33 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/472d5e8dad1f96fa21ab49278efd06ed.pdf 5188e49d113fdb60444b3483c55bb8ac PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 29. Faust: Creative War of Spirit a1) Peter von Cornelius, 1816, Faust and Mephisto on the Rabenstein, Graphische Sammlung, Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf 1) William Blake, c. 1808, Satan Calling up his Legions, formerly Lord Leaconfield 1a) Same, upper detail Music: Beethoven, 1823, Finale of Ninth Symphony (opening), Col. SL-165 Y7 30051 (Walter) The heroic vindications of 1800 are three: of Faust, of this Lucifer, of Prometheus. "Faust," said Burckhardt, "is a genuine myth, a great primordial image." But since the Renaissance, the Faust story had been waiting its time and place; as the protomyth of Satan had waited for Milton or, as here, for the culminant upheaval of Blake. The wave that lifts these actions — as on the Finale search of Beethoven's Ninth — is a Revolutionary reversal by which a defiance once outlawed beckons to new heaven and earth. (fade Ninth) So Blake shows Milton's Archangel — Milton "of the devil's party without knowing it" — rousing our Antediluvian powers (Energy the only life and Reason its outward bound) from the fiery hell to which creed and law have consigned them: The whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. At the same time, Lessing, and then Goethe, veered hell-compacted Faust from self-destroying to self-saved. 2) 2a) Goya, c. 1815(?), Prometheus, Aquatint, 1st state, Fine Arts, Boston Same, upper detail (Ninth up, search motif) JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Prometheus, too, had been seized on by Goethe in the Storm and Stress 1770s of his youth, when he took up the Faust legend he would work at for sixty years (Prometheus to Zeus): Here I sit and fashion mortals After my image, A race of men to be as I am, To suffer and to weep, To relish, to enjoy; And to despise as I do You and yours — (CGB) Und dein nicht zu achten; Wie ich! A conception Goya, having stood the course of Revolution and Napoleonic war, endowed, about 1815, with its giant ambiguity of threat and promise — the same half-god Shelley would unbind and raise to cloud-ecstasy: (Scherzo phrase) To defy power, which seems omnipotent… Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent… This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. a3) 3) 3a) C.D. Friedrich, c. 1818, Woman at a Window, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Double: [A] a3, and [B] P.O. Runge, 1809-10, Large Morning, detail, Hamburg Double: Detail of both the above (video does not use 3, only 3a) (Adagio phrase) But Shelley's rhetoric is far from the immediacy of Goethe's Faust, which opens at its center to a love tender as the Beethoven adagio (fade Ninth), simple as Friedrich's girl at a window — Gretchen: "For him only/ I look from the window" — "Nach ihm nur schau ich/ Zum Fenster hinaus"; present, as when she plucks the petals, "Er liebt mich — Liebt mich nicht"; yet ungraspable as the form Faust had seen in the witch's mirror (as the Helen who melts to a mist which carries him forward); it is the Gretchen he leaves in prison tied to guilt and loss, her wrenching pain-prayer: JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Ach neige/ Du Schmerzenreiche/ Dein Antlitz gnädig meiner Not! later agleam — like Runge's Morning: Neige, neige,/ Du Ohnegleiche/ … Dein Antlitz gnädig meinem Glück! (Again Ninth: search toward Hymn of Joy) That Gretchen waits a4) b4) 4) Double: [A] Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818, Woman before the Sunset, Kunsthalle, Hamburg, and [B] 4: Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818, Mountain Climber over Fog, Kunsthalle, Hamburg Eugene Delacroix, c. 1827, Gretchen tempted in Church, Dessins, Louvre, Paris Caspar David Friedrich, Mountain Climber, Hamburg for Faust to return from Wood and Cave — Faust, who has there framed his image against hers, as Friedrich opposed this climber on the last rock over a sea of fog, to those studies of his own bride yearning at the window or across fields to the sunset: (fade Ninth) Faust a cataract hurled from crag to crag (as Hölderlin would take it up: "von Klippe/ Zu Klippe geworfen,/ Jahrlang ins Ungewisse hinab"); Gretchen an alpine cottage which he, hated of god, der Gottverhaßte, must hurl into the abyss. No wonder imprisoned Gretchen will shudder at him, fiend attended: "Heinrich, mir graut's vor dir." And yet, as Goethe confessed, he could not have borne to write sheer tragedy. That intolerable pain must fire regeneration. Thus in Hegel only Philosophy sustains the pathos of history, only the knowledge that Reason "makes war on itself — consumes its own existence, but in this very destruction works up that existence to a new form…" (Ninth, Hymn of Joy, instrumental) We know Friedrich's haunted climber looks toward death and transfiguration. a5) J. Martin, 1817, The Bard, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; + V details, or Vb5, double 5) Isabey, 1805, Frontispiece, "Poems of Ossian," Bibl. Nat., Paris; + V detail 5a) F.P.S. Gerard, c. 1811, Ossian on the Shore (oil variant of the Isabey), Kunsthalle, Hamburg (fade Ninth) JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Everywhere the spirit of storm shook the old moorings. It had begun in the 1750s; Gray had blown it up in the Pindaric passion of a Welsh Bard: Ruin seize thee, ruthless King! Confusion on thy banners wait … In 1760 Macpherson published what he called translations from the old Gaelic of Ossian; so a rant too cloudy for anything but a translation (though indeed it was Macpherson's own) swept from the Scotch Highlands over England and all Europe, reverberating in long echoes from Blake to Frankenstein, from Werther to Hölderlin's Hyperion — through Beethoven, of course; even in France, where the Faustian action was mostly political, it fueled the cause of freedom. Through the neo-classic coldness of French Empire, Ossian spills his raptures, as he invokes the heroes of war. It is a phase of that anomaly by which the more and more actual seizure on the forces of the world moves for its Hynm of Joy further and higher, Music: 6) 6a) 6b) 6c) Hymn of Joy, instrumental statement continued K.F. Schinkel, c. 1815(?), Ideal Landscape, Nat. Gal., Berlin; + V detail, left Same, detail, right foreground Swiss, late Gothic, end of 15th cent. (orig. 13th cent.), Aigle Castle Again, Schinkel, Ideal Landscape (detail, above) into a kind of irradiated and transcendental dream, remote as this SchillerBeethoven "All men shall be brothers" from the 1823 Europe of Holy Alliance and reaction. Schinkel, painter-architect, turns a Claude landscape to a German vision, where a deer strays and a dove flies over boys who will shoot only at a target. It is like the castle somewhere up from the Aegean, where Faust and Helen meet in Part II ("The God-deceived incur no blame") — the sign of their union Helen's migration from classical hexameters to the Gothic mystery of rhyme: Helen: How can I speak with that delicious art? JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Faust: To learn is easy; it springs from the heart… The soul sees nothing before or after this; The moment, the moment only… (Helen closes) is our bliss. (CGB) So the castle dissolves to an Arcadian paradise, where the short-lived Byron-Euphorion is born. (fade Ninth) a7) Delacroix, c. 1826, Mephisto Over City, detail, Faust Illustrations 7) Franz Klein, Beethoven Life Mask, 1812 7a &7b) Michelangelo, 1513-16, Heroic Captive, torso, then head, Louvre, Paris; with video return to 7, Beethoven Life Mask The original Faust had been thrown down by the "fiendful fortune" of all who "practice more than heavenly power permits." But what does heaven permit? It is not inscribed in the stars. (Ninth: search resumed, then voice) For the new Prometheus, it can only be felt out by the daring of excess — as the Beethoven of this 1812 life-mask (already shaking his fist at the sky) had to stretch the symphony of Haydn and Mozart to vocal imperative. What sparks off divinity has no fulfillment but attempted godhead. The dilemma is suspended in Faust from the Prologue in Heaven — Man must err as long as he strives — Es irrt der Mensch, solang' er strebt — to the last scene: Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, Den können wir erlösen — Who always pains himself to strive, That one we can redeem. (CGB) Striving destroys and creates — as in Blake, Hegel, Nietzsche. Against the incapacity of sin-fallen man, Pico's self-maker had foreshadowed a new morality of volitional risk — that Western venture which has crested in the Faust-wave. (fade Hymn of Joy) JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell 8) Symbolic History Danubian, c. 5500 B.C., stone "Fish-Mouth Man," Lepenski Vir, Yugoslavia Civilization must have been a Faustian enterprise from the start. When the fish-mouth man of the Danube Iron Gate hammered himself, before five thousand B.C. into the first free-standing stone monument of the human family, he recorded such a daring as the plowing up and seeding of mother earth which burned its way into the Oedipus myth; or the comparable assault on heaven for which the Giants were thrown down. 9) Egyptian, c. 2660 B.C. (Dynasty III), Step Pyramid and Temple, Sakkara And when the step pyramids and papyrus temples rose 4600 years ago over the valley of the Nile, a raid had been made on the kingdom of death surely as great as that of the Babylonian Gilgamesh, pathfinder for saviour heroes of how many faces, who went down (as Faust to the Mothers, stamping) to spoil and harrow hell. 10) 10a) Aegean (Thera), 16th cent. B.C., ships off a coast (Libya?), from Santorin, Nat. Mus., Athens Same, detail of upper left And when that Hero would don the mask of Satanic compact, where could he venture but in the old field of overweening and disaster? It had shaped the myths Homer received from Achaian conquerors — that epos of ruinous assault on an ancient city of the Gods — as in this twenty-foot Theran fresco of ships deployed off a coast whose flora and fauna suggest Africa. Kazantzakis had died before it was uncovered, but his Faust-Odysseus divines such an action. The earthquake that destroyed that Atlantis 11) Mycenean, 16th cent. B.C., Gold Mask, called Agamemnon, Nat. Mus., Athens must have colored mythic fact — the gloomy pride and death-disaster which made Schliemann call this Mycenean mask of hammered gold, from 300 years before the Trojan War, the mask of Agamemnon, Aeschylus' type of hybris and Ate: "But his unbridled heart drove him on to outrage, keen to sacrifice his child." How near and far, Faust's curse on Hope, Faith, and Patience. 12) Attic (Vulci), c. 475 B.C., Odysseus and the Sirens, Brit. Mus., London JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So the tragic question was seeded: to which end Arete will lead, Iliadic ruin; Odyssean homecoming — Odysseus, who stopped the ears of his sailors with wax, but bound himself to the mast to hear the Sirens' song (like Faust, to experience all good and evil: "der Erde Weh, der Erde Glück zu tragen"); but Odysseus brought it off, with Athena's aid, refurbishing his kingly line — a feat of earth-management Goethe's dying hero dreams of: … ein paradiesisch Land — A land like paradise, won from the sea: To tread that free ground with a people free. (CGB) 13) Attic Krater (Pan Painter), c. 470 B.C., Artemis Kills Acteon, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston On the other side are the luckless aspirers — Acteon struck by Artemis' revenge and the fury of his own hounds. As if the Iliad and the Odyssey — destructive wrath and skilful homecoming — had defined forever the polar field of searching fable: Ulysses in Dante banned to the Hell camp, infinite seeker drowned; while Faust, who had begun there (Marlowe: "Mountains and hills come, come and fall on me/ And hide me from the heavy wrath of God") finds the redemptive shore: (CGB) In his darkest urges, a good man Will know and grope his way to the right course — Ein guter Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewußt. 14) Roman, c. 20 B.C., detail of armor, Prima Porta Augustus, Vatican, Rome (CGB '86) Now the armored breast of Augustus (like Virgil's poem) fuses the twofold theme: homecoming rule of the war-mastered earth; so the whole Hegelian task of the Christian West seems foreshadowed, though in weighty outwardness, as if, beyond the armor, we did not know what the breast contained — hollow as the state of Faust's threatened Roman Kaiser. JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell 15) 15a) Symbolic History South German, 11th cent., The Sin of Adam and Eve, bronze door relief, Augsburg (CGB '59); video: detail only North Italian, c. 1100-25, Expulsion from Paradise, bronze door relief, S. Zeno, Verona (CGB '59) If what it held was soul-hunger, it devoured doctrine with a vengeance — Dark Age fallen man, prayer- and faith-addicted (the Sin of the Augsburg doors). From that ascetic vault ("Verfluchtes dumpfes Mauerloch," damned musty hole in the wall; and "Das is deine Welt! das Heißt eine Welt!" that's your world; they call that a world) Faust is in rebellion. Yet every attempt hurls him back to that ground. From the grim Earth Spirit he wriggles like a worm ("Ein furchtsam weggekrümmter Wurm"), and it is the Easter miracle ("In memory only, reconsidered passion") that saves him from suicide. Die Träne quillt, die Erde hat mich wieder! He returns to earth, but not to the faith-fold. "Entbehren sollst du! entbehren!" — "Renounce, renounce, is all they say." 16) sollst Nicholas of Verdun, 1180, Harrowing of Hell, Klosterneuburg Altar, near Vienna; video: detail only That was hardly just, any more than Nietzsche would be, to his Christian launching. For Christ had broken hell and fetched Adam and Eve for the ultimate ecstasy of glorified flesh. Such upward daring in Gothic — in Leonin and Perotin, Music: Perotin, c. 1200, Sederunt, close of 1st Quadruplum, (Deller) Vanguard HM 1 SD in this Nicholas of Verdun enamel, or in Joachim's Third Kingdom — had sowed the seed (as Goethe knew, with his heaven-close) 17) 17a) Delacroix, 1830, Liberty leading the People, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Same, detail of Liberty and corpses; video: corpses only of all later harvests of utopian hope: Delacroix. JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Berlioz, 1834, close of Harold in Italy, RCA-V LSC-2228 What we have long been tracing is the filling in of the temporal and earthly chords (here Berlioz) of that claim, its Machiavellian, Hegelian, then Marxist acceptance of ingredient negation, of the devil's pact which Hegel calls the cunning of Reason, that it alienates itself in the passionate work of heroes who must break the old law: The idea pays the penalty of determinate existence and corruptibility, not from itself, but from the passions of individuals. (end Berlioz) In this Revolutionary transformation of the harrowing of hell, 18) 18a) Rembrandt, 1653, Faust in his Study, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Same, central detail JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Faust plays a mythic role. Midway between his origins and Goethe, he was etched by Rembrandt, as he faces the sign of the Macrocosm, an episode neither in the Faust Book nor in Marlowe. Where did it arise in the folk womb of Faust's unfolding? And the sign, copied from a magic amulet Rembrandt knew, the shadowy mother, the mirror she holds, are they cabala truth, or Goethe's Schauspiel: what a show, but only a show. Between Rembrandt's truth-seeker and the ironist in Goethe's vaulted room, what bitter lees have been drunk: Habe nun, ach! Philosophie, Juristerei und Medicin, Und leider auch Theologie Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn. Da steh' ich nun, ich armer Tor! Und bin so klug als wie zuvor… — A disillusion the Transcendental had to transcend. 19) Ottonian (Reichenau), c. 1000, Transfiguration, Gospels of Otto III, Royal Lib., Munich The Faust-myth had arisen in the German soul. With Goethe it returns to the matrix which even from 1000 had mysteriously charged the union of spirit and nature: this Reichenauer Transfiguration, where God-colors in the sky call flower-colors from the rock ground: that "mystic harvest of the fields of God" brightening toward Wolfram's metaphor of dawn: "Its claws strike through the clouds; with power it lifts up from the gray." — "Sîne klâwen durh die wolken sint geslagen,/ er stîget ûf mit grôzer kraft." 20) Altdorfer, 1529, Victory of Alexander, detail, Alte Pinakothek, Munich In the vast expatiation of Renaissance: Altdorfer's battle-vista points to Faust's rapture of following the sinking sun: Schon tut das Meer sich mit erwärmten Buchten Vor den erstaunten Augen auf… Ich eile fort, ihr ew'ges Licht zu trinken… Already ocean with its sun-warmed bays Spreads from the hills to my astonished sight… JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And soul spreads wings to drink the eternal light… (CGB) It is Goethe's genius to have preserved in Faust, as from the 1500 fable, Altdorfer's Renaissance discovery — yet joined with the romantic longing of 1800, to transcend that very phenomenology. 21) 21a) 21b) V21c) Friedrich, c. 1812(?), Two men by the sea at moonrise, Nat. Gallery, Berlin Friedrich, 1830-35, A man and a woman contemplating the moon, detail, Nat. Gallery, Berlin Friedrich, 1807-08, Top half of Cross in the Mountains, Dresden Gallery Detail of 21: Friedrich, Men at Moonrise Music: Beethoven, 1825, Cavatina: Adagio (opening), Quartet No. 13 in BFlat Major, Op. 130; Columbia M5L 277 Such yearning is distilled by Friedrich, whose pantheistic landscapes Goethe admired: this moonrise sky a cathedral of light for the almost disembodied soul; so by Beethoven's last slow movements, or by Goethe's "Selige Sehnsucht," written (incredibly) the night his wife Christiane died: (three of the five stanzas, translated by CGB) From its woven bed of shadows Mere enclosure falls away: Love spreads new wings to the meadows Of another mating play. Tireless, upward; spaces dwindle; Nothing hems declared desire; God is light and light will kindle, And the moth wings leap in fire. Know, until you learn to weave Such flame-dying into breath, Everywhere you haunt the grave Of the shadowed earth. Und solang du das nicht hast, Dieses: Stirb und Werde! Bist du nur ein trüber Gast Auf der dunklen Erde. JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In that pool of world-spirit, Faust reached the goal of Burckhardt's Primordial. (fade Beethoven Cavatina) 22) 22a) J.G. Schadow, 1816, Goethe Life Mask (at age 67) Goethe, c. 1780, Silhouette before a bust The crucible was the Goethe of this 1816 life-mask. Poet and artist, statesman, scientist, man of passion and of formal control, nearing 70 but with a last consuming love for a young girl before him — he would have doubted being paired with Beethoven, whose admiration he, always struggling for balance, never quite returned. Mozart had been his younger contemporary and chosen composer: Music: Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, Close of Act I, from London A-4406 the only man, he said, who could have set Faust — who indeed had done as much in Don Giovanni. But that was of Part I. Neither in its damnation nor in Mozart is the cresting of our Faust-wave. It was as if Goethe had lived two lives. In 1770, at Beethoven's birth, a23) 23) 23a) Franco-German end of 13th cent., Prince of this World, Dom-Museum, Strasbourg (CGB '59); video: top detail only Double: [A] a23 (CGB '59); and [B] Houdon, c. 1777, Voltaire in Age, Louvre, Paris Single of 23B, Voltaire, upper detail he was already a known poet, in Straßburg, celebrating German Gothic and fomenting Storm and Stress. The smiling devil-prince from the Cathedral there might be a forestudy for his own jester Mephistopheles, as he tempts Faust's scholar to the lecheries of medicine, flirts with gossip Martha, bawdies with witches and jokes his way through everything. But Goethe's joker did not simply step from the Strasbourg façade. That Medieval tempter was joyfully innocent. Whereas Goethe's Mephistopheles is as old and worldly-wise as Houdon's Voltaire. It is in the aging of the smile, from Gothic delight to the ironic rationalities of the author of Candide, that we feel the conscious weight of history against which Revolutionary renewal — Blake's "happy, happy Love! JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History free as the mountain wind!" — had to pit itself. As Tolstoi's Prince Andrei would never live down his rationalist Voltaire father, so Faust is saddled to the end with the grin of denial Gretchen abhors, that Ewig-Leere, Eternal-Empty, which mocks his blind age with a pun on Graben and Grave. (end Don Giovanni Act I) Where Goethe transcends Mozart, is not in carrying that irony, 24) 24a) Blake, 1785-90, Oberon, Titania, and Puck, Tate Gallery, London Blake, 1793-95, Song of Los, plate 5, Oberon and Titania in Lilies, British Museum; video: detail only but in kicking off from it, into the transcendental. Or had The Magic Flute, like early Blake, hinted at that too? Music: Mozart, 1791, Magic Flute, close of the Water Test, from Deutsche Gramnophon 2709-017 (fade) Though even vision bore the weight of history. 25) Baldung Grien, 1514, Witches' Sabbath, drawing, Albertina, Vienna; video: detail only Goethe's witches are not those overflows of Gothic force Baldung Grien vitalized in the time of the original Faust, when English Skelton was carousing with Elinor Rumming: Her loathly lere Is nothing clear, But ugly of cheer, Droopy and drowsy, Scurvy and lowsy, Her face all bowsy, Comely crinkled, Wondrously wrinkled, Like a roast pig's ear, Bristled with hair… a26) 26) Jacob de Gheyn II, 1600, Witches' Sabbath, Ashmolean, Oxford, detail Whole of same drawing JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Nor Jacob de Gheyn's more lurid witches of the time of Macbeth, a play Goethe was reading those same years at Strasbourg, guided to Shakespeare by Herder: cave, cat, bat, poisoned entrails and all. But witches had been alive in 1600, as the poet Fairfax wrote when his children were possessed, or as Massachusetts Bay would painfully record. Hardly in tourist Rome two centuries later, when Goethe sketched his Witch's Kitchen: Au! Au! Au! Au! Verdammtes Tier! Verfluchte Sau! Versäumst den Kessel, versengst die Frau! Verfluchtes Tier! 27) Van Wynan (Ascanius), Dutch, c. 1710(?), Temptation of St. Anthony, Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74); + V detail (to be added 1996) He had to revive all that, from what had gone interplanetary and remote, as in this Dutch fantasy after 1700. Enlightened Faust objects to the whole affair: "this crazy sorcery goes against the grain … Haven't you found any other balsam?" But the apes roll the gleaming globe of the world, Faust looks in the magic mirror, and rejuvenation goes forward: This drink in your belly, You'll see Greek Helen in every filly. 28) 28a) (CGB) Goya, 1797-98, Witches' Sabbath, Fund. Lázaro, Madrid Goya, 1797-98, Pretty Teacher, etching, Caprichos 68, Prado, Madrid It is Goya, of the same time, who confronts the same task — that of Burns in "Tam O'Shanter," with its "haunted kirk," "Auld Nick in shape o' beast," JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Warlocks and witches in a dance… Satan glowered and fidged fu' fain, And hotched and blew wi' might and main; or later of Hawthorne — of all who artfully summon the lost supernatural from the depths: so Goethe's Walpurgis Night, with its old witch, like a split tree, with "ungeheures Loch" — conscious revival rousing the unconscious: Wer heute sich nicht heben kann, Ist ewig ein verlorner Mann. 29) 29a) 29b) Goethe, 1787, The Palatine, drawing, Goethe Museum, Weimar Goethe, 1787, The Phlegraean Plain, colored drawing, same ('96 replacing Claude drawing) Double: [A] Goethe, 1787-88, Vesuvius in Eruption, ink and water-color; and [B] detail of 29, The Palatine; both Goethe Museum But the Goethe who tangled with the Middle Ages in Strasbourg became the classicist of the 1786 Roman Journey, of this ink-wash of the Palatine, as of the iambic dramas Iphegenia and Tasso. It was a year after his return from Rome, and in the vein of classical command, that he began the soliloquy of "Wood and Cave" — "Wald und Höhle": Exalted Spirit, you gave me, gave me all I prayed for… Nature for a kingdom, with power To feel and to enjoy her. (CGB) Though what follows is the converse gift, of the indispensable devil-companion: So from desire I stagger toward enjoyment, And in enjoyment languish for desire — (CGB) those classical sketches brushed with the Storm and Stress of a Vesuvius in eruption. That cloven one is the crux of Goethe's power; it is what inspired also in Rome Faust's rejuvenation in the Witch's Kitchen. JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a30) Double: [A] Cologne Cathedral, 13th-19th cent; and [B] Andalusia, c. 1830, near Philadelphia 30) Double: [A] Schinkel, 1810, Sketch for a burial chapel for Queen Luise, Schinkel Museum, Berlin; and [B] Schinkel, 1816-18, Die Neue Wache unter den Linden, Berlin 30a) Schinkel, 1834, Design for a Royal Hall on the Acropolis of Athens, Schinkel Museum, Berlin 30b) Friedrich, c. 1830, Temple at Agrigento, Dortmund Museum; + V detail In architecture Goethe and his age passed the rift to the romantic century: the Gothic adoration which would complete, as at Cologne, cathedrals abandoned for centuries; the temple-dream that would row the American East and South with columns. Schinkel best exhibits it: this sketch of a burial chapel for Queen Luise, 1810 — against his columned Museum or Watch under the Lindens; or more tellingly, this unconstructed Royal Hall for the Acropolis of Athens — as Faustian a flight as Hölderlin's toward a land he would never see: Sacred Greece… feast-hall floored with ocean, tables Mountain peaks, lifted time out of mind for a destinate Coming. But where are the thrones and temples, where The Vessels, brimmed once with nectar, delight of the gods, with song? (CGB) Aber di Thronen, wo? die Tempel, und wo die Gefässe, Wo mit Nectar gefüllt, Göttern zu Lust der Gesang? 31) Altdorfer, c. 1525, Fall of Man triptych, with Bacchanal, Nat. Gal., Washington, D.C.; video: whole follows two Bacchic details Music: L. Senfel, c. 1525(?), close of Freundliches K, M.H.S. 1390 In blending Classic and Gothic, Goethe culminates what began in the Renaissance. Witness his Bacchic chorus, rhymed as in Medieval Latin, with which Mephistopheles' spirits sing Faust asleep. But in this 1525 Altdorfer, the drunken left panel is subordinate to the Fall, of which it is one of the sinful consequences. Pagan joy was as islanded as in the songs and dances of 1520 Senfel. (end Senfel) JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell 32) 32a) Symbolic History Neumann, c. 1740, and G. Tiepolo, 1753, Stairhall with ceiling fresco [video: ceiling only], Bishop's Palace, Würzburg Same (Tiepolo), Kaisersaal Ceiling (CGB '86) By 1753, when Tiepolo frescoed the Bishop's Palace in Würzburg with the lustful gods of Olympus, the sacred dependence had been broken. Music: Vivaldi, 1726, Four Seasons, Autumn (opening), Turnabout TV 34040S As in Vivaldi's Seasons, opulent Autumn fruits around us. It may well have been some such tour-de-force rapture of vaulted sky which suggested the opening of Goethe's bacchic fantasy, "Das Einschläferungslied": Let the stone-dark arches Vanish above us, Smiling reaches Of blue ether crown us… (CGB) 33) Feichtmayr and Christian, 1747-58, Angel, High Altar, Zwiefalten, Bavaria German Baroque churches too had featured those lighted openings, through which angels, melodiously unrobed, smile like girls at harvest home — bright forms of heaven in the Faust poem. (fade Vivaldi) 34) V34a) Mantegna, 1465-74, Ceiling, Camera degli Sposi, Ducal Palace, Mantua Same, a central detail The architect who decorates the chapel in Goethe's Elective Affinities copies the pure sky and angels of early Renaissance. Mantegna stands at the source of such a vanishing of vault into blue. Thus the spirits to Faust: Schwindet, ihr dunkeln Wölbungen droben! Reizender schaue Fruendlich der blaue Äther herein! A35) Pontormo, 1521, Autumn, Villa Medici, Poggio a Caiano near Florence, detail JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History B35) Watteau, 1717, Embarkation for Cythera, detail, Berlin-Dahlem 35a) An. Carracci, c. 1595, Silenus gathering grapes, Nat. Gal., London 35b) Double: [A] P.O. Runge, 1808, Morning, small version; and [B] Böcklin, 1888, Hymn of Spring In the dissolved space a pagan harvest opens, like that Pontormo frescoed for the Medici; but aflutter with wings and robes over arbors of lovers, as in Watteau's rococo Cythera. Then grapes and wine, earth pouring streams of wine. Could Vivaldi's Autumn have swelled to Beethoven without the Goethean vision Disney would vulgarize? For us, let the Pastorale Scherzo and the Faust Vintage advance through three centuries to the earth-meltings and soul-wingings of 1810 Runge and 1880 Böcklin. (CGB translation follows) 2nd 34) 2nd 34a) Music: Again, Mantegna Ceiling, center T. Zuccaro, c. 1555, Arbor fresco, ceiling, Villa Giulio, Rome (CGB '48) Beethoven, 1808, opening, "Pastoral," Vox PL 6960 3rd movement, Symphony #6, If the clouds would give place, Through sundered blackness Stars would glisten, Suns without number, Milder than ours; Heaven's plumed powers In beauty and yearning Bend and sway to us; 2nd 35) Double: [A] Pontormo Autumn; and [B] Watteau Embarkation for Cythera How the blown garments Of gossamer cover Meadows of clover, Bowers where lovers Hushed in fervor Wreathe love forever, Arbor on arbor, Green leaves and tendrils; And harvest clusters Of grapes heap panniers; JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Va36) 36) 36a) Symbolic History An. Carracci, 1597-1600, ceiling, with Bacchus and Ariadne, Galleria, Palazzo Farnese, Rome Same, detail of the Silenus group Lower detail of a37, Runge Morning, small version (CGB '86) Crushed in presses The red juice gushes, Foams into torrents Of blushing bright wine, Streams that rush down Crystalline channels, Leave peaks and highlands Gleaming behind them, Spread into basins Of ponds, lakes, and bays — Breiten zu Seen Sich ums Genügen Grünender Hügel. a37) 37) 37a) Again, Runge Morning, small version (see A of 35b) Runge, 1809-10, Morning, large version, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (CGB '86) Same, upper detail (CGB '86) Und das Geflügel Schlürfet sich Wonne, Flieget der Sonne, Flieget den hellen Inseln entgegen — Shores flanked with pastures, Flower-slopes of pleasure; There the winged creatures Skim purple ocean, Dip, sip, and rising Soar into sunlight, JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Bank over islands Wave-borne on billows That lap the shallows; Hear clear voices From echoing hollows In choirs rejoicing As they dance and scatter: 38) Again, Böcklin, Hymn of Spring (see B of 35b); video: detail only Some, air-nimble, Climb sheer mountains, In must-fountains Others are swimming, While sky-flights hover On pinions of azure — All singing, all craving Life, and the far-figured Stars of loving Rapture and grace. Andere schweben; Alle zum Leben, Alle zur Ferne Liebender Sterne, Seliger Huld. (fade Beethoven, Pastorale) Is Böcklin's the last phantom of that hypnosis? 39) 39a) Correggio, c. 1530, Leda and the Swan, Museum, Berlin-Dahlem Same, center detail When Faust, stunned by the first embrace of Helen, is stretched again in Northern darkness, Homunculus hovering above him reads his dream — a description of this 1530 Correggio, which had come from France to Germany in 1763, after it had been wilfully damaged and in part repainted (Goethe did not know that the three nudes are all Leda at different moments of the story): Clear waters in a grove, and girls undressing, JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All beautiful… but one the rest surpassing… Of royal line… laves her foot in crystal. What rush of beating wings in the watery mirror? The maidens flee; the queen, in tranquil play, Sees the prince of swans glide to her knee. (CGB) This avoids the abstract violence Yeats would give the scene: A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl… Yet Goethe's Correggio myth speaks a related symbol: Helen, born of this coupling, is the spirit of Greece; Faust dreams of that under Gothic vaults, as Goethe yearned for the Italian Journey. 40) 40a) Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem, plate 28: Vala and Jerusalem in the Lily, Mellon Collection Same, detail Faust [to Helen in Arcadia]: …Know yourself a child of Godhead, The primal world your paradise and home. (CGB) How far Blake's primal world (Vala and Jerusalem lifted in the Lily of Havilah over the Sea of Time and Space) has put off the outwardness of Goethe. Not even the love-fragrant lily of Hölderlin's "Farewell to Diotima" is so visionary: Stunned I gaze at you; voices and sweet song, As from former times, I hear, and the sweep of strings, And golden, over the brook, The lily breathes fragrance upon us. (CGB) Und die Lilie duftet Golden über dem Bach uns auf. Hegel: The essence of spirit is freedom, self-contained existence… History is the exhibition of Spirit in the process JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially… a41) 41) Blake, 1800-05, The River of Life, detail, Tate Gallery, London Same, whole. Video adds another detail In the German nations… the spiritual becomes reconnected with the secular and develops this latter as an independent organic existence. Freedom has found the means of realizing its ideal… that man as such is innately free. Not Goethe, not Hölderlin ("Einmal lebt ich, wie Götter"), not Hegel, lived spirit more freely than Blake did. Yet how far his "River of Life" gleams in the dusk of their temporal hopes: Hegel's State, Faust's land won from the sea, Hölderlin's coming of the Gods in Germany. It is the modern, leery of historical promises, who takes to eternal Blake. Though Goethe has closed Faust (whatever that may mean) with "the transient a likeness, the unattainable achieved": Alles Vergängliche Ist nur ein Gleichnis; Das Unzugängliche, Hier wird's Ereignis … 42) 42a) 42b) Blake, 1823-24, Job watercolors, Satan appearing before God, from the New Zealand set. Video shows details from the Engraving, British Museum. Earth and Moon in Space, from Hutchinson's Splendor of the Heavens Central detail of 42. He had opened it (though the Prologue in Heaven was not written until 1797) with a takeoff on Job, a book Blake would engrave near the end of his life. When Goethe's three archangels praise God's ordered realm in the manner of that famous Ode by Addison: The spacious firmament on high, With all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim — JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Goethe: Die Sonne tönt, nach alter Weise In Brudersphären Wettgesang, Und ihre vorgeschriebne Reise Vollendet sie mit Donnergang… Und alle deine hohen Werke Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag. which Shelley translates: The sun makes music as of old Amid the rival spheres of Heaven, On its predestined circle rolled With thunder speed… The world's unwithered countenance Is bright as on creation's day — Blake bids the right-foot striding Satan of fiery energy throw down that Deist clockwork of natural law, of which the family of Job in material prosperity clings to the proscriptive letter. 43) 43a) Blake, 1825, Job's Latter End, watercolor, British Museum, London Blake, 1800-03, Jacob's Ladder, British Museum, London In Blake's "Latter End of Job," the books of Natural Religion are closed and the instruments of inspiration have replaced them. Similarly when Faust's curse has destroyed the old world, the spirits counsel: "Build it again, in inwardness" — "In deinem Busen baue sie auf." How can Goethe's Mephistopheles, a rationalist mocker from the start (to be used and tricked by the world-shaping passions of Faust) claim those spirits as his? What powered the Faust-wave in history was doing Blake half-way, and turning that half to a dialectic of earth-gain. It was the conversion of transcendental inwardness to revolutionary leverage. No one in the wake of Kant, Faust, Hegel — not even Nietzsche — was ripe for Blake's Newtonian overthrow: "the outward Creation… to me… is hindrance & not Action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, no part of me." JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell 44) Symbolic History Catalan Romanesque, early 12th cent., Hand of God, S. Clemente de Tahull, Mus., Barcelona Consider Faust's attempt to translate the opening of John: εν αρχη ην ο λογος: "In the beginning was the Word." He balks that mere word — Wort — should rate so high. Has he not resolved in the opening scene not to traffic in what Hamlet called "Words, words, words"? Of course there is a theological position, suggested by this 1100 Spanish creating God as symbolic hand, according to which the ineffable speaks only by the sanctified and transrational, which Faust has deposed. 45) French Gothic, c. 1250, God sees Adam in his Thought, North Portal, Chartres From creed-invested Word he turns to a kind of Platonic Reason as cause: "Im Anfang war der Sinn." So in the 13th-century reliefs of Chartres, God, making birds, sees Adam in his thought. The mystery has moved into the world, but in idea, not physical. "Can it be merely Thought," Faust asks, "which works and creates?" 46) Michelangelo, 1508-12, God creating Sun and Moon, detail, Sistine, Vatican He writes again: "Im Anfang war die Kraft!" — In the beginning was the Power. Michelangelo, type of the creating divine, has always led the conscious titans of history, Milton, most of all Beethoven; he seizes on art like a more productive Faust. Yet as the translation Power still separates Prime Mover from effect, Michelangelo shaped his giants in creed acceptance of the rounding of the wheel — what made Goethe say: "I cannot even relish the essence of Michelangelo, since I cannot see with such great eyes as he did." In fact, Michelangelo claimed less. His power was above, not within. However he may lean that way, his is not 47) 47a) Rodin, 1897-98, The Hand of God, marble, Rodin Museum, Paris Michelangelo, 1508-12, The Brazen Serpent, Sistine Vault, Vatican the hand of God. JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Turning from the external and pre-existing Kraft, Faust cries: "The Spirit helps me; I see my way," and he writes, "In the beginning was the Act" — Tat, the uncaused and immanent deed. Cause becomes one with creation, Faust and now, as "The Hand of God" is Rodin's hand, its Adam and Eve the Lovers he had made. So with Melville's Ahab: "Is it I, God, or who, lifts this hand?" That is the terminus of Incarnation — that raising of the flesh-snake (Mephisto, Strong-men and all) on spirit's creative rod. "The history of the world for 3000 years," Goethe said of Faust II; though that history (comprising Part I) is also the nautilus shell of the poet's own life, shaped by the two souls struggling in his breast. So Hegel's Spirit works itself up by the self-war of alienation to what but the worldconsciousness of Hegel himself? 48) Chinese (Ching), rebuilt 1897, Altar of Heaven, Peking, China That actualization of what Spirit is potentially has for Hegel historical phases, dawning East to West, and variously named and numbered. "The Orientals know only that one is free … the Greeks and Romans that some are free … German Christendom that Man as such is free." But there are also the Ages of man: Oriental Childhood, Egyptian and Persian Boyhood, Greek Adolescence, Roman Manhood, Western renewal in age. That this Peking Altar of Heaven was rebuilt in 1897 would not ruffle the timeless childhood of Hegel's "Only one is free." 49) Chao Meng-Fu, Chinese, c. 1300, Tao Yuan-Ming in the Mountains, Private Collection JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "With China and the Mongols," he writes, "(the realm of theocratic despotism), History begins… Individuals remain mere accidents… outside the One Power… there is only caprice… no subjectivity." Of how many millenia is Hegel speaking? And how to fit his tyrannic formulation to the musing subjectivity of silk-scroll fact: Tao Yuan-Ming in the Mountains, painted 900 years after, by Chao Meng-Fu? 50) South Indian, 17th cent. (color restored), Minakshi Temple, South Gate, Madura in Madras But Hegel's Orient breaks in two: China, rigid one; India, flowing all. He writes: a wild chaos of fruitless variation, which must appear as madness to a duly regulated, intelligent consciousness… Everything — Sun, Moon, Stars, the Ganges, the Indus, Beasts, Flowers — everything is a God… Spirit wanders into the dream-world, and the highest state is annihilation. A marvellous antithesis, and no doubt with truth enough for Forster to have made it the theme of A Passage to India — not to mention its appropriateness to this gate tower of the Minakshi Temple in Madras. But that is 17th century and art-lush. 51) Gupta Buddhist, late 5th cent., Lady of the Court, Cave XVII, Ajanta What reconciles the BOOM of Marabar cave to the 5th century, when India had assimilated the Greek (Hegel in reverse) and was expressing itself in a fine consistency of Buddhist forms, from classical Gupta heads to the precise observance of Ajanta frescoes? 52) Peloponnesian, c. 460 B.C., Atlas head, Metope, Temple of Zeus, Olympia One cannot deny that the living center of Hegel is the sequence of Greece and Rome, to the birth of Christianity. There he knew and loved all the texts and some of the art: "In Greece," (he writes) JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the Idea is united with a plastic form… immediately bound up with the Real, as in a beautiful work of Art; the Sensuous bears the stamp and expression of the Spiritual. This Kingdom is consequently true Harmony, the world of the most charming but perishable bloom. And when he moves from that "geniality and joy of soul" 53) Roman, c. 20 B.C., Augustus, Palazzo Capitolino, Rome to the "abstract Universality of the Roman State, in which the Social absorbs all individual aims" — with Augustus and the Aeneid, that shift (mediated by Plato) from outward nomoi to a brooding responsibility which both trains and hollows the soul for the subjective morality of Christendom — at that point we know that Hegel has either made or discovered an elixer of historical truth. 54) German (Rhine), c. 1291, Head, Rudolph of Hapsburg Tomb, Crypt, Speyer So we follow him; but find that his hatred of the Medieval was so great — A truculent delirium of passion renounces all that is worldly and devotes itself entirely to holiness — that all we can learn from him about the cathedral age (this 1290 tomb of Rudolf of Hapsburg in the crypt of Speyer, with its gaunt repudiation of what Goethe and Hegel stood for) is that "such an antithesis must arise in man's consciousness of the Holy" to "establish the empire of thought actually and concretely." In short, the Middle Ages had to be lived through to get to Hegel. 55) Giotto, 1321, Head of bystander, Raising of Drusiana, S. Croce, Florence So wherever we see a massive human dignity emerging in the consciousness of spatial right, as in Giotto, 1321, or Dante at the same time: "I crown and mitre you lord of your own," and We were not made to live like brutes — Fatti non foste a viver come bruti — JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History we nod the head and say "Faustian precursors." 56) 56a) Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1490(?), Man's head, drawing, Louvre, Paris Titian, c. 1555, Self Portrait, Kaiser Friedrich Mus., Berlin As the Renaissance heightens, the head wags increasingly — as for this Leonardo sketch, with his proud words: O thou that sleepest, what is sleep? Sleep is an image of death. Oh, why not let your work be such that after death you become an image of immortality: as in life you became, when sleeping, as one of the hapless dead. — wags for Bruno toward the giant century's end: There is no need to cast the eyes toward the heavens, to raise the hands, to frequent temples or intone to images… we have but to enter into the inner self, remembering God is nigh, with us, here, within us, the soul of souls, life of lives, essence of essences. 57) 57a) Hans Steinmüller, c. 1585, Apostle Simon, detail, St. Ulrich and St. Afra, Augsburg; + V detail Hiemer, 1792, pastel of Hölderlin, Schiller Mus., Marbach — comparing this Steinmüller Apostle Simon around 1585, when Bruno in his Farewell Address to Faust's University of Wittenberg was foretelling the rise of German mind and spirit: Here is being prepared the soil for the transplanting of wisdom from the lands of Greece and Italy. May Jupiter grant that the Germans may recognize their strength and aim for the highest, and they will no longer be men, but rather reasonable gods, for god-like is their genius. It is what Hölderlin, schoolmate of Hegel and Schelling, now felt happening around and in him, as the Zeus-eagle, from Indus and Parnassus and "the votive hills of Italy" Exultant, over the Alps, wings on at last JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And sees, wide-spread, the many-patterned lands. (CGB) 58) 58a) Michael Sweerts, c. 1661, Self Portrait, Private Collection, Zurich; + V detail William Blake, 1793, "Water" from Gates of Paradise Engravings, British Museum Music: William Lawes, c. 1640(?), Paven from Sett No. 1 in G Minor, Loiseau-Lyre, DSLO 564 An inebriation that swells in this 17th century Sweerts (Self), as in Lawes' chromatic Paven, or Milton's dynamic truth: if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition — point of departure for Blake: The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind. a59) b59) c59) d59) e59) 59) Dannecker, 1805-10, Large plaster bust of Schiller, detail, Weimar Library Jacques Louis David, 1797-98, General Bonaparte (unfinished), detail, Louvre, Paris P.O. Runge, 1802, Self Portrait, crayon, Kunsthalle, Hamburg C.D. Friedrich, c. 1810, Self Portrait, pencil and chalk, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Jacques Louis David, c. 1794, Death of Bara, detail, Musée Calvert, Avignon Double: [A] Same as c59; and [B] Same as d59 Such Faust's dying strategy: He only earns his Freedom and his life Who takes them every day by force. (CGB) Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, Der täglich sie erobern muss. — A wave to break in Hölderlin: (CGB) Look, we are it, ourselves; we, fruit of Hesperia — JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the godlike burden from which, stretched to madness, his "Blind Singer" prays to be eased: O nimmt, daß ichs ertrage, mir das Leben, das Göttliche mir vom Herzen. Take from my heart, that I may bear it, Life, the godlike, take from me. (CGB) (fade Lawes) While the self-portraits of Runge and Friedrich (from about 1800 to 1810) witness in art the Romantic polarity which Goethe's "dread hand" hammered into Faust. 60) 60a) 60b) Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, c. 1765(?), Bust of Diderot, Louvre, Paris P. Lejeune, 1760, Bust of Voltaire, Stuttgart Museum Double of 60 and 60a (video shows detail of Diderot only) Music: Glück, 1761 ff., Don Juan Ballet, 19, Fandango, London, STS 15169 But between the Baroque claim and the Faustian lies the ironic transition of 18th century: Glück's Don Juan, Pigalle's fastidious modelling of the Encyclopedist, Diderot — the Mephistic limitation Faust must override. Though even that eddy looks Hegelian — a secularization, for which Spirit had again to be driven back on itself. So the ironic debacle exemplifies a threefold dialectic of Aufhebung. It cuts off the God-reason confidence of Baroque, turning Leibniz to an absurd Pangloss. But in that stepping down, it sustains under the mask of secular wit the bill of human values formerly delivered as divine. Yet to be so sustained is also to advance; ironic sensibility, even in Diderot, transcends itself, as if, in some future tense, aufheben, to up-heave, looked to the Faustian quest of heart. (fade Fandango) a61) 61) 61a) V61b) H. Fuseli, c. 1777, Self Portrait, arms akimbo, chalk, National Portrait Gallery, London H. Fuseli, c. 1780, Self Portrait, head in hands, chalk, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Goya, 1799, The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters, Los Caprichos, detail, Prado, Madrid Again 61: Fuseli Self JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: Mozart, 1785, Dissonant opening, String Quartet #19, C Major, West. XWN 18047 Like Goya and Blake, Goethe is born to irony: So here I stand, a poor fool, As wise as when I went to school… The fruit of all my study and art This ignorance that burns my heart. (CGB) But it is an irony which, as in Mozart's Dissonant Quartet or Fuseli's 1780 Self, swells through Storm and Stress toward the Romantic. What gulfs are yawning under the prospect of self-command? When the curtain opens it is the old Faust we see in the vaulted chamber; but the young Goethe speaks, who had dodged suicide, he said, by enacting it in Werther (as Dostoievsky, trying to bring health out of Crime, would let Svidrigailov, a kind of Conrad Secret Sharer, take the rap for Raskolnikov) — Goethe of two souls: With tentacles of lust one clings to the world, The other soars for the Elysian fields. (CGB) a62) 62) (fade Mozart) Tibetan Tanka, 16th cent. Mahakala, terror-god of Northern Buddhist Pantheon, Brit. Lib. (Add. 8899). London (CGB '84) Same, center detail (video takes only details, from both slides) Music: Tibetan, 16th cent. (Padma Sambava), from Mahâkâla Sandhana, ritual to the Great Black Lord, Nonesuch H 72071 Eastern religions had embraced terror in the divine, as in this Tibetan 16th century Tanka to Mahâkâla, Buddhist ego-destroyer, with his ritual praise, from the same time and place. Was not the son of Pandu in the Gita shown the universal God, "infinite of arms, eyes, mouths, and bellies"? Terrible of fangs, O mighty master… Licking with your burning tongues, devouring All worlds, you probe the heights of heaven With intolerable beams, O Vishnu… JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But when Werther saw "the spectacle of infinite life" change before him "into the abyss of an always open grave," he headed for it. The complicity of devil in godman and god-history, 63) 63a) 63b) C.D. Rauch, 1828, Self Portrait, bust, Nat. Gal., Berlin Thorwaldsen, 1810-11, Self Portrait, Thorwaldsen Museum, Copenhagen; first, V detail Dannecker, 1805-10, Schiller, colossal plaster bust, Weimar Library had still to be faced by Jefferson, by Rauch and Thorwaldsen, sometimes by Beethoven. (fade Mahâkâla Sandhana) Music: Beethoven, 1823, Finale, Ninth, cont. March: "Froh" etc. Shelley: The man remains Sceptreless, free uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself… When Dante, so "self-crowned and mitred," steps from the Medieval frame, there is something facile in the Euphoric soar. Goethe knew that Byron-boy must fall. Even rapt Schiller: Surely we must call him great who stands, his own law and maker, Controlling by mastery and worth the hostile schemes of fate; But luck is beyond his dominion; the reach of conscious will Can never claim for its own what envious Charis debars. (fade Beethoven) For 2nd 62) Tibetan, 18th cent., Embroidery, Yama (Death), Buddhist Protector, British Museum which Hölderlin intensifies: (CGB) More deeply, more rendingly, Fate, all-levelling, grips the inflammable heart of the strong — JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History …die entzündbare Brust dem Starken. For 2nd 61) J.A. Carstens, c. 1795(?), Self Portrait in pastels, Kunsthalle, Hamburg Does the crest of the human claim coincide with its breaking? When Kant had tracked reason to its self-defeating lair in the antinomies, he had to avoid the Heraclitean rock: "Though reason is common to all (κοινος), each lives as if he had a truth of his own (ιδιαν)." By the categorical command, "act as if the rule of action could become a universal law," Kant thought to give the moral imperative reason's common ground. For 3rd 62) Blake, 1793 (1799), Los-Orc in Flames, America: A Prophecy, plate 10, Mellon But in the ambiguities of good and evil, what actual precept can have that character? Not even the commandments or the Golden Rule. For 2nd 63) Blake Life mask, 1823, National Portrait Gallery, London JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Kant avoids the inescapable, that in the brunt of situations, only one imperative remains categorical, the stripped reflection of moral necessity on itself: "If you have to do a thing, do it!" An absolute without content — subjective mockery of the hope for a rational ground. Blake: "The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God." [The 1996 video revision will include this quotation.] 64) Samuel Palmer, c. 1826, Self with Halo, K. Preston Collection It is Luther's "So help me God, I cannot do otherwise." It becomes the dilemma of Kierkegaard's Abraham in Fear and Trembling — beyond external correlatives, no way to tell the voice of temptation from the voice of God: "Kill your son!" Blake's devotee Samuel Palmer, who would struggle all his life with the inner calling against responsibility, hints at that in his weird 1826 self-portrait with a halo. a65) 65) "Bismark Tower," 1891, Hamburg George Kolbe, 1934, Self Portrait, bronze Goethe, born 25 years after Kant, faced the demon Kant could not. But however deep he went in two-souls and hell-compact, he clung to the perilous hope of Lessing. While Hegel, born 20 years later still, set the passions (as stone in a vault, by downward gravity, arches upward) "to fortify a position for Right and Order against themselves." It is as if an Enlightened design were always deepened and darkened, gouged with a more and more Bismarkian violence of shadow. Then Nietzsche, whose Zarathustran imperative transvalues value; yet he rides the Faust-wave of Yea. And how could Hitler have entered the Rhineland but under the same banner of categorical calling: "And now, like a somnambulist," he said, "I go the way God has chosen." In 1934, George Kolbe, a sculptor the Nazis would acclaim, cast in a bronze of himself the scored and eroded idealism of Spengler's post-Faustian and post-Hegelian West. a66) A. Dürer, 1513, Knight, Death, and Devil, engraving, whole, Fogg, Cambridge JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell 66) 66a) 66b) Symbolic History Same, detail P. Breughel, 1562, Fall of the Rebel Angels, whole, Beaux-arts, Brussels (CGB '59); video has only a variant detail from this whole Same, detail (CGB '59) The Faust myth came into being with the German Renaissance, when Dürer's Erasmian Knight, clad in Paul's armor of God, pursued his calling in sure neglect of skull and reptile, Death and Devil. The Luther of Christian Freedom was such a knight. We do not know what actual Faust in that morning followed the call of which Goethe would make much: (CGB) That I may know all links and ties That thread earth's deepest mysteries — Daß ich erkenne was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält — and the Faust Book and Marlow so little: Here try thy brains to gain a deity. Since Protestant reversal had intervened: Luther, scared by the Peasants' Revolt, was calling reason "an ugly devil's bride," "a poisonous beast with many dragons' heads." Whatever daring had stirred in Faust, the 1587 Book tramps out like brush-fire. 67) 67a) 67b) 67c) 67d) 67e) 67f) Agricola, De Re Metallica, published 1556, Mine shaft with pumps Same, Tap-hole furnaces Same, Various ways of descending into mines Swedish Copper Mine, c. 1790, color print Agricola, Steel forge with Bellows Swedish Ironworks, c. 1781 (interior) Welsh Irontown, 1780s, watercolor (also 1914: Crisis, V18a) Meanwhile the wave outspread all private sequences. In Agricola, 1556, mines with relays of stream-powered pumps, smelting furnaces and steel mills hint at the body on which Faustian Europe rode; and there too the back-lash met the mounting fact. Leonardo: JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All the animals languish, filling the air with lamentations; the woods fall in ruin, hills are torn open to carry away the metals that are produced there. So Hölderlin would complain of man, rebellious to the sun-god, probing the shafts of mountain caves: "doch gräbt er/ Sich Höhlen in den Bergen and späht im Schacht." Baucis in Faust II smells Satan in the great land-project: In vain the workmen's daily racket — Pick and shovel, slog and slam; Where the flames by night were swarming Stood next day a brand new dam. (Macneice) But Adam Smith (1776) ascribed such powers to division of labor abetted by machines: in the trade of the pin-maker… divided into eighteen distinct operations… performed by distinct hands… ten persons make upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day… separately… they could not each have made twenty, perhaps not one… 68) 68a) 68b) Turner, 1844, Rail, Steam, and Speed, National Gallery, London Same, detail P.J. de Loutherbourg, c. 1800, Coalbrookdale at Night, Science Museum, London Before Goethe's death steam had entered the rivers and was taking to the rails. The excitement of a power that could "lap the miles and lick the valleys up," poets and painters expressed: this Turner, and even Thoreau: When I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils… it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it… But the thrill was Faust-ambivalent. Thoreau knew also: "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us." Blake had tied the mills of industrial England to the dark Satanic wheels of Cartesian determinism. By the later 19th century, JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History mechanization was reenacting on the stage of history Goethe's death of the Wanderer and pious old couple: "Unbridled fire… gives all three one funeral pyre." No wonder Faust wants to free himself from that destructive Magic, "to stand in Nature as a man again." 69) 69a) Joseph Wright (of Derby), 1768, Experiment with an Air Pump, Tate Gallery, London Same, detail, center; + V: closer detail of dove and scientist It was a fear that had been gathering with the advance of science. In 1768 the painter Wright had endowed this night demonstration of the death of a dove in an evacuated jar with the ghastly take-over Mary Wollenstonecraft would exploit in Frankenstein's creation of life. Priestley might go on voicing the technocratic hope of indefinitely extended Enlightenment: Knowledge will be subdivided and extended; and knowledge, as Lord Bacon observes, being power, the human powers will, in fact, be enlarged… men will make their situation in the world abundantly more easy and comfortable… and will grow daily more happy… Thus, whatever was the beginning of the world, the end will be glorious and paradisical, beyond what our imagination can now conceive. JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But the optimism was more and more undercut: Wordsworth: "We murder to dissect," and "Great God, I'd rather be a pagan, suckled in a creed outworn." 