by Will Durant
These landscapes are majestic, but monotonous. We should hardly distinguish one from another if Poussin had not thrown in some identifying figures or a careless title. He loved line wisely but too well; he neglected the gamut of color, playing too much on brown; no wonder later artists have rebelled against this “brown sauce” dripping from his trees. And yet those softly lighted, softly colored vistas, so unsatisfying to a Ruskin fascinated by Turner’s glare,147 are a relief after the ideological fermentation of painting in our time. Here is the classic conception of beauty as the harmony of parts in a whole, not the youthful idea of art as “expression”—which might be a child’s daub or a hawker’s cry. Amid mannerism and baroque, and against the force and sentiment of Italian painting in the seventeenth century, Poussin clung to the classic ideal of nothing in excess: no shouting colors, no tears, no bizarreries, no theatrical contrasts of light and shade. It is a masculine art, resembling Corneille rather than Racine, and Bach more than Beethoven.
The self-portrait that he made in 1650 shows his eyes a bit weary, perhaps with painting or reading by scant light. He read much, seeking to know the life of ancient Greece and Rome in sedulous detail; not since Leonardo had an artist been so learned. As he entered old age he found his eyes weakening, his hand unsteady. The death of his wife at fifty-one (1664) cut a living bond; he survived her but a year. “Apelles is dead,” wrote a friend. On or near the tomb in the parish church of San Lorenzo, Châteaubriand (1829) raised a marble monument as one mortal immortal to another:
F. A. de Chateaubriand
à
Nicolas Poussin
Pour la gloire des arts et l’honneur de la France
His closest rival as a landscape painter was his neighbor but friend, Claude Gellée, named Lorrain from the province of his birth. He too felt the urge to Italy, accepting any position, however menial, to get there and live there, where every turn of the seeking eye revealed some monument of Christian art or some inspiring fragment of antiquity. In Rome he apprenticed himself to Agostino Tassi, mixed colors for him, cooked for him, learned from him. He made a thousand tentative drawings, and etchings now prized by connoisseurs. He worked slowly and scrupulously, sometimes a fortnight over one detail. At last he too was a painter, fed with commissions from appreciative cardinals and kings. Soon he had his own home on the Pincian Hill, and he shared with Poussin in meeting the new demand for natural scenes.
He responded willingly, for he loved the land and sky of Rome so passionately that often he rose before dawn to watch the daily creation of light, to catch the stealthy changes of light and shade made by each emerging inch of the sun. Light was to Claude no mere element in a picture; it was his major subject; and though he did not care, like Turner, to look into the very face of the sun, he was the first to study and convey the spreading integument of light. He grasped the intangible play of air upon fields, foliage, water, clouds; every moment of the sky was new, and he seemed bent on having each fluid moment still itself in his art. He loved the tremor of sails meeting the wind, the majesty of ships riding the sea. He felt the lure of distance, the logic and magic of perspective, the longing to see, beyond the visible, the infinity of space.
Landscapes were his only interest. On Poussin’s advice he inserted classical structures—temples, ruins, pedestals—into his pictures, perhaps to give the dignity of old age to a passing scene. He consented to add some human figures to Nature’s panorama, but his heart was not in these excrescences. The figures “were thrown in for nothing”; he “sold his landscapes and gave away his figures.”148 The titles and the stories they suggested were concessions to minds that could not feel the miracle of light and the mystery of space without the grace of Christian legend or some tag of classical tales. But in reality there was for Claude only one theme—the world of morning, noon, and eventide. He dowered the galleries of Europe with fond variations, whose names mean nothing, but whose pantheism is a mystic marriage of poetry and philosophy.
We may admit to Ruskin149 that Claude and Poussin show Nature deceptively in her gentler moods, missing her grandeur and ignoring her furies of pitiless destructiveness. But through their work a great tradition of landscape painting had been established. Now more and more this would compete with figures and portraits, with Biblical and mythical scenes. The way was opened for Nature’s procession from the Ruisdaels to Corot.
Richelieu and national unity, Corneille and the Academy, Montaigne and Malherbe, de Brosse and Mansart, Poussin and Lorrain—this was no scanty harvest from a land at war. Louis XIV would now stand on that rising heritage and preside over France in her greatest age.
