The best documented of Cleyn’s surviving decorative work in stately homes is in Ham House, a villa close to Mortlake. He painted there during the 1630s for its owner, William Murray, who had been Charles I’s whipping boy. Against the odds—a whipping boy received the punishments earned by the prince he served—William and Charles became good friends. William was with Charles in Madrid and returned, like the prince, enthusiastic about Titian. A nice copy of Titian’s rendition of Acteon approaching the nymphs decorates the stairway in Ham House. Cleyn did not handle this conspicuous and seductive subject of his youth but rather decorated the more intimate and sedate space of Murray’s study or “Green Closet.” He made use of the same pictures by Polidoro da Caravaggio that he had adapted to tapestry, and the same technique he used for his cartoons, to improve the closet’s coves. It is likely that he did much more, probably a part of a drawing room, a balustrade, over-doors and over-mantels, other bits in an Italianate manner, and some chairs. He may have supervised the entire project.81
Cleyn the decorator was soon in demand among people with big houses needing embellishment. He worked in Holland House, Wimbledon House, Carew House (Parson’s Green), and Stoke Park, Crane’s country seat in Northampton.82 Perhaps he worked at Corfe Castle. Bankes knew about Cleyn and Mortlake by the time he was improving his Dorset home, if not earlier. For, in 1638, two years after he had bought Corfe, he drew up the contract by which Charles acquired the Mortlake operations and responsibility for the salaries of Cleyn and the rest of the staff, £250 for Cleyn and his assistant (“the painter and his man”), and £2,000 for six Flemish weavers and their supplies.83 The weavers agreed to provide, con diligenza, 250 ells of tapestry at £25⁄8 each; con studio, 200 at £3¼; and con amore, 150 at £4¼, give or take sixpence.84 Although no evidence supports (or negates) the conjecture, Sir John might have obtained the help of the all-around artist Cleyn in redecorating Corfe Castle con amore.
Book Illustrator
“The mother of every ingenious concept,” as we learn from the ex-Jesuit Emanuele Tesauro, as persuasive as a preacher as he was undisciplined as a priest, is argutezza, or wittiness: “in so far as a work is not animated by wit, it is dead.” Tesauro showed his wit, and his connection with his times, by aiming what he called “the telescope of Aristotle”— that is, the principles of rhetoric, at the arts. In the case of painting, argutezza appears primarily in the choice of apt symbols, like those on the frontispiece of Il cannochiale aristotelico (Figure 44).85 We see Lady Rhetoric ill-advisedly looking though a telescope pointed at the sun and supported at one end by a bearded figure named Aristotle. Around Rhetoric are symbols of the arts and some disused implements of war. Opposite her another lady paints in the difficult and witty style of anamorphosis, in which the image can only be unscrambled by looking from a special point of view; here, by reflection in the cone, the viewer reads “omnis in unum,” the whole grasped as one, the economical essence of wit. The banner at the top of the telescope reads Egregio in corpore, which all good rhetoricians would have recognized as a compaction of Horace, Egregio inspersos reprehendas corpore naevos, “you find fault with scattered blemishes on an otherwise spotless body,” referring at the same time to the solar spots detected by Galileo and the subtlety of rhetorical inference.86 The blemish that caused Tesauro’s break with the Jesuits is worth recording. He and a confrère had disputed in print over whether the Emperor Augustus’ rising sign was Virgo or Capricorn.
Figure 44 Emanuele Tesauro, Cannochiale aristotelico (1664), frontispiece.
