The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are
Page 35
The Burgundian duke, Charles the Bold, rode into Dijon in January 1474 wearing armour covered with rubies, diamonds, huge pearls. Three years later he died in just such gaudy armour trying to take back the French town of Nancy in the Lorraine. His body was found in the snow, but all the armour was gone, he had been stripped naked and he was so badly mauled that his own doctor took days to identify him by the one remaining sign: a fistula in the groin. The show failed him.
Inside three years the Hapsburgs inherited Flanders by marriage and the Flemish were in full revolt against their new rulers: a rehearsal, in a way, for the final break a century later. The first revolt went on for fifteen years, the second started a relentless eighty-year war because it was scaffolded with the religious divide between Calvinist and Catholic and not just grievances over tax and local privileges; both revolts were against a state so weak that the show had to go on even in times of civil war. Giovanni Botero in the 1580s understood very well: ‘There was not a country throughout all Europe neither more rich nor more indebted.’14
This was a mirror world, one we know: politics as theatre, power as a show. If the machinery became visible at times, that only made it clear that some people still wanted to believe.
Self-made men, senior bureaucrats, understood this very well. Peter Bladelin was the duke’s moneyman and treasurer of the Order of the Golden Fleece and once he had become ‘rich beyond measure’ he was also master of the court, producer of its constant pageantry. He was allowed to use the money he guarded for his own personal investments, and he bought land, assembling a site parcel by parcel like any modern property developer. Nobody built whole towns any more because nobody was a feudal lord or an abbot who must be obeyed, and besides there were towns growing everywhere by themselves. But Bladelin did build a town, called Middelburg, to show that he was as good as any lord or abbot before him.
The town was as neatly organized as a model: a mill, a hospital, a church with a priest, two chaplains and six canons, areas for living, areas for working and naturally a town hall to administer everything because Bladelin was true to his trade. He brought in coppersmiths to work there, and tapestry weavers, the kind of artisans who suggested taste and sophistication; he built a canal to take their products out by water to Ghent and Bruges; he used his political position to make sure the copper could be sold in England and that the duke ordered tapestries when he happened to be staying.
He also built a castle: a stone fanfare, the loudest possible statement that Peter Bladelin was ‘lord of Middelburg in Flanders’, as his will said, not just a successful bureaucrat and certainly not some ambitious climber from Bruges. The spine of his town was the road from Bruges to Aardenburg, which went through the town and led directly to the castle walls; to go on to Bruges you had to turn sharp left. Everything inside the town led to the castle, and to the longest wall of the whole building, built out to impress. Anyone passing would see the moat which surrounded the wall of Middelburg and inside it the moat around the castle: the town separate from the ordinary countryside, the castle apart from the town in its own landscape of water. Ride in through the castle gates, if you were invited, if you were the right sort of person, and you went through a long high corridor to a bridge across the moat to Bladelin’s own quarters, which had a drawbridge, a gatehouse, three massive round towers and two smaller ones for the stairs. They made a statement about Bladelin’s knightly skills and warrior tendencies, but they faced the wrong way; an enemy would not see them, only friends.
The castle’s next owner was another high civil servant, executed by the townspeople in 1477; he had looked after the interests of Duke Charles the Bold quite dangerously well. When the northern provinces rebelled and war moved back and forth, town by town, the castle stood in the way. It was knocked into ruins thirty years after it was built, because the towers were no kind of serious defence. By 1607 it was said to be ‘a ruin … desolated and destroyed … ready to be totally dismantled’. It was no more durable than a trick on the stage.15
Leo left Burgundy and set sail from Calais for England, on a ship he shared with thirty-six horses. ‘When we left harbour and reached the open sea the ship sprang a great leak and the water poured in so that the horses stood in water up to their bellies. Then our Lord God sent us good luck. The wind veered so that we had a good breeze. But if the wind had not changed, we should all have been drowned.’ They found another ship, but this time it lay offshore and they had to take a small rowing boat to reach it; and again they almost drowned. ‘My lord and his other attendants,’ Leo said, ‘were so distressed by the waves that they lay on the ship as if they had been dead.’
