The Ghost of Galileo

by J. L. Heilbron

  Two true scholars, Polumathes, who knows everything, and Philobiblos, who knows books, arrive at the new university and flush out the charlatans. Philobiblos to Polupragmaticus: “Hast thou beheld old Oxford?” “Aye … but I cannot recall having seen any wise men living there.” Polumathes, to a new Master of arts: “What thinketh thou of the new star – is it sublunary, or of the Heavens?” What about Tycho’s system? What do you think of Magini’s proposal of a universe with eleven heavens, “[w]herein, belike, he offendeth against first principles of mathematics: optics on the one hand, philosophy on t’other. What, then, shall we believe? To what conclusions have you come?” Theanus, the fake theologian, answers for the fake Master of arts: “What’s above is naught to us.” The play ends with the exposure, branding, and banishment of the philosophasters, and the closing down of all unnecessary taverns. Sir John Bankes tried to realize half of this academic utopia by imposing a warrant for licensing only three pubs in Oxford, “for the preventing the disorders of youth there.”121 He did not succeed.

  A Cambridge don peering at Oxford through an “optick glasse” spied many absurdities among the claims of the merry sons of Saturn there. Students working day and night, melancholics meandering from rapturous contemplation to hellish purgatory, scholars elevated because Saturn stands high in the heavens—nonsense all. No doubt, however, Oxonians belonged to Saturn. The plodding progress of the furthest planet in every world system perfectly represented the working habits and scientific attainments of Oxford men.122

  7

  The Painter

  Cosmopolitan

  Francis Cleyn was so versatile an artist and so little an egoist that the high reputation he enjoyed in his time did not long survive him. Another Titian in the seventeenth century, but a “dull and derivative” eclectic in the twentieth, at best weakly and vaguely imitative of Rubens.1 The disparagement may result from lack of an adequate account of his wide-ranging work and the destruction of the buildings his paintings, tapestries, and interior designs adorned. Most of his extant output consists of designs for etchings and engravings. Here again his reputation has tumbled. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries he was an inventive storyteller who raised the standard of allegorical depiction by an order of magnitude. “He was very eminent for his Invention, and made several Designs, that were extraordinary fine, for Painters, Gravers, Sculptors, etc.”2 In the twentieth century he dropped to an uninspired mechanic, “totally without grace,” skilled only in clutter and confusion, “show[ing] no evidence of his considerable experience as a painter and designer.”3

  A revaluation is in progress, however, and Cleyn as illustrator is climbing back toward the height he once shared with Hollar.4 “Although not an artist of great distinction, he played an important role in introducing more up-to-date and sophisticated motifs into the vocabulary of Caroline decoration.”5 More recently, an eminent authority has praised Cleyn for his “exuberant creativity,” “magnificent imagination,” and “cornucopia of delights.”6 His allusive style and impressionistic line drawings reminded another modern connoisseur of the mannerist etchings of Parmigianino, another artist whose reputation has fluttered. Arundel thought very highly of Parmigianino. Galileo judged him to be the best representative of the worst trends in Italian art.7

  Franz Klein (our Francis Cleyn) was born in 1582 in the prosperous old Hanse city of Rostock. Of his state and education nothing certain is known; but if, as lexicographers suppose, his father worked as a goldsmith, he would have been raised in reasonable comfort and in surroundings preparatory for his multifarious career. A goldsmith’s son might learn not only the use of tools but also the attitudes of a skilled artisan. Cleyn was to cooperate easily with others without claiming the precedence his accomplishments merited. One of his friends remarked that he was worthy of “admiracon and encouragement, not onely for the excellency of the work, but for the exemplar, vertues, and indefatigable industry of the workman.”8