Invention required more than draftsmanship, more even than cleverness: it also required learning of the sort, if not the degree, that painters’ patrons shared. Renaissance and early modern handbooks of art recommend that painters acquire a fund of general knowledge, “as learned as possible in all the liberal arts,” and, especially, geometry.87 Cleyn had at his disposal a repertoire of standard symbols and examples of their successful deployment, and also a miscellany of learning picked up in his wide travels. And, if he was the “D. Clenius” (the Latin form of his name) connected with Isleworth in Middlesex (which is close to Mortlake) in 1639, he had some connection with the circle around Selden and Cotton. In any case, he devised a coat of arms for Selden to decorate the printing of a Renaissance manuscript on heraldry Selden owned. The shield features swans, which, as Selden’s friend Spelman explained, referred not only to singers and persons with long necks, but also, which would suit Selden better, brilliant minds.88
Sandys and Ovid
When frontispieces and illustrated title pages first came to England around 1550, they were straightforward indications of a book’s subject; by Cleyn’s time, many had become so elaborate as to require explanations themselves.89 Cleyn made his literary debut as the designer of very intricate frontispieces for one of the great coffee-table books of his time, a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses published in 1632, the same year as Galileo’s Dialogue. The translator was George Sandys, brother of that Edwin Sandys whose pacific Relation (1605) had impressed Wotton and Sarpi and whose performance in parliament had irritated King James. George Sandys transmuted the family back into favor by dedicating his work to King Charles with a witty invocation of the ancient gods and a play with stars worthy of Galileo.
Those old Heroes with their Heroines
Who spangled all the firmament with Signes
Shut out succeeding worthies; scarce could spare
A little roome for Berenices Haire.
Latecomers like Caesar had to be content with a comet. No matter, the rising sun wipes them out, “Their lights prov’d erring Fiers, their influence vaine ǀ And nothing but their empty names remaine.” No such fate awaited divine and humble Charles, no association with planets shining by reflected light or stars extinguished by the sun, but rather a reserved and deserved heavenly throne.90
Like his brother Edwin, George Sandys was Oxford educated, well traveled, and uncommonly tolerant. His first important literary work, his Relation (1615) of a trip to Jerusalem, elaborates the distinction his brother drew between indifferent and core religious beliefs. In the Holy City, surrounded by Turks who had no interest in their adiaphora, the many Christian confessions, including Roman Catholics, got along well enough; in Jerusalem, their differences paled before their common commitment to Christ. Understood as an expansive military power, however, the Roman Church was no better than the Turks. At home, the Sandys brothers championed a mixed constitution of prerogatives and liberties and remained partisans of parliament until financial interests moved them kingward. Edwin Sandys supported Charles and Buckingham in their anti-Spanish policy, and George became a gentleman of Charles’s Privy Chamber. Their ways to these positions ran through the Virginia Company.91
As a director of the company, Edwin wanted war with Spain to open trade in the New World. George’s politics went hawkish around the same time, during a stint as resident treasurer of the Virginia colony. In 1622, a year after his arrival, the Indians massacred the colonists. That overstretched his tolerance, and he metamorphosed into a leader of reprisal raids. He spent the little leisure his office left him with Ovid, the ancient world’s authority on transformations, and returned to England to see his full translation of the poet’s Metamorphoses through the press. Then he exchanged the dangers of America for those of Charles’s Privy Chamber without, however, diminishing his regard for parliament, in which three of his brothers and his cousin Dudley Digges served. With the Personal Rule, he had no sympathy. He regarded it as a move toward despotism and made some futile efforts to arrest it.92
Meanwhile he was busy with a new edition of the Metamorphoses enriched by notes raked in from all antiquity and illustrations, one for each book, depicting the major stories it contained. This last task called for skill at storytelling. Sandys called on Cleyn for sixteen compact frontispieces—one for the volume as a whole and one for each book—to complement his 13,210 lines of economical poetry.93 Sandys praised Cleyn’s drawings as so many illustratio
ns of the adage, ut poesis pictura, poetry is like painting, or vice versa.
