by John Man
26 In my 1664 edition, reproduced by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, these names and many others are in a modern typeface, not the original Gothic, which suggests the 1664 text had been modified from some unspecified earlier edition.
27 Nectandra cinamomoides.
28 Because large-scale tribal ‘nations’ do not exist today, Carvajal’s reports have been dismissed as fantasy. But this sounds like eyewitness evidence, and should at least be taken seriously. Recently, in southern Amazonia, aerial surveys have revealed hundreds of ‘geoglyphs’ – remains of huge rectangular and circular earthworks, evidence of long-vanished and large-scale communities. Perhaps similar states existed on the Amazon itself.
29 He was a ‘trumpeter’, says Carvajal, for his people had many ‘trumpets, drums and pipes’. I’m interested because I played the trumpet, long ago, when I thought I was musical. What on earth did he mean by ‘trumpets’? The only trumpets in Europe at the time were valveless open trumpets, like doublelength bugles. Valves came much later (the instrument in Haydn–s Trumpet Concerto used clappers and holes to play harmonics). Wooden clarinos with recorder-like holes also had trumpet mouthpieces. Rainforest tribes had no metal. Perhaps these Indians had wooden instruments, with a bore-hole, or used deer horns. It’s a mystery.
30 The two versions differ in style, but not much in content, perhaps because they were dictated separately.
31 Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, autrement nommée Amérique. See Bibliography.
32 The original is available on http://gallica.bnf.fr/
33 Relation abrégée . . . See Bibliography.
9
A PAINTING, TWO PLAYS AND A SUICIDE
IN 1600, THE AMAZONS WERE FIRMLY LODGED IN EUROPE’s consciousness, placed there by Greek history, confirmed by exploration in the New World, cemented in place by novels. Everyone just knew they had once been real, and probably still were, somewhere over some distant horizon. So it was natural for writers to mention them and artists to paint them. There are good reasons why most contributions are forgotten. They’re boring or insignificant, just re-stating well-worn themes. But every now and then, over the next three centuries, somebody produced something worth a closer look. This chapter is about three of these instances, in which the Amazons were made to carry meanings very different from anything in the ancient world.
Prague is a beautiful city, but it has a rather ugly tradition: they throw people out of windows. That is a bit of an exaggeration. There have been three defenestrations in Prague, each separated by centuries, so you could hardly call it a tradition. The first was in 1419, when a mob supporting the ideas of the executed heretic Jan Huss slung a dozen eminent officials to the waiting crowd below, and the third was in 1948, when Communist thugs tossed the anti-Communist foreign minister Jan Masaryk to his death. Let’s focus on the middle one. In 1618 Protestant leaders defenestrated three visiting Catholic hardliners, who, rather surprisingly, survived. Later, some claimed they had been saved by divine intervention, others that they had fallen into a dung heap. The point of this story is the religions. The incident started the Thirty Years’ War, which turned the Reformation begun by Luther a century before into the most brutal and destructive outpouring of barbarity until 1914.
In fast-forward, the years 1618–48 made mainland Europe into a cloud chamber of rag-tag armies fighting for changing faiths, dying dynasties and rising nation-states: German Protestants, German Catholics, German warlords – for there was no Germany yet, only a kaleidoscope of states and cities – the Emperor, the Pope, the Habsburgs (with possessions across all Europe and beyond to India, Africa and the Americas), the Wittelsbachs, France, Spain, Holland, Bohemia, Denmark, Sweden and various Italian states – for there was no Italy yet either – all combining and opposing, acting and reacting, with mercenaries changing sides at the sight of a ducat. Firearms, disease and famine turned much of the continent to a wasteland. Millions died: perhaps 3 million, perhaps over 10 million. In Germany, the heart of it all, probably more than 20 per cent of the population perished, possibly up to 40 per cent. In the most extreme case, in Magdeburg in 1631, virtually the whole population of 20,000 were murdered or burned to death in their homes. Across the continent, no one counted the atrocities, let alone the dead.
