by Will Durant
CHAPTER VI
Episode in Burgundy
1363–1515
I. THE ROYAL DUKES
BY its position on the eastern flank of France around Dijon, and by the subtle statesmanship of its dukes, Burgundy emerged with little harm from the Hundred Years’ War, and became for half a century the brightest spot in transalpine Christendom. When the Burgundian ducal family of the Capetian line became extinct, and the duchy reverted to the French Crown, John II gave it to his fourth son Philip (1363) as a reward for valor at Poitiers. During his forty-one years as Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (Philippe le Hardi) managed so well, and married so diplomatically, that Hainaut, Flanders, Artois, and Franche-Comté came under his rule; and the duchy of Burgundy, technically a province of France, became in effect an independent state, enriched by Flemish commerce and industry, and graced by the patronage of art.
John the Fearless (Jean sans Peur), by a fine web of alliances and intrigues, stretched his power to the bursting point, and France felt challenged to resist. Louis, Duke of Orléans, ruling France for his mad brother Charles VI, allied France with the Holy Roman Empire in a plan to check the unwisely fearless Duke. John’s hired assassins killed him; violent strife ensued between the Burgundian party and the Armagnacs—followers of Louis’ father-in-law the Count of Armagnac—for the control of French policy; and John in turn died under an assassin s knife (1419). His son Philip the Good renounced all feudal allegiance to France, allied Burgundy with England, and annexed Tournai, Namur, Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Limburg, and Louvain. When he made his peace with France (1435) he exacted the recognition of his duchy’s practical sovereignty, and the cession of Luxembourg, Liège, Cambrai, and Utrecht. Burgundy was now at its zenith, rivaling in wealth and power any kingdom in the West.
Philip might not win from tender minds his title “the Good.” He was not above chicanery and cruelty and unmannerly flares of wrath. But he was a devoted son, an excellent administrator, and a fond father even to his sixteen illegitimate offspring. He loved women royally, had twenty-four mistresses, prayed and fasted, gave alms, and made his capitals—Dijon, Bruges, and Ghent—the art foci of the Western world outside of Italy. His long rult brought to Burgundy and its provinces such affluence that few of his subjects made any fuss about his sins. The Flemish towns fretted under his mastery, and mourned to see their old guild organization and communal liberties yielding to a national economy under a centralized government. Philip and his son Charles suppressed their revolts but allowed them a conciliatory peace, for they knew that from the industry and commerce of these cities came the richest ducal revenues. Before Philip the regions of the lower Rhine had been fragments, as diverse in institutions and policies as in race and speech; he bound them into a unified state, gave them order, and seconded their prosperity.
Burgundian society at Bruges, Ghent, Liège, Louvain, Brussels, and Dijon was now (1420–60) the most polished and amorous in Europe, not excepting the contemporary Florence of Cosimo de’ Medici. The dukes preserved all the forms of chivalry; it was Philip the Good who founded the Order of the Golden Fleece (1429); and it was in part from her Burgundian allies that England took the chivalric pomp and glamour that brightened the rough surface of English manners, glorified the campaigns of Henry V, and shone in the pages of Froissart and Malory. The Burgundian nobles, shorn of independent power, lived chiefly as courtiers, and developed all the graces of dress and bearing that could adorn parasitism and adultery.1 Merchants and manufacturers robed themselves like royalty, and fed and gowned their wives as if preparing the scene for Rubens. Under so loving a duke monogamy would have been lèse-majesté. John of Heinsberg, the jolly Bishop of Liège, spawned a dozen bastards; John of Burgundy, Bishop of Cambrai, had thirty-six children and grandchildren begotten out of wedlock; many of the elite, in this eugenic age, were so born.2 Prostitutes could be found at almost any time and price at the public baths. At Louvain they pretended to be landladies, offering accommodations for students.3 Festivals were many and extravagant; famous artists were engaged to design the pageants and decorate the floats; and people came over frontiers and seas to view gorgeous spectacles in which nude women played the part of ancient goddesses and nymphs.4
II. THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT
In somber contrast with this effervescent society were the saints and mystics who, under these dukes, gave Holland a high place in religious history. Jan van Ruysbroeck, a Brussels priest, retired at fifty (1343) to an Augustinian monastery at Groenendael, near Waterloo, where he devoted himself to mystical contemplation and compositions. He professed that the Holy Spirit guided his pen; nevertheless his pantheism verged upon a denial of individual immortality.
