Figure 38 Francis Cleyn, Christian IV (c.1620).
Whether or not Cleyn’s Danish paintings have the quality of “silent poetry,” of a “presentation from the soul,” as his most knowledgeable modern critic reckons, they attracted the attention of the English ambassador.35 He was Robert Anstruther, a Scot whose father had served King James, literally served, as the Royal Carver. Anstruther was closer to King Christian even than a carver, as he had been bred in the Danish court and negotiated for as well as with the Danes. The timing of his recommendation of Cleyn to James is intriguing: the mid-1620s, the years in which James was borrowing heavily from Christian and simultaneously trying to enlist him in military action in the Palatinate. Anstruther carried one installment of interest on the existing loan (£6,000!) to Denmark in 1620 and returned to negotiate another for £30,000 in 1621. Dickering came to a head in 1623 when the emperor transferred the Electoral dignity of the Palatinate from the ousted Frederick to the Duke of Bavaria.36 Anstruther prepared to return to Denmark to render another interest payment and to discuss Christian’s intervention in Germany, for which he required 30,000 men and £180,000 a year.37
On his first visit to England in 1623, Cleyn had immediate access to James. Did he bring information about the great matter of the Palatinate? As we know, itinerant artists often served as government agents; Cleyn had a bad example close to home in his Danish–Dutch colleague Isaacsz, who spied continuously for Sweden.38 Anstruther delayed his trip to Denmark, commissioned at the end of 1623, until the middle of 1624, perhaps because Cleyn had conveyed whatever he had to report to Christian. Cleyn certainly carried at least one such message. It was from King James. It asks that Cleyn, “who has occasion to go over there may have leave to return.” The phrasing is suggestive. The ostensible reason for Cleyn’s travel to England was not to gather intelligence, however, but to assist in preparations to receive the unrealized Infanta.39 When he came back to England in 1625, he worked with Inigo Jones on a triumphal arch to welcome the substitute queen, Henrietta Maria. He also designed a new Great Seal for Charles, for which his inventiveness suggested six possibilities.40 Then came the call to Mortlake.
The tapestry works had been in operation since 1619, when Francis Crane brought over enough Flemish weavers to run eighteen looms. The government of the Spanish Netherlands had regarded tapestry production as prestigious and profitable, even at the standard output of one square yard of standard stuff per weaver per month, and had tried to keep the weavers at home.41 Crane needed the help of the English agent in Brussels to secure his workers and the approval the Archbishop of Canterbury to guarantee them freedom of worship. The Dutch Reformed Church of London facilitated the business by agreeing to set up a branch in Mortlake. The arrangement worked well under Archbishop Abbot but faltered under Laud, who rated Dutch Calvinists as no better than Puritans. The Dutch Church outlasted Laud, however, and helped Mortlake survive the Civil War with its orders.42 Cleyn attended the Anglican church of St Mary, in whose font five of his six children were baptized between 1625 and 1632.43
The Mortlake factory occupied a three-story building with a footprint of 1,000 square feet and employed a workforce of 140 or more. Cleyn had a house across the street from the works. Memory of the former proprietor Dee also dwelt in the neighborhood. Many of the locals had known him (he died in 1608) and could point out his house and the garden gate where Queen Elizabeth had once stopped to converse with him. Dee also talked with angels. His conversations with one of them reached print in 1659. The book has a frontispiece by Cleyn on which Dee appears as the last of six “illuminati” running from Mohammed to Paracelsus (see Figure 6).44 The other five had worked through private revelation, whereas, to the benefit of mankind, the more discursive Dee had preserved his instructions for posterity in the unknown angelic language in which he received it.
