by A. S. Byatt
And he listened to all the birds. Birds on roofs, birds in trees, birds in and on water. In the late summer of 1871 he wrote:
The birds were very delightful about us; I have been of late so steeped in London that it was quite a fresh pleasure to see the rooks about, who have been very busy this showery weather. There was no lack of herons in these upper waters, and in the twilight the stint or summer snipe was crying about us and flitting from under the bank and across the stream: such a clean-made, neat-feathered, light grey little chap he is, with a wild musical little note like all the moor-haunting birds.
We are told that he mentions herons ‘stalking about the fields in the gravest manner’; a kingfisher taking a fish, and a ‘sailing’ owl.*1
Kelmscott Manor makes a strange and mysterious appearance at the end of Morris’s pastoral vision of the future, News from Nowhere (Or an Epoch of Rest) published in 1890. In this tale the central character, William Guest, having gone to bed in winter after a meeting of the Socialist League wakes up in summer and finds himself in the future, in a socialist society without private property, money, cities, class system. It is an agrarian society where people work because work is pleasurable, and make things that are naturally beautiful for their homes. Children do not go to school but find things out naturally through play and exploration. At the centre of the story is a boat journey up the Thames from the (clean) London shore into the countryside Morris loved. The story is full of conversation and objects, but at the end, with Ellen, whom he loves and loses, he visits what she describes as ‘this many-gabled old house built by the simple country-folk of the long-past times, regardless of all the turmoil that was going on in cities and courts, [which] is lovely still amidst all the beauty which these latter days have created; and I do not wonder at our friends tending it carefully and making much of it.’
Kelmscott in News from Nowhere is a presence both ghostly and empty and enduring.
We went in and found no soul in any room as we wandered from room to room, – from the rose-covered porch to the strange and quaint garrets among the great timbers of the roof, where of old time the tillers and herdsmen of the manor slept, but which a-nights seemed now, by the small size of the beds, and the litter of useless and disregarded matters – bunches of dying flowers, feathers of birds, shells of starlings’ eggs, caddis worms in mugs, and the like – seemed for the time to be inhabited by children.
Everywhere there was but little furniture, and that only the most necessary and of the simplest forms. The extravagant love of ornament which I had noted in these people elsewhere seemed here to have given place to the feeling that the house itself and its associations was the ornament of the country life amidst which it had been left stranded from the old times, and that to re-ornament it would but take away its use as a piece of natural beauty. We sat down at last in a room over the wall which Ellen had caressed, and which was still hung with old tapestry, originally of no artistic value, but now faded into pleasant grey tones which harmonized thoroughly well with the quiet of the place, and which would ill have been supplanted by brighter and more striking decoration.
Morris’s daughter May became a highly accomplished artist and embroidress. Morris died in 1896, and in 1923, at the age of sixty-two, May gave up her London home and came to live permanently in Kelmscott. She was torn between her desire for the house to continue to feel ‘lived-in’ and for it to remain unchanged from the house Morris had known and loved. It is now in the process of being restored, as a museum, to something more like Morris’s home than it became after various alterations and occupations. William Morris’s great bed can be seen there in all its glory, with the pelmet and bedspread beautifully embroidered by May. Round the pelmet runs his ‘Inscription for an Old Bed’.
The wind’s on the wold
And the night is a-cold,
And Thames runs chill
’Twixt mead and hill;
But kind and dear
Is the old house here,
And my heart is warm
Midst winter’s harm.
Rest, then, and rest,
And think of the best
‘Twixt summer and spring,
When all birds sing
In the town of the tree,
And ye lie in me
And scarce dare move,
Lest the earth and its love
Should fade away
Ere the full of the day.
I am old and have seen
Many things that have been –
Both grief and peace
And wane and increase.
No tale I tell
Of ill or well,
But this I say,
Night treadeth on day.
And for worst or best
Right good is rest.