1st 70) Rodin, 1877, The Age of Bronze, Louvre, Paris (lighted front view) When Goethe's Faust knit up the radical poles of the West, it became a seed-plot of the history to follow. We think of history as a time art, as if there were crisis and then healing, or hope succeeded by despair; but the antinomies are joined throughout — as in Rodin's 1877 Age of Bronze, wish and satiety meet in pathos-elation. 1st 71) Rodin, 1886, The Prodigal, Cantor Foundation, Beverly Hills, California Yet style-colors shift like chords; there is a progression. As with Rodin, to The Prodigal, nine years later. If Faust from the start, like Eliot's devil of the stair, "wears/ The deceitful face of hope and despair," it remains true that where Enlightenment stressed the hope, post-Romantic and Symbolist stress the frenzy, if not despair, then lashed by despair. 2nd 70) Again, Rodin, Age of Bronze (detail, upper half) How many fate-defiers we would go on inventing, from Beethoven of the death-fist to Melville's Ahab, Ibsen's Gant and Gynt, Conrad's Kurtz, the Sutpen of Faulkner's Absalom. And as the cresting of the Faust-wave saw a reversal from dark to light, from titan damned to titan saved; 2nd 71) Again, Rodin, Prodigal (detail, upper half) already with Byron's Manfred a reversal of reversal crowns with celebration the giant fact of destruction: Melville: "Better… to perish in that howling infinite…" Conrad, where the dying whisper of "The horror" pierces to "all the hearts that beat in the darkness." 3rd 70) Again, Rodin, Age of Bronze (variant upper detail) 3rd 70a) Same, closer detail JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The heaving search-motif of Beethoven's Ninth, to lead from opening crisis to joy-finale: Music: Beethoven, 1823, 9th Symphony, 1st movement, repeated straining phrase would reach through the century — to Brahms — the heaves more ominously goaded (as in the sequence of wars: Napoleonic, American Civil, World) toward affirmations always harder fought for: Music: Brahms, published 1876, 1st Symphony, from 4th movement, (Walter) Columbia ML4909 (search, drum-roll and theme) a3rd 71) Rodin, c. 1886, Fugit Amor, Marble (from Gates of Hell, Paolo and Francesca), Rodin Mus., Paris 3rd 71) Again, Rodin, Prodigal [slide: vertical whole; V: close upper detail] So to Cesar Franck's D Minor of 1888. Music: Cesar Franck, D Minor Symphony, 1st movement, climb to theme, West. WL-5311 (fade) What seems to have outraged its first audience above all is that the Faustpoles, those germinal motifs of the Symphony, dark and light, indistinguishably fuse in the Prodigal fever of the close. Music: a72) b72) 72) Cesar Franck, Symphony in D Minor, 4th movement, close Blake, 1824, Dante plate 37, detail of watercolor, Circle of Lust, Paolo and Francesca, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Blake, c. 1823-24, Job #5, Satan Goes Forth, watercolor, New Zealand set; video: detail only Blake, 1823-24, Job #3, Sons & Daughters Destroyed, watercolor, New Zealand set. Video: detail only A complementarity clouded, since the 1800 "Energy is Eternal Delight" of Blake, Faust, Beethoven — that fugal joy keenly coiled in musical space. JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Beethoven, 1823, 9th, Finale, continued, fugal passage Are we pursuing time-plots, or the instantaneous blaze of ambivalence? No doubt, both in one. Even of history Hegel knows: "In one aspect … with Spirit there is no past, no future, but an essential now." While Faust's cry to the moment: "Linger!" — "Verweile doch, du bist so schön!" — is optative: "If I could reach the unreachable, I might say linger." So it wins the wager. Of himself, Goethe wrote: "If I am restlessly active to the end" (and it was near the end) "nature is obliged to find me some other form of being, when this one breaks down under my spirit." In Blake's simultaneity, the Destroyer of Job's material temples is one of those "tygers of wrath… wiser than the horses of instruction." (fade Beethoven) 73) 73a) Goya, 1810-20, etchings: Los Desastres de la Guerra, #69, Nada, Ello Dirá, Prado, Madrid: "Nothing! It is spoken." Same, Nada, detail: "Nothing" Although the time-drama of Faust and Hegel would dominate the century, timeless Blake's question remains — as when Mozart hurls down the 40th Symphony: Music: Mozart, 1778, Symphony #40, 1st movement, opening, Col. D3L291 or Goya this death-writer of "Nada" in the Disasters of the War — (fade Mozart) a74) 74) Same: #80, Si resuciterá? "Will she revive?" Same: #82, Esto es lo verdadero: "This is the Truth" and beside it, in Mozart's case, and from the same months of furious composition, the triumphant Jupiter: Music: JJune 1996 Mozart, 1778, Symphony #41, 1st movement, opening, Col. D3L291 (fade) Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History or with Goya the unprinted close of the Disasters, where Truth revives to bless the procreant earth — the question remains, are these historical successions or eternal states of the soul? For 2nd 73) For 2nd 73a) Same Goya: #79, Murió la Verdad: "Truth has died" Same: #79, detail (video replaces these with closer detail of Nada) So when Goethe closed Faust I (1775, in prose, later versified) with Gretchen in prison for the death of her mother and child, the intolerable: I dare not leave; for me there is no more hope — Ich darf nicht fort; für mich ist nichts zu hoffen — Music: Beethoven, 1823, 9th Symphony, Finale, near close, modal hymn — to Joy-coda 2nd 74) Same: Again, #82, detail: This is the Truth 2nd 74a) Same: Double: details of [A] #69, Nada; and [B] #82, Truth 2nd 74b) Same: Double: details of [A] #79, Murió; and [B] #80, Revive? (video replaces the doubles with a close detail of Goya #80) the same Goethe to open Part II fifty years after with Faust's sleep (comforted by the small spirits of nature) and his waking to new earth-quests, Helen, and that land claimed from the sea — such a juxtaposition can be conceived as a progress in life or history only because antinomies may in fact wear temporal wefts. But the fire of Part I will consume the old couple in the free land; as Beethoven's Joyhymn must weave with the dissonances where it began. (fade Finale on last suspension) a75) b75) c75) 75) P.O. Runge, 1807-08, lower detail of Morning, small version, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (CGB '86) Same, upper detail (CGB '86) (For this slide and the next, video shows only the upper half of c75) Same, whole (CGB '86) Blake, 1820, from Thornton's Virgil, I xi, wood engraving JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Faust II, scene 1, CGB — here slightly trimmed:) (Twilight. Faust stretched on a flowery bank… Ariel, to Aeolian harps:) You whose airy circles weave this head, Perform your elfin healing; touch the heart And calm its raging fever; forbid remorse; Draw out the rankling darts, that he may wake Clean of terror; let the past be past. Night is measured by four silences; Fill them all with service: First let him sleep pillowed on coolness; And the dew that bathes him, bring from Lethe Quiet forgetfulness; then the cramped tendons Ease as he slumbers toward the dawning; Last and noblest, let him wake, And come again into the sacred light. Chorus: When evening blows Over bordered fields, Twilight falls In perfumed veils… Waters mirror The sky's fire, And the moon sheds sleep On the world's floor. (Blake here at his most realistic and classical, the little 1820 woodcuts he made for Thornton's Virgil, yet symbolic as the Faust-healing: Beulah's "mild and pleasant Rest.") 76) 76a) 76b) Double: [A] J.A. Koch, 1805, Landscape with Rainbow, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe; and [B] Constable, 1835, Stonehenge, watercolor, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Same as A of 76 (video takes only separate details of A and B) Same as B of 76 JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Two rainbow landscapes: 1805: Swiss-German Koch fulfills the classical harmony (as of Poussin and Claude) to which Goethe (and even Beethoven) gave life-loyalty. Chorus: Old pains, old pleasures Melt away; The heart is whole, Let it trust the day… Renew your wishes At the light. Sleep is a chrysalis; Shake it off… From thirty years later: Constable's Stonehenge yields to the storm Goethe himself had raised, though Goethe would question its force in others — as in Beethoven and Hölderlin. (A terrible uproar announces the sun. Ariel: Always in tumult light is born. Drums, Trumpets. Deafened, blind, Spirits creep in flower crowns; Unhearables must not be heard. Cower deeper, in leaves, in rocks; Close your ears. The day breaks. a77) 77) Friedrich, 1807-08, Summer, Neue Pinakothek, Munich Same, Friedrich, Summer, detail (CGB '59); video uses only the detail Faust: The pulse of life wakes in me, roused to greet The mild ethereal gray. And earth that was steadfast Through the long dark breathes the quickening air… (Friedrich, too, in the calm of this "Summer," yearns through nature to renewal.) JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The world is wrapped in a pale shimmer of dawn; The woods are full of voices, living songs; In low places pools of mist are poured, That take the light of heaven and are pearl… 78) Turner, 1798, Buttermere, A Shower, Tate Gallery, London (Turner starting, 1798, with the old physical nature, shot through with the symbols of Wordsworth and Goethe.) Faust: I lift my eyes to the hills. The highest peaks, Already touched with light, announce the coming. They drink the day before us, eternal brightness, For which we lower creatures wait in longing. And now the upland slopes and last smooth pastures Receive the glory, which step by step descending Down the long sequence of the folded ranges, 79) Turner, by 1846, The Angel Standing in the Sun, Tate Gallery, London Strikes: it strikes; and blinded, I turn away, my eyes shot through with anguish… (Turner ending almost fifty years later with a Faust allegory of the light he had given his art to: the armed angel standing in the sun.) We thought to kindle our life's torch a little; A fire enfolds us… wraps us in its burning Remorseless waves of ecstasy and wounding… And so I set my back against the sun. 2nd 78) Again, Turner, Buttermere Shower, detail, rainbow The waterfall that brims the rock chasm Dilates the orbit of my sight with wonder. From fall to fall it breaks in… fountains of spray, At whose peak and crown, over-vaulting the storm, A rainbow comes and goes, dying and born, Hovering spirit of the downward shower. I see it now: it images our striving — JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Itself an image, child of sun and water: We only live in light's refracted color. How balanced in his power the old Goethe, to go backwards, 2nd 79) Again, Turner, Angel in Sun, detail where romantic soul everywhere was surging ahead. But there are no backward moves in genius. That wisdom of measure — Im farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben — informs Faust's infinite search. Have not the spirits of nature announced (though they themselves hid from the dawn) "The noble soul that understands and seizes, may accomplish all." a80) b80) c80) d80) 80) 80a) Friedrich, c. 1835, Riesengebirge, Nat. Gal., Berlin Same, detail (video crops one image only from a80) Friedrich, 1809-10, Evening (sky), Kunsthalle, Mannheim Detail of a3: Friedrich, Girl at Window (pre-1996 videos omit this) Friedrich, c. 1830-35, The Evening Star, Frankfurt am Main. Same, detail (video uses detail only) But what can soul accomplish? It is the oldest God-mystery, Faust thought to settle by the translation "Act" — Why should the One overflow? Music: Beethoven, 1826, close of Lento of Quartet #16, F Major, Opus 135, Columbia M5L-277 Beethoven did not close with the Ninth, but with the Late Quartets; Friedrich leads nature to the infinite; when the Mystical chorus lifts Faust, we have not gone back to Dante, we are in the noumenal, where inner Faust always was — the Now climax of history — Thoreau: "God himself culminates in the present moment…" It is the transcendental ascent at the heart of every tornadic desire. Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan. JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The urge for the Eternal Womanly (as Gretchen) has prime-moved the Faustian lunge and miscarriage; yet the womanly is its containment of saving love. So Ewig Weibliche links arrow and wheel, Classic and Gothic, leaf and flame. Is Friedrich's boy less of the stippled ground, as he dances toward the evening star? (close of Beethoven) JJune 1996 Faust: Creative War of Spirit10/23/2017� � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 29 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Faust : Creative War of Spirit, Symbolic History, Part 29 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 29 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_29_Faust--Creative_War_of_Spirit Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3442acd392591761ba3f62b62561ee8d.pdf 4609f28c8a20d729613b2f498485e92d PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 28. Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 1) Blake, c. 1790 (inscribed 1780), "Glad Day" engraving, British Museum, London Blake's Albion as rebel Orc (dated 1780, but engraved ten years later) announces a threefold prophecy: One: Innocence: In the "Glad Day" of free desire "everything that lives is holy": (America 6) Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field: Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air; ...his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open... For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease. 2) Blake, 1794 (1818), Urizen, pl. 17, The Fall, Library of Congress (Rosenwald) Two: Experience: In the material world that proclamation of hope enters an Orccycle, an eternal Fall, as from Lucifer to Satan: "serpent form'd... Lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law" (America 7). Where ''Rintrah roars and shakes his fires," Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood can only shade into terror: "The Winepress of Los is call'd War on Earth." 3) Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem, pl. 76, Albion Worshipping Christ, Mellon Three: Regeneration: In this plate from Blake's last prophetic book, Jerusalem, the Orc-Albion of his rebel youth turns the cruciform joy toward Christ self-sacrificed on the tree of prohibition. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History These are not (and that is the crux of Blake's prophecy) Hegelian sequences of time, but simultaneous states of every clarified vision. For 2nd 2) Detail of The Fall Thus the arm-spread gesture is preserved through the snake-wrapped fall into our cramped Ulro of imbruted sense and mind's repression — a complicity of Blake-Orc, Satan and Christ — "Luvah, King of Love, thou art the King of Rage and Death" (Four Zoas, v, 42); and "The Lamb of God clothed in Luvah's Robes" (Four Zoas viii, 62) — For 2nd 1) Glad Day, detail, worm, moth, etc.; video then shows the whole 2nd 1a) Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1492, Canon of Proportions, Academy of Fine Arts, Venice 2nd 1b) Glad Day, center detail; + V detail of head already shown in the "Glad Day," under which Blake would write (after 1800): "Albion arose from where he labour'd at the Mill with slaves. Giving himself for the Nations he danced the dance of Eternal Death." In his break with the Venetian oil shadowing of his own time — "Go send your Children to the Slobbering School" — Blake claimed the clarity and defining line of Renaissance, Michelangelo and Raphael, the canons of intellectual form: "A tear is an intellectual thing." Here he turns the proportions of anatomy as formulated by Vitruvius and drawn by Leonardo and Dürer, into a leap of freedom. Music: Joseph Haydn, 1772, 4th movement (middle), F Minor Quartet, Op.20, #5, Qualiton SLFX 1133a Similarly in the Revolutionary fugue, baroque discipline heightens the defiance of release. First Haydn's Opus 20 makes the old order spirit's battleground. (fade Haydn) 3rd 2) Again, detail of The Fall; first, video close detail Sixteen years later, Mozart took off in his fiercest fugue, the C Minor of 1788: June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 2 �C.G. Bell Music: 2nd 3) Symbolic History Mozart, 1788, close, fugue of Adagio and Fugue K. 546, G DB 3391 (end) Again, Albion Worshipping Christ, detail of Christ; first, video detail of Albion Beethoven climaxed the sequence in the Grosse Fuge of 1825. Music: 4) 5) Beethoven, 1825, from the Grosse Fuge, through) Col. M5L-277 (c. l/3 Blake, 1823-4, Job, (watercolor) pl. 14, upper detail, Angels as "The Morning Stars," New Zealand Same, pl. 15, above, God and Job, below, Behemoth and Leviathan, New Zealand (video: lower detail only) (fade Grosse Fuge) That fugal energy presupposes the inwrought joy of conflict. a2nd 4) 2nd 4) 2nd 4a) Again, Job, pl. 14, central and lower sections: God, with Job group beneath Same, whole; + V closer detail of angel-stars Blake, 1825, Same, lower section, from the Engraved Design, Leviathan beneath, British Museum, London At the height of the illustrations for Job, the outcast of Uz, with whom Blake increasingly identified — that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in heaven... I have long made up my mind, & why this should be made an objection to Me, while Drunkenness, Lewdness, Gluttony & even Idleness itself, does not hurt other men, let Satan himself Explain — Job sees his cloud-cave of misery and false friends, embraced in the cruciform likeness of his Divine Imagination, with sun-reason and passion-moon, and above, the eternal singing of the morning stars. Such the vision of which Blake wrote to Butts, the patron who, as Palmer would testify, ''for years stood between the geatest designer in England and the workhouse": Till the Jewels of Light, June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Heavenly Men beaming bright, Appear'd as One Man. Who complacent began My limbs to infold In his beams of bright gold... In the engraved plate, Leviathan coils in the margin below; 2nd 5) Again, Job, (watercolor) pl. 15, whole, God shows Job Behemoth, and Leviathan while the next design shifts the threefold scheme downward. Job's God, above, points through this cloud-hollow, to the depths of our subconscious Egypt, the time-and-space sea of war and repression: "Behold now Behemoth" (and Leviathan) "which I made with thee." 6) Blake, 1808, Last Judgment, watercolor, Petworth House, Sussex (video: a sequence of details only: cf. V6a, b, and c) For Blake Judgment is the ecstasy which subsumes all that. It is not, as with the orthodox (even Michelangelo), a post-temporal reward or punishment. whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual… His whole rejection of materialism and jealous condemnation, of "Bad Art and Science" and the emergence of energy as Eternal Delight, swirls, as within a symbolic skull, around the forgiveness of the redeemed Humanity: Mental things alone are Real... Error, or Creation, will be Burned up & then & not till then Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment men cease to behold it... Those thrown down on Christ's left are not vicious persons, ''but States Signified by those Names" — stations, through which individuals pass. 7) 7a) Last Judgment (1808) superimposed on life-mask of Blake (by J. S. Deville, 1823); with video details of forehead and features) Life-Mask, 1823, (J. S. Deville), profile, National Portrait Gallery, London June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V7b) Blake, c. 1805, watercolor, God Writing Upon the Tables of the Covenant, National Gallery, Edinburgh V7c) Again, Deville Life-Mask, full face 7d) Blake, Double: [A] Songs of Innocence, 1789, pl. 25; and [B] Songs of Experience, 1794, pl. 39; both (Rosenwald) copy of 1825-26, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; + V details The whirling of that Judgment within that deep-browed head set Blake further from the life (for him the death) of his time than any other creator has ever been. I am laid by in a corner as if I did not Exist... Profit never ventures upon my Threshold, tho' every other man's doorstone is worn down into the very Earth by the footsteps of the fiends of commerce. There elation — I have Conquer'd, and shall Go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God & in the Abysses of the Accuser — and loss — Tuesday, Janry. 20, 1807, between Two & Seven in the Evening — Despair — with cheerful work — in Palmer's words "practically sane, steady, frugal and industrious''; and in Blake's letters: I go on Merrily with my Greek & Latin... am now learning my Hebrew... I read Greek as fluently as an Oxford scholar... I live by Miracle. I am Painting small Pictures from the Bible... The Ruins of Time builds Mansions in Eternity — sustained those "enjoyments of Genius'' which, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, look "like torment and insanity." So Leigh Hunt of the 1809 Exhibition: William Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement... fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures... unintelligible allegory... very badly drawn... of which he has published a Catalogue... the wild effusions of a distempered brain... June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So Wordsworth (shown the Songs of Innocence and of Experience thirty-five years after their appearance — Blake still producing in always more divine obscurity): There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott! a8) 8) Blake, 1804-18, Jerusalem (Rinder copy), pl. 76, Christ on the Cross, detail (video: closer detail only) Bernini, 1669, Terra-Cotta model, Equestrian Louis XIV, Gallery Borghese, Rome; + V details The price, in that Augustan extension of Baroque and Enlightenment, of Blake's personal reshaping of radical Christianity. Music: Händel, 1742, Messiah, Overture, allegro (close), Philips C 71 AX 300 (side 1) Since what had come to dominance in Christendom was the secular antithesis: the rational, realist and assertive pomp of Bernini's Louis XIV: in thought "this Newtonian Phantasm/ This Voltaire & Rousseau: this Hume & Gibbon & Bolingbroke/ This Natural Religion," "Covering Cherubs... of the... Tabernacle of Bacon, Newton & Locke." We cannot know if Blake, who sang his lyrics to his own tunes, would have specified also the music which Europe was vaulting to the keystone of Händel's Messiah, though he implies as much: "Music as it exists in old tunes or melodies... is Inspiration"; "Demonstration, Similitude & Harmony are Objects of Reasoning..." (fading the Overture) 9) 9a) John Closterman, c. 1711, Duke of Marlborough, Royal Hospital, Chelsea (video detail only, then whole after Blenheim Palace) Sir John Vanbrugh, 1705-22, Blenheim Palace, North Court over Ha-ha (CGB '84) A grandeur the great Duke of Marlborough turned on its origins in the Battle of Blenheim — as, in the monstrous palace so named, he outflanked the vaunts of Louis. (having skipped to the close of the Overture) 10) David, 1800, Napoleon on Horseback, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; + V detail June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 6 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Cherubini, 1815, Symphony in D (close), RCA-LSC 3048 In the hundred year shift from Baroque through Neo-classic to Revolutionary, what David's mounted Napoleon charges with romantic impulse is the old assertion — still for Blake, Urizen's conquest of the space-plotted material earth: "Let each choose one habitation/...One curse, one weight, one measure/ One King, one God, one Law." In Cherubini, whom Napoleon asked why his music was so Germanic, complex, and noisy, the crescendo of Haydn and Mozart swells toward Beethoven. (end Cherubini) Yet the very fugues we earlier compared with Blake coil in that plot we have called his antithesis. As he himself wrote: "I must invent a system or be enslaved by another man's". How roundly our Western equestrians converge in formulable consciousness, 11) 11a) South Indian Hindu, late 16th cent., Mounted Warrior, Horse Court, Spirangam Blake, 1793 (1825 copy), Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 27, detail of leaping horses, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge a contrast will reveal: this mounted warrior from South India about fifty years before the Bernini Louis XIV. Its huge energies are mythopoetic. Of course it exists in space and time, but not as determined there. Its battle is of another realm than Marlborough's at Blenheim or Napoleon's crossing the Alps. With Blake, Western temporality seeks such a realm. Music: 12) V12a) Beethoven, 1807-8, 3rd Rasumovsky Quartet, last movement, fugue, Col. ML 5587 Blake, 1809, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, Tate Gallery, London (here, video details only) Blake, 1805(?), The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth, Tate Gallery, London (video then returns to Nelson Guiding Leviathan, detail and whole) Though leaping eternal horses illuminate his pages, it is hard to think Blake could have mounted monumental Pegasus — even had he been commissioned, as he proposed, June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to fresco the halls of England (Beethoven commissioned by Count Rasumovsky). (fade Quartet) Blake's most public designs were this Nelson guiding Leviathan and Pitt guiding Behemoth, inspired, the Descriptive Catalogue tells us, by Asiatic and Biblical originals seen in vision — source of all Greece and Rome owed to the Muse of Memory. Here, as in "those wonderful originals'', ''more is meant than meets the eye." Nelson is Hero in the ambivalent mode of Urizen, sterile delimiter: ''Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth." He stands on the serpent of rational and material power, which Job would see in the abyss; it wreathes and swallows the nations, reined by the haloed British angel of Establishment: (Europe 10) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then was the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel, Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd. a13) b13) 13) 13b) Blake, 1827, Dante Engravings, Whirlwind of Lovers, detail, lower left, Brit. Mus., London; with video details (cf. Va13 and views of the whole) Blake, 1793, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 20, Snake-Leviathan, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Again, Whirlwind of Lovers, whole (video adds details of Paolo and Francesca, Dante and Virgil, cf. V13a) Same, detail of the englobed kiss The French have submitted to paradox only in their broken, Pascalian phase. English empiricists and Newtonians eschew it, Berkeley as rationally as any: ''Impossible even for an infinite mind to reconcile contradictions." But the Italo-Germans, from Bruno through Leibniz to Schelling, burn in the flame of mating opposites. Where they systematize paradox, Blake intuitively rides it: "Without Contraries is no progression". In his moony Beulah "Contrarieties are equally true" — far more in "the great Wars of Eternity, in fury of Poetic Inspiration." At the Judgment close of Jerusalem, with the eternal forms of nature and life (even Bacon, Newton, Locke, fourfold clarified) awaking to immortality, Blake sees ''the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems & rich array Humanize." So in the Dante engraving of Paolo and Francesca (at the end of Blake's life), it is as the coiled suppressed snake of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ("advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence'') that the whirlwind sucks up lovers from stormy Ulro, a fugal flame of bondage tilted skyward like a vine. Music: Beethoven, 1807-8. 3rd Rasumovsky Quartet, last movement, close, Col. ML 5587 While Dante swoons under the radiant kiss to the ground of repressive thorns. 14) Blake, 1793 (1825 copy), Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 3, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (now two slides, A: detail above, and B: detail below; to which the video adds the whole, V14, and closer details) (end Beethoven) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Blake was 33 when he began The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives," taking his own birth for the fulfillment of a Swedenborgian prophecy — Blake stretched at the top of the page in the delight of creative fire; and below: "Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence." The page epitomizes Blake, both accepting and at war with the poised antinomies, Innocence and Experience, the kiss of joy, the birth in pain. Music: 15) Again, Mozart, 1788, Fugue from the Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, opening, G DB 3391 Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen, pl. 24, The Four Elements, Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; first, video details From his earliest years Blake was compelled to frame existence in recurrent wheels of two, three and four; and yet to give himself in impassioned identification to a freedom that defies them. Of these elements: Water, Earth, Air, Fire, prototypes of his later Life-powers the Zoas, it is Blake's destiny to be Fire, yet linked with the others in vital strife — (as in Mozart's C Minor Fugue) a frenzy almost intolerable to Hegelian programmers. Such in Urizen is the petrifaction of Body through seven ages of dismal woe: A roof, shaggy, wild inclos'd In an orb his fountain of thought; or in ''The Mental Traveller'' the reciprocating historical gyres, from burning Babe and Woman Old, through freezing Age and Female Babe, back to frowning Babe and Woman Old: She nails him down upon the Rock And all is done as I have told. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight (fade Mozart Fugue) 10 �C.G. Bell 16) Symbolic History Blake, 1824-27, Dante Drawings, #4, Hell Gate, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail This is the material world created in one sense by demonic Elohim, but more deeply by Los and Jesus as an act of Mercy, to stay the fall toward Eternal Death, weaving for the fallen a protective garment of generation. It is the hell to which Dante in Luvah's red robe must be led by Virgil in the blue of Los. Its four continents appear through flame, and under the sea of Time and Space the lost Atlantis of our unity, "infinite mountains of light now barr'd out by the atlantic sea'' (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 25:8), ''when the five senses whelm'd in deluge o'er the earth-born man." (Europe 10:10) 17) V17a) 17b) 17c) Same, Dante Drawings, #60, Primeval Giants Blake, 1793 (1799 copy), America, plate 14, detail, Snake from woman's loins, Mellon Same, America, plate 17, detail, Blake as Los-Orc, Mellon Blake, 1793 (1825 copy), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 16, Ugolino and his Sons, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Dante's Giants deep in hell become for Blake those five earth-sunk senses, ''giant beauty and perfection fallen into dust" (Jerusalem 19:8), when man …closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern'' (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14). Only touch (hardly differentiated here) opening through the entire body into the ecstasy of sex (''The lust of the goat is the bounty of God"), yet smitten, like Job, with boils (Tiriel's fifth daughter, left alive, but with her hair turned to snakes) — only touch affords a model for cleansing the rest: the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14) Yet the giants brood, whelmed in hell, like pot-bellied Hume, Concerning Human Understanding: "there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connection which is conceivable by us." And Blake: "Doubt, doubt, & don't believe without experiment." June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 11 �C.G. Bell 18) Symbolic History P. G. Batoni, 1776, Marshal Cyril G. Razumowski, Razumowski Collection, Vienna (with various video details) Blake's Hell was just the Enlightenment court painters of the 18th century were celebrating; as Battoni did this earlier Razumowski, with his classics and copies of classics — (Blake) the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the sword... We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just & true to our own imaginations — the displayed medals for royal intrigue — (Lord Chesterfield to his son) I reccmmended to you in my last an innocent piece of art, that of flattering people behind their backs, in presence of those who... will not fail to repeat, and even amplify, the praise to the party concerned — Chesterfield, who as Johnson observed, taught the morals of a whore in the style of a dancing master: your dancing-master (he wrote that son) is at this time the most useful and necessary of all the masters you have or can have. While the Earl of Shaftesbury extended the decorum of dress to literature: I hold it very indecent that a man should publish his meditations or solitary thoughts. These are the froth & scum of writing which should be unburdened in private and consigned to oblivion, before the writer come before the world as good company. 19) J. Reynolds, 1787, Lord Heathfield, Governor of Gibralter, National Gallery, London; + V details June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against that Old Regime of Form, this Reynolds 1787 defender of Gibralter seems to herald the new republic of Humanity — as if Lord Heathfield were George Washington, roused by the strains of Lallan Burns: ''Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled": Lay the proud usurper low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty's in every blow! Let us do or die! Yet Reynolds was Blake's despised priest of establishment: This man was Hired to Depress Art... A Pretence of Art: To Destroy Art. Reynolds or Chesterfield, Whig or Tory, all shared the Enlightened fabric Blake had pursued from childhood with "contempt and abhorrence" — Montesquieu: of the necessary tie between laws and the constitution of each government, of its manners, climate, religion, commerce... 20) Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen, plate 3, Los striding in flames, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; + V detail While Blake, Los-Orc striding in flame, cries what his cry almost makes true: ''Ages are All Equal, But Genius is Always Above the Age." Music: a21) 21) 21a) Beethoven, 1807, Fugal bit from lst movement, lst Rasumovsky Quartet, HS Q-41, or other (Quartet fades for Hammerklavier) Blake, 1794 (1815 copy), Urizen, plate 18, Los in Flames, Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (video: detail only) Blake, 1804-18, Jerusalem (Rinder), plate 26, Hand and Jerusalem, Rinder Collection Blake, 1793, "Fire," from the Gates of Paradise (3rd State), Miss Carthew Collection June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 13 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Beethoven, 1818-19, Sonata in B Flat (Hammerklavier), opening of fugue, Seraphim IC/ 6066 Yet in what sense above the age, where the cruciform gesture of delight hardens to the vulture oppression of Hand — Jerusalem's news of freedom script for a Reign of Terror: Rebellion struck the tyrant dead, Became a tyrant in his stead. Thus the fugal play of the lst Rasumovsky turns to the time-tangle of the Hammerklavier — of all late Beethoven fugues: as when Schindler visited in l819 and heard from the next room the hammerings and howlings of the Missa Solemnis Creed, ''the door opened & Beethoven stood before us with distorted features... as if he had been in mortal combat with the whole host of contrapuntists, his everlasting enemies." 22) Goya, 1815-24, Proverbs 7, Matrimonial Folly, etching (Dover); + V detail (fade Hammerklavier) The rational mode of that crisis had been satire, the acid of Swift, which spills into the new century most fiercely in Goya — this Matrimonial Folly from the Proverbs. Blake too had begun with satire, in An Island in the Moon: Hail Matrimony made of Love To thy wide gates how great a drove On purpose to be yok'd do come; Widows & maids & Youths also That lightly trip on beauty's toe Or sit on beauty's bum. For 2nd 21) Blake, 1795, "Good" and "Evil" Angels struggling for a Child, Tate Gallery, London (video: detail of "Evil" only) No doubt all Blake's Ulro pictures have that cutting edge; and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the seven church houses of brick in which ''monkeys, baboons, & all of that species" June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 14 �C.G. Bell 2nd 22) Symbolic History Again, Goya, Matrimonial Folly, detail are ''grinning and snatching at one another... the weak... caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with, & then devour'd," as recklessly envenoms Swift, 23) Chardin, c. 1736(?), Monkey Antiquary, Chartres (other versions, Louvre, etc., are variously dated) as Swift's lacerated heart had soured the prevailing monkey-play — this pensive antiquary by Chardin. With Storm and Stress, such irony is everywhere possessed by alienating furies, personal, demonic, political. So Blake to the Reverend Trusler, who had contemned his pictures: I really am sorry that you are fallen out with the Spiritual World... you ought to know that what is Grand is necessarily obscure to weak men... 24) Rowlandson, c. 1802, Blood Royal: the detested Duke of Cumberland, British Museum, London; + V detail Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 27, Hell 14, Capaneus the Blasphemer (as rebel hero), British Museum, London Blake, c. 1826, The body of Abel found by Adam and Eve, Tate Gallery, London V24a) a25) I perceive that your Eye is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do... The caricaturist was Rowlandson, whose caustic pen had etched every phase of Georgian excess, as in this 1802 depiction of the hated Duke of Cumberland. But to Blake (though republican friend of Tom Paine) the satiric, stripped of prophecy, seemed trivial. Again to Trusler: I know that This World is a World of Imagination & vision. I see Every thing I paint in This World but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun... Music: b25) Beethoven, 1818-9, Hammerklavier, closing fugue, conclusion, Seraphim IC 6066 Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1810, Landscape with Rainbow, formerly Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Weimar, now lost June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 15 �C.G. Bell c25) 25) Symbolic History Goya, 1825-28, Milkmaid, Prado, Madrid (video: detail only) Blake, 1804-18 (printed 1820), Jerusalem, plate 37, Albion sustained by Christ etc., Mellon Collection, Washington D.C.; + V details, as V25a If the giants of 1800 share a prophetic reforging of the Enlightened and sophistic heritage, Blake has this Pascalian distinction: In the others, when, as in Beethoven's Hammerklavier, the demonic battle eases, (Hammerklavier, sempre dolce cantabile) it is into the irradiated "calm that nature breathes among the hills and groves" (even Goya's last Milkmaid takes that gleam); whereas in Blake, any such respite hangs between Ulro and the flaming wars of Eternity, a sleep of dreams in moony Beulah: It is not nature but Christ who sustains this fainting Albion ("between the Palm tree and the Oak of weeping"), Albion's left foot planted on the winged red sun of chaos, his knee as in false prayer to that Druid oak of sacrifice, while below Urizen's starry sky, his Emanation, Jerusalem, vegetates on an arc-bier in the sea of time and space, ravened over by the vulture specter of possessive jealousy (caricature indeed, but far from Rowlandson). As the Reverend Dibdin said: "The sublime and grotesque seemed...forever amalgamated in his imagination." (fade Hammerklavier) 26) 26a) 26b) Blake, 1804-1818 (printed 1820), Jerusalem (Census copy E, "Stirling"), plate 99, Reunion of Soul and God, Mellon Collection, Washington D.C. (video: details only) Same, Jerusalem, Title page August Klöber, c. 1812(?), portrait of Beethoven (video returns to a detail of 26a, Spectre of Jerusalem) At the close of Jerusalem, in the union of soul and God, it is ambiguous (because complementary) whether the dark-haloed brooding God is drawn down by the "eternal womanly" into hell flames of generation, or she upward into the ecstasy where those "furnaces of affliction" are the fountains of life. The text reads: June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone, all Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality. And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem. No wonder vegetated Southey fled from that visit when Blake showed him "a perfectly mad poem called Jerusalem": his madness was too evident, too fearful. It gave his eyes an expression such as you would expect to see in one who was possessed. What fear, in Christian England, of divine possession! Beethoven had it better in Faustian Germany. (here the Hammerklavier comes in again for the closing bars) 27) Hogarth, 1758, The Bench, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; + V detail The curse of satire, the blessing of heart, embrace the comic reality Fielding admired in Hogarth. These 1758 judges on the bench are just such as bear the brunt in Amelia, Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews: (the bribed justice of Joseph and Fanny) ''I have only ordered them to Bridewell for a month." — ''But what is their crime?"..."A kind of felonious larcenous thing. I believe I must order them a little correction too, a little stripping and whipping"...''Still,'' said the squire, "I am ignorant of the crime — the fact I mean." "Why, there it is in peaper,'' answered the justice... (showing the deposition about the breaking of a twig) ''Jesu!" said the squire, ''would you commit two persons to Bridewell for a twig?" — "Yes," said the lawyer, ''and with great lenity too; for if we had called it a young tree, they would have been both hanged." 28) Hogarth, 1757, Garrick and his Wife, Royal Collection, Windsor; + V detail At the same, time, Hogarth painted this portrait of Garrick working late, his wife teasing him to bed. Here is the impulsive humanity which — limbed round with the scalpel of wit — makes Fielding promise his heroes and heroines a lifetime of actual good: June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Mr. Jones appears to be the happiest of all humankind; for what happiness this world affords equal to the possession of such a woman as Sophia, I sincerely own I have never yet discovered. a29) 29) Blake, 1800, The Infant Jesus riding on a Lamb, formerly Stirling Collection; + V detail Hogarth, c. 1735-40, Satan, Sin, and Death, Tate Gallery, London Fielding had still to wrestle with the Christian calling, from Parson Adams to Amelia's benefactor: "If one of my cloth should begin a discourse of heaven in the scenes of business or pleasure... would he not... be thought by all men worthy of Bedlam?" Even Hogarth, beyond the enlightened field where Voltaire and Rousseau traffic in reason's irony and heart's worth, felt a weird stirring (through Milton, Dante, and the Bible: as in this Satan, Sin, and Death at the gate of hell) toward the evidence of things not seen — yet so whelmed in the Cartesian bulk of operatic Baroque, as almost to have lost the revelation it gropes for; though even this picture became for Blake a point of departure. 30) V30a) June 1996 Double: [A] Bosch, 1506-8, Fragment of a Judgment, detail, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); and [B] Rubens, c. 1620 (copy), Fall of the Damned, detail, Aachen Gallery (CGB '74) Titian, c. 1550-60(?), Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, lower detail, Jesuit Church, Venice (video returns to the double, 30, and then shows a detail of the Bosch, from V30A, CGB '59) Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History If spirit cannot speak without body, there remains a graded stair from stripped symbol to spatial representation. Blake's continual rage against the post-Venetian — labouring to destroy Imaginative power, by means of that infernal machine, called Chiaro Oscuro... The spirit of Titian was particularly active in raising doubts... Rubens is a most outrageous Demon — springs from an absolute clarity: that in all the 17th- and 18th-century schools, the life of Gothic invention (as in this Bosch detail) had been buried under the brown-shadowing earth-laws of codified matter. As Bosch had fleshed out Medieval symbol with Renaissance techniques, 31) Blake, 1823-24, Job, plate 11, Thou affrightest me with Dreams, New Zealand Blake had to shear Newtonian fulness into prophetic reality, though like his radical contemporaries, he sweeps the world heritage with him — in storm. Job in the 11th design, "Thou affrightest me with visions," lies on the mat of penitence under the cloven-hoofed and snake-wrapped God of his own jealous making: And is there not eternal fire and eternal chains To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life? a32) 32) Joseph Vernet, 1773, Seaport by Moonlight, Louvre, Paris Winchester, end of the 10th cent., Pentecost, Pontifical of Archbishop Robert, Municipal Library, Rouen In the Leviathan depths of reason's limitation, of which Eliot in our time would write — Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place — what hungers must have mounted to break through again into the realm of vision (this Winchester miniature from before 1000, where the Holy Ghost spills like molten metal to a spaceless and selfless whirl of Apostles flattened on the rainbow arch of that upper June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History room). What was Blake's madness but to heed some apostolic cry of modern consciousness? Va33) b33) 33) Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen, plate 11, Urizen fettered weeps, Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Blake, c. 1804, Milton (Census copy D), plate 16, Milton advancing disrobed, Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem, plate 53, detail, Vala Throned on a Sunflower, British Museum, London At Felpham false-friend Hayley (in Byron's quip, "For ever feeble and for ever tame'') tried to wean Blake from such "Abstract folly," to chain his ''feet to the world of Duty and Reality." And as Blake wrote Butts, his own return to London was that I may converse with my friends in Eternity. See Visions, Dream Dreams, & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals... — to see this Vala, beauty of nature, materialize into the Female Will, throned on the sunflower of sexual desire (an ellipse of projective geometry): (Ah, Sunflower! weary of time): They took their Mother Vala & they crown'd her with gold; They named her Rahab & gave her power over the Earth, ...to destroy the Lamb & Usurp the Throne of God Drawing their Ulro Voidness round the Four-fold Humanity. (Jerusalem 78: 15-20) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 20 �C.G. Bell 34) Symbolic History Roman Baroque, 1595 ff., Santa Trinita de' Monti with the Spanish Stair, 1723-26 (CGB '47) Music: Händel, 1742, Messiah #9, chorus: "0 thou that tellest" Philips C71 AX300 In the assertive rationalization of Christianity, Händel's Messiah, warhorse of oratorios, stands at a Urizenic limit of opacity, culmination of a century and a half of Baroque: — Rome: Santa Trinita de' Monti over the Spanish Stair; 35) Piazza Navona, Rome: Bernini, 1647-52, Fountain; Rainaldi & Borromini 1652-57, St. Agnese, etc. [slide show CGB '48; video CGB '86 with detail from CGB '48] or the Piazza Navona with Bernini's Fountain and Borromini's Church, from which, they used to say, the statue of the Nile veils his face. (close Messiah #9) 36) Claudio Coello, c. 1690, Charles II adoring the relics, Sacristy, Escorial (video: details only, above and below) Music: Messiah #12. close of chorus: "unto us a Child". Philips C71 AX300 By 1690 in Spain, Coello had opened within a frame of florid marble and bronze this extraordinary pomp of space. 37) Mexican Baroque, early 18th cent.(?), Façade and Towers, Cathedral Taxco (CGB '70) (video: upper detail only) Mexican Baroque, finished 1752, façade detail, Cathedral, Zacatecas (CGB '70) V37a) A grandeur which by the time of Handel had gathered native workmen and the remains of Indian style, as at Taxco, into the sacred conquests of the New.World. (close Messiah #12) 38) Mansart, Coypel, etc., 1661-1722, interior, columned apse, Chapel at Versailles (CGB '59); + V detail of painting Music: June 1996 Messiah #18, opening "He shall feed his flock" Philips C71 AX300 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Nor had the style-restraint of France held the Corinthian chapel of Versailles from as flagrant a proclamation of Cartesian victory. 39) Straub (with Günther?), c. 1767, Gabriel, High Altar, Berg-am-Laim, München (CGB '59); + V detail In Bavaria the currents from Italy and France fructify, as at Berg-am-Laim, in the richest outpouring of all Baroque; yet its sensuous passions but complement the underlay of heroic formulation and proud rationality. (fade Messiah #18) 40) Sabastiani Ricci, c. 1712-16, Resurrection, sketch for Chelsea Hospital, Dulwich College, London; + V detail Music: Messiah, #42. Halleluja, opening, Philips C71 AX300 About the time of Händel's coming to London, Ricci imported the festive Venetian Baroque. (fade Halleluja) 41) 41a) 41b) V41c) Thomas Archer, 1725, West Tower, Cathedral of Birmingham (CGB '74) Borromini, 1650-59, Sant' Ivo, from the Courtyard, Rome (CGB '86) Sir Christopher Wren, 1673-1711, St. Paul's Cathedral, London (CGB '77) Same, another view of the dome (CGB '77) Music: Händel, Messiah, #52, Amen, close, Philips 671 AX300 While Thomas Archer, trained in Rome, gave the tower of Birmingham a wonderful sweep of counterpointed curves. If the grandiose display of earthly religion is a Blakean antithesis, it is an antithesis which contains the fugue, already in creative struggle (like the 3-body problem in Newton) stretching the rationale it exemplifies. (close Messiah) 42) Double: [A] Bramante, 1499-1502, Tempietto, and [B] Borromini, 1642-60, Sant' Ivo; both, Rome (CGB '86); + V single of St. Ivo (from 41a) 42a) Double: [A] Raphael, 1510-11, detail of Homer, Parnassus, Vatican, and [B] Rembrandt, 1662-63, Homer dictating, fragment, Mauritzhuis, The Hague June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 22 �C.G. Bell 42b) Symbolic History Double: [A] Bramente, Tempietto, Trastevere, Rome; and [B] Raphael, 1504, Temple in La Sposalizio, Brera, Milan In Rome two courtyard chapels oppose Bramante's High-Renaissance island of calm, 1500 (left), to the Miltonic and Pascalian implosion of Borromini (right) 1650, that wagered marriage of passion and method. From its first tactile declaration, the Baroque was revolutionary, fantastically overpushing its always heroic might — to contain Blake's heaven in the laws of earth. Through what maze of paradox genius searhes its style-affinities — Blake extolling Renaissance Raphael against Baroque Rembrandt, while Milton's dark Baroque remained his creative center. "Grecian," he said, "is Mathematical Form: Gothic is Living Form." What is implied for Bramante's Temple, so linked to Raphael's in the Sposalizio? 43) Double: [A] Borromini, 1650-59, Lantern of Sant' Ivo, Rome; and [B] Borromini, 1649-52, sketch for the same, Albertina, Vienna (video uses Berlin sketch for A; see V43) What revealed of Borromini's spire-tribute to the heraldic Barberini bee? Surely its Baroque incorporates, beyond Renaissance, the soul-leap of Gothic — how transparently if, as in one of Borromini's drawings, we might experience at once its outward flaming gyre and (right) the lanterned vault within. 44) Double: [A] English Gothic, 1286-1325, Wells, Chapter House (CGB '84); and [B] Borromini, 1650-59, St. Ivo Dome, within, Rome; + V singles Here the teaching of Greece and Rome is caught up in a soaring as radical, as (three centuries before) in the Gothic groining (left) of Wells Chapter House. The music which most designedly challenges the possible is of the string tradition Bach climaxed, where an essentially one-voiced instrument delivers itself of the polyphonic and fugal. Thus Casals chose Bach's Sixth Cello Suite as the vehicle of ultimate modern reach. Music: June 1996 Bach, c. 1720, Prelude, Cello Suite No. 6 in D Major, last part, (Casals) Angel COLH 18 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 23 �C.G. Bell a45) b45) Vc45) Vd45) 45) Symbolic History Borromini, 1666-76, Façade detail, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome Same, Façade, another view (CGB '86) Same, Façade, detail over the main door (CGB '86) Same, Interior, vault with organ (CGB '86); video: detail only Same, Interior, vault (CGB '86); video: detail only Again Borromini: San Carlo of the Four Fountains. V45a) a46) Guarini, 1667, Sidona Chapel dome, Duomo, Turin (CGB '84) Narcisco Tomé, 1721-32, The Transparente Altar, in the Apse of Toledo Cathedral. Where the slide sequence opens with the central tower of carved figures only, the video draws first from the lower spread of slide 46 the same structure against clerestory windows of the choir. Middle-height of the same carved tower: a gold-rayed marble whirl of Mary and Angels From the base of the same structure, an altar with Mary and the infant Christ Vertical slide of the same: the altar tower in the window-lighted cathedral, from a glory-dome opened in the vault, down the pillar of saints and angels, to the Madonna below; here the video shows a middle-spread of the whole, and last a detail of the radiant heaven above. Vb46) Vc46) 46) (end Casals Bach) In Spain, Baroque daring peaks in the Transparente, where Tomé lifted the apse of Toledo Cathedral for a carved and painted spill of angels from Heaven's vault above, to an altar of the Virgin below. Here, as at the same time in Bach, what would seem the Blakean opposite of pyrotechnic display, swells with conscious prophecy. So Blake, to Butts, from Felpham: I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines without Premeditation and even against my will… & an immense Poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life… My heart is full of futurity. 47) Double: [A] Roman Christian, c. 420, Crucifixion, from Ivory Pyxis, British Museum, London; and [B] Irish, late 7th cent., Bronze, Crucifixion Plaque, National Museum, Dublin (with video details of singles, A before, B after) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 24 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Gregorian, Libera me (Burial Service), closing chorus, MHS OP 349 In Blake's merger of flesh and spirit, time and eternity, self and Christ ("Mine has a snub nose like to mine") the pendulum of Incarnation has swung all the way from ritual abstraction of God's humanity — these Crucifixions from 5th-century Rome to 700 Ireland: the spaceless distance of Gregorian Chant (with its Celtic and other irrecoverable offshoots) — to all of which Blake, in the arm-flung immediacy of Albion-Christ might say, "thou readst black where I read white." (fade with "saeculum") 48) 48a) 48b) Grünewald, c. 1512-15, Crucifixion from Isenheim Altar, Museum, Colmar; + V details of John the Baptist and Christ Same, closer detail of Christ Same, detail of the group on the left Music: Morales, published 1543, Lamentabatur Jacob, (Turner) ARC ST2533 321 From the anguished Plague Crucifixes of 14th-century Germany, to this Grünewald ordeal of sacred body, painted about 1515 for the abbey church and hospital of the Anthonites in Alsatian Isenheim, we feel the build-up of Incarnate identification — in music, the harmonic pain Morales learned from Josquin. (fade Morales, after "Heume") 49) Feichtmayr and Christian, 1747-58, Christ on the Cross, Pulpit, Zwiefalten (video details only: above, below, and Christ's head) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Such passion, grappled into form, mediates the Baroque. In Bach's great Chaconne from the Second Partita, the Caesarian extraction of so much glory from scraped gut, adumbrates, in divine cat-fight, spirit's war on itself — as if Feichtmayr's God had "pitched his mansion in the place of excrement." Music: Bach, 1717-23(?), from Chaconne, Partita #2, Odnoposov (or better: H. Szeryng, DGG 2709-028) By the end of Bach's life, Baroque was the matrix of pre-romantic, like that Arcana Cœlestia, in which Swedenborg pours Divine Love and Wisdom through a universe of nebular astronomy, fashioning salvation, as soul fashions body. 50) 50a) Blake, c. 1799-1800, Agony in the Garden, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail Blake, 1807-08, First Temptation, watercolor, from Paradise Regained, T.H. Riches, Esq. (video: detail only) The Blake of this Agony in the Garden was reared in the Swedenborg circle of London. And though he left the prophet behind like the linen clothes folded at the tomb: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number — he and his art consummate the personal transcendence of Northern Baroque — in his case, of Milton. (fade Chaconne) How would Jane Austen's clergyman Pharisee — nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish… his curate does all the work, and the business of his life is to dine — have seen this mystic heir to embodiment as anything but mad?: Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility And the just man rages in the wilds Where lions roam. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 26 �C.G. Bell a51) Symbolic History Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1776-77, Lady Caroline Scott as "Winter," Duke of Buccleugh, Bowhill, Selkirk Reynolds, 1788-89, Master Hare, Louvre, Paris Reynolds, 1777-80, Lady Elizabeth Delme and her Children, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; + V detail Blake, 1793 (copy of 1799), America (Census copy M), plate 11, below, Nude Children Riding a Snake, Mellon Same, upper detail, Boy riding a Swan Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen (Census copy G), plate 21, Chain of Jealousy (Los, Enitharmon, Orc), Rosenwald, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (video: detail only) Vb51) 51) 51a) V51b) V51c) Music: Thomas Arne, c. 1751, Andante from Overture #1, Argo 2RG-577 "Active Evil, " said Blake, "is better than Passive Good." He must have shared more with the great Baroque, as with Milton, than with the social sweetness of his time: — easy Thomas Arne (through Christian Bach a likely influence on Mozart); this Sir Joshua Reynolds — no contrary, but a negation. "Reynolds & Gainsborough" (Blake wrote) "Blotted & Blurred one against the other & Divided all the English World between them. Fuseli indignant almost hid himself — I am hid." It was not just that the youthful Blake had shown Reynolds some designs and been told to correct his drawing. Nor was it envy of what was beyond him. Blake could have been successful. In his most productive period, he had taught the children of the wealthy, and, as Tatham tells, so pleased patrons of rank that he had been offered the post of tutor to the Royal family. Aghast, he surrendered his pupils, preferring want and his own art to betrayal of principle. As Southey allowed in his caustic 1809 review: "Nothing but madness had prevented him from being the sublimest painter of this or any other country. (close Arne) 52) 52a) Gainsborough, c. 1759, Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, National Gallery, London Gainsborough, c. 1762, The Painter's Daughters, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (video returns to details from Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, then to left detail from Painter's Daughters) June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Like every admired artist of the time, Gainsborough was on the social rack — as between the lacy brilliance of Lady So-and-so and the unfeed sensibility of his own daughters chasing a butterfly, or tousling each other. It was more and more the century of youth: Rousseau's Emile, Pestalozzi's invention of progressive education, leading toward Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality": Thou little child, yet glorious in the might Of heaven-born freedom on thy Being's height… Mozart was freer than Gainsborough, and paid the price; but even in him there is a spread between social performance and, as in the Romanza from the D Minor Concerto, its inspired surpassing. Music: 53) Mozart, 1785, from Piano Concerto #20, K 466, Romanza, Piano entrance ff., (Fisher) V. LCT 6013 (or Richter, Murray Hill S2957) J.A. Houdon, c. 1777, Bust of Alexandre Brogniart as a child, Louvre, Paris (cf. his Daughter Sabine, Huntington, San Marino, California); first, V detail (fade Mozart Romanza) Houdon, too, most delights in his salon skills when he models children, especially his sylphid daughter Sabine. a54) 54) 54a) 54b) George Romney, c. 1780(?), Lady Arabella Ward, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Romney, c. 1781-83, Miss Willoughby, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Blake, 1805, "The Dog" (for Hayley's Ballad), British Museum, London Jean Baptiste Isabey, 1812, Fürsten Katharina Bagration Skawronska, collection Fürst Franz Auersperg (video returns to a detail of Romney's Miss Willoughby, from 54) And Romney, who had wanted to paint Allegory and History, seems happiest when his bombast ladies freshen in the fountain of youth toward Burns' Highland Mary, or Wordsworth's Lucy, of whom Nature would say: This Child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A lady of my own… June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Blake, after refusing the Royal Children Copley had lately painted, was saved from destitution by Hayley, given a cottage in Felpham, and, of course, set to pick-thank tasks, engraving after minor artists, decorating Hayley's Library, portraying the gentry in miniature. Miniature [he writes] is become a Goddess in my Eyes, & my Friends in Sussex say that I Excel in the pursuit. I have a great many orders, & they multiply. Until the break his poem Milton treats in symbols, with the return to poverty in London: Hayley… thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did poor Romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do… 55) Blake, 1793 (copy of 1799), America, plate 7, Children Sleeping with a Ram, Paul Mellon; + V lower detail Perhaps Blake too is at his happiest with children, but his are of the Imagination, out of Georgian context altogether: Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: "Pipe a song about a lamb!" So I piped with merry cheer, "Piper, pipe that song again"; So I piped: he wept to hear. Or: Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?… He is meek, & he is mild; He became a little child… 56) English MS, early 14th cent., Angel leads St. John to Heaven, MS Roy. 19B, XII, 5v., British Museum, London; + V detail Music: June 1996 French, c. 1260(?), Codex Bamberg, Hoquetus VII, d'Amiens longum/ In seculum (4th phrase); from (Munrow) Archiv 2723 045 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Blake's pastoral Beulah reaches far back to the living innocence of the Gothic, which he copied as a boy in Westminster Abbey — this 1300 John, led up the symbolic ladder, above what Blake would have recognized as the Vegetative world. But the prepersonal suspension in creed attested by the formal faces or the bare-fifths of the music, could not have been the element of revolutionary Blake. (close Hoquetus) 57) 57a) Albrecht Dürer, 1496-98, Apocalypse Woodcuts, #14, Angel Locks Dragon in Abyss (with a view of New Jerusalem); video: details only Dürer, 1522, Self as Man of Sorrows, Kunsthalle, Bremen; first, video detail Music: Mouton, 1515, 8-voice motet, "Exsultet," 1st half, SAWT 9561-B That City, which the Angel showed John from a spirit mountain, has come to earth in Dürer, 1498, to spread over the plain by a river, like any of the Renaissance towns of Germany — as the 8-voice "Exsultet" of Mouton incorporates soul's victory. So where was Blake to look for renewal but in man's incarnate imagination: "Energy is the only life, and is from the Body"; or as he said to Robinson: "Yes, Jesus is the only God… and so am I, and so are you." His appeal was not to the Middle Ages, but to the corporeal powers of Renaissance: Dürer, Raphael, June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 30 �C.G. Bell 58) 58a) Symbolic History Double, Two Expulsions: [A] Jacobo della Quercia, 1425-38, door panel, San Petronio, Bologna; and [B] Michelangelo, 1508-18, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican; + V singles John Flaxman, 1778, Plaque from Vase of the Apotheosis of Homer, British Museum, London Michelangelo (right), with a prototype Blake could hardly have known, this 1430 della Quercia. Yet surely the physical conglobing of symbol, exhibited in this sequence, was what Blake had to reverse; as he says: "Thus is the heaven a vortex pass'd already, and the earth a vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity." (end Mouton, 1st half) Though Michelangelo's fresco line, against the fog Blake scorned in Titian and Correggio, is such a carrier of force as that process of relief-etching brother Robert, dead, showed William in vision: melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If Blake had known Florentine art before Michelangelo, could he have called Flaxman "Dear Sculptor of Eternity"? 59) Blake, 1795, Elohim Creating Adam, Tate Gallery, London; + V details Yet he caught enough from doubtful prints (the 10-year-old boy at art auctions, Langford's "little connoisseur": "from my earliest childhood… I knew the difference between Raffaele and Rubens") to rival the ceilings of Catholic Rome — though shrunk to the illuminated privacy of a page: this 1795 Creation and Fall crushed into one. In Albion's "Chaotic State of Sleep, Satan & Adam & the whole World was Created by the Elohim" (third of the seven eyes of God, creator and judge) "a very Cruel Being." Such the dæmon who shapes, under cloud and by setting sun, this Adam stretched on the thorn bank over the Sea of Time and Space, already wrapped in the snake-spire of sin and doubt. How was Christian art to regain its ancient might but by such appropriation of heretical power? a60) 60) Blake, 1825, Job, plate 13, God Appearing in a Whirlwind, British Museum, London English, late 13th cent., St. Peter from a Retable, Westminster Abbey, London; + V detail June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For all Blake's "Gothic is living form," his art had no backward road. With the personal fury of Goya and Beethoven, he had to launch Pascal into Revolutionary transcendence. There is none of the anonymous refinement of cloister mysticism — Westminster 1300 — with Richard Rolle of Hampole: But fleschly lufe sal fare as dose the flowre in May, And lastand be na mare than ane houre of a day, And sythen syghe ful sare thar lust, thar pryde, thar play, When thai er casten in kare til pyne that lastes ay… Jesu es lufe that lastes ay, til Hym es owre langing; Jesu the nyght turnes to the day, the dawying intil spryng. Jesu, thynk on us now and ay, for The we halde our keyng; Jesu, gyf us grace, as Thou wel may, to luf The withowten endyng. 61) 61a) Raphael and School, 1518-19, Jacob's Dream, Loggia, Vatican Blake, 1800-03, Jacob's Ladder, British Museum, London (video returns to the Jacob's Dream of 61) We can even understand Blake's admitting Giulio Romano, Raphael's chief helper in the scenes of the Loggia, as his fourth art hero. These forms are still incised; the famous capture of nature looks symbolic now; and what the scene shows is what Blake was sure of: that the sleeper in moony Beulah is offered visions of the eternal stair. We say "if Blake could have seen Giotto, Angelico, Botticelli"; but this Jacob's Dream gave him what he required. Raphael chanced on symbols, painting the Bible; 62) Blake, 1827, Queen Katharine's Dream, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; + V details Blake searched all literature for images of his own symbolic themes. Here Shakespeare's Queen Katharine, dying in detention, sees a blessed Troupe Invite me to a Banquet, whose bright faces Cast a thousand beams upon me, like the sun… It is not with but through the eye, as Los in Jerusalem June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History …beheld the Divine Vision among the flames of the Furnaces; Therefore he lived and breathed in hope… (Jerusalem 62: 35-6) So Blake, when his brother Robert died, saw the spirit rise from the body "clapping his hands for joy." And thus his own death was described by Richmond: Just before he died His countenance became fair — His eyes Brighten'd and He burst out in singing of the things he saw in Heaven. In truth He Died like a Saint. 63) 63a) Fuseli, 1786-89, Titania and Bottom, Tate Gallery, London Fuseli, 1793-94, Titania and Bottom, Kunsthaus, Zurich; first, video detail Fuseli treats Shakespeare in another mode. His are illustrations, picturesque or dramatic. It is a measure of Blake's isolation that in his life-search for co-workers he found none nearer than this Swiss-English explorer of the grotesque and fanciful: The only Man that e'er I knew Who did not make me almost spew Was Fuseli, he was both Turk and Jew. And so, dear Christian friends, how do you do? The artist who could say "Blake is damned good to steal from" had perception and humor; and there is that story of the old Blake's joining the students at the Royal Academy to sketch from the cast of the Laocoön, and Fuseli's saying: "What! you here, Meesther Blake? We ought to come and learn of you, not you from us!" But what could that irony have made of the Prophetic Books? 64) 64a) 64b) Fuseli, 1780, Thetis Mourning over Achylles, Art Institute, Chicago; + V detail George Romney, c. 1792, Witches Cave, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Blake, c. 1808, Satan Calling his Legions, detail, formerly Lord Leaconsfield If we go back to a Fuseli drawing, Achilles mourned by Thetis, of 1780, the date Blake engraved on his "Glad Day" (though ten years after), there is no doubt that the older Swiss immigrant, already the stir of London and to influence David and Goya, helped Blake to a whole vocabulary of Mannerist gestures. But such Storm-and-Stress abstractions (with the related ink washes by Romney) end where Blake begins — their theater, his Halls of Los in Golgonooza. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is hard to credit the obscurity of England's greatest living poet and artist. There is the evening at Lady Caroline Lamb's, 1820, when Blake was invited 65) 65a) 65b) 65c) Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1810, Viscount Castlereagh, National Portrait Gallery, London Blake, 1794, separate print from Urizen, plate 2, Enitharmon Floating at Dawn with Infant Orc, British Museum, London; + video return to 62, Blake, Queen Katharine's Dream, detail of Katharine Again, Viscount Castlereagh, detail Lawrence, 1819, Portrait of George IV, detail, Vatican Museum, Rome with the courtly Sir Thomas Lawrence, who painted this portrait of Viscount Castlereagh, English Foreign Secretary. Lady Charlotte Bury records: Blake… an eccentric little artist… not a regular professional painter… full of beautiful imaginations… one of those whose feelings are far superior to his situation in life… I could not help contrasting this humble artist with the great and powerful Sir Thomas Lawrence… [Lawrence] looked at me several times whilst I was talking with Mr. B., and I saw his lips curl with a sneer, as if he despised me for conversing with so insignificant a person… Later, at Linnell's urging, Lawrence bought and apparently treasured, among other Blake, Queen Katharine's Dream. Who was truly powerful? The man who lived for his vision, or the portrait flatterer of Castlereagh, of whom Byron had just written: The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant! Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore, And thus for wider carnage taught to pant, Transferr'd to gorge upon a sister shore, The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want… Cobbling at manacles for all mankind… As Blake had commented on Sir Joshua: The Enquiry in England is not whether a man has Talents & Genius? But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass: & Obedient to Noblemens Opinions in Art & Science. If he is; he is a Good Man: If Not he must be Starved. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 34 �C.G. Bell 66) V66a) 66b) 66c) 66d) Symbolic History Samuel Palmer, c. 1826, A Hilly Scene, Tate Gallery, London Palmer, 1830, Coming from Evening Church, detail, Tate Gallery, London Palmer, c. 1826, Self-Portrait, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Palmer, 1835, A Pastoral Scene, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Blake, c. 1790-93, Marriage of Heaven and Hell (copy of 1794-5), Title Page, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (video: detail only) Blake, c. 1794 (copy c. 1818), Urizen, Title Page, detail, Book of Laws, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. V66e) In Blake's age, a group of young artists gathered around him. Palmer was the genius among them, and the most possessed by Blake's vision. The little pictures he painted at Shoreham before Blake's death change the phenomenal into imagination. As Palmer quoted Blake on the vastness of space: "It is false, I walked the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my fingers." But Palmer, too, had to suffer neglect, and he was not as strong as Blake, nor was his wife Blake's selfless Kate. His career is a pathos of compromise. Perhaps the God-tie gives the clue. Palmer's modernism is of art; Blake's of soul. It is typical that Palmer, who, seeing Blake in his plain black suit among the swells at the Royal Academy, thought "How little you know who is among you!" — that even Palmer prefaces his praise of Blake's sanity, genius, and industry, with the proviso: "Without alluding to his writings, which are here not in question." Palmer could not face the prophetic books without quaking at Blake's heresies: "Misled by erroneous spirits… he suffered fancy to trespass within sacred precincts." And Linnell, who commissioned Blake for the Dante drawings and engravings, wrote: "With all admiration… it must be confessed that he said many things tending to the corruption of Christian morals…" a67) 67) 67a) Blake, 1820, Woodcut # 11 for Virgil's First Eclogue (Thornton), British Museum, London Blake, 1820, Same, #3, proof of 1st state, British Museum Constable, 1813-14, Page from a sketch book, #1, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Among Blake's works, those that most inspired Palmer (or Linnell and Calvert, for that matter) were the 1820 woodcuts for Thornton's Virgil, (another commercial disaster), June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History and surely, their alchemizing of nature is more than magical. For Palmer, they were pictures only, freed of the apostolic; though old Thenot, glad under the boughs of fruitfulness against young Colinet, mournful under the oak of error, is, like all Blake, mystically personal. Yet how romantically full, the nature through which his threefold vision looks — like a Constable, of which he said: "Why this is not drawing, but inspiration." To which Constable: "I meant it for drawing." 68) Giovanni di Paolo, 1455-60, St. Nicholas of Tolentino Saving a Ship, Museum of Art (Johnson Collection), Philadelphia; first, video detail When Blake rebelled from the visual as model — "Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaded, and obliterate imagination in me" — he quoted Milton, preferring "devout prayer for the hallowed fire" to "Memory and her Siren Daughters." The historical shift Vasari had praised, from Gothic sharpness, as in this Giovanni di Paolo storm at sea, 69) 69a) Giorgione, Palma Vecchio, etc., c. 1510, Storm Miracle, Scuola di San Marco, Venice (video: detail only) Blake, c. 1824-26, Dante, plate 2 (Hell ii, 140), Dante and Virgil enter an oak forest, Tate Gallery, London to the cloudy bondage of the phenomenal net Blake ascribed to the malice of the Venetians — and indeed this miracle of Venice saved from a ship of demons on a stormy night, which Giorgione left for Palma and others to finish, is the first of its kind — Blake saw that shift as tied to the deceits which, from the infernal trinity of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, had spread oak groves and Druid temples over the Earth, mocking God [he writes] & Eternal Life, & in Public Collusion calling themselves Deists, Worshipping the Maternal Humanity, calling it Nature and Natural Religion… 70) Blake, 1804-05 (1815 copy), Milton, plate 42, Albion and Jerusalem on the Rock of Ages, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; with video details Music: Haydn, 1796-98, The Creation, opening, Vanguard VRS 471/2 Yet we are struck again how awesomely Blake carries natural bodies, rock, sea, and sky, across into symbol; what earth-life fills this eagle of prey transformed to the June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Eagle of Genius ("lift up thy head!") as he wakes Albion and Jerusalem from their sleep on the Rock of Ages (the actual sleep of History); and how the long slip of light on the Sea of Time and Space unfolds space itself, with all its mood and longing: — 71) Schinkel, 1803, View of Trieste, formerly Kronprinzenpalais, Berlin; + V detail almost as in this Schinkel, or later in Courbet and Böcklin — or in the musical chaos shot through with searching rays which Haydn's Creation bequeathed to Beethoven and Wagner. (fade Creation) Once Cartesian reason had precipitated Pascalian paradox, there seemed two directions mind could take: One: to forge a dialectic which, like calculus, might embrace the exhibited antinomies in organic reaffirmation (Leibniz, Hegel, Whitehead). It was for being of this camp that Wordsworth, Blake's "only poet of the age," was also called by him "a landscape painter": "I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man." a2nd 70) Blake, 1794, Europe, A Prophecy, Frontispiece, The Ancient of Days (with compasses), Sir Geoffrey Keynes For 2nd 70) Blake, c. 1804, Milton (Rinder uncolored), plate 38, detail of Albion and Jerusalem on the Rock of Ages The second, the Pascalian way — reverting to our disproportion and incapacity — must strip the temporal for saving miracle: Kierkegaard's Christ in the moment now. Yet no sooner are the possibilities formulated than they prove inadequate — any polar field admitting of infinite life-solutions. Thus Blake, who abandons nature and Cartesian reason, fires personal Christianity with more than Transcendental daring. In this, he leaps at once backward and forward from the landscape men: …in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven And Earth, & all you behold, though it appears Without it is Within In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow. For 2nd 71) Schinkel, 1815, Gothic Church on a Rock by the Sea, National Gallery, Berlin; video: detail only June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 71a) Blake, 1804-20, Jerusalem (copy E), plate 28, detail, Vala and Jerusalem in the Lily, Mellon Collection, Yale Center No doubt the Faustian Germany of Hegel, Beethoven, Hölderlin and the rest became the center of the landscape rapture — of the romantic irradiation of time. Even Goethe's break with Newton was to rear a science of organic interplay, salvaging what Blake would discard. As with Spinoza and Leibniz against Pascal, we cannot tell which was the forward motion. At least Germany for a while seemed kinder to the creative. It is curious that the strongest recognition of the old Blake came from a traveling German, Götzenberger. He had seen many men of talent in England, he said, "but only three of Genius, Coleridge, Flaxman, and Blake, and of these Blake was the greatest." Va72) 72) 72a) V72b) Thomas Girtin, c. 1797, The Rocking Stone, Tate, London; video: detail only Girtin, c. 1802, Fells Near Bolton, watercolor, T. Girtin, Esq. John Varley, c. 1810(?), Mountain Lake: Afterglow, watercolor, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Blake, 1797-1807, Vala (later, The Four Zoas), MS., plate 86, pencil and crayon of Vala as a nude, British Museum, London Of English painters, perhaps Girtin, in his early watercolors, best suggests the solemn affinity of soul with a nature of "huge and mighty forms" which Wordsworth enshrined in The Prelude and in "Tintern Abbey": Until the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things… And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things… Blake would not have overlooked that both passages close with the word "things"; both seat godhead in nature; Va73) John Constable, c. 1825, Clouds over Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a boy sitting on a bank, Tate Gallery, London Constable, 1821-22, Streaming sun over Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Blake, 1821, from Taylor's De Antro Nympherum, Odysseus Throwing the Girdle, National Trust, Arlington Court Detail of 73, Sunlit Branch Hill Pond Blake, c. 1805, God Blessing the Day, Private Collection, Great Britain; video: was detail, now revised to whole Blake, 1804-18, Rinder Jerusalem, plate 25: Dominion of Vala, Rahab, and Tirzah over the fallen Man; video first returns to 33, detail of Vala Throned on a Sunflower [so revised. 1995] Again, Branch Hill Pond, the sun-rayed central section; which video prefaces with a cloud-detail and closer cloud-detail of Va73) 73) 73a) 73b) 73c) 73d) 73e) as Whitehead would say of The Prelude (and it is true of this Constable as well), show nature "as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others…" Thus Coleridge: Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds! Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! But when Blake sees "the real and eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow," he sees all objects as human forms. Where Constable shows the sun "as a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea," Blake cries: O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 39 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To paint landscape as real is Deism for Blake, enthrones Vala, emanation of Emotion (Luvah) — A creation that groans, living on Death, Where Fish & Bird & Beast & Man & Tree & Metal & Stone Live by Devouring — Wordsworth: "Knowing that Nature never did betray/ The heart that loved her"; and Coleridge: "I shall know/ That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure." As if Chaos itself, in Haydn's Creation, has summoned from its depths the musical ecstasy of Light: Music: a74) b74) Vc74) 74) Haydn's Creation, continued, the phrase: "Und es war Licht" (fade) C.D. Friedrich, 1808, Morning Mist in the Mountains, Museum, Rudolstadt; where videos have previewed 74: Mist in the Riesengebirge [revised 1995] Constable, 1821, Cloud Study, Horizon of Trees, London, Royal Academy; where video has previewed b76, Cirrus Clouds, Victoria and Albert Museum, London [revised 1995] Friedrich, 1823, Lone Tree, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Friedrich, Mist in the Riesengebirge, Neue Pinakothek, München The paradox of the Romantic landscape is that where the old dimensional absolute becomes in one sense merely a veil, it is a veil of working power — the huge sea of mist Wordsworth saw from Snowdon, The perfect image of a mighty Mind, Of one that feeds upon infinity, June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 40 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Which Wordsworth, in orthodox revisions, would later tone down. misread The Recluse — Blake had not All strength, all terror, single or in bands. That ever was put forth in personal Form — Jehovah — with his thunder & the choir Of shouting Angels & the empyreal thrones — I pass them unalarm'd — to cry out: "Does Mr. Wordsworth think his mind can surpass Jehovah?" For the depiction of nature as living spirit, Caspar David Friedrich, north German contemporary of Beethoven, looms over the century. So at the close of Beethoven's last sonata, the solid soars into light and air. Music: 75) Beethoven, 1822, Sonata #32, Opus 111, near close, Seraphim IC6066 C.D. Friedrich, c. 1823, Drifting Clouds and Pool, Kunsthalle, Hamburg — Friedrich's Pool under rising mist, such a reminder as Wordsworth's in The Prelude, where "the hiding-places of [our] power seem open." V75a) Va76) b76) 76) Friedrich, 1825-30, Bohemian Landscape, Gemäldegalerie, Stuttgart Friedrich, c. 1835, Twilight, Riesengebirge, National Gallery, Berlin Constable, c. 1821-22, Study of Cirrus Clouds, Victoria and Albert Museum, London [originally other Friedrichs; revised, as here, 1996] Friedrich, 1824, Evening Sky, Kunsthalle, Mannheim Constable and Turner painted views of nothing but sky; but their clouds are actual, those of Friedrich, God-signs. As his wife said: "On the day he is painting air, he may not be spoken to." (close of Beethoven) 77) V77a) June 1996 Blake, 1795, Newton, Tate Gallery, London Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 96, Paradise XXV: Saints Peter, James, and John the Evangelist with Dante and Beatrice, British Museum, London Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As Plotinus said: "Cut away everything." And Christ: "If thy right hand offend against thee, cut it off." In conceiving Newton as sterile Urizen seated by the vegetative polyp under the Sea of Time and Space to compass the abstract ratio of the five senses, Blake turned from the art of irradiated Space. The synthesis most of the 19th century aspired to became for him a delusion. "The natural world must be consumed" — one of Blake's convictions which Crabb Robinson (as if he had never heard of the Bible) called "unintelligible." a78) Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 1, Inferno I: Dante, Virgil, Beasts, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 9, Inferno V: Minos and the Lustful, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 35, Inferno XIX: The Simoniac Pope, Tate Gallery, London (video: upper detail only) Vb78) 78) Blake's universe was more perilous. As he had written Butts in 1802: Temptations are on the right hand & left; behind, the sea of time and space roars & follows swiftly; he who keeps not right onward is lost, & if our footsteps slide in clay how can we do otherwise than fear and tremble. That Ulro was ever present — not the orthodox Hell of a punitive Nobodaddy he reclaimed from Dante the last two years of his life. Who knows, if Mozart had lived, he might have paralleled that realm. As for Beethoven, only in the Grosse Fuge did he pierce radiant nature to the fission of such a flaming core. Music: 79) Beethoven, 1825, Grosse Fuge, fierce theme in coda, Columbia M5L-277 (with softer succession to slide 79) Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 77, Purgatory ix: Lucia Carries Dante in his Sleep, Fogg Museum, Harvard; + V detail June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Gleaming through Purgatory, Blake sees Beulah: a soft Moony Universe, feminine, lovely, Pure, mild & Gentle, given in mercy to those who sleep… 80) (Four Zoas I) Blake, 1825-27, Dante, plate 90, Paradise xiv: Dante Adores the Flaming Christ, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; first, video details, below and above In Paradise, the fire image of Christ becomes for Blake the ecstatic sacrifice in every moment of simultaneous vision: Soon all around the Heavens burnt with flaming fires, And Urizen and Luvah and Tharmas and Urthona arose into Albion's Bosom. Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds Of Heaven, Fourfold among the Visions of God in Eternity. 80+1) Blake, c. 1795, Glad Day, color print, British Museum, London Shakespeare: Night candles are burnt out, and Jocund Day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. Blake: For… Rivers & Mountains Are also Men; every thing is Human, mighty! sublime! In every bosom a Universe expands, as wings Let down at will around, and call'd the Universal Tent. (Jerusalem 38) Christian history telescoped to that eternal coming: And suddenly there was with the angels a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy! June 1996 Blake: Fire-Fugue of Delight 43 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 43 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Blake : Fire-Fugue of Delight, Symbolic History, Part 28 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 28 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_28_Blake--Fire-Fugue_of_Delight Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/44679fec289ecd2f4e4cdaf1c30dd523.pdf ed0256248b3f86df3c9fa9788f9f6ec0 PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 27. The Larger Declaration a1) 1) Ralph Earl, 1792, Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth and wife Abigail, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut; + V details, left, then right M.M. Sanford, c. 1830(?), Washington at the Battle of Princeton; N.Y. State Historical Association, Cooperstown. Music: American, c. 1760(?), Yankee Doodle, tune played by Dick Stark, organ Our aim is not to cut history to size, but to share in its deepest unfoldings; and what has been deeper than the Constitutional achievement of the United States of America? So the Federalist: whether societies of men are really capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political Constitutions, on accident and force. The fine arts, however, present us with an anomaly. Against the visionaries of England and the Continent — Blake, Goethe, Goya, Mozart, Beethoven — what conventionalized these shores points the irony to which our third century is vulnerable. In a world seeded by tragic complicities of that Europe, what can this "Battle of Princeton" teach us, but to whistle "Yankee Doodle," and hope humor will bring us through? (end Yankee Doodle) 2) G. Stuart, 1795, Washington, "The Vaughan Portrait," National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V detail The stiff look of Stuart's Washington has been blamed on false teeth, but Paine's 1796 letter seats the falseness deeper: I declare myself opposed to almost the whole of your administration; for I know it to have been deceitful if not perfidious... Monopolies of every kind marked [it] almost in the moment of its commencement. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The lands obtained by the revolution were lavished upon partisans: the interest of the disbanded soldier was sold to the speculator; injustice was acted under the pretence of faith; and the chief of the army became the patron of the fraud... 3) Blake, 1793, The Argument Page: Oothoon and the Flower, Vision of the Daughters of Albion, Lord Cunliffe; + V detail V3a) J.S. Deville, c. 1807, Life Mask of Wm. Blake, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England (detail of a67) Could this be the America of which Blake wrote in 1793: "For the soft soul of America, Oothoon wandered in woe..."? Or had that America arisen, an ideal and longing, in the heart of Europe? Yet Blake had thought of emigrating there, as to a geographical place: Tho' born on the cheating banks of Thames, Tho' his waters bathed my infant limbs, The Ohio shall wash his stains from me: I was born a slave, but I go to be free. 2nd 2) Stuart, Washington, another detail of 2 Blake's goal, anyway, was not the federal actuality of rich and poor, proprietary law, slavery, and compromise which Tom Paine had lately brought news of — when (as the story goes) he was saved from arrest by Blake's shrewd or prophetic warning. 2nd 3) 2nd 3a) Blake, c. 1795, Oothoon and the Flower, color print, British Museum, London. Anonymous, c. 1790, American Quaker Meeting, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Oothoon's search was for some Land of Heart's Desire — what Western Civilization had always dreamed of, the Kingdom of God made flesh in the love and freedom of here and now. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Was Rousseau's claim for that here and now — taking men as they are and laws as they might be made... to establish some just administration of the civil order — at last, by Hamilton's "great improvements" in "the science of politics": "balances and checks," "Confederacy" and "representation" to be instituted — though in defiance of Rousseau's dictum that "Sovereignty cannot be represented"? 4) 4a) Romanesque, Languedoc, c. 1130, Prophet holding a Scroll, detail of portal, Moissac. American, Anonymous, c. 1780(?), Appalachian Pass, Corcoran Gallery There had been a change, of course over the years, in the whereabouts of the Kingdom of God and how it was to be realized. For Abelard in the 12th century: Jerusalem est illa civitas... Jerusalem is the city of everlasting peace... Now it was over a continental expanse which would have seemed before to defy democratic possibility that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were to be secured. 5) Blake, 1793 (1799 copy), Orc in Flames, America, plate 17, Paul Mellon; first, video detail Even Blake's Kingdom (which in the continuity of Christendom he called "Jerusalem"), though somehow of the spirit ("all deities reside in the human breast"), had still to be forged, like Faust's, by rebellion against every outward dogma and hierarchy, whether of priest or law — Blake, rearing himself across the page in the flaming delight of Energy: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." 6) American, Anonymous, c. 1800, The Sargent Family, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. V6a) Rufus Hathaway, M.D., 1790, Lady with her Pets, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. By the subtlety of historical assimilation something of that revolt has penetrated even the naively conservative America of 1800, quietly shaping an individual good in the June 1996 The Larger Declaration 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History secular and domestic (Blake's "lineaments of satisfied desire"). But it is a likeness in opposites: here an art of limitation, with all the risk of stuffiness and disappointment attendant on such vegetative claims. As Emerson would take it up: "Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind." 7) Blake, 1795, Satan exults over Eve, Tate Gallery (formerly W. Bateson, Esq.); + V detail of Eve Thus when Oothoon heads for the new land "over the waves... in wing'd exulting swift delight," Bromion, possessive violence, brands her free desire with the name of whore: Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south: Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun; They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge... a8) b8) 8) Gilbert Stuart, 1794, John Jay, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. John Trumbull, 1806, Alexander Hamilton, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. G. Stuart, 1824, John Adams as an Old Man, Adams Collection, Waltham, Massachusetts Strange that the actual American achievement of a republic of compromise should have seemed to the spiritual revolutionary not a triumph but a sell-out. Strange the Founding Fathers should give no hint of any such dark awareness, though the radical dreamers of Europe were always exhibiting themselves in a Faustian bond. Stranger that skeptical Hamilton ("every man ought to be supposed a knave" and "the people is a great beast") and John Adams, here shown in age ("whoever would found a state must presume that all men are bad by nature"), should have helped to shape a tolerable republic. a9) Greek (Phidian), c. 440 B.C., Riace Bronzes, Young Warrior, rear view, Mus. Reggio-Calabria, Italy; video: first, Va9, a varied rear detail; then, a detail of a9 9) Same, Young Warrior, right side, full-length; video: half-length only 9a) Same, Young Warior, front torso; which video replaces with head and shoulders, from 9 V9b) Same, Double: half lengths of Young and Old Warriors V9c) Again, Young Warrior, detail of head June 1996 The Larger Declaration 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet why call it strange? Blake could repudiate the "silly Greek and Roman slaves of the sword." But politics from Machiavelli to the Federalists had focussed, with searing ambivalence, on the troubled freedom of those city-states — as charged with radiance and danger as this Riace warrior lately recovered from the sea. Hobbes: "there was never anything so dearly bought as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues." Still, Doric and Ionic columns were on the rise. The book Washington kept by him was not the Bible, but Plutarch's Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans, Machiavelli's cycle of governments, each, by its own corruption, sliding to the next — degenerate Royalty to Aristocracy, Aristocracy through Oligarchy to Democracy, Democracy through mob-rule back to Tyranny — was Greek, clarified by Polybius from Plato. And it was Polybius' dictum that the best state is "a composite of the three, as with Sparta and Rome," which would provide so many Constitutions with Monarchic Executive, Aristocratic Senate, and Democratic House — though all those ancient lessons sprang from the Athens of this warrior, from Plato's dire celebration of Democracy, that "fair and spangled state... the glorious beginning out of which tyranny springs." 10) 10a) Jacques-Louis David, 1784, Oath of the Horatii, Louvre (CGB '80); + V detail Same, Oath of the Horatii, detail; video: closer detail only So the caution of the Founding Fathers may have been less strange than the neglect of such Classical and Tory doubts by Robespierre: "Every institution that does not suppose the people good and the magistrate corruptible, is vicious" — while he played midwife to a Reign of Terror. So in art, David's Horatii conspire ("breathe together") like Rousseau's General Will. Gone is the caution of Madison: The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands... may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. 11) C.W. Peale, c. 1787, Benjamin Franklin, Historical Society, Philadelphia; + V detail June 1996 The Larger Declaration 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Was it luck or craft, the openness of a new land, or what, that enabled Americans to stretch the limits of old Europe in so dangerous an enterprise as Revolution without feeling its blasting effects, without even, as it were, taking off their 18th-century dress? As Franklin, that always fortunate Poor Richard, drew lightning from the clouds — where if the hemp cord had been more wet by the rain before he touched the ring, the new Prometheus would have been consumed (like the less favored Russian who repeated the experiment) by electrical fire. a12) b12) 12) Houdon, 1784, George Washington, Boston Athenaeum Houdon, 1783, Winter, Musée Fabre, Montpellier; the video takes the whole figure from Vb12 (a wider view), then a detail from this b12 Houdon, 1785, Another Bust of Washington, Mt. Vernon; + V detail As if the political climate which could nurture a Washington were as incompatible with the art that could model his image, as in Jefferson's pragmatic notes for American travellers abroad. Study Agriculture, he advises, useful mechanics, gardens, architecture, "since we must double our houses"; but as for painting and statuary "it would be useless and preposterous for us to make ourselves connoisseurs of those". Only a visiting Frenchman, Houdon, has stamped the first president with the idealism of Jefferson's other words: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness... for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. 13) 13a) J.H. Dannecker, 1797, Self-Portrait, full face, Landesmuseum, Stuttgart Again, Dannecker Self, profile of bust; here, video shows in turn details of 13 and 13a By the turn of the century, what Houdon's Washington and Jefferson's prose had held in stately measure, receives more flagrant assertion over Europe, especially from Germany, where world-hope, self-reliance, brotherhood and "Gefühl ist alles," cast such a revolutionary person, as one might have assumed Jefferson to be. The sculptor Dannecker presents himself as a glowing Schiller, herald of that Hymn of Joy ultimately June 1996 The Larger Declaration 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History set by Beethoven, 1823, in the finale of the Ninth: embraced... the kiss of the world..." Music: a14) 14) V14a) 14b) Beethoven, 1817-23, 9th (Toscanini), V-LM 6901 "All men brothers, ...millions Symphony, Finale, Choral fugue Blake, engraved 1790 (colored 1794-96), Glad Day (or The Dance of Albion), from the knees up, British Museum, London Blake, 1790 (dated 1780), Glad Day (Orc-Albion) Engraving, British Museum, London; + V details Again, colored Glad Day, whole; + V upper detail Blake, 1793 (1825-27 copy), from Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 27, from "A Song of Liberty," Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Of Americans, only British-born Tom Paine, firebrand kindler of the Revolution, anticipated that fervor. And perhaps one could have predicted his later trouble with the "Power Circle" by trying to sort their competent faces with his passionate words — though Blake can match him, and more: the so-called Glad Day, signed 1780, though here in a print of about 1790, Albion as rebel Orc. So Tom Paine, from Common Sense, 1776: 0 Ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind... Yet Blake might better speak for himself, since he adds dimensions of boldness Paine never dreamed of, defiance of whatever limits and binds — marriage, rational science, and law: Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast, Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying Empire is no more! and now the lion and wolf shall cease. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 7 �C.G. Bell 15) Symbolic History Blake, 1793, Vision of the Daughters of Albion, frontispiece, Lord Cunliffe, Blake Trust; + V detail Chorus: Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious lechery call that virginity that wishes but acts not! For everything that lives is holy. As always, visionary hope sharpens the specter of what is: our shackled, fallen convention (like dogs): "Bound back to back in Bromion's caves, terror and meekness dwell." 16) 16a) 16b) Savage, 1796, The Washington Family, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V detail Meissen (design by Kändler), c. 1750, Monkey Musicians; + V detail Again, Savage's Washington Family, detail of Washington Music: Duport, 1792, Minuet danced for George Washington, Col. (78): 17072-D(a) How far from the intensity of Blake and Beethoven is the father of our country as Savage paints him with his family. Call for an accompanying music, and what sounds but the Duport minuets, danced in 1792 for George and Martha in the prevailing artifice of hair and dress. (Jefferson, 1778, having written an unknown Italian about importing a band of sober and industrious persons: gardener, cabinet maker, etc., who could also play French horn, clarinet, etc., and so provide music without enlarging one's domestic expense: "the favorite passion of my soul, though fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism." Duport, however, seems no more barbaric than this painter is Savage. 17) 17a) 17b) Double: [A] J. Trumbull, 1792, Alexander Hamilton, National Gallery, Washington, D.C., and [B] Gainsborough, 1785, George IV as Prince of Wales, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Left of Double, Trumbull's Hamilton; first, video detail Right of Double, Gainsborough's George IV June 1996 The Larger Declaration 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From the same year as the music, Alexander Hamilton (left), whom Jefferson called "not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption." And by a fortuity of likeness, from a few years earlier, Gainsborough's George IV as Prince of Wales (right) — the scion of tyranny against an author of the Constitution (until he left in a pet); yet style says with Lear: "Handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?" (close Duport Minuet) Though it was Hamilton whose intellect (perfecting Rousseau), incomparably stated the antinomies of rule: If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the Government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. It seems history requires an esprit de finesse to plot the variance of like from like. Music: A18) B18) 18) 18a) V18b) Again, Duport, 1792, Minuet B. Otis, c. 1816-20, Dolley Madison, N.Y. Historical Society, NYC Goya, 1800, Whore Queen, from the Family of Charles IV, Prado, Madrid (video, detail only) Double: A18 and B18; + V close detail of A B. West, 1802, Hope Family Group, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston W. Williams, 1766, Deborah Hall, Brooklyn Museum, NY Suppose we go forward a few years and take in Dolley Madison, hostess wife of the fourth President. We have known her since childhood and hesitated to accuse her by name, though Blake would have had no trouble in recognizing "the system of moral virtue called Rahab... Whore of Babylon" — in the White House. And again a chance resemblance pairs her with Goya's ironically handled WhoreQueen. As if the difference between corrupt Europe and Federal American had been one of awareness: the satanic complicity there fiercely faced, wreathed here in a simper of good. And yet, as we are aware, a shift of a few degres in the average temperature makes the difference between an ice age and a temperate clime. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History If we ask, is Duport's the music of a revolutionary America? — the answer it returns is unmistakable: that the revolution Blake, and even Paine envisaged, did not occur; that the Fathers never wanted it to occur; that the so-called American Revolution, as everybody has long said, was in the deepest sense not a revolution at all. As for the Washington minuets, we hear what they are and what they represent. (close George and Martha Minuet) 19) 19a) Watteau, c. 1717, Fêtes Vénitiennes, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; video: details only Watteau, 1718, Love in the French Theatre, Staatliche Museen, BerlinDahlem Only by timidity are they distinguished from the whole 18th-century horizon of courtly rococo and poignant style of sentiment, which from Couperin to Mozart (and in painting from this Watteau to Goya) elaborated telling refinements. On the coda of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet, where rococo and neoclassic stir with far deeper content, let us thread mannered couples from 1717 to 1791 and from various parts of Europe: France, Italy, Austria, Spain. Music: 20) 21) 22) Mozart, 1789, Clarinet Quintet, Coda of last movement., London CM9379 Guardi, c. 1780-90(?), Conversation before the Stair of a Palace, Pinacoteca dell' Accademia Carrara, Bergamo Viennese Porcelain (Grassi), c. 1780(?), Portrait Painter, Museum für Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt Goya, 1791, Blind Man's Bluff, detail, Prado, Madrid (close Mozart) In that ferment of Europe, what depths underlie Goya's surface of elegant play. a23) 23) Fuseli, 1781, Nightmare, Institute of Arts, Detroit Fuseli, 1790 version, Nightmare, Private Collection, Switzerland; first, video detail June 1996 The Larger Declaration 10 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Mozart, 1789, Adagio in C Minor, K 546, (Busch) HMV (78) DB 3391 The same Mozart who in the same years, on the eve of the French Revolution, when the Duport minuet was being danced for Washington, wrote his Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, a kind of suicide piece; the same Goya who, taking a cue from this 1790 Nightmare by Füssli, (the Fuseli of England) — as from the general cult of violence and Gothic terror cresting under what Paine called "The Age of Reason" — 24) Goya, 1799, The Sleep of Reason, Caprichios, etching, Prado, Madrid; first, video details would give the picture and motto for that incursion: "El sueño de la Razon produce monstruos" — "The Sleep of Reason produces monsters." Goya's comment paraphrases Paine: "Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty." The language of Enlightenment. But what the etching suggests is darker and more borne out by the age; 25) Blake, 1795, Nebuchadnezzar, Tate Gallery, London; first, video detail it is the insight of Blake, that rationality itself is a bondage, a dessication and sleep, which stirs antithetical terrors, which becomes itself a terror, as the Storm and Stress gripping Europe after 1770 is a counterpole of Enlightened progress — both Albion's Prince and repressed Orc (like this imbruted Nebuchadnezzar) sprouting dragon scales (America). (fade Mozart Adagio) a26) 26) Blake, 1794, "The Howling Terrors..." (Slavery), Europe: A Prophesy, plate 2 Goya, 1793(?), The Madhouse, Academy of San Fernando, Madrid; first, video detail Music: Mozart, 1789, Fugue from Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, HMV (78) 3391 When Mozart goes from the Adagio into the Fugue, the tempo and life increase, but not the cheer. Since the celebrations of the great Baroque ended in Bach, the fugue has shifted from deterministic glory to the terror of deterministic bondage. So with the ratios of vaulted space from Rembrandt to this Goya Madhouse; so with the formulation of the phenomenal from Descartes to Kant. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 11 �C.G. Bell 27) Symbolic History Blake, 1794 ff., The Ancient of Days, Frontispiece to Europe, Keynes Collection; + V detail With Blake, Creation itself has become a fall into the compassed limits of the equational. 28) Goya, 1815-24, Disperates (Proverbs) 4, Big Booby, Prado, etc.; first, video detail Finally, when the old Goya lets the Big Booby dance, who will take up the jollity? (fade Mozart Fugue) 29) 29a) Tischbein, c. 1787, Goethe on the Campagna (c. 1787), State Museum, Frankfurt Same, Tischbein's Goethe, detail, head and shoulders How did that European revolution, which should have exhibited the calm command of this Goethe on the Campagna, come, like Goethe's own Faust, to be so violently cloven? Faust in the fable is a Renaissance man, issuing from the crypt of the Middle Ages. But he is also a romantic revolutionary; and in that phase, against what closure does he rebel? The anomalous convergence of 1500 and 1800 poses a vast question: how the conscious assertion of liberty, mastery, and right has fared in the Christian West. 30) School of Reichenauer, c. 1000, St. Matthew, Hillinus' Evangelair, Cathedral Library, Cologne, ; with video details Music: 11th cent.(?), Veni Sancte Spiritus, History of Italian Music RCA Ital. LM 40000, Rec 1 Consider its opposite eight centuries before, the Dark Age ground of 1000: Earth a symbolic battlefield for angelic and demonic powers, Man reduced to a spaceless energy, crouched before expected Judgment in somber resignation of the phenomenal realm with all those dignities later so grandly claimed — their very promise a temptation to satanic pride: "To practice more than heavenly power permits." (fade Veni Sancte Spiritus) June 1996 The Larger Declaration 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In diametrical stand against that self-surrender, 31) 31a) 31b) V31c) 31d) Dürer, 1498, Self Portrait, Prado, Madrid; + V detail (use V31) Dürer, 1506, Christ Among the Doctors, Thyssen Collection, Lugano Dürer, c. 1500, The Lamentation, detail, Alte Pinakothek, München Dürer, 1490-94, Young Couple, detail, Kunsthalle, Hamburg Dürer, c. 1495(?), View of Nuremberg from the West, formerly Kunsthalle, Bremen, missing since 1945; wider variant, V31d Dürer, 1508, Praying Hands, sketch, Albertina, Vienna V31e) by 1500, the Renaissance — here Dürer — had given programmatic expression to the new man, operating in a universe of ordered space, time, and cause, to which his reasoning humanity is affined. We sense in all the arts Pico's discovered Dignity: ...0 great and wonderful happiness of man! It is given to him to be that which he wills...if he cultivates vegetable seed, he will become a plant; if the seeds of sensation, he will grow into a brute. If rational, he will come out a heavenly animal. If intellectual, he will be an angel and a son of God. If he... takes himself up into the center of his own unity, then, made one spirit with God... he will stand ahead of all things. Who does not wonder at the chameleon which we are...? The poignance of this insular vision is its dawn hopefulness, as if it could not foresee the length and stormy turbulence of the ensuing day, as if it assumed that the Christian Middle Ages could be magically transformed into free humanistic enlightenment, with a new art, a new philosophy, new values of life, science, democratic free cities, an individually reformed religion… 32) 32a) Leonardo, c. 1513, Drawing: Girl Pointing, Windsor; first, video detail Leonardo, 1504-06, Leda and the Swan, Chatsworth Collection, Devonshire Music: Rossinus Mantuanus, c. 1495, Un Sonar (Lirum Bililirum), Decca DL-79435 As in Leonardo's "Girl by a Stream," it is a smiling invitation to a promised land, a land already present in the richness of the art. And in music, too, as suddenly present: a 1500 Frottole imitating winds and waters in a harmony of nature and love. (fade frottole) June 1996 The Larger Declaration 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That Theleme beckons above, 33) Bosch, 1500-04, Visions of the Hereafter: Hell, detail, Palazzo Ducale, Venice; + V closer detail while beneath lay the almost unaltered hell-message of the Middle Ages — Bosch painting in the same years — the very techniques of Renaissance substantiating the nightmare of damnation. Luther: "Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense and understanding... and wish to know nothing but the word of God." a34) 34) P. Breughel, 1562, The Triumph of Death, detail (top right), Prado, Madrid Same, whole; video: details only Music: Sweelinck, c. 1600, from Echo Fantasy, (Weinrich) Musicraft Alb. 9 (3) The pity lay in this, that the floating humanist hope had to work itself out against those demonic possessions — as in Breughel's documentary Triumph of Death. It could not be actualized without the cleavage and cross-breeding struggle of new on old, the Lutheran and Calvinist broils, Inquisition, Thirty Years War, the destruction of the most progressive parts of Europe, with a harvest reaching across the Rhine to the madnesses of our own age. a35) 35) Rubens, c. 1618, Battle of the Amazons, whole, Alte Pinakothek, München (CGB '59); + V detail (Vb35, CGB '59) Same, Battle of the Amazons, closer detail (CGB '59); + V detail from a35, right In Rubens, in Sweelinck's Echo Fantasies, the enormous energies of the Baroque form in a tumult that also sweeps the English stage, from Lear's: "we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools"; through Webster's: "In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness/ Doth womanish and fearful mankind live"; to Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid: "And the trees about me,/ Let them be bare and leafless; let the rocks/ Groan with continual surges; and behind me,/ Make all a desolation." (end Sweelinck) June 1996 The Larger Declaration 14 �C.G. Bell 36) 36a) Symbolic History Rembrandt, 1630-31, Old Man Reading, drawing, Weimar Museum; first, video detail English, Anonymous, c. 1670, John Clark, Fortune, July 1942; + V detail Music: S. Scheidt, 1624, from organ Credo, AS 10 (next to last pedal entrance) When the great volitional grandeur speaks again, as in Rembrandt or the composer Scheidt, it is with the Miltonic organ tones formed at the heart of a century of religious wars: "Who knows not that truth is strong next to the Almighty?" In those organ tones, what Thoreau would call the last important news from Europe, had been divulged — which was essentially why the Revolution could be so slight in American in 1776. Its homogeneous religious vanguard had been transplanted a century and a half before, from the old world to the new — as if Cromwell, Milton, Rembrandt, Schütz, and Huyghens had come with the Pilgrims, forgotten their intenser callings and become breeding stock. (end Scheidt) 37) 37a) Thomas Smith, c. 1690, Self-Portrait, Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts; + V detail American, Anonymous, 1640's, John Winthrop New England branched off from that stem, and it preserved, in stiff colonial form, the dark religious claim, through a century of preachers debating out of the Bible rights and sovereignty: tolerant Thomas Hooker: The foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people... And whereas it hath been charged that through their ignorance and unskilfulnesse, they are not able to wield such privileges... the Lord hath promised to take away the veil from all faces... Against Winthrop, "Stewart of Theocracy": We see not that any should have authority to set up any other exercise beside what authority hath already set up. Va38) 38) June 1996 Bernini, 1669-70, detail of 38, Constantine, Bernini, 1654-70, Conversion of Constantine, St. Peter's, Rome The Larger Declaration 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Meanwhile, in Europe, as the humanist and rational forces of the Renaissance slowly assert themselves, they do so in the great formal frames of Church and State: Bernini in Italy, the Conversion of Constantine; 39) Le Brun, 1663-75, Louis XIV at Dunquerque, tapestry, detail, Versailles, CGB '59; + V closer detail in France Le Brun: the thrust of Renaissance usurped and appro- priated by such pompous formulations as the Monarch of the Sun — mounted on the same Bernini horse — campaigning against the Protestant Lowlands. It is the deflection of humanist energy through Baroque religiosity and the dangerously overblown heroics of courtly grandeur that saddles the 18th century with a deeply cloven loyalty and aim. Hear the royal march of Louis XIV: Music: 40) Lully, 1686, from Marche Royale, Turnabout TV 34232 French, c. 1680, Louis XIV as Roman Emperor, MS Fr. 7892, Biblioteque Nationale, Paris; first, video detail (fade Lully) The heroic style is here so close to mock heroic that one might question what the art means. The overstretched assertion that all is for the best in this best of all possible kingdoms, pumped up through the Wars of the Spanish Succession and the virtual bankruptcy of France, would break with the King's death to the Regency — 41) 41a) V41b) Watteau, 1716, L'Indifferent detail, Louvre, Paris Watteau 1718(?), The Music Party, detail, The Wallace Collection, London Again, The Music Party, whole the delicious mockery and Rococo sentiment of Watteau. While music, with Couperin's miniatures, breaks at the same time: Music: Couperin le Grand, Folies Françaises, opening, HMV D 8 4945 (78) (fade) Which brings us back to the century and style of the George Washington minuet. Between the great assertive thrusts of Baroque and Revolutionary, the 18th century hangs, in all its richness, a catenary of question and regrouping. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 16 �C.G. Bell 42) 42a) 42b) Symbolic History Houdon, c. 1770(?), Voltaire, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Again, Tischbein c. 1787, Goethe on the Campagna, detail, State Museum, Frankfurt (see #29) Houdon, c. 1778, Bust of Rousseau, Mus., Orleans; then a video return to 42, Bust of Voltaire Like the Hegelian word aufheben, the 18th century plays a triple role: it terminates in mockery the heroic vaunts of the great Baroque; it continues that basic assurance under the ironically smiling mask of Voltaire; it raises up (Goethe on the Campagna) in transcending form the human and utopian claim, shifting it from its old center in reason toward a new center in the passion of creative will. As Werther says: "Was ich weiss, kann jeder wissen — mein Herz habe ich allein." "What I know each can know; only the heart is mine." How the Revolution will relate to this transition will vary from place to place with the slightest shiftings in the social complex. 43) Gainsborough, c. 1755(?), Talk in a Park, Louvre, Paris; + V detail It is a subtle but telling shift from the novels of Marivaux to those of Richardson, Fielding and Sterne; so too from the courtly airs Watteau disarmingly parodies, to the mid-century English elegance Gainsborough and the rest partly mock and partly celebrate on the parks and estates of England. a44) 44) American Colonial, 1730 ff., Westover (built by Wm. Byrd), lower James River, Virginia Jefferson, 1769-84, remodelled 1796-1809, Monticello, near Charlottesville, VA (CGB '62) An even smaller, but still significant migration takes us from the English house to those Georgian imitations along the shores of the Chesapeake and James, or (most original and natural) to Palladian Monticello. Immediately two levels of revolution become possible: 45) Ralph Earl, c. 1790(?), Daniel Boardman, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V detail June 1996 The Larger Declaration 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a kind of minimal level, which could only occur where the blend of middle class and landed gentry was sufficiently benign and law-abiding to offer its own rather wigged and robed convention of freehold elegance and Lockean law as the human base a constitutional republic required. Against this milder possibility, a more deeply cutting maximal likelihood was hardly to be avoided Va46) Fragonard, 1766, The Swing, detail of the woman, Wallace Collection, London Same, The Swing, whole Same, The Swing, central detail 46) 46a) where, as in absentee France, an eroded aristocracy seemed the parasitic artifice to be uprooted before the natural man could expatiate in Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood. Beside the liberal mean of the Colonies, this Europe was a complex of tensile stirrings, convergent opposites: here the surfeit of rococo play, marriage á la mode, this Fragonard husband[?] pulling a swing while the wife kicks a slipper to the underpeering lover. Thus Jefferson (1785) opposed the education of American youth in Europe: "He acquires a fondness for European luxury and dissipation 47) Copley, 1771, Mrs. Humphrey Devereux, National Gallery, New Zealand "and a contempt for the simplicity of his own country" — though forthright Englishmen, Fielding and the rest, had written similarly about the dangers of going from England to France. Surely there was a fine directness to the Copley Boston portraits of before the Revolution; 48) Chardin, 1771, Self-portrait in a nightcap, Louvre, Paris; + V detail but plain humanity breathing republican spirit was cropping out everywhere, as here with Chardin in France — like the enlightened couple in Joseph Andrews, Joseph's parents it turns out — part of the natural and human Eden to be progressively reclaimed ("il faut cultiver notre jardin"). Va49) 49) June 1996 J.S. Copley, 1771, Ezekiel Goldthwait, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; video: detail only Piranesi c. 1743-45, sketch for one of the Carceri, Kunsthalle, Hamburg The Larger Declaration 18 �C.G. Bell V49a) 49b) June 1996 Symbolic History Piranesi, 1743-45, Carcere X, 1st State, detail of Captives, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Piranesi, 1743-61, Carceri XV, 2nd State The Larger Declaration 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History What distinguished America was the consistency of the simple, its lack of antinomies. While under courtly Europe and under the Enlightenment, from early in the century, as in Swift's Yahoos and Piranesi's prison scenes, there had yawned a splenetic dark cellar (saeva indignatio). Was it the madhouse of avoidable corruption and cruelty, or the doomed reversal of Renaissance reason and hope, the heroic fretted vault become the dungeon of man irremediably flawed? 50) Tischbein, c. 1786, Goethe at a Roman window, Goethe Museum, Frankfurt; with video details Music: Mozart, 1787, "Deh, vieni alla finestra" from Don Giovanni, Angel 3605 DL In that Europe, one morning of 1786, in the pre-romantic dawn of free humanity, Goethe, child of courtliness and defiance, of Enlightenment and Gothic terror, leaned out of a Roman window on his Italian Journey, and was sketched by Tischbein. It is like an aria from Mozart's Don Giovanni. "Deh, vieni alla finestra"; Goethe might almost have been singing it to a passing flower girl — or the girl who became his mistress, and he wrote the poem of waking in the morning, his arm around her, his fingers strumming the long hexameters on her back. (fade Aria) 51) V51a) Goethe, 1787-88, Eruption of Vesuvius, sketch, Goethe Museum, Weimar; first, video detail J. Wright, c. 1775, sketch of the annual Fireworks, at the Castle of San Angelo, Rome; Art Gallery, Birmingham, England (CGB '74) Music: Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, Stone-guest passage, Angel 3605 DL But in the opera, seduction yields to the chromatics of Damnation. And Goethe, in classical Rome, was writing of the rejuvenation of Faust in a Gothic Witches' Kitchen. He practiced sketching also on that trip: here a guache of Vesuvius in eruption. Faust's ambivalent cry was for Goethe himself, as for Revolutionary Europe: "Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast" — "Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust." (fade Stone-guest) 2nd 50) V2nd 50a) June 1996 Again, Goethe at a Roman window, detail of 50 Dürer, 1524, Portrait of a Gentleman, Prado, Madrid The Larger Declaration 20 �C.G. Bell V2nd 50b) Symbolic History Rigaud, 1730, Louis XV of France at age 20, Versailles; video: detail only Goethe, in fact, at that Classical window and with his Gothic soul, was perhaps the only man in the world who saw clearly and creatively what we now realize about the divided relation of Revolution to the larger motion of the West: that there was a daytime, conscious phase in which both he and Faust had to take up the fresh and liberating humanism of the Renaissance — the 1500-promise of reason glimpsed only to be lost in religious wars and hardening Method, courtly artifice and kingly foppery — had to act as if those three hundred years had never intervened. Va2nd 51) M. Falbe, c. 1760, Portrait of J.M. Lüttichau, Gal., Dresden; + V return to 49b, Piranesi, Carcere XV, detail For 2nd 51) J. Wright, 1774, Eruption of Vesuvius, Art Gallery, Derby But of course they had — unalterably. It was not only the old dark and superstition to be put aside by Jeffersonian light, but the false pomp of state, the wit and wigs of misguided enlightenment, the web of analytic and mocking reason, the noble vault turned prison. Here revolution explodes against all limitation and sane order, within and without; it erupts 52) 52a) 52b) Delacroix, 1828, Mephistopheles, Private Collection, Geneva; video, center spread only (from V52) Goethe (by J.G. Schadow), 1816, Life Mask, at age 67 Blake, 1793, Frontispiece, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Library of Congress in Storm and Stress, titan rebellion, romantic hunger, and the Gothic novel, Delacroix's dream-haunted revival of the Middle Ages of faith and mystery, which the other daylight Faust would have planned to dispel. That Goethe could hold and use all that was the greatness of which Napoleon remarked: "Voilá un homme." Thus the Wald und Höhle (Wood and Cave) scene of Faust, with its cleavage (already anticipated in Werther's love and suicide) between calm possession of nature and mind and a destructive satanism raging like a cataract into the abyss. That Europe, striving within and without against hereditary bondage, was already driven "Beyond Good and Evil," into Satanic compact, or as Blake put it, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 21 �C.G. Bell 53) 53a) 53b) 53c) Symbolic History Goya, c. 1815, The Giant, etching, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; video: detail only Blake, 1794 (1815/18 copy), Urizen, pl. 5, Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress; here the video returns to 53: Goya's Giant, whole Fuseli, c. 1785(?), Prometheus, drawing, Kunstmuseum, Basel Again, Goya's Giant, closer detail Goya, about 1815, made Prometheus the symbol. Had not Goethe more than forty years before written the poem that gave "Promethean" its new and ultimately Nietzschean meaning? Jefferson would say: "I have sworn, upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." But what of the tyranny of that altar? Paine, the only American to assault it publicly, was reviled and ostracised. But Goethe had long before spoken the words of Prometheus: "Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus,/ Mit Wolkendunst..." Darken your heaven, Zeus, With dusk of clouds And like a boy who lops off Thistles, spend yourself On oaks and mountain crags; But this my earth Look you let stand, My house too that you did not build, And this my hearth Whose glowing fire Incites your jealousy. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I know nothing under the sun More wretched than you are, gods. On tithes of sacrifice And breath of prayers You feed penurious Shreds of majesty, And you would starve If children and beggars Were not hopeful fools. When I was a child I could not tell truth from lie; I turned bewildered eyes To the sun, as if an ear were there Inclined to my complaining, A heart like mine, To pity and relieve. 54) 54a) Goya, c. 1811, The Colossus (Mars), Prado, Madrid Fuseli, 1802, Satan Calls Beelzebub from the Flames, Kunsthaus, Zurich Who shielded me Against the pride of titans, Rescued me from death And slavery? You, sacred glowing heart, Have we not worked these things? And then deceived, In youth and goodness Poured out thanks and praise To the sleeping fraud of heaven? I honor you? Wherefore? Have you once eased the torments of the afflicted, Once appeased The tears of the disquieted? Was I not wrought to manhood By time the almighty And fate eternal, Your masters, as they are mine? June 1996 The Larger Declaration 23 �C.G. Bell 55) Symbolic History Goya (or Eugenio Lucas), c. 1811, A City on a Rock, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, (CGB '74); with video details, the last: foreground (cf. unused CGB '74, V55a) Did you assume perhaps I would disdain life And fly to the wilderness Because not all My flowering dreams ripened? No! Here I sit and fashion mortals After my image, A race of men to be as I am, To suffer and to weep, To relish, to enjoy, And to despise as I do You and yours. (CGB) (Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei, Zu leiden, zu weinen, Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich, Und dein nicht zu achten; Wie ich!) The musical climax parallelling these haunting Goya symbols of about 1811 (this "City on a Rock," its winged defenders hovering over the fire-assault of dark swarms) is no doubt in Beethoven; but it was the Mozart of the courtly style and of the style of frenzy 2nd 54) Again, Goya, The Colossus, upper detail who also in the Jupiter Symphony (1788-89) had forged the affirming spearhead of revolution. Music: 2nd 55) 56) 56a) V56b) 56c) June 1996 Mozart, Jupiter Symphony, close of finale, Col D 3 L 291 Again, Goya, City on a Rock, right side (after CGB '74) Baron A.J. Gros, 1796, Napoleon at Arcola, detail, Louvre, Paris Gros, 1807, Napoleon at d'Eylan, Paris Louvre; video: upper detail only) Same, Napoleon at Eylan, central detail Cogniet, 1836, Volunteer National Guard leaving Paris, 1792; Versailles (end Jupiter) The Larger Declaration 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We have cheated on Mozart by accompanying the last bars of the Jupiter with Gros's rather windy Napoleon, but was it to be avoided where history cheated on the spirit of Revolution, setting Rousseau's "General Will" at war with itself? As Shelley put it later in Prometheus Unbound: Names there are, Nature's sacred watchwords... The nations thronged around and cried aloud, …Truth liberty and love! Suddenly fierce confusion fell... Tyrants rushed in and did divide the spoil." Wordsworth was in France, and described the first ecstasy: ...triumphant looks Were then the common language of all eyes: As if awak'd from sleep, the Nations hail'd Their great expectancy: the fife of War Was then a spirit-stirring sound indeed, A Blackbird's whistle in a vernal grove. a57) 57) Klauer, c. 1790(?), Bust of Goethe, Goethehaus Dannecker, 1794-1805, large Schiller bust, Schiller House, Weimar Goethe was on the border and told in Hermann und Dorothea how the soldiers came like liberators: "they planted the glad tree of freedom, promising that each should be his own ruler." Coleridge summed it up in his poem to Wordsworth — the fiery spirit Dannecker aimed at in his busts of Schiller: Amid the tremor of a realm aglow, Amid a mighty nation jubilant, When from the general heart of human kind Hope sprang forth like a full born Deity! Va58) 58) Dannecker 1794, colossal plaster bust of Schiller, Weimar Goya, 1799, Self from the Caprichos, Etching, Prado, Madrid; video: detail only Coleridge added: "Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down..." And Wordsworth: "It was a lamentable time for man." Goya, who would witness the guerilla June 1996 The Larger Declaration 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History terrors of the Peninsular War, already lours from the page of his Capriccios, as if to answer with a fierce Bronx cheer the rapt Schiller zeal which would miscarry so disasterously over Europe: "A plague on both your houses." a59) Vb59) 59) Goya, esp. 1810-20 (pub. 1863), Disasters of War # 37, etching Goya, 1814, Riot of May 2nd, 1808 at the Peurta del Sol, Prado, Madrid Goya, 1814, The Execution of May 3rd, 1808, Prado, Madrid; + V detail A generation lived through the shock of revolutionary reversal, driven back to the dark wisdom of Milton: "Licence they mean when they cry liberty;/ For who loves that must first be wise and good." So Coleridge: "The Sensual and Dark rebel in vain,/ Slaves by their own compulsion." And Goethe, after telling how the early rapture soured into the atrocities of the Rhine invasion, returned to the same ground: "May I never again in such contemtuous madness/ Look upon man! Better the beast in his rage/. Never let him speak of freedom, as if he could rule his own passions." But Goya shaped the most searing indictment of all, to show man once and forever the beast he is. So the radiant opening of Beethoven's Third turns in the Fifth to the grim hammering of fate. 60) 60a) Ingres, 1810, the architect Desdeban, Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Besançon Ingres, 1806, Mademoiselle Rivière, Louvre, Paris (Against the Goya, an Ingres of 1810 liberation.) Music: a61 61) Beethoven, 1804 (pub. 1806), Third Symphony, opening, Deutsche Grammophon LPM 18 802 (fade) Again, Goya, The Execution, detail of the victims Same, larger central detail (which video follows with a still closer detail of a61) Music: Beethoven, 1805 (pub. 1809), Fifth Symphony, lst Movement, opening, Deutsche Grammophon LPM 18 804 (fade) — though Beethoven brought the Fifth to transcendental victory. Against that cloven Europe, torn by a violence as fierce as its vision is radically soaring — June 1996 The Larger Declaration 26 �C.G. Bell 62) Symbolic History Copley, 1771, Mrs. Goldthwaite (with fruit), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston how plain our American aspirations seemed, how wholesomely pursued and fruitfully realized. Boston had produced a Revolutionary composer too, Billings, working in the time of Copley and Charles Wilson Peale. Blamed by connoisseurs for using no dissonance in his Fuging tunes, he wrote a short cacaphony, "Jargon," only two lines long, ending: 2nd 61) Music: Goya, Execution, detail of the next to be Executed, Prado Billings, esp. 1786-94, last bars of "Jargon," Col. MS 7277 Is it a joke, or an Ives' potentiality? 2nd 62) Copley, Mrs. Goldthwaite, upper half 2nd 62a) Copley, Mrs. Goldthwaite, detail of hand and fruit What represents Billings is rather "Be Glad then America" — a gladness of the consonant earth. Music: 63) Billings, esp. 1786-94, from "Be Glad then America," Col. MS 7277 (through the "Satisfied" phrase) Ch. Wilson Peale, 1773-1809, the Peale Family, NY Historical Society; + V detail (Same Billings: "Be Glad" phrase, then fade) The closest America came to radical unrest was in Shay's Rebellion, a populist uprising in Western Massachusetts in 1786. 64) 64a) John Trumbull, 1786-94, The Declaration of Independence, Yale University Same, Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, central detail; then the video returns to the right half of the whole, from 64 It sprang from post-Revolutionary manipulation of money and land, and was often referred to in arguments for a stronger government and Constitution. What we hear of it comes mostly from the outraged "men of property and station". Thus General Knox to George Washington: June 1996 The Larger Declaration 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ...Their creed is, that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all... we find we are men — actual men — possessing all the turbulent passions belonging to that animal, and that we must have a government proper and adequate for him... 65) 65a) Houdon, 1785, Thomas Jefferson, NY Historical Society; + V detail Mather Brown, 1786, English portrait of Thomas Jefferson, American Historical Art Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; first, video detail Jefferson wrote back from Paris, 1787, about the same "late rebellion in Massachusetts": ...I hold that a little rebellion, now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government... To have said that, and been named just after Secretary of State and later elected President, speaks not only to the temper of Jefferson but to the breadth of that America. But it does not clarify the naiveté of the optimism — to betray no sign of the European cleavage; to make Revolution and practical Enlightenment one motion of the mind. Yet if any American could have participated in the deeper moral shakeup of the wider Revolution, it should have been Jeffer-son. He saw the beginning of the Terror in France, and wrote after his return (1793): "My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause" (Condorcet would die the year after), "but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated." a66) Vb66) 66) Jefferson, finished 1824, The University of Virginia, Rotunda, side view (CGB '83) Same, Lawn and Rotunda (CGB '86); video picks up Rotunda only Same, Lawn, Rotunda, and West Range Evil and disaster struck in his own family: not only that his cousin Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition killed himself under the accusation of corruption in the Louisiana Territory, but that his Kentucky nephews butchered a slave for a trivial offence before their household and servants. Yet it remained for the poet Warren in our time to ask how June 1996 The Larger Declaration 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Jefferson's dream was consonant with such satanic ties. Jefferson saw Hamilton's bank corrupting the rural simplicity he depended on to save us "from eating one another as they do in Europe." His sufficient answer was education, the University, his last and noblest architectural vision, completed in 1824. a67) b67) 67) J.S. Deville, c. 1807, Life Mask of William Blake, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England Goya 1815, Self-Portrait, Prado, Madrid Beethoven Death Mask, 1827 (the video then circles through 65, Jefferson, 52a, Goethe, back to this 67, Beethoven); + V detail By that time in Europe, Goya, Beethoven and Blake were all closing their lives. They had experienced idealism, revolution, terror, and repudiation; the creative hope had been driven far down and under to reshape inner revolt out of desperate negation. In those depths of confrontation one could hardly tell the cry of "Yes" from the cry of "No". One would only know afterwards that the spiritual crisis of later civilization, even down to our own day, had been unbelievably stared in the face. If the mortal imprint could not itself reveal the trial and transcendence of spirit, there would hardly be an art of portrait representation. Let the death mask of Beethoven (against the unflawed smile of Jefferson) hint what price, through revolutionary hope and agony, Europe had to pay for those geniuses of violence and inward turning: octogenerian Goya and Goethe, Blake past 70, this titan of music dead at 56 — Music: Beethoven, c. 1824-26, Große Fuge, first bars (Busch) Col. M-X221 (78's) (fade opening) still shaking the fist of the last Great Fugue at a thundering sky. Such the theme, and now the fugal entrance, 68) Blake, c. 1805-10, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. with two Blakes, two Goyas. Music: June 1996 Beethoven, Große Fuge, fugal passage, Col. MX-221 The Larger Declaration 29 �C.G. Bell 69) a70) 70) 71) Symbolic History Blake c. 1820, The Ghost of a Flea, Tate, London Goya, 1820, The Fates, Prado, Madrid Again, Goya, The Fates, detail; + V closer detail (V70a) Goya, 1820-23, Saturn Devouring his Children, upper half, Prado, Madrid This last Goya, of Saturn devouring his children, though it decorated the artist's own dining room, is not a painted myth but an image of the universe, 72) 72a) Same, Goya, Saturn, whole; + V close detail Another Houdon Jefferson, 1789, differently lighted, Fine Arts Museum, Boston; + V detail flung in creative defiance in the face of God. Jefferson was in a position to have looked at it and said "I see what you mean." But would he have looked? "I will not believe," he wrote to Adams, Sept. 12, 1821, "that our labors are lost." June 1996 The Larger Declaration 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As Sam Johnson said, "Nature sets her gifts on the right hand and on the left... no man can at the same time fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile." (Rasselas XXIX) The liberal hope and future of Spain was plowed into the peninsular campaign and the making of Goya. "Useless and preposterous," Jefferson would have said, "to buy art at such a cost." Was not his the immunity for which Goethe would congratulate the New World (1827): "Amerika du hast es besser..." "You have it better than our exhausted Continent... no Medieval castles, no Gothic horror-trappings." As if regretting that Faust could not have been, like Jefferson, of one soul. a73) 73) 73a) 73b) Thomas Cole, 1825, Landscape with Dead Trees, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH Cole, 1833, The Titan's Goblet, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC Same, Cole's Titan's Goblet, upper detail; + V lower detail (from 73) A.P. Ryder, 1875-91, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Music: Gottschalk, 1846, Ossian Ballade, No. 2 (Piano), MHS 3135 But already Rip van Winkle, waked from his long sleep to Federal politics and the "Almighty Dollar," felt a nostalgia for the dreamy past. As outward confidence waned, our art too would shape inner realms (even New Orleans Gottschalk to compose Ossian Ballades): so Cole's 1833 Titan Goblet, with cities above on the Platonic brim, and darker ones on the rock bays below. Who knows what it can mean, but the longing beyond what is — such a haunted mood as in Hawthorne's story of "Doctor Heidegger's Experiment" with its other goblets and vase brimming with water from the fountain of youth, which rejuvenates the faded widow and her three ancient rivals: "her warm breath fanning each of their faces by turns... yet... the tall mirror is said to have reflected the figures of the three old, gray, withered grandsires, ridiculously contending for the skinny ugliness of a shrivelled grandam." For all Goethe's advice, we had still to face our demons within and without. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 31 �C.G. Bell Va74) Symbolic History Ryder, 1890-1908, Macbeth and the Witches, Phillips Collectionn, Washington, D.C. Ryder, c. 1887, The Flying Dutchman, Smithsonian, Wash., D.C. Ryder, 1890, Jonah detail, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. 74) 74a) Maybe Charles Brockdon Brown had given a hint just before 1800 in the Wieland. That fanatical father's death in the agony of putrefaction after the flaming visit of his god is not just Gothic fashion; it means something, and what it means is hardly Enlightenment. Not even Poe is an isolated caprice. Melville was preordained to set himself where Goya had stood. And Ryder's "Flying Dutchman," another of those "hideous and intolerable allegories," might have been informed by Moby Dick. "This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. 75) 75a) 75b) Raphael, 1510-11, School of Athens, Vatican Same, School of Athens, Groups to Aristotle's left Thomas Nast, 1871, Let Us Prey Our great triumph, the political structure, framed by the counterpoise of checks and balances, for a citizenry of worth and with the fortune of an expanding frontier, was a vault of minimal law, irrespective of economics, health, the media, Platonic wholeness, or Utopian plan — some 1500 noble School of Athens, where all sorts and conditions of men could live in abstract legal equality, poor and rich, slave, even, and free, unspecified. Though Rousseau had warned (and Paine and Jefferson echoed him) that in states of economic disparity, "legal right... only serves to keep the poor in misery, and support the rich in their usurpations." a76) 76) 76a) Currier and Ives 1860, The Catskill Mountains, Roy. King Col., NY American Federal, etc., Chestnut St., Salem, Massachusetts Francis Costigan, 1840-44, James F.D. Lanier House, Madison, Indiana (CGB '82); the video then adds V76b, same, nearer, from the side (CGB '82) All actual states are polyvalent suspensions in whose dynamic wished absolutes are embodied and consumed. From the radiance of an America spreading over a continent and through four centuries, what blessings shall we affirm, what threatened values crown? The constitutional documents, with the court cases that almost made them June 1996 The Larger Declaration 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History real, have no art sign more compelling than the shaded lawns of an American avenue, where brick and clapboard dwellings claim the equality of the commonwealth. Yet from the merchant port of Salem (Hawthorne under the eaves, searching darker symbols), through Philadelphia (along the Delaware), Annapolis, Georgetown, Charleston, to Natchez, and north with the first frontier to Madison — "if ever the tree of time bore richer fruit" — comes the backlash of our opulence: To float a dream Of lawns and houses down the Main Line, We slag earth's ocean to a dying pool… (CGB) a77) 77) Antebellum, Natchez, unfinished 1861, Longwood, (CGB '62) R.B. Hughes, 1834, John Trumbull, bust, Yale U.; + V detail Like the rest of the world, we were bound to come to grips with the specter of our fate. Though our fate is not yet clear. Hear the worst evidence: After 1830, American busts, even of artists (this the painter Trumbull), too often have that Roman look of self-righteous corruption which Lyndon Johnson exemplified in our time. D. H. Lawrence, in 1924, purported to find the "real American" hidden in the books of Cooper, Hawthorne and the rest. He says of Deerslayer: All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted... And when this man breaks from his static isolation, makes a new move, then look out, something will be happening... 78) 0. Mueller, 1919, Self, Neue Staatsgalerie, München; first, video detail And of Moby Dick: Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch, doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed. The spirit, doomed... "Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern." June 1996 The Larger Declaration 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I have searched American portraits and found none to fit the suicidal killer described by Lawrence — only a German, Otto Müller, from the pre-Nazi bitterness after the First World War. Maybe Lawrence as so often was projecting the European pain of the years in which he wrote. 79) 79a) 79b) Edward Hicks, c. 1848, The Peaceable Kingdom, Museum of Art, Philadelphia Hicks, c. 1845, Separate version of Penn's Treaty with the Indians (background detail in the above), Museum, Philadelphia Chinese-American, after 1799, George Washington Ascending, Painting on glass, Winterthur Museen; + V detail While the United States, pursuing its manifest destiny in the Indian West, went on toying with Hick's Peacable Kingdom... Music: Yankee Doodle again Did the simplicity of American art reflect some naive flaw of the democratic mind? — To escape the antinomies of the organic field (as the fire-release of freedom against the leaf-bonding of the long-term good); even now, with movie hacks, to amputate a patient (nation, world) disposed, at the least dumb incision, to fibrillate. If that is the instinct of the herd, hostile to the keenness of the Riace bronzes — De Toqueville: "in democratic republics... the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved" — then D.H. Lawrence could claim the crystal ball; even Rousseau might have his say: "On peut acquerir la liberté, mais on ne la recouvre jamais." — "Liberty may be acquired, but recovered, never." (end Yankee Doodle) a80) 80) 80a) 80b) E.S. Field, c. 1860, Garden of Eden, Webb Gallery of American Art, Shelburne Museum, Vermont W.S. Mount, c. 1855, Banjo Player in Barn, Institute of Arts, Detroit; first, video detail Charlie Chaplin, 1936, from "Modern Times": Chaplin oiling the machine Chaplin, 1936, "Modern Times," closing shot: Chaplin and Paulette Goddard 1 Two hundred years of incarnate vision, earth quickened toward entropic ruin, this is the America that wrings our hearts. June 1996 The Larger Declaration 34 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Stacey Samuels and Charlotte Bell, banjo etc., playing Jesse James (taped by CGB) But the pied piping, as of barefoot volunteers at Valley Forge, homespun cue for Beethoven's Hymn to Joy, Yankee Doodle yields to the outlaw, Jesse James, by the youth bums of Bowery and the Street, plucking like Mount's solitary Black smiler in a barn. Has another humanity been at work under the march of America? And even at this ninth hour can the humor of Franklin, Melville and Twain, the wry humor of Chaplin, come to our aid? As Galway Kinnell closes the Book of Nightmares: On the body on the blued flesh, when it is laid out, see if you can find the one flea which is laughing. The closing shot is both a comic solution and the bleakest irony of the show — resuming the fatal error of Adam Smith and Marx, that "Nature is inexhaustible and works gratuitously." 1 June 1996 The Larger Declaration 35 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 35 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Larger Declaration, Symbolic History, Part 27 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 27 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_27_The_Larger_Declaration Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3826c0f770a0eadb042a25a367ff6231.pdf d1171517ec13210a73961d40dd25b2ec PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 26. Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 May 1994 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 26. Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative 1) Joseph Lange 1782-83, Mozart (unfinished), Mozart House, Salzburg; + V detail Same, Mozart, close detail 1a) Music: Mozart 1785, Concerto No. 21 in C Major (K.467), 2nd movement, piano entrance, Col. ML 4791 Mozart wrote the C Major Concerto in 1785, six years before his death as a pauper near the age of 36. Can art add to the prodigy of the music — especially an art as limited as that of the Salzburg portrait? Yet, against the pomps of 1700, even this bespeaks an enlightened sensibility, hung between assertive claims of Baroque and Revolution. From that valley, where reason in Voltaire mocks itself, yielding after midcentury to Rousseau's cult of heart, what fine-spun enigmas of confidence and disillusion rise through Werther's natural rapture and suicidal pain: "Our only happiness our spring of sorrow." (fade Concerto 21) 2) 2a) Goya, 1798, G. M. de Jovellanos, Collection Viscountess of Irueste, Madrid Same, de Jovellanos, detail of figure; + another V detail of 2 Two years later Mozart, shifting to the string quintet and the key of G minor, risked an ultimate poignance. Music: Mozart 1787, Quintet in G Minor, K.516, Col. ML 5192, (excerpts through three movements, with 16 slides as ff; other music interposed as called for) while Goya, born before Mozart and to live a generation beyond him, in his portrait of Jovellanos, endangered Spanish liberal, robes in high style a melancholy lyrical as Burns': 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �2 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The wan Moon is setting behind the white wave, And time is setting with me, oh. Music: a3) 3) Fade Quintet and advance almost half through the 1st movement. Goya, 1793-94, Corral de Locos, detail, Meadows Museum, Dallas Same, whole; with other V details (cf. V3 and V3a) Like Cowper's "stricken deer that left the herd" — I sum up half mankind And add two thirds of the remaining half, And find the total of their hopes and fears, Dreams, empty dreams — we plumb a private recess where Rembrandt's irradiated space has shrunk to a corral of twelve Bedlamites, too sharply felt ever to be forgotten. And it is not merely private. Goya releases the unconscious of neo-gothic Europe: visions of terror, (fade and skip to close of 1st movement) 4) Blake 1793, Dream of Thiralatha. Canceled plate from America, British Museum, London; with V details before and after whole visions of longing. Blake, born a year after Mozart, though he would just outlive Beethoven, was already stretching obscurity and neglect with imperative symbols. Here "the virgin that pines for man" conceives, under the drooping phallic trunk, a winged kiss in the Vale of Leutha: "As when a dream of Thiralatha flies the night." (from end of 1st movement to melody-repeat, 2nd movement) 5) 5a) Canova, 1787-93, Cupid and Psyche, Villa Carlotta, Tremezzo (cf. 5a, Louvre) Same, Cupid and Psyche, Louvre (CGB '80; video adds a detail of 5, Villa Carlotta) Through the academic skill of Canova that ferment turns the Cupid and Psyche, begun the year of Mozart's quintet, to another Dream of Thiralatha. What staggers us in this fin-de-siècle is the complexity with which Ancien Regime opens its Baroque and Rococo heritage of sophisticated resource to Enlightenment, Storm-and-Stress, Romantic and Faustian desire: "To wing mountain caves by 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History moonlight... Bathe body in fountains of dawn." movement) 6) (to trio of 2nd C.D. Friedrich, c. 1818, Woman at Sunset, Museum Folkwang, Essen; + V detail In that Sehnsucht, Kantian soul finds itself alien to the Cartesian and Lockean earth it had thought to master: Meine Ruh ist hin, Mein Herz ist schwer, Ich finde sie nimmer Und nimmermehr. The phenomenal melts toward the 1800's transparency of this Caspar David Friedrich. But the longing beyond earth has threaded Christendom throughout. Let our search for a Mozartean match test a sequence of elegiac refinements 7) German (Rhine) Gothic, c. 1220, Synagogue, Strassburg (CGB '59); + V details from the 1220 height of Gothic down. How could the blindfolded and spear-broken Synagogue of Strasbourg but distill love-banishment? Yet the pure thinness of those lines, before Renaissance or Baroque were thinkable, exclude Mozart's mood (fade Mozart), suggest their own supersensual sliding through dissonances of second and third to the unsullied vacancy of fifth and octave: Music: a8) 8) Perotin, c. 1210, close of Organum Virgo, EMS-201 (so back to the Mozart Quintet) Ambrosio Lorenzetti, c. 1340, St. Dorothy, detail, Pinacoteca, Siena; + V detail (Va8) Same, St. Dorothy, detail of face; + V closer detail And on the green underpaint of the 14th century, the rose-tinted saints of Simone and the Lorenzetti, this flower-bearing Dorothy, require, in haloed estrangement, some music of mood-suspension, (fade Mozart) Machault's Ars Nova, haunted by ambiguities of double leading tone. 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �4 C.G. Bell Music: 9) Symbolic History Guillaume de Machault, c. 1370(?), from Lasse! Comment oublieray, ARC-2565-052 (so to Quintet, end of 2nd movement and on to third movement) Botticelli, 1495, La Derelitta, Pallavicini Collection, Rome; first, a video detail Botticelli, c. 1490-1500(?), Noli me Tangere, Johnson Collection, Philadelphia; + V detail Again, La Derelitta, detail 9a) 9b) By the late 15th century, Botticelli blends into Florentine Renaissance the last Gothic strain, eternizing what Pater would call the ineffable sadness of Exiles — this Tamar-soul shut out: Such coats young Tamar and fair Rachel's child Put off, when He was sold and she defil'd. (Fairfax) But if temperament curiously affines the clean-cut melancholy .of Botticelli to the wistful perfection of the Mozart adagio, it is over a gap as vast (fade Mozart) as from the Chansons of Poliziano, Isaac, this Busnois. Music: a10) 10) Busnois, c. 1480(?), Chanson, Seule apart moy, from last stanza, Nonesuch H 71247 (fade to Quintet, 3rd movement, agitated) El Greco, 1584-87 (variant of 1577-79), Disrobing Christ, Alte Pinakothek, München (CGB '59) Same, detail of holy women (video adds details of a10 and 10) As Renaissance fills out its energized forms, tragic power sweeps us from the melting of G Minor. Even the expressive break of El Greco asks such trans-personal chromatics as spread from Italy to all Europe: (fade Mozart) thus the 1600 France of the old Claude le Jeune. Music: Va11) 11) 5/1994 Claude le Jeune, before 1600, Helas, mon Dieu, close, DL-9629 Poussin, 1629-30, Et In Arcadia Ego, Chatsworth Settlement, Chatsworth, England Poussin, 1638-39, Et in Arcadia Ego, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �5 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History d'Anglebert, c. 1672, opening, Tombeau de Chambonnieres, VICS-1370 While the Baroque at its most tranquil, these Poussin shepherds deciphering a tomb inscription: "I, too, in Arcadia," moves to the formulated chords of the century of Descartes — a grandiloquence Mozart and his time (fade d'Anglebert) have outgrown. (to Mozart Quintet, mid 3rd movement) 12) 12a) Watteau, 1717-19, Mezzetin, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Watteau, 1720(?), Lady Awaiting Her Lover, Musée Condé, Chantilly (video returns to Mezzetin, detail; then again Lady, detail) Only with the Watteau-turn to the 18th century does the plaintive introspection of rococo under the façade of grand style approach the horizon of Mozart. While music too, in Couperin and Rameau, hints at a like possibility; (fade Mozart) Music: Rameau, published 1741, opening 2nd Movement, 5th Piece de Clavecin en concert, (Ars Rediviva) Parliament PLPS 605 but in miniatures Goya and Mozart would liberate and magnify. (fade Rameau) 13) J.H. Füssli (Fuseli), 1790-95, Portrait of a Girl, Collection R. Ganz, Chicago; + V detail (to Mozart Quintet, in 3rd movement) Though it is not a question of physical size, or even of the preeminence of the artist, but that 1790, as in this Füssli Portrait of a Girl, is a post-rococo and pre-romantic hatching-ground, where modernity, with its transfiguring reach and risk, is already astir. As Beethoven was told when he went to Vienna: "Receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn." Yet what he received ripened toward another future. 14) 14a) D. G. Rossetti, c. 1863, Beata Beatrix, Tate Gallery, London; first V detail Same, upper detail; with various video details (Mozart, 3rd movement, agitated repeat) 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The pre-Raphaelite revival, under the myth of Dante, of soul's timeless hunger (this Blessed Beatrice by Rossetti), has slipped from Mozart in the other direction (fade Mozart) — too lush of romantic touch, searching the sensual for a mystic clue — Isolde's dying swoon. Music: 15) V15a) Wagner, 1857-9, from Liebestod, Tristan and Isolde, RCA Vic. LM 6700 (5) (fade) Picasso, 1901, Mother and Child, Maurice Wertheim, New York Picasso, 1903, The Tragedy, Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (video returns to Mother and Child) Music: Stravinsky, 1910, Lullaby from The Fire Bird, Col. MG 31202 And as that voluptuous transcendence of earth mounts through Picasso's Blue and Rose toward the ecstatic break of Cubism, Stravinsky's Fire Bird speaks how far music is shedding the tonal canons in which Mozart had robed expressive pain. (fade Fire Bird; again Mozart Quintet, close of third movement) What the resonances reveal over all diversity, all anachronistic likeness, 16) Goya, 1786, The Marquesa de Pontejos, National Gallery, Washington D.C.; with V details is the power of the time-strand — the 1786 fitness of Goya, where the courtly dress and ironic play of France, this park of cloudy trees out of Fragonard, trembles toward that future — 17) 17a) Friedrich, c. 1824, Trees by Moonlight, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Köln Same, detail, Tree and Moon; + another V detail (Mozart continued, 4th movement, opening) toward Friedrich's dissolution of outwardness, when late Beethoven and Schubert would confirm the soul-search Mozart had deepened even into the last movement of the G Minor Quintet. How far Berkeley, early in the century, had taken the turn to subjective nature, one might not have known until Coleridge's use of him in 1796: All... organic Harps diversely fram'd 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �7 C.G. Bell Symbolic History That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? 18) Chinese (Sung), c. 1220, Liang K'ai, Crows and Willow, Museum, Peking; + V detail (fade the Mozart Quintet) In the reduction of the picture to sure plane and line, Friedrich explores an affinity the modern has felt with the Orient, with that calligraphy of mood-soul the Chinese by 1200 had shrined in the thought and poetry of ink on silk. Yet what could Liang K'ai have revealed to Friedrich but what Kant had mediated, the shift from outer to inner, while the representation of the outward is quietly maintained. Whatever 1820 Friedrich might have treasured in the Chinese, 19) Fr. Boucher, 1742, Emperor of China gives Audience, Museum, Besançon; + V details is far from that picturesque fable of royal pomp 1740-Boucher had found there. Music: Mozart, 1782, Overture, Entführung aus dem Serail, Deutsche Gram. 2709-021 Though Mozart had embraced those poles: the Turkish Seraglio, with piccolo, trumpets, triangle, and cymbals, from five years before the Quintet in G Minor. (fade Seraglio) 20) Muslim (Sicilian Fatimid), c. 1140, Capella Palatina Ceiling, Palermo V20a) Venetian Byzantine, 1069-74, with later Mosaics 12th-13th cent., Cupola of the Pentecost, St. Mark's, Venice We pick up what we are attuned to. Western cultivation of world art can only clothe in foreign tongues what is nascent and native. The ceiling of Roger II's Palatine Chapel in Palermo was surely executed by Muslims from Fatimid Africa; but its Byzantine ritual of gold in dark, speaks the 12th-century Romanesque which hosted those kindred jewelings. 21) 5/1994 Gentile Bellini, c. 1490(?), A Turkish Artist, Gardner Museum, Boston Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History By the end of the 15th century, Gentile Bellini's sketch of a Turkish artist, however aware of the Persian parchment miniature, favors the cleanness of foreshortening, space, and gathered robe which the early Renaissance was focused on. 22) Mughal Islamic, 1639 ff., arch and ceiling from the Red Fort, Delhi And what the Western Baroque and Rococo found in the palatial East after 1600 was the splendor their own courts were ripe to rival. Yet the luxury of inlay decoration, whether from Chinese porcelains or Mughal India, Va23) 23) 23a) Spanish Rococo, 1740-72, Sacramental Chapel, Church of San Mateo, Lucena; + V detail Capodimonte, Porcelain Room 1757-59, Museo Capodimonte, Naples Same, closer horizontal view; + V details from 23 and 23a was caught up in the dynamism of 18th-century Europe. Music: Pergolesi, c. 1735(?), Sinfonia in F, 4th Movement, Presto, 1st repeat, Nonesuch HC 3008, side 4 In Capodimonte Naples, the feather curliques and Chinese figurines mount another body of fate, whose radiative conquest coincides with its art absorption — no less of the West than the tonal tensions of the music Mozart was heir to: Pergolesi. (music) Yet even in that energy, Baroque grandeur yields to precious line; bulk thins, like the 1710 universe of Berkeley: For...things... Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them. (close Pergolesi) Va24) 24) V24a) 5/1994 English, 1687-1707, State Drawing Room, Tapestries woven c. 1635, Cartoons by Raphael, Ceiling by Laguerre, Chatsworth, Darbyshire Wallis and Laguerre, c. 1700, Painted Hall, Chatsworth, Darbyshire English, 1700-03, probably designed hy Thomas Archer, West Front, Chatsworth, Darbyshire Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �9 C.G. Bell 24b) Symbolic History Wrenn and others, end 17th cent. and after, Naval Hospital, Greenwich, London; first, video detail Music: Charpentier, c. 1690(?), from Offerte of Instrumental Mass, Nonesuch 71130 A break from the heroic past: from the 1700 halls of Chatsworth, the music of Charpentier. These forms swell with Cartesian substance, with the certainty which crowns Locke's Primary and Secondary analysis of reason's limitation: Wherever we perceive the agreement or disagreement of any of our ideas, there is certain knowledge; and wherever we are sure those ideas agree with the reality of things, there is certain real knowledge. Of which agreement of our ideas with the reality of things having here given the marks, I think I have shown wherein it is that certainty, real certainty, consists. a25) 25) Germain Boffrand, c. 1740, French Rococo, Salon de la Princesse, Hotel de Soubise, Paris; first, video detail Watteau(?), c. 1708, Panel wlth decorative figures, Besançon de Wagner Collection; + V details Music: Rameau, 1735, from Indes Galantes, Rigaudon I, L'Oiseau Lyre SOL 60024 How far from the tone of solid Locke is Voltaire's skeptic praise of him in The Ignorant Philosopher: Locke confirms me in the opinion that there are no innate ideas, that it is absurd to say the will is free... that I cannot know any substance, as I can have no ideas but of their qualities... that the words matter and spirit are mere words... The first thinning, the diversion of incipient ennui in elegant play, with its fondness for motifs from Renaissance, Pompei, and China, appears in those arabesques Watteau painted about 1708 in the studio of Audran — to be imitated by a generation of followers. The link to Couperin and Rameau (this dance from Rameau's Gallant Indies) is patent; and it was during the same years that Berkeley, as in the passage just quoted, let reason deprive itself at once of its chief field and power — of physical reality and of 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History intellectual abstraction. (end Rameau) a26) b26) 26) 26a) Porcelain (Meissen), 18th cent., Old Lover Group, Conservatori, Rome Double: [A] Boucher, c. 1760, (woven in Beauvais), Chinese Fair, Palazzo Reale, Turin; and [B] Chippendale, c. 1760(?), Chinese Bedroom, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Sicilian Chinoiserie, 1799, Ceiling of King's Bedchamber, Chinese Palazzina, Palermo Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1784-88, Cupid untying the girdle of Venus, Hermitage, Leningrad (The video draws on these four slides, along with V-A and V-B of the double, taking them in the following order: a26, detail; 26, lower half; A of b26; B of b26; 26, upper half; 26a; and again from 26, a close detail.) Music: Mozart, 1782, Entführung, Overture, continued, Deutsche Gram. 2709-021 Since the Crusades, the West had been too intently fixed on its own Eurekan action, vision, and art to experience the sophisticated restlessness with which the 18th century, called (as with the consciousness of Vico) Augustan by the English, now scours the globe for fashionable novelties. From Boucher's France to Chippendale's England, from the porcelain factories of Dresden to this Sicilian Chinese palace at the end of the century, the Janissaries of Sultan Soul, Candide and the rest, press the world-search for pleasure. But as with the Abyssinian inhabitants of Johnson's "happy valley... gratified with whatever the senses can enjoy", the romantic disquiet of Rasselas distills exactly from those "gardens of fragrance," those "fortresses of security." (fade Seraglio overture) 27) V27a) Chinese, Ming, c. 1500(?), Soul Tower of Emperor Yung-lo, Near Peking Chinese, Ming, 1368-1644, Temple of the God of the Universe, South City of Peking Though that Europe of Chinoiserie, of Johnson's Abyssinia and Mozart's Seraglio, was still Europe, as far removed as Don Juan or Childe Harold from the ceremonial repose of the East it ransacked — the Ming Tombs and Hall of Sacrifice near Peking. Thus with a wilder frenzy, Pound, late Symbolist off-shoot of that Byronic need, seizes 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �11 C.G. Bell Symbolic History on every chateau vestige of mythic health, from Homer to the Italy of Dante, or the dynasties of HAN, SUNG, TANG. a28) Vb28) Vc28) 28) 28a) Robert Archer, 1764-73, Kenwood House, Hampstead, London Neumann, c. 1719-35, Würzburg Residence, from Garden Terrace (CGB '86) South German Baroque, 1713, Cosmas Damian Asam, Jupiter as Satyr to Antiope, fresco detail, Schloß Alteglofsheim, Bavaria Robert Adam, 1760-69, Ante-Room, Syon House, Milddlesex; + V detail Neumann, 1719-35, and Tiepolo, 1751-53, stair-hall, Würzburg Residence In England, as in Germany, the stance of Reasoned grandeur persists, but undercut, as with Swift, Pope, Berkeley, Hume. Handel clothes German Baroque in European Enlightenment. Music: Handel, 1739, Concerto Grosso in D, Op.6, #5, Largo to Allegro, Decca LX 3055 The sophistications of Couperin and Scarlatti prank the amplitudes of his Concerti Grossi. So the Adam's interior of Syon House, from the 1760's, with verd-antique columns dredged from the Tiber, slicks English Augustan confidence almost to the Roman Augustan display of an empire stretching through known space and time. (fade Handel) Even in Mozart the old chord-parade would uphold all ironies of wit and pangs of heart. Music: a29) b29) Vc29) 29) Mozart, 1790, Cosi fan tutte, Overture, close, Angel-3522-c Horace Walpole, 1747-63, Library, Strawberry Hill (CGB '74); first, video detail Same, Strawberry Hill, exterior (CGB '74) Chinoiserie (Lightfoot), c. 1775-80, Chinese Tea Party within alcove, Claydon House, England Horace Walpole with Thomas Pitt, 1747-63, Gothic ceiling, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (CGB '74; video: three details only) And already in the sons of Bach, what was upheld was Storm and Stress and pre-romantic experiment. Music: 5/1994 C.P.E. Bach, c. 1765(?), from Fantasia #2, C Major, M.H.S. 1549 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �12 C.G. Bell Symbolic History At the same time Horace Walpole, whose 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto revived the Medieval terrors that would swell through Scott to Frankenstein and Dracula, was finishing his Twickenham Gothick hall, Strawberry Hill, just while Syon House was building down the Thames. We remember Claydon House, Bucks, with its Chinese room and its Gothic room varying the classic and rococo. Yet Walpole's house avoids the mopes of his fiction; its abandonment of space for line is as parlor-frail as the fantasias of C.P.E. Bach, of whom Mozart said, "He is the father, we are the children." Revival goes by opposites, implies the lack of the thing revived. This fan-vault is laid on in decorative plaster, like the gold-fret of a snuff-box. (close K.P.E. Bach) 30) 30a) V30b) English Tudor, 1500-12, Chapel of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey, London; first, video detail English Norman, 1141-80 with vault of early 16th cent., Christ Church, Oxford (video uses CGB '59 variant, V30a) English late Perpendicular, 1446-1515 (Tudor), King's College Chapel, Cambridge Music: Taverner, c. 1525(?), In Nomine for viols, Bach Guild 576 But the stone-lace of Westminster Abbey, Walpole's model, supports itself, a floreation of structure. No doubt the Tudor In Nomines of Taverner were forgotten. (fade Taverner) But it was some such recovered polyphony that Beethoven transcended in the C# Minor quartet — Music: a31) 31) Beethoven, 1826, Opening, C# Minor Quartet, Col. M5L 277 C.D. Friedrich, 1819, Ruined Cloister and Cemetery in snow, formerly National Gallery, Berlin (destroyed 1945) C.G. Carus, 1830-31, Dresden at Dusk, G. Schäfer Collection, Obbach; video: details only, center and above turning it, as in Friedrich or this Carus, to a mystery of person and mood. Not this 1830 heir to twilight space asserts spatiality, nor the Gothic it tenderly looks back to; (fade C# Minor) a32) 5/1994 G. Guarini, c. 1666, Dome of San Lorenzo, Turin Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �13 C.G. Bell 32) Symbolic History Guarini, 1667, Dome, Santissima Sindone Chapel, Turin (CGB '84) but the reading over, from Renaissance to Baroque, of transfinite Gothic into cosmic physicality — the rib-vaulted radiance of Guarini's Turin domes. Here was dimensional voyage, as by dead reckoning, ahead. Against it Walpole's filligree thins to Style Galant — Christian Bach against the old Johann Sebastian. 33) V33a) Lombard, c. 1050-75, Heavenly Jerusalem, detail, St. Piero al Monte, Civate; + V closer detail Same, whole ceiling Music: Elegy for William the Conqueror, d. 1087, opening, Everest 3452 As in music and thought, but visibly in art, space is of the essence. The Lombard Heavenly City of 1050 was remote from such dependence; it did not (any more than the plainsong Elegy for William the Conqueror) make vaunted earth the locus of its power. Yet the common and repeated truth of Western conquest — from spacelessness, (fade 1087 Elegy) a34) Vb34) 34) 34a) Andrea Pozzo, 1683-94, Ceiling of St. Ignatius, detail, east end (?), Rome Same, NE corner detail Same, St. Ignatius, whole ceiling fresco (video shows: first, the west half of 34; then, a34; next, central spread of 34; then, Vb34; finally, 34, the entire ceiling) Another view of 32, Dome of SS Sindone Chapel Music: J.S. Bach 1731-3, Gratias (opening), from Gloria, B. Minor Mass, (Klemperer) Angel SC 3720 to the enormous assertion of space, not only for earth but for God — takes total force under the frescoed vault of the Triumph of St. Ignatius in Rome. The musical form of that mastery was the polyphonic fugue; as in Bach's Gratias (fade Gratias) but, since the Renaissance, an ambiguity had been seated in the fugue, related to what would later seem the Satanic mill of Reason, Blake's "loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire, wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton..." — since the great law of Baroque whlch swells thought and morality, music and art, can suggest either the praise or dread of the destinate. 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �14 C.G. Bell Symbolic History a35) Piranesi, 1743-45 ff., engraving, The Prisons XV, 2nd State 35A) J.M. Fischer, 1735-51, Michaelskirche, Berg am Laim, München (CGB '59) V35) The double of 35A, and 35B 35B) Zuccali, 1710 ff., interior, Dome, Ettal, Bavaria (CGB '59) Music: J.S. Bach, 1723-7, "Wir haben ein Gesetz" (opening), St. John Passion, Odeon STE 80668/78 From 1500 down, Passion motets and cries of the crowd had hammered the stretto of canonic entrance, as in the protest of Bach's Passion According to St. John: "Wir haben ein Gesetz!" — "We have a law." Yet more typically in Bach (fade), the fugue (with that domed and towered might which took South Germany by storm) sounds the predictive majesty of God. Music: a36) 36) J.S. Bach, Gratius agimus, (conclusion), B Minor Mass, Angel SC 3720 (end) Piranesi, 1743-45 (2nd State, 1761), Carceri V, engraving (video shows three details only: upper, middle, and lower; while slide show, after the whole, adds b36, lower half of the same Carceri V, with lions) Same, Carceri (2nd state) VII; + V details (cf. V36a) Music: Mozart, 1791, Kyrie (fugue), Requiem, Columbia ML 5012 Meanwhile by mid-century, and most startlingly in Piranesi, the great "I think" of Baroque space becomes a prison frenzy of "I nightmare" — as if the mind-vaulted immensity were crying out with Blake's Urizen: "Wir haben ein Gesetz": is there not one law for both the lion and the ox? And is there not eternal fire and eternal chains To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life? Such the "mistaken Demon of heaven" Rousseau thought Voltaire made of God (though for Blake both were mockers) — from the Confessions: I received a copy of his poem on the destruction of Lisbon... Voltaire, while always appearing to believe in God, has never really believed in anything but the Devil, since his pretended God is nothing but a malicious being, who, according to him, finds no pleasure except in doing injury... 