Englishman
The early productions of Crane’s weavers were uninspired copies of earlier designs made for his chief clients, Charles and Buckingham, while they dallied in Spain.45 During a respite there, Charles bought the set of scratched and patched cartoons for The Acts of the Apostles that Raphael had made for hangings to cover the nakedness of the lower reaches of the Sistine Chapel. Cleyn copied and accommodated them for production. His main apparent qualification was his expertise in grotesque. Purchasers of tapestries typically commissioned distinctive borders bearing their crests and other decorations, which sat well in the elaborate bric-a-brac that Cleyn so readily invented. An excellent example is the festoon of fish and putti around Raphael’s rendition of the miraculous catch in the Sea of Galilee, where Christ told his disciples they would be fishers of men (Luke 5:4–10) (Figure 39).46 Tapestries made from Cleyn’s copy came on the market in the 1630s.47 The success of his borders, quite superior to earlier ones, gained him ongoing employment at a salary of £100 a year. He became a citizen. His salary in 1637, £200, acknowledged his merit, as it equaled the pension promised, but not paid, to Van Dyck.48 Cleyn’s artistry at Mortlake also put him on a par with Van Dyck, who had worked on tapestry design under Rubens. Some critics impressed by great names have mistakenly assigned some of Cleyn’s best designs to Rubens’s student.49
Figure 39 Francis Cleyn, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, tapestry after Raphael. (1630s).
Cleyn enjoyed so high a salary because tapestries were more expensive and, in the cold, more useful, than paintings.50 Queen Anna had worried that Princess Elizabeth would have to live in a drafty palace in Heidelberg, “without enough tapestry to cover the bare walls.” Elizabeth showed her suitor what her mother expected by embellishing the rooms in which she received him with new tapestries, and Anna made sure that the hall built for the wedding feast boasted many valuable hangings, some borrowed for the occasion. Frederick did not need the hints. The collection of the palatine Elector, built up over a century and more, contained 500 pieces. Still, a wedding gift of sixteen tapestries from the Dutch States General was welcome.51 As an indication of their comparative cost, Charles owed Crane £6,000 for tapestries in 1625, and £12,500 in 1629; whereas he had paid only £300 for the Raphael cartoons and spent less on a full-length portrait by Van Dyck. Charles repaid Crane in part with an estate of 500 acres, on which, with the help of Jones and Cleyn, a Palladian villa rose, no doubt warmed within by hangings from Mortlake.52
During the reign of Crane and Cleyn, tapestries made in England rivaled the best in Europe in their artistry, and surpassed them in their main ingredient, the finest, native-grown, Cotswold wool. Their excellence, according to French experts, consisted not only in richness of borders and colors, and quality of wool, but also in the weavers’ attention to detail. One of them specialized in faces and another in carnations, “modeling them with three tones of pink merging with one another.”53 As a mark of special favor, Charles would give a foreign ambassador a suite of Mortlake tapestries as a parting gift—thus, to the French ambassador in 1630, six hangings, to the Spanish, in 1631, the same, each set valued at £3,000. The standard gift for departing ambassadors was silver plate nominally worth £800, but usually clipped to no more than £600 by the frugal Master of the Jewels.54 One of Conn’s assignments in England was to acquire a set of the Acts of the Apostles for his patron Cardinal Barberini.55
The earliest set of tapestries that Cleyn designed portrayed the story of Love and Folly in five pieces. Only drawings survive. If, as supposed, they date from the time of Charles’s wedding in 1625, their elegant representation of a blind cupid guided by Folly made an excellent symbol, or forecast, of his later relationship with Henrietta Maria.56 The main Mortlake output to Cleyn’s original designs before the Civil War comprised three sets: The Five Senses and Hero and Leander in the 1620s, and Noble Horses, completed in the mid-1630s.57 Of the three, Cleyn’s friend Norgate preferred the mythological, for good reason:
These six rare peeces of the story of Hero and Leander, all within excellent Landscape of Sestos, and Abydos, the Hellespont, Temple of Venus, etc. which by him done i
n water colours to the Life, were wrought in rich Tapestry, in silk and gold, with bordures and Compartments in Chiar oscuro of the same hand alluding to the story.
Lyme Park, a National Trust Property in Cheshire, has the first three pieces (Meeting in the Temple, First Swim, Arrival at Hero’s Tower); the Victoria and Albert Museum in London the last (The Death of Leander).58
The tale of Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite in Sestus, and Leander, a lad from Abydos who swam the Dardanelles to visit her at night, does not end well. One evening the light she lit to guide him failed; he drowned; and she threw herself from her tower into the sea, the pair thus making an unhappy emblem of the four elements, “Both robbed of air, we both lie in one ground ǀ Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.”59 A modern critic judges the series to be “a rather clumsy echo of Paolo Veronese,” an assessment in disagreement with that of contemporaries who praised Cleyn’s “excellent designes for thos rare Tapestry works, wrought at Moretlake.”60 Certainly Cleyn’s handling of the first meeting of the lovers at The Temple of Venus (Figure 40) successfully conveys pity as well as expectation, as in the double portrait at Kingston Lacy, and his scenes of Leander in the water have the verisimilitude of the swimming manual he consulted.