God Himself is swallowed up with all the blessed in an absence of modes... an eternal loss of self.... . The seventh degree is attained when, beyond all knowledge or all knowing, we discover in ourselves a bottomless not-knowing; when, beyond all names given to God or to creatures, we come to expire, and pass over in eternal namelessness, where we lose ourselves .. . and contemplate all these blessed spirits which are essentially sunken away, merged and lost in their superessence, in an unknown darkness without mode.5
The Netherlands* and Rhenish Germany saw in this period a profusion of lay groups—Beghards, Beguines, Brethren of the Free Spirit—whose mystic raptures led often to piety, social service, quietism, and pacifism, sometimes to a rejection of the sacraments as unnecessary, and occasionally to a cheerful acceptance of sin as quite swallowed up in union with God.6 Gerrit (Geert, Gerard) Groote of Deventer, after receiving a good education at Cologne, Paris, and Prague, spent many days with Ruysbroeck at Groenendael, and was moved to make the love of God the pervading motive of his life. Having received deacon’s orders (1379), he began to preach in the towns of Holland, in the vernacular, to audiences so large that the local churches could not hold them; people left their shops and meals to hear him. Scrupulously orthodox in doctrine, and himself a “hammer of heretics,” he nevertheless attacked the moral laxity of priests as well as of laymen, and demanded that Christians should live strictly in accord with the ethics of Christ. He was denounced as a heretic, and the bishop of Utrecht withdrew from all deacons the right to preach. One of Groote’s followers, Floris Radewijnszoon, drew up a semi-monastic, semi-communistic rule for the “Brethren of the Common Life,” who lived in a Fraterhuis at Deventer with Groote at their head, and—without taking monastic vows—occupied themselves with manual labor, teaching, religious devotions, and copying manuscripts. Groote died at forty-four (1384) of a pestilence contracted while nursing a friend, but his Brotherhood spread its influence through 200 Fraterhuizen in Holland and Germany. The schools of the Brotherhood gave the pagan classics a prominent place in their curriculum, preparing the way for the Jesuit schools that took over their work in the Counter Reformation. The Brethren welcomed printing soon after its appearance, and used it to disseminate their moderna devotio. Alexander Hegius at Deventer (1475–98) was a memorable example of the type that fortunate students have known—the saintly teacher who lives only for the instruction and moral guidance of his pupils. He improved the curriculum, centered it around the classics, and won the praise of Erasmus for the purity of his Latin style. When he died he left nothing but his clothes and his books; everything else he had secretly given to the poor.7 Among the famous pupils of Deventer were Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, Rudolf Agricola, Jean de Gerson, and the author of The Imitation of Christ.
We are not sure who wrote this exquisite manual of humility. Probably it was Thomas Hamerken of Kempen in Prussia. In the quiet of his cell in the monastery of Mt. St. Agnes near Zwolle, Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) gathered from the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, and St. Bernard passages expounding the ideal of unworldly piety as conceived by Ruysbroeck and Groote, and rephrased them in simple mellifluous Latin.
What will it avail thee to be engaged in profound discussions of the Trinity, if thou be void of humility, and art thereby displeasing to the Trinity? T
ruly, sublime words do not make a man holy and just, but a virtuous life maketh him dear to God. I had rather feel compunction than know how to define it. If thou knewest the whole Bible by heart, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what would it profit thee without the love of God, and without grace? Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity, except to love God, and Him only to serve. This is the highest wisdom, by contempt of the world to tend toward the Kingdom of Heaven.... Yet learning is not to be blamed... for that is good in itself and ordained by God, but a good conscience and a virtuous life are always to be preferred....
He is truly great who hath great love. He is truly great that is little in his own eyes, and that maketh no account of any height of honor. He is truly wise who casteth aside all earthly things as dung, that he may win Christ....