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PALAZZO PESARO ORFEI
We went to the Museo Fortuny, in the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, on a sunny spring day. Fortuny bought the house at the end of the nineteenth century – he was already working there in 1899 – and moved into it with Henriette in 1902. It was built from the mid-fifteenth century, and stands, not on the waterfront of a canal, but between the Campo and the Rio di Ca’ Michiel. Ruskin admired it for its ‘masculine’ elegance, and it has two intricate facades on the Campo and the Rio, with rows of large mullioned windows – with round ‘bottle-bottom’ panes, and interior courtyards and loggias, where a wisteria grows strongly. It took its full name Palazzo Pesaro degli Orfei from an eighteenth-century musical society known as the Accademia d’Orfeo which had been a tenant. It was later occupied by another philharmonic company, the Società Apollinea who later moved to the newly opened Teatro La Fenice. When Fortuny first saw it, it had fallen away from its rich days when it had housed important collections of paintings, and had been divided into rented apartments for workers. When Fortuny moved into his first two rooms there were 350 craftsmen and others working there. Fortuny acquired more and more space, bit by bit, and was finally able to restore the original Venetian spaces inside the building. These consisted of two large porteghi – on the ground floor and on the first floor – and above them huge attic spaces. A portego is a long salon with small rooms at each end where work is done. The first-floor portego was where the Fortunys lived and worked. The second floor was the workshop where over a hundred workers made the silk and velvet fabrics, and stitched the wonderful clothes. When we went in for the first time I was dazzled by the darkness – the walls are dark, the rooms are dark, and inside them Fortuny’s paintings and fabrics glimmer and glitter on the walls. When I went to Topkapi in Istanbul I remember my guides explaining that this was the richness of an originally nomadic culture – cherishing carpets and hangings and things which could be moved, redeployed, folded. Fortuny’s spaces seem to have something of this quality, Arabic or oriental. I was pleased to read that one winter, to protect himself and his work from the cold, he did in fact put up a giant marquee in the portego.
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Fortuny’s interest in textiles was first aroused by his mother’s rich collection of ancient fabrics in a trunk, which she would open to show her guests amazing dyes, designs and weaving. Henri de Régnier described her collection in his book L’Altana, ou la vie Vénitienne.
She made her first purchase in Spain: a blood-red piece of old velvet, embellished with pomegranates…Mother and daughter open a massive chest in the corner of the room. Here, lightly folded, lie hundreds of fabrics, which they slowly and carefully draw out to show me. The first appears: a fine piece of dark blue velvet made in the fifteenth century, goffered with stylish arabesques. The shade is strange, deep and pure, like the colour of night. Slowly, slowly, the magic is wrought: one by one, the fabrics are brought forth, unfolded, viewed, and cast over the back of an armchair or a sofa later to be replaced in the great cassone where they reside.
Looking at the portego in the Palazzo Fortuny, one can see the continuing influence of this changing richness – it is both a showroom, and a living space, with w
orks of art and craft, sometimes with mannequins with Fortuny garments draped around them, sometimes with screens or settles over which wonderful fabrics are apparently casually thrown. I am particularly intrigued by a painting by Fortuny himself of the first-floor salon. It is almost like a theatre set with two ceiling-high dark curtains dividing the room, open to show the riches beyond. Figures in armour glimmer dimly – one oriental, one European? – inside the curtains. In the inner part a pale statue stands over draped cloths, with another dark armed figure just visible in front of her. Some kind of drapery or flag is suspended from the ceiling – red and cream with a red-and-blue edge. The ceiling is high and dark with red-lit beams. A flag hangs from this and disappears behind the curtain. There are paintings on the walls but we see only the glimmer of gold frames. There is one frame leaning casually against a wall. There is a pale pillar. And a piece of furniture with a startling turquoise pattern, also in shadow. Everything is rich and provisional. There is a kind of almost-clothes-horse with layers of garments thrown over a red-gold drape. In the fore-ground is a clutter of tools of the trade – a litter of paper, in a roll, and folders, sketches, a ruler. On the left edge – so that it is the thing I at least noticed last – is a painting, almost white and black, small and discreet, of the painter painting, less real than the richness of the orderly clutter. He is making and altering a world.