But someone recorded a little of the suffering. He was a German, Hans von Grimmelshausen, and the suffering he saw and heard about when kidnapped by Hessian troops at the age of ten in 1631 formed the basis of a novel usually referred to as Simplicissimus, short for its very long title. It was the most popular German novel of its day. Before we get to the point of all this, here in the words of the simple-minded hero is a hint of the suffering imposed on ordinary people: pillage, rape, wanton destruction, and torture, including the seventeenth-century equivalent of water-boarding:
The first thing these troopers did was, that they stabled their horses: thereafter each fell to his appointed task: which task was neither more nor less than ruin and destruction. For though some began to slaughter and to boil and to roast so that it looked as if there should be a merry banquet forward, yet others there were who did but storm through the house above and below stairs . . . Bedsteads, tables, chairs, and benches they burned, though there lay many cords of dry wood in the yard. Pots and pipkins must all go to pieces, either because they would eat none but roast flesh, or because their purpose was to make there but a single meal. Our maid was so handled in the stable that she could not come out; which is a shame to tell of. Our man they laid bound upon the ground, thrust a gag into his mouth, and poured a pailful of filthy water into his body: and by this, which they called a Swedish draught, they forced him to lead a party of them to another place where they captured men and beasts, and brought them back to our farm, in which company were my dad, my mother, and our Ursula.
And now they began: first to take the flints out of their pistols and in place of them to jam the peasants’ thumbs in and so to torture the poor rogues as if they had been about the burning of witches: for one of them they had taken they thrust into the baking oven and there lit a fire under him, although he had as yet confessed no crime: as for another, they put a cord round his head and so twisted it tight with a piece of wood that the blood gushed from his mouth and nose and ears. In a word each had his own device to torture the peasant . . . Yet in the midst of all this miserable ruin I helped to turn the spit, and in the afternoon to give the horses drink, in which employ I encountered our maid in the stable, who seemed to me wondrously tumbled, so that I knew her not, but with a weak voice she called to me, ‘O lad, run away, or the troopers will have thee away with them. Look to it well that thou get hence: thou seest in what plight . . .’ And more she could not say.
That was in Germany. For Holland, the Thirty Years’ War was part of something much longer lasting – an Eighty Years’ War of independence from Spain (1568–1648). Holland was divided: Protestants, known as Calvinists, in the northern United Provinces, Catholics in the south (roughly modern Belgium). In the southern capital, Antwerp, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, joint rulers from 1599, built up a court that was the centre of a Catholic renaissance. They continued to try to subdue the Dutch rebels through military force, until the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1609, which effectively recognized the independence of the northern provinces.
Commercially, Antwerp was giving way to Amsterdam, but Albert and Isabella provided an intellectual and artistic haven in which artists thrived. There were damaged churches to be restored, new ones built, altarpieces made, stained-glass windows put in, mansions to be filled with fine paintings. It was a great time to be an artist in Antwerp. Two of them were among the most famous of their day: Jan Brueghel and Peter Paul Rubens. Brueghel – brilliant son of the brilliant Pieter Bruegel the Elder (who omitted the h in his name, though his children kept it) and younger brother of the equally brilliant Pieter Brueghel the Younger – was the better established, being nine years older than Rubens. Both had t
heir own studios, both their own special talents. Brueghel, known as ‘Velvet’ for his delicate touch, was expert in landscapes and multi-figure scenes; Rubens, though hardly out of his teens, loved historical subjects. They started a collaboration, like many others, artistic collaboration being a well-established practice, not only in Antwerp. A master would often paint the essence, with assistants adding the details. Art historians spend a great deal of time trying to work out who did what. In the case of Brueghel and Rubens, collaboration turned into a close friendship, in a tight-knit community of artists who were in and out of each other’s studios and houses, and often intermarried. In 1598, when Rubens was twenty-one and Brueghel thirty, they produced their first work together, The Battle of the Amazons.