* * *
I.The first edition, 1580, contained Books I and II; the second, 1588, expanded these and added Book III; the third, containing his final revision and edited by Mlle. de Gournay, appeared in 1595, after his death. The nine editions between 1580 and 1598 attest their popularity.
II. “But she was of the world, where the loveliest things have the saddest destiny. Herself a rose, she lived as lives the rose, a morning’s hour … Death has compulsions nowhere paralleled; we pray to it in vain; cruelly it closes its ears and lets us cry. The poor man in his cabin, under a thatched roof, is subject to its laws; and the watch that guards the Louvre’s gates cannot keep him from our kings.”
III. Dreaming philosophers, prattle loftily; without budging from the earth-leap to the stars; make the whole firmament dance to your tune, and weigh your discourses in the scale of the sky…. Carry a lantern into the recesses of nature; know who gives the flowers their lovable hues; … decipher the secrets of heaven and earth: your reason deceives you as well as your eves.”
IV. “I have lived without a thought, letting myself go sweetly by nature’s good law; and I know not why death should think of me, who never deigned to think of her.”
V. El Cid (i.e., Sayyid, noble) was the title given by the Moors to Rodrigo Díaz, the half-legendary hero who shared (c. 1085) in restoring Spain to Christ.
VI. “I am a Roman, alas, since Horace is a Roman; I took that title in receiving his hand; but this bond would hold me a chained slave if it closed my eyes to the place of my birth. Alba, where I first breathed the day, Alba, my dear land and my first love, when I see war declared between you and ourselves, I dread our victory as much as our defeat. If, Rome, you complain that this is to betray you, give yourself such foes as I may hate. When I see from your walls their army and ours, my three brothers in the one and my husband in the other, how can I form my prayers and, without impiety, importune Heaven for your felicity?”
VII. Note the fine specimens in the Wallace Collection in London and the Frick Collection in New York.
VIII. All Poussin pictures named are in the Louvre unless otherwise indicated.
CHAPTER XVII
The Revolt of the Netherlands
1555–1648
I. MISE-EN-SCENE
ON October 25, 1555, the Emperor Charles V transferred the sovereignty of the Netherlands to his son Philip. On the twenty-sixth, before the States-General at Brussels, Philip received oaths of allegiance, and swore to maintain the rights and privileges of the seventeen provinces according to tradition, treaty, and law. Those mutual pledges set the stage for one of the great dramas in the history of freedom.
The scene was complex. The Netherlands—i.e., the lowlands—then comprised the present Belgium as well as the existing Kingdom of the Netherlands. Dutch—Low German—was the language not only of the seven northern provinces (Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Groningen, Overijssel, and Gelderland) but also of four provinces (Flanders, Brabant, Mechlin, and Limburg) in northern “Belgium”; while Walloon, a dialect of French, was spoken in six southern provinces (Artois, Walloon Flanders, Cambrai, Tournai, Hainaut, and Namur). All these, and the neighboring duchy of Luxembourg, were under Hapsburg rule.
The people, in 1555, were overwhelmingly Catholic,1 but their Catholicism was of the humane humanist kind preached by Erasmus a half-century back and gene
rally practiced in Renaissance Rome—not the somber, uncompromising type developed in Spain by centuries of war against Moslem “infidels.” After 1520 Lutheranism and Anabaptism seeped in from Germany, and then, more numerously, Calvinism from Germany, Switzerland, and France. Charles V tried to stem these inroads by importing the papal or episcopal form of the Inquisition and by proclaiming, through “placards,” the most terrible penalties for any serious deviation from Catholic orthodoxy; but after the weakening of his power by the Peace of Passau (1552) these penalties were rarely enforced. In 1558 a Rotterdam crowd forcibly rescued several Anabaptists from the stake. Alarmed by the growth of heresy, Philip renewed the placards and their penalties. Fear spread that he intended to introduce the Spanish form of the Inquisition in all its severity.