Figure 40 Francis Cleyn, Meeting at the Temple, tapestry from the series Hero and Leander (1630s).
The story was popular. King James had written himself into it in a poem he composed during the storm he braved to fetch his Danish princess. Charles liked it too, especially as told by Christopher Marlowe and set to music, in 1628, by Lanier. Naturally so popular and saccharine a subject invited parody. Ben Jonson fell to it. He replaced Leander by a fuller’s son, Hero by a hussy, the Hellespont by the Thames, and Venus’ temple by a puddle. There they met:
Now as he is beating, to make the Dye take the fuller
Who chances to come by, but Fair Hero, in a Sculler
And seeing Leander’s naked Leg, and goodly Calf
Cast at him from the Boat a Sheeps Eye and a half.”
Here is Marlowe’s version of their meeting:
He kneel’d, but unto her devoutly prayed
Chast Hero to herself thus softly said
“Were I the saint hee worships, I would heare him”
And, as shee spake those words, came somewhat nere him.61
For inspiration for his other series, Cleyn turned to Aesop (the borders of The Senses) and Ovid (the subject matter of Noble Horses).62 The Senses, “the most magnificent products of the [Mortlake] workshop at its height,” survives in England only in a single set, at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire.63 Charles probably commissioned it, as the bottom border displays four crossed scepters under the optimistic slogan sceptra favent artes, “royal rule favors the arts.” The overall design is arresting: against a creamy background filled with animals symbolic of the senses and elaborate grotesques, sit, centered, the ladies of the senses, done in a red chiaroscuro highlighted with gold thread. Roundels on the vertical borders depict scenes from Aesop.
Cleyn followed a Renaissance innovation, stimulated perhaps by the publication of Aristotle’s De sensu, of representing the senses by female figures. The animals traditionally associated with the senses (lynx or eagle with sight, mole or deer with hearing, vulture or dog with smell, monkey with taste, and spider or tortoise with touch) either disappear or share the stage with the ladies. Cleyn avoided the obvious cliché of replacing the animals with cavaliers better suited to help the personifications indulge their senses.64 In his rendition, each lady holds an object able to excite her special sense and has angellini in attendance who extend the possibilities. Thus Sight (visus) admires herself in a mirror while her putti hold up a pair of spectacles and peer through a telescope—this last by then being an old association, occurring as early as 1616, in José de Ribera’s cycle of the senses.65
After Vision comes, in the Aristotelian order, Hearing (auditus), whom Cleyn pictured strumming a lute that charms animals while a pair of angellini try to play bagpipes; Smell (odor), busy only with the sweet scent of flowers; Taste (gustus), eating fruit from a bulging bowl as her angellini empty cornucopias; and Touch (tactus), submitting to a bird’s peck and resting her foot on a traditional tortoise as her angellini prick themselves with thorns. The same company reappear in a set of etchings Cleyn did for less exalted patrons when Civil War reduced work at Mortlake (Figure 41ab).66 There may be more in The Senses than meets the eye if they relate to the Aristotelian ranking as moralized in the Renaissance. Aristotle had privileged sight and hearing for their superior ability to instruct intelligent animals like philosophers. Smelling, tasting, and touching, which inform by direct contact, necessarily bring in less information. Thus the hierarchy identified sight with Platonic, and touch with ordinary lust.67
Figure 41a Francis Cleyn, Quinque sensuum (1646), Title Page, Vision, and Hearing.
Figure 41b Francis Cleyn, Quinque sensuum (1646), Smell, Taste, and Touch.
Cleyn’s work at Mortlake included cartoons made from paintings by other artists—for example, Titian’s Supper at Emmaus and Van Dyck’s portrait of himself and Endymion Porter, both of which exist as tapestries, at St Johns College, Oxford, and at Knole House (National Trust) in Kent, respectively. Other Cleyn cartoons scaled up depictions of satyrs and puttini by Polidoro da Caravaggio that became popular during the reign of the great satyr Charles II. What were perhaps Cleyn’s last designs produced at Mortlake, The Hunters’ Chase, commemorated the favorite illiberal pastime of the early Stuarts. One surviving piece, The Evening Entertainment, has Cleyn’s usual multiplicity of activity: in the foreground, an elaborately dressed couple dance on uneven ground accompanied by three musicians and a torch bearer; in the background, a woman prepares to bowl down ninepins so close she can hardly miss them, while another woman helps a hunter overcome by the good cheer at the hunters’ dinner.68
There is no complete set of Noble Horses anywhere in Britain. The sole surviving member now known certainly to have come from Mortlake shows Perseus rescuing Andromeda (Figure 42). Its vigor and liveliness suggest the appeal the entire set would have had for a first-class cavalier and connoisseur.69 Such a person was William Cavendish, with whose circle of philosophers we are acquainted. His other main interests were horsemanship, which produced magnificent stables and riding schools at Welbeck and Bolsover, and womanizing, which left some traces in paintings done for the Bolsover folly.70 Of this latter pastime his indulgent philosophical second wife, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote: “I know him not addicted to any manner of Vice except that he has been a great lover and admirer of the Female Sex; which, whether it be so great a crime as to condemn him for it, I’le leave to the judgment of young gallants and beautiful ladies.”71
Figure 42 Francis Cleyn, Perseus and Andromeda, tapestry, from the series The Horses (1630s).
Cavendish also had a taste for art awakened when he accompanied Wotton to Turin when the ambassador tried to negotiate marriage between Savoy and England. Young Cavendish took to the Italian style and returned to Welbeck with some pictures.72 It may well be that Cavendish commissioned some paintings from Cleyn for Bolsover during the early 1630s: an old account credits him with decorating several rooms, and a more recent one repeats it.73 Cavendish would have needed good fast-working artists like Cleyn to make Welbeck and Bolsover fit to receive the king and queen as they made their way from London to Edinburgh in 1633 and 1635.74
William welcomed guests at the folly, or “Little Castle,” at Bolsover in an anteroom that challenged them with ingenious pictorial messages encoded in lunettes above the wall paneling. The messages are consistent with Cleyn’s wit and style. One depicts a fisherman and his wife selling their wares; another, a red-faced warrior and his girlfriend; a third, a lecherous mature man proffering jewels to a bare-breasted young woman; and, on the fourth wall, a sea and a temple without a human figure. No doubt a puzzle! As a hint to a solution, William stood in front of the empty scene, thereby completing what an astute viewer
might identify as representations of the four humors. The fishmongers stand for the watery or phlegmatic humor; the worked-up soldier, the choleric; the display of exchangeable goods, the melancholic; and William, hale and hearty, the sanguine.75 The unexpected presence of the open book and celestial globe in the reception room of the half-dressed lady exposes her as a courtesan of Venetian attainments (Figure 43). These props also suggest the broad scientific interests of the Cavendish circle, which willingly studied everything from moons to mites with the help of Galileo’s “multiplying glasses.”76
Figure 43 Francis Cleyn?, The Melancholic Temperament (c.1635).
If Cleyn did not paint at Bolsover, it was not because he disdained painting houses. He often moonlighted as an interior decorator. He helped Jones with Henrietta Maria’s establishment at Somerset House, the most sensitive and difficult parts of it, her closet and her chapel. Of the closet we know that the ceiling boasted “a faire skie,” sunnier than the real one, and personifications of art, architecture, painting, music, and poetry, and also a wall frieze in the grotesque style, “all done by [Cleyn’s] own invention, con studio, diligenza, e amore.”77 (Wotton informs us that diligenza, studio, and amore designated an ascending scale of workmanship.78) As for the chapel, it was a perfect mix of art and politics. Its beauty surprised the chief of the queen’s Capuchins. “The architect, who is one of those Puritans, or rather people without religion, worked unwillingly, however with the help of God [and Cleyn!]…this building has been completed, and is more beautiful, larger and grander than one could have hoped for.”79 It is said that when Francis Windebank saw it, he declared himself openly a non-Roman Catholic.80 Somerset House and Jones’s chapel perished toward the end of the eighteenth century to make way for today’s Somerset House.
The Ghost of Galileo Page 28