Why the Amazons? It was not a particularly popular subject with Renaissance artists. Both, though, were drawn to the themes of classical mythology and the turmoil of battle. Brueghel, newly back from Italy, did the landscape, the top half; Rubens, already well educated in the classics and soon to go to Italy, did the figures which fill the bottom half. On a wide plain, with a wooded hill to the left, the Greek army charges in, pushing the Amazons towards a river and towards us. In the foreground Hercules34 subdues two Amazons, one of whom is wearing an incongruous plumed cap. Perhaps the Amazon in red with a gold banner, the one holding a head, is Hippolyte. A muscular figure, Theseus perhaps, holds a limp Antiope. All around warriors surge, trampling and being trampled. There are many wild expressions and much violence.
But it’s all rather academic. There are as many naked bodies as figures in diaphanous costumes. A spotlit woman lying in the foreground is obviously dead, except that there is no blood and she has somehow died while preserving her modesty with a well-placed hand. In fact, there’s not really much blood anywhere, given the mayhem. Even the head being held by Hippolyte, if it is she, is rather insignificant. Hercules and his two opponents recall the famous marble statue of Laocoön and his sons wrestling snakes, every muscle tense. The design also refers to a fresco by Raphael in Rome, The Battle of Constantine Against Maxentius, done 100 years earlier, which Brueghel would have seen in Rome and Rubens knew from engravings. Rubens was, it seems, more eager to solve the problems of composing all the bodies than engaging with the brutality of war.
But the Amazons now had him in their grasp and would not let him go. It was as if his unconscious was telling him: ‘You can do better, Peter. You can give the Amazons real meaning.’ He even explored the subject in a drawing, perhaps gathering material for another version in the future. One image he kept was that of an Amazon, Hippolyte perhaps, waving a severed head. That was in 1602–4, after which the subject went on a backburner, as if he were giving peace a chance.
In 1621, three years after the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, he was doubling as an undercover diplomat. Holland was still divided, the rebellious Protestant north against the still-Spanish Catholic south. For twelve years, from 1609, the two sides had held back. Rubens, now aged forty-four, was an established master, collector and connoisseur with an international reputation, having trained in Italy and toured Spain. Most of Europe’s top art collectors had pieces by him and his studio of helpers – great hunting scenes, portraits, tapestry designs, altarpieces. As court painter to the Archduke Albert and his wife Isabella, he was the jewel in Antwerp’s crown. Success gave him high-level contacts, which was why Archduchess Isabella, an equal to her husband, employed him as an unofficial envoy. His task, as the Twelve Years’ Truce approached its end, was to try to broker a lasting peace between divided Holland and Spain. He failed. War broke out again. He ran his studio to the occasional sound of cannon fire and when he travelled – as he did to Paris in 1622 to plan twenty-one portraits for France’s Queen Mother, Marie, a Medici from Florence – he did so across a war-ravaged land.
So he knew from the inside the disaster that faced all Europe when, in some unspecified year about this time, he painted his own The Battle of the Amazons, which he gave to the great collector Cornelis van der Geest. It is very different from the previous picture done with Brueghel. In a chaos of horses and two dozen half-naked bodies, Greeks and Amazons struggle on top of a small, low-arched bridge, with corpses tumbling down on either side into a shallow river. In size, imagine a school blackboard – not exactly palatial, but just right for the wall of a spice merchant and art collector. It is at first glance an appropriate piece of mythology, exactly the sort of thing a seventeenth-century aristocrat would want.
But a closer look reveals a most unlikely agenda. In ancient times, the battle would have been designed to show the fine qualities of both winners and losers. There were models to be followed in similar works by Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, both glorifying particular victories. Here, though, Rubens has made the subject his own. The figures, fighting against smoke surging from a blazing city, swirl around a Greek seizing the Amazon standard – a traditional theme in military subjects, because the flag, being colourful and visible, was the point round which troops were supposed to rally. Here there is no rallying and no glory. The Amazon standard-bearer, already collapsing and unarmed, is having the flag dragged away from her by a Greek wielding a bloody dagger, while another raises his sword to finish her off. The Amazon queen, Hippolyte, is no leader now, riding off in the background. There is no hint of heart-stopping beauty or any power-giving girdle, only barbarity. She is holding up a Greek head, leaving its owner’s decapitated torso on top of the bridge, dead centre, bleeding into the river below. It is a scene of extreme and shocking brutality. Bodies are distorted in death. A female corpse almost blocks the river. In antiquity Greeks liked to see virtue in their own side for achieving victory over respected adversaries, but here there is no respect for either side. The Greeks are slaughtering defeated women, and being slaughtered in their turn.