He found London ‘a powerful and busy city, carrying on a great trade with all countries’, and he was properly impressed by the English court. The king was announced with a choir, with trumpeters, pipers, players of string instruments. The queen sat alone at table ‘on a costly golden chair’ and her sister stayed on her knees until her majesty had drunk water; other noblewomen knelt silently all the time the queen was eating, which could be as much as three hours. Leo noticed the women’s dress because they had ‘long trains. In no other country have I seen such long ones.’16
It should have been familiar; it was one more imitation of Burgundy. Olivier de la Marche, who was master of ceremonies at the Burgundian court, was a kind of consultant to the English king Edward IV. He wrote him a detailed description of how things were done in Brussels, which served as the manual for the English court: how to eat, when to bow. The show of how to be king became even more important when the Tudor Henry VII took the throne of England in 1485. He had a weak hold on power and he had to act out being exceptionally powerful. He chose to build his palace at Richmond as much as possible like the Prinsenhof at Bruges with its covered walkways and its gardens with tennis courts, and he asked ‘merchants of Flanders’ to find the tapestries, jewels and stained glass that would make it officially regal.17
Show and debt and bluff: that, not Hobbes or Machiavelli, may be the true start of a modern politics.
Albrecht Dürer came to the Low Countries in 1520, and he kept a journal, which reads like an account book; so we know he spent two sous on ‘the red colour you find at Antwerp in blocks newly cooked’, that he bought varnish and colour in Bruges, where a single red crayon cost him a sou, that he spent three pounds on the grey-blue ‘colour of lead’ in Antwerp. He traded a batch of engravings that he said were worth ten ducats for a single ounce of ultramarine, the mineral compound out of Afghanistan that contains the blue of lapis lazuli,18 and which probably came by way of Venice to the great Northern shop of Antwerp.
The town had artists because it had everything the painter needed: the docks bringing green verdigris from Montpellier, but also the dyes for cloth that made colours for paint as well, blue woad, red brazilwood or madder. Cochineal came from the New World on Spanish boats, landed at Antwerp and was sold on to Italy. There were local dealers prepared for the stink of making vermilion, the colour that ‘makes all the flesh parts glow’, as Karel van Mander wrote in his guidebook to the painters of the time; it was made from the sulphur and mercury mined in Germany, treated in Antwerp and then sold back by way of Cologne, on one occasion in 1543 in a load of four hundred pounds of colour on a single waggon. Like Venice, but nowhere else, Antwerp had at least four dealers in the 1560s who sold only colours; and the leaseholder of the galleries on top of the New Bourse, Bartholomeus de Momper, registered as an art dealer with the guild of St Luke but also found it worth while to enrol as a dealer in colours with the mercers’ guild.19
Works from Flanders had a reputation for life, light, vividness, for a mastery of the new-fangled painting in oils, for clever attention to the real world. Florentines were rude about foreign artists – ‘their brains are in their hands,’ Anton Francesco Doni wrote – but they went on buying Netherlandish paintings from the North with enthusiasm.20 They bought work on panels, the masterpieces we still know, but they also bought paintings on cloth, the ki
nd that can be ‘wrapped around a rod’ for easy transport. Antwerp sent these out everywhere, dozens of them to England and once a ‘barrelful’. They sold perhaps 2,500 in the course of fifty years.21
There were holy subjects, peacocks, carnival scenes, warnings against slander and just possibly some proto-porn: ‘four women and three men who are giving each other pleasure’. These cloths could be very large, which suited Florentine tastes: Lorenzo Strossi sent down from Bruges three cloths for his dealer mother to sell in Florence, but she reckoned she could only get three florins each for the peacock and the three Magi because the pictures were small. She liked them, she even kept one, but the market wanted scale: something that looked rather like a fresco but was portable.