  The earliest piece by Cleyn now known is a drawing in brown ink and a little color depicting the story of Acteon. As it dates from his time in Rostock, he must have been young when he drew it. Its size and clumsy composition suggest that it came from an album amicorum (the sort of witty academic autograph book that got Wotton into trouble); if it did, Cleyn may have studied at the University of Rostock or known people there, and later evidence also suggests that he had more education than an artisan’s.9 The drawing shows five oddly posed adipose nymphs standing in a shallow bath made of dressed stone incongruously let into a grotto in a hillock. They do not seem to be alarmed at the sight of a man growing the ears and antlers of a stag as he approaches them. However unsatisfactory the drawing, it advertises the inventiveness for which Cleyn would be known. The action continues in the background where Acteon, now completely transformed into a stag by Diana for gazing at her naked nymphs, is ripped to pieces by his dogs.10 When directed to composing narratives, Cleyn’s vigorous imagination would win him his fleeting reputation as “the greatest storyteller in English art.”11

  Cleyn continued his training at the center of painting in northern Europe, the cosmopolitan Netherlands, where he encountered Pieter Isaacsz, who entered the service of Christian IV not long after the king had returned from his first bibulous visit to England. The palaces and furnishings Christian saw there had fired his competitive spirit. He wanted pictures in quantity, Dutch and Flemish pictures, for the walls of Rosenborg, the palace then being built in Copenhagen. The emissary he sent to the Low Countries bought an acre of paintings, good and bad, sometimes with the advice of Isaacsz, who knew the Danish as well as the Dutch scene. He was born in Denmark, the son of an official who collected tolls from ships passing through the Danish Sound, and inherited the post on his father’s death in 1617. To help slake the demands of the royal walls in Copenhagen, Isaacsz would accept as tolls any good Dutch paintings the ships might be carrying.12

  Alternatively, Christian could buy painters. Cleyn, recruited by Isaacsz, was at work in Denmark by 1611. He thereby acquired a rich and powerful patron, settled close to home (Copenhagen lies 100 miles from Rostock by sea), and took the first step on the journey that would end in England. His course ran through Italy. Like Jacobean collectors, Christian was beginning to appreciate modern Italian painting. Thinking it safer to dispatch a solid Protestant to Italy for finishing than to import a finished Italian, inevitably a knave, Christian sent Cleyn to brave the dangers, and learn the arts, of the peninsula. That took some four years between 1612 and 1617. In Sarpi’s Venice, Francesco Clennio met and impressed Wotton; in Paul V’s Rome, he mastered the art of grotesque.13

  Grotesque developed in Italy during the sixteenth century from examples exposed in 1480 during excavation of Nero’s infamously extravagant Domus aurea. Cleyn met it as wall decoration consisting of ill-assorted objects, animals, and zoomorphs cleverly and incongruously attached by ropes, vines, acanthus leaves, and strapwork. He would later put them in his tapestries, decorative panels, and prints, tying together human and mythological figures, birds of all species, satyrs, centaurs, pergolas, fountains, birdcages, tripods, lamps, candelabras, cornucopias, altars, garlands, a sphinx here, a triton there, putti playing, monkeys swinging, acrobats climbing. The form demanded a wild imagination and controlled technique and also, because grotesques usually appeared in surrounds and borders, a feel for symmetry and geometry.14 And also a grasp of the subject matter thus framed. The art theorist Lomazzo defined grotesque as “a secondary language, a gloss on the central discourse,” a sort of anti-masque.15

  A clutch of drawings Cleyn made in Italy and Denmark is preserved in Copenhagen. Some of these seem playful: a shield displaying three inverted violins made for a Dutch family, for example, and a sleeping woman apparently exhausted from the attentions of a satyr. Another drawing makes a story from a collector’s visit to a curio shop: he studies the stock while shopkeepers reckon the cost in time and money. The clutch includes items on religious themes, among them a nice torso of Chris
t and a curious unsigned version of Eve handing the apple to Adam. These items have their modern admirers. The organizers of the Council of Europe’s showcase of the age of Christian IV, mounted in 1988, chose the Satyr, the Collector, and the Shield as representative of the royal treasures.16

