renaissance is popularly dated, by sending so many
Italians flying home, must have provided Italy with Oriental information
as well as Greek manuscripts. And the Renaissance (or re-born) camel
represents the quickened sense of local colour. At first, indeed, there
is little improvement on the Giotto breed. Apparently none of the
fugitives rode off on camels. Such fat creatures as take part in _The
Reception of the Venetian Ambassador_ (a picture of the school of
Gentile Bellini) were never seen on sand or land. The Magian kings
should have come riding on camels with swart servitors, but only a rare
artist like the animal-lover Gaudenzio Ferrari is bold enough to attempt
this local truth. And the result belongs to comedy. But a people without
circuses or zoological gardens, to which the camel was as remote as the
centaur, was not keenly aware of the anatomical details of this exotic
beast, grotesque enough at its truest. And in the hands of Gentile
Bellini himself the creature became quite possible, if still curious,
and in that great decorative picture _St. Mark preaching in the Piazza
of Alexandria_ there is a real feeling of the turbaned, shrouded and
minareted East, even if the head-shawls of the women do appear to cover
top-hats and the giraffe strolls about the piazza and the dromedary is
led by a string.
Nor is Eusebio di San Giorgio’s camel impossible in his _Adoration of
the Magi_ in San Pietro, Perugia, though immeasurably inferior to his
oxen and his horses. Carpaccio, too, gets something of Eastern
architecture and dress, if more of Venetian, into his _St. Stephen at
Jerusalem_.
But after all there is more fascination in the primitive artistry which
knew no differences of Space or Time, no colour but universal—_id est_,
Italian—no place _un_like home. The whole temper of these early
painters seems to me summed up in a picture in the Uffizi by Pietro
Lorenzetti, who lived about 1350, _Gli Anacoreti nella Tebaide_. A green
water borders a white, curving shore, and land and sea are a chaos of
trees, houses, steeples, people, skiffs, sailing-boats, all of the same
size and brightness. A like absence of perspective—geometrical,
spiritual, or humorous—is seen in Benaglio’s fresco in Verona of
_Christ Preaching by the Lake of Galilee_, or Giotto’s fresco in Santa
Croce depicting the _Apocalypse of St. John_. In the Lake of Galilee
float two gigantic ducks and a gondola, while the audience includes
mediæval falconers and pipers. Patmos is a vague turtle-shaped island,
and the saint squats in the middle of it, while above hover the
celestial figures. Temporal perspective is as confounded as spatial.
Hence all those anachronisms which give us pause. Cimabue’s Madonna
consorts with the Doctors of the Church, Fra Angelico’s with Dominicans,
Alvise Vivarini’s with Franciscans. As Dante explains, the imagination
can ignore Time, just as—though his dubious comparison weakens his
explanation—it can conceive two obtuse angles in one triangle. A truer
simile may perhaps be drawn from the Baptistery of Pisa, where the
janitor—humble link in the “nutritive chain”—chants a note to show the
wonderful echo, and after its long reverberation has been sufficiently
demonstrated he sounds the notes of a simple chord, one after another,
so that the earlier notes remain alive and enter into harmony with the
new ones, and one hears an enchanting quartet—yea, even a quintet or a
sextet. Sometimes he will set an even more complex chord in vibration,
and all the air is full of delicious harmony. Even so the mediæval
thinkers conceived of the dead and the quick, the pioneers and the
successors, all living in unison, vibrating simultaneously though they
had started in sequence, all harmoniously at one in the echoing halls of
Fame. And so things disparate could be pictured united—anachronism was
merely man putting together what blind Time had put asunder. Everything
happened in the timeless realm of ideas. And often—as we saw in
Sicily—the strictly chronological aspect of things is, indeed,
irrelevant. Space and Time are shifting illusions that the spirit
disregards. Those who are in harmony are of the same hour and of the
same place.
Nor do I know where to look for a better map of the world as it figured
itself in the mediæval mind—for your atlas with its assumption that man
inhabits mere mounds of earth fantastically patterned is as absurd as
your school chronology—than that naïve _Mappamondo_ which Pietro di
Puccio frescoed on the walls of the Campo Santo of this same white Pisa.
The universe is held in the literal hands of God, whose haloed head
appears dominatingly above, not without a suggestion of a clerical band.
In the centre of the cosmos—note the geocentric glorification—stands
the earth, mapped out into continents by a couple of single straight
lines. (If Asia lies north of Europe that is a mere turn to express its
hyperborean barbarism; in Fra Mauro’s map in the Doge’s Palace the south
has got to the top, perhaps because Venice was there.) America, of
course, is not. And yet there are compensations even for the absence of
America. For this old world is circumscribed by circle on circle. On the
rim of the third are perched the mere figures of the zodiac, but the
spaces between the remoter extra-terrestrial circles are a-swarm with
cherubs, all heads and wings, and floating robed saints and endless
haloed heads of the beatified. The dim spaces below the cosmos are
solidly garrisoned by bishop with crozier and monk with breviary, and
the predella is full of suggestions of beauty and sanctity. Thus the
whole world lies serenely in the palms of God, and saints and angels
girdle it with circles of holiness.