In the bottom left corner is a woman on her back, lying dead on the steep riverbank. A Greek is hauling her cloak from under her, his foot on the inside of her naked thigh, an act that combines the implication of necrophilia – the rape of a corpse – with the theft of an item that is entirely useless in military terms. Plundering the dead was never described in Greek and Roman texts. Seventeenth-century viewers would not have expected to see it in a mythological scene, which this seems to be. But the picture is not really mythological. It is a reflection of current warfare, in which plundering corpses was punishable by death if done without orders, but commonplace.
In all this, there is no dignity or heroism, no right or wrong. Both Greeks and Amazons are victims and perpetrators. The subject is the war and its horrors, and to show them Rubens has stripped away every positive element he might have inherited from the past.
Rubens was eager to spread his universal message as widely as possible. The way to achieve this was by making an engraving of the picture and having it published. This was another monumental achievement, another display of virtuosity. He had it made two-thirds the size of the original (85 × 120 centimetres), which meant dividing the plates into six sheets – the largest engraving made in Holland up to that time. Moreover, Rubens made his message even more explicit by dedicating the print to a woman – Alethea Howard, Countess of Arundel (her name is pronounced Al-ee-thea, from the Greek for ‘truth’). Her husband, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, was Earl Marshal of England, a famous art collector and Rubens’s future patron, but it was she who was of special interest to Rubens because he had painted her (along with her jester, dwarf and dog) when she came through Antwerp and she was now part of his message – as a force in her own right, in effect an Amazon. She (he implied) was politically engaged, and could, perhaps, exert influence that would end the dire consequences of violence shown in the engraving done for her and the picture from which it was taken.
The PR worked, for art and perhaps a little in politics. The picture was given pride of place in a composite of portraits and well-known paintings in The Gallery of Cornells van der Geest, done by the gallery’s curator, Willem van Haecht. And the print, when red
uced to normal size, became extremely popular. It still is.
And peace came at last. The Treaty of Westphalia that brought to a close the Thirty Years’ War marked the end of the wars of religion in Europe, the end of Spanish military control, the start of France’s rise. It settled peoples and dynasties within national frontiers. Wars were now between nations, and not continent-wide, peace ensured by a balance of powers, until Napoleon unbalanced them 150 years later, recalling some of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War and Rubens’s dystopian view.
*
Move forward now to a quieter time, the mid-eighteenth century. We are in the age of the Enlightenment, a label used by self-satisfied intellectuals who liked to think that the scientific method and reasoned thought was setting aside the authority of the Church, whatever that was in a Christianity divided between Catholics and Protestants and their countless rival sects.
Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:
God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.
Alexander Pope’s epitaph on the man who more than any other led the scientific revolution overstated a little, because Newton himself was half-hid in night, believing that his work on the Bible was as flawless as his laws of motion. Newton died in 1727. Soon, John Locke would argue that the only true foundations for knowledge were the impressions made by the real world on the senses. The only authority, the only truth, the only way to unlock nature’s secrets was to make sense of sense-impressions with mathematics and experiment and reason. Emerging from the dark and pessimistic depths of what seemed universal and enduring war, mankind was at last climbing towards sunny and optimistic uplands. If all was not yet light, it soon would be.
Moreover, it was possible for almost anyone to know almost everything if they put their mind to it. In France, Voltaire was a playwright and a poet, but he also wrote history and explained Newton’s physics to the French. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations founded modern economics, but he was also a moral philosopher.