  When in Italy Cleyn probably made use of the laissez-passer accorded itinerant artists to acquire objects and information of interest to their patrons. If he did, he had much to relay. There was the new hard line Rome had drawn in 1616 through philosophical speculation by banning and indexing Copernican books. That would have interested Christian, who eventually emulated his father’s support of Tycho by building an observatory, the Rundetaarn, for Tycho’s former assistant Christian Longomontanus. Another hard line would have been of even greater interest to him. Apparently undaunted by the failure of the Venetian interdict, Pope Paul had ambitions to reinvigorate his predecessor’s plan to return northern Europe to the Catholic camp. It was not a promising project. Christian had prohibited Catholics from holding public office or private property in Denmark, and in 1617, when he celebrated the centennial of Luther’s rebellion, he could declare his kingdom doctrinally pure.17 Nonetheless, Rome tried again. The hermetic seal remained tight, however. Christian had no Catholic problem, although he sometimes found it useful to pretend that he did.18

  Cleyn returned to Demark in the year of Luther’s centennial to join Isaacsz and a few Dutch and Danish painters in decorating Rosenborg.19 Since many of the group’s paintings do not bear signatures and many others have been lost, Cleyn’s total contribution to the improvement of the palace cannot be determined. But, since he had learned to paint anything anywhere, on surfaces of any shape, ceilings, walls, corbels, pendentives, or lunettes, whether serious pictures, indifferent ornamentation, or grotesques, his contribution during his seven or eight years in Copenhagen must have been considerable. Four large paintings for the ceiling of the Great Hall at Rosenborg, authoritatively attributed to Cleyn, have survived. All date from 1619 or 1620.20 They now decorate the ballroom at Kronborg in Elsinore, the putative home of Hamlet. Together with paintings by Isaacsz and other members of the Rosenborg group, they fill one long wall of a huge whitewashed room otherwise almost empty of ornament.21 In Cleyn’s time a series of forty elaborate tapestries devoted to the doings of 100 kings of Denmark covered the wall.22

  The Rosenborg paintings presented three series of seven: planets, liberal arts, and ages of man. Some say that in its details the series refers to the rendition of the ages by Longomontanus, who came under the mysterious power of 7 at the University of Rostock, to which he migrated after Christian drove Tycho from Hven.23 The university’s badge and emblem was “7” in recollection of the 7 sets of 7 doors, streets, gates, wharves, turrets, bells, and linden trees the city boasted. Longomontanus eventually obtained a professorship in the University of Copenhagen, where he worked out tables that made the Tychonic system useful and lobbied for building the Rundetaarn. He also squared the circle, justified astrology, fit the world’s history into the time allowed by Scripture, and accomplished many other impossible things. An English mathematician who tried to straighten him out received an answer couched in the reasoned language of mathematical discourse: “stupidus, stolidus, cani similis, temerarius, petulans juvenis.”24 Possibly Longomontanus’s confident account of the seven ages of the world and their astrological connection with the planets and liberal arts influenced the Rosenborg depictions of the ages of man. Cleyn had the task of illustrating the first two stages, infancy and boyhood.

  “[F]irst the infant muling and puking in his nurse’s arms.”25 Cleyn (or perhaps Pieter Isaacsz, to whom it is sometimes credited) preferred to place the baby in its mother’s arms and to show a sedate baptism in a Venetian scene modeled on a painting by Tintoretto. In its Danish rendition, an addition to the right has an open arch through which the viewer sees the baptism of Christ (Figure 33), an addition that contrasts the mysterious power of the sacrament with the first helpless stage of life.26

  Figure 33 Francis Cleyn and/or Pieter Isaacsz, Baptism (c.1620).

  And then the whining schoolboy with his satchel

  And shiny morning face, creeping like snail

  Unwillingly to school.

  One of the two paintings Cleyn devoted to the whining schoolboy illustrates the snail’s pace of reluctant children clinging to their mothers before starting to climb the steep stairs to the temple of learning (Figure 34). One clings also to a pretzel. Boys already on the steps linger for a last look at liberty on their long, arduous, tranquil climb. The temple stands under a clear sky, while clouds form over a fortified castle on a hill in the background.

  Figure 34 Francis Cleyn, On the Way to School (c.1620).