I have contracted the substance of every Booke into as many Figures (by the hand of a rare Workman, and as rarely performed, if our judgment may be led by theirs, who are Masters among us in their Facultie) since there is between Poetry and Picture so great a congruitie…Both daughters of the Imagination, both busied in the imitation of nature, or transcending it for the better with equall Libertie.94
Cleyn’s frontispiece to Sandy’s work presents personifications of four elements (Jove and Juno with salamander and peacock above, Ceres and Neptune with cornucopia and trident below), from which, we read, “everything is made” in accordance “with love and wisdom.” As witnesses to this truth, Cleyn added figures of Venus and Minerva: “Fire, Aire, Earth, Water, all Opposites ǀ That strive in Chaos, powerfull Love unites.” At the bottom a shield displays a metamorphosis under the learned tag, Affixit humo divinae particulam aurae, which, in its Horatian context, signifies that a body loaded down with the sins of the past carries the mind with it, and so “fixes to the ground a bit of divine substance.”95 Sandys explains the connection: Minerva has stocked our minds with all the heroic virtues needed for fame and glory. “But who foresake that faire Intelligence ǀ To follow Passion, and voluptuous Sense,” these “themselves deform…and are held for beasts.”96
A good example of Cleyn’s storytelling is his frontispiece to Ovid’s third book (Figure 45). We meet Acteon again, also naked Diana, and a representative nymph and dog, all squeezed into the lower left corner. To Acteon’s right, Narcissus gazes lovingly into a reflecting pool, and, in counterpoint, the hideous dragon slain by Cadmus shuffles off its mortal coil. Cadmus sights Minerva, who, in contrast to Diana, is clothed and armed; she advises him to sow the dragon’s teeth, from which, once planted, armed men sprout up fighting, like newborn hyenas. In fast-track evolution, the winners of this infantile combat become Cadmus’s close companions. Above the fighters, two episodes from the life of Bacchus continue the unpleasantness. The lady in the burning palace is his mother, thus suffering for her wish to enjoy Jove’s favors in as ardent a manner as Juno. She is pregnant with Bacchus, whom, as everyone knows, Jove removed, sewed into his thigh, and carried to term. In the second episode, a ship picks up young Bacchus, wandering precociously tipsy along the shore. Where does he want to go? “Wine-growing Naxos.” The crew tries to row off in another direction. Ivy fouls their oars and stays the ship, and the terrified men, some turned to fish, jump into the sea. To the left of the dragon-seed warriors Cleyn depicts the seer Tiresias engaged in the research necessary to answer the question raised by Jove and Juno, whether male or female gets the greater pleasure from intercourse. Teresias found that by uncoiling certain snakes he could change sex. Having thus acquired both male and female experience (not shown), he decided for Jove’s contention that females have more fun. Galen had arrived at the same conclusion by reason: the advantage goes to females as compensation for the pain of childbirth.97
Figure 45 Francis Cleyn, illustration for Sandys’ Ovid, book III (1632).
Cleyn’s familiarity with Ovid may have inspired the subjects of Noble Horses. The vivid Perseus and Andromeda has the same sea monster as his illustration for book IV of Metamorphoses—which correctly has Perseus flying to the maiden’s rescue on his own wings, strapped to his ankles, not on a flying horse. And we have the same “Andromeda, freed from her chaines ǀ The cause and recompense of all his paines.” The story of Niobe inspired a scene of vigorous but useless galloping. Niobe had claimed precedence over the mother of Apollo and Diana, in both status and beauty, and boasted of being mother to seven strong sons and seven lovely daughters. To punish her effrontery, the gods slew her sons as they tried to evade the divine arrows, and then the daughters as they watched their brothers fall. One of the horses and riders from Cleyn’s illustration to Ovid’s sixth book made it into his tapestry. Since both stories tell of punishment for impudence and arrogance, they had some relevance to the Caroline court. Andromeda’s mother’s excessive vanity caused many evils; to cure them, the gentle gods required the sacrifice of Andromeda; being innocent, however, the girl escaped. But Niobe, having only herself to blame, suffered cruelly and was turned into a weeping stone. Sandys lets Niobe draw the moral:
Who proudly reigns in Princely towers
Nor feare the easy-changing powers
But too much trust their happy state
My change behold: for never fate
Produc’t a greater Monument
Of slippery height, and pride’s descent.98
A subtler Ovidian omen advertises the sad outcome in the first of Cleyn’s tapestries on Hero and Leander: two kingfishers seen above the water between Hero’s tower and the temple in which the lovers meet. These birds reminded the well-read of the fate of King Ceyx and his wife, Alcyone, whom the “compassionate gods” turned to birds after drowning the king and encouraging his queen to drown herself. The passages describing the storm at sea that killed Ceyx are among the most riveting in Sandys’s translation. Cleyn did not include the storm in his illustration for book XI of the Metamorphoses, but only the birds that it indirectly bred. Although Ovid does not say so, the myth, like Niobe’s, describes chastisement for hubris. The royal pair, who in their devotion to one another outdid Charles and Henrietta Maria, had the bad habit of referring to themselves as Zeus and Hera. The real Zeus, annoyed at their lèse-majesté, threw a thunderbolt at the ship carrying Ceyx. Hera took further revenge by informing Alcyone of the event, and so inspired her suicide. In contrition and partial compensation, the gods turned the faithful pair into kingfishers, which, as Sandys informs us, breed only when there is no wind or storm, “on halcyon days.”99
It would be wrong to leave Ovid without a word about Pythagoras, whose life and opinions occupy most of the last book of Metamorphoses. Cleyn begins his presentation of the details with a transformation of black into white (Figure 46, lower left corner). Hercules accomplished this feat, now commonplace among politicians, to rescue one Mycilus, whom he had chosen to found the city of Croton. Mycilus’ fellow citizens tried to condemn him to death for leaving home, but Hercules transformed the black balls they cast into white. Near his new town, Mycilus discovered another émigré, the Samian Pythagoras, depicted lecturing (Figure 46, bottom right). He is preaching metempsychosis and its implication vegetarianism (you would not want to eat an ox who might be your late brother). To exemplify the transmigration of souls, Pythagoras reels off many credible metamorphoses, several of which Cleyn illustrated. One is the tree grown from Romulus’ spear, which flourishes above Pythagoras. The active middle ground depicts the story of Hippolytus, who, being unable to control his horses when they sighted an ocean-going bull, was dragged by his chariot and ground into a thousand unrecognizable pieces. Nonetheless the great doctor Aesculapius, Apollo’s son, put him back together, and Diana transformed him into a lesser god. The serpent beneath the temple in the upper right is an incarnation of Apollo, come to reinvigorate his cult. In the sky above, Cleyn shows the transformation of Julius Caesar into a comet.
Figure 46 Francis Cleyn, illustration for Sandys’ Ovid, book XV (1632).
One reason Ovid gives for Caesar’s elevation was his conquest of Britain. To this Sandys remarks that the conquered were in fact the gainers, “having got thereby civility and letters, for a hardly won, nor a long detained domination.”100 Indeed, no polity, no religion, nothing, long endures. “What was before, is not, what was not is ǀ All in a moment change from that to this.” Earth rarifies to water, water to air, and air to fire, which, on condensing, returns to air, to water, and to earth. And so it is with humans.
Helen cry’d
When shee beheld her wrinkles in her Glasse
And asks herselfe, why she twice ravisht was.
On further reflection, Ovid discovered an exception to the change and tribulation here below.
For, where-so-ere the Roman Eagles spread
Their
conquering wings, I shall of all be read
And if we Poets true presages give
I, in my fame eternally shall live.101
Cleyn and Sandys strove to keep this hope alive.
One way to do so was to update the poet’s cosmology. Ovid had believed the heavens incorruptible; “late observations have proved the contrary.” The moon is just a big rock, “[as] discovered by Galileo’s Glasses.” Parallax has driven comets above the moon, violating “the virgin purity of Aristotle’s quintessence.” Despite their great distance, they act on us, indirectly, by drying the air, and on Sandys, by giving him material on which to expatiate. He touches on Caesar’s comet, which brings him to Caesar’s calendar, and then to Gregory’s; he piles on factoids like another Bacon, to whom he awards “the Crowne of the modernes.” The story of Phaeton inspires an explanation of the ecliptic, the seasonal change of daylight, the duration of dawn and twilight, and the habits of Venus, who is as changeable as the moon, “as found out by the new perspectives.” “The new refiners of astronomy” put a soul in the sun and the sun in the center, whence it directs the planets. Many more stars exist than the 1,143 visible to the naked eye, “as appears [again] by Galileo’s Glasses.”102 And so on. Readers of Sandys’s coffee-table Ovid could glimpse an eclectic semi-modern cosmology against a familiar ancient literary background. Among those who could do so in presentation copies of the press run of 820 were Kenelm Digby, Ben Jonson, King Charles, and “Mr Clen.”103
The Ghost of Galileo Page 29