De: ITALIAN FANTASIES
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 _un_like 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!
AN EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL: WITH A DEPRECIATION OF DANTE
In that volume on the grotesque a chapter—nay, a section—would deal with the attempts of Art to give form and colour to that after-world “from whence no traveller returns.” The grotesquerie belongs more to the thought than to the picture, for in eschatological æsthetics the horrible can be reconciled to the decorative, as it is in Giotto’s _Last Judgment_ at Padua, which I suppose is the earliest treatment of the theme that counts, and which, as Giotto and Dante were in Padua together, was probably painted under the personal influence of that great authority and explorer. There is no justification in Dante’s own work, however, for the Father’s supersession by the Son, who—while _Il Padre Eterno_ is relegated to the choir-arch—occupies, as so often, the judicial bench, and looms dominant in a large polychromatic oval like an incomplete spectrum, with saints at either hand on golden chairs, and golden companies of hovering angels, the Cross beneath his feet making a decorative division of Heaven from Hell, and its arms providing clinging-points for floating angels. Among the beatific company on the celestial side of the Cross are monks presenting their monastery to lady saints, and fussy nude corpses of all ages and both sexes bobbing up out of their coffins, some looking round in surprise, some instinctively begging for grace, and one looking back into his coffin, as into a cab for something forgotten. The Hell is a chaos of tortures, overdusked by the Personal Hell, the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre (with whom I came to grow very familiar) who gulps down sinners like oysters. You see their legs protruding, and others ready for his maw clutched in his greedy hands. Still other sinners stand on their heads or hang by their hair or quiver under the tortures of gorilla-like devils and strange serpentine beasts, or whirl like Paolo and Francesca. And over all the agony, with beautiful serene face, floats the angel, clinging to the Cross, and the saints sit placid on their golden chairs, perhaps, as in that ecstatic prevision of Tertullian, finding their bliss enhanced by these wails of woe, as one’s enjoyment of one’s warm hearth is spiced by the howling of the winds about.
The mere ardour of life was immoral to the mediæval mind, as we may see from the celebrated anonymous frescoes of _Il Trionfo della Morte_ in the Campo Santo of Pisa—as if a cemetery needed any enforcement of Death’s triumph! But the opportunity is seized of besmirching “The Triumph of Life,” and by way of prelude to the tomb and its terrors a gay cavalcade of hunters rides to the chase, with hound and horn, winding through a lovely landscape. Their horses are arrested by three open coffins on the roadside, precisely of the shape of horse-troughs, but containing corpses, apparently a king’s, a priest’s, and a layman’s. The last is a mere skeleton; the others are fully robed and serpents curl spitefully about them. A stag, a rabbit, and a partridge rest serenely upon a little plateau, as if conscious there will be no danger to-day from these disconcerted sportsmen. A cowled monk holds out a long scroll to the leader of the chase, like an official presenting an address. Other holy hermits read ostentatiously beneath the trees outside their humble cottage, and one milks a quaint goat. As if the hermit were more immune from death than the hunter! Overhead hover fearful fire-breathing demons bearing beautiful women head downwards to their doom. Towards the centre of the entire picture, of which this forms but a half, sweeps Death, a sombre flying figure with a great scythe, whom cripples and the sorrowful invoke in vain; underneath are his slain, upon whose bodies swoop demons with long pitchforks and angels with long crosses, fighting furiously for the spoil, in a game of pull devil, pull angel. In one case the angel has gripped the arms, the devil the feet, and they tug and lug with wings distended to their fullest, every muscle a-strain; even if the angel succeeds, the racked ghost will have known the Inferno. Let us pray the poor soul may recover breath in the Hesperian garden, where sit the meek sainted playing on lutes and lyres or nursing pet doves and spaniels.