This is, indeed, the true way to make a map—for the actual shape of the
world is only one of the factors of our habitation, just as the actual
features of a beloved face do not constitute its total reality for us.
’Tis not eyes or nose one sees so much as those mental circles due to
loving habit in which the face swims for us—the dear haloing circles of
tender experience. Rivers and mountains have, indeed, an influence on
life, just as the real eyes and nose, but the world we live in is always
more mental than geographical, and the same rivers and mountains serve
the life of successive races. The Red Man’s America is not different
from the White Man’s on the atlas—save by the black dots which mark the
ephemeral tumuli called cities—yet the America of the Trust and the
America of the Tomahawk are two different continents. The same thin
curve marks the Thames up which the pirate Vikings sailed and the Thames
of Sunday picnics. More veraciously did the Arab geographers conceive of
a country by its autochthones and not by its configuration. For our
country lives in us much more than we live in our country.
And so, to-day, too, a true map would circumscribe our globe—not with
the equally non-existent circles of the spatial latitude and longitude,
but with those of the spiritual latitude and longitude in which we
float—only, I fear, our modern _Mappamondo_ would be girdled with dark
rings marked “Survival of the Fittest,” “Necessity for Navies,” “The
Need of Expansion,” “The Divinity of the Dollar”; soldiers and
syndicates would float around in lieu of cherubs, nor would any divine
hands appear upbearing us amid the infinite spaces.
That old Pisan map leads me to suspect that Swift saw only half a fact
when he complained that
“Geographers in Afric maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps.”
True, many an old map might seem to attest the truth of the accusation.
There is a map of the Dark Continent in the Museum of Venice, dated
1651, with a camel, a unicorn, a dromedary, and a lion’s tail—all put
in by hand. But in another map of “Apphrica” in the Arsenal of Venice
there are not only lions and tigers, but tents and veiled figures, and
the turrets and spires of strange buildings, and a gay sprinkling of
flags. Surely the old cartographer was less concerned to fill his gaps
than to express the poetry of geography. Maps were, in truth, of
mediocre use in ancient times when the old Roman roads took one from
town to town. What profited an aeronaut’s panorama? Maps were only
indispensable on the roadless seas. The first maps in the modern sense
were thus pragmatic, not scientific, for it was from the mariner’s map,
or _Portolano_, that rigid cartography arose. But even these coast
charts refused to be prosaic. There is one in the Venice Museum—a view
of Italy lying sideways, as if its famous foot were asleep. Never have I
seen a more joyous chart. It is all glorious with the gold and vermilion
of compasses and crests and flying banners, while mountains stand out in
red and gold. It must have belonged to a jolly mariner. In a complete
_Portolano_ of Europe each country flies its national flag, amid a whirl
of crests and compasses. And the “Portolano del 1561 di Giacomo
Maggiolo,” which may be seen in the Palazzo Bianco of Genoa, is
illuminated in gold and blue and vermilion and green, sprinkled with
compasses, sown with towered cities crowned by golden flags, and
a-flutter with flying angels and banners and the bellying sails of
carracks, with kings seated on their thrones in the middle of the sea,
under glorious canopies crowned with angels, while over the whole
presides the Madonna in her golden chair. Most taking of the monarchs is
the King of Tartary, wearing a large moustache and surrounded by golden
scimitars.
There were no gaps to fill up in these _Portolani_. No, the cynical
Swift has missed the inwardness of these old maps, in which Art was
called in to give the touch of life and reality and to eke out, not the
barrenness of knowledge in particular, but of science in general. There
is in the Uffizi an old map of Italy which fills the Mediterranean with
boats and compasses, draws the mountains, sketches the towered cities,
and illumines the names with gold-leaf. There is an old map of Venice
which perches Father Neptune dominatingly in the middle, and symbolises
the winds by the curly locks of children blowing every way, and fills
the canals with sailing-boats and galleys and gondolas. This is
something like a map of Venice. On another, which is more of a plan of
the city with its buildings named, Venice is alive with heraldic
figures, and over the roofs and domes fly winged lions and Neptune and
Venus and angels and warriors, while a stout-lunged angel blows two
trumpets at once. And the spaces of the sea are full of brave beflagged
vessels with swelling sails, and galleys with many oars. Surely all this
is less false than the dead reticulation which expresses Venice in your
modern map. The map of Genoa, too, shows the arms of the city floating
over a sea crowded with red galleys and black merchant ships and white
sailing-boats.