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is in such fugal seizure that Mozart closed his religious output, with the Requiem Kyrie, a fugue on the leap of a diminished seventh; while Goethe's Gretchen, 1790, swoons under the Dies irae: "Grimm fasst dich!" and "Weh! weh!" (fade Requiem) a37) 37) 37a) Rembrandt, c. 1631, Scholar under a Spiral Stair, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Rembrandt, 1631, Scholar in a Lofty Room, National Museum, Stockholm Same, central detail; while video takes two details from 37 It was with another certainty that thought in Rembrandt had possessed the luminous dark. Spinoza: the mind, in so far as it truly perceives a thing, is part of the infinite intellect of God... and therefore it is as necessary that the clear and distinct ideas of the mind are true as it is that those of God are true... It is the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain species of eternity. Music: Schütz, 1648, "Auf dem Gebirge" opening, MHS 1467 what music could sound in that room of "Milton's solitary Platonist" — Till old experience do attain To something like prophetic strain — but the polyphony of high Baroque, from a Schütz opening (fade Schütz) to a Bach close: Music: 38) V38a) 38b) 38c) Goya, 1801, Interior of a Prison, Barnard Castle, Durham Blake, c. 1795, frontispiece, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Tate Gallery, London Again, Goya, Prison, detail of 38; first, video closer detail, then V38b Again, Goya, Corral de Locos, detail of slide 3 (while video uses V38d) Music: 5/1994 J.S. Bach, 1717, Mensch, bewein' dein' Sünde gros, close, (Schweitzer) Col M-310 (78), cf. Odyssey 32 26 0003 Mozart, 1791, Requiem, continued, Dies Irae, Col. ML 5012 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �16 C.G. Bell Symbolic History But in Goya's Pascalian prison ("l'image de la condition des hommes"), the lighted vault, like all the skull-caves of Blake, plays a converse role, the web of reason's law, gray and hoary dark, as with Swift's Struldbrug Immortals: opinionative, peevish... morose... dead to all natural affection.. So Johnson's Rasselas, searching "the choice. of life", at last descends with the old astronomer, who has lived by the illusion that he guides the sun and seasons ("I can only tell that I have chosen wrong") into the catacombs of the dead, a universe of "matter… inert, senseless, and lifeless" where our only hope comes from "higher authority". It is first with Kant's Critique, 1781, that Reason, by its own pure skill, exhibits the vaulting of its cave: the four unanswerable antinomies: the necessity and impossibility of infinite space and time; that there must and cannot be any simple substance; that free will both is and is not; that God as absolute cause can be alike proved and denied. 39) 39a) V39b) 39c) 39d) V39e) Goya, 1783, Self-Portralt, Agen, France; first, video detail Blake, 1793, Earth, from the Gates of Paradise, British Museum, London Blake, 1793-4 (Copy M, of 1800), Shackled Covering Cherub, Frontispiece, America, privately owned Reynolds, c. 1776(?), Dr. Samuel Johnson, National Trust Property, Knole, Kent Again, 39, Goya, Self, detail Goya, 1799, Self Portrait (Caprichos), Prado, Madrid Music: Mozart, 1791, Requiem, continued, Tuba mirum, Col. ML 5012 (opening then fade) What would lift the Age of Revolution from Johnson's prayerful return to "higher authority," Goya caught in this self-portrait of 1783 — a defiance to which he continually returns — soul's resolve to break its own prison. Blake: "When thought is closed in Caves, then love shall show its root in deepest Hell." But Blake's love would thunder like his Rintrah, like Rousseau's heart, Hegel's passion, Faust's Satanic compact. Music: 5/1994 Mozart, 1788, first fugal passage, Finale, Jupiter Symphony, #41, C Major, Columbia D3L 291 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History And had not rational-pessimist Johnson ("Must helpless man in ignorance sedate/ Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?") answered "Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry on the nonexistence of matter" not with reason at all, but, as Boswell describes, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus." How far does Mozart prepare for Beethoven's translation of the fugue into the will's battleground with "the army of unalterable law", for Kant's moral imperative and final Strife of the Faculties: For what is man but the original creator of all his representations and concepts; what should he be but the first author of his own deeds? (fade Jupiter) a4O) Vb40) Vc40) 40) J. Both, c. 1640(?), Italian Landscape, Wallace Collection, London J. Both, c. 1640, Italian Landscape, Mauritshuis, the Hague (for Vb40, gone orange, slide show now has b40, J. Both, c. 1645, Rocky Landscape, National Gallery, London) Albert Cuyp, 1660-64, Horsemen and Herdsmen, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; first, video detail Agricola, c. 1700(?), Landscape, Pitti, Florence (CGB '48) Music: J. Rosenmüller, pub. 1670, from Sonata #2 in E Minor, Esoteric 517 The Baroque had glowingly possessed what Blake had to reforge from alienated man and matter — "To see the World in a grain of sand/ And Heaven in a Wild Flower." Such "deep and dazzling dark" had been the element of Silesius, 17th-century Cherubic Wanderer: Time is like eternity, eternity like time; Never bring division in that golden clime. (CGB) It poured from Rosenmüller's sonatas, as in Grimmelshausen the hermit sings in the night wood: "Komm, Trost der Nacht, O Nachtigall!" — "Comfort of night, come nightingale"; or as the alchemical light of Both and Cuyp floods this 1700 landscape by German Agricola, an irradiation of the actual. (cut Rosenmüller) 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �18 C.G. Bell 41) Symbolic History J.A. Koch, c. 1830(?), Mountain Lake, lower detail, Museum, Basel (CGB '80); video shows first an upper detail from 2nd 41, the whole picture Music: Schubert, 1826, Andante of Trio No. 1 in B Flat Maj., Op. 99, WL5188 But the Transcendental begins, like a Schubert farewell, to dissolve the material in symbol and dream — "The light that never was on sea or land." Koch's 1830 Mountain Lake is as spectral as that twilight pond in Goethe's Elective Affinities where Ottilie totters in the boat, loses the oar and drowns the child. (fade Schubert) 42) R. Wilson, c. 1762, Kew Gardens, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; + V detail Music: Mozart, 1778, 2nd Movement, Violin Sonata in C Maj., K. 296, Murray Hill S.4356 The melting had begun in the 18th century, as in this Wilson, Kew Garden, Pagoda and Bridge; it pervades the wistfulness Mozart's first violin sonatas drew from Italy, from Mannheim and the sons of Bach; it had been the message of Berkeley: visible ideas are the language whereby the governing Spirit on whom we depend informs us what tangible ideas he is about to imprint upon us... 2nd 41) Again, J.A. Koch, Mountain Lake, whole, Basel (CGB '80) which Coleridge would rephrase: The... shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God. Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all and all things in himself... (fade Mozart) For 2nd 40) Van der Neer, c. 1650(?), A Canal Scene by Moonlight, Wallace Collection, London (video having returned first to a detail of 40, the Agricola Landscape) Kant shows the change. His mid-century "Origin of the World" still glows with Leibnizian science: 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History matter... by natural evolution... strives to fashion itself... If the grandeur of a planetary world in which the earth... is scarcely perceived, fills the understanding with wonder; how are we astonished to behold the infinite multitude of worlds and systems which form the extension of the Milky Way! How transported beyond astonishment when we realize that the nebulae are other such star systems, as innumerable as vast... For 3rd 41) C.D. Friedrich, 1818, Woman on the shore near Rügen, Reinhart, Winterthur Fifty years later the same Kant would write: I learned that philosophy... is not a science of all sciences or anything of the kind, but a science of man, his images, thoughts and deeds. Va2nd 42) Richard Wilson, c. 1760-70(?), Study of a Landscape, National Museum, Wales (cf. 18th Century, 55) 2nd 42) Again, Wilson, Kew Gardens (of which video shows a detail only) 2nd 42a) Joseph Wright, 1780-89(?), Moonlight Landscape, Museum, Brighton As Wilson daydreams from his baroque models, Blake distills Milton into the Poetical Sketches of his teens: "To the Evening Star": Thou fair-haired angel of the evening, Now, while the sun rests on the mountains, light Thy bright torch of love! Thy radiant crown Put on, and smile upon our evening bed! ...Let thy west wind sleep on The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, And wash the dusk with silver... The German cognate is in Klopstock (though his Messias vexed Blake at stool), "Wilkommen, o silberner Mond" — Welcome, silver moon, beautiful Silent companion of the night; So begins that gloaming elegy to the lost friends of his youth: Your graves are heavy with moss: 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �20 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Happy the time when I could behold with you The rose flush of dawn, night a silver glow. (CGB) O wie war glücklich ich, als ich noch mit euch Sahe sich röten den Tag, schimmern die Nacht! Va43) 43) 43a) Again 1, Lange's Mozart, detail Goya, 1785, Self-Portrait, Collection Count of Villagonzalo, Madrid Same, 1785, Self, detail; + V closer detail We seem to be stating a paradox, that the time of Mozart, Kant, Goethe and the rest plays opposite roles — detaches itself from the spatial assertions of Baroque, yet more wilfully seizes on the assumed helm of earth-control. But is that not what Kant had learned: that philosophy is not the metaphysics of the Absolute, but "a science of man, his images, thoughts and deeds." It is what the Invisible Chorus tells Faust: "You have destroyed the noble world... Build it again, in yourself." And why not repeat Blake: "that all deities reside in the human breast." Goya's 1785 Self thins everything to transparency — but charged — the dielectric of a capacitator. If Mozart gathers up the century, he, as much as anyone, should heighten that antinomy. Va44) 44) V44a) Canaletto, 1729, Return of the Bucintorno on Ascension Day, whole, Crespi Collection, Milan Same, central detail; + V closer detail Canaletto, c. 1740, The Square of Saint Mark's, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; first, video detail Music: Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1735, Sonata in E Major, end of 1st section; K. 380, (Kirkpatrick) ARC 2533-072, or (Landowska) DB 4965 (78) The satiric break of Magnasco and Watteau had pierced the Great Baroque when Canaletto began to turn the reality of Venice into a sparkling Capriccio. His 1729 Feast of Ascension Day, with this Scarlatti Sonata Landowska used to call The Parade, retains the focus of objective brilliance from which the inward shift of the century would move. (cut Scarlatti) 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �21 C.G. Bell Symbolic History But early Mozart could cultivate that sharpness, even in the style of sensibility, marked by the shift from harpsichord to pianoforte. Music: a45) 45) Mozart, 1778, Allegro, Sonata in B Flat, K. 333, Siena Pianoforte, Counterpoint 53000 Canaletto, 1726, Harbor of St. Marks, National Museum, Cardiff, Wales; + V detail Same, close detail of couple And already Canaletto's perspective camera opens, like the plays of Goldoni, to a rush of wind-blown impressions — the path Watteau had blazed for 18th-century art. (fade Mozart Allegro) In Venetian music it was the Galuppi of Browning's poem ("Dear dead women, with such hair, too") who explored the sonata form with the sons of Bach and Haydn. Music: 46) V46a) 46b) Galuppi, c. 1760(?), close of Andante, Sonata #9, F Minor Nonesuch H-71117 Fr. Guardi, c. 1760(?), Giudecca with the Zitelle, National Gallery, London Guardi, Santa Maria della Salute, lower detail, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Guardi, c. 1770, View on the Cannaregio, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. By mid-century Guardi had put the crisp representations of Canaletto through a filter of coloristic mood, turning the landscape to an evanescence of light. (end Galuppi) Va47) 47) Panned detail of Gondolier, from 46, Giudecca Guardi, 1784-89, Gondola on the Lagoon, Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan; + V detail Music: Mozart, 1787, Rondo in A Minor, K. 511 RCA-L SC-7062 While Guardi's works when he was seventy and more, from the time of Mozart's A Minor Rondo, move as far as that exquisite Cantilena toward the felt nuances of the 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �22 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Romantic and Impressionist century. (fade Rondo) 48) 48a) H. Fuseli (Füssli), 1781, Nightmare, Institute of Arts, Detroit; + V details (see V48,detail) Fuseli, 1790, Thor, in Hymir's Boat, Battling the Midgard Serpent, Royal Collection, London On the musing suavities of that Europe broke Füssli's Nightmare of pseudoGothic, a pre-Freudian attack of nerves, more startling when reflected in the clear spring of Mozart and of the Minuet. Music: Mozart, 1788, from Minuet (after trio), Symphony #40, G Minor, K. 550, Col-D3L-291 But it was everywhere the Werther shadow of Enlightenment. Yet neither the acid of Swift nor of Goya, not Gothic Revival nor Storm and Stress, could deeply score the civilized fabric of Cartesian assurance. If the crisis was social and temporal, it called for stronger temporal cures. (fade Mozart) 49) 49a) Simone Martini, c. 1340(?), Deposition, Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp; first, video detail Barna da Siena, c. 1367, Bad Thief, detail of Crucifixion, Collegiate Church, San Gimignano Music: Philippe de Vitry, c. 1330(?), Impudenter circumivi, 2723-045 (2b) close, ARC Man had hardly begun to strip to the penitential severities and bare soul drama of true Gothic: Simone Martini's arm-flung gesture of the scarlet Magdalen, de Vitry's isorythms, the hue and cry of the Divine Comedy. (end de Vitry) 1st 50) Tintoretto, 1559, Deposition, Accademia, Venice Against that sharpness, from Raphael and Michelangelo, from this 1560 Tintoretto, from Tasso and Renaissance tragedy, from the great polyphonies of Rome and Venice, we have traced the swelling claim of a new pathos, 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �23 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1st 51) Guercino, c. 1620-25(?), Angels Weeping over Christ, National Gallery, London in its spatiality of tenebrist formulation — as here with Guercino — 1st 52) Rembrandt, 1632, Descent from the Cross, Alte Pinakothek, Munich calling for the crisis of post-tragic and Pascalian pain. 1st 53) Asam Brothers, 1733-35, Trinity, apse, St. John Nepomuk, München (CGB '59) We have seen the Asam Brothers carry such Baroque power into the skeptic complexities of the 18th century. The age of Mozart is residuary legatee to that two-hundred year span of Crucifixion rhetorlc. V for 2nd 52 and 2nd 51) Feichtmayr and Christian, 1747-58, Christ on the Cross, detail of Pulpit, Zwiefalten, Bavaria Let us gather it first in a chromatic 12-voice Crucifixus by Lotti, a work surely known to Bach and Mozart. 2nd 50) Again, Tintoretto's Deposition (video: detail only) 2nd 50a) Tintoretto, 1563, Pieta, Brera, Milan Music: Lotti, c. 1720(?), Crucifixus à 12, V-20410 (78) 3rd 51) Again, Guercino, Angels and Christ; + V detail 3rd 52) Again, Rembrandt, Descent, central detail V3rd 52a) Rembrandt, c. 1639, The Entombment of Christ, Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow 2nd 53) Asam Brothers, closer view of the Trinity (video uses first a detail of 1st 53, then of V2nd 53) 1st 54) Tiepolo, c. 1730(?), Christ Carrying Cross, lower detail, San Alvise, Venice (end Lotti) 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �24 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Of all the artists who Spread the Venetian grand manner over Germany and to Spaln, Tiepolo was the most sought after. The youthful Goya was formed in his wake, with gallant and classical promptings from Mengs. 55) Günther, c. 1763(?), Pieta, upper detail, Weyarn, Bavarla (CGB '59; video shows the whole, from 2nd 55) From the South German sensualization of Rococo (Günther, who carved into the time of Haydn and Mozart), 2nd 54) Again, Tiepolo, Carrying Cross, whole; + V detail (cf. V2nd 54) from the delayed Baroque of Tiepolo, we pursue the chromatic Passion — with Mozart now, from the 1782 C Minor Mass: Miserere — Music: 2nd 55) 56) Mozart, 1782-3, C Minor Mass, K. 427, from the Qui tollis, Deutsche Gram. SLPM 138 124 Again, Günther, Pieta, whole (CGB '59); video, details only Goya, 1798, Arrest of Christ, Sketch, detail, Prado, Madrid; first, video closer detail (fade Qui Tollis) to Goya's pushing of the Tenebrist into Revolution, seven years after Mozart had died. Va57) Vb57) 57) Zimmermann and Schmaedl, 1751-55, Andechs Cloister Church, detail, Bavaria (from CGB '59) Same, upper high Altar, close detail (from CGB '59) Same, Choir loft (CGB '59); + V detail Music: Mozart, 1777, close of Credo from Missa Brevis, Decca DL 710091 Into the Baroque ingredient, whip the lighter Rococo, those wave, shell, and flower forms with which Zimmermann sprinkled Bavaria. Though Andechs was finished a year before Mozart's birth, its curves invite his early masses. (end Credo) a58) 5/1994 Donner, 1737-39, River Goddess, New Market Fountain, detail, Vienna (CGB '77) Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �25 C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 1st 58) Günther, c. 1764, Angel from a pedestal, Weyarn, Bavaria (CGB '59); + V detail From 1600 down (in the Carracci, Poussin, the sensuous swoon of Bernini), Neoclassic had refined its softer charms within Baroque. So in the 18th century, Donner's Vienna fountains had smoothed rococo toward this Bavarian Günther. It is the blend that leads in English poetry from Milton, to Collins' "Ode to Evening": If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song, May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, Like thy own solemn springs, Thy springs, and dying gales... Such voluptuous mood Klopstock would pass to early Goethe — "On the Moon": For 1st 59) Günther, c. 1765(?), Herald Angel, Diessen am Ammersee, Bavaria (copy of CGB '59, Avant Garde Break 4); + V detail Happy he who without hate From the world withdraws, Holds in love a single friend And with him enjoys All, that to men of earth, Closed from mind and sight, Through the labyrinth of heart, Wanders in the night. (CGB)Was, von Menschen nicht gewußt Oder nicht bedacht, Durch das Labyrinth der Brust Wandelt in der Nacht. a2nd 58) Günther, c. 1764, Annunciation, wide view of the whole, Weyarn, Bavaria (CGB '59) b2nd 58) Same, upper section of the pair (CGB '59) For 2nd 58) Same, detail of Mary (CGB '59) Though in the abandon of sacred rococo and personal love, Mozart's Laudate from the Vespers outsoars them all. Music: Mozart, 1780, from Laudate Dominum Solemn Vespers, K. 339, Nonesuch H-1041 For 2nd 59) Same, detail of Gabriel (CGB '59) 60) Same, Annunciation, closer view of the whole (CGB '59) [From these five slides, the video shows: the whole; detail of Mary; detail of Gabriel; closer details of each; and upper section of the pair.] (fade Laudate) 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �26 C.G. Bell 61) Symbolic History Veit Stoss, 1517-18, Annunciation, St. Lawrence Church, Nuremberg; + V detail Of what earthly color and touch 1500 had seemed, approaching it from the Middle Ages. Looking back from Günther and Mozart, how brightly thin and pure the Nuremberg Annunciation by Stoss, or the Tudor carol of Mary to her son: "Ah, my dear": Music: a62) 62) 62a) V62b) 62c) English, c. 1500, Fayrfax MS, "A, My dere," Vanguard VCS-10022 (close) F.A. Bustelli, c. 1760, Bavarian Porcelain, Lady's Maid and Valet, upper section, Nymphenburg, Munich; + V details of Maid and Valet Same, Maid and Valet, whole Liotard, 1744-45, Girl with a Cup of Chocolate, Dresden Museum; video: detail only Liotard, c. 1750, Portrait of the Countess of Coventry, Museum of Art and History, Geneva Chodowiecki, 1768, Party in the Tiergarten, Leipzig Museum; video: detail only Music: Mozart, 1786, "Ding, ding" aria, Nozze di Figaro, Deutsche Gram. SLPM 138697-99 In the porcelains of Dresden and Munich — this 1760 Valet and Lady's Maid from the Nymphenburg — the angel and Virgin have taken up residence, both satiric and celebratory, in the rococo parlor, to advance, under that trivial surface, such life-claims as the English novel was making — say Fielding in Joseph Andrews. No style component more delighted Mozart than this gallant play; and its radical humanizing becomes the revolution of The Marriage of Figaro. But as Baroque was penetrated by Rococo, (cut Figaro) so the courtly artifice assumed the balance and candor of Enlightenment, of which the musical focus was ln Mannheim. By 1750 Johann Stamltz there had perfected those symphonies and clarinet concertos the young Mozart would take in before his 1778 fruitless stay in Paris. Music: 5/1994 Johann Stamitz, c. 1750, from 1st movement, Clarinet Concerto, B flat Major, ARC-3092 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �27 C.G. Bell 63) V63a) 63b) Symbolic History J.H. Tischbein (Elder), 1756, Landscape with Chateau Wabern, in the Schloss Fasanerie, Fulda Caspar Wolf, c. 1780(?), Lauterbrunnen Glacier, Art Collection, Basel Thomas Gainsborough, 1748-50, Robert Andrews and his Wife, National Gallery, London; first, video detail On the great estates life and art move to the open, natural as Mr. Allworthy and Squire Western, or as George Washington along the Piedmont and Tidewater. (fade Stamitz). That easy freedom quickens the symphonic style Haydn learned from Stamitz and the sons of Bach: "Le Matin": Music: 64) Haydn, 1761, from 1st movement Symphony #6 (Le Matin, Turn. Vox TV 34150S Gainsborough, c. 1755(?), Couple on an Estate, Dulwich College, London; first, video detail The English were bound to take to Haydn. Where else is his break with the volutions of Baroque and Rococo so paralleled as in those portraits of couples among groves and fields, lively as Tom Jones and Sophie Western, which Gainsborough began to paint after 1750? (fade Haydn) a65) Vb65) c65) 65) Honoré Fragonard, c. 1770, The Marionettes, A. Veil-Picard Collection; + V detail Fragonard, 1769(?), Sleeping Bacchante, cropped figure, Louvre, Paris Fragonard, c. 1765, the Bathers, detail, Louvre, Paris (cf. Vc65, whole) Again, Bacchante, whole, Louvre, Paris It was in Fragonard's Paris that Mozart staged his 1763 triumph as wonder-child performer, and his 1778 failure as the mature composer of whom Haydn had said to father Leopold: Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. Music: 5/1994 Mozart, 1778, close of 2nd movement, Sinfonia Concertante in E flat Maj., K.297B, Angel 35098 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History How could the French not perceive that Mozart (as in the E Flat Sinfonia Concertante he wrote there) could light abandons of love, with an art beyond that of Fragonard's most voluptuous Bacchantes — touching the sensuous with the wand of Oberon: I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows... There sleeps Titania sometime of the night... 66) 66a) Fragonard, 1771-72, The Meeting, Frick Collection, New York City; first, two video details, then whole Same, The Meeting, the lover, lower right; video takes first the girl, left, then the lover, right Music: Mozart, 1778, same, close of 3rd movement., Angel 35098 — not realize he could send his secrets forth on display and parade, dramatize them for kings on operatic walls and never compromise their prophetic force or soul of sweet delight, never quite reduce them to Gretry dance or Fragonard fluff. (end Sinfonia Concertante) 67) Same, The Meeting, lower portion, the pair (video continues with the lover) Music: 68) Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, from Zerlina's Wedding, close of dance, etc., Angel 3605 D/L leading into "Là ci darem lo mano" Levitsky, 1773, Pastoral played by Ladies of Smolny Institute, Russian State Museum, Leningrad; video: first two details, then whole After Paris Mozart had 13 more years to live — time to give ultimate voice to that late-century meeting of Baroque and Rococo, Sentiment and Neo-classic, Storm and Stress, Revolution, pre-Romantic — which had spread over Europe — here Levitsky, as far as Russia. In such pastoral play as by these noble young ladies of Smolny Institute, Don Giovanni lures country-bride Zerlina to his paradise castle "to heal the pangs of an innocent love." 69) 5/1994 Goya, 1786(?), Autumn, Grape Harvest, Sketch for tapestry, Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; with V details Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �29 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The artist closest to Mozart in age, originality and courtly training was Goya. Through the opera years of Mozart's prime, Goya was producing sketches and cartoons for the Royal tapestries, art-summit of the same style-blend of polish, irony and gallant passion. ("Là ci darem" coninued: "Andiam!" ) 70) Goya, 1788-89, Blind Man's Bluff, cartoon, Prado, Madrid; + V detail 71) Goya, 1812-19, Burial of the Sardine, San Fernando Academy, Madrid; + V details (end "Là ci darem lo mano") Meanwhile, the bite of Storm and Stress more and more agitates the mannered joy, lashing it toward a crisis of insurgent frenzy: this Goya Burial of the Sardine; the love-drive of Don Giovanni, inseparable from demonic possession. Music: 72) 72a) 72b) Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, from Overture, Angel 3605 D/L (fade) Goya, 1796-97, Duchess of Alba, Album Aa, Her Welcome, National Library, Madrid Same, upper detail of figure; + closer V detail Double: Goya c. 1802, [A] La Maja vestita, and [B] La Maja desnuda; Prado, Madrid (video: details only, first of A, then of B; cf. 1700, Vb&c79) Music: Mozart, 1790, Cosi fan tutte, #25, from Per pieta (da capo), Angel alb.3522C/L (side 5) In Cosi fan tutte (1790) Mozart transcends the whole horizon of light courtliness — somewhat as Goya did in 1796, when he took up residence with the Duchess of Alba, his love before and now widowed. On the first page of the Sketchbook she greets him. As Klopstock wrote: She looked at me; her being hung With that look upon my being, And round us spread Elysium. (CGB) So Faust, when the Devil mocks his play with Gretchen, shrines a mortal passion in eternal words: "Ewig, ewig!" It is the bloom Mozart's love arias can always engraft on scorn: (fade aria) as Alfred Einstein says: 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �30 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Mozart raises the banner of pure beauty, 73) Goya 1796-97, Duchess of Alba Album, page 2, Welcome, from the rear, National Library, Madrid; + V details Music: Mozart, Cosi, continued, #26, from Aria, Donne mie, la fate a tante without forgetting the old cynic in the background laughing himself to death. The Duchess on the second page of the same Goya album... So the fickle delights of Mozart's ladies lead through the title pharse, "Thus they all do" —"Cosi fan tutte," 74) 74a) Goya, 1797, The Duchess of Alba, Hispanic Society of America, New York City; with V details Goya, 1791, The Manikin, variant of sketch for Madrid Tapestry, Armand Hammer Music: Mozart, Cosi fan tutte, continued, close of the opera, Angel Alb 3522 C/L to a reconciling whirl ("in mezzo i turbini") with something of the fever of Goya's "Burial of the Sardine". While the imperious Duchess, toward the end of that passionate year, points to an inscription, "Solo Goya," of which the artist afterwards erased the first word — not Goya alone. (end Cosi) 75) Goya, 1797-98, from Caprichos, Dream of Lying and Inconstancy, National Library, Madrid; + V detail And in the Caprichos an etched Dream shows how near that dark angel "of lying and inconstancy" brought Goya to despair. A new lover arrives, shushing for silence to the two-faced Duchess and her duplicious maid, while the painter clings to his barebreasted lady's arm. No doubt the Cosi fan tutte cry of betrayal Music: 5/1994 Mozart, 1790, Cosi fan tutte, #27, "Tradito, schernito" phrase Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History (fade) a76) 76) Schinkel, 1814-15, Queen of Night, from Magic Flute design, National Gallery, Berlln Goya, 1810-20, Los Desastres, #30, Ravages of War, detail, Madrid was sharpening not only to the Requiem fugue, but even in the gaiety of The Magic Flute, toward the Queen of Night and perfidious Moor. Music: Mozart, 1791, The Magic Flute, from close, Overthrow, 3 -DC 2709 017 As the horrors Mozart did not live to see, would build in Goya to Disaster etchings as fierce as anything in art. a77) b77) 77) 77a) Schinkel, 1814-15, Temple of Reason, National Gallery, Berlin; + V detail J.M. von Rohden, 1800-10, Tivoli waterfall, Kunsthalle, Hamburg Goya, 1810-20, Los Desastres, #80, Si resuciterá?; + V detail Goya, same, #82, This is the Truth; + V detail But the Queen of the Night is thrown down; the lovers are united, wisdom and beauty under the sun-lord of Masonic Brotherhood. (fade Overthrow) Music: The Magic Flute, close, continued: "Die Strahlen der Sonne" etc. (fade) The vast good humor of the opera Music: The Magic Flute, continued, skip to finale flows as benignly through crisis to renewal as Condorcet's History through nine past ages toward the fabulous tenth (of which he wrote in hiding as he waited to be seized by the passionate mob). Even Goya, who had seen the souring of that first Enlightened hope, closes his somber "Desastres" with the death and resurrection of Truth: "Si resuciterá?" And if the rays had not answered with Milton — "Who knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty?" — we might turn to an aquatint later discovered, where the same bosomed radiance greets a bearded peasant, with whom Tolstoy also would identify. (end Magic Flute) 78) 5/1994 Gainsborough, 1787-88, The Woodsman, Pierre Jeannerat, London; + V detail Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �32 C.G. Bell Symbolic History From the overlapping chronology of 1791, Alfred Einstein concludes: "Mozart's last work is not the Requiem; it is Die Zauberflöte, in which he has compressed the struggle and victory of mankind." Society painter Gainsborough had closed his life twelve years before with a moral deepening of the comic vein, a woodsman in thunderstorm trusting the God of nature, as Tamino and Papageno trust the basso profondo of Freemason Sarastro-von-Born. a79) 79) Goya, 1820-23, La Leocadia by a Tomb, Prado, Madrid Goya, 1827, The Painter's Grandson Mariano, George Embiricos, Lausanne; + V detail And Goya, having filled his country house near Madrid with the Black Paintings that seemed a final grim testimony, shut it behind him and moved from repressive Spain for four last years in Bordeaux, and an art sometimes — as in this 1827 portrait of his grandson — strangely affirmative. So the young Nicholas Bolkonsky at the end of War and Peace, revives the romantic dreams with which the novel began. Like Goethe and Hegel, Beethoven, Blake, even Goya, Mozart closed his life with the humanized myth of redemption. It is true that the explicit program is called that of Reason (a loyalty early Goya had shared); 80) Goya, 1825-27, The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, Prado, Madrid 80a) Same, Milkmaid, detail 80b) Blake, 1794, Frontispiece, Songs of Innocence, Shepherd with Pipe, Library of Congress(?) (while video has used an upper detail of V80b, the 1794 Songs of Experience frontispiece, shepherd and cherub) 80c) Blake, 1875-90, Oberon, Titania, and Puck, with Fairies Dancing, Tate Gallery, London 80d) Blake, engraved (dated) 1780, colored 1794-96, Glad Day or the Dance of Albion, detail, British Museum, London (video takes its detail from V80d, the whole) though Berkeley, with Pascal before and Rousseau after, had already pointed from Reason to Heart. Tolstoy would learn that Masonic Enlightenment is not the road. But 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative �33 C.G. Bell Symbolic History how could time exist, if experience at every moment did not leave consciousness seared with its transforming mark? Anyway (like Goya's Milkmaid of Bordeaux) The Magic Flute works by delight. If Zarastro praises reason, Tamino glories in that reconciling flute; Music: The Magic Flute, from Scene 6, "O so eine Flöte" (fade) Papageno sounds his bells; Music: The Magic Flute, from Scene 14, "Das klinget' etc. (fade) the three magic boys have promised a morning Music: The Magic Flute, from Scene 25, "Dann ist die Erd' ein Himmelreich" (fade) where mortals shall be as gods. 5/1994 Mozart: Age of Critique and Imperative � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 34 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mozart : Age of Critique and Imperative, Symbolic History, Part 26 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 26 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_26_Mozart--Age_of_Critique_and_Imperative Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/571180ebea2898d069bcd3cd94670c75.pdf 6337edba87fc9949c25c51958f39b6f7 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 25. 18th Century: Voltaire's Smile CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 May 1994 Last Revised January ‘96 �2 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 25. 18th Century: Voltaire's Smile 1) Pierre F. Lejeune, c. 1760, Bust of Voltaire (profile), detail, Landesmuseum, Stuttgart; + V, whole bust (from 2nd 1) 1a) Houdon, c. 1770(?), Voltaire (full face), National Gallery, Washington, D.C. V1b) Houdon, c. 1777(?), Voltaire in age, detail, Louvre, Paris 1c) Double: [A] whole Lejeune Bust of slide 1, and [B] Houdon, c. 1778, terra cotta Bust of Rousseau, Mus., Orleans; while video shows a detail only of B Music: Rameau, published 1741, 5th Piece de Clavecin en Concert, lst movement, A.S. 30 At the French heart of the 18th century lies Voltaire's smile, witty as the octave leap in Rameau's 5th Concert de Clavecin. Martin concluded on the whole that man was born to live in the convulsions of inquietude or the lethargy of boredom... "Let us work," he said, "for it is the only way to make life tolerable."...Their little land produced abundantly. Cunegonde was ugly indeed, but she became a fine pastry cook... Not one of their company was idle... As for Pangloss, he would say to Candide: "All events are linked in this best of all possible worlds: If you had not been kicked on the breach out of that beautiful castle because of your love for Lady Cunegonde; if you hadn't been seized by the Inquisition, traversed much of America on foot, run your sword through the baron, and lost those sheep you brought from Eldorado — you wouldn't be here eating citron comfits and pistachio nuts." "You have spoken well," said Candide; "but we ought to cultivate our garden." (fade Rameau) Is this the smile of scoffing or the smile of reason? (Locke): 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes — And yet the Enlightened smile, in the confidence game of 18th century, was somehow modulating from Locke's reason toward Rousseau's heart. 2) French Gothic, c. 1260, Smiling Angel, Portal, Rheims Cathedral; + V detail Music: French, c. 1280(?), Secular Motet: En mai, quant rosier sont flouri (with Robin and Marion duplum and tenor) Munrow, ARC 2723045 (#12) Contrast the smile of grace — a Rheims angel from another century of formal synthesis, the 13th — its art, its music a sprightly overflow of heaven onto earth — the motet, still vowed to the Church modes and bare-fifth chords, yet flowering in the melody, rhythm, words of the May morning, the loves of Robin and Marion — (fade En mai) Would the two smiles have told us 2nd 1) Again, Lejeune's bust of Voltaire (profile), whole that where the century of Voltaire was working toward the least action calculus of a mechanical universe of conserved energy (Maupertius, the Bernouillis, Euler, D'Alembert, Lagrange, La Place), 2nd 2) Again, Smiling Angel, detail of same or another Rheims Angel the chief scientist of the Thomistic century, Roger Bacon, even as he writes in his Opus Maius On Experimental Science — I now wish to unfold the principles of experimental science, since without experience nothing can be sufficiently known — seeks higher truth: a3) French Gothic, c. 1250-60, Dragons and Foliage, Rheims Cathedral Vb3) French Gothic, c. 1240(?), Capital of Choir, Joshua and Caleb fight over grapes, Rheims Cathedral 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �4 C.G. Bell 3) Symbolic History English Decorated Gothic, 1280-1300, Leaves (vine) on Capital in Chapter House of Minster, Southwell; + V detail But experience is of two kinds; one is gained through our external senses... This experience is both human and philosophical... but this does not suffice, because it does not give full attestation in regard to things corporeal owing to its difficulty, and does not touch at all on things spiritual... For the grace of faith illuminates greatly, as also do divine inspirations, not only in things spiritual, but in things corporeal and in the sciences of philosophy. So the realism of leaves which adorns the capitals of Gothic cathedrals (here of the vine at English Southwell) sprouts as ravishingly in the sacred, as Bacon's prophecy of lenses: from an incredible distance we might read the smallest letters... an army might appear close at hand... we might cause the sun, moon and stars in appearance to descend here below. 4) 4a) V4b) 4c) G. dei Grassi, c. 1380-90, antlered deer, sketch, Accad. Carrara, Bergamo A. Pisanello, c. 1440, The Vision of St. Eustace, National Gallery, London Same, The Vision of St. Eustace, right detail, National Gallery, London Again, G. dei Grassi's sketch of an antlered deer; first, video detail In this Giovanni dei Grassi, late 14th century, the art of nature comes from the sacred (here the Vision of Saint Eustacius) into the perfection of its own powers. Such Buridan's formulation (against Aristotle, and by appeal to experience) of the "impetus" by which mass retains an impressed motion. So 250 years before Descartes and Galileo, Nicholas of Oresme (French Bishop) graphs such intensities as velocity and acceleration, along such an extension as time: sometimes it happens that velocity is increasing while acceleration is decreasing... accelerations can take place uniformly or difformly in various ways... (What was he observing but pendulums, harmonic functions, falling bodies?) 5) Il Rosso, c. 1523, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail V5a) Same, c. 1527, Dead Christ with Angels, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History V5b) Dürer, 1511, Adoration of the Trinity, foreground detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '60) 5c) Elsheimer, 1609, Night Flight to Egypt, right detail, Alte Pinakothek, München V5d) Rubens, c. 1624, Het Onwaer, The Storm, detail, Konig Collection, Haarlem That insular rebirth swells to the 16th century, this Il Rosso, where the physical and dynamic struggle within Biblical legend (Moses and the Daughters of Jethro). So, within the frame of the past — of Aristotelian motion, Ptolemaic geocentricity and Church dogma (no vast empty spaces in God's universe; no spots on the ethereal sun; no change in the sphere of stars; and "as Holy Writ declares, it was not the earth but the sun Joshua commanded to stand still") — the new astronomy of worlds in space struggles through Copernicus: ("Nothing stands in the way of the movability of the earth"), Tycho Brahe ("this new star is not some kind of comet or fiery meteor... it is a star shining in the firmament itself — one that has never previously been seen before our time, ...since the beginning of the world."), Gilbert's globes of earth, moon, sun, planets as gravitating loadstones: "the agent force abides in bodies themselves... not in the interspaces." 6) 6a) 6b) 6c) 6d) Rembrandt, 1632, Anatomy Lesson, Mauritshuis, The Hague C. Huygens, 1703, from De Motu Corporum, Picture of boat, etc.; + V detail Leibniz, c. 1700, Impact equations with Cartesian graph, drawn by CGB (video: details only, above, then below) Again Rembrandt, 1632, Anatomy Lesson, detail; first, video closer detail Rembrandt, 1656, another Anatomy Lesson (of Dr. J. Deyman), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam In Rembrandt's Anatomy Lessons (this of 1632, or the fragment from 24 years later), the drama of mind invests a space-world of lighted mass, causal force — what Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, would formulate through the century: Huyghens, in Rembrandt's Amsterdam, solving the impact of two elastic spheres, viewed by his wonderful postulate, as on a moving frame of reference — a boat, seen from the shore; so that each case can be adjusted to one of symmetry, where, the center of gravity stilled, equal momenta are exchanged. But that visualization was not required. We had only to mathematize the common first principle that the motion of body is conserved, admitting the division by which any 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History body can be both one and many, in this case the summed whole and a rebounding two. If in elastic impact, the momentum of the total mass and the relative velocities of its colliding parts must both be preserved, Leibniz' three equations automatically arise, for the conservation of inner velocity, for the momentum of the whole, and (the two compounded) for the energy of the masses times their velocities squared. But if all matter must follow these laws, every motion in the universe becomes a clockwork determined from beginning to end. The snare Leonardo, talking of the wonder of force, had implied, but failed to see ("Without force nothing moves" and "there cannot be any force exerted in any movement made by imaginary spirits"), that noose is being sprung upon us. Is not the lighted drama of either Anatomy Lesson the temporal appearance, in such a clockwork mill as this cadaver, of the paradox springs of life and motion? But had Rembrandt, or anyone else of that century (except perhaps Pascal) felt the foreclosure of Cartesian mechanization? 7) 7a) Rubens, 1618, Landscape with a Wagon, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V details Rubens, c. 1635(?), Evening Woods, Neuerburg Sammlung, Hamburg This 1618 Rubens Landscape is still mysteriously organized, as in exploratory polyphony, all over the canvas. To the left, is an Elsheimer memory of the reflected moon; on the right, day expatiates over open fields; center, above the wagon, which seems to be stuck, though lurching down hill, an incredible rock pocket glows like a Resurrection cave. In science we recall the speculative daring which leaps (before the formulation of method) from Gilbert: As for us, we deem the whole world animate, and all globes, all stars, and this glorious earth, too, we hold to be from the beginning by their own destinate souls governed and from them also to have the impulse of self-preservation — to Kepler: The celestial movements are the work... of soul acting in accordance with bodily powers... the ellipse bears witness to the natural bodily power and to the emanation and magnitude of its form. 8) 5/1994 Jacob v. Ruisdael, 1665, A Forest Marsh, Hermitage, Leningrad 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �7 C.G. Bell Symbolic History V8a) Same, Ruisdael's Forest Marsh, center detail V8b) Ruisdael, c. 1665-69 Landscape with Waterfall and Castle, National Gallery, London (video: upper detail only) 8c) Ruisdael, 1660-65(?), A Waterfall in a Rocky Landscape, National Gallery, London 8d) Salomon van Ruisdael, c. 1660, Estuary with Sailboats, Staatl. Kunstsammlungen, Kassel; + V detail V8e) J. v. Ruisdael, c. 1660(?), Sunlight through Clouds, Louvre, Paris On the other side (of Cartesian formulation). Ruisdael's Forest Marsh of 1665, has no such independent vitalities of scene. Meaningful details can be made only by closing in, as under increasing magnification, on the focal center of the reflecting pool and waterfowl. It is what was unfolding, through that mid-century, in Spinoza's philosophy and in propositional physics, from the logic and mathematics of axiomatic deduction. Descartes, 1644: That God is the first cause of motion, and that He always conserves an equal quantity of it in the universe. Newton, about 1690: Law I: Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by force impressed upon it. Law II: The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed. Law III: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. The mystery of action withdraws to the unstated dilemma: that impressed force can only live (and die) one with the change it is supposed to cause. 9) French late Gothic, 1517 Choir with late Renaissance (1600-05) Jubé or roodloft, detail to the right, St. Etienne du Mont, Paris (CGB '59) V9a) Same, detail to the left (CGB '59) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �8 C.G. Bell 10) Symbolic History Same, 1517 Choir with the rood-loft and spiral stairs (CGB '59); from these the video shows four details and then the whole Music: Sweelinck, c. 1600(?), Echo fantasie (Videro), G-DB 5214 (78) Let architecture and music repeat the focal formulation from Mannerist (or late Renaissance). to Baroque: — here an Echo Fantasie by 1600 Sweelinck, with the fanciful rood-loft of the same date, in the Flamboyant choir of St. Etienne du Mont, Paris. (fade Sweelinck) Va11) Vb11) 11) Va12) 12) Roman Baroque, S. Maria in Vallicella, frescoed and decorated, 1647-56, Cortona and others, Rome Lanfranco, 1621 ff., ceiling detail, S. Andrea delle Valle, Rome Rainaldi, 1663-67, S. Maria in Campitelli, interior, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail Bernini, 1658-70, Main elliptical vaulting, S. Andrea Quirinale, Rome (CGB '86) Bernini, 1663-66, Scala Regia, Vatican Palace (to St. Peter's), Rome Music: Frescobaldi, 1635, Toccata per l'Elevatione, AS 4 Whereas in the 1660 church structures of Rainaldi and Bernini, as in the toccatas and canzone of Frescobaldi, methodic consciousness centralizes the weighty masses of the Roman Baroque. (fade Frescobaldi) Va13) 13) V13a) J. Prandtauer, begun 1702, Melk, Danube, Austria Same, Melk, part of Church and S. Tower (CGB '59) Same, Melk, interior, Library (CGB '59) With that heritage the German 18th century began: Melk on the Danube, 170226, and far to the north, the old Buxtehude, whose organ-playing Bach would walk 200 miles to attend. Music: Buxtehude, c. 1700(?), close, Toccata in D minor (Kraft) VBX-29 (end) Meanwhile, the Great-Chain-of-Being philosophy and science was carried across 1700 by Leibniz, born in Leipzig and variously active from Berlin and Hanover to Mainz, 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �9 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Holland, Paris, London. In that Europe it must have seemed that the stair of progress could mount without limit, each worker, by the method of experimental reason, adding, through publication in the academies of learning, verifiable truths to the achievement of the past, the promise of the future. a14) b14) 14) Same, Melk courtyard with S. Nepomuk (CGB '59): + V detail Same, Melk, interior, Church (CGB '59) Same, Melk, interior of the Dome (CGB '59) Music: Again, same Buxtehude, close, but starting earlier In regard to the question already raised: How is motion conserved through physical exchanges? — nothing could reach further than Leibniz' three equations, of which the last — for live-force, where velocity squared matches the height through which a weight falls (the work to lift it there) — led to a cosmic insight: that such absolute force (to be called energy) is the eternal ground of the world; that even when friction damps the momentum of a body, there is no loss, but a complex exchange between the motion of the whole and of its molecular parts. Leibniz: But this loss of total force, this failure of the third equation, does not detract from the inviolable truth of the law of the conservation of the same force in the world. For that which is absorbed by the minute parts (as heat) is not absolutely lost to the universe, though lost for...the concurrent bodies. (close Buxtehude) Va15) b15) Vc15) d15) Ve15) 15) 5/1994 Schlüter, 1698-1700, Chained Captive, from the Great Electors' Monument, Berlin; first, video detail Schlüter, 1698, One of 21 Masks of Dying Warriors, Zeughaus, Berlin (video, detail only) Again Schlüter, another Chained Captive, from Electors' Monument, Berlin Schlüter, 1705, Death, from the Sarcophagus of Queen Sophia Charlotte, Dom, Berlin Schlüter, 1700, Tomb: Death and Child, detail, Nikolaikirche, Berlin A. Schlüter, c. 1698, another one of 21 Masks of Dying Warriors, Zeughaus, Berlin 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet in Andreas Schlüter, chief architect and sculptor of that northern Germany, what Wagnerian premonition disposed his carving to chained captives, hooded figures of death, dying Warriors from Germanic myth? Music: Buxtehude, c. 1700(?), Passacaglia in D minor (close), Nonesuch H-71188 So in Buxtehude's B-Minor Passacaglia, the ground-bass celebration of order rounds on itself in a chromatic brooding, to evoke Bach's Passacaglia in C Minor. And even in a science throned over Baroque debacle and vagrant moods — in Leibniz' proclamation of active force as the substance of change, there lurks the Eleatic axiom of changelessness, Aristotle's: "surely the substratum cannot cause itself to move." The vital mystery once invoked to stir inert matter, becomes a reservoir, powerless to stir itself. The Deist clockwork yawns over an entropic void which the Romantic century would unveil — the contradiction that energy, though eternal, can only run down hill, to a stagnation in which it denies its name. a16) 16) 16a) Rigaud, 1701, Louis XIV, Louvre, Paris; + V details Double: [A] Again, a16, Rigaud, Louis XIV; and [B] David, 1810-12, Napoleon in his Study, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Right side of Double, David's Napoleon; here, video shows six details only, then returns to 16, the double In France the century of Voltaire (the rational utopia of Eldorado at its core — though Candide had fretted there) begins with the formal assertion of this Louis XIV, 1701, who sustains the robe of Divine Right not by the old Judgment Throne, from which he has risen, but on his own high-heeled legs, pillars of the rational pomp that was pouring, in all the arts, from Versailles over Europe — "the agent force... in bodies themselves..." That century breaks into the 19th with the more pragmatic boast of Napoleon, Faustian self-maker — the painter David well aware of ringing the changes on Rigaud's Louis. This emperor also rises, his sheathed sword on the heraldic honey-bee chair, working throne of Rousseau's Lawgiver. Had not Rousseau's 1762 Social Contract voiced the world's most ironic prophecy? — 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �11 C.G. Bell Symbolic History There is still one country in Europe capable of receiving laws: it is Corsica… I have a presentiment this little island will some day astonish Europe. The candle has burnt to a nub; the clock stands at 4:13; under the Egyptian lion desk lies Plutarch's tome of the past, of the great Greeks and Romans; above, just signed, and the goose quill pen laid down, is the scroll of the Napoleonic Code. Between those great thrusts of Baroque and Revolution, the 18th century enacts its civilized play. 17) Wm. Hogarth, 1743-4, Marriage à la Mode #4, The Countess' Levée, National Gallery, London; + V details and a return to the whole (where slide show has only one detail, a17, left of center, and then the whole) Music: Boyce, pub. 1760, Symphony #1 in B flat, from closing Allegro, BG S-70668 — Thus in the England of Boyce and Hogarth: this fourth scene from Marriage à la Mode, the Levée of the Countess (that woman in the yellow dress having her hair curled), a rich alderman's daughter married to a sickly Earl (the fop who sips chocolate, his hair also in curlers, though the music, with the other lady's raptures, would seem enough to curl it) — the Countess's lover, a lawyer who will kill the Earl in a duel, lounges on a sofa; a black boy in front points to a statue of horns; on the wall Correggio's Io, cloudembraced, instructs the clandestine in their play. (end Boyce) Va18) 18) 18a) Fragonard, c. 1770(?), The Two Lovers, Leopold Rey Collection, Sion Fragonard, c. 1776, La Chemise enlevée, Louvre, Paris; first, video detail Fragonard, c. 1770(?) The Peeping Children, Louvre, Paris Music: Rameau, Impatience, Cantata, 2nd recitative, "Les Oiseaux," (78 Album) Technichord 2 In Fragonard's Paris, as to the sensuous seduction of Rameau, Cupid pulls off madam's nightgown — a curious art-focus in 1767, France already on the whirls sloping toward Revolution. (close Recitative) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �12 C.G. Bell 19) V19a) 19b) V19c) Symbolic History Luis Paret, c. 1770(?), Charles III dining before his court, Prado, Madrid; first, video detail Tiepolo, 1764-66, "Apotheosis... Spanish Monarchy," detail, Royal Palace, Madrid Again, Paret, Charles III dining, detail, Prado, Madrid Watteau, 1717, Embarkation for Cythera, detail of a couple, Paris, Louvre Music: Soler, c. 1770(?), from Concerto No. 1 for two organs, opening, Col. MS 7174 In the Spain of Scarlatti's devotee Soler, and about the time of the American Revolt, Paret shows an Enlightened Charles III dining before his court. Above, Tiepolo's frescoes carry the glorification of the Spanish line from Baroque Italy into the apprenticeship of Goya. To the cost, the irreality, of keeping up the old-regime façade around the would-be royal liberals of the Age of Reason, summon Lord Chesterfield: It is an active, cheerful, officious, seducing good-breeding that must gain you the good will and first sentiments of the men and the affections of the women. You must carefully watch and attend to their passions, their tastes, their little humours and weaknesses, and aller... au devant. (fade Soler) Va20) b20) 20) Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1748, Self-Portrait, National Portrait Gallery, London (video: detail only) Ant. Ralph Mengs, c. 1775, Self-Portrait, Hermitage, Leningrad Pieter von Verschaffelt, c. 1760(?), Bust of Himself, Historisches Museum, Speyer; + V detail Music: Haydn, 1764, Symphony No.22 in E flat ("Der Philosoph"), HSLP 1009 But something else was coming to birth: an immediate declaration of human value, Burns: "A man's a man for a' that"; and "That man to man the world o'er/ Shall brithers be for a'that." We read it in this self-portrait by the sculptor Verschaffelt, active in Mannheim while the symphony was developing there, when Haydn, following the Mannheim lead, wrote his 22nd, called "The Philosopher". 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �13 C.G. Bell 21) V21a) V21b) V21c) 21d) Symbolic History Alan Ramsay, 1766, Portrait of J.J. Rousseau, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Gainsborough, 1754, Self-Portrait, Marchioness of Cholmondeley's Collection, Norfolk Fragonard, 1773-76, The Donkey's Stable, Veil-Picard Collection, Paris Ramsay, 1754-55, The Painter's Wife, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Liotard, c. 1765(?), Portrait of the Artist, Museum of Art and History, Geneva The man who gave his name to all that was Jean Jacques Rousseau. Does the portrait by the Scot, Ramsay, hint at the complexities under Rousseau's appeal to Nature? (On the Origin of Inequality) That men are bad; my sad experience proves. But man is naturally good, as I have shown... It is the spirit and inequality of society, that perverts our natural inclinations. (Emile) Respect childhood... Allow nature to act in her way... Is it nothing to be happy? To jump, play and run?… What would you think of a man who, in order to turn his whole life to profitable account, would never take time to sleep?... Reflect that childhood is the sleep of reason. (Confessions) How came it to pass that I, a man of naturally expansive soul, ...consumed by the desire of loving, without ever having been able to satisfy it completely, saw myself approaching the portals of old age, and dying without having lived. (fade "The Philosopher") 22) V22a) V22b) 22c) 5/1994 Fuseli 1799-1801, Silence, from the destroyed Melancholy, Kunsthaus, Zurich Anne Girodet, 1808, The Funeral of Atala, Louvre, Paris J. Vernet, 1777, The Storm, Calvert Mus., Avignon John Flaxman, c. 1780(?), Chatterton takes Poison from the Spirit of Despair, Private Collection, England 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �14 C.G. Bell 22d) 22e) Symbolic History Carstens, 1795, Night with her Children, Sleep and Death, Schlossmuseum, Weimar Canova, c. 1818-22, Lament for Abel, Gipsoteca, Possagno Impulse so trusted opens through Revolution to Romantic: to Fuseli's turn of the century Silence from his destroyed Melancholy. It leads in France to Chenier: Pleurez, doux alcyons!... la jeune Tarentine! Son beau corps a roulé sous la vague marine... In England Cowper compares his life of insanity and despair with that of another castaway: No voice divine the storm allay'd No light propitious shone; When, snatch'd from all effectual aid, We perish'd, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he. In Germany the brooding of Klopstock passes from Hölty Und die einsame Träne Bebt mir heisser die Wang' herab! — to Goethe: Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen asz... Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte. In Italy, Alfieri's tragic preoccupation vaults over 1800 to Leopardi: Amaro e noia La vita, altro mai nulla; e fango è il mondo. 23) V23a) 23b) 5/1994 Telescopes, 1609 and 1897, Galileo's and Yerkes 40"x64', Splendour of the Heavens, p. 41 Harvey, 1619(?), Experiments on a bandaged arm, from Circulation of the Blood Air Pressure, 1654 (pub. 1672): Demonstration of Guericke's air pump against the pull of horses, detail of engraved plate 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �15 C.G. Bell V23c) 23d) V23e) V23f) 23g) Symbolic History Astronomy and Physics 1676 (pub. 1730): Roemer, Design for "The Finite Velocity of Light", from the moons of Jupiter as timed across Earth's orbit Newcomen, c. 1726(?), Early Pumping Steam Engine Galvani, 1792, Experiments with Animal Electricity Lavoisier, late 18th cent., Reconstruction of his Lab, Conservatoire Mus., Paris Herschel, 1789, 40-foot Telescope, Slough, England But science (from Galileo's telescopes to the Yerkes refractor, 40 inches by 64 feet) held to the course Pascal had long discounted: we burn... to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. 1609 and '18: Kepler's Laws; 1619: Harvey proves the Circulation of the Blood; 1637: Descartes' Analytical Geometry; 1654: Guericke's air pump against the pull of horses; thereafter, his electric machine; 1660: Boyle's Gas Laws; 1676: Roemer clocks light from the moons of Jupiter; 1678: Huyghens, the theory of light as waves; 1687: Newton's Principia; 1675-1717, his corpuscular optics; 18th century: Newcomen's steam engines with Watt's improvements; 1735 and after: Linneus, Systema Naturae; 1745 and after: Electricity pursued by Franklin, Galvani, Volta; 1749: Buffon, Newtonian synthesis of cosmic evolution; 1774: Priestley; 1777: Lavoisier — an oxygen-based chemistry of combustion; 1789: Herschel's great reflector; 1798: Cavendish measures the gravitational constant to weight the universe; end of the 18th century: La Place, probability, Celestial Mechanics: God? "No need for that hypothesis". 