A companion fresco devotes itself to _The Last Judgment_. To the sound of angel-trumpets the dead rise from their coffins, to be marched right or left by stern sworded archangels, as the great arbiter—again in a surmounting oval—may determine. Haloed saints occupy a safe platform on high and watch the suppliant, panic-stricken sinners in the dock. Hell in many compartments takes half the picture, Satan throned at centre, a grisly Colossus, horned and fanged, and each compartment a chamber of horrors unspeakable, or a caldron of stewing sinners, most noteworthy of whom are the three arch-heretics of the fourteenth century, Mohammed, Anti-Christ, and Averroes (the last grown much less respectable since Dante put him with Plato). This composition—the heretics apart—is obviously on the general lines of Giotto’s, which may be considered the archetype of all the Judgment pictures, and the crudity of the conception is apparent. It is a mere parody of earthly tribunals. In the hands of a Signorelli—as at Orvieto—the vigour of the technique dominates and sweeps away the _naïveté_. It is the sublimity of terror—
“Where the bright Seraphim in burning row Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow.”
But this conventional and crowded rendering has always impressed me far less than Maso di Bianco’s in S. Croce, where a solitary soul appears for judgment in a wild gorge under the throne of Christ, while two down-sweeping angels, blowing their trumpets perpendicularly, assist the awesomeness of the design. What a pity Michelangelo did not handle the theme with this massive simplicity, and give us one naked, shivering soul with the fierce light of judgment beating upon him, instead of the stereotyped arrangement of the Judge on high, the blessed on his right, the damned on his left, the rising dead at his feet, with Hell opening underneath! His colossal fresco, with its huddle of naked saints—to which the clothes provided by later Popes lent the last touch of gloom—is, with the possible exception of Tintoretto’s _Paradise_, the dismallest picture in the world, and it is even worse placed than Tintoretto’s stupendous canvas.
The angel Michael, whose scales weigh souls, must have been hard at work ere he could find enough good people to fill this _Paradise_. When I last peeped into it in the Palace of the Doges, it was conveniently on the floor, having been removed from its wall for repair, and, standing thus propped up in the centre of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, it loomed even more gigantic than my recollection of it, filling half the vast hall and extending to the ceiling. Its precise dimensions, according to a buzzing attendant, were twenty-two metres broad by seven metres high. Here surely is the prize of prizes for the American millionaire. The largest picture in the world! Think of it! But, alas! a pauperised Government arrogantly clings to its treasures, forbids exportation. How smuggle it out? What railway carriage could hold it? How get it even across the Grand Canal to the station? What gondola, what _barca_, what _vapore_ even could carry it? Perhaps a bridge of boats might be built, as for the passing of an army. And an army indeed it holds.
Tintoretto’s Heaven is, in fact, congested beyond any hygienic standard. ’Tis a restless, jostling place, unpleasing and muddy in colour, where you are doomed to carry for ever the emblems of your life, where Moses must eternally uphold his Tables of the Law and St. George sport his armour, and martyrs shiver in perpetual undress. As usual, God the Father is an absentee Lord, and Christ and the Madonna—in equal authority, not with the woman subordinate, as in a Veronese in the same Sala—dominate the chaos of figures, flying, whirling, praying, playing, or reading. To see this Heaven is to be reconciled with Earth. Some parts of it are already destroyed, and I look forward to the day when it shall pass away with a great noise. Smaller but far more select is Tintoretto’s impressionist _Paradiso_ in the Louvre, with its rainbow swirls or celestial vortices, its curving sweeps of figures flying on clouds, only prosaic by its platform where Christ, the Madonna, and the greater saints sit like the distinguished persons at a public meeting. His _Purgatorio_ in Parma is equally imaginative, a whirl of figures and wild cliffs and rugged, lurid, serpent-haunted chasms, down which angels plunge to bring up souls to the Madonna, who sits alone in her gloriole. Bartolommeo Spranger’s Heaven—which may be seen in Turin—is a place where saintly companies link hands as in a child’s game, while grimacing demons or snakes tear at sinners.
Palma Giovane tried to cover the entrance wall of the Sala dello Scrutinio of the Doge’s Palace with an emulation of Tintoretto, but the main renown of his _Last Judgment_ seems to rest on his humorous idea of putting his wife both into Heaven and Hell. The use of Hell to pay off private scores is not unique with Palma, and of course everybody can plead the precedent of Dante.