Fly the tumult of men as much as thou canst, for the treating of worldly affairs is a great hindrance.... . Truly it is misery to live on the earth.... It is a great matter to live in obedience, to be under a superior, and not to be at our own disposing. It is much safer to obey than to govern.... The cell, constantly dwelt in, groweth sweet.8
There is a gentle eloquence in the Imitation that echoes the profound simplicity of Christ’s sermons and parables. It is an ever needed check on the intellectual pride of frail reason and shallow sophistication. When we are weary of facing our responsibilities in life we shall find no better refuge than Thomas à Kempis’ Fifth Gospel. But who shall teach us how to be Christians in the stream and storm of the world?
III. SPARKLING BURGUNDY: 1363–1465
Despite such deprecating Thomases, the provinces under Burgundian rule indulged in considerable intellectual activity. The dukes themselves—Philip the Good above the rest—collected libraries and encouraged literature and art. Schools multiplied, and the University of Louvain, founded in 1426, wa soon among the leading educational centers of Europe. Georges Castellain’ Chronique des ducs de Bourgogne recorded the history of the duchy with rhetorical effulgence and a minimum of philosophy, but in a vigorous French that shared with Froissart and Comines in forming that favorite medium of clear and graceful prose. Private groups organized Chambers of Rhetoric (Rederijkers) for contests in oratory and poetry and the performance of plays. The two languages of the realm—the French or Romance of the Walloons in the south and the German dialects of the Flemings and Dutch in the north—rivaled each other in producing poets who repose in the peace of oblivion.
The supreme expression of the duchy was in art. Antwerp began in 1352 its vast, many-aisled cathedral, and finished it in 1518; Louvain raised the beautifully proportioned St. Pierre—another casualty of the second World War. Men and cities were so rich that they could afford mansions or town halls almost as magnificent as the churches that they conceded to God. The bishops who governed Liège housed themselves and their administrative staff in the largest and most elegant palace in the Lowlands. Ghent built its guildhall in 1325, Brussels its town hall in 1410–55, Louvain in 1448–63; Bruges added its hotel de ville in 1377–1421, and crowned it with a world-famous belfry (1393–96) that served as a landmark to mariners far out at sea. While these noble Gothic structures expressed the pride of cities and merchants, the dukes and aristocracy of Burgundy financed for their palaces and tombs a brilliant outburst of sculpture, painting, and manuscript illumination. Flemish artists, frightened from France by war, flocked back to their own cities. Philip the Bold gathered a veritable pleiad of geniuses to adorn his summer residence at the Chartreuse de Champmol—a Carthusian monastery in the “gentle field” adjoining Dijon.
In 1386 Philip commissioned Jean de Marville to design for him an elaborate mausoleum in the Chartreuse. When Marville died (1389) Claus Sluter of Holland continued the work; when Sluter died (1406) his pupil Claus de Werve carried on; at last (1411) the tomb was completed, and received the bones of the Duke, now seven years dead. In 1793 a revolutionary assembly at Dijon ordered the dismantling of the great sepulcher, and its components were scattered or destroyed. In 1827 the communal fathers, breathing a reverse political breeze, collected the remaining pieces, and housed them in the Dijon Museum. The Duke and his Duchess, Marguerite of Flanders, lie in handsome alabaster on a massive marble slab; and below them forty pleurant figures—sole survivors of the ninety carved—mourn the ducal death in silent and graceful grief. For the portal of the chapel at the Chartreuse, Sluter and his pupils (1391–94) chiseled out five superb figures: the Virgin receiving the homage of Philip and Marguerite, presented to her by John the Baptist and St. Catherine of Alexandria. In the courtyard Sluter set up his master work, the Puits de Moïse, Well of Moses: a pedestal bearing statues of Moses, David, Jeremiah, Zachariah, Isaiah, and Daniel, originally surmounted by a “calvary” or crucifixion scene, of which nothing remains but a somber, noble head of Christ crowned with thorns. No sculpture of such masculine power and unique audacity had been seen in Europe since the best days of Roman art.