In these old maps the dull spaces of the world are lit up by fiery
stars, trumpeting angels, and allegorical figures, while another
symbolic group, upholding a titulary tablet, serves, as it were, to
introduce the territory to the spectator. A wreathed lady and a male
student thus combine to present Arabia. Greece is introduced and
presided over by angels. “Terra nova detecta et Floridae promontorium”
are presented by a man holding a tablet, which records how Henry VII of
England sent out John Cabot and his son Sebastian, while the dry details
are further vivified by a superdominant figure of a gallant signor in a
feathered cap, hand on globe and learnèd tome at feet. Asia, as a nymph
with a camel, presides over a map of her continent, while a prodigious
Latin title—“Quae Asiae Regna et Provinciae Hac Tabula Continentur a
Propontide usque ad Indos,” &c. &c.—records how its three makers were
sent to Russia in the fifteenth-century and how they ripped up
(_dissuerunt_) much in the published itineraries. One of the trio,
Ambrosius Contaremus, remained long in Russia to study the less-known
portions; another, Josaphat Barbarus, devoted himself for sixteen years
to the provinces round the Euxine and the Mæotian marsh. “Perlustrata
commentariolo exponunt.”
That old map of Frau Mauro which I have already mentioned belongs to
this same century, being dated 1459; a circular map this, in a gilded
frame, with little ships floating around and America away from home,
perhaps enjoying itself in Paris. Here our familiar world shows upside
down, which is, of course, as scientific as being downside up. It is
notable how Anglia and Caledonia (or Anglia Barbara, as she is styled in
Church Latin) are disguised by this simple shifting of the point of
view, and how much like herself Hibernia looks, even topsy-turvy.
Another pre-American map in the University of Ferrara pictures the winds
personified, blowing from every quarter.
The Stones of Venice also assume the forms of maps, as in those stone
reliefs on the rococo façade of S. Maria Zobenigo opposite the Traghetto
of the Lily. These are town-maps—Candia, its name upborne by a flying
boy angel; Roma with its twin brethren at the wolf’s breast; Corfu,
characterised by its castle and its beflagged galleys. The symbolic
shorthand, which I have already noted in pictures, spread also to
map-decoration as in a map at the Arsenal, wherein Ægyptus is figured by
an elephant, Libia by giraffes, Judea by the crescent and minarets,
Germany by a winged sage, and “Holy Russia” by churches.
If these old maps erred in the courses of rivers and the lines of
mountains and in ratios of space, they are not so misleading as your
modern atlas with its all too accurate earth-measurements. For even your
most primitive map, your mediæval figment, with Paradise on the East, a
gigantic Jerusalem in the centre, great spaces for Gryphons and
Cynocephali, Sciapodes and Anthropophagi, and St. Brendan’s Isles of the
Blest marked clearly west of the Canaries, gave in its way a less
distortive impression than that which we obtain from the most scientific
chart on Mercator’s projection. Your modern cartographer would persuade
you that Canada is fifty times as large as Italy, and Canada,
contemplating herself on a school globe, already pouts her breast with
the illusion. In a true map, as distinguished from a geographical, dead
Space would shrink to its spiritual nullity, and for its contribution to
the human spirit, for its amplitude of history and poesy,
Sicily—Italy’s mere foot-note—would loom larger than all the provinces
of the Canadian Confederation.
And this misleading potency of the map scientific engenders political as
well as spiritual dangers. Tariff Reform in Britain rests on the notion
of exchanging products preferentially with these great British colonies
which bulk on the map like continents, but which, as yet in their
infancy, only represent in all some poor ten million souls against the
homeland’s forty millions. Australia, beholding her unified contours
from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Bass Strait, persists in the heroic
delusion that, despite the torridity and drought of her Northern
Territory, she is a single country, and that country a white man’s—nay,
a Briton’s exclusively. For it is from the surplus population of the
little island in the Northern Sea that all these continents into which
Britain has blundered are to be filled up: a notion which lives in the
same brains that fever with alarm over the exodus from her shores. And
all save the spherical maps foster an infinity of fallacies of
dimension: drawn to fill the like-sized page in the atlas, South America
seems a twin of India; Ireland and Madagascar (which contains seven
Erins) look much of a muchness; and Brazil, which is almost another
Europe, bulges in the imagination less than the Balkan Peninsula. What
wonder if statesmen have misguided the destinies of nations and
misdirected wars by false impressions derived from atlases, with their
deceptive distances and their obscurations of the real character of
territories, rivers, or harbours. Seoul, the capital of Corea, Lord
Curzon tells us, seems on the river, yet it is three or four miles away,
and approachable only by a canal at times shallow. “Get large maps,”
advised the late Lord Salisbury; but I would say, beware of maps
altogether. For your school map would foist upon you the delusion that
Morocco is not the East at all, but actually ten degrees more westerly
than London! Whereas every schoolboy knows that it is in the middle of
the “Arabian Nights.” With the Orient thus thrown south-west of Europe,
we are as befogged by the atlas of to-day as by the old maps which put
the Orient on the top. In truth, the Orient, like heaven, is not a
place, but a state of mind.
To the deuce with your parallels of longitude! Fez in the West,
forsooth!