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To think about Fortuny is to think about light. Light reflected from silk and velvet – and flesh – light on water and stone, airy light, dense light, almost infinitely varied coloured light. In the book on Fortuny by Anne-Marie Deschodt and Doretta Davanzo Poli, there are two plates showing women wearing Fortuny silk-velvet capes, seen from behind and looking out over the water. The first is seen at dusk, with the Palladian church of San Giorgio Maggiore across the water. Deschodt writes: ‘The short silk-velvet cape catches the breeze of the sirocco. It is printed in silver and gold with Coptic designs at the shoulders, Persian tree-of-life palmettes, and cuffs and border motifs inspired by Hellenistic Greek ornamentation’. The coat is an inky brown-black colour, the formal yet lifelike trees shine soft silver, the water and the sky are an inky dark blue, one expanse with a hint of rosy light in the indigo. Both garment and sky, both water and shadowy building, are unworldly and strange. In the other photograph the woman is standing in the mouth of an alleyway wearing, Deschodt says, ‘a long velvet cape printed with a gold leaf pattern inspired by Chinese and Japanese textiles. Its warm tones harmonize perfectly with the pink-and-beige brickwork of a Venetian alleyway. In the distance across the water lies the island of the Giudecca, with the Palladian church of the Redentore’. Here the spread of fabric covered with shining and shadowy gold and silver leaves glints in the darkness. The water, seen again in front of the woman’s head, is a pale blue, with silver waves; the paving stones in the sun are a pale pink ochre, the church is a graceful shadow in muted white stone and pink tiles. The sun is soft on the pale sky and water. Again it is both real and unreal, in this world and unworldly.
In À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s narrator describes the Fortuny dress, ‘bleu et or doublée de rose’, which Albertine prefers to all the other dresses she is given. Gérard Macé has written a wonderful book, Le manteau de Fortuny, in which he describes the significance for Proust of the work of Fortuny. He quotes Proust’s description of the dress and says ‘la robe de Fortuny n’est que l’ombre de Venise, et comme le manteau un peu plus tard, une métaphore filée autant qu’une étoffe’. (Fortuny’s gown is no more than the shadow of Venice, and, like the cloak a little later, a woven metaphor as much as a fabric.) He quotes Proust’s description at length.
Elle était envahie d’ornementation arabe comme Venise, comme les palais de Venise dissimulés à la façon des sultanes derrière un voile ajouré de pierres, comme les reliures de la Bibliothèque Ambrosienne, comme les colonnes desquelles les oiseaux orientaux qui signifient alternativement la mort et la vie, se répétaient dans le miroitement de l’étoffe, d’un bleu profound qui au fur et à mesure que mon regard s’y avançait se changeait en or malléable par ces mêmes transmutations qui, devant la gondole qui s’avance, changent en métal flamboyant l’azur du grand canal. Et les manches étaient doublées d’un rose cerise, qui est si particulièrement vénitien qu’on l’appelle rose Tiepolo.
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It swarmed with Arabic ornaments, like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like the sultan’s wives behind a screen of pierced stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that symbolised alternately life and death were repeated in the mirror of the fabric, of an intense blue which, as my gaze extended over it, was changed into a malleable gold, by those same transmutations which, before the advancing gondola, change into flaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal. And the sleeves were lined with a cherry pink, which is so peculiarly Venetian that it is called Tiepolo pink.
When Albertine flees the narrator she takes away only one of his presents – a Fortuny cloak in sombre dark blue. In Les Oeuvres d’art imaginaires chez Proust, Michel Butor distinguishes between ‘le roman robe’ and ‘le roman cathédrale’ – two different metaphors for the work itself. Seeing Fortuny garments beside Venetian churches gives a new depth and force to these alternative metaphors.