In another Venetian Paradise—that of Jacobello del Fiore—the symmetrical groups of haloed saints in blue and red and gold recall exactly the groups in the La Scala ballet. The Paradise in Botticelli’s _Assumption of the Virgin_ in the National Gallery is also somewhat geometric, though the empty lilied court below gives beautiful relief. Fra Bartolommeo’s large faded fresco of _The Last Judgment_, in Florence, with its sworded archangel to greet the poor souls as they rise from their graves, is inspired by the Pisan fresco, and is less interesting than that of Fra Angelico, his fellow Dominican at San Marco, in whom we breathe a serener, clearer air, though his sweetness and finish accentuate again the intellectual _naïveté_. His series of little panels in the Accademia of Florence has a quaint originality, the Judge sitting over a mystic red and green wheel, with the blessed on either hand. Angels welcome newcomers or lament over the rejected, while demons poke spears into the damned. More conventional in composition is his large easel-picture in the same room—a miracle of detailed loveliness, except for the Hell, which is botched, as though unsuited to his artistic temperament. Indeed we know he made his devil hideous out of sheer dislike of the theme. The sheep are divided from the goats by a curious row of open graves resembling sky-lights. The Judge is superdominant, angels and babes hovering round him, the trumpeting angels at his feet. In the Paradise of flowers walk the saints in couples and companies; the sinners—in crowns, mitres, or mere caps—are driven Hellward at the points of a pitchfork into their respective circles, where some are eaten of the horrible horned Satan, some are eating one another, and others are gnawing their own bloody hands. There are sinners seething in pots, sinners starving at a laden table, sinners hung up, sinners holding their own heads in their hands. Demons like brown bears gnash white teeth, and in the north-north-east corner of Hell a capacious big-toothed gullet—horrible in its suggestion of more behind—is gulping down two red-headed wretches. In his _Christ in Hades_ the gentle painter, following an apocryphal gospel, incarnates Hell in a demon crushed beneath its door.
In the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella the theme is repeated by the brothers Orcagna. Andrea took Paradise and suffused it with tender beauty, fitting it with row upon row of seraphim and saintly figures, whose serried symmetrical haloes suggest, however, a marshalling of saints for inspection; while Bernardo made of Hell a chart of ugliness—a compartmental chaos of strange fading horrors—fading though the Heaven has lasted. But it is not easy to get decorative beauty into the Inferno, especially when broken up into parishes of pain and not part of a complete _Last Judgment_ such as that by Andrea single-handed in the same Chapel. In this last, angels carrying the cross and the thorns make a variant in the composition. In the Spanish Chapel of the same church _The Way to Paradise_ is treated as of more concern to mortals than the nature of the goal, of which we get the merest peep; and perhaps the artist’s own concern was Beauty, for the central pattern of the picture is woven by a procession on richly caparisoned horses winding round and round. Tranquilly beautiful are the figures at the Passion, even apart from the tender figure of Christ, whose halo hides the form of the decorative polished cross he bears.
The Paradise is, however, a Dominican Paradise, for this noble fresco on examination turns out to be a complicated allegory in glorification of the order, even including the pictorial pun or rebus of black-and-white dogs (_domini canes_), guarding the faithful sheep and worrying the heretical wolves. The Dominican Heaven has always a marked preference for Dominican dogma, as the Dominican Hell is particularly hospitable to rival forms of teaching. Incidentally this great anonymous painting is a social _Mappamondo_ of the mediæval, including every type in Church and State from Pope to pauper; the vanities and pomps, the penances and renunciations. A lovely peace broods over this picture, as over all the Chapel. Hell does not disturb its restful walls, save as the mild Limbo to which Christ descends to redeem Adam, Noah, and other figures, proleptically haloed. He hovers majestically over the vague scene, carrying a red-cross flag over his left shoulder. It is only the demons who give grotesquerie to the picture, but they are unsurpassable. One of these baffled imps falls prostrate in the void, another is tearing his goatee beard, a third stands scowling, with folded wings, the hair of a fourth stands on end, a bristle of wires. This last demon is livid in hue; his fellows are more or less fiery.
Bronzino has dealt less happily, if less grotesquely, with the same theme, for to his later vision it was a good opportunity for studying the nude and the half-nude. But to follow out the theme of _Christ in Hades_ would carry me too far. I must, however, refer to the touching conception of Christ _rushing_ to the rescue: as in the picture by Andrea Previtali in which Christ is seen in a whirl of drapery with a streaming flag, pulling up an old woman and a girl. A large cross occupies the centre of this Limbo, to which cling or pray rescued nude figures, while St. John stands by with a smaller cross.