AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE: WITH A GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN FALLACIES
Touching is that quaint theological tree in the cell of sainted Antoninus in San Marco, upon whose red oval leaves grow the biographies of the brethren. They lived, they prayed, they died—that is all. One little leaf suffices to tell the tale. This brother conversed with the greatest humility, and that excelled in silence. A third was found after his death covered with a rough hair shirt (aspro cilicio). In the holy shade of this goodly tree sits St. Dominic, separating—as though symbolically—the monks on his right from the nuns on his left.
Naïveté can no further go. And, indeed, if one were to regard the naïveté and forget the sweet simplicity, there is much in the mediæval world that one would relegate to the merely absurd. The masterpieces of Art have been sufficiently described. What a book remains to be written upon its grotesques!
The word is said to derive from the arabesques found in grottoes or excavated Roman tombs; those fantastic combinations of the vegetable and animal worlds by which the art of Islam avoided the representation of the real. But by the art of Christendom the grotesque was achieved with no such conscientious search after the unreal. Nor have I in mind its first fumblings, its crudities of the catacombs, its simplicities of the missal and the music-book, its Byzantine paintings with their wooden figures and gold embroidery. I am not even thinking of those early Masters whose defects of draughtsmanship were balanced by a delicious primitive poetry, which makes a Sienese Madonna preferable to a Raphael, and the early mosaics of St. Mark’s more desirable than the sixteenth-century work that has replaced them. The grotesque lies deeper than unscientific drawing; it mingles even with the work of the most scholarly Masters, and springs from the absence of a sense of history or a sense of humour. That the Gospel incidents should be depicted in Italian landscape and with Italian costumes was perhaps not unnatural, since, as I have already pointed out, every nation remakes the Christ in its own image—psychologically when not physically. Even the Old Testament was de-Orientalised by Raphael and his fellow-illustrators. Bonifacio Veronese, for example, put Italian hills and music-books into The Finding of Moses, and his Egypt is less Eastern than the Venice he lived in. But that the fancy-dress Bible should include also Doges and Cardinals and Magnificent Families, and that a Tintoretto in everyday clothes should look on at his own Miracle of St. Mark or a Moretto come to his own Supper at Emmaus, this it is that lifts the eyebrows of a modern. One can permit Dominican friars to witness The Incredulity of St. Thomas, or Franciscans to assist—as in Marco Basaiti’s picture—at The Agony in the Garden. These holy brethren are at least in the apostolic chain; and in the latter picture, which is becomingly devotional, the scene is suggested as a mystic vision to justify the presence of these anachronistic spectators. But how is it possible to tolerate proud Venetian senators at The Ascension of Christ, or to stomach the Medici at the building of the Tower of Babel? It is true sacred subjects had become a mere background for lay portraits, but what absence of perspective!
It would be an interesting excursion to trace the steps by which the objective conception of a picture—true to its own time and place—was reached, or the evolution by which singleness of subject was substituted for exuberance of episodes and ideas, till at last Art could flower in a lovely simplicity like that of Simone Martini’s Annunciation. You shall see St. Barbara throned at the centre of her anecdotal biography, or the Madonna della Misericordia sheltering virtues under her robe, while her history circles around her. Even when the picture itself is simple and single, the predella is often a congested commentary upon the text, if, indeed, it has any relevant relation to the text at all. What can be more charming than the little angels round the throne of the Madonna in Benaglio Francesco’s picture in Verona—angels with golden vases of red and white roses, angels playing spinets and harps and pipes and lutes and little drums and strange stringed instruments that have passed away! But what can be more grotesque than the predella of this delightful picture, the Entombment and the saints with the insignia of their martyrdom (hammer and tongs and fiery braziers), and the cock that crew, and the kiss of Judas!
In a picture by Lorenzo Monaco at Florence the Virgin and St. John raise Christ out of his tomb, and above are not only a cross and the instruments of martyrdom, but a bust and floating hands, while spice vessels figure below.
To a modern the mere treatment of God the Father suffices to create a category of the grotesque, even though His head has usually the venerable appearance of the aged Ruskin and He is kept a discreet kit-kat or a half-length. But Fra Bartolommeo in Lucca paints Him at full length with His toes on a little angel and a placard in His hand bearing the letters alpha and omega. And Lorenzo Veneziano parts His hair neatly in the middle.
Our catalogue of grotesques is swollen by the explanatory scrolls and inscriptions of the early pictures; by the crude religious allegories, in which devils gnash teeth when Virtue routs Temptation; by the political cartoons at Siena—of Good and Bad Government (though these are more primitive than comic); by the literal genealogic trees—like that of Jesse in St. Mark’s, or on the stone door-posts of the Baptistery of Parma; by the Tree of the Cross in Florence, which shoots out branches with round leaves containing scenes from the life of the central crucified figure, and supports a pyramid of saints and celestials; by the devices of symbolism for representing abstract ideas or identifying saints. All haloes are proleptic even from childhood, and a martyr and his passion can never be parted. Those poor martyrs, what they suffered at the hands of painters without a gleam of humour!
’Twas not till I had found out for myself that the overwhelming preponderance in Art of the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, the Entombment, and the Pietà were due in no small measure to the opportunities they afforded of painting the nude figure, that I discovered why St. Sebastian was the most popular of all the saints, exploited in every other sacred picture, and—naked and unashamed—the almost inseparable attendant of the Madonna when she sits in saintly society. The superiority of his martyrdom at the hands of a troop of archers to other paintable forms of death leaps to the eye, for the arrows must be seen quivering in the target of his naked figure, though I have seen this pictorially precious nudity marred by such a plethora of arrows—as in the Opera del Duomo at Florence—that the saint is become a porcupine. The grim humour of the situation lies in the fact that St. Sebastian recovered from his arrows to be subsequently clubbed to death, but this deutero-martyrdom is hushed up by the Italian painters. To add to St. Sebastian’s sufferings at their hands, he has been made a plague-saint and his invaluable nudity haled into plague-pictures and plague-churches, as by Bartolommeo Montagna, who turned his arrows into the metaphoric shafts of the Pest. Not that I can blame the Italian painters. If I had ever been inclined to underrate the artistic significance of the nude, I should have been converted by the full-dressed angelets of Borgognone’s Gesù Moriente in the Pavian Certosa. These delicious little creatures were once without a fig-leaf, but at the Father Superior’s protest they were clad in belted tunics and skirts, thus becoming squat little figures whose wings burst comically through their clothes. What might have been a masterpiece is thus a grotesque.
But if St. Sebastian must go sempiternally branded with arrows, like a British convict, it is St. Lawrence who has the clumsiest symbol to drag about. He and his gridiron are as inseparable as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Often it stands on end and seems the iron framework of a bed. Like his halo, it is with him long before his martyrdom, as it accompanies him to heaven. Only once in all Florence do I remember seeing it in its proper place—under the grilling saint—and then he is turning his other side to the flame in true culinary Christianity (“Jam versa: assatus est”). The artist has spared us nothing except the towels with which the angels wiped his face, and these may be seen at Rome in S. Giovanni in Laterano. St. Stephen is also heavily burdened with the stones that still keep falling on his head. In Bernardo Daddi’s frescoes in S. Croce they stick to him like burrs. St. John, transformed to an angel, contemplates his own (haloed) head on a platter, as if thinking two heads are better than one. Lucy keeps her eyes in a dish. St. Bartholomew holds his skin. St. Nicholas—the patron of commerce and the pawnbroker—is known by his three golden balls. Even families had their symbols, and the Colonnas, the complacent Colonnas, had themselves painted as soaring heavenwards at the last trump, each with a small column rising from his shoulder—literal pillars of Church and State.
These symbols, and many others less grotesque, disappear either with the gradual obscuration of the legends or the development of purer artistic ideas. There is another kind of symbolism, which may be called the shorthand of primitive art, and which may be studied in the archaic mosaics of St. Mark’s. Egypt dwindles to a gate (as though it and not Turkey were the Porte). Alexandria is expressed by its Pharos. Trees stand for the Mount of Olives. There is much of the rebus in these primitive representations. The Byzantine symbolism of St. Mark’s reaches its most curious climax in the representation of the four rivers that watered the Biblical Garden of Eden by classical river gods. The palm branch as the shorthand for martyrdom is a more congruous convention. In the mosaics of S. Vitale in Ravenna, Jerusalem and Bethlehem are expressed by towers, in Sant’ Appolinare Nuovo a few Roman buildings stand for Classe. In a Venetian painting ascribed to Carpaccio, Bethlehem is spelt by palm-trees and a queer beast tied to one of them, probably meant for a camel.
A more pretentious form of symbolism lies in the allegory proper, but even when the painting avoids the grotesque, the meaning is often hopelessly obscure. Such popular pictures as Botticelli’s Spring, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, and Paris Bordone’s Lovers are still unsolved puzzles, and perhaps only the more satisfactory for that. But allegories that are enigmatic without being beautiful are merely bores. Such are the two pictures of the school of Lazzaro Sebastiani in Venice, in which a company of figures holding scrolls is perched in the boughs of a tree, looking at a distance like a full orchestra. Both of these pictures come from monasteries, and are therefore to be presumed sacred. And in one of them Adam and Eve are unmistakable under the tree, with mice and lizards gambolling around them, so that the tree must be the Tree of Life or of Knowledge; but who is the youth who stands beneath the other tree in a strange city of spires and towers and plays on a golden ’cello, while a maiden offers him an apple? Such intellectually faded pictures illustrate clearly the limitations of painting as a medium for intellectual propositions. But the most lucid of allegories or symbolisms has its own peculiar pitfalls. Luca Mombella introduces into a Coronation of the Virgin a figure of “Humilitas” who is magnificently attired and wears pearls in her hair, while Montagna’s Nestor Victorious over the Vices (in the Louvre) proves that most of the Vices are at least devoted mothers, for they burden their flight by snatching up their satyr-like brood.
But these confused or unintelligible allegories are far preferable to symbolisms which are perfectly decipherable yet perfectly repellent, like Giovanni da Modena’s fresco in S. Petronio which shows us Christ on his cross agonising between two female figures, one bestriding a full-maned lion (the Catholic Church) and the other riding blindfold on a goat (Heresy). The lion has four different feet—a pedal man (St. Matthew), a pedal ox (St. Luke), an eagle’s claw (St. John), and a real foot (St. Mark). The blood from the side of Christ flows into the chalice held by the Church, and in the middle of the stream is formed the wafer. The four ends of the cross turn into hands: the upper hand opens with a key the gate of Paradise—strangely like a church; the lower hand opens Hell with a winch; the right hand blesses the Catholic Church, the left stabs Heresy. Garofalo has a vast but still poorer fresco of this sort in Ferrara, brought from a refectory. Each arm of the cross branches into two hands engaged in much the same occupations as in the Bolognese fresco save that one hand crowns Wisdom. The foot of the cross also turns into hands, the right holding a cross towards Limbo, the function of the left fortunately faded. It is refreshing to turn from such geometrical symbolisms to the meaningless flower-patterns of F. dei Libri, in which Crucifixions, cherubs reading, satyrs blowing brass instruments, and putti playing citharas or puffing at bagpipes are interwoven with wriggling snakes, contemporary poets and ecclesiasts, and shaven monks performing service.
This, of course, is the conscious grotesque, like the borders which Girolamo dei Libri put round a serious picture of the Magi—vignettes of other scenes, hands of donors, floral patterns and scutcheons with strange ramping beasts.
To the deliberate grotesque belong, of course, the stone beasts that crouch before the old cathedrals, the griffin of Perugia, and the heraldic beasts of Tura. I should have added Raphael’s dragons to the same category were it not that though deliberately drawn and though delightfully grotesque, they are mere representation of an object that happens to be grotesque in itself, and this is no more the artistic grotesque than the portrait of a beautiful woman is necessarily the artistic beautiful. There is a deal of movement, spirit, and invention in these great worms of Raphael, and every individual St. George, St. Michael, or St. Margaret is handsomely provided with an original and unique dragon, each with an elegant precision of fearsome form. But Raphael drew with equal hand and the same loving seriousness a monster or a Madonna.
Equally conscientious is the Medusa’s head once ascribed to Da Vinci, with its carefully combed snaky locks and its frogs and bats and toads. Carpaccio’s dragon has far more fun in him, for all his grisly litter of skulls and skeletons.
And I like Vasari’s dragon in his St. George in Arezzo, with its spitting double tongue and its half-eaten man, and the gorgeous dragon on a piece of majolica in Urbino, into whose mouth St. George is driving his spear, and the fierce-clawed, winged dragon of the spirited Tintoretto in the National Gallery, and above all the dragon of Piero di Cosimo’s Andromeda in Florence, with that delightful curling tail and that broad back on which Perseus can stand securely while delivering his stroke.
But the deliberate grotesque without fun—this, I confess, is a note in Italian art which I find disquieting. For into this polished and palatial world there intrudes at times a touch of something sinister, cynical and mocking, as though the artist, constricted by pompous conventions, sought relief by sticking out his tongue. Leonardo—whatever Mona Lisa’s smile may mean—kept his grotesquerie for his caricatures. But other of the Masters were less discriminating. This something of enigmatic and perturbing—perhaps it is only the acute Renaissance consciousness of the skeleton at the feast—I find most of all in Crivelli—Venetian soldier, as he once signed himself—whose rich lacquer work has had more attention than this diablerie of his. Nobody else touches the grotesque so consciously, dares to give us such quaint, ill-drawn angels as those in his Madonna and Child in Verona, with that bird-pecked giardinetto of fruits over the Virgin’s head, and Christ in a gold frock as in some Byzantine mosaic. The microscopic Crucifixion is perhaps no more incongruous with the subject of this picture than its landscapes seen through arches, its chivalry and pomp of horses. But one cannot help feeling that Crivelli had a grim joy in perching that vulture on the large gaunt tree. And in his Brera Madonna, in which St. Peter holds two heavy real keys, gilded and silvered, he gives the celestial doorkeeper a crafty ecclesiastical look, while his St. Dominic looks sawny. Even his baby Christ is cruelly squeezing a little bird. There is a leer in the whole picture. The accident of juxtaposition has accentuated the wilfulness of Crivelli’s grimace, for in the Brera there are two Madonnas, side by side, yet at the extreme poles of his genius. In the Madonna della Candeletta we have beauty unalloyed. The tiny candle standing at the foot of the Madonna’s throne strikes, indeed, a note of bizarrerie, but it is beautiful bizarrerie, and the Madonna, marvellously robed and embowered in fruit and leaves, who is offering a great pear to a charming Child, is less the Mother of God than a crowned queen of faery with an infant prince in a golden robe and a golden halo, and less a queen with a prince than a wonderful decorative pattern, a study in gold and marble and precious stones and brocaded gowns, broidered, rich-dyed, and fantastic with arabesques. And beside this poem hangs the other Crivelli, a gaunt crucifix with ugly, contorted figures of the Madonna and St. John. And it is sardonic humour, not naïveté, that has turned his St. Sebastian (in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli) into a porcupine.
But even Giovanni Bellini, with his sense of restful perfection and unity of theme, cannot resist putting in microscopic accessories that only catch the eye from anear, as into his green-throned Madonna and Child in the Brera he introduces a horseman, two men talking by a tree, a shepherd, a flock of sheep, and, strangest of all, a shadowy ape crouching on a tomb which bears his signature: “Johannes Bellinus.” What is the significance of this shadowy ape? What mockery of the theme, or of humanity, or of himself, was here shadowed forth?
And that even more sinister ape in Tura’s Virgin supporting the Dead Christ—what does he here? The mother, seated on the tomb, holds the poor bleeding figure as though it were again her baby. They are alone, they and the thieves and the cross; other men are moving away, bearing a ladder. The picture is complete, a grim, solemn, soul-moving unity. Why then did Tura, that master of the conscious grotesque, throw in that grinning monkey on that strange fruit-tree? Was he, who lived to see the Borgian Pope become the Vicar of Christ, suggesting sardonically what quaint sequels of orgiastic splendour, what pride and lust of life, were to spring from this tragic sacrifice?
A less perturbing monkey looks on with other creatures at The Creation of Man in a Venetian picture now in Ravenna. A red-girt, blue-mantled Deity floats over a huge recumbent Adam, whose thigh he touches, while the monkey, eating an apple, appears to follow with interest the next phase in evolution, when fruit would be forbidden.
Apes appear again in Fogolino’s Adoration of the Magi in Vicenza; squatting below the castled rocky ways and mountain-bridges, over which winds the great procession with its beautifully caparisoned horses. These apes, like the ape on the elephant’s back in Raphael’s treatment of the same theme, might be merely designed to suggest the East, were it not for the disconcerting, mysterious, lobster-red, sprawling wings? What further note of discord do we catch here?
But it is in the unconscious grotesque that Italian art is richest. I have already shown some of the trap-doors that lead to it, but to enumerate them all is impossible. There are so many ways in which humour can be absent. Perhaps one might generalise as a source of the unconscious grotesque the convention dating from the Byzantine period which expresses souls as small swaddled dolls. See, for example, Paolo da Venezia’s Death of Mary, where, by a seeming inversion of rôles, Christ flies up to heaven with his mother-doll. Perhaps, too, all pictures connected with stigmata or vernicles are foredoomed to farce. There may be a noble way of expressing this material transference, but I have never seen one. St. Veronica receiving on a handkerchief a head with neatly parted hair is prosaic if not comic, while St. Francis receiving the stigmata is simply ludicrous.
In a picture in the Museum of Vicenza the kneeling saint is apparently flying a kite by red strings passing through holes in his hands and feet. The seeming kite is really a small winged nude figure, feathered at head and feet like a cock—the six-winged seraph of the Legenda Trium Sociorum that bears the crucified figure,—red strings passing through corresponding holes in his head and feet. The treatment of the same scene by Giotto (in the Louvre) gives this kite-like appearance to Jesus himself.
Even more absurdly geometrical is Gentile da Fabriano’s handling of the theme at Urbino, five strong red cords passing to the saint’s breast, hands, and feet from an eight-winged figure on a cross, naked to its waist. It is a relief to find these Euclidian lines absent from the representation in the church of Assisi itself, though it is only in seventeenth-century painters like Sisto Badalocchio in Parma or Rochetti in Faenza that the stigmata are transmitted from a celestial glory or down a broad ray of golden light. Macrino d’Alba at Turin shows the saint receiving the image of a praying Christ on a slate with a golden frame, and this image has the tonsured head of a monk!
And what can be quainter than the six-winged cherubs who hover round the Madonna in a picture of the Botticelli school at Parma? Two of their red wings are spread, the second pair crossed like legs, and the last pair crossed over the head, making a sort of pointed cap. The faces attached to these wings are mature, as of elderly, clean-shaven barristers. Another comical circle of these seraphs, a few with blue wings, tends to spoil a charming fifteenth-century Coronation of the Virgin in Florence.
Martyrdoms, too, are a rich mine of the grotesque, as witness the boiling of St. John in the National Gallery, with its accessories of the bellows and the blowpipe, and God lifting the saint bodily up to heaven.
In the exhilarating frescoes of Montagna in the church of the Eremitani at Padua, St. James’s hair, which is yellowish throughout, turns black, apparently, under the horror of an impending mallet, despite that his halo seems like a protective plate of yellow armour. A very gay and pleasing picture this.
Another source of the grotesque is the angelic aeroplane. In an Adoration of the Shepherds by Francesco Zaganelli in Ravenna three wingless angels employ cherubs to bear them aloft, balancing themselves upon the winged heads. One needs a cherub for each foot, the second places both feet upon the same head, the third, expertest gymnast of all, maintains himself upon one foot. Another primitive aeroplane may be seen at Ferrara, in The Assumption of St. Mary of Egypt. St. Mary rises on a platform supported from beneath by a series of nude and clothed angels, to the amaze of a worthy signor walking in the field of strange palms amid quaint green buildings. A rabbit, a pigeon, and a bird continue absolutely indifferent to the phenomenon.
In a Carpaccio in the same town the cherubs fly, three heads together, like a celestial molecule. In Zacchia da Vezzano’s Assumption of the Virgin at Lucca she rides on cherubs. There is an angelic aeroplane in a painted relief at San Frediano in Lucca, and in Guido Reni’s Immaculate Conception at Forli (where the Virgin stands on a leaf on a cherub’s head), and in Lippo Lippi’s picture at Prato of the Madonna handing down her girdle to St. Thomas. Zuccari Taddeo in the Pitti uses the angelic aeroplane to carry up Mary Magdalen, who is further provided with a number of fussy heralds and avant-coureurs. Marco Antonio Franceschini in the Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini of Genoa likewise carries up the Magdalen on the backs of angels, her familiar hair streaming over her familiar breast. Raphael’s Vision of Ezekiel suggests to the profane, God the Father holding up His arms as if to start a flying competition.
But when every generalisation is made, it is the individual genius for blundering that opens up the most spacious vistas of humourless humour. Byzantine art affords, of course, the most naïve illustrations. In the sarcophagi of the Christian emperors at Ravenna you may see sheep eating dates from tall palms. In the mosaics of the vestibule of St. Mark’s you may see humanity unconcernedly drowning in the Deluge. Some, it is true, are whirled helplessly on their backs, but others are quite apathetic among the blue, curly waves. Noah looking out of the little folding doors of the Ark is as quaint as in the mosaics of Monreale Cathedral in Sicily. In the ancient church of S. Zeno at Verona there is an eleventh-century fresco of the Resurrection of Lazarus in which the bystanders hold their noses—a poetic touch that was repeated in later treatments of the theme.
In the Scuola of the Confraternity of St. Antony at Padua, Domenico Campagnola has a fresco, A Hungry She-Ass adores the Eucharistic Sacrament by a Miracle of the Saint, in order to convert a Heretic. In vain are heaps of green stuffs and corn spread and baskets tendered her and piles of beans; the ass, on her front knees, adores the Eucharist on a priestly table, so that even the baby lad is wrought up to adoration. One is irresistibly reminded of Goethe’s landlady at Rome calling him to see her cat adore God the Father like a Christian, when it was licking the beard of the bust, probably because of the grease that had sunk into it. In the same Scuola there is a representation of the saint’s preaching which liberates his hearers from an approaching rain-storm. People all around are flying to get out of the rain, not knowing that the saint’s sermon is dry. There are charming figures of mothers and children in the audience which atone for the unconscious humour.
But when one considers the libraries written on Italy, it is strange that that book on her grotesques should be as yet merely an impious aspiration, and that nobody has mocked even at those horrid little waxworks that represent the plague-stricken. Meseems the blessèd word “Renaissance” has hypnotised student and pleasure-pilgrim alike, but some day an irreverent refugee from the Renaissance will gather up the threads I but indicate. In that delectable volume of his there will be a chapter on the camel.
For the advent of the camel marks the faint beginnings of an historic and geographic sense, and stands for all the fantastic wonder-world of the East. Strange that the Crusades or Venice’s Eastern Empire should not have earlier awakened the comparative consciousness. But the East, with its quaintness and its barbaric colour, broke very slowly upon the culture of Europe—Victor Hugo had to rediscover it even for modern France. Despite Altichiero’s pig-tailed Tartars, it was not till the Byzantine Empire was destroyed in 1453 and the Turks were firmly established in Europe that the Christian world became really aware that the East was a world of its own. That conquest of Constantinople, from which the blessèd Renaissance is popularly dated, by sending so many Italians flying home, must have provided Italy with Oriental information as well as Greek manuscripts. And the Renaissance (or re-born) camel represents the quickened sense of local colour. At first, indeed, there is little improvement on the Giotto breed. Apparently none of the fugitives rode off on camels. Such fat creatures as take part in The Reception of the Venetian Ambassador (a picture of the school of Gentile Bellini) were never seen on sand or land. The Magian kings should have come riding on camels with swart servitors, but only a rare artist like the animal-lover Gaudenzio Ferrari is bold enough to attempt this local truth. And the result belongs to comedy. But a people without circuses or zoological gardens, to which the camel was as remote as the centaur, was not keenly aware of the anatomical details of this exotic beast, grotesque enough at its truest. And in the hands of Gentile Bellini himself the creature became quite possible, if still curious, and in that great decorative picture St. Mark preaching in the Piazza of Alexandria there is a real feeling of the turbaned, shrouded and minareted East, even if the head-shawls of the women do appear to cover top-hats and the giraffe strolls about the piazza and the dromedary is led by a string.
Nor is Eusebio di San Giorgio’s camel impossible in his Adoration of the Magi in San Pietro, Perugia, though immeasurably inferior to his oxen and his horses. Carpaccio, too, gets something of Eastern architecture and dress, if more of Venetian, into his St. Stephen at Jerusalem.
But after all there is more fascination in the primitive artistry which knew no differences of Space or Time, no colour but universal—id est, Italian—no place unlike home. The whole temper of these early painters seems to me summed up in a picture in the Uffizi by Pietro Lorenzetti, who lived about 1350, Gli Anacoreti nella Tebaide. A green water borders a white, curving shore, and land and sea are a chaos of trees, houses, steeples, people, skiffs, sailing-boats, all of the same size and brightness. A like absence of perspective—geometrical, spiritual, or humorous—is seen in Benaglio’s fresco in Verona of Christ Preaching by the Lake of Galilee, or Giotto’s fresco in Santa Croce depicting the Apocalypse of St. John. In the Lake of Galilee float two gigantic ducks and a gondola, while the audience includes mediæval falconers and pipers. Patmos is a vague turtle-shaped island, and the saint squats in the middle of it, while above hover the celestial figures. Temporal perspective is as confounded as spatial. Hence all those anachronisms which give us pause. Cimabue’s Madonna consorts with the Doctors of the Church, Fra Angelico’s with Dominicans, Alvise Vivarini’s with Franciscans. As Dante explains, the imagination can ignore Time, just as—though his dubious comparison weakens his explanation—it can conceive two obtuse angles in one triangle. A truer simile may perhaps be drawn from the Baptistery of Pisa, where the janitor—humble link in the “nutritive chain”—chants a note to show the wonderful echo, and after its long reverberation has been sufficiently demonstrated he sounds the notes of a simple chord, one after another, so that the earlier notes remain alive and enter into harmony with the new ones, and one hears an enchanting quartet—yea, even a quintet or a sextet. Sometimes he will set an even more complex chord in vibration, and all the air is full of delicious harmony. Even so the mediæval thinkers conceived of the dead and the quick, the pioneers and the successors, all living in unison, vibrating simultaneously though they had started in sequence, all harmoniously at one in the echoing halls of Fame. And so things disparate could be pictured united—anachronism was merely man putting together what blind Time had put asunder. Everything happened in the timeless realm of ideas. And often—as we saw in Sicily—the strictly chronological aspect of things is, indeed, irrelevant. Space and Time are shifting illusions that the spirit disregards. Those who are in harmony are of the same hour and of the same place.
Nor do I know where to look for a better map of the world as it figured itself in the mediæval mind—for your atlas with its assumption that man inhabits mere mounds of earth fantastically patterned is as absurd as your school chronology—than that naïve Mappamondo which Pietro di Puccio frescoed on the walls of the Campo Santo of this same white Pisa. The universe is held in the literal hands of God, whose haloed head appears dominatingly above, not without a suggestion of a clerical band. In the centre of the cosmos—note the geocentric glorification—stands the earth, mapped out into continents by a couple of single straight lines. (If Asia lies north of Europe that is a mere turn to express its hyperborean barbarism; in Fra Mauro’s map in the Doge’s Palace the south has got to the top, perhaps because Venice was there.) America, of course, is not. And yet there are compensations even for the absence of America. For this old world is circumscribed by circle on circle. On the rim of the third are perched the mere figures of the zodiac, but the spaces between the remoter extra-terrestrial circles are a-swarm with cherubs, all heads and wings, and floating robed saints and endless haloed heads of the beatified. The dim spaces below the cosmos are solidly garrisoned by bishop with crozier and monk with breviary, and the predella is full of suggestions of beauty and sanctity. Thus the whole world lies serenely in the palms of God, and saints and angels girdle it with circles of holiness.
This is, indeed, the true way to make a map—for the actual shape of the world is only one of the factors of our habitation, just as the actual features of a beloved face do not constitute its total reality for us. ’Tis not eyes or nose one sees so much as those mental circles due to loving habit in which the face swims for us—the dear haloing circles of tender experience. Rivers and mountains have, indeed, an influence on life, just as the real eyes and nose, but the world we live in is always more mental than geographical, and the same rivers and mountains serve the life of successive races. The Red Man’s America is not different from the White Man’s on the atlas—save by the black dots which mark the ephemeral tumuli called cities—yet the America of the Trust and the America of the Tomahawk are two different continents. The same thin curve marks the Thames up which the pirate Vikings sailed and the Thames of Sunday picnics. More veraciously did the Arab geographers conceive of a country by its autochthones and not by its configuration. For our country lives in us much more than we live in our country.
And so, to-day, too, a true map would circumscribe our globe—not with the equally non-existent circles of the spatial latitude and longitude, but with those of the spiritual latitude and longitude in which we float—only, I fear, our modern Mappamondo would be girdled with dark rings marked “Survival of the Fittest,” “Necessity for Navies,” “The Need of Expansion,” “The Divinity of the Dollar”; soldiers and syndicates would float around in lieu of cherubs, nor would any divine hands appear upbearing us amid the infinite spaces.
That old Pisan map leads me to suspect that Swift saw only half a fact when he complained that
“Geographers in Afric maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps.”
True, many an old map might seem to attest the truth of the accusation. There is a map of the Dark Continent in the Museum of Venice, dated 1651, with a camel, a unicorn, a dromedary, and a lion’s tail—all put in by hand. But in another map of “Apphrica” in the Arsenal of Venice there are not only lions and tigers, but tents and veiled figures, and the turrets and spires of strange buildings, and a gay sprinkling of flags. Surely the old cartographer was less concerned to fill his gaps than to express the poetry of geography. Maps were, in truth, of mediocre use in ancient times when the old Roman roads took one from town to town. What profited an aeronaut’s panorama? Maps were only indispensable on the roadless seas. The first maps in the modern sense were thus pragmatic, not scientific, for it was from the mariner’s map, or Portolano, that rigid cartography arose. But even these coast charts refused to be prosaic. There is one in the Venice Museum—a view of Italy lying sideways, as if its famous foot were asleep. Never have I seen a more joyous chart. It is all glorious with the gold and vermilion of compasses and crests and flying banners, while mountains stand out in red and gold. It must have belonged to a jolly mariner. In a complete Portolano of Europe each country flies its national flag, amid a whirl of crests and compasses. And the “Portolano del 1561 di Giacomo Maggiolo,” which may be seen in the Palazzo Bianco of Genoa, is illuminated in gold and blue and vermilion and green, sprinkled with compasses, sown with towered cities crowned by golden flags, and a-flutter with flying angels and banners and the bellying sails of carracks, with kings seated on their thrones in the middle of the sea, under glorious canopies crowned with angels, while over the whole presides the Madonna in her golden chair. Most taking of the monarchs is the King of Tartary, wearing a large moustache and surrounded by golden scimitars.
There were no gaps to fill up in these Portolani. No, the cynical Swift has missed the inwardness of these old maps, in which Art was called in to give the touch of life and reality and to eke out, not the barrenness of knowledge in particular, but of science in general. There is in the Uffizi an old map of Italy which fills the Mediterranean with boats and compasses, draws the mountains, sketches the towered cities, and illumines the names with gold-leaf. There is an old map of Venice which perches Father Neptune dominatingly in the middle, and symbolises the winds by the curly locks of children blowing every way, and fills the canals with sailing-boats and galleys and gondolas. This is something like a map of Venice. On another, which is more of a plan of the city with its buildings named, Venice is alive with heraldic figures, and over the roofs and domes fly winged lions and Neptune and Venus and angels and warriors, while a stout-lunged angel blows two trumpets at once. And the spaces of the sea are full of brave beflagged vessels with swelling sails, and galleys with many oars. Surely all this is less false than the dead reticulation which expresses Venice in your modern map. The map of Genoa, too, shows the arms of the city floating over a sea crowded with red galleys and black merchant ships and white sailing-boats.
In these old maps the dull spaces of the world are lit up by fiery stars, trumpeting angels, and allegorical figures, while another symbolic group, upholding a titulary tablet, serves, as it were, to introduce the territory to the spectator. A wreathed lady and a male student thus combine to present Arabia. Greece is introduced and presided over by angels. “Terra nova detecta et Floridae promontorium” are presented by a man holding a tablet, which records how Henry VII of England sent out John Cabot and his son Sebastian, while the dry details are further vivified by a superdominant figure of a gallant signor in a feathered cap, hand on globe and learnèd tome at feet. Asia, as a nymph with a camel, presides over a map of her continent, while a prodigious Latin title—“Quae Asiae Regna et Provinciae Hac Tabula Continentur a Propontide usque ad Indos,” &c. &c.—records how its three makers were sent to Russia in the fifteenth-century and how they ripped up (dissuerunt) much in the published itineraries. One of the trio, Ambrosius Contaremus, remained long in Russia to study the less-known portions; another, Josaphat Barbarus, devoted himself for sixteen years to the provinces round the Euxine and the Mæotian marsh. “Perlustrata commentariolo exponunt.”
That old map of Frau Mauro which I have already mentioned belongs to this same century, being dated 1459; a circular map this, in a gilded frame, with little ships floating around and America away from home, perhaps enjoying itself in Paris. Here our familiar world shows upside down, which is, of course, as scientific as being downside up. It is notable how Anglia and Caledonia (or Anglia Barbara, as she is styled in Church Latin) are disguised by this simple shifting of the point of view, and how much like herself Hibernia looks, even topsy-turvy. Another pre-American map in the University of Ferrara pictures the winds personified, blowing from every quarter.
The Stones of Venice also assume the forms of maps, as in those stone reliefs on the rococo façade of S. Maria Zobenigo opposite the Traghetto of the Lily. These are town-maps—Candia, its name upborne by a flying boy angel; Roma with its twin brethren at the wolf’s breast; Corfu, characterised by its castle and its beflagged galleys. The symbolic shorthand, which I have already noted in pictures, spread also to map-decoration as in a map at the Arsenal, wherein Ægyptus is figured by an elephant, Libia by giraffes, Judea by the crescent and minarets, Germany by a winged sage, and “Holy Russia” by churches.
If these old maps erred in the courses of rivers and the lines of mountains and in ratios of space, they are not so misleading as your modern atlas with its all too accurate earth-measurements. For even your most primitive map, your mediæval figment, with Paradise on the East, a gigantic Jerusalem in the centre, great spaces for Gryphons and Cynocephali, Sciapodes and Anthropophagi, and St. Brendan’s Isles of the Blest marked clearly west of the Canaries, gave in its way a less distortive impression than that which we obtain from the most scientific chart on Mercator’s projection. Your modern cartographer would persuade you that Canada is fifty times as large as Italy, and Canada, contemplating herself on a school globe, already pouts her breast with the illusion. In a true map, as distinguished from a geographical, dead Space would shrink to its spiritual nullity, and for its contribution to the human spirit, for its amplitude of history and poesy, Sicily—Italy’s mere foot-note—would loom larger than all the provinces of the Canadian Confederation.
And this misleading potency of the map scientific engenders political as well as spiritual dangers. Tariff Reform in Britain rests on the notion of exchanging products preferentially with these great British colonies which bulk on the map like continents, but which, as yet in their infancy, only represent in all some poor ten million souls against the homeland’s forty millions. Australia, beholding her unified contours from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Bass Strait, persists in the heroic delusion that, despite the torridity and drought of her Northern Territory, she is a single country, and that country a white man’s—nay, a Briton’s exclusively. For it is from the surplus population of the little island in the Northern Sea that all these continents into which Britain has blundered are to be filled up: a notion which lives in the same brains that fever with alarm over the exodus from her shores. And all save the spherical maps foster an infinity of fallacies of dimension: drawn to fill the like-sized page in the atlas, South America seems a twin of India; Ireland and Madagascar (which contains seven Erins) look much of a muchness; and Brazil, which is almost another Europe, bulges in the imagination less than the Balkan Peninsula. What wonder if statesmen have misguided the destinies of nations and misdirected wars by false impressions derived from atlases, with their deceptive distances and their obscurations of the real character of territories, rivers, or harbours. Seoul, the capital of Corea, Lord Curzon tells us, seems on the river, yet it is three or four miles away, and approachable only by a canal at times shallow. “Get large maps,” advised the late Lord Salisbury; but I would say, beware of maps altogether. For your school map would foist upon you the delusion that Morocco is not the East at all, but actually ten degrees more westerly than London! Whereas every schoolboy knows that it is in the middle of the “Arabian Nights.” With the Orient thus thrown south-west of Europe, we are as befogged by the atlas of to-day as by the old maps which put the Orient on the top. In truth, the Orient, like heaven, is not a place, but a state of mind.
To the deuce with your parallels of longitude! Fez in the West, forsooth!