Calvinism was congenial to the mercantile element in the economy. The ports of Antwerp and Amsterdam were the central ganglia of north-European commerce, alive with importation, exportation, speculation, and every form of finance; insurance alone kept six hundred agents in affluence.2 The rivers Rhine, Maas, Ijssel, Waal, Scheldt, and Lys and a hundred canals bore in silence a dozen varieties of transport. The winds of trade fed the fires of craft and factory industry in Brussels, Ghent, Ypres, Tournai, Valenciennes, Namur, Mechlin, Leiden, Utrecht, Haarlem. The businessmen who controlled these towns respected Catholicism as a tradition-rooted pillar of political, social, and moral stability; but they had no relish for its pompous heirarchy, and they liked the role given to the educated laity in the management of Calvinist congregations and policy. More immediately they resented the taxes laid upon the Netherlands economy by the Spanish government.
The peasantry suffered most and benefited least from the revolt. The greater part of the land was owned by magnates resembling the feudal lords of Germany and France, and it was these who organized the struggle for independence. Philippe de Montmorency, Count of Horn, held vast tracts in the southern provinces. Lamoral, Count of Egmont, had spacious estates in Flanders and Luxembourg, and could afford to marry a Bavarian duchess. In several campaigns he fought with such dashing valor that he became a favorite of Charles and Philip; it was he who led Philip’s army to victory at St.-Quentin (1557). In his princely palace he displayed a generous but extravagant hospitality and slipped embarrassingly into debt. Such men, and many lesser nobles, looked hungrily upon the wealth of the Church and heard with envy of German barons who had enriched themselves by seizing ecclesiastical property.3 “They thought that the King would do well to carve a round number of handsome military commanderies out of the abbey lands,” so creating “a splendid cavalry … in place of a horde of lazy epicureans telling beads.”4
The richest and ablest of the great landowners was William of Nassau, Prince of Orange. The family owned large properties in the German province of Hesse-Nassau and in the district around Wiesbaden as well as in the Netherlands, while it derived its title from its little principality of Orange in southern France. Born in German Dillenburg (1533), William was brought up as a Lutheran till he was eleven; then, to be eligible to inherit the lands of his cousin René, he was moved to Brussels and reconditioned as a Catholic. Charles V took a fancy to him, secured for him the hand of Anne of Egmont (heiress of the Count of Buren), and chose him as chief attendant at the historic abdication in 1555. Philip sent him—still a youth of twenty-two, but already a master of Flemish, German, Spanish, French, and Italian—as one of his plenipotentiaries to negotiate the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis; there William handled himself with solid judgment and such watchful tongue that the French called him le taciturne, the Silent Philip made him a state councilor, a Knight of the Golden Fleece, and stadholder of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht. But William developed a mind of his own, and Philip never forgave him.
The young prince had graces of person as well as of purse. He was tall and athletic, carried no useless weight, and charmed all but his enemies by his eloquence and courtesy. As a military leader he was a consistent failure, but as a political strategist his flexible persistence and patient courage transmuted his defects into the establishment of a new state against the opposition of the strongest political and religious forces in Europe. He handled men better than armies, and in the long run this proved the greater gift. His foes charged him with changing his religion to suit his personal or political needs.5 It was probably so; but all the leaders of that century used religion as an instrument of policy.I Many found fault with his marriages. His first wife having died, he negotiated for the hand of another wealthy Anne, daughter of the Protestant Maurice, Elector of Saxony; he married her with Lutheran rites in 1561, but did not declare himself a Protestant till 1573. Anne went semi-insane in 1567 and was deposited with friends. While she was still alive, William secured from five Protestant ministers permission to marry Charlotte de Bourbon, of the royal house of France (1575), who had fled from a nunnery and had embraced the Reformed faith. She died in 1582. After mourning her for a year William took a fourth wife, Louise de Coligny, daughter of the admiral who had perished in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Despite—perhaps because of—these marriages, William was rich only in lands, poor in money. By 1560 he was almost a million florins in debt.7 In a flurry of economy he dismissed twenty-eight of his cooks.8
Philip fumbled ruinously in handling the Netherlands nobles. His father, reared in Brussels, knew these men, spoke their language, managed them judiciously. Philip, brought up in Spain, could speak neither French nor Dutch; he found it difficult to bend to the magnates graciously, to respect their customs and their debts; he frowned upon their extravagance, their drinking, and their easy ways with women; above all, he could not understand their claims to ‘check his power. They on their part disliked his somber pride, his penchant for the Inquisition, his appointment of Spaniards to lucrative posts in the Netherlands, his garrisoning of their towns with Spanish troops. When he asked for funds from the nobles and businessmen who constituted the States-General, they listened coldly to his plea—through interpreters—that his father and the recent wars had left the treasury with great deficits; they were alarmed by his request for 1,300,000 florins and a further tax of one per cent on realty and two percent on movable property; they refused to sanction these levies, but voted him only such sums as they deemed adequate for current needs. Three years later he summoned them again and asked for three million guilders. They yielded, but on condition that all Spanish troops be withdrawn from the Netherlands. He made this concession, but canceled its conciliatory effect by getting papal permission to establish eleven new bishoprics in the Low Countries and nominating to these sees men willing to enforce his father’s decrees against heresy. When he sailed for Spain on August 26, 1559, never to see the Netherlands again, the economic and religious outlines of the great struggle were taking form.