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �16 C.G. Bell 24) V24a) 24b) V24c) V24d) V24e) Symbolic History Starlight, prism and spectrum, from Book of Knowledge, Vol. 9 Astronomy: Full Moon as Photographed by Apollo VIII Rainbow, 1981, East, from 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe (CGB '81) Aurora Borealis, photo by Tarnjörn Lörgren Goya, 1788-89, Blind Man's Bluff, Prado, Madrid Photograph of Lightning bolt (cf. Nature, slide 59) A tower to the Infinite. (This imagined spectrum from the light of a star.) Yet the romantic close of the century was also to trigger in the science of thermodynamics which the older Carnot, strategist of the Revolution, would leave to his son, the dilemma foreseen in Leibniz, that indestructible energy may go slack. So for the theology of rational science, Pascal had the last word: "But our whole groundwork cracks and the earth opens to abysses." — the particle-wave ambivalence of light deeply bedded in 18th century (in England from Newton to Young); the ambivalence of matter as atom and field, working from Galvani toward the assumed stretched bands of Faraday's electric force, in void. The two stories we seem to be telling of 18th century — one an art vagary of reason's mockery and heart's search, the other a scientific dream of unlimited progress — begin to converge. Va25) 25) F.E. Juvarra, 1717-31, detail of Basilica di Superga, on a mountain near Turin Guatemalan Baroque, 1638, 1668, and 1728, Señora del Carmen, Antigua (CGB '74) Through the first quarter of the century, while Melk was raising High Baroque over the Danube, and the great vaunt was flowing out everywhere, from Bernini and Borromini of Rome, through Juvarra in Turin and the Churrigueresque in Spain, all the way to this earthquake-destroyed, 1728-rebuilt, and again destroyed Señora del Carmen in Guatemalan Antigua — through those same years, Va26) Vb26) Vc26) 5/1994 J.B. Pater, c. 1725, Fête Champêtre, Dublin (CGB '74) Lancret, 1720, Dance in Pavilion, Schloß Charlottenburg, Berlin Watteau, 1720, L'Enseigne de Gersaint, detail, from the left side, Louvre, Paris (all the above are replaced in the slide show by d26) 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �17 C.G. Bell d26) 26) V26a) Symbolic History Lancret c. 1720(?), Le Moulinet, detail of the lower half, Staatliche Gal., Berlin; from this, video shows a couple only, bottom right Same, the whole; here video shows only the lower half Rigaud, 1735, Pres. Gaspard de Gueidan playing bagpipe, Mus., Aix-enProvençe; digital variies this sequence, dropping some V slides Music: Fr. Couperin, 1722, 4th Concert Royal, beginning of last movement, Nonesuch 73014 ("Courts") Couperin in Paris, with Watteau and his followers, here Lancret, were refining the sentiment and fragile wit of Rocooco. In England Congreve marks the transition (Millamant's contemplation of marriage in The Way of the World, 1700): My dear liberty, shall I leave thee?...'tis more than impossible — positively, Mirabell, I'll lie abed in a morning as long as I please. Mirabell: Then I'll get up in a morning as early as I please. Millament: Ah! idle creature, get up when you will... Pope polished the verse — Snuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat, With singing, laughing, ogling, and all that — which Gay would apply in "Trivia": The ladies gayly dres'd, the Mall adorn With various dyes, and paint the sunny morn... You'll sometimes meet a fop, of nicest tread, Whose mantling peruke veils his empty head... Him, like the miller, pass with caution by, Lest from his shoulder clouds of powder fly... a27) 27) 5/1994 (fade Couperin) Magnasco, 1731, Church Thieves attacked by skeletons, Chiesa di S. Maria Assunta, Campomorto (Pavia); + V detail Magnasco, 1720-30, Monks in a Landscape, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; video: upper detail only 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �18 C.G. Bell 27a) V27b) Symbolic History Magnasco, c. 1720-30, Storm scene with fleeing Monks, detail, Brera, Milan; video: closer detail (then video returns to a lower detail of 27) Hogarth, 1733-35, Debtors' Prison, Soane Museum, London Music: Tartini, c. 1745, from Siciliana, Sonata #2 for Violin and Cello SAWT-9592-B But the 18th-century break sharpened also within Rococo a fierce counterpole to the courtly; Magnasco's irony of monks in the old skull-caves of earth, the dissonances, here of Devil's-trill Tartini, speak what from darker Baroque (Dryden) — When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat... I'm tired of waiting for this chemic gold, Which fools us young, and beggars us when old — through Swift (as of religious sects, worshippers of wind, inspired — literally, blown into) — with every man a pair of bellows applied to his neighbors breech... after certain gripings, the wind and vapours issuing forth, having first, by their turbulence and convulsions within, caused an earthquake in man's little world, distorted the mouth, bloated the cheeks, and given the eyes a terrible kind of relievo. At which junctures all their belches were received for sacred, the sourer the better, and swallowed with infinite consolation by their meager devotees — clouds to Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes": That life protracted is protracted woe… 28) (fade Tartini) Diezenhofer, Hildebrandt, etc., 1711 ff., Pommersfelden, Stables (CGB '52); + V detail Music: Bach, 1721, 3rd Brandenburg Concerto, from close of lst movement, London LPS 226 In Bach's Germany, Rococo innovation, courtly or splenetic, is carried, like the Brandenburg Concerti, on the great surge of residual Baroque. Conceive the Palace of Pommersfelden from the pomp of these stables! 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 29) Same, Pommersfelden, main house across the grounds (CGB '52); + V detail of reflection (the two adagio chords) 30) Same, Pommersfelden, inner detail of the Banqueting Hall (CGB '52); + V closer detail of the ceiling (closing allegro) Though even in Bach, or in the decoration of Pommersfelden — within the might of Baroque — the style-lightening of Rococo is brilliantly advanced. (fade 3rd Brandenburg) a31) 31) Same, Pommersfelden, Stairhall (CGB '52); + V details G.R. Donner 1735, St. Martin and the Beggar, from High Altar, Dom, Pressburg; + V details Music: Bach, c. 1720(?), from 2nd movement, Concerto in D for 2 Violins and Orchestra, SAWT 9508-A Ex Yet through that extravagance and preciosity, the classical and pre-romantic was being explored — a melodious interfolding in which Bach's Largo of the Concerto for two violins seems to outdistance the works of his sons. In Viennese sculpture, Donner's St. Martin and the Beggar, cast in lead, so rounds its conscious contours. In poetry Klopstock's Messias (in classical hexameters, the first three cantos, published in 1748, the others thereafter) evokes out of Milton such neo-Attic Baroque: "Seraph, I will descend... Follow me, my chosen, in your beauty from afar." — (CGB) "Seraph, ich steig' hinunter... Folge mir, mein Erwählte, in deiner Schöne von fern nach." (Canto 5) 32) V32a) V32b&c) Donner, 1739, detail from Andromeda Fountain, Altes Rathaus, Vienna Donner, 1737-39, River Goddess, from Neuer Markt Fountain, Vienna (CGB '77) Same, a River God, Variant views (CGB '77) Donner's Andromeda is a fountainhead of that swelling idealism. "These the seraph freed, and robed their new aspiring forms in deathless radiance" — "Diese verklärte der Seraph und goß unsterbliche Strahlen/ Um den neuen, schwebenden Leib." 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �20 C.G. Bell 33) Symbolic History Zimmermann, 1755-57, Ceiling, Gods of Olympus, Great Hall, Nymphenburg, Munich; + V detail (CGB ‘59) Zimmermann's last ceilings melt Baroque and Rococo, Renaissance and Classical into a rainbow of academic romance. (Klopstock): On the other verge of the road of suns raised himself Upon his gleaming chariot, Eloa, against whose coming Through all heaven beat a thousand-voiced acclaim That rang about the golden axles. Behind him like clouds Billowed his robes and streaming hair... (CGB) 34) V34a) V34b) (fade Bach) French, 1762, Frontispiece of de Fontenelle's Sur la Pluralité des Mondes (video: center detail only) Composite photo of Milky Way Galaxy (cf. Now III, C of slide 154a) M83: Spiral Nebula in Centaurus (Malin photo); then video returns to the whole of 34, + another detail Even the new astronomy is whipped into Klopstock's God and Seraph journey from heaven to earth: The Almighty passed the star-field named the Milky Way, (A thousand stellar miles, the space from sun to sun His measure) as he neared a world where men also Were found, like us, but innocent, immortal forms... (CGB) Kant's 1755 Island Universes are nebular systems of suns, like our Milky Way; so this 1762 edition of de Fontenelle's Sur la Pluralité des Mondes floats the solar system in a cloud of angel-faced stars, each circled by planetary worlds. a35) 35) F.X. Schmaedl, c. 1760(?), Bavarian Baroque, Rottenbuch, Bavaria (CGB '59); video: horizontal detail only Same, Pulpit, Rottenbuch, Bavaria (CGB '59); while video shows three details: above, below, and below but closer Music: 5/1994 K.P.E. Bach, 1749, from Magnificat, "Fecit potentiam," Bach Guild552 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �21 C.G. Bell Symbolic History It was within Bach's lifetime that his own sons took up the gallant style of Italy, France, and Mannheim, parallelling (against the weight of the old Baroque) the passionate levity of Rottenbuch Pulpit. Let K.P.E. Bach's Magnificat, composed a year before Johann Sebastian's death, rear the expressive arch to Haydn and Mozart. (fade "Fecit Potentiam") For Va36) Schmaedl, Rottenbuch; video returns to a closer detail of a35 36) Same, Pulpit, detail of Luke (CGB '59); + V detail Music: K.P.E. Bach, Magnificat, continued, from "Deposuit", Bach Guild552 In the St. Luke of that pulpit, Baroque force, by the always more personal involvement of the advancing century, anticipates Storm and Stress. (fade "Deposuit") 37) 37a) Maulbertsch, c. 1755, Holy Family with Saints, Österreichische Galerie, Wien Same, horizontal detail (which video replaces with three details) Music: K.P.E. Bach, Magnificat, continued, Esurientes (2nd repeat, vocal) BG-552 In painting Maulbertsch is the master of that search, where the base of Italian chiaroscuro is stretched and whirled on the agitations of person. (close "Esurientes" vocal) 38) Joh. Mich. Fischer, 1732-39, Façade of Diessen, Bavaria (CGB '59); + V details Music: K.P.E. Bach, Magnificat, "Esurientes", BG-552 continued, Instrumental close of As emotion ebbs, Philip Emanuel's instrumental texture is as suave as Johann Michael Fischer's caressing of Diessen façade. (close "Esurientes" section) a39) Vb39) 5/1994 D. and J.B. Zimmermann, 1746-54, Die Wieskirche (among fields and snowy mountains; CGB '86) Same, Die Wieskirche, from the south-west (CGB '86) 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �22 C.G. Bell 39) Symbolic History Same, detail of West front, sun and shadows (CGB '86) Music: Haydn, 1766, "Great" Organ Mass No. 2 (E flat), opening, Deutsche Gram. LPM 18 756 The Meadow Church (Die Wieskirche, finished 1754), is Zimmermann's final gem of openness and delight. Haydn had written his first mass while it was building; the second, the "Great" Organ Mass (whence this Kyrie) followed the church by 12 years. Amazing, in a cult and tradition so ornately sectarian, heart's appeal to nature. (fade Haydn) Va40) Vb40) 40) Same, interior, detail: windows, columns, and fanciful arches Same, interior, stucco and fresco (CGB '59) Same, wide angle view upward toward choir (CGB '86) Music: Mozart, 1779, "Coronation" Mass (C Major), Benedictus to Hosanna, Nonesuch H-1041 To enter the Wieskirche, is to pursue Rococo almost to the Coronation extravagance and joyful immediacy of Mozart. (end Hosannah) Va41) 41) V41a) Cuvillies, 1734-39, Hall of Mirrors, Allegory of Water and Fishing, stucco detail, Amalienburg, Nymphenburg, München Same, wider view, mirrors and ornament, (CGB '59; cf. Bach a65) Same, through a door (CGB '59); to which video adds another detail of slide 41 Music: J.S. Bach, from Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro in E-flat (interlude in fugue), (Landowska) RCA-V-LM 1217 (1) (or VIC 1594) In the hunting lodge of the Nymphenburg, Cuvillies had brought Rococo lightening to its secular triumph — the silver frosting of a mirrored filigree. But did not the old Bach himself tend that way whenever he touched the harpsichord in the manner of Couperin? (fade Landowska) For the fused polarity of Baroque against Rococo, we go from this hall of the Amalienburg a few miles north, 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �23 C.G. Bell 42) V42a) V42b) Symbolic History Asam Brothers, 1717-35, detail of carved vault, Weltenburg Cloister, Bavaria (CGB '59); first, video closer details Same, whole ceiling, carved border and fresco (video cuts to half) Same, half of the ceiling fresco (CGB '59) Music: Bach, 1709(?), Toccata and Fugue in D minor, close, (Kraft) Vox PL 11-440 to a vault the Asam Brothers were constructing about the same time (1735) at Weltenburg on the Danube. Yet the same Bach whose harpsichord interlude matched the one, in his organ toccatas and fugues, gives the other its strongest cognate. But the stretch from this mighty Baroque (end Toccata and Fugue in D minor) 2nd 41) Again, 41, Amalienburg, wider view; while video shows a lower section of 41 to the weightlessness of Cuvillies, exhibits the 18th century already in Berkeleian flight 2nd 42) Detail of 42; while video pans to a closer detail from the solidarities of Leibniz, of assertive cadence, muscled gesture, intestinal clouds — the whole conscious rhetoric of the formulated earth. 43) French Flamboyant, c. 1510 (on 13th cent.), Frieze of the Sanctuary, St. Pierre, Caen (CGB '74) V43a) Same, Sanctuary, c. 1520 ff., St. Augustine, with a Flamboyant vault (CGB '74) Music: Paumann, c. 1455, "Des klaffers neyden" (Tablature), pos. organ, ARC 3222 It is a winging which might take us back, at least 200 years, to a prior vaulted filigree — the last defiance of space and mass in the lacework of Flamboyant stone (St. Pierre in Caen), with a setting by the 15th-century blind organist, Conrad Paumann, of Nuremberg. (fade Paumann) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �24 C.G. Bell 44) Symbolic History English, 13th century, 1540, and 1753, Neo-Gothic, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire (CGB '67); with video details Small wonder the wished revival of the style Congreve had called "rude as Gothic" was already under way. Music: Thomas Arne, 1738, from Comus, Dance of the Naiads, Largo, L'Oiseau-Lyre OLS 141 (side 3) It is always a happy surprise, traveling abroad, to move from the ostentations of the courtly Continent, to the special green of rural England. Is the charm of Lacock Abbey backward or forward looking? A 13th-century monastery was here, which became a Tudor House at the Reformation, yet it was tenderly Gothicized after 1750, and what estate near Bath would so perfectly fit the romance of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey? 45) English revived Gothic, 1740 (from 15th cent.), Blue Drawing Room, St. Michael's Mount, Cornwall; + V detail So Thomas Arne, enamoured of Elizabethan music, Shakespeare and Milton, was reviving and exploring, as in his 1738 Comus, a style of pre-romantic and ballad simplicity. About the same time, at St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall, the 15th-century Lady Chapel of another ancient priory became such a neo-Gothic parlor as any of Austen's heroines 60 years later might have visited in demure pursuit of eligible Knightleys, Bingleys, Brandons, Bartrams, Wentworths. (close Arne Dance) 46) French Romanesque Castle, 11th cent., Loches, Keep, Indre-et-Loire V46a, ‘95 Edit) R. Haldingham, c. 1290, Mappa Mundi, Hereford Cathedral V46b) English, 1066 ff., Scolland's Hall, Richmond, England To have come, from the 11th-century castle, to that house, is as clear a progress as in experimental science — however we reserve the right to prefer the castle (provided we are not required to live there); indeed, some have similarly chosen the God-synthesis of medieval thought (though Pound said "Aquinas map not valid now") over a technology which cannot deal with its atomic and industrial wastes. Maybe, with wall-hangings and the fire-logs of a forested land, they kept cheerful enough in those halls and towers (though we can hardly conceive it); 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �25 C.G. Bell 47) Symbolic History English Paladian (C. Campbell), 1722, Stourhead House, Wiltshire (CGB '59); + V detail but the Palladian delight of Stourhead, which Fielding would turn to Tudor brick, preserves from 1722 what our millionaires might still aspire to live in. (Though heating and plumbing, even since the Jamesian era, have advanced, again, at some cost to the globe — the question of science and progress being always the hidden cost.) Va48) 48) 48a) 48b) English Paladian (Roger Morris), 1736-37, Bridge, Wilton House, Wiltshire Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1751-2, The Painter, his Wife and Daughter, Marchioness of Cholmondeley, Houghton Same, detail Gainsborough, c. 1780(?), Margaret Gainsborough, National Gallery, London Music: Thomas Arne, Comus (continued), Ballad: "On every hill in ev'ry grove" Anyway, as the Palladian and Gothicizing scene of musical Arne and Fielding would remind us, the familiar mode of freehold humanity had been made lovable, from early in the century, by Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley — a country right-mindedness which reaches through novels and essays, the early paintings of Gainsborough (this about 1751, the artist with his young wife and daughter), to Goldsmith, who spreads it over Europe, and to Fanny Burney, whose Evelina prepares for the balanced good of Austen: (fade Arne) Persuasion: There they returned again into the past, more exquisitely happy, perhaps in their re-union, than when it had been first projected; more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other's character, truth, and attachment; more equal to act, more justified in acting. a49) 49) P. Longhi, 1740-45, Artist Painting a Lady's Portrait, whole, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74); first, video detail Same, Lady's Portrait, detail (CGB '74); video: closer detail only Music: 5/1994 Haydn, 1755, Trio of Quartet Op. 1, #6, Haydn Quartet Society 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �26 C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is a study in the dialectic of one-many, to compare Pietro Longhi's Venetian mid-century family scene (a lady escorted by her husband for her portrait). How little it shares in the English openness of manner, yet how unmistakably is embraced in a single horizon of enlightened emergence from the artifice of court. And could not Haydn's plucked-string trio from an Opus 1 Quartet have moved either way — to the Italy from which it was inspired, or to the England which would make Haydn's music a household entertainment? (fade Haydn trio) a50) 50) Fr. Boucher, 1759, Pan and Syrinx, National Gallery, London Boucher, 1748, The Triumph of Venus, National Museum, Stockholm; first, video detail Music: Rameau, c. 1740(?), from L'Impatience, Air gai, Technichord T-2 (78) Meanwhile, even in Paris, bastion of absentee noble play, of which Lord Chesterfield: I should have thought that Lord , at his age, with his parts and address, need not have been reduced to keep an opera whore in such a place as Paris, where so many women of fashion generously serve as volunteers — Boucher sweetening the opulence of Baroque for the Venus Triumph of all those highborn volunteers; Rameau seductively reclaiming the heroic cantata; 51) J. H. Fragonard, c. 1765, The Bathers, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); first, video detail (fade Rameau) Fragonard (past Boucher) subliming into pure fluff the copulative drive of flesh, as if revolution and all could be staved off by nymphic sprees — 52) 52a) Boucher, 1750, Landscape with a Mill, Musée, Orleans; first, video detail Mill House by Mique and H. Robert 1783, Marie Antoinette's Hamlet, Park of the Petit Trianon, Versailles, France even in that Paris, must not romantic wish have been as deeply seated as Rousseau was read, repudiated, and admired? Boucher himself, between sports of sea-girls, brushes his 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �27 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1750 Mill with the sighs that would lead Marie Antoinette to her cottage retreat in Versailles park. Let it box the compass that Rousseau in his operas (for he also wrote music) seems to outdo Fragonard; Va2nd 51) Vb2nd 51) Fragonard, 1780's, The Stolen Kiss, Hermitage, Leningrad Fragonard, c. 1770(?), The Two Lovers, close detail, Leopold Rey Collection, Sion (cf. Va18) For 2nd 51) Fragonard, c. 1785, The Fountain of Love, The Wallace Collection, London Music: J.J. Rousseau, 1752, Le Devin du Village, "Avec l'objet de mes Amours," AS 54 (fade) For 2nd 52) Boucher, 1755, Landscape with a Water Mill, National Gallery, London; first, video detail Music: Rameau, 1737, Minuet from Castor and Pollux, Decca CA 8153 (78) while witty Rameau, as in this minuet from Castor and Pollux, wakes the strain that would flow through Glück and Mozart into a century of longing. 53) Chardin, c. 1745 (or 1733?), Soap Bubbles, National Gallery, Washington D.C.; first, video detail Chardin, indeed, through two generations of court frolic, had quietly pursued the plastic composition of fables of the heart. (fade Rameau) 1st 54) Joseph Vernet, c. 1745, The Ponte Rotto (Rome), Louvre, Paris; first, video detail Before mid-century, the cult of the antique, of which Winkelmann would become spokesman, was drawing pre-romantics to Rome. Vernet sketched the Ponte Rotto in 1745. And it was he who, at the same time, 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 1st 55) Richard Wilson, 1755(?), View of Rome from Villa Medici, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (cf. V1st 55) guided the deeper genius of Richard Wilson into landscape. The radiance of Cuyp is recovered, in inwardness — as in Kant, will secures what pure reason had forfeited. In music, the first fruit of that revival is Gluck's Orpheus, with the wistful dance of Elysian spirits. V2nd 54) Again, Vernet, Ponte Rotto, closer detail (while slide show goes at once to 2nd 55) Music: Gluck, 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice, Act II, Che puro ciel, London LL 924 (B) In English poetry, Gray's "Elegy" still breathes that solemn hush: (1750) 2nd 55) Richard Wilson, 1760(?), Oil sketch: River with Ruins, National Museum, Wales 2nd 55a) Same, central detail 2nd 55b) Christian G. Schütz, c. 1770, Valley of the Main with Thunderstorm, Neue Pinakothek, München (CGB '59); + V detail, from V2nd 55c (to which video adds from 2nd 55, R. Wilson, a detail, far left) The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as wand'ring near her secret bow'r Molest her ancient solitary reign... Collins had caught it in the "Ode to Evening" (1746): Then lead, calm vot'ress, where some sheety lake 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �29 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow'd pile Or upland fallows grey Reflect its last cool gleam. (fade Orfeo and skip to chorus) a56) 56) Gainsborough, c. 1785, Landscape with a Bridge, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; + V detail Gainsborough, c. 1785, Landscape, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (CGB '74); + V detail (One of Gainsborough's misty late landscapes here enacting the Ode): But when chill blust'ring winds, or driving rain, Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut That from the mountain's side, Views wilds, and swelling floods, And hamlets brown, and dim-discover'd spires, And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil. Winckelmann's Greek mode become the mode of nature, the people's mode of feeling and earth, the romantic classicism of Goethe's Herrmann und Dorothea, or of Wordsworth's appeal to rustic life and the language of men. (fade Gluck's Orfeo) Va57) b57) 57) George Stubbs, 1770, White Horse Frightened by a Lion, Walker Gallery, Liverpool; + V detail Stubbs, 1765, Lion Attacking a Horse, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven Stubbs, 1769, A Lion Devouring a Horse, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail Music: Haydn, 1772, from Fugue for 4 subjects, 4th movement of C Major Quartet, 0p. 20 #2, (Tartrai) Qualiton SL PX 11-332a (last twofifths) In the polar reversal by which Cartesian reason, turned to Deistic clockwork and courtly pose, unseats itself and points to the intuitive successor (an action opened by Berkeley and climaxed by Kant — Swift near the beginning, where reason drives the man mad; Paine toward the end, mad for an Age of Reason), in that scrimmage under the 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �30 C.G. Bell Symbolic History polite surface of the world, the roofed unconscious of Blake's creative Hell, where Haydn was revitalizing the fugue as a ground of struggle, and George Stubbs (1769 Lion Devouring a Horse) turned animal realism to savage symbol — there everything splits from itself and fights on both sides. (close Haydn Fugue) 58) 58a) Sir Joshua Reynolds, c. 1765(?), Portrait of Dr. Johnson, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail Reynolds, c. 1776, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Knole, Kent; + V detail Sam Johnson in mid-stream holds the fort of mind, in the knowledge of its own and the world's vanity, sustained by a promise which faith could only credit, reason not confirm. Of course he condemns all romantic and Rousseaunian innovators: "Truth sir, is a cow which will give such fellows no more milk; sir, they are gone to milk the bull." Yet his immortal letter to Chesterfield is, under its formal robes, the most independent outbreak in the language: Seven years, my Lord, have now passed, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour... The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it... Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible. with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation, MY LORD, Your lordship's most humble, most obedient servant, SAM. JOHNSON Va59) Vb59) 5/1994 Daniel Chodowiecki, 1771, engraving, the Artist's Family, National Print Gallery, Berlin Double: [A] Frans Hals, c. 1625, La Bohemienne, Louvre, Paris and [B] Hogarth, 1740(?), Shrimp Girl, National Gallery, London 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �31 C.G. Bell c59) 59) 59a) Symbolic History Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1774, The Twelfth-Cake (detail), Musée Fabre, Montpelier (video takes detail from 59, whole) Same, Twelfth-Cake, whole Double: [A] Greuze, c. 1765, The Morning Prayer, Musée Fabre, Montpelier, and [B] Greuze, c. 1768, The Broken Pitcher, detail, Louvre, Paris (video takes these singly from V59a A and B) In Johnson's circle, Goldsmith published The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, a novel which took Europe, most of all Goethe's Germany, by storm. Here the plot in the grand manner, where good, ensnared by hypocrisy and evil until the world seems such a vale of dark that only the old appeal beyond time will serve, is suddenly delivered to the vindication of this best of all possible worlds — that Baroque cadence is here stretched to the limit. Within its Leibnizian action, the Vicar and all his family (delivered from prison and oppression) become homespun models of truth and sensibility, calling mannered Europe to such values as Greuze, taking the pulse of his aristocratic clientelle, would enshrine, eight years later, in his picture of "The Twelfth Cake" — almost a pastiche of Goldsmith. In the attempt to recover simplicity in an age of social artifice and irony, only fierce genius can avoid the mawkishness of Greuze (those crouching babes at Morning Prayers, that Pitcher Broken on the spouting phallic lion). 60) V60a) 60b) Double: [A] George Morland c. 1790(?), Soldier's Return, Lady Lever Art Gallery, and [B] A. Brouwer, 1635-8(?), Interior with peasants, Alte Pinakothek, München (video takes these singly, substituting for the Brouwer his Card Players, from the same gallery, see VA and B of 60) Double: A of 60, Soldier's Return, with 60b, Guinea Pigs, both Morland Morland (same date and gallery?) Guinea Pigs (here video shows details only, below and above) So what could we expect of poor George Morland, who wrote his own epitaph "Here lies a drunken dog"? He was sold too short to give even his boozing scenes the Brouwer force of Burns: a merry core O' randie, gangrel bodies In Poosie-Nansie's held the splore To drink their orra duddies... 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �32 C.G. Bell Symbolic History What then when even Burns, in "The Cotter's Saturday Night," slips to the tearful verge: At length his lonely cot appears in view, Beneath the shelter of an aged tree; Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through To meet their dad, wi' flichterin' noise and glee. His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie, His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie's smile, The lisping infant prattling on his knee, Does a' his weary kiaugh and care beguile, And makes him quite forget his labor and his toil. 61) V61a) V61b) V61c) 61d) Gainsborough, 1777-78, The Honourable Frances Dunscombe, full-length, The Frick Collection, New York City Thomas Rowlandson, 1802, Blood Royal, detail, British Museum, London William Blake, 1794 (copy of 1818), Urizen plate 20, Burning Babe, Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (here video adds a half-length detail of 61, Lady Dunscombe) Gainsborough, 1785-86, Lady Sophia Charlotte Sheffield, National Trust, Waddeson Manor, Bucks (standing figure, from which video draws a halflength detail) Same, Lady Sheffield, detail, head and shoulders, from which video takes a close-up of the face, then returns to a half-length of 61, Lady Dunscombe No social painter of England rose as Goya did, from courtly praise (this Gainsborough Lady Dunscombe), through such irony as Rowlandson's, to Revolutionary vision (as in Blake). If mockery lurks under these robes and studio props, it is not overt; nor would the sitter have claimed the resemblance to Lady Teasle in Sheridan's School for Scandal of the same year: The hypocrite Joseph Surface, seducing her: Ah, my dear madam... 'tis this very conscious innocence that is of the greatest prejudice to you... What makes you run into a thousand little imprudences? — Why, the consciousness of your own innocence... Lady Teasle: So... then I must sin in my own defence, and part with my virtue to secure my reputation? 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �33 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though even in Sheridan, mockery yields to the Handel cadence of vice discomfited and virtue wed. 62) Thomas Lawrence, c.1810(?), Julia, Lady Peel, Frick Collection, New York City; + V details (cf. Panavue, V62) It would cost the next century a groaning to cast that heroic baggage. Yet in the Frick Gallery there is a room where one may take in, at a glance, Gainsborough's optimism of limitation, and on the other wall, the sensuous vulnerability of Lawrence's Julia, Lady Peel — ripe for Scott's Bride of Lammermoor, for the Brontes' Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Hardy's Tess, or, in The Return of the Native, Eustacia Vye. The 18th century, by the lure of Voltaire's smile, prone to an infection of heart. 63) Guardi, 1784, Balloon Ascent over the Giudecca Canal, Staatliche Museen, Berlin-Dahlem (video: details only) In Venice the seventy-year-old Guardi shows us a gas balloon rising over the Giudecca Canal, while the beau-monde of what was already Revolutionary Europe, look on, though dressed still in the manner of court — like Goethe and Beethoven when they met the noble party and Goethe bowed and stepped down. Through the play of fashion some defiant giant release is stirring, as from deep in the mineral veins of earth. Proud Beethoven walked on; but it was Goethe's Mephisto who had said: "This puff of hydrogen will do it" — and they were lifted into the air. 64) V64a) 64b) Venetian Gothic, 1424 ff., Doge's Palace, West Façade, Venice (CGB '59) (video: detail only) Same, Doge's Palace, wider view Italian late Gothic, c. 1380-1452 ff., Apse of Milan Cathedral Music: Matteo da Perugia, c. 1400(?), Gloria in Excelsis, OL 1 (78) For the taste of progress go back 400 years, the Doge's Palace, trecento in style, though 1424 and after, with the Ars Nova Gloria of Matteo da Perugia — Italian lateGothic, a style like the Rococo, of cunning complexity — yet how stripped to line and structure, 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �34 C.G. Bell 65) V65a) Symbolic History Andrea (Bonaiuti) da Firenze, acc. 1343-77, Church Militant and Triumphant, detail, Spanish Chapel, Florence (CGB '59) Same, Spanish Chapel, closer detail (CGB '59) how clean of wishful personality; in the symbolic Florence of this Spanish Chapel Allegory of the Church, humanity, as in Chaucer, is keenly emergent: no pompous "all is best," no sentimental longing. 66) Florentine MS Illumination, late 14th cent., Annunciation (Initial R) Add. MS 35254C, British Museum, London; + V details The Annunciation, in this initial from a choirbook, is as reconciled (in all the flare of its decoration) to its creed-given spacelessness, as the faces to their vacancy, or music to its bare fifth intervals. (fade Gloria) 67) V67a) French Rococo, 18th century, Salon of the Chateau de Champs German Rococo, 1745-47, for Frederick the Great, Music Room, Sans-Souci, Potsdam Music: Philibert de Lavigne, c. 1740(?), from Sonata in C for Recorder and Continuo, "La Barssan," start of Rondeau, SAWT-9570-B In the French Rococo salon, the civilized recess is as ornately, as formulably filled as the time-space fabric of material causality, or (under the inventive floreation of recorder delight) the harmonic assertions of the enlightened ground. (fade Rondeau) 68) 68a) François Casanova, 1772, Beauvais Tapestry, Country Pastimes, detail, Mobilier National, Paris (video: closer details only, above and below) English Classical Baroque (James Gibbs), 1737-48, Radcliffe Camera, Oxford (CGB '84); first, for digital, V68a, wider view (Adams) Music: Same as above , but close of Tambourin, SAWT-9570-B In tapestries of "Country Pastimes," our very picnic clownings, our ironies of wit, affirm the plenum of the ordered universe: "All is best, best, best." (end Sonata) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �35 C.G. Bell Symbolic History But that completion and closure of the phenomenal, that rounding of the wheel, summons the old antagonist. Against the dream of methodic science: that though men (even scientists) may fall in love, despair, kill themselves, or (like Pascal) get religion, still the great tree of knowledge grows — 69) 69a) V69b) 69c) Joseph Wright of Derby, c. 1774, The Old Man and Death, detail, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; first, video closer detail Istrian late Gothic (Vincent of Kostav), 1474, Dance of Death fresco, Guild Church, Beram, Yugoslavia Zurbaran, 1639, Fra Gonzalo de Illescas, detail, skull, etc., on table, Geronimite Monastery, Guadalupe, Spain Piranesi 1743-61, Carceri XIII, engraving, 2nd state Music: Again, Tartini, Siciliana, SAWT - 9592 B (as with slide 27 above) comes a hiss from that very tree: "The fruit of science is death." What is the Age of Reason giving birth to but its own antithesis? But when, with Wright of Derby, 1774, the skeleton appears in the crumbling garden, it is no backward motion. The old Dance of Death was painted on church walls: "Rest of their bones and soul's delivery." It is upon energy now, where all action has reared its eternal claim, that the withering of entropy will fall. Carnot's irreversibility of the physical. Blake: The same dull round, even of a universe, would soon become a mill with complicated wheels. (close Tartini, 2nd phrase) 70) Viennese, c. 1800-10, Astronomical clock, Uhrenmuseum der Stadt Wien; + V details; digital, central detail 1800: a final overflow of the post-Newtonian century — the famous passage from Laplace, with a Viennese Astronomical clock: If an intelligence, for one given instant, recognizes all the forces which animate Nature, and the respective positions of the things which compose it, and if that intelligence is also sufficiently vast to subject these data to analysis, it will comprehend in one formula the movements of the largest bodies of the universe as well as those of the 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �36 C.G. Bell Symbolic History minutest atom: nothing will be incertain to it, and the future as well as the past will be present to its vision. The human mind offers in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a modest example of such an intelligence. 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �37 C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is what Whitehead (after Faraday's fields had finally led to Indeterminacy) would call "misplaced concreteness." Against the tick of that astronomical clock, against motion's subsiding pool — a71) V71) 71a) V71b) 71c) 71d) 71e) Blake, 1795, color print from design of 1780 or earlier: Glad Day, British Museum, London (slide show, whole; video, detail) Double: [A] Blake, Glad Day (cf. a71); and [B] Blake 1794 (1818 copy), Urizen pl. 18, Los in Flames, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., cf. 71a) B of the double V71: Los in Flames (slide show, whole; video, detail) Blake, c. 1803-05, Ezekiel's Wheels, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Antonio Canova, 1795-1815, Hercules and Lichas, National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome Canova, 1787-93, Cupid and Psyche, Louvre, Paris Blake, 1825-27, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Pl. 1, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (video: two details only, above and below) Blake from the 1790's had raised the Son of Morning — from the only axiomatic source of life as unpredictable, creative paradox: Without contraries there is no progression. What the religious call... Evil... is the active springing from Energy... Energy is Eternal Delight. And when his arm-spread Day turns to Los at the forge of Imagination, sheathed in the battle-fires of energy's operation in the inertial world — however many thereafter might espouse (with conservative Burke) the propriety and balance of an old regime, Blake through Reign of Terror and the dragon-scaling of the Orc Cycle, would still affirm: Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! For Glück (as for Blake's repudiated Swedenborg), Hell's dissonant outbreak Music: 5/1994 Glück, 1762, Orfeo ed Euridice, from the Taming of the Spirits, Act II, Col-LL 924 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �38 C.G. Bell Symbolic History is to be calmed by successive applications of Orphic harmony. (fade Gluck) How radically Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell has broken with that mid-century. Is it in Mozart, or first with Beethoven that music espouses the Faust compact, Hegel's Passion, the Dionysiac cry of Hölderlin: The rescuer I hear then in the night, hear Him kill as he frees, and beneath, full Of fetid weeds, I see the earth, As by second sight, an enormous fire. (CGB) (Shau ich die Erd', ein gewaltig Feuer.) 72) 72a) J. L. David, 1787, Death of Socrates, cropped, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (CGB '74); video uses V72, uncropped whole, + V detail David, 1784, The Oath of the Horatii, Louvre, Paris; + V detail In France the ferment had been rising since the 1762 publication of Rousseau's Social Contract: When each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without the rest… it may be said that legislation is at the highest possible point of perfection. An absolute moral law of the cloud-wrapped General Will. In the representations which from about 1783 David gave to Classical scenes of heroism or revolt (tight as if Cartesian formulation could be reèndowed by fiat), we feel the closing in of that "Republic of Virtue": Robespierre: If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror...without which virtue is impotent. Babeuf: a single man on the earth more rich, more powerful than his fellow men... destroys the equilibrium... Perish, if needs be, all the arts, provided real equality abides with us! 73) 5/1994 David, 1794, Self-Portrait in Prison, Louvre, Paris; with video details 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �39 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In 1794 David, briefly imprisoned, painted this baffled self-portrait. Perhaps he felt, with Chenier, in "La Jeune Captive": And even as she, those with her in that place Feared the closing of their earthly course. Though Chenier's death testament would not apply: A certain Andre Chenier was among those five or six whom neither the general frenzy, nor avidity, nor fear, could induce to bend the knee before crowned assassins, to touch hands stained by murders, and to sit down to a table where they drink human blood. ("s'asseoir a la table ou l'on boit le sang des hommes.") Since David came quickly to terms, and would again as Napoleon's court painter. 74) Goya, 1777, The Parasol, Prado, Madrid; + V detail Music: Mozart, 1787, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Romanza, Angel 35098 Only the genius of Goya could wear the richest robes of the artifice it was to revolutionize, making this parasol play of the '70's as poignant as the lighter Mozart: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. (fade) 75) V75a) 75b) V75c) Goya, 1795-97, Self-portrait, drawing, Metropolitan Museum, New York City; + V detail H. Fuseli, c. 1780, Self-portrait with Chalk, detail, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Fuseli, c. 1785(?), Prometheus, drawing, Kunstmuseum, Basle Fuseli, c. 1800(?), Satan Fleeing from Athuriel's Spear, Cleveland Gallery (CGB '81) Music: Mozart, 1788, Symphony No. 40, from last movement, C-D3S691 By the mid-nineties Goya had loosed the furies we tie in music to Beethoven. Though Mozart, too, in some late works, this G Minor Symphony of 1788, rode the rising storm. 5/1994 (fade Symphony #40) 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �40 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Beethoven, 1798, Sonata #8, Op. 13, Pathetique in C Minor, (Schnabel) 1st movement, Seraphim ID-6063 While Gauss, discovering Euclid's space of the parallel postulate no more demonstrable than a curved space of hyperbolic asymptotes, wrote the elder Bolyai: If it could be proved that there can be a rectilineal triangle greater than any area, I could demonstrate the whole of Euclid... But however far apart the vertices, the area might fall below a given bound... a76) 76) V76a) David, c. 1794, Death of Bara, detail, Musée Calvet, Avignon Canova, c. 1787, Death of Adonis, second terra cotta model, Gipsoteca Canoviana, Possagno near Treviso Same, first terra cotta model, Gipsoteca, Possagno — a Lobachevskian gulf from which that Bolyai would vainly warn his son: (Pathetique continued) I have traversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and joy of my life. I pray you, leave the science of parallels alone. By 1800 Beethoven had not only written the First Symphony, the First Concerto, the first string quartets and the Prometheus Overture, but the Grande Sonata Pathetique, which so overwhelmed his contemporaries. Canova, 1797, answering from Italy the muster of a revolutionary art in almost every country of Europe. (Pathetique continued) 77) 77a) 77b) J. A. Koch, 1796, Waterfall, whole, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; + V 77, Double: details, above and below Same, Waterfall, upper detail (CGB '86) Same, Waterfall, lower detail (CGB '86) 1796: the German Romantic landscape begins with this Koch: the human figure (right) reduced from the shepherd below to an insect-sized being above. (fade Pathetique) 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �41 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Sublime had appeared in Edmund Burke as a transrational element, born in pain of the Great, Dark and Terrible, yet somehow stronger than its smooth contrary, the Beautiful, founded on pleasure, engendering "in the soul that feeling which is called love". It is the germ of Blake's Angelic and Satanic, of Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian. And what the transition of 1800 would require is the leap from calm balance to the cascade of energy. In Kant, the Sublime almost, but never quite, becomes the pedalpoint of such a modulation: The mind feels itself set in motion in the representation of the sublime in nature; whereas in the aesthetic judgement upon what is beautiful therein it is in restful contemplation. This movement... may be compared... with a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same object. (Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, ch. 27) 78) 78a) Turner, 1797, Moonlight — A Study, Tate Gallery, London Same, a central detail; + V closer detail Music: Beethoven, 1798, Pathetique, Op.13, continued, Adagio, (Brendel) Murray Hill S 34564 With Beethoven's Pathetique Adagio and Turner's Moonlight — A Study (1797) — however few were aware, matter in motion was giving ground. What was emergent, from Galvani's electricity and muscle response, Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants, or Evolution (from the older Darwin to volitional Lamarck) — requires what Whitehead would call "entwined... modal presences". Faraday (1854) My physico-hypothetical notion... accepting the magnet as a centre of power surrounded by lines of force... views these lines as physical lines of power... or as a state of tension... — Things dissolving to force-fields, as under Turner's moon. 1st 79) 79a) Runge, 1799, Self-Portrait (Crayon), Kunsthalle, Hamburg; V, detail only Triple: Portraits: [A] Hegel, c. 1820 [B] Hölderlin, 1792 and [C] Schelling, c. 1810; here V returns to 79, Runge, Self In 1799, the German painter Runge made this glowing crayon of himself. It is not that Baroque confidence has gone under. Wordsworth is at least as certain as Dryden; 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �42 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Beethoven as rapt as Buxtehude. The constructions of space and cause, art, harmony, plot, are retained. That trio of schoolmates, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling are no less fired with God in the world than Leibniz was. But there has been a shift of ground. (fade Beethoven Adagio) Hegel might frown if we said: "Voltaire and Rousseau have led you through the scoff of Reason to the trust of Heart. Since Hegel calls his history Reason's actualization in the world. If we protest: "But your reason makes war on itself, works by passion; you forge a dialectic of contradiction" 80) V80a) 80b) Double: [A] portrait of Leibniz, c. 1700, steel engraving; and [B] Solimena, c. 1710, Self Portrait, detail, Uffizi, Florence Detail of the same engraving of Leibniz Again, Solimena, whole self-portrait — how easy for him to remind us that Leibniz (complex as the Solimena of this 1710 self-portrait) had planted contradiction in the very Monad, making a multiplicity of change in that changeless One the primary fact of perception: The passing condition which involves and represents a multiplicity in the unity, or in the simple substance, is nothing else than what is called Perception. Both Liebniz and Hegel soar to giant syntheses. How could they, as men, but use what men have: reason, passion, intuition? Yet those seemingly constant words, man, reason, and the rest, also undergo style-changes. Solimena's formulated claim (undercut by protective irony) 2nd 79 and for 2nd 80) Runge, Self yields in Runge to the risk of romantic dream. Though even the dream takes up the program of the past. 80+1) 80+1a) V80+1b) 80+1c) 80+1d) 5/1994 Lejeune's Voltaire, again 1 Houdon's Rousseau, again B of 1c (cf. V1c) Canaletto, 1754, Rotunda at Ravelagh, National Gallery, London Brunel, 1836-64, Clifton Suspension Bridge, Avon Gorge, Bristol David, 1797-98, General Bonaparte, Louvre, Paris 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile �43 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Was Voltaire's smile of mockery, progress, or revolution? At the center of The Wealth of Nations, published 1776, in which Adam Smith launched the science of economics — a book crammed with the ironies of exploitation and capitalist self-seeking, there lurks the "invisible hand," sure pilot of the murderous barque of history (the "agent force" gone beyond bodies themselves): As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it...he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. — As if Pangloss's providence had heaved up into Hegel's cunning war of Reason. "Let us cultivate" — but which garden? 5/1994 18th Century: Voltaire’s Smile � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 43 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 18th Century : Voltaire's Smile, Symbolic History, Part 25 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 25 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_25_18th_Century--Voltaire's_Smile Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/38a398914e88973a92900a24142ea90f.pdf d740118c9d212c6cbaf931e2899fbb5c PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 24. Bach: Fort of Post-Baroque CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 May 1994 Last Revised January ‘96 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 24. Bach: Fort of Post-Baroque Music: Bach, 1723-50, Cantata 34, O ewiges Feuer, opening, MHS 1574 1) J.B. Neumann, 1743 ff., Vierzehnheiligen over fields, near Bamberg (slide copy, nearer, from slide 80+1, CGB ‘52); then a video preview of 8a, below 2) Same, still nearer, from the entrance path (CGB '52); video: detail only 3) Same, interior (CGB '52) 4) Same, central space with High Altar (CGB '52) V4a) Same, High Altar in center (CGB '52) 4b) Same, ceiling fresco (CGB '52) 5) G.A. Viscardi, Asam Brothers, and others, 1718-41, Fürstenfeld, Nave through ironwork (CGB '59) a6) Fr. X. Schmädl, c. 1740, Chancel detail, Rottenbuch, Bavaria (CGB '59) Vb6) Same, from Choirscreen, detail of David and angels, from the side (CGB '59) 6) Same, David detail, against the vault (CGB '59) a7) J. Dietrich, 1738, Top of High Altar, Diessen am Ammersee (CGB '59) b7) Marx Kriner, 1739, View of Nave ceiling through gate of ironwork, Diessen am Ammersee (CGB '59) 7) J. Dietrich, 1738, Augustine, etc., High Altar, Diessen am Ammersee (CGB '59) 8) Asam Brothers, 1732-36, Archangel Michael, fresco detail, Maria-Viktoria Hall, Ingolstadt (CGB '59) (cut "O Ewiges Feuer") 8a) Another view of Vierzehnheiligen, entrance path (CGB '52) 8b) Again 8, Michael, a wider view (CGB '59) With the opening of Bach's Cantata 34, "O ewiges Feuer" — "Eternal fire, fountain of love" — we have gone from the pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen, through Fürstenfeld, Rottenbuch, and Diessen, to an Asam fresco detail of Michael's old victory over the dark, but endowed, like the Bach brook of love with all the timpani of concerted power. a9) b9) French Gothic, 1190-1220, Apse exterior, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59) Same, Choir interior, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59)Vc9) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Vc9) Same, Clerestory of Apse, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59) The West has many summits, from the flame-leap of Gothic, the thrilling century around 1200 (in music the bare-fifth mystery of Perotin, yet a mystery so severely organized that this triplum on two syllables, "Virgo," builds entirely over tenor F, but for one rise to G, a heaven-smile at climax, with the return, under B-flat tension, again to F, the chord of the fifth, then unison — a "modulation" in which the whole claim of time beckons through timelessness) — Music: 9) a1O) b10) 10) 11) 12) 13) 14) V14a) Perotin le Grand, c. 1200, Organum Virgo, (Cape) EMS 201 Same, Pier of the Crossing, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59) Same, Ambulatory, Chartres Cathedral (copy of CGB '59, Gothic I, 68) Same, 1200-25, Glass, Madonna and St. James, Chartres Again, Chartres, windows of Ambulatory Chapel (CGB '59), which video replaces with V10, French Gothic, 1160-1212, Nave and Choir, Soissons (CGB '59) French Gothic, 12th-13th cent., St. Pierre, Chartres, interior (CGB '59) Same, St. Pierre, Chartres, buttressed Apse (CGB '59) Swiss French Gothic 1160-1250, Death of the Virgin, detail, South Portal, Lausanne Cathedral Mosan, c. 1200, oak and polychrome Madonna (Sedes Sapientiae), Diocesan Museum, Liège French Gothic, c. 1200, Head of Mary from Virgin and Child, polychrome and gilt oak, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (close Perotin) from that skyward yielding, the Lady of the soul's romance, 15) a16) 16) 16a) 17) Kandinsky, 1914, Composition, Guggenheim Museum, New York City; + V detail Kandinsky, 1913, sketch for "Orient," detail, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Kandinsky, 1913, Composition: Storm, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Kandinsky, 1914, Picture with 3 Spots, Guggenheim Museum, New York City. Kandinsky, 1912, Autumn, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; first, V detail �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to the parabolic outbreak of force in our century (a venture of spirit too costly ever to be paralleled: Rilke's "Überzäliges Dasein entspringt mir im Herzen" — "Existence past number wells up in my heart" — Kandinsky and Bartok) — Music: Bartok, 1927, close of the 3rd String Quartet, Concert CS 501 (close Bartok) against that beginning or that end, the spire of Gothic descent or storm of Symbolist return, 18) 18a) 19) Asam Brothers, 1732-36, Maria-Viktoria, Altar Wall, Ingolstadt (CGB '59) Same, High Altar (CGB '59); + V details Same, Maria-Viktoria, Altar with ceiling fresco (CGB '59); first, video lower detail 19a) Same, expanse of ceiling fresco (repeated for V24, below) 20) Same, the group of Mary and Angels; + V details 20a) Same, God the Father group; first, V detail 21) Same, Christ, Dove and Angels (video: details only, left and right) a22) Same, Abraham and Isaac 22) Same, David, Pegasus, Europe, etc. (video: details only, above and below) 22a) Same, Africa, elephant, snakes, etc. 23) Same, Fountain of Grace, hunting pearls; + V detail V24) Same, again 19a, Mary group with Fountain below 25) Same, widest view, altar with Fountain, Mary, etc. how rooted in the harmony of God's best of all possible worlds are the grandeurs between — from the 1730's, Asam's Maria-Viktoria, with a patchwork from the Gloria of the B Minor Mass. Music: Bach, c. 1733, B Minor Mass: Gloria opening; Domine Deus, opening; Cum Sancto Spiritu, close; (Scherchen) Mus. Guild S630 (close Gloria) From such Leibnizian pomp of heaven and earth, the four Continents, arts and collegiate learning imbued with humanizing grace, 26) Roman Mosaic, 9th cent., Madonna, St. Zeno's Chapel, St. Praxed's, Rome; + V detail �C.G. Bell 26a) Symbolic History French Gothic, 13th cent., Interior, Nave looking west, Rheims Cathedral (CGB '74) Music: Gregorian (Solesmes), Spiritus Domini replevit, Pentecost, French Decca 7543 how strange, how secret, the descent into the crypt that underlies the West, the Dark Age Mary of St. Praxed's in Rome, where symbol has almost shed the assertions of earth, even while the Gregorian text acclaims: "The Spirit of the Lord fills the orb of the world". (fade Gregorian) — A retreat as far prior to the anagogical upsurge of Gothic as its vaulting of soul-force had been a27) 27) 27a) Roman early Baroque, 1591-1628 ff., Maderna with frescoes by Domenichino, Sant' Andrea della Valle, Rome (CGB '86) Baciccia, 1674-9, Ceiling of Il Gesu, Rome (video: three details only) Same, detail (CGB '86); video: lower section only from the proclaimed opulence of Baroque. It is the stretching of that incarnate antithesis, as in Baciccia's Victory of the Holy Name and Satanic overspill, which would knock the props from great church art; and it had seemed, as 1700 approached, that the crisis neared — the mummery of sacrificial aggrandizement, as when Monteverdi whoops it up in the anchoritic words: "Fugge, fugge," "Flee, my soul, from the world" — Music: Monteverdi, 1620, Fugge anima mea 10022 (close), Vanguard VCS- a strange parade of withdrawal. a28) b28) 28) Raitenhaslach, Bavarian Romanesque, then 17th cent., painted and stuccoed under Zick, Zimmermann, et al., 1735-43, view from entrance (CGB '59) Same, organ loft (CGB '59) Zick, et al., c. 1739, St. Bernard ceiling, Raitenhaslach, Bavaria (CGB '59); with video details Bach is full of such swellings, where the depraved singer today squeals like a pig under a gate: "the chains of Hell and Jesus' Blood" �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Bach, 1723-50, Cantata #74, Alto aria, a phrase, MHS 1574 and "throw yourself in his arms". Music: Bach 1723-50, Cantata #155, Soprano aria, opening, MHS 1388 (fade) Does not the flesh-loading of the old mystical content produce such curiosities as this Raitenhaslach Visions of St. Bernard — the saint on his knees (right) to lap Christ's fountain of blood, and again (left) for the milk stream from Mary's breast — South German, six style-centuries from Bernard's ascetic dreams? a29) 29) Bernini, 1657-66, Cathedra Petri, or High Altar, St. Peter's, Rome; + V detail Double: [A] Bernini 1657-66, St. Augustine, High Altar, St. Peter's Rome; and [B] E.Q. Asam c. 1735, Augustine, Weltenburg Yet who can deny, over the paradox of assertive abnegation, the seriousness of high Baroque, even in the grandiloquence Bernini lends Peter's Chair, or the young poet Pope, Virgil's "Messiah" (1712): The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay, Rocks fall to dust. and mountains melt away; But fix'd his word, his saving power remains: Thy realm for ever lasts, thy own MESSIAH reigns! And it is just the gift of the Germans to extend the art of sacred heroics beyond the mocking debacle of French Regency and English Pope, which is our theme and inquiry — the gift of E.Q. Asam to carry Bernini into the 18th century on his own ground, and with more worship; 30) Again, Asam, Augustine, B of 29 (video: detail only) Bach's related genius, but beyond the Asams, beyond all his contemporaries, writers, artists, other composers, Vivaldi, Telemann, Handel, to make that stronghold of belated Baroque an eternal Passion center of Christian and human truth. a31) Zurbaran, 1635-40, detail of Christ, from Crucifixion, with the painter, Prado, Madrid �C.G. Bell Vb31) 31) Symbolic History Rembrandt, 1632, Descent from the Cross, Alte Pinakothek, Munich The whole of a31, Zurbaran, Crucifixion with the painter Music: J.S. Bach, 1729, St. Matthew Passion, "Und um die neunte Stunde" etc., ARC-2712001 The deeply pietistic sharing in the Passion, which would culminate in Bach's settings, as in these last words according to St. Matthew, with the following Chorale, was not merely Protestant, but Counter-Reformation as well: so with Zurbaran's 17th-century Crucifixion and the Painter; a32) 32) Rembrandt, 1633, Raising Christ on the Cross, centerspread with self-portrait of the artist, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Same, detail of artist (with video detail of Christ from whole and a closer detail of the artist; then, video returns to Vb31, Rembrandt, Descent, upper detail; while slide show introduces 32a, Rembrandt, c. 1637-41, Deposition, National Gallery, London) Music: Same, opening of Chorale, Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden (fade) though the example which most anticipates Bach is perhaps that Munich raising of the Cross, into which Rembrandt has introduced his own sorrowing face. As so often, it is as if Bach had endowed the soul of Rembrandt with the musical emotions of the last and richest Baroque. Thus the closing modulations to which he subjects the Passion Chorale, "Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden" (close of Chorale) — building on the intensity and tenderness of the German past: Albert, nephew of Schütz: Music: 33) 33a) H. Albert, c. 1640, from Kirchenkantate: Bekehrung zum Herren "Kommst du"; (Tinayre) Col. M-431 (fade) M.B. Braun, 1712, St. Jude the Apostle, upper detail, National Gallery, Prague Same, detail of face By the time of Bach, the more-than-Racine rhetoric of passion, like all the energies of earth, has been magnified; this Apostle Jude by Braun in Bohemia, might be Bach's St. Peter, or the tenor soul of man, at the cockcrow of denial. �C.G. Bell Music: 34) Symbolic History Bach, 1723-7, St. John Passion, from #18: "und ging hinaus und weinete bitterlich," Odeon ST E 80668-70 M.B. Braun, 1726, St. Jerome before his Cave, near Kuks, Bohemia; first, V detail Music: Bach, same, cont., close of #19, "Meine Missetat" (end) Braun's 1726 Jerome before his cave so crying the penitence of his "Missetat" has almost the terror of Blake's Nebuchadnezzar, imbruted specter of man. To entrain in sacred participation all divisive powers of post-Renaissance self and world, without being daunted by the gulf between, 35) Rembrandt, 1668, Return of the Prodigal, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V details is the victory of the religious Baroque — as certain in Bach's Passions as in this ultimate Prodigal by Rembrandt. How the Matthew-Passion pours on Peter's denial not the rancor of the St. John "Misdeed" but the balm of a comfort aria: "Erbarme dich." Music: Bach, 1729, St. Matthew Passion, from 46-7, "weinete" and "erbarme" ARC-2712001 (fade) 2nd 34) Again, St. Jerome, another detail 2nd 34a) Maulbertsch, c. 1760(?), Raising of the Cross, place unspecified Though both Passions are formed in the Baroque antinomy of actual wrong and reasoned vindication, that of John heightens the negative, as in the fierce Bass aria and chorus: "Eilt!" — Hasten! — Where? — To Golgotha": Music: 2nd 35) Bach, St. John, from 48, "Nach Golgotha" Od. ST E 80668-70 (fade) Again, Rembrandt, Prodigal's Return, detail Which the Matthew Passion as determinedly parallels with assuagement: "Come ! Stay! — Where? — In Jesus' arms." Music: St. Matthew Passion, continued, from 70: "Sehet, kommt," (Scherchen) West. Gold WGM 8318-4, side 7 (fade) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But must we always go back before Bach's birth for an art suggestion of his deep and shadowed containment? 