The painters formed as remarkable a dynasty as the sculptors. The miniaturists still found patrons: Count William of Hainaut paid well for the illumination of Les tres belles heures de Nôtre Dame (c. 1414);* and the unknown genius (perhaps Hubert van Eyck) set a model and pace for a thousand Lowland landscape artists by depicting with microscopic zeal a port with ships beached or in full sail, passengers disembarking, sailors and longshoremen at their diverse tasks, waves breaking on a crescent shore, white clouds moving stealthily across the sky—all in the space of a picture card. In 1392 Melchior Broederlam of Y pres brightened the Chartreuse de Champmol with the oldest significant panel extant outside of Italy. But Broederlam and the artists who painted the walls and statuary of the monastery used traditional tempera—mixing their colors with some gelatinous material. Nuances of shading and tint, and translucency of tone, were hardly attainable by these means, and moisture could ruin the finished work. As early as 1329 Jacques Compère of Ghent had experimented with colors mixed in oil. Through a hundred years of trial and error the Flemings developed the new technique; and in the first quarter of the fifteenth century it revolutionized pictorial art. When Hubert van Eyck and his younger brother Jan painted The Adoration of the Lamb for the cathedral of St. Bavon at Ghent, they not only established the superiority of oil as a vehicle of color; they produced one of the supreme masterpieces in the history of painting, for whose sake St. Bavon has been a goal of pilgrimage ever since.
In form this greatest of fifteenth-century paintings—this “pivot of the history of the art,” Goethe called it9—is a folding polyptych of six panels, painted on wood, with twelve pictures on each side; opened, it is eleven feet high, fourteen feet wide. In the center of the lower row is an imaginary countryside, with a city of majestic towers—the Heavenly Jerusalem—rising in the distance beyond the hills; in the foreground a well of the Water of Life; farther back an altar whereon a lamb symbolizing Christ pours out its sacrificial blood, while patriarchs and prophets, Apostles and martyrs, angels and saints, gather around in rapt adoration. In the upper center a throned figure, looking like some benevolent Semitic Charlemagne, is designated as God the Father—a naturally inadequate representation of deity, but a noble conception of a wise ruler and just judge. It is surpassed, in this painting, by only one figure—the Virgin, a soft-featured, blond Teutonic type not so much of beauty as of purity and modesty; the Sistine Madonna is less nobly conceived. On Mary’s left is a group of angels; at the extreme left a naked Adam, thin and sad, “remembering in misery a happy time.” To the right of God the Father is John the Baptist, very sumptuously robed for a shepherd preaching in the wilderness. At the extreme right stands a naked Eve, somber and hardly fair, mourning paradise lost; she for a time, like Adam at the other end, shocked a chilly Flanders unaccustomed to the nude in life or art. Above her, Cain slays his brother as a symbolic prelude to history.
The reverse of the polyptych declines from the exalted type of the inner panels. In the middle row an angel at the left and Mary at the right, separated by a room, picture the Annunci
ation—the faces stereotyped, the hands remarkably fine, the draperies as lovely as any in Flemish painting. At the bottom is a Latin poem of four lines; some words have been worn out by the centuries; the rest reads: “Hubertus van Eyck, great and skilled beyond any other, began the heavy task, and Johannes, second in art... encouraged by the bequest of Jodocus Vyd. This verse on the sixth of May calls you to behold the finished work”; and in the final line certain letters add up in their numerical value to 1432, the year of completion. Vyd and his wife were the donors. How much of the picture was painted by Hubert, how much by Jan, is a problem happily insoluble, so that dissertations thereon may be written till all trace of the painting disappears.*
Perhaps there is in this epochal picture an undue profusion of figures and minutiae: every man, woman, angel, flower, branch, blossom, beast, stone, and gem is reproduced with heroic patience and fidelity—to the amusement of Michelangelo, who saw in Flemish realism a sacrifice of central significance to incidental and irrelevant detail.11 But nothing in contemporary Italy rivaled this painting in scope, conception, or effect; and in later pictorial art only the Sistine-Chapel ceiling of Michelangelo surpasses it, and the Vatican frescoes of Raphael, and probably Leonardo’s Last Supper before it began its long decay. Even in its own day all literate Europe talked of the Adoration. Alfonso the Magnanimous pleaded with Jan van Eyck to come to Naples and paint for him such men and women, with golden hair, as sang in this picture but were so rare in southern Italy.