II. MARGARET OF PARMA: 1559–67
Philip had appointed as his regent Margaret, Duchess of Parma, a natural daughter of Charles V by a Flemish mother. She had been brought up in the Netherlands and, despite long residence in Italy, she could understand the Flemings if not the Dutch. She was neither bigoted nor intolerant, but was a devout Catholic who, annually in Holy Week, washed the feet of twelve maidens and gave them marriage dowries. She was an able and kindly woman, uncomfortably lost in a maelstrom of revolution.
Her authority was limited by advisers whom Philip had designated. Egmont and Orange were in her Council of State, but, finding themselves consistently outvoted by the three other members, they ceased to attend. In the resultant triumvirate the dominant personality was Antoine Perrenot, Bishop of Arras, known to history as Cardinal de Granvelle. He was a man of good character according to his lights; like Margaret, he was inclined to peaceful means in dealing with “heresy,” but he was so dedicated to Catholicism and monarchy that he found it hard to understand dissent. He and the Regent were handicapped by Philip’s insistence that no important measure could be taken without the royal consent, which took weeks to transmit from Madrid to Brussels. The Cardinal sacrificed popul
arity by obeying the King. He privately opposed the multiplication of bishoprics, but yielded to Philip’s insistence that four sees were not enough for seventeen provinces. The Protestant minority noted with anger that the new bishops were spreading and intensifying the papal Inquisition. In March 1563 Orange, Egmont, and Horn, themselves Catholics, wrote to Philip charging Granvelle with violating provincial rights that the King was pledged to maintain; they thought the Cardinal responsible for the new bishops, and they urged his removal from office. Margaret herself did not relish his assumption of powers; she longed for some accord with the dissatisfied nobles, who were important to her in preserving social order; finally (September 1563) she too recommended that Granvelle be sent to other pastures. After long resistance, Philip yielded, and invited the lordly minister to enjoy a leave of absence. Granvelle left Brussels (March 13, 1564), but he continued to be one of the King’s most trusted counselors. The nobles returned to Margaret’s Council of State. Some of their appointees sold offices, justice, and pardons, and the Regent seems to have shared in the spoils.9
The Inquisition spread. Philip watched it from Spain, urged it on, and sent Margaret the names of suspected heretics. Hardly a day passed without an execution. In 1561 Geleyn de Muler was burned at Audenaarde; Thomas Calberg was burned alive at Tournai; an Anabaptist was hacked to death with seven blows of a rusty sword in the presence of his wife, who died with horror at the sight.10 Enraged by these barbarities, Bertrand le Blas invaded the cathedral of Tournai during Christmas Mass, rushed to the altar, snatched the Host from the priest, trampled it underfoot, and cried out to the congregation, “Misguided men, do ye take this thing to be Jesus Christ, your Lord and Saviour?” He was put to torture, his right hand and foot were burned away to the bone, his tongue was torn out, he was suspended over a fire and was slowly roasted to death. At Lille Robert Ogier, his wife, and his sons were burned because they called the worship of the consecrated Host a blasphemous idolatry.II