The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  The grief, and the trauma, must have been profound, but it is clear that not everyone was thrown into mourning, since in the following decades there was a multiplication of sumptuary laws preventing the ignoble from wearing – for instance – scarlet trimmed with ermine.15 Black was not forbidden, and those who had not only survived but prospered could beat the sumptuary legislation by wearing, for example, the finest black velvet. In this way the sumptuary laws assisted the fashion for black, and those merchants who already wore black could, as their wealth grew, wear ever more expensive blacks, as we see from their portraits in the side-leaves of altarpieces given to churches. Their faces are serious, and doubtless they gave sincere thanks both for life and for success. It may also be that the Black Death had a long- if not a short-term effect, for though fashions were bright in its immediate aftermath, they darkened slowly through the early decades of the fifteenth century, while a grotesque celebration of death was elaborated in pictures and carvings of dancing skeletons, who accosted rich and poor, and kings, popes and farmhands, leading them all to the grave. In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death, of the following century, Death assails man in a thousand forms, including regiments of skeletons – as well as plague, warfare and every sort of accident (illus. 31). But especially Death emanates from the curious black tower or vessel in the centre of the picture, with windows like goggling eyes. Fire and black birds rise from it, a giant black insect hovers, while frolicsome black Deaths lean from its sides, and even wave to us as if they enjoyed the excursion.

  As to the fifteenth century, as the decades passed, it became ever less smart to wear clothes like Joseph’s coat. It is not surprising if darker fashions weighed on aristocracies in a world prone to apocalyptic epidemics, where priests in black had power over the soul as physicians in black had power over death, while lawyers in black had power over goods, which one had bought from merchants in black with money one had borrowed from bankers in black, who offered at interest the loans which caused families, and royal families, to be increasingly engulfed in debt. At a fifteenth-century wedding in Florence the bride might wear black velvet worked with gold thread. Other ladies might wear rich dark damasks, while men wore black and gold tunics with hose that were part red, part black.16 Dark tones and black were increasingly the signature of wealth managed with probity and foresight, and of discreet possession of the goods of this world. In the courts of kings, also, colours were deepening. It was in this context that the court of Burgundy made its move into black, and Charles of Luxemburg and Burgundy brought court black to Spain.

  31 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, c. 1562, oil on panel, detail.

  Europe was then ready when, through the later decades of the sixteenth century, the midnight black of Spain – gleaming with golden trophies ferried from the New World – spread its influence through allied states in Italy. Black became the smart wear of serious, handsome young men as they coolly posed for portraits, their fingers poised on books of verses (illus. 32). The black doublet in Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man is sumptuous in its material and elaborate cut, though the detail is hard to make out in the assured, daunting, even blackness.

  From Spain black spread also to those states with which Spain was most often at war, England and the Netherlands. In those wars Christendom was divided ferociously against itself. Interests alligned with one persuasion or another, the choice being between Catholics in black on one side, and on the other Lutherans in black and Calvinists in black.

  32 Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano), Portrait of a Young Man with a Book, late 1530s, oil on wood.

  IF I HAVE been brief on the expansion of black in Europe, it is because I was lengthy on the subject in an earlier book, Men in Black. I have tried to avoid repeating details. We can see how the currency of black had grown and diversified by the early seventeenth century if we follow the painter Peter Paul Rubens on the journey he began in 1628, when he believed he could make peace between the hostile powers of Spain and England.17

  Rubens was one of the great masters of colour in Western painting, second (if second) only to Titian and equalled (if equalled) only by Delacroix and Monet. But often he wore smart black in the Spanish style, both as a gentleman (he began early to give himself a sword in self-portraits), and because painters, like musicians, were likely to wear black, as the colour of dedicated expertise in an art. But at the time of his mission he wore a plainer style of black, since he was in mourning for his wife Isabella. The diplomacy was in part a distraction, though he also evidently believed, perhaps vainly, that he could affect political events. It is not surprising if a painter who loved the body as he did should hate war (this was the period of the Thirty Years War, from 1618 to 1648) and seek to broker peace. He lived in the Spanish Netherlands – Flanders – where the gentry wore Spanish black, as did the priesthood, especially the ubiquitous Dominican Black Friars. A plainer black was worn in the neighbouring country Holland, where the rapidly prospering merchants were Calvinists.

  At this time, Rubens was 51 years old. He was briefed for his mission by the Spanish viceroy in Antwerp, the Infanta Isabella, an aunt of Philip IV of Spain. She too would have looked sombre as they conversed, since following her husband’s death she had joined the Order of the Poor Clares, and wore the black head-dress and habit of a nun. Rubens needed to be accredited by the Spanish court, and travelled to Madrid, where the nobles wore grand black and the citizens plain black, as also again did the many priests, monks and nuns. Likewise the penitents who would pass in black processions, with eye-holes in their drooping hoods; they carried black flails to scourge themselves.

  The black style of the Spanish and Italian aristocracies would have been familiar to Rubens from his earlier travels, when he had painted (among others) the young Genoese noble Giovanni Carlo Doria in a high-crowned black hat and shining black armour, leaping towards us on a prancing horse (illus. 33). The Spanish court itself was more uniformly black than on his previous visit, since the complaisant and pleasure-loving Philip III had been succeeded by Philip IV, who made black the official dress colour at court. We can see his lantern-jawed, guarded, Habsburg face in portraits by Velázquez. Velázquez also wore black, as we know from self-portraits; he and Rubens climbed the hill above the Escorial together.

  Rubens’s principal discussions were with Philip’s first minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares. He too wore black, as we know from the portrait that Rubens made of him, wearing a fur-trimmed black gown over a plain black doublet. In different portraits by Velázquez we may see now the sobriety, now the splendour of his blacks (illus. 34). Black was suitable to him because, as Rubens remarked drily in a letter, Olivares lived like a monk ‘and had in his room a coffin in which he would lie while De Profundis was being sung for him’. Olivares let Rubens wait weeks and months for full instructions, for while it was the custom to use famous painters as unofficial ambassadors – they had access to monarchs – they could not be thought noble since they worked with their hands.

  Rubens travelled through France to take ship for England. The tone and style set by French tradition, and by the Bourbon monarchy, was lighter and more colourful than that of Spain, especially since France just then was seizing the leadership of young fashion from Italy. Her young gallants wore bright-coloured capes, and belts of coloured ribbons tied in bows. In France black was worn by merchants and often by artisans, by the learned as well as the clergy, and by the Protestant Huguenots. The first minister of France marked Rubens’s passage. Though, unlike Olivares, he was a churchman, he did not wear black but red, since he was Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu.

  At Dunkirk the artist boarded the English man-of-war Adventure. In London Rubens stayed with Balthazar Gerbier, sometime agent to the duke of Buckingham, in a large house near Charing Cross, close to the old Water Gate which still stands near the Thames. At one point Rubens fell into the Thames when a galley taking him to see Charles I at Greenwich was overturned. Charles Stu
art may well have worn black satin when Rubens did see him, since he favoured the colour (in 1634 he had in his wardrobe ten suits of black satin to seventeen in other colours – cinnamon, fawn and green). The negotiation of a peace made some progress, though Charles troubled Rubens by his overriding concern to get help from the king of Spain in recovering British possessions in the Palatinate. The conversation would have been in Italian, the lingua franca of the time, since Rubens did not speak English, but had excellent Italian from earlier travels.

  33 Peter Paul Rubens, Giovanni Carlo Doria on Horseback, 1606–7, oil on canvas.

  Matters were referred to the king’s council, and consideration took many months. It was fortunate for Rubens that the English Parliament was at the time suspended by Charles, for it was dominated by Calvinist Puritans who would oppose a peace with Catholic Spain. Had the parliamentarians met, they would have worn black, not merely out of Calvinism, but because by that date parliaments, senates and seigneuries, like gatherings of elders and aldermen, generally wore black throughout Europe. Probably Rubens did not know that Richelieu had dispatched an agent, Furston, to contact leading Calvinists, assuring them that, though a Catholic, he had the highest regard for them, and trusting they would exert themselves to prevent a peace between England and Spain.

  34 Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, c. 1625, oil on canvas.

  In the streets of London Rubens would have seen many styles, some in crimson, green, white and gold after French or Italian fashion. There were the black coats and black, steeple-crowned hats of the sectaries. Young aristocrats were brilliant in black velvet and satin, with radiant ruffs or intricate lace, just as Rubens’s pupil, Anthony van Dyck, had painted them when he had been in London. A pining lover conned a sonnet, dressed in funereal black. On very many heads of both men and women he would have seen black felt hats made from beaver fur, and he himself wore one – or several – which we see in his self-portraits (they hid a receding hairline). Some ladies wore a ‘gibeline’, a kind of pom-pom on a stem, jutting upright like a mushroom on their foreheads: this often was black.

  Behind the people, many house-fronts had black-stained beams. Inside the Gerbier house itself, the walls may have been hung with leather panels embossed in gold: these were normally black or red (in Antwerp, in Rubens’s house, they were red). There may have been cabinets and a harpsichord made from ebony, with ivory inlay. The frames of mirrors, and of pictures on the walls, would have been of ebony (or, in a poorer house, of blackened whalebone). If Rubens sat with the Gerbiers, while they played on woodwind instruments to beguile a rainy evening, the instruments would have been turned (literally) in black cocuswood from the Caribbean.

  While in London Rubens met a compatriot from the Netherlands, the inventor and alchemist Cornelis Drebbel, who may have shown to Rubens the underwater boat he was in the process of inventing. It consisted of a longboat with a superstructure housed in canvas, with canvas sleeves surrounding the oars, the whole being coated thickly with the age-old black protector, pitch.

  Cardinal Richelieu dispatched a diplomat, the Marquis de Châteauneuf, to urge the English against the folly of an Anglo-Spanish peace. In spite of this, eventually, Rubens’s efforts found success. A formal exchange of envoys was agreed, and Sir Francis Cottington and Don Carlos Coloma travelled in opposite directions across Europe, timing their journeys so they would arrive in the foreign capitals on the same day. Don Carlos was received in the new-built Banqueting House designed by Inigo Jones in Whitehall, all white fluted columns and pilasters. It is likely that many of those present wore black, given the importance of the event; there was some confusion when the cartwheel ruffs of the ladies, which were extremely wide, began to crush each other in the not-wide doorway of the Banqueting House.

  It was from this hall, whose ceiling was later decorated by Rubens with paintings representing the peaceful reign of James I, that Charles I took his final walk in 1649: through a space where a window had been removed, stepping onto a platform which was raised high so his execution could be seen. As we know from the contemporary portrait by Edward Bower, Charles had worn black, and a tall black hat, throughout his trial (illus. 35). At his execution, too, he wore black.

  That, however, was after Rubens had gone. Before he left, Rubens presented Charles with his great painting Minerva Protects Pax from Mars, or Peace and War, which hangs now in London’s National Gallery. In it, Pax, or Peace, squeezes a bare breast so as to direct milk into the mouth of a cherub, while behind her the goddess Minerva, in a black-lacquered helmet and black breastplate, presses the war-god Mars to depart. His armour and shield are also stained black, as was the fashion, while the Fury Alecto who leads him on is dark-skinned with black hair (which Rubens, a fair man, seldom painted). Though he loved light and colour, black returns to his canvas when he contemplates war. In a later, more pessimistic painting, not only is the armour of Mars stained black, but also Europa, or Europe, who tries vainly to restrain him, is herself dressed in mourning black.

  His mission done, Rubens returned with honours to his home in Antwerp, and to his two surviving sons, Albert and Nicholas. He resumed his regular life, where he painted every weekday, and on Sunday, the day of rest, drew designs to be engraved on wood or copper – the black-and-white department of his art. At the end of 1630, aged 53, he remarried. His bride was the pretty, plump, fair-haired Hélène Fourment, then sixteen. He painted her many times, sometimes naked as Venus, and at other times in the smartest of rich, noble dresses, which often are black. In Hélène Fourment with a Carriage the billowing black dress, worn with a black hat and trailing black veils, is almost all one can see (illus. 36).

  35 Edward Bower, Charles I at His Trial, 1648, oil on canvas.

  Most intimately and most famously, Rubens painted Hélène naked except for a large black fur in Hélène Fourment as Aphrodite – as it is called – of 1638 (illus. 37). The thick, black fur must have had a luxurious softness, for Hélène sensitively fingers it, inviting us to feel it too. The soft black beauty of it complements her beauty, though her bright but reserved eyes suggest that, however lovely, she also is a thoughtful person. But though sumptuous, the fur is very black, and one may wonder whether its darkness includes an acknowledgement of mortality – hers, ours, but also that of Rubens himself, for he was ill with arthritis and gout and had only two years of life remaining. There is some enigma in her bright look, while the first finger of her right hand points into the darkness behind her. Not that the intimation of death – if any is present – seems either macabre or depressed: the darkness is there, it peacefully bides, coexisting with the tender warmth of love here and now.

  36 Peter Paul Rubens, Hélène Fourment with a Carriage, c. 1639, oil on panel.

  For blackness was no longer confined to picture frames. It had, in Rubens’s lifetime, entered painting itself: in the work of a painter six years his senior, who was active in Rome when Rubens, as a young man, had gone there to study – Michelangelo Merisi, from the town whose name was to become his own, Caravaggio.

  37 Peter Paul Rubens, Hélène Fourment as Aphrodite, or Het Pelsken (The Fur), 1638, oil on panel.

  38 Caravaggio, David Victorious over Goliath, late 1590s, oil on canvas.

  FIVE

  Two Artists in Black

  PERHAPS FASHIONS IN art should not follow dress colours. But if dress fashions do relate, however indirectly, to a dominant colour that we find within ourselves – and if artists may be the sensitive centre of a culture – then it should be no surprise that the colour black rose to power in art in the years that saw the high point of the black style in dress. One artist in particular was the conduit of this change, and his innovation was quickly imitated.1

  Michelangelo Merisi was born near Caravaggio, near Milan, in 1571. When he was six northern Italy was ravaged by the plague. His father and two grandparents died in one night, and some of his late, dark paintings of the deaths of saints may recall that epidemic. Though
he seems to have made a slow start in his apprenticeship, by his early twenties he was famous in Rome, not only for his low-life studies of cheating gypsies, but for the dramatic way in which he painted figures, close-up and firm-fleshed but with the face and part of the body spotlit, while other limbs disappeared in solid darkness. The effect was intensely theatrical – perhaps to our eye cinematic – and also highly artificial, since we almost never see people in such an absolute contrast of light with dark. The reflectiveness of human skin means that it is hard for one part of a face to be bright as day while the other part is dark as night. A contemporary said that Caravaggio painted his studio black to make such visual drama possible. He would have needed also to arrange a single, brilliant light-source, perhaps the midday sun admitted through a tiny aperture. The extreme contrast of tone lent itself to the expression of crisis, of terror or wonder, and so to the representation of miracles, or the death by torture of saints.

  Though other artists had painted night-scenes – lit sometimes by a luminous Christ-child – Caravaggio had invented, or perfected, a new kind of image, which ever since has been identified with the Italian term chiaroscuro (literally ‘light-dark’). His style of deep contrast may be seen in innumerable later paintings, engravings, photographs and films. He did not jump in a single picture from even tones to this new intensity, but in some early paintings, like the teasing Sick Bacchus of 1593–4, some shadows are as near-black as the background. Four or five years later, in David Victorious over Goliath of the late 1590s, most of Goliath’s gigantic form is lost in blackness (illus. 38). Only one giant hand, a massive shoulder and the cut-off head with Caravaggio’s face are strongly lit. Goliath – and Caravaggio by implication – are half made of darkness.