36) 36a) E.Q. Asam, 1733-35, Resurrection of Sinners, St.-Johann-Nepomuk Kirche, Munich; + V details Same, Resurrection of the Just The earthquake resurrection of the dead from the Matthew Passion — Music: Bach, St. Matthew Passion, cont. (73) Earthquake, ARC-2712001 (fade) that cry which stretches creed — has startling parallels in this E.Q Asam. 37) 37a) Rembrandt, 1638, The Risen Christ appearing to the Magdalen, Buckingham Palace, London; + V detail Rembrandt, c. 1650-55, Landscape with Ruins, Gemäldegalerie, Cassel But for the evening peace and nature-love which follows (though the German soul has always leaned that way) we are pressed again to Rembrandt — Christ as gardener to the Magdalen. Music: 38) Bach, Matthew Passion, cont. (74), Bass, "Am Abend" 2712001 ARC- C.D. Friedrich, 1817, In Memory of John E. Brewer, Charlottenburg; + V detail (fade "Am Abend") Or forward to Friedrich's landscape symbols, this memorial to a lost friend, the Gothic city through the gate of death, beyond estranging water. a39) Zimmermann, 1746-54, Die Wieskirche, against snowy mountains, Southern Bavaria (CGB '86; copy of 18th Century a39) Vb39) Same, detail of West front, sun and shadows (CGB '86; copy of 18th Century 39) 39) German Baroque, 1746-58, Birnau am Bodensee, in landscape (CGB '66) 39a) Abbey of Our Lady, 18th cent., Zwiefalten, Germany �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet the German Baroque, above all styles, breathes harmony with the flowering earth, as in the poems of Bach's contemporary, Brockes (his lyrics included in the St. John Passion), a poet at his best in nature: on The Nightingale: Die aus so enger Brust und mit so kleiner Kehlen Die grössten Wälder füllt durch ihren Wunderschall — that song-wonder Blake would compare with the scent of flowers: "how from so small a center comes such sweets,/ Forgetting that within... Eternity expands/ Its ever-during doors." The title of Brockes book is the very key to Baroque: Earthly Delight in God — Irdisches Vergnügen im Gott: In the cool of night, in pensive mood, I walked, and saw of late where a cherry stood, Blossoming in the light of the moon, That nothing whiter could be seen or known. It was as if a great snowfall Had heaped the branches and each bough Down to the smallest twigs with snow Clustered in rounds of pure white balls. Surely — I said — it would be sought in vain, Over all the earth, to find a whiter thing. But as I shifted here and there, My sight still lifted to the tree, I caught by chance, in a space of sky, A single clear and shining star, Far brighter than the blossoms were. I thought: how the beauty of earth, all God has given, Dwindles in the brightness of his heaven. (CGB) a40) 40) 40a) E.Q. Asam, 1731-32, St. Anne, Joseph and the infant Mary, Osterhofen, near the Danube (CGB '59); video: detail only: angels with a huge crown E.Q. Asam, 1733-35, Trinity, detail, from St.-Johann-Nepomuk Kirche, München E.Q. Asam, Same, wider view, from which video takes only a close detail, then previews 46: pan-detail of Apse and Trinity �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is not canvases that hold the German art of Bach's time, but churches and palaces, entire. The greatest artist, E.Q. Asam, like his brothers, is architect, sculptor, painter. It is significant that our search for a Passion parallel of the right depth and humanity led us back to Protestant Holland and Rembrandt. Music: Bach, Johannes-Passion continued (58), "Es ist vollbracht" But against even Bach's greatest moments — that lonely "consummatum est" ("Es ist vollbracht") from the Passion according to John — E.Q. Asam, Catholic Bavarian, marvellously holds nis own — most of all in the brooding Nepomuk Church he and his brothers designed and built at their own cost beside their house in Munich, with an apselighted Trinity which gives the florid Baroque its darkest glory. To have preserved that solemnity into the generation after Watteau and Couperin, Swift and Pope, is not Bach's triumph only, since Asam shared in it too. 41) Dürer, 1511, The Trinity, Woodcut; + V detail As the resemblance (less in form than spirit) to Dürer's 1511 Throne of Grace might suggest, it is the heritage which made Machiavelli praise Republican Germany above all Europe for probity and religion; though of course what we are in search of is deeper than morality, a God-immediacy by which that rapt people so miscarried in our century. 42) South German, c. 1340, Christ and St. John, Staatliche Museen, Berlin; + V detail (cf. V42) Back and back in time the intimacy sustains itself — South German, early 14th century, and the loving union of Christ and John, both wrapped in the blood-lined robe of flesh, has a spirit parallelled nowhere else, tied to the soul-soaring of Meister Eckhardt: God is all things; all things are God. The Father begets me, his son, without cessation. I say more: he begets in me himself and in himself me. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye. 43) Master of Naumburg, c. 1270, Head of Christ on the Cross, Dom, Naumburg �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And it is in Naumburg, from a century earlier — the 13th — that the dying saviour first receives the human reality of each and all. How is Bach thinkable without that consummation? 44) German, 10th or 11th cent., Head of St. Metronus, Abbey, Gernrode We pursue it further, into the Dark Ages. This battered Metronus head from Gernrode, illuminates the 10th or 11th century with a testimonial inwardness unique in that Europe — the sacred accomplishing itself in subjectivity: "Es ist vollbracht." (close) 45) Roman Christian, 3rd cent., Orant, detail, Catacombs of Priscilla, Rome; video having picked up more of the figure from Va45 No doubt the deepest origin is in the Christ-man himself, incarnate mediator for the West; but if we trace that Logos to its third century art-beginnings, we feel, as in Gregorian, the passions of flesh dissolve in mystery; we can hardly distinguish the hollow hush of "Crucifixus" from a "Resurrexit" attested as by the empty tomb.. Music: 46) 46a) Gregorian, Crucifixus and Resurrexit, Credo I 4th mode, Solesmes, London 5632 (fade) E.Q. Asam, 1733-35, St.-Johann-Nepomuk Kirche, interior from entrance, München (CGB '59) Same, Apse with Trinity; first, video detail of Christ By the time of Asam and Bach, Incarnation has mounted creed in other body and robes on quite another stage. The outraged cry of "Let him be crucified" Music: Bach, St. Mathew Passion, continued (from 54) "Lass ihn kreuzigen" (cut) demands a Leibnitzian calculus of containment: "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden": Music: Bach, St. Mathew Passion, continued (63) from "O Haupt voll Blut..." (cut) 1st 47) Same, Apse and Trinity (detail taken from Mozart 53, CGB '59); while video pans to an angel, upper left �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The great organ fugues — as for the Passacaglia — go as far as assertion can in empowering the dissonant antithesis: Music: Bach, 1708-17, Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, close, (Biggs) Col-MS 6261 1st 48) E.Q. Asam, 1723, Assumption of Mary, High Altar (from church aisle), Rohr, Bavaria (CGB '59) Thus in the B Minor Mass, where the Gregorian Creed is to be set, the tympanic Resurrexit seems to pile the Asam altar at Rohr, of Mary's Assumption from the grave, For 2nd 47 and 2nd 46) Again, Asam Nepomuk Trinity: slide show has a wider view of 46a; while video returns to the frontal view of slide 40 (plus a Christ detail) For 3rd 47) Here the slide show repeats the frontal view of 40; while the video details Mary's tomb from the Assumption (see V3rd 47 in the video file) on the chromatic grief of the Nepomuk "Cruxifixus." Music: Bach, close of Crucifixus, B Minor Mass, from Angel 3500 C (end Crucifixus) 2nd 48) Again, Asam, Assumption of Mary, from nearer (CGB '59); first, video previews 49, Mary and Angels ascending 49) Same, Assumption of Mary, nearer and above (CGB '59); video: details only: Mary, then angels; also from 2nd 48, tomb with apostles 50) Same, below, closer: tomb with Apostles (CGB '59) 51) Same, nearer, Apostles to the left (CGB '59) 52) Same, above, Heaven, with Mary rising (CGB '59) 52a) Same, Mary, a side view (slide copy of 1700 #20, CGB '59); then video returns to detail from 52, Heaven Music: Bach, opening of Resurrexit, B Minor Mass, Angel 3500 C (fade Resurrexit) In the Baroque engrossment of Gothic heaven, mystical rapture lifts a weight of Cartesian bulk, which, as in Leibnitz, it has entrained in its cosmic surge: �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Souls act in accordance with the laws of final causes through their desires, ends and means. Bodies act in accordance with the laws of efficient causes or of motion. The two realms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, are in harmony, each with the other... According to this system, bodies act as if (to suppose the impossible) there were no souls at all, 53) V53a) Asam Brothers, c. 1735, Assumption above High Altar, Kloster Weltenburg, Bavaria (CGB '59) Same, a nearer view of figures against the vault (CGB '59) and souls act as if there were no bodies; yet both body and soul act as if the one were influencing the other... The totality of spirits must compose the city of God... a moral world within the natural world... Another harmony between the physical realm of nature and the moral realm of grace... brings it about that things progress of themselves toward grace along natural lines... Under this perfect government... everything must turn out for the well-being of the good... not only for all in general, but also for each one of us in particular... As Leibnitz kindles formal Descartes, a54) 54) French-German, 1st half of the 14th cent., Stained Glass windows, Strasbourg Cathedral (CGB '59) German, 14th cent., Gothic, Stained Glass window, Cathedral, Augsburg (CGB '59); + V detail (cf. V54a) Medieval German mystics had enflamed the Scholasticism of Paris. From Suso on his cross studded with nails, 1350, the "Sursum Corda" — "Lift up your hearts" — rises like the burning windows of Augsburg: I set before my inner eyes myself in all my being, with body, soul, and all my faculties, and placed around me all the creatures God has created, in heaven, on earth, and in all the elements, birds of the air, beasts of the forests, fishes of the sea, and thereto all the little dustmotes which shine in the rays of the sun, and all the little waterdrops which ever fell or fall from dew, snow, or rain — and wished that each and all of these things had a sweetly swelling sound of harps, well prepared from the innermost essence of my heart, �C.G. Bell 55) 55a) Symbolic History Grünewald, c. 1511-15, Vision of God, upper detail from Madonna and Angels panel, Isenheim Altarpiece, Colmar Same, larger context, Heavenly Glory so that there would rise up from them a new and jubilant hymn of praise to the beloved, gentle God from evermore to evermore. And then the longing arms of my soul spread out toward the countless beings of all creation, exhorting and inciting them even as a zealous precentor incites his fellow-singers to sing joyfully and to offer up their hearts to God: Sursum corda. So Grünewald incites the Renaissance to a fire-vision of glory spilling from and returning to the Father. Now that German continuity 1st 56) E.Q. Asam, 1731-32, Glorification of the Lamb, Osterhofen (detail of CGB '59); first, video closer detail haloes the vaults of Asam with lighted angels, at Osterhofen, on wings around the Lamb. Again Leibnitz gives a clue to the German genius which could hold the mighty style of Christian Baroque into the Salon century, raising the rational and phenomenal to mythic ecstasy. 1st 57) Bernini, 1657-66, Angel window (over Peter's Chair), St. Peter's, Rome (video: wider variant, V1st 57) Against the Asam, set Bernini's 1660 paradigm. This tangle of rays and angels is as calculatedly cool as the forces of a Newtonian wheel. And the World System, which in Newton, despite his ardent wish, becomes a clockwork of vectorial force, 2nd 56) Again, Asam, Glorification of the Lamb (whole of 1st 56, CGB '59) is glowingly sustained in Leibniz by the vital antinomies of Energy. Indeed, the shift from a physics of force and momentum to one of energy (from MV to MV2) fills the universe with the ubiquitous ground of nature as fluctuant substance. 2nd 57) Again, wider: Angel Window and Peter's Chair; while video narrows to a Window detail, V2nd 57 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The poles always mingle. Leibniz is rational too, but not with so Galilean a command of heaven as matter in motion. And how remote from outward Bernini, 58) 58a) V58b) Münstermann, 1631, Head of Moses, Altar detail, Parish Church, Tossens, N. Germany Münstermann, 1637, Evangelist Matthew, upper detail, pulpit of the church in Holle Münstermann, 1631, from Head of John the Baptist, Altar, Parish Church, Tossens (CGB '57); video narrows to a close detail is this 1638 Moses by his North German contemporary Münstermann, steeped in the Hermetic mysticism then voicing itself in Jacob Böhme: When the will resigns and surrenders to God's Ground, it sinks beyond itself, beyond all grounds and points of view, into the only place where God is revealed, where He works and wills. It has become a no-thing to its own ego-self... God lives within it... as fire reddens iron: so that it loses its darkness... and glows with the Love-will that rules and works in all. (CGB) — Böhme, of whom Silesius would write later in the century: As fish in water, as in earth the plant, Bird in the air, sun to the firmament, Or salamander to his fiery haunt, God's heart is Jacob Böhme's element. (CGB) — Silesius, to write the same of his own eternal I: I also am God's son: I share his company. His Spirit, Flesh and Blood are known to him in me. (CGB) Ich auch bin Gottes Sohn, ich sitz' an seiner Hand: Sein Geist, sein Fleisch und Blut ist ihm an mir bekannt. a59) 59) Martin and Michael Zürn, 1634, The Rose Garland Altar, Münster, Überlingen; + V detail Justus Glesker, c. 1650(?), John the Baptist, detail, National Gallery, Munich; + V detail Music: Buxtehude, 1680-87, from Ich bin eine Blume zu Saron, ARC-3096 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Before Bach's birth, the art of German Baroque (this Glesker John) shares in Silesius' rapture: The rose is without purpose, asks neither how nor why; It blooms because it blooms, selfless as earth and sky. (CGB) Such the leaven Buxtehude caught up from Schütz, Albert, Hammerschmidt. And it was Buxtehude's evening concerts ("I am the rose of Sharon") which Bach, in 1705, walked 200 miles to hear. (fade Buxtehude) 60) 60a) Glesker, 1648-53, Grieving Mary from a Crucifixion, Dom, Bamberg Same, another lighting (video: upper detail only) Where immediate person pours into the sacred, the romantic is foreshadowed. So with Glesker's grieving Mary, or the haunting oboe unison as watchman's horn in Buxtehude's "I sought by night... him whom my soul loves": Music: 61) 61a) 61b) 62) Buxtehude, 1680-87, from "Ich suchte des Nachts," ARC 3096 (fade) M. Willmann, 1666, Miracle of St. Bernard, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Breslau Same, detail of carriage, with a video return to the whole Same, detail of landscape Same, another detail of landscape And in this rare German landscape of the time, by Willmann — the devil charmed into piecing out, with his own body, St. Bernard's broken coach wheel — we are startled by an earth and sky webbed with the lightning of Grünewald, as energized as the viola da gamba line from Buxtehude's "Jubilate": Music: 63) Buxtehude, 1680-7, Gamba introduction from Cantata II, Lumen 32050 (end viola da gamba) E.Q. Asam, c. 1735, High Altar with St. George, Weltenburg Cloister Church, Bavaria (CGB '59); video uses wider variant, V63 �C.G. Bell 63a) V63b) 63c) 63d) 63e) Symbolic History Same, from the oval Nave (CGB '59); video starts with a wider variant, V63a, then goes to a detail from 63a C.D. and E.Q. Asam, 1717-35, View across the Danube of the same Cloister Late Roman Baroque, 1685, Andrea Pozzo, detail of ceiling fresco, San Ignazio, Rome (CGB '86) Again, Asam Brothers, Weltenburg Cloister Church, detail of ceiling stucco (copy of CGB '59, see 18th Century, 42) Again, the St. George Altar (horizontal detail of 63, CGB '59); video: closer details only Music: Bach, c. 1735(?), Cantata #50, Nun ist das Heil, BG 555 Both Bach and Asam cling to that chain of life-marvel, which reaches from Gothic and Altdorfer all the way to Wagner and beyond. The charged adventure of George, the Lady, and Dragon, flanked by Bernini columns and saints, with every feature of the cloister church of Weltenburg, wrought by the Asam brothers as if from one precious stone, is full of such pictorial exuberance as Schweitzer has stressed in Bach. (skip in Cantata to near close) Incredible, that 1735 continuance and heightening of expressive powers, the Great-Chain-of-Being faith of the century before, from Galileo and Descartes to Newton, Leibnitz, the vast contructions of Bernini and Boromini, Pozzo and Baciccia, or of the France of Louis XIV, brought to a grandeur unmatched before. and at a time when Baroque assertion might seem to have spent itself, (end Nun ist das Heil) 64) V64a) 64b) Fr. Mansart, 1643-50, Hall of Mirrors, Chateau Maisons-Lafitte Mansart, Le Brun, Coysevox, 1678 ff., Salon de la Guerre, Versailles Le Vau and Le Brun, 1671 ff, Escalier des Ambassadeurs, Versailles In France we have seen the rational heroics of the Sun-King, this first Mansart hall of mirrors in the Maisons-Lafitte, swell to the methodic sublimity of Versailles, the overreach of Lully's Overtures: Music: Lully, 1686, Overture to Armide, opening, HSL-2072 (fade) �C.G. Bell a65) Vb65) 65) Symbolic History Fr. de Cuvillies, 1734-39, from Hall of Mirrors, Allegory of Water and Fishing, Amalienburg, Nymphenburg, Munich (copy of CGB '59, see 18th Century 41) Same, whole wall (then video details from a65) Same, another stucco detail (cf. 18th Century, Va41) Music: J.S.Bach, c. 1627, Partita #2, Courant, close, Landowska, VIC 1594 (fade in) We have seen, we have heard it break, with the 18th century, to the playful arabesques of rococo asymmetry, which spread over Europe and in all the arts: we pick it up here from Munich, 1735, the hall of mirrors in the Amalienburg. Bach absorbed it as he did every style, grafting the fragilities of Couperin and Rameau onto the earlier base. (close Courant) Most of all it frills the chamber-play of Telemann Music: 66) V66a) 66b) 66c) Telemann, Mus. de Table, from E Minor Ouverture, ARC 73234-35 (fade) J.B. Zimmermann, 1727-36, Steinhausen, piers and ceiling (CGB '59) (with video detail of Eve, etc.) Same, another portion of the ceiling (CGB '59) Same, Die Wieskirche, upper detail of Choir (CGB '86); while V66b copies 18th Century Vb40: same, wider spread (CGB '59) Same, Die Wieskirche, columned height of the Choir Music: Telemann, c. 1640(?), Magnificat in C, close, PHM 500-104 And against the Roman weight of the Asams, the Zimmermanns lace and embroider Steinhausen (as here) and finally Die Wies’ with a Tiepolo and Louis Quinze brilliance as of porcelain, though with an Eden simplicity of the pastoral. The result is an ecclesiastical delight unparallelled, unless in those always more operatic masses and Magnificats — as from Telemann (close Magnificat) to Mozart almost at the century's end: Music: Mozart, 1779, "Coronation" Mass in C, Gloria, Amen, Nonesuch H1041 (close) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Religious display in Bavaria has not struck so desperately 67) H. Rigaud, c. 1700, Cardinal de Bouillon, Musée des Beaux Arts, Perpignan on the clarity which had etched the final pomps of 1700 France, high Church and high state, Versailles, tax-farming, the Wars of the Spanish Succession, with mockery. The skeptic wit of Voltaire, Holbach, the Encyclopediasts, already peeps through the playacting of Rigaud's Cardinal de Bouillon, angel kiddies and all — as if to voice a68) Vb68) 68) 68a) Watteau, 1708-09, Decorative panel, with monkeys, Private Collection Zimmermann, 1746-54, Die Wieskirche, video pan on detail of slide 66b, above (CGB '86); video then returns to a68, decorative panel Watteau, 1717, Gathering Under an Arcade, Dulwich College, London (cf. 1700 67); + V detail Same, detail of dancers and fountain what Watteau might share with Congreve: "No more of that nauseous cant." Watteau's training under Audran as a painter of arabesques — those wave, shell, and flower forms with which Zimmermann would pendulate whole churches — must have shielded him from the heavy hangover of Le Brun. But he goes beyond decorative buoyancy. Music: Fr. Couperin, 1713, from La Favorite, Landowska, Soc. Album The break with the heroic uncovers a frail poignance of ennui and lonely heart, which Verlaine had only to romanticize: (Symonds) Your soul is a sealed garden, and there go With masque and bergamasque fair companies Playing on lutes and dancing and as though Sad under their fantastic fripperies... As in Couperin, so in the tearful light of the Dulwich College "Gathering" (detail), the very fountains seem to sob: Au calme clair de lune triste et beau, Qui fait rever les oiseaux dans les arbres Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau, Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres. (fade Couperin) �C.G. Bell Va69) 69) Symbolic History Magnasco, c. 1740(?), Gathering in a Garden, Palazzo Bianco, Genoa Magnasco, detail from the far right of the same picture Music: Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1740(?), Sonata in F Minor, K 184 (L. 189) close, Nonesuch H-1094 By 1735 — Bach and Asam then at their height — French languor and precious ridicule show in Italy through the dark and chromatic passions of Magnasco and Domenico Scarlatti. (end Scarlatti) 70) Norbert Grund, c. 1760, Minuet in a Park, National Gallery, Prague (video: details only) In that Germany, where Norbert Grund was already prettying his teacup gardens with minuets in the plaintive mode, the old Bach held the great fugal fortress almost alone. What had happened in France forty years before. now stretched the generation-gap of his own musical family. Those brilliant sons, from Wilhelm Friedemann through Philipp Emanuel to Christian, all courted the modish amours of the style galant: Music: Johann Christian Bach, c. 1770(?), Sinfonia in B flat Major, 0p.18, #2, plucked string section from the Andante, Chamber Music Society, CM-6 (fade) 1st 71) G.L. Bernini, 1658-70, Glory-dome over altar, Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail While the outmoded father, Johann Sebastian, brought his last enormous powers to bear on the fugue. Nothing but the Newtonian and Leibnizian synthesis of the world had expressed Baroque command as completely as formulated fugal polyphony. As the daring cupola of the last Bernini Va1st 72) C.D. and E.Q. Asam, 1717-35, whole ceiling, stucco and fresco, Weltenburg Kloster/Danube (video: central spread only) 1st 72) Same, the lower half of the fresco (CGB '59); + V detail: Asam leaning in (from V1st 72a) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History reads itself over into the light-hung ceiling of that George-and-the-Dragon church of Weltenburg, where clouds and carved angels, with an ecstatic Asam (top right) overflow the rim — so Bach, for the final work of a God-affirming lifetime. 1st 73) Bernini, 1655-67, Piazza of St. Peter's (from the Colonnade roof), Rome set himself to systematize, in constructions of every complexity, simple, augmented, diminished, mirrored, and with added subjects, the whole Art of the Fugue, culminating what had swept from 17th century Italy — the spatial conquest of Bernini's Piazza of St. Peter's 1st 74) J. Prandtauer, 1702-18 ff., Kloster Melk, Austria (detail of 3rd 74, CGB 59) — north over the Danube: in music Fux' Gradus ad Parnassum, in architecture the supreme Monastery of Melk, after 1702 — as if synthesizing power would proclaim itself to the world. 1st 75) English landscape gardening, 1741 ff., Stourhead Park, Wiltshire (CGB '59) Almost no work of Genius is harder to parallel than the Art of Fugue. It seems the apotheosis of the great organizing will of Europe's most formal centuries — what in England by 1740 had shaped whole countrysides of forest, lake and park: Stourhead, where nature receives the idyllic touch of art. 1st 76) N. Poussin, c. 1644-45, Landscape with St. John on Patmus, Art Institute, Chicago A perfection devised a hundred years before, when Poussin accorded heroic landscape to the geometry of planes, a fugal abstraction to inspire Cezanne. 1st 77) Rembrandt, 1653, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City All the greatest art of the 17th century has that canonic eternity, working through the richest matter of sense and world — Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1st 78) Zuccali, 1701-04, and Effner, 1720-26, Lower Hall, Neues Schloss Schleissheim (CGB '59) In Bach's Germany such panel painting seems to disappear; the Parnassian nobility shifts to architecture, bearer of the ritual dream. For 1st 79) Double: J.S. Chardin, [A] left, 1734, Philosopher Reading, Louvre, Paris; and, [B] right, 1733, The Water Urn, Museum, Stockholm Of course the whole rococo is imbued with formal design; but in France only Chardin holds the seriousness of the old Baroque, its sense of space as metaphysical — what composes this Philosopher to a still-life. or a still-life to philosophy. For 1st 80) Double: [A] Rembrandt, 1669, Last Self-Portrait, Mauritzhuis, the Hague; and [B] Goya 1815, Self-Portrait, Prado, Madrid Finally it is in Goya that the grand manner of the Western centuries of confidence breaks through Revolution to an ultimatum of Baroque self in fugal plasticity. For 2nd 79 and 2nd 78) Jan Vermeer, c. 1660, The Girl with a Red Hat, Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (CGB '62) We have no choice, for Art of the Fugue cognates, but to invoke so extended a span. Since it is to the outpost of the century before that Bach mounts, For 2nd 77) H. Matisse, 1905, Portrait with the Green Stripe, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhacen most of all at the end of his life, and to such solitary eminence, that he belongs simultaneously to the past, and to the abstract search of the future, even down to today. For 2nd 76) Asam Brothers, 1717-35, Stucco from Forehall, Kloster Weltenburg, N. Bavaria (CGB '59) The Art of Fugue is another of those life-studies we have to hint at in the closing minutes of a show. Best to focus on For 2nd 75 and 2nd 74) �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Borromini, 1650-59, St. Ivo, upper part, Rome (copy of Blake, 43, CGB '86) the last great quadruple fugue, intended for three new invertible subjects combined with the leading theme; though unfinished, it is still the longest fugue Bach wrote; 2nd 73) F. von Erlach, 1717 ff., Church of San Carlo, Vienna so even with this fragment of a vast work, we must start part way through with the second and faster theme, hear it combine with the first. Then yield to the four-note grandeur of the chromatic For 2nd 72) E.G. Haussmann, 1746, Portrait of J.S. Bach, place unspecified; + V detail signature, Bach: B - A - C - H (H the designation of B natural), with the beginning of its unbelievable measuring against the other themes. So the fugue breaks off, in a trailing voice, as if Bach had dropped it on his death-bed. Music: a2nd 71) 2nd 71) 3rd 72) For 3rd 73) 3rd 73a) 3rd 74) V3rd 74a) 3rd 75) 3rd 76) 3rd 77) For 3rd 78) 3rd 79) a2nd 80) 2nd 80) Bach, 1750, Art of Fugue, close of the last, (Münchinger), London CSA 2215 Another CGB '86 variant of Bernini, Sant' Andrea al Quirinale [at present, slide show only, but to be revised into the video] Again, Bernini, Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, spread opening of Heavenly Glory (video: details only, right, then left) Again, Weltenburg, ceiling fresco (CGB '59); video returns, for details only, to 1st 72 [add to video Va3rd 72, whole fresco] Again, St. Peter's Piazza, the sweep of the curved colonnade Same, the triple colonnade, from within Again, Melk, at evening (here, original slide CGB '59) Same, another view, from the Danube Stourhead, another view, twilight (CGB '84); video: two details only Poussin, 1643, St. Matthew and the Angel, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Again, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, detail Schleissheim Hall, another angle (CGB '59) Again, Chardin, Philosopher Reading Again, Rembrandt, last Self Portrait, detail Again, Goya, 1815 Self Portrait, detail �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (here Art of Fugue trails off) 2nd 80a) Francisco Goya, 1820, Goya and his Doctor, Minneapolis Institute of Art (video: detail only) Yet Bach, like the 70-year-old Goya, did not die then and there. Though it was not long after, as he lay in a darkened room, too blind to write, that he dictated a fugal prelude for the Chorale "Wenn wir in Höchsten Nöten sein" — a pilgrim, in his death need, calling on God. 80+1) Again, Vierzehnheiligen over fields; with video detail and return to whole (CGB '52, original of slide 1) Like Vierzehnheiligen over fields and woods, that last polyphony of faith, printed with The Art of Fugue, has the serenity of an Eden-earth recovered by love. Music: Bach, 1750, Wenn wir in Höchsten Nöten sein, close, (Münchinger) London CSA 2215 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 25 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bach : Fort of Post-Baroque, Symbolic History, Part 24 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 24 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_24_Bach--Fort_of_Post-Baroque Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/df853bd1a45fba3632c1e6bafcbd87b1.pdf 95efce658052f2d88d8e3126a73bf996 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 23. 1700: The Comic Divide CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 April 1994 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 23. 1700: The Comic Divide 1) Double: [A] Rigaud, 1701, Louis XIV and [B] Watteau, 1717, L'Indifferent; both Louvre, Paris Double: details of 1, [A] and [B] 1a) The Divide of 1710, from the heroic and rational Baroque to the mock-heroic and wistful Rococo, is peculiarly the comic divide; since those opposites — assertive fulness and ironic play — suggest the blending poles of comedy itself: exuberance and mockery. Typical that grandeur and ridicule so meet in both styles that the change from Louis XIV to Regency (as from Cartesian command to Berkeleian subjectivity) seems merely a change of emphasis. What else informs historical contrasts but subtle shifts of stress between wedded contraries? 2) 2a) H. Rigaud, 1701, Louis XIV, Louvre, Paris; first, a video detail (Va2) Testelin, 1648, Portrait of Louis XIV as a Boy, Versailles (video returns to 2, upper body detail Same, detail of legs; + V return to the whole (see V2) 2b) Music: M.-R. Delalande, c. 1695, From lst Suite, Musiques Royales, Turnabout TV 34232 When Riguad's 1701 Sun King steps from his throne, as to the supper music of Delalande, the trailing vast fleur-de-lys robe raised on aging cork-heeled legs (already his vanity in Testalin's portrait fifty-three years before), that heroic proclamation — not throne, not crown, but self: "L'etat c'est moi" — bears the burlesque of Vanbruch's 1696 Lord Foppington: Mr Mend Legs, a word with you; the calves of my stockings are thicken'd a little too much. They make my legs look like a chairman's... let the next be the 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �2 C.G. Bell Symbolic History thickness of a crawnpiece less — (Aside) If the town takes notice my legs are fallen away, 'twill be attributed to the violence of some new intrigue. (fade Delalande) Yet the break at Louis XIV's death in 1715 — from pomp's overreach 3) 3a) 3b) Watteau, 1717, L'Indifferent, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Watteau, 1712, detail of Jupiter and Antiope, Louvre, Paris Return to 3, L'Indifferent, upper detail to the precise wit of Watteau — is one of the sharpest in history: in drama, the softening from Molière to the delicious sentiments of Marivaux, "A Game of Love and Chance"; in music from Lully and Delalande to Couperin's plaintive Concerts, the first in fact written to soothe the ailing king's last years. Music: Fr. Couperin le Grand, c. 1710(?), Echos, 2nd of Concerts Royaux, Vanguard Cardinal S-10029 Thus in England the fragile ironies of Pope's 1714 "Rape of the Lock": Belinda still her downy pillow press'd, Her guardian sylph prolong'd the balmy rest: 'Twas he had summon'd to her silent bed The morning-dream that hover'd o'er her head? A youth more glittering than a birth-night beau, (That ev'n in slumber caused her cheek to glow) Seem'd to her ear his winning lips to lay, And thus in whispers said, or seem'd to say: "Fairest of mortals, thou distinguish'd care Of thousand bright inhabitants of air! … For 2nd 2) V2nd 2a) Music: French Baroque, c. 1680, Louis XIV as Roman Emperor, MS Fr. 7892, Biblioteque Nationale, Paris Le Brun, 1663-75, Tapestry, Louis XIV at Dunkerque, detail, Versailles (CGB '59; cf slide 57) Again, Delalande, from lst Suite, close — that Pope succeeds Dryden's 1685 "Threnodia Augustalis": 4/1994 (fade Couperin) 1700: The Comic Divide �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History A Warlike Prince ascends the Regal State, A Prince, long exercis'd by Fate… False Heroes made by Flattery so, Heav'n can strike out, like Sparkles, at a blow; But e're a Prince is to Perfection brought, He costs Omnipotence a second thought. (end Delalande) What can so swell the heroic tympanum For 2nd 3) Watteau, c. 1717(?), The Gamut of Love, National Gallery, London but the birth of precious ridicule — mutation of bouyancy and disenchantment? 4) N. de Largilliere, 1696, Ex Voto to St. Genevieve, with the Magistrates of Paris, Church of St. Etienne du Mont, Paris; first, video details (see V4 and cf. 24) By the end of Louis' reign, a France ruined by extravagance and war was in the hands of such tax-farmers as the forthright Lesage shows us in Turcaret: I marvel at the course of human life! We pluck a coquette; the coquette devours a man of affairs; the man of affairs pillages others: and all this makes the most diverting chain of knaveries imaginable — un ricochet de bourberies le plus plaisant du monde. Largilliere's 1696 devout magistrates of Paris cloak the travesty of that ricochet. a5) Vb5) 5) V5a) Watteau, 1720, Shop of Gersaint, whole; Charlottenburg, Berlin Same, detail: portrait being packed away Same, detail, left side Same, detail, right side (to which video adds closer details of 5 and V5a) No wonder, twenty-four years later, in Watteau's Shop of Gersaint, the wigged Virtu of the old Louis, painted by Lebrun and acclaimed by Molière at the close of Tartuffe: We live under a prince wise in the ways of the world, Whose great soul sees the truth through every mask, Whose steadfast reason admits of no excess — 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �4 C.G. Bell Symbolic History that pomp is stowed in straw in a packing case, from which the painter himself beckons a nostalgic beauty. Thus at the close of the school of manners Molière's France began, Sheridan's improvident auctions the stern portraits of his family past. As in Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes": From ev'ry room descends the painted face, That hung the bright palladium of the place... For now no more we trace in ev'ry line Heroic worth, benevolence divine; The form distorted, justifies the fall, And detestation rids th'indignant wall. But what if, with the picture, normative reason should be deposed, ushering in the passionate successor? Va6) Hans von Aachen, c. 1596(?), Joking Couple, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna b6) B. Strozzi, c. 1625(?), Vanity (old woman making up), Private Collection, Bologna Vc6) Velasquez, c. 1628(?), Los Borrachos (The Topers), or Triumph of Bacchus, detail, a peasant, Prado, Madrid 6) Same, whole High comedy is a type and mirror of purposive aim. In every act of purpose — as when we reach for something — the central thrust is trained on its goal by a feedback correction of misses. So in the comic antinomy, Dionysian release, breaking tame symmetry in a dance of the grotesque, takes the blaze of corrective mockery, by which its overflow is guided home — from Aristophanes to Twain and Chaplin, ironic mantle of generative force. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Gargantuan Renaissance, the poles seem to fuse in Windmill assault or Falstaffian celebration; in the social comedy of Method, from Molière to Austen, reason separates a truth-core, etched round with the acid of vanity and hypocrisy scorned. Velasquez' 1628 praise of Bacchus and castigation of drunk peasants straddles the line, at once Quixotic and normative. a7) Van Dyck, 1622-27, Marchesa Balbi, National Gallery, Washington Vb7) Velasquez, 1635, Filippo IV of Spain on horseback (variant of the Prado painting), Pitti, Firenze 7) Bernini, 1650-1, Bust of Duke Francis I d'Este, Mus. Estense, Modena V7a) Jean-Louis Lemoyne, 1703-04, Bust of Jules H. Mansart, Louvre, Paris 7b) John Nost, c. 1698, Digby Memorial, S. Transept, Sherborne Abbey, Dorset (CGB '84) 7c) Again Bernini, Bust of Duke Francis I d'Este, closer view Music: Fr. Turini, 1624, Sonata in A, 2 vls & continuo, Telef. AWT 9461-C But when Bernini's 1650 Duke of Este had proclaimed over Europe the code and canon of reasoned grandeur, what were all those courtly aspirants with their art- and stage-reflections to do but assume the stance of that saltimbanque nobility (Dryden's Alexander: "None but the Brave deserves the Fair"): in France the Bourgeois Gentilhomme M. Jourdain preposterously apes; in England, the Dorimants and Bellairs, Harcourts, Mellefonts, Mirabells, who pace the Restoratian stage? Though of course the manly center will be rimmed (Grave to allegro) 8) Bernini, 1665, Caricature of a French Cavalier, Gab. Naz. Stampe, Rome; first, video detail with the misses and exaggerations of Sir Fopling Flutter, Sir Novelty Fashion, Sparkish, Lord Froth, Tattle, Witwoud, Petulant. Is it not thematic that the man who schemed the ultimate inflation, Bernini, also, and at the same time, invented its caricature — the very idol, in this French Cavalier, pricked and deflated by comic scorn? (fade Turini) 9) 4/1994 Egyptian, Dyn XIX, c. 1250 B.C., One of four colossal statues of Ramses II, on the Great Temple, Abu Simbel 1700: The Comic Divide �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Perhaps the heroic has always occasioned playful divisions on its ground. From Soser and Khafre to Tut and this Ramses II, the enthroned Pharoah was the image of power, as epic for Egypt as Homer's warriors for the Greeks. But when in tomb-paintings of the same XIXth Dynasty, the same judgment seat 10) Egyptian, Dyn. XIX, c. 1300 BC, Cat serves a throned mouse, Brooklyn Museum secures for a royal mouse the service of a cat, we recall those Iliad parodies once ascribed to Homer — the Battle of Frogs and Mice, in which Aristotle found the comic source, how mice, armed with beanpod greaves and peanut helmets, attack the frogs armed with rushes and snail-shells, until the Myrmidon crabs intervene. Va11) b11) 11) Breughel, c. 1557, St. Anthony Landscape, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '60) Vincenzo de' Rossi, c. 1560(?), Hercules and Antæus, Palazzo Vecchio, Firenze Domenichino, c. 1620(?), Apollo and Cyclops, with the Aldobrandini dwarf, National Gallery, London Now, as the epic mode revives, the take-offs also stake a claim: Cervantes — Scarce had..Aurora... display'd her rosy graces to mortal eyes from the gates and balconies of the Manchegan Horizon, when the renowned Knight Don Quixote... forsook the voluptuous down; or under baroque hardening, Tassoni's 1622 Rape of a Bucket: a Bolognese assault on Modena, In which they make horrible war for a bucket And go back home in triumph and racket — (CGB) Fanno per una Secchia orribil guerra, E Tornan trionfanti a lor terra — model in Dryden's England for Hudibras, and then, as the title reveals, for Pope's "Rape of the Lock." Compare Pope's mock-heroics with this fresco Domenichino painted for the Aldobrandini: the negligence and punishment of their dwarf against a simulated tapestry of Apollo and the Cyclops: 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �7 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast, When husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last; Or when rich China vessels, fall'n from high, In glitt'ring dust and painted fragments lie! 12) Longhena, 1631-56, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice (CGB '59); first, video details Music: Benevoli, 1628, 53-v. Festival Mass, Et Resurrexit, Epic LC 3035, near opening If earthly exultance is a ground of laughter, even the religious Baroque must surge that way, as in the formal leaps of Benevoli's Et Resurrexit, or the dome and volutes of La Salute, everywhere on the point of overplaying such magnificent powers — pious exhuberance denying mockery. (fade Benevoli) 13) V13a) 13b) Bernini, 1657-66, St. Athanasius, head, High Altar, St. Peter's, Rome Guarini, 1667, 36-arch Dome, East end, Duomo, Turin (CGB '84) Same, more central detail (CGB '84) Carissimi's "Deum de Deo" from the Mass for Five and Nine takes up the dance of Bernini's High Altar or Guarini's Turin Domes — Music: 14) Carissimi, c. 1660(?), Deum de Deo, Missa a quinque et a novem, MHS-lllO (fade) Pozzo, 1688-94, side of nave ceiling, St. Ignazio, Rome (CGB '48) which carries to the end of the century in Pozzo's Ignazio ceiling, or in the Christmas Concerto of Corelli: Music: Corelli, by 1699, lst Allegro close, Christmas Concerto, ARC-3147 15) V15a) Pozzo, 1688-94, Center, nave ceiling, St. Ignazio, Rome (CGB '48) Pozzo, 1685, left transept, Nave ceiling, St. Ignazio, Rome (CGB '48) 16) Churriguerra, 1693-96, High Altar, Esteban Church, Salamanca, Spain (video divides to below and above) 4/1994 (end Corelli) 1700: The Comic Divide �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History It fills the Spain of the organist Cabanilles with Churriguera's altars; Music: Va17) 17) Cabanilles, c. 1700, from Tiento XVII, de Pangue Lingua, MHS 3069 (B,1) Mexican, 16th-17th cent., Dome at sunset, Santo Domingo, San Cristobal, Chiapas (CGB '78) Mexican, 1659-90, Ceiling, Rosary Chapel, Santo Domingo. Pueblo (CGB '74) (end Cabanilles) and crowns Indian Mexico with the gold of earth-conquest. Va18) 18) Prandtauer, 1702 ff, Monastery of Melk, Danube near Vienna (CGB '59; video takes a detail here from Bach 74, over the town) Same, West front from below (CGB '59); + V detail From Rome and Venice the power of High Baroque strikes north over the Danube, rearing, as to the festal pomp of Biber's St. Polycarp Sonata, the imperial monastery of Melk. Music: Va19) b19) Vc19) 19) H.I.F. Biber, c. 1690(?), St. Polycarp Sonata, near close, SAWT 9537-A Ex Same, 1702-26, interior of Melk, detail of Cloister Library (CGB '59) Same, a corner of the Library (CGB '59) Same, Cloister Hall, detail (CGB '59) Same, Chapel, Choir & High Altar, detail (CGB '59) (end Biber) Though German music, at this Melk turn of the century, peaks 400 miles to the north, in the fugal toccatas of Buxtehude. Music: Va20) 20) 4/1994 Buxtehude, c. 1690(?), Toccata in F Major, close, (Hansen) Nonesuch H 71188 E.Q. Asam, 1717-25(?), Assumption of Mary, Choir and Altar (from the Nave), Rohr, Bavaria (CGB '59; video first shows a detail of Mary and the Angels from Bach 49); digital varies this order Same, Assumption of Mary, Altar from side (video: detail only) 1700: The Comic Divide �9 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History J.S. Bach, 1723, Magnificat, Instrumental opening, Bach Guild 555 — A sacred exuberance flooding over the century, through the lifetime of Bach: here Asam's boisterous ascent of Mary from tomb to angel-light: Magnificat. (fade Bach) What should the courts be where religion has become the bouyant opera of material praise? VA of 21) Sir Peter Lely, c. 1660(?), Self-Portrait, Collection of Mrs. H.N. Lely 21) Sir Peter Lely, Double: [A] c. 1660(?), Self-Portrait, Collection of Mrs. H.N. Lely; and [B] c. 1650(?), Portrait of a Woman, British Museum, London; + video detail of [B], from VB of 21 21a) S. Cooper, 1643, Viscountess Fauconberg (Cromwell's Daughter), Collection of E.M. Hodgkins 21b) W. Dobson, c. 1645, The Artist with Sir Charles Cotterell and Sir Balthazar Gerbler, Albury Park, Guilford 21c) Cooper, c. 1650(?), William Lenthall, National Portrait Gallery, London 21d) Le Brun, c. 1665(?) Portrait of Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Viscomte de Turenne, sketch for a tapestry, Versailles; where video has used: Sir Charles Lely, c. 1658, Robert, 2nd Earl of Sunderland, Knole, near London (see V21d) In Dutch Lely, fad of the English court after Van Dyck, Bernini's Duke of Este sires manly virtue thinning into mannered dress. Etheridge (1676): next to the coming to a good understanding with a new Mistress, I love a quarrel with an old one. Wycherley's Horner (1671) who has himself declared impotent (as from something caught in France) that his cuckolds may not suspect him. Lady Fidget: ...could you be so generous, so truly a man of honour, as for the sakes of us women of honour, to cause yourself to be reported no man? No man! and to suffer yourself the greatest shame that could fall upon a man, that none might fall upon us women by your conversation? but, indeed, sir, as perfectly, perfectly the same man as before your going into France, sir? as perfectly, perfectly, sir? 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though the loving Country Wife almost explodes everything. Her jealous husband is being assured of Horner's impotence: Why, thou jealous fool, dost thou doubt it? he's an arrant French capon. Country Wife: Tis false, sir, you shall not disparage poor Mr. Horner, for to my certain knowledge… Others: — O, hold! — Stop her mouth! — Upon my honor, sir... The lie prevails: Cuckolds, like lovers, should themselves deceive. In that field, Molière's good is moderation: The rigid virtue of the ancient sages Is out of key with present usages… (Bishop) Like the "nature" Boileau says art should follow, it is style, groomed by wit. 22) 22a) N. de Largilliere, 1703, The Artist with his Wife and Daughter, Louvre (CGB '80); + V details Strozzi, c. 1625, Vanity, Private Collection, Bologna (detail of b6) And yet it overweens. Molière (with Largilliere): Men never will keep to the golden mean; They will spoil and pervert a noble aim, By exaggeration, carrying things too far. (CGB, after Bishop) The cosmetic arts of Pope's beautiful Belinda are those Congreve marvelously misapplies to the earthquaked old face of Lady Wishfort, that "antidote to desire," so "prone to the iteration of nuptials" — as Erasmus' Folly had said: "they pluck out hairs from the strangest places; they display their withered and foul breasts": Lady Wishfort: 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �11 C.G. Bell Symbolic History He has put me out of all patience. I shall never recompose my features to receive Sir Rowland with any economy of face. This wretch has fretted me that I am absolutely decayed. Look, Foible. Foible: Your ladyship has frowned a little too rashly indeed, madam. There are some cracks discernible in the white varnish. Lady Wishfort: Let me see the glass. — Cracks, sayest thou? — why, I am errantly flayed — I look like an old peeled wall. Thou must repair me, Foible, before Sir Rowland comes, or I shall never keep up to my picture. What Lady Wishfort is to the Belle, 23) V23a) 23b) V23c) 23d) Claudio Coello, c. 1690(?), Portrait of Charles II of Spain, Prado, Madrid Daniel Mytens, 1629, 1st Duke of Hamilton, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Cooper, 1665, Portrait of Anthony Ashley, 2nd Earl of Shaftesbury, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Ghislandi, c. 1700(?), Portrait of a Gentleman in a Tri-Cornered Hat, Poldi Pezzoli Mus., Milan Coello, c. 1690(?), Charles II of Spain (detail of 23) the fop is to the Beau. We approach the type wherever Baroque might decks a puny center — as with poor sickly Charles II of Spain. On the English stage, it is as if Shakespeare's "waterfly" Osric (" 'A did comply with his dug before 'a sucked it") had absorbed, with the exiled Court of St. James, the preciosities of Molière's France, to become Etheridge's Sir Fopling Flutter — "He went to Paris a plain bashful English Blockhead, and is return'd a fine undertaking French Fopp." — He thinks himself the Pattern of modern Gallantry. — He is indeed the pattern of modern Foppery. He was Yesterday at the Play, with a pair of Gloves up to his Elbows, and a Periwig more exactly Curl'd than a Ladies head newly dress'd for a Ball. — What a pretty lisp he has! — Ho, that he affects in imitation of the people of Quality of France. — ...his looks are more languishing than a Ladys when she... leans her head carelessly against the side of a Box i'the Playhouse. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �12 C.G. Bell a24) 24) V24a) Symbolic History N. de Largilliere, 1696, lower detail of Magistrates, St. Genevieve Ex-voto, St. Etienne-du-Mont, Paris (video: right half only) Same, right detail (video: closer details only) H. Rigaud, 1728, Count Phil. L.W. Sinzendorf, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna By the end of the century, Largilliere's Magistrates vie with Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington: Gad's curse! Mr. Foretop, you don't intend to put this upon me for a full perriwig? Foretop: ...Why, as God shall judge me, your Honor's side-face is reduc'd to the tip of your nose. Lord Foppington: My side-face may be in eclipse for aught I know; but I'm sure my fullface is like the full-moon. Foretop: Heaven bless my eye-sight... an't please your honor... the broadest place I see in your face does not seem to me to be two inches diameter. Lord Foppington: If it did, it would just be two inches too broad; for a perriwig to a man should be like a mask to a woman, nothing should be seen but his eyes — Foretop: My Lord, I have done; if you please to have more hair in your wig, I'll put it in. Lord Foppington: Passitively, yes. Foretop: Shall I take it back now, my lord? Lord Foppington: No; I'll wear it today, tho it shew such a manstrous pair of cheeks, stap my vitals, I shall be taken for a trumpeter. In Molière, vigor is less lost under the mannered wig. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �13 C.G. Bell a25) 25) 25a) 25b) 25c) Symbolic History Jan Steen, c. 1650(?), The Village School, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin Jan Steen, c. 1660, "No medicine for love", Alte Pinak., Munich Le Nain Brothers, c. 1645(?), from Peasant Family, peasant, Louvre, Paris Again, Steen, "No Medicine for Love," detail (video takes other details from 25, the whole) J. Steen, 1660s(?). Sick Lady, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam He is closer to the mid-century realism of the North, the clean fugues of Pezel. Music: 4/1994 Pezel, pub. 1685, Intrade for Brasses, Anthologie Sonore 2 1700: The Comic Divide �14 C.G. Bell Symbolic History That comic play, as in Jan Steen's "No medicine for love," rides a grandeur of ordered space. Such Molière's absolute clarity of character and action, against which Restoration drama blurs its complexities of plot and person. Yet Molière transcends the realism of the Small Masters. As La Fontaine wrote: "Under this stone, where Molière lies alone, Plautus and Terence lie, three dead in one." So in Le Medecin Malgré Lui, Sganarelle, woodcutter, taken for a physician by the trickery of his wife, fumbles a girl who plays dumb for love: "Here is a pulse which denotes that your daughter is dumb"; and when father, lover, and all pay him, he finds doctoring a good trade: Maybe I'll stick to medicine the rest of my life... For whatever you do, good or bad, you get paid the same... If a cobbler spoils leather, he has to pay; but here you can spoil a man and it costs you nothing... It's always the fault of the one who dies. You don't hear the dead man complain of the doctor who killed him. In The Hypochondriac there is Purgon's curse at the refusal of his clyster: — That in four days' time you enter on an incurable state… that you fall into a dyspepsia. — Ah, M. Purgon! — From a dyspesia into a dissentery; from a dissentery into a dropsy. — Mercy, M. Purgon! — From a dropsy into the privation of life, where your folly will bring you... Or the closing chorus of mock-doctors in Pidgin Latin: Vivat, vivat, forever vivat, Novus doctor… et manget et bibat, Et bleedet et killat. (1739 translation) a26) b26) 26) 4/1994 (end Pezel) Cornelis Troost, c. 1737-41, Cuckold Scene, detail, Print Collection, BerlinDahlem Museum, Berlin J. Steen, c. 1665, Girl Eating Oysters, Mauritshuis, The Hague Again, Troost, Cuckold Scene, whole; first, video close detail 1700: The Comic Divide �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History By the 18th century, French Classical has permeated Dutch realism with its comic themes. The mocking maid through the half-door, her fingers raised to her forehead like horns, tells after what discovery the magisterial husband hides his face, leaving his wife in tears. It is cuckoldry, on which Molière, with a girl-actress for sportive bride, tellingly dwells — Arnolphe in The School for Wives: I know all the tricks, all the devices That ladies use to victimize their husbands... And so I've taken adequate precautions. The girl I'll marry is an innocent, And her simplicity is my protection. . . (Bishop) While Chrysalde counsels proportion: Why should the actions of a wife determine whether a man is worthy, or not, of honor? … Does breach of trust make her, make him, a monster? A gentleman treats cuckoldry with reason. Though Troost's print is as mild as 18th-century Addison; 27) 27a) Charles LeBrun, 1661, Chancellor Sequier, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80) Same, upper center detail (while video takes five details from 27, whole) whereas Molière's blend of classical balance and rolicking farce is of the high baroque, never rococo, never Watteau-light. LeBrun's equestrian Chancellor hints at such a comic seriousness, where the formal is real, poetry has wit, state and grandeur wear a mocking, urbane smile. Such aims attend the heroic normalization of verse which advances in France from Malherbe (English Waller's model) to the swelling periods of Boileau, where "a just cadence has reduced the muse to obligatory rules" — "Une juste cadence" "réduisit la muse aux règles du dèvoir." The proof of the achievement is that it could contain Molière's verse plays, Racine's tragedies, and even in Boileau, not simply the reason of his Art poetique, but the Pascalian shadow of Les Folies Humaines: Often of all our evils reason is the worst — Souvent de tous nos maux la raison est le pire. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �16 C.G. Bell Symbolic History And where was reason going in the guise of this chancellor with his mocking smile? The year of the picture is 1661. Va28) Le Vau, Le Brun, Le Notre, 1656-60, Chateau Vaux le Vicomte, side view, SE of Paris (CGB '80) Same, interior, Round Hall under Dome (CGB '80) Same, exterior, front view from distance (CGB '80); + V detail Vb28) 28) That August, Nicolas Fouquet, libertine Superintendent of Finance, invited Louis XIV and the court to a fête at his Chateau Vaux le Vicomte, just completed by the team of Le Vau, LeBrun, and Le Notre, later to create Versailles. Lully's violins played; there was a farce by Molière, followed by a tremendous firework (Artefice de Feu). La Fontaine wrote: Tout combattit a Vaux pour le plaisir du Roi, La musique, les eaux, les lustres, les étoiles — All contended at Vaux for the king's applause: The music, the waters, the lights, the stars. (CGB) But "heaven was jealous of it" — "Le ciel en fut jaloux." Nineteen days later the subject who had out-pomped a king was imprisoned — as it turned out, for life. For 2nd 27) Again, Chateau Vaux le Vicomte, interior, corner of Mirror Room (CGB '80) Chancellor Sequier could have agreed with Molière's Philinte: Perfect reason flees every extremity; Warns wisdom itself: be wise with sobriety. (CGB) The convergence of mannered Séquier, baroque Lully, cork-heeled Louis, La Fontaine of sage Fables and Molière of truth-telling farce, 2nd 28) Again, Vaux le Vicomte Chateau, nearer front view (CGB '80) in the showiest palace of pre-Versailles France, has import. Ages of formal pomp incline to the comedy of manners. 