  The second schoolboy painting, which belonged to the series on the seven liberal arts, shows the interior of a temple, or rather, a factory of grammar (Figure 35). Here the space–time sequence is reversed. The frieze in the apse behind the young teacher on the left shows boys at play. In the middle ground, four young scholars, attentive to a book and the teacher’s stick, express a persuasive mixture of puzzlement, effort, and understanding. They also display the knobby knees that seem to be one of Cleyn’s trademarks. In the foreground, older boys work at harder texts, while the youngest among them performs before a master whose kindly face balances his raised stick. The master looks inquiringly at and beyond the boy at a proof of his gentle pedagogy, a broken switch lying on the stairs. Behind the group, on a plinth between fluted pillars, the school’s library is attractively if inconveniently placed. The few connoisseurs of Cleyn’s Danish paintings rate it his best both for composition and for execution.27 The double portrait of young John Bankes and his tutor refers to a higher level of education, the quadrivium, represented by the liberal and melancholic art of astronomy.

  Figure 35 Francis Cleyn, Interior of a Boys’ School (c.1620).

  And then the lover

  Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad

  Made to his Mistriss’ eyebrow.

  The third Rosenborg painting, A Wedding (Figure 36), has the interest that one of Cleyn’s schoolboys has escaped into the scene (the head on the far right), that it shows mastery in handling action in several planes, and that the positioning of its three central figures echoes Albrecht Dürer’s Betrothal of the Virgin.28 Rubens painted a similar arrangement for Marie de’ Medici. The painting has a pronounced Venetian character and a surprisingly Catholic flavor for a commission from a Lutheran king.29 In the fourth and most unusual of the Cleyn paintings the lady from the Wedding witnesses a great display of fireworks over Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome in the company of a gentleman in a turban who does not resemble her husband (Figure 37). The display terrifies almost everyone in the scene—notably, the little black boy, the dog, and the little girl and her mother; only the richly dressed people appear calm. The menacing castle in the background adds to the distress of the spectators, who know that it houses the papal dungeons. Although fireworks might entertain people educated enough to recognize them as artificial and harmless, they could awe and intimidate others. Hence the picture has been construed as a criticism of the display of papal power.30 In other renditions of the time the Castel Sant’Angelo resembles a squat fire-breathing toad.31

  Figure 36 Francis Cleyn, A Wedding (c.1620).

  Figure 37 Francis Cleyn, Fireworks at Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, 1619.

  Cleyn must have seen at least one of these displays, since they occurred twice a year, on the feast days of Saints Peter and Paul. The fireworks began by burning barrels of tar. Thousands of rockets then leapt into the night sky to shower sprays or girondele of shooting stars, torches, dragons, and other intimations of the fires of Hell. They might more readily have reminded onlookers of the horrors of war. Large-scale fireworks became court fare in Italy during the sixteenth century as underemployed gunners sought new markets for their talents.32 Fireworks therefore belong to the fourth age, when a man becomes

  a soldier, fu
ll of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard

  Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel

  Seeking the bubble reputation.

  Christian and James delighted in fireworks.

  Other pieces by Cleyn survive in situ at Rosenborg. Most of them decorate Christian IV’s study: characteristic whimsical grotesques in the embrasures and, in the corners, a little mythology, depictions of Minerva and Juno, of Helen’s abduction to Troy and Aeneas’ flight from its ruins. The Trojan scenes recur in Cleyn’s etchings for Ogilby’s edition of Virgil’s works. On the ceiling of the study is a copy, perhaps made under Cleyn’s supervision, of a scene from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. This is a more curious choice for a cabinet of reason than Helen’s abduction, since it depicts Orlando’s unfaithful girlfriend Angelica in the sort of situation that drove him mad. Galileo made use of the same scene in his Dialogue in reference to the maddening problem of the tides.33 The paintings at Rosenborg and Kronborg by no means represent the full spectrum of Cleyn’s work in Denmark. He had the reputation there of a portrait painter, established by his persuasive depiction of his employer (Figure 38). The eyes tell of Christian best qualities, the slight curl of his lip of his worst; a portrait more subtle and insightful than Isaacz’s contemporary painting of the same subject in the same pose. A knobby knee in an extant likeness of Christian’s son suggests that it too may be Cleyn’s. Few if any other Danish portraits by him survive. His portraits in England had a similar fate, apart from the Kingston-Lacy painting, one other, and some rough preliminary sketches.34