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Fortuny worked with light itself. All his life he took photographs of all sorts of things and people – he was an early user of the wide-angle lens to show the Grand Canal, and the Piazzetta San Marco, but he studied the shadows in the alleys of Venice. He photographed women, naked and clothed – his images are about light and substance rather than provocation, I think. He seems to have been a man who liked women, who was interested in them. He photographed Henriette in many lights and from many angles, but always with understanding, affection, endless interest. He photographed the interiors of the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei, the shelves in his library, with the rows of volumes he had covered himself. He photographed the lights he had designed. He took out a patent for a new kind of photographic paper, and was among the earliest to use the Lumière brothers’ new coloured films.
Fortuny invented large numbers of lights, including the famous ‘Saracen shield’, a circular silk ceiling lamp, and various dangling silk lamps in the form of reticules or long purses. He made spiral cesendelli in glass and in silk. He made ‘firefly’ table lamps. But he also used electricity to make many different very modern reading and table lamps, and the image of these introduces the aspect of the interior of the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei I have not yet mentioned – it is full of invented machines, including electric lamps of different heights and with different stands to hold brushes or other implements. There are many different easels often with wheels and with the seat and the easel as parts of the same travelling equipment. The library contains two large presses, one old, one already electric. There are arrangements of small tools – drill bits for instance. Fortuny designed his own reading desk and curved shelving. There are cupboards full of pigments. The crafts and their tools are an essential part of the brilliant spaces – I was reminded of William Morris, having learned to weave, buying a loom and setting it up in his bedroom. During his lifetime, according to Anne-Marie Deschodt, Fortuny took out more than fifty patents in Paris.
Among the most notable are a system for indirect theatrical lighting; an arc lamp that can function in any position; a dimmer switch or rheostat for variable lighting; a curved, collapsible theatrical backdrop or cyclorama called the Fortuny dome; a method of pleating fabric in ‘wavy pleats’; a method of polychrome printing on textiles; a transparent curtain for vitrines or bookcases; a system of propulsion for ships that allows them to swim in the water like eels; and a hat stand of superior ability (the ordinary sort being liable to fall over), with a broad conical base set in a heavy socle, and a spring lodged in the centre to connect the stand with the base.
One of his most important inventions was indeed the new form of s
tage lighting which enabled him to contribute in an extraordinary way to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (total work combining all art forms). In 1901 he patented the technique of indirect – reflected – lighting for the stage. In 1904 he describes looking at a sheet of white paper in a dark studio:
If one lets a ray of sunlight into a darkened room, one will see a shaft of light piercing the air, but the room will not be lit up. If one then introduces a white leaf of paper in front of this shaft, the light will break up and illuminate the whole room; and yet the actual quantity of light entering still remains the same in both cases. This experiment proves that it is not the quantity but the quality of light that makes things visible and allows the pupil of the eye to open properly.
He invented, and refined, a system of reflected electric light for the stage – a dome, white at first and then with mixed and reflected colours. Wagner’s operas, in the days of gas lighting, had had endless painted backdrops. Fortuny was now able both to compose the setting onstage, conducting light as one conducts music, and to do away with the empty spaces between elements of the painted sets. He began with a white cement dome, but moved on to a collapsible light one. He was the inventor of the gallery behind the audience where the lighting artist sits.
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To sum up, my system is composed of three parts: a system of lighting by means of reflection; a system of stage decoration by means of reflection, allowing for the use of a concave surface to make skies and distant views; last, and most important, a complete reform of the visual element in the theatre, because it can be said for the first time that theatrical scenery will be able to transform itself in tune with music, with the latter’s domain, that is to say in ‘time’ whereas hitherto it has only been able to develop in ‘space’. This last ability is of supreme importance for the staging of the works of Richard Wagner.*2