29) 4/1994 Indian (Islam), 1632-52, Taj Mahal, Agra, India; + V detail 1700: The Comic Divide �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History And in one of those resonances the world gives hints of, our Renaissance and Baroque coincide, over Asia, with a noble opulence (soon to be imitated in the rococo), a Taj-Mahal grandeur, 30) Indian (Nepalese), 16th cent., Dancing divinities, Private Collection, Rome charged, in illumination and sculpture, with meticulous abandonment, refined out of the sacred energies of centuries before. It is the more and more courtly dance of divinity. 31) Japanese, 16th cent., mask of the "Ugly Woman" ("Oto"), Nat. Mus., Tokyo; + V detail Nowhere has civilization achieved higher life-style than in late Muromachi Japan. A mask designed for "Ugly Woman" roles seems to reach across land and ocean to the praised improvisations of the Commedia del Arte. But what speaks in it like a comic oracle is the blend of the vital and grotesque, the corrective energy of the art-laugh. 32) Upper Paleolithic, c. 23,000 B.C., Venus of Willendorf, Natural History, Madrid; + V detail We know nothing of the use or intent of Cro-Magnon fertility fetishes; yet here, in the earliest carvings we possess, generation revels in an all-time archetype. In burlesque New Orleans, it is "the biggest baby-doll of them all" who keeps her dancing mass continually in the air, a captive balloon in defiance of gravity. In Molière, it is the Mock Doctor's enthusiasm for the ample wet nurse: "Ah nurse of my heart... there is one, not far from here, who would be happy just to kiss" (as Bishop will translate "les petits bouts de vos petons") "to kiss the sweet utensils of your trade." Va33) 33) V33a) 33b) 4/1994 Hellenistic, 3rd-1st cent. B.C., Double Comic Mask, Mus. Barracco, Rome Hellenistic, 3rd-lst cent. B.C., terra cotta of comic actors in masks (Life, Feb. 8, 1963) Classical Greek, Peloponnesian from Palestrina, 2nd half of 4th cent. B.C., Aphrodite on a Goat (cover of a box mirror, detail), Louvre, Paris Greek (Macedon, tomb at Derveni), c. 330 B.C., Krater, Dionysus, etc., Mus., Thessalonikê 1700: The Comic Divide �18 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Like any polarity, the vital-and-ugly admits of infinite field solutions: How keen the satyr discovery of the Greeks — Aristotle's Ridiculous: "a mistake or deformity not productive of pain... the mask, for instance, that excites laughter." Though the rapturecloses of Aristophanes should have brought even the Stagirite nearer to mockery's ecstatic core. The Birds: …to the nuptial couch!… Take hold of me by my wings and let us dance... Oh joy! Io paean! Tralala! victory is thine, oh thou greatest of gods! Lysistrata: Appear dancers, and the Graces with you... Apollo... Dionysus... Aphrodite. Io Paean! dance, leap, as in honor of a victory won... and Artemis… a fillet binding thy tresses... strike thy divine hands to animate the dance; aid us to praise the valiant goddess of battles, Athene of the Brazen House! Va34) b34) 34) Attic cup by Makron, c. 470(?) B.C., Satyr and Maenad, Mus., Munich Greek, 6th cent. B.C., Phallic Monument, Sacred precinct, Delos Græco-Roman, 1st cent. A.D., Phallic Fountain, House of Vetii, Pompeii — The Lysistrata standing as near as any play to comic center: the deed of kind, with its life-giving clown. When the oath of the Athenian and Spartan women, "to refrain from the male part altogether," has brought their warring men, like stalking herms, to treat for peace and coition: Could any man's back and loins stand such a strain? — Ye gods in heaven, the pangs I suffer! — it is the phallus that leads to god-celebration. Even in the Neronian lust of the Satyricon, the Priapus of this Pompeian fountain holds some sacred claim: a land so infested with divinity, one might meet with a god more easily than with a man. 35) 4/1994 French Romesque-Gothic, 1145-50, Shepherds, right of West Portal, Chartres; + V detail 1700: The Comic Divide �19 C.G. Bell 35a) Symbolic History Rohan Hours, 1425(?), Shepherds’ Dance, f85 v, Bibl. Nat., Paris Like everything of the pagan earth, comedy went down in Christian faith. When it revives in the church close it is under the transformation of innocence — these sely shepherds of Chartres, naive as Chrestien's description of a bridge, which is the sharp blade of a sword: There was never such a bad bridge, nor one whose flooring was so bad… It is badly made and badly built, and the construction of it is bad. From this 1140 carving to the mystery plays of the 15th century (the shepherd to the Christ child: "Have here a ball/ And go to the tennis"), we sense how the Germanic word "selig," blessed, innocent, would change to the English "silly," stretching the salvation comedy of innocence, Music: Lochaimer Liederbuch, 1452-60, "Es fur ein pawr gen holcz," opening, Arc-3222 Va36) German late Gothic, 1352-61 (attributed to Heinrich Parler), Portal of Frauenkirche, Nuremberg, Bavaria Vb36) English (E. Anglian), early 14th cent., Psalter of the St. Omer family, detail of Beatus page, Add. MSS 39810, British Museum, London; + V detail Vc36) Grandes Heures of the Duc de Berry, 1406-09, pl. 64, detail, "Mock Priest"; Biblioteque Nationale, Paris d36) German, 1480 (Erasmus Grasser), A Moorish Dancer (standing), City Hist. Mus., Munich e36) Bellini, 1515, Lady at her Toilet, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) 1st 36) E. Grasser, c. 1480, Another Morisco Dancer (crouching), Stadtmuseum, Munich with the profane juggling and farce that boil up from folk Gothic, Corpus Christi interludes, between-sports, Grasser's 15th-century Morisco Dancers, this Lochaimer germ of Don Giovanni's demonic patter-song; (fade music) or the English ballad of the proud lady and the juggler: Here beside dwelleth A riche barons doughter; 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �20 C.G. Bell Symbolic History She wold have no man That for love had sought her, So nise she was. She wold have no man That was made of molde, But if he had a mouth of gold To kisse her whan she wold. So dangerus she was. There of hard a joly juggeler That laid was on the grene, And at this ladys wordès Iwis he had gret tene, An angred he was. He juggeled to him a well good stede Of an old horse bone, A sadill and a bridill both, And set himself thereon. A juggeler he was. 1st 37) V2nd d36) V2nd e36) 2nd 36) For 2nd 37) French Gothic, 1260-70, Smiling Angel, head, Rheims Detail of d36, above: Standing Moorish Dancer Detail of e36, above: Bellini, Lady at Her Toilet Detail of 36, above: Crouching Moorish Dancer [B] of double 38, below: Franco-German, c. 1280, Prince of this World, head, Cathedral Museum, Strassburg He priked and praunsed both Beffore that lady's gate; She wend he had ben an angell Was come for her sake. A prikker he was. He priked and praunsed Beffore that lady's bowr; She wend he had ben an angel Come from heven towre. A praunser he was… The day began to passe, The night began to come, To bed was brought 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �21 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The fair jentell woman, And the juggeler also. The night began to passe, The day began to springe, All the birdès of her bowr They began to singe, And the cokoo also. 'Where be ye, my mery maidens, That ye come not me to? The joly windows of my bowr Look that you undo, That I may see! For I have in mine armès A duke or elles an erle.' But whan she lookèd him upon, He was a blere-eyed chorle. 'Alas!' she said. She lade him to an hill, and hangèd shuld he be. He juggeled himself to a mele pok; The dust fell in her eye; Begilèd she was. God and our Lady And swetè Seint Johan Send every giglot of this town Such another leman Even as he was. 38) V38a) 38b) 39) 40) 4/1994 Double of 1st and 2nd 37, above: [A] French-Gothic, 1260-70, Smiling Angel, Rheims; and [B] Franco-German, c. 1280, Prince of this World, Strassburg; + V detail of each Basler Münster, c. 1290, The Deceiver and a Foolish Virgin, from a cast, Basel Museum Mantegna, c. 1468, Triumph of Silenus, detail, British Museum, London Salvator Rosa, c. 1650, Head of a Faun, Albertina, Vienna; + V detail Goya(?), c. 1824, Self in a Tall Hat, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; first, a video detail 1700: The Comic Divide �22 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History French, c. 1250-60, Alle Psallite cum Luya, vocal, Seraphim SIC6052 In two smiles we read the radical Christian heightening of the poles of comic possibility (wide as from Shakespeare's Tempest to Jonson's Volpone; yet fused in one troped Alleluya) — the Rheims angel smile of Grace; and the Strassburg smile of the Tempter, the Prince of this World. (end Alle) That equivocal vitality reaches forward from the Gothic root; through Renaissance, 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �23 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: Mozart, 1787, Finch' han del vino, Don Giovanni, Angel 3605 D/L through the satyr espousal of Rosa's baroque, toward Storm and Stress, the rape aria of Don Giovanni, as revolutionary a seizure on the comedy of manners as Goethe's Faust; as this smile the old Goya painted or inspired, resurrected from the beast-base of the snarl. Such the humor of Kant's Critiques, where reason sharpens its weapons to depose itself and crown the intuitive successor. (end Mozart) a41) 41) V41a) 41b) J. Fouquet, 1453-55, Job on his Dung Heap, Hours of Etienne Chevalier, Musée Condé, Chantilly Florentine, c. 1525(?), Bust of Machiavelli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence Giulio Romano, 1540(?), The Lovers, Hermitage, Leningrad Valerio Cioli, 1558-70(?), Morgante, Duke Cosimo's Dwarf, astride a turtle, Giardino di Boboli (video then returns to 41, Bust of Machiavelli) By the 15th century, medieval farce had begun the amplification which would lead to Molière: — Pathelin, shyster, out-cheated by the baaing shepherd with his "bump of villainy". But it is first with Machiavelli, who even in his bust smiles like a roguish Leonardo, that fabliaux realism is invested in the spatial harmonies of Renaissance, without loss of natural immediacy. In the Mandragola, the beautiful Lucrezia is to be seduced. Parasite Ligurio suggests a spa to the learned dolt her husband: — — — — Did you see the sea at Leghorn? What do you think? Of course I saw it. How much bigger is it than Arno? Than Arno? Why it's four times — no, more — six bigger — seven bigger — I tell you, you don't see anything but water, water, water. (CGB) — …e non si vede se non acqua, acqua, acqua. 42) 42a) After Q. Massys, 1510-20, Ugly Queen of Tunis, National Gallery, London School of G. Romano, 1530-32, Jove and Olympia, Palazzo Te, Sala di Psiche, Mantua (video returns to a detail of 42, the Ugly Queen of Tunis) We have seen that surge engender on gargoyle farce a progeny of giants strange as Massys' Queen of Tunis — Rabelais, with codpiece distending the monk's habit — as when Panurge, rejected by a lady, sprinkled her clothes, in church, with an extract made from a hot and salt bitch: 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �24 C.G. Bell Symbolic History All the dogs in church came running, big and little, laying out their yards and pissing all over her… A tall greyhound bepissed her head; some her sleeves and others her crupper; the little ones pissed on her pattens. Panurge laughed and said to a lord of the city: "I think that lady is in heat, or has been covered lately by a greyhound." Then he left... and wherever he saw dogs in the street, he would give them a kick and say: "Get along! Join your fellows, in the devil's name." 43) Bronzino, c. 1546, Exposure of Luxury, National Gallery, London; + V details The comic-tragic cleavage has mostly ruled the stage. Yet Bronzino's Allegory of Cupid, Venus, and Time, sometimes called the "Exposure of Luxury," is a comic picture, applying the heroic mythology of Raphael and Michelangelo in a Mannerism of fancy play — as in the court comedy of Lyly: Cupid and my Campaspe played At cards for kisses; Cupid paid. Though there was no such brilliance of Cupid-lust in English until heroic Dryden toyed with it: He showed her his arrow, and bid her not fear, For the pain was no more than a maiden may bear; When the balm was infused, she was not at a loss What they meant by their sighing and kissing so close; By their praying and whining, And clasping and twining, And panting and wishing And sighing and kissing, And sighing and kissing so close. a44) b44) 44) School of Leonardo, c. 1505, Leda and the Swan, Borghese Gal., Rome Titian, 1559, Rape of Europa, Isabella S. Gardner Museum, Boston Tintoretto, 1550, Vulcan, Venus, Mars, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V details, then again the whole The revived mythologies of Poliziano, Ariosto, and the rest prompt the visual. Marlowe, of Venus' temple in Sestos: 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �25 C.G. Bell Symbolic History There might you see the gods in sundrie shapes, Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes; For know, that underneath this radiant floure Was Danaes statue in a brazen tower, Jove slylie stealing from his sisters bed, To dallie with Idalian Ganimed, And for his love Europa bellowing loud, And tumbling with the rainbow in a cloud: Blood-quaffing Mars heaving the yron net, Which limping Vulcan and his Cyclops set… In the Venetians such scenes range from the tragic, through high romance, to this comic Tintoretto: Vulcan reflected in the mirror like an old woman, inspects the Venereal premises, while Cupid feigns sleep, and the phallic helmet of Mars pokes from under the bed. Music: a45) 45) V45a) Vicentino, c. 1571, close of Petrarch "Passa la nave," Bach, Guild HM 34 SD G. Arcimboldo, 1570(?), The Summer, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien Arcimboldo, 1560-70, Water (fishy-face), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien; + V detail Arcimboldo, 1563, Winter, (head of a gnarled tree), same museum In the deepening value crisis of the late century, even comedy and pastoral darken; while mocking experiments — Arcimboldo's heads formed of vegetables or of fish — accompany the chromatic upheaval of music: Vicentino. (end Vicentino) In Bruno, the hermetic fury of magic swells with modern science, a cauldron of the tragic and grotesque. Of all Renaissance plays, his Candellaio is the weirdest, fuzing the visionary 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �26 C.G. Bell 46) 46a) 46b) Symbolic History An. Carracci, c. 1585, The Bean Eater, Colonna Gal., Rome Rubens, 1612-15, Toilet of Venus, Vaduz-Lichtenstein Collection; + V detail Rubens, 1608(?), detail of Sampson and Dalilah, National Gallery, London (video repeats 46, The Bean Eater) with the brute physicality which in this early Carracci looks to the Baroque. Carubina is to meet with her old candlemaker, he taking her in the dark for the mistress he thinks he has charmed; she plots it all: I'll come on hot with kisses like a bear. When I gnaw his cheeks, you'll hear him yell in the next room. "My heart, my life," I'll say; "soft, or we'll be overheard..." I'll get his tongue between my teeth and bite until he screams some more. "O love, O sweetheart," I'll whisper, "passion drives me wild." I'll pretend to want him before we go to bed, get him ready, egg him on; but before the King of Glory can come in, 1'11 squeeze his root and cullions like wringing out a wash, and pant: "My own, to have you in my hands." When you hear him howl the third time — and I'll twist until he howls — then come into the room, all of you, with lights; and we'll see. (CGB) Against the diabolic grossening which would lead to Ben Jonson: Sirrah, I'll strip you — What to do? Lick figs out at my — 47) V47a) V47b) 47c) 47d) G. Lytens, c. 1617, Winter Scene, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59); + V details Same, Another winter scene, Aachen Gallery (CGB '74) Roeland Savery, 1610, Mountain Landscape with Woodcutters, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59); + V detail Jan Brueghel, 1599, Little Bouquet in a Clay Jar, close detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien Brueghel, 1609, Harbor City, Alte Pinak., Munich (CGB '59); + V detail angel make-believe enwreathes The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, fills art with naturelove (Lyten's Gypsy snow-pleasures, romantic as Huck Finn), spins the lute arabesques of Dowland's incomparable fantasies. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �27 C.G. Bell Music: a48) b48) 48) V48a) V48b) Symbolic History Dowland, c. 1610(?), Fantasy, (Bream) beginning and end, RCA V LDS 2656 H. Goltzius, 1604, Venus, Bacchus, Ceres, etc., Hermitage, Leningrad J. de Gheyn, c. 1590(?), Mother and Child studying drawing book, Print Room, Staatliche Museen, Berlin H. Avercamp, c. 1615(?), Storm on the Coast, Berlin-Dahlem Mus., Berlin; first, a video detail Rubens, c. 1632(?), Homecoming from the Fields, Pitti, Firenze Frans Hals, c. 1622, A Couple in a Garden, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam In Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey, reasoned exuberance proliferates observational science. The later novel, Dickens and all, lurks in the melodrama of humors. In the neglected sketches of 1600, Golzius, de Gheyn, Velvet Brueghel, this Avercamp, man walks the animate stage of earth, winds, and waters. (end Dowland) 49) 49a) J. Jordeans, 1638, The King Drinks, Royal Museum, Brussels; first, a video detail J. Jordeans, c. 1640, The Feast of the Bean King, close detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien In Rubens and his school (this Jordeans' "The King Drinks") myth riots in the physical. So drunkenness on the English stage thickens from Iago's "Potations pottle deep" and Anthony's "Cup us till the world go round," to that Heywood carouse where revellers take the house for a ship tossed by storm: To cast their lading overboard... All fall to work, and hoist into the street... Stools, tables, trestles, trenchers, bedsteads, cups, Pots, plate and glasses; here a fellow whistles, They take him for the boatswain; one lies struggling Upon the floor, as if he swum for life; 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History A third takes the bass-viol for the cockboat, Sits in the belly on't, labours and rows, His oar the stick with which the fiddler played... 50) 50a) V50b) 50c) G. Honthorst, c. 1625-30, Merry Flea-Hunt, Öffentliche Sammlung, Basel G. Honthorst, 1625, The Procuress, detail, Central Mus., Utrecht; + closer V detail Rembrandt, 1646, French Bed, Amsterdam Again 50, Merry Flea-Hunt, detail Jonsonian comedy points again and again to the northern Caravaggiesque. Honthorst's Merry Flea-Hunt reaches from the joking lust of Falstaff: "She's neither fish nor flesh, a man knows not where to have her," to Otway's Sir Jolly Jumble, old pimpvoyeur: My Ganymede!... She's thine, boy... plump, soft, smooth, wanton! Ah rogue!.. here's shoulders... here's a leg... I will kiss thee ; ha, ha, he, he... a toad... Odd, I love... to see a pretty wench and a young fellow touze and rouze and frouze and mouze... faith dearly!... I'll pimp for thee, dear heart; and shan't I hold the door? shan't 1 peep, ha?... if thou hadst her in thy arms now between a pair of sheets, and I under the bed to see fair play, boy... gemini!... there would be doings! O lawd, 1 under the bed! (Enter whores) .... Bubbies! Oh, law, there's bubbies — odd, I'll bite 'em... Tickle me a little Jenny — do! he he, he he! 51) Poussin, c. 1629-30, Nymph carried by satyr, Gallery, Cassel; + V details Even moral Spenser had played the wag with satyrs — when old Malbecco finds his wife among them: Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day, That all his hart with gealosie did swell. Even elegiac Poussin shows such a nymph as Beaumont sends into the woods in his play otherwise called The Faithful Shepherdess: From one danger I am free; No man on earth can ravish me — I am so willing. . . 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �29 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The haste of the fruit-bearer, the white flesh on brown, the turnabout play on riding, the drape between the satyr's legs, like a Shakespearean pun, the cupids, voyeurs surely, like Sir Jolly — yet beside the later erotica of Boucher or Fragonard, this holds the heroic vein. a52) b52) J. Steen, 1650-60(?), The Poultry Yard, detail, Mauritshuis, The Hague Le Nain Brothers, 1645(?), Peasant Family, whole, Louvre, Paris (this video whole yields in the slide show to peasant and wife; plus video: woman to the left, from Vb52; woman, far left, from V52a; and man, right of center, from V52b) In England realistic comedy is cut off by the Puritan closure of the stage; though the genre equivalent in painting flourished in Calvinist Holland through much of the century. In France the peasant realism of the Le Nain brothers parallels that liveliest ingredient of Molière — thus at the opening of The Mock Doctor, Sganarel's fight with his wife, and the backfiring intervention of a neighbor — she: "Why do you stick your nose in? Suppose I want to be beaten?" But to approximate the style condition of Molière, that wonderfully articulated folk stem must be engrafted with a noble scion — Va53) 53) French Renaissance, 1518-27, Chateau d'Azay-Le-Rideau, Indre et Loire French Renaissance, 1519 ff., Chateau de Chambord; first, video detail Music: Attaignant, 1529, Tant que vivray, lute, Turnabout TV- 34137S the courtly splendor growing in Royalist France since the Renaissance Chateau de Chambord, or the lute songs and dances of Attaignant. But the 150 years from this Francis' hunting lodge on the Loire, (fade Attaignant) 54) 54a) 4/1994 Le Vau and others, 1669-85, Garden Façade, Palace of Versailles Same, corner view; with video return to a detail of 54 1700: The Comic Divide �30 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Le Sage de Richée, pub. 1695, Lute Ouverture, Turnabout TV34137S to Louis XIV's Versailles, swells airy Renaissance to the heroic assertions of Baroque. And even within the limits of the musing lute, as played by the same performer, the passage from 1529, to Le Sage de Richée, 1695, loads the chords with grandeur. (fade Le Sage de Richée) How much more when the orchestra of Lully took up the orgulous overture — Music: a55) 55) V55a) Lully, 1675, from Thesée Overture, (slow, fast) from Col. M-376 Same, interior, Ambassadors' Staircase, Versailles Le Vau, Mansart, Le Brun, 1668-79, ceiling of Salon de Venus, Versailles (CGB '59); + V detail Le Brun, c. 1650-61, detail of ceiling fresco, Galerie d'Hercule, Hotel Lambert, Paris as in those royal apartments by Le Vau, Mansart and LeBrun, where the whole life of the King, among heaped geometries, wreathed and stuffed with precedents of power, became a state display. But the very structure of the French Overture opposes to the majesty of the opening grave 56) Le Brun, 1663-75, Tapestry, Louis XIV visits the Gobelin factory, Versailles (CGB '59); + V details, return to whole, and a closer left detail a faster moving section of fugal play, as if we had gone from the embattled virtu of Corneille to Molière's ingenious toyings in the high costumed mode: THE STAGE OF THE ROYAL THEATRE AT VERSAILLES Molière (alone): Come along, ladies and gentlemen. Why don't you come out? The devil take your delay… You'll drive me mad. Actor: It's you who'll drive us mad. We don't know our parts, so what are we to do? Molière (Towards Louis XIV): 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Well, the king won't be here for two hours, let's rehearse and see if we can hit on something. (end Lully) Or among the tapestries glorifying the reign, turned to this one where Le Brun leads the Grand Monarch to see the Gobelin works. So Dryden passes from The Conquest of Granada to Marriage à la Mode — Why should a foolish marriage vow, Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now, When passion is decayed? — without abandoning the stance of the beau monde. 57) 57a) Le Brun, 1663-75, Tapestry, Louis XIV at Dunkerque, Versailles (CGB '59) Same, detail, left (from CGB ‘59 Larger Declaration 39) Music: Lully, 1675, Thesée, Marche des Sacrificateurs, Col. M. 376 And even when the king, mounted on Bernini's horse of Constantine, appears at the siege of Dunkerque — as in that Dryden heroic Conquest: Heaven has not destined you so soon to rest: Heroes must live to succour the distrest... Into the press of clashing swords we'll go, And, where the darts fly thickest, seek the foe — the royal claim so curls with irony, we might wonder if the last courtier to the left were not the admired original of Lord Foppington. 58) Le Brun, 1665-80, Tapestry, detail, Crowning of Louis XIV, Les Gobelins, Paris (here video adds a closer detail of 57a, above) How can the honnête homme in all his formal nobility, but walk the tight-rope of Molière's Misanthrope between unmannered bluntness and sauve hypocrisy? — an argument Wycherley would stuff with English life and color: Lord Plausible: If I did say or do an ill thing to anybody, it should be sure to be behind their backs, out of pure good manners... 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �32 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Manly: And if I would say or do ill to any, it should be to their faces... Why should a man be troubled with the flattery of knaves if he be not a fool or cully; or with the fondness of fools, if he be not a knave or cheat? Va59) 59) F.L. Juvarra, 1729-33, Stupinigi, through the gate, Palace near Turin French, c. 1690, Painted Fan, The Ball (Le Loir, Histoire du Costume) We are particularizing an axiom of historical change, that the polarity which sets Baroque grandeur against Rococo play must be structurally bedded in both styles; as this 1690 ball in the baroque salon thins toward the Mozartean ironies which would bring down the curtain on the Ancien Régime. In music the rift is bridged by the foremost composer, François, the great Couperin, whose Third Lesson of Tenebrae, amplified in its first festal recording, For Va60) Mansart, 1699-1710, Royal Chapel, Apse, from courtyard, Versailles (a detail previewed from 2nd a60, below) 60) Mansart, Coypel, etc., 1699-1710, interior of Chapel at Versailles culminates the French Baroque — such a "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum Tuum," as Bossuet preached in this Versailles Chapel, to the admiration of the court he served next to God: Behold! Columns that lift to the sky the boast of our nothingness… Voila... des colonnes qui semblent vouloir porter jusqu'au ciel le magnifique témoignage de nôtre néant... 2nd 59) Again, Painted Fan; + V detail Yet Couperin launches the closing great Jerusalem fugue from a skipping confession of weakness, as if some salon lady, waving such a fan as this, had fluttered "the liquefaction of her clothes". Music: Couperin le Grand. 1714, Third Tenebrae Service, V-1235-6, from "de qua non poter surgere" to close 2nd a60) Again, Royal Chapel, exterior, Apse (video: closer detail only) V2nd 60) Again, Interior of Chapel at Versailles (detail of 60, above) 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �33 C.G. Bell 61) 62) 63) Symbolic History Versailles Chapel, lower nave and choir (CGB '59); with V details Same, upper row of columns and apse (CGB '59); first V detail Same, vault, with Coypel painting (CGB '59); video: details only, below and above, then a return to the apse painting, detail of 62, above (end Tenebrae) From Coypel's heroic religiosity, 64) Watteau, 1716, Les Deux Cousines, Marquis de Ganay, Paris; + V detail to the frail dream of Watteau, seems to crowd into the fewest years a centennial demarcation. Music: Couperin le Grand, c.1715-20, from Les Folies Françaises, 2nd through 5th (Landowska), Couperin Society But Couperin found no difficulty in going from the Lamentations of Jeremiah to the most precious miniatures on the Follies of France — like Watteau's little canvases, plaintive diversions of the Regency. 65) Watteau, 1720-21, Judgment of Paris, Louvre, Paris; + V detail (Folies 3) In Watteau a Rubens Judgment of Paris turns to a parody in the vein of Pope: "To arms, to arms!" the fierce virago cries, And swift as lightning to the combat flies... (So when bold Homer sets the gods in arms, Towered Olympus rings with loud alarms). 66) Watteau, 1718(?), The Music Party, Wallace Collection, London (Folies 4) V66a) Same, detail of musician Yet whatever the loss and longing of these deft ironies, in space and person they cling to the noble norm; instruct us that the death of the Grand Monarch and waste of heroic war ("It was a famous victory") drove the thinnest wedge into the confidence of the West. For 1st 67) Watteau, 1717, Gathering under an Arcade, right section, Dulwich College, London, which video replaces with three details (Folies 5) 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �34 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In The Rape of the Lock — Hither the heroes and the nymphs resort, To taste a while the pleasures of a court; In various talk th' instructive hours they pass'd, Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last; One speaks the glory of the British Queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks and eyes; At every word a reputation dies — that derision celebrates Augustan values. (Cut Folies) 1st 68) Watteau, c. 1718(?), Gilles, Louvre, Paris In the "Essay on Man", our Pascalian paradox — The glory, jest, and riddle of the world — meets Leibnitzian surety: And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, whatever is, is right. 2nd 67) Again, Gathering under an Arcade, whole; + V details 2nd 67a) Same, detail of dancing to the left Watteau's wigs, robes, poses, this Baroque arch and piers, still voice what we would hear if we could freeze the full chords of Couperin's music — as indeed we almost do in his Passacaille "Vanity of Human Wishes". Music: Couperin, c. 1717, Passacaille (from 1st into 3rd Refrain), (Landowska) Couperin Society Album It is hard to decide whether Congreve's last refinement of manners in his 1700 Way of the World, has crossed the Watteau divide: (1st Couplet) Mrs. Millamant: I won't be called names after I'm married; positively I won't be called names. 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �35 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Mirabell: Names! Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart, and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar... let us be very strange and well-bred; let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well bred as if we were not married at all... Va2nd 68) Watteau, Gilles, with frame (CGB '80); + V detail 2nd 68a) Same, closer detail (2nd Couplet) But when the dowager Duchess of Marlborough, after Congreve's death in 1728, had a wax effigy of him made to sit by her at table, and the better to suggest the gouty genius, let the feet be regularly blistered and annointed by his doctor, that was comedy in the new mode of Watteau's Gilles, of Marivaux and Sterne, an overplaying of le sentiment du coeur. (fade Passacaille) a69) 69) 69a) Wrenn, 1664-69, Sheldonian, detail, Oxford (CGB '59) Sir Peter Lely, c. 1650-55, Henry Sydney, Penshurst, England Giacomo del Po, c. 1690, Expulsion, detail of The Fall, Metropolitan Museum, NYC (CGB '74) Music: Henry Purcell, c. 1685, Canzona, Golden Sonata, Purcell Society Album In England as in France, the 17th-century Baroque, by its brisk facility of command, enacts the soul of comedy. Thus Lely's Henry Sidney, or the Canzona of Purcell's Golden Sonata. Is the delight of precise imitation a comic delight? (fade Purcell) The canon, anyway, was the form taken by Purcell and the Restoration for the lusty catch: "Adam caught Eve by the furbelow/ And that's the oldest catch we know." a70) b70) 70) 70a) V70b) English late Baroque (Sir John Vanbrugh) 1705-22, Blenheim Palace, SW view, Oxfordshire; + V detail Same, detail of North Court (CGB '84) Same, North Court through iron gate (CGB '84) Same, a darker detail (CGB '84) Same, a variant detail (CGB '84) Music: 4/1994 Lully, 1668, Overture to George Dandin (Le Grand Divertissement Royal de Versailles); Musical Heritage Society 704 1700: The Comic Divide �36 C.G. Bell Symbolic History From Versailles, the Lully Overture — Grave and Allegro — spread over Europe, like all the Sun-King assertions of architecture, dress, reason, statecraft, war. So when Vanbrugh, playwright and architect, came to design for the Duke of Marlborough the most heroic mansion in England, how could his genius not yoke those perennial steeds of comedy, fat and lean — ostentation and ironic wit? (allegro) With what repartee the north gate, with its iron curls and gilded sharp flower-flames, pricks the swelling vaunts of the wide-winged court. Was not Vanbrugh, maker of Lord Foppington and Tunbelly Clumsy, to break off his unfinished Journey to London (and his life) with the lurid awakening of Sir Francis Headpeice: — ...And why will you be in a passion, Sir Francis? — Because I came here to breakfast with my Lady (Arabella)... expecting to find my family set round a civil table with her, upon some plumb-cake, hot rolls, and a cup of strong beer; instead of which, I find these good women staying their stomachs with a box and dice, and that man there, with the strange periwig, making a hearty meal upon my wife and daughter. Va71) 71) 71a) V71b) 71c) V71d) 71e) J. Thornhill, c. 1710, etc., upper section of 71, used here for two close video details J. Thornhill, c. 1710, Painted Hall Ceiling, Former Naval Hospital, Greenwich (slide show: whole; video: upper half only) I. Jones, (Wrenn and others), 1616 ff. and 1694 ff., The Queen's House, Naval Hospital, etc., from the Thames, Greenwich, London (CGB from Milton Vb42) Ch. Le Brun 2nd half of the 17th cent., Gobelins Tapestry, The Elements: Water, as restored by Colbert, Gobelins Mus., Paris (here video first shows the whole of Thornhill's Painted Ceiling Hawker, c. 1680-85, Charles II, National Portrait Gallery, London (video: upper half only) Kneller, c. 1706, John Churchill, lst Duke of Marlborough, Nat. Port. Gal., London Again, Thornhill's Ceiling, lower detail Music: Purcell, 1689, Overture, Dido and Aeneas, l'Oiseau-Lyre, 50216 When Thornhill in the Great Hall ceiling at Blenheim, or in this of the Greenwich Naval Hospital, exalts the conquering England of William and Mary, who can 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �37 C.G. Bell Symbolic History unscramble Homeric epic from Battle of the Frogs? Does it match the Grave of Purcell's Dido Overture, with the Dryden "Year of Wonders" where Pope began? The time shall come, when free as seas or wind Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind, Whole nations enter with each swelling tide, And seas but join the regions they divide. (Music: Allegro) Or is it the rush and edged wit of the succeeding allegro — the Dryden Swift belittles in the "Battle of the Books"? the helmet nine times too large for the head, which appeared situate far in the hinder parts... like a shrivelled beau, from within the penthouse of a modern periwig. With the takeoff on War, in A Tale of a Tub? the true foundation of grandeur and heroism... necessary to establish subordination... as also to purge bodies politic of gross humours... 72) W. Hogarth, 1743, Marriage a la Mode II, Breakfast, National Gallery, London; + V details In England as in France the fugue fiercens as peanut virtue rattles in the great shell: — Hogarth's "Morning After the Party" in the spendthrift mansion of Marriage a la Mode, Swift's Modest Proposal for maintaining the destitute of Ireland: (fade Dido) I have been assured by a very knowing American... that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled... I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children... This would... increase the care and tenderness of mothers toward their children... Men would become as fond of their wives during the time of their pregnancy as they now are of their mares in foal... nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage... 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �38 C.G. Bell 73) V73a) V73b) V73c) 73d) V73e) Symbolic History French Engraving, 17th cent., "Monkey-Shines," Abbé de Marolles Collection Huet, 1760(?), Mural from Salon des Singes, detail, Chantilly, France (here video returns to a detail of 73, "Monkey-Shines") Callot, 1631, Siege of La Rochelle, detail, British Museum, London Callot 1631, Siege of the Isle of Ré, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien Callot, c. 1633, from the Miseries of War: Plundering a Large Farmhouse, left detail Same, right detail (here video returns to another detail of 73, "MonkeyShines") The ironic masque of manners had inevitably hit on the court-mockery of monkey-shines, as in this French engraving, good-humored as Molière. There is a card game of Monkey belles at Chantilly, and Chardin did several versions of the Apeantiquary. But as the rift widened between the façade of divine right and the stink of world wrong, Swift, in "hatred, disgust and contempt," turned the whole "execrable crew" into dung-flinging Yahoos: I gave [my Houyhnhnm master] a description of cannons, culverins, muskets... pistols... battles, sieges... plundering, stripping, ravishing, burning and destroying... He said whoever understood the nature of the Yahoos might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning equaled their malice. But... it gave him a disturbance in his mind, to which he was wholly a stranger before. It is this disturbance which tells us that corrective comedy has swung to something lacerative, an abhorrence destructive of the good it reached for. Va74) Vb74) c74) Vd74) 74) 4/1994 Magnasco, c. 1720-30, Storm Scene with Fleeing Monks, lower detail, Brera, Milan (note: videos before ‘94/5, use for Vb74 &c74 a CGB foreground of Vd74) Magnasco, c. 1730(?), Monks' Library, J. Brass Collection, Venice Same, 1730-40, Interrogation, Kunstinstitut, Frankfort am Main Magnasco, c. 1735(?), Landscape with Figures, upper detail, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74) Magnasco, 1712(?), Punchinello Playing the Guitar, Gatti-Casazza Collection, Venice; + V detail (cf. V74a) 1700: The Comic Divide �39 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1730(?), Sonata in F Minor, (Landowska) Society Album We minimized the rift opened in France by the Baroque debacle. In Swift it strikes deeper, undermining the exuberance which still exalts the style. And in the weirdly lighted satires of Magnasco, (North Italian, early 18th century) forms are wrenched in a violence as darkly radical as the savage indignation of Swift. We have related it before to the chromatic fury of Domenico Scarlatti. No doubt these are comic arts (with the possible exception of Bach's Passions, tragedy was the lack and failure of the age), but it is a comedy of Storm and Stress, seeded with the bitterness of what would later be called "La Comedie humaine". (end Scarlatti) Va75) Vb75) 75) V75a) 75b) 75c) Piranesi, 1743-45, Le Carceri X, 1st State, Nat. Gal., Washington, D.C. Same, XI, 2nd State (pub. 1761) Same, XIV, 2nd State, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Same, detail Piranesi, 1743-61, Carceri X, 2nd State, detail of Chained Captives, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (cf. Va75) Blake, c. 1795, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Frontispiece Tate Gallery, London; + V detail Music: Alessandro Scarlatti, c. 1710(?), lst movement, close, Concerto Grosso in F Minor, Telefunken 89-80059 And what Pascalian vertigo of the young Piranesi would seize exactly on the vaultings of spatial command to exhibit, in his mid-century Prisons, the rational order of the phenomenal gone from Cartesian glory to nightmare bondage? — a doom here sprung upon us by a contradiction: that the two great piers to the left are joined by an arch which must hold the plane of the picture, though we see it reaching back in space. And already in Alessandro Scarlatti (Domenico's father), the fugue, Baroque structure of reason affirmed, flexes with menace, (fade Alessandro Scarlatti) Music: 4/1994 William Friedemann Bach, c. 1750(?), from Sinfonia for 2 Flutes and Strings, Fugue, MHS 3474 1700: The Comic Divide �40 C.G. Bell Symbolic History to become, in the moodiest of Bach's sons, Wilhelm Friedemann, almost the battleground late Mozart and Beethoven would make of it. Between the first state of this engraving and the second, Blake was born, to cry the skull caves of space and time — Blake, too, trained on satire — 1784: Ha ha ha said Inflammable Gass, [Voltaire] was the glory of France — I have got a bottle of air that would spread a plague... 76) V76a) Fr. Boucher, 1752, Reclining Girl, Alte Pinakothek, München; + V detail Rubens, 1636-40, Diana and Nymphs Surprised by Satyrs, Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin; + V detail In that ferment, for salon France to go on refining more sensuous provacations in the courtly mode, comedy sliding over into Casanovan Memoirs — this Luise Murphy on her belly, so disposed as to suggest the addition of a succubent king, a picture in which Boucher pimped for Louis XV, who took the bait, and the mistress — how that confrontation delayed fosters the explosion of '89, the terror of '93. (fade W.F. Bach) Sex has always seemed our funniest attribute. The Fontaine-Congreve fable of an impossible task for the devil, to straighten a ringlet curl, could not be so diverting if the hair in question were not "A tendril of the Ciprian vine/ Shade of the labyrinth of love." But sexuality itself does not make high comedy; it must be caught up in a godhead mocked and believed. 77) V77a) Double: [A] Gainsborough, c. 1760(?), Lady Innes, Frick Collection, NYC; and [B] Greuze, 1760(?), Broken Pitcher, Louvre, Paris (video uses only singles and details: see video file, A and B of V77) Blake, 1794 (copy of 1826), Songs of Experience, 39, “The Sick Rose,” Library of Congress In Gainsborough's England middle-class humanity assumes the formal robes. From Addison's Sir Roger to Fielding's loveable Fanny and Joseph, Sophie and Tom Jones, with Parson Adams and the rest (on the angel side of the Christian smile), a new nature softens toward the geniality of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. But in such complicity with the mocked Lady Boobies, Tow-wowses, cheats and hypocrits (heirs to 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �41 C.G. Bell Symbolic History the devil-strain of grinning possibility) that the Enlightened rose-garden knocks under, as in the Greuze Broken Pitcher, to the spouting Faustian lion. (Blake) O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy… 78) Pietro Longhi, 1751, The Rhinoceros, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice; first, three video details In Venice from mid-century, the thinning masquerade of high style barely hints at the volcanic buildup of what Blake would have called "the Antediluvians who are our Energies." Though surely that master of symbol would have recognized Longhi's Rhinoceros, under the dividing barrier of consciousness, as the great suppressed Behemoth of Job, gawked at by the puppets of empty dress, while the managing barker brandishes the cut-off phallic horn, long famous as a drug of aphrodisiac power. Thus, over a Europe as international as ever before or after, the comedy of manners — Goldoni in this Venice, Beaumarchais in France, Lessing's Minna in Germany, in England Sheridan's brittle take-offs on the genteel — 79) 79a) 79b) Goya, 1791-92, La Boda, detail, Prado, Madrid (for which video substitutes Va79, La Boda, whole) Goya, c. 1798-1805, The Naked Maja and The Clothed Maja, Prado, Madrid (by video numbering b, c, and d79: first single details, then double. Here video inserts 79, Goya, La Boda, detail, as V79) Goya, 1777, Dance on the Banks of the River Manzanares, Prado, Madrid (by video numbering 79a) or in the art of Spain this Goya cartoon of mismarriage — everywhere that comedy yields, like the Bastile, to the revolution of nature and heart. In Blake's reversal of Heaven and Hell, it is from the burning infinite of creative desire that Reason's establishment has distrained its goods. Its "Messiah fell & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss." A rape the original sadist, Marquis de Sade, deviantly applied in his erotica, 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide �42 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Justine 1791, Julliette 1792 — de Sade, called ''the freest spirit...in the most imprisoned body." While Mozart closes Don Giovanni, after the hero's demise, with a chorus of the "good little people" singing the customary sweet song. Music: Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, from the closing chorus, Angel 3605 (or London A4406) But how thin and posed the morality of reason has become. (fade Mozart) If, in this comedy of outbreak, exuberance and mockery have fused as in the Renaissance, it is under a reversal of sign. Molière's corrected good has dwindled to the trivial mask; Va80) b80) 80) 80a) Goya, 1788, St Francis of Borgia at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, version in the Cathedral of Valencia, whole Goya, 1788, same subject, in the fiercer oil sketch, Marquesa de Santa Cruz (slide show: whole; video: detail only) Goya, 1815-24, Disparate Desenfrenado, engraving (Proverbs 10), Prado, Madrid; + V details Picasso, 1934, The Minotaur, drawing, S.W. Labrot, Jr., Hobe Sound, Florida Music: Mozart, 1787, Don Giovanni, Close of the Hell-descent, Angel 3605 (or London A4406) while the excess once castigated, now in flaming reach and fall, flaunts a passionate banner. Even in Goya's Proverb of "Unbridled Folly," where lust reverts to the oldest centaur radical of the horse — as Lear said: "The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to it with a more riotous appetite" — the old irony swirls in the modern ambivalence. Thus in Don Giovanni, before the manikins usurp the stage, Dionysian eruption in the formal house of cards has affirmed the cry of Blake: Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy... What the outcome is to be, Faust and Nietzsche have left our time to discover. (end of Damnation) 4/1994 1700: The Comic Divide � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 43 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1700 : The Comic Divide, Symbolic History, Part 23 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 23 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_23_1700--The_Comic_Divide Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2f7b53f75ef36df9dafecdba17c68a0e.pdf c96fbea0f5efbbf4787719e7eedb134a PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 22. Pascal: Humanist Reversal CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 June 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 22. Pascal: Humanist Reversal al) Eustache Le Sueur, 1645-48, Death of Raymond Diocre from Life of St. Bruno, Louvre, Paris; video: detail only, preceded by a detail of 1 Eustache Le Sueur, 1645-48, Death of St. Bruno, whole, Louvre, Paris 1) Music: Carissimi, 1650: Jepthe, from recitative: ''Heu, heu, mihi", Arc 3005 Pascal's Pensées were left unfinished at his death in 1662: Humble yourself, weak reason, be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man; and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are ignorant. Hear God! (skip in Jepthe to near close) In the religiosities of that mid-century — this Le Sueur Death of St. Bruno from Paris; 2) 2a) Zurbaran, c. 1645, St. Francis, Fine Arts Museum, Boston Zurbaran, 1633, Fra’ Jeronimo Perez, Academia de San Fernando, Madrid; video: two details only, with a return to 2, St. Francis, detail from starker Spain, Zurbaran's St. Francis; in music the oratorio deepened by Carissimi — how the proud art of reason buckles with need. Humiliez-vous, raison impuissante! Taissez-vous nature imbécille. Aprenez que l'homme passe infiniment l'homme, et entendez de vostre Maistre votre condition véritable que vous ignorez! Ecoutez Dieu! (end Carissimi) 3) El Greco, c. 1600(?), St. Francis and the Lay Brother, Monforte de Lemos; first, video detail V3a) El Greco, 1603-07, Pentecost, detail: head of a Saint, Prado, Madrid June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 3b) El Greco, 1600-1610, Christ on the Cross, Art Gallery, Cleveland (CGB'81) V3c) Again, St. Francis and the Lay Brother, detail of 3 Music: Lassus, 1550-52, Carmina Chromatico, Prophetiae Sibyllarum, introduction, Nonesuch H 71053 That was the call of Christ from the start. Fifty years before Zurbaran, El Greco had painted St. Francis — Renaissance skills hurled with Inquisitional frenzy against Renaissance itself. So the chromatic daring of music (here Lassus); the pentameter force of the anonymous: No me mueve me Dios para quererte, El cielo que me tienes prometido... Tu me mueves, Señor... To the love of Christ on the cross our love is given, And not from fear of hell or hope of heaven... If heaven were not, I would love you still, And I would fear you if there were no hell; However hopeless of all hope of favor, As now I love you, I would love forever. (CGB) (end Carmina Chromatico) But between El Greco For 2nd 2) Zurbaran, St. Francis, upper detail (where the video shows an upper detail of slide 2, the slide show uses the Leon variant of the same subject) and Zurbaran (as between Lassus and Carissimi) the focussing of Method has occurred, which in thought is called Cartesian. For 2nd 3) Again, El Greco, St. Francis and the Lay Brother; but where video uses a closer detail of slide 3, the slide show goes to the Brera, Milan version If we speak of the immolation which threads Christendom — ''Humble yourself, proud reason'' — El Greco might seem absolute; June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 4) Ph. de Champaigne, 1662, Ex-voto, Sister Catherine and Mother Agnes, Louvre, Paris V4a) Same, right detail if of the Pascalian moment, what El Greco lacks is what boldens to spatial relief this Exvoto painted by Philippe de Champaigne for the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal, where Pascal's sister was a nun and moving spirit, and to which, through her love and spiritual sway, Pascal was converted in 1654. Between El Greco and this voluminous assertion of piety 5) Rubens, 1615-18, Scholar (called von Thulden), Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V details there is a 1600 antecedent: Ruben's manifesto of the compact of flesh and reason — like the Galilean science Pascal mastered in his teens, to proclaim in his 1647 treatise on the pressure of the air: Let all the disciples of Aristotle gather their strongest arguments... to account if they can for these phenomena through nature's horror of a vacuum; if they cannot, let them acknowledge that experiments are the true masters we must follow in physics; that what has been done on the mountains has overthrown the universal belief that nature abhors a vacuum, and has disclosed a truth which can never perish — 6) Frans Hals, 1639, Portrait of an Officer, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V detail V6a) Hals, c. 1615, Shrovetide Merry Makers, Metropolitan Museum, NYC (CGB '74) that nature has no horror of a vacuum, that she does nothing to avoid it, and that the weight of the mass of the air is the real cause of all the effects hitherto attributed to that imaginary cause. We must ask who begins, during Pascal's youth, with a proclamation of reality reared on the physics of Rubens and the Caravaggiesque? One such is Hals. Perhaps his tavern-blustering is remote from the megrims of intellectual Pascal (even in the supposed dissipation of Pascal's youth); June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a7) Hals, 1664, Women Guardians of the Almshouse, detail of central figure, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem 7) Same, whole, the five women; with video details V7a) Same, detail of three women to the left 7b) Same, detail, four women to the right but the portraits Hals painted in age, in the almshouse — Music M.A. Charpentier, c. 1680, from Third Tenebrae, Vide, Domino…"; Nonesuch H-1040 or -71040 this, two years after Pascal's death, of the guardian women there — record some kind of encounter with "Pyrrhonian" terror: Let us imagine a number of men in chains; and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men... ...se regardent les uns et les autres avec douleur et sans espérance, attendant à leur tour. C'est l'image de la condition des hommes... Severe as the lamentations Carissimi's pupil Charpentier wrote for the Reform nuns of Pascal's Port-Royal: ''Her people sigh and seek bread... how vile, Lord, I am become.'' (fade Charpentier: "…vilis") 8) van Gogh, 1885, The Potato Eaters, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; + V detail As the first to penetrate the new universe and fall into the void beyond, Pascal pioneered for the existential modern. And for reasons not dissimilar, late Hals points to 19th-century Van Gogh, who, like Rimbaud, spent his Season in Hell: I am in the lowest depths and I have forgotten how to pray... the harbor of wretchedness... under a sky stained with fire and mud. Ah! the rotten rags, the rain-soaked bread, the drunkeness, the thousand loves that crucified me... At least I will ask forgiveness for having fed on lies... 9) English, c. 1377, Bronze effigy of Edward III, head, Westminster Abbey, London; + V detail June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The proud lie was harder to cultivate in the Middle Ages; no buildup for Pascalian reversals in the continual gauntness of the fallen fact. Power itself wears such a deathmask as this of Edward III, victor of Crecy, who died deserted by all. "Tragedy," says Chaucer's Monk, "is to tell '' Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly. 10) V10a) Donatello, 1438-43, David, back view, Bargello, Florence Same, side view, body to knees Music M. Cara, c. 1490(?), Non è tempo d'aspettare (instr.) Allegro 72 Only with humanist daring can atonement swell toward Savonarolla. First Donatello, as in this marvellously profane David, herald of the sensuous claim, shaped with Renaissance body, (fade Cara) its shadow: 11) Donatello, 1455-57, Pieta, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; first, video detail Music: Josquin des Prez, c. 1490(?), from the Stabat Mater, verses 4 and 5, AS 73 a compulsion of penitence for that interruption of creed-light. So Josquin's Stabat Mater breaks chordal grandeur on the Cross. (fade Josquin) 12) V12a) Michelangelo, 1526-33, Day, detail of back, Medici Tomb, Florence Same, detail of face and shoulder From the aged Donatello the buckling of soul passed to his most titanic successor, Michelangelo, in whom the earth-thrust flexes with consciousness of power, longing, imperfectibility. Thus Pascal a century after: We burn with desire to find a solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation on which to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses... June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And already in Michelangelo, that orogeny yields 13) Michelangelo, 1556-64, Rondanini Pieta, detail, Sforzesco, Milan; + V closer detail to a fault and syncline, which holds in personal fragmentation, our whole incapacity and need for grace — Herbert's "Pulley," Pascal's ''corruption of nature and redemption by Christ'': Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man. 14) Titian, 1557, Annunciation, Church of San Salvatore, Venice At the same time in Venice Titian cycloned paint in the dynamics of late Renaissance, 1st 15) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Flight to Egypt, left side, with Mary, Joseph, and Christ, Scuolo di S. Rocco, Venice a tumult which, through the whirl and forked lightening of Tintoretto, 1st 16) Jan Müller, 1590, Baptism of Christ, whole, Staatliche Graphische Collection spreads to the Mannerist north (this ecstatic Baptism by the nineteen year old Jan Müller); and of course, with El Greco, to Spain. Va2nd 15) Tintoretto, 1579-81, Resurrection, Scuolo di San Rocco, Venice 2nd 15) Again, Tintoretto, Flight to Egypt, whole: figures (left), landscape (right); [earlier videos had a detail only, V2nd 15, of Mary and background, now revised to the whole] What would shift the soul from the Magian euphoria of Bruno for a centerless infinite of innumerable animate worlds, to the vertiginous retreat of Pascal? June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We sail a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and fasten to it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us and vanishes forever. 2nd 14) Again, Annunciation, detail, angels (above); + V detail (below), Gabriel and Mary Awash on Gesualdo da Venosa's chromatic sea, do we cry with Burney, 18thcentury lover of order: "shocking and disgusting to go from one chord to another... composed of sounds wholly extraneous and foreign to any key to which the first chord belongs?" Music: Gesualdo, pub.1611, Moro Lasso BGS-5051 (from 2nd Moro), Vanguard 3rd 15) Again, Tintoretto, Flight, landscape; video substitutes V3rd15a, Tintoretto 1583-87, St.Mary of Egypt, center detail, Scuola di San Rocco, Venice; and V3rd15b, Tintoretto, 1592-94, The Last Supper, upper left, flambeau, S. Giorgio Maggiore, Venice 2nd 16) Again, Müller, Baptism of Christ, lower section; first video, upper section, heavenly choir V2nd 16a) Jan Brueghel, c. 1604(?), Aeneas in the Underworld, detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) 2nd 16b) Jacopo Bassano, 1574, Deposition (Night), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna Va17) El Greco, c. 1610-14, Laocoon, detail, National Gallery, Wash., D.C. 17) El Greco, c. 1607-13, Immaculate Conception, [or, The Assumption of the Virgin?], landscape detail (lower left), Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo (end Gesualdo) So far as Pascal's experience is of drifting in a universe of infinite recess: V17a) 18) Again, Tintoretto, landscape from the Flight to Egypt, 3rd 15 Again, El Greco, 1607-13, from The Immaculate Conception, lower half of the painting; while video turns instead to the Virgin of the upper half (see V18) Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows... what does it matter that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? Is he June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History not always infinitely removed from the end?... I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and to know the whole without knowing the parts in detail... All the principles of sceptics, stoics, atheists, etc. are true. But their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true... The sceptic Arcesilaus who became a dogmatist... such giddiness should relate back to El Greco, or to Gesualdo's trans-tonality. Yet between their exploratory wildness Va19) Bