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.