The rooms of the Medici were wrapped in Flemish taste. The family collected at least forty-two cloth paintings from the North, a third of their whole collection; some were in their city palace, and even more were spread around their country houses. Medici cousins hung a cloth Moses on the same chimney as Botticelli’s Primavera.22 The Florentine Raffaello Borghini sang the praises of Jan van der Straet from Bruges, who went to Italy ‘hearing talk of the excellence of Italian painters’, met in Venice one of the Flemish craftsmen making tapestry for the Grand Duke Cosimo and began a career making the cartoons for huge woven pictures: vivid hunts for a seethe of wild cats or a family of boar snouting out of a cornfield or a pack of sinisterly attentive wolves; some classical subjects, Jason and Medea waiting to sail away in a high-prowed ship that bucks in the water like a powerful horse, Time with a wicked sickle holding captive the goddess of wisdom and virtue because death will cut the brightest life short; a biblical theme, Samuel anointing King David as his heir but of course meaning to endorse Grand Duke Cosimo. The pictures are as ornate as some baroque carving, but they are criss-crossed with energy, human and lively, just as Borghini promised: ‘with his many works he has much enriched the art of drawing men, animals, landscapes and views, with fresh and lovely invention’.23
The works were made by artisans in guilds, plain craftsmen, yet there were already famous persons whose styles could be discussed, whose genius was assumed. Jan van Eyck ‘has been judged the prince of the painters of our time’, the Naples humanist Bartholomeus Facius wrote; ‘he is thought … to have discovered many things about the properties of colours recorded by the ancients.’24 The legend as Vasari wrote it in his Lives of the Artists is even more striking: Van Eyck invented oil painting.
‘Realizing the imperfection of tempera colours,’ Raffaello Borghini said, ‘after many experiments he discovered that mixing colours with the oil of walnuts or linseed gave a very strong tempera which, when it dried, not only had no fear of water but also gave life and lustre without varnish.’25 Lodovico Guicciardini, who was a merchant from Florence living in Antwerp, called van Eyck ‘the first inventor of the art of mixing colours in oil … a glorious and highly important invention, for it renders the colours eternal, nor is there any reason to suppose that it had ever been known before’.26 His eighteenth-century translator, anonymous but wise, suspected that painting in oils was an old idea from Byzantium, but still Vasari’s legend lives, alongside the idea that it was only by studying Italians, the ancient ones and Michelangelo and Raphael, that Northern painters could hope to ‘escape the prison of their dry, archaic, even barbarous manner and become modern’.27 Neither one is quite true.
For a start, there is a twelfth-century text all about using pressed oil to bind colours: Theophilus Presbyter’s Schedula diversarum artium. Vasari says van Eyck was the one who taught Antonello da Messina how to paint in oils; Pietro Summonte, writing from Naples, says it was a Naples master called Colantonio who had wanted to move to Flanders because he ‘looked to the work of Flemish painters’ but was kept at home by a king with the skill to ‘show him … how to mix and use these colours’.28 The point is that Italian painters looked at the life and brightness, the brilliance and the shadows, of the Flemish masters, and they were hugely impressed. They saw faces that could be alive, which suggested a new kind of portrait, and landscapes of a kind they had never yet tried, which could be used as details in their own paintings. Mona Lisa became imaginable, a woman whose name we still want to know in front of a landscape we still try to read. The Italians learned from the North in the way the Flemish went down to Rome to learn.
They also imitated particular painters, and recognized painting as something more than a craft which requires simply practice. They honoured the painter Hugo van der Goes by imitating the great altarpiece he painted for the Portinaris in Florence, commissioned by the head of the Medici bank in Bruges: the shepherds pressing in on each other to see the vulnerable baby on the ground, watched by a still, modest Virgin all in dark blue. Before the Virgin there are flowers: the usual lilies, but also black aquilegia, the flower of the Holy Ghost and the flower whose French name, ancolie, sounds like melancholy. Van der Goes had finished the painting just before he went into the monastery at Windesheim as a conversus, a plain craftsman and not a learnèd man. He was acknowledged as a great painter and he was very nearly mad.
Gaspar Ofhuys was Prior of Windesheim and also Master of the Sick, and he told the story thirty years later. ‘He kept repeating that he was damned … and because of this, he even tried to do himself bodily harm and to kill himself – had he not been forcibly restrained with the help of bystanders.’ Gaspar thought he was suffering like King David and might recover to the sound of music, but he did not improve; ‘rather, he declared that he was a son of perdition, uttering strange things’. He became ‘exceedingly anxious about how he would carry out the works he was supposed to paint’. He drank with his guests and got worse. The idea grew that somehow he must have hurt something in his brain, ‘a very small slender vein that nourishes the power of imagination and fantasy’; his individual state, his individual fantasy, had somehow gone wrong.29 In other words, he thought he had a talent, that it was personal and that it had been ruined; and the people around him agreed.
Most pictures sold in Antwerp did not need a genius as much as a steady hand, and a print or a drawing blacked on the back to trace out the outlines that the artist would then fill. There were ‘patterns’ for paintings, drawings that were pricked with tiny holes along the outlines; when they were put against wood or cloth, and blacked, a delicate outline showed through. Sometimes a painter took one of the many prints being published, traced it onto wood and invented colours for it; sometimes there was no painted original at all, just the pattern. The patterns were assets; Ambrosius Benson, a lacklustre Italian marooned in Flanders, went to court to get back the patterns in a chest he had left behind.
Copying was the business: to give people what they wanted, at a price they could pay. Art was no longer something that great persons commissioned for great churches in order to save their souls. Guicciardini listed among the excellent artists of Flanders ‘Peter Brugel of Breda, a sedulous imitator of the fancies of Jerome Bosch whence he is commonly called the second Jerome Bosch.’ This is Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who also turned out versions of the originals by his more famous father Pieter, copies for people who could never find or afford the originals. He was five when his father died, and he may never have seen his father’s work, but he was taught to paint by his grandmother and he had access to the ‘patterns’ for his father’s pictures; so he signed his pictures ‘Bruegel/Brueghel/Brueghel’. He did copy Bosch but he did not do what forgers do: he did not smoke the canvas to make it look old. He was reproducing, not faking.
When the Valois Duke of Burgundy Charles the Bold was killed, and the Hapsburgs came riding into Flanders, the court commissioned far fewer paintings; genius had a hard time. Middle-class commissions were everything, and a line of product that could be made ready for each year’s trade fair. The middle classes liked to pray at home and they bought ‘contemplation pieces’, holy pictures on a domestic scale, and they bought them on the open market from painters they never met. The Madonna of Cambrai, which was
supposed to be painted by St Luke himself although it looks suspiciously like a late copy of a Byzantine icon, was copied over and over again: three at a time for some great persons, and in dozens by the Cathedral of Cambrai, which sold them to pilgrims. Even Jan van Eyck turned out a couple of versions at a time; he did that for the merchant Anselmus Adornes, two virtually identical pictures of St Francis.30
Conspicuous consumption, with an unfamiliar holy accent, had already reached the middle classes, who in the North would make possible all the domestic glories of the Dutch golden age. So had the idea of genius, which they knew very well was something quite different.
Ten in the morning and the men are crowding into the Bourse: into a great Gothic quadrangle in the middle of Antwerp, arcades all around and shops upstairs, two great bell towers like a castle, shut in by streets of other people’s houses but open to the business of the known world. It opened in the 1530s as a kind of engine for the town.
The men have letters that give the bearer a claim on money left at some fair in Spain or a warehouse in Cologne, credits or debts: the kind of money that crosses borders. They’re here to trade them. Each trader needs to find a broker, maybe Spinola from Genoa or Fontoba from Spain, who knows the various exchange rates for the day; the big trading firms know them already, having fixed them. The movement of goods from as far away as Afghanistan or Africa depends on their deals.
Watch them and you watch the kind of market that will come to rule our lives: a market you play by handling paper rather than anything solid like spices, amber, cloth or fish. A man like Gaspar Ducci, who started with a firm from Lucca, could make money by arranging loans for the broke Emperor in return for the right to collect taxes. He could also make bets on the difference between prices and the cost of money in different markets, between Antwerp and Lyons, say, and take a profit. Theologians had once said that that kind of expertise could justify a profit when trading goods, a merchant doing real work, but Ducci dispensed with the goods altogether and took a profit just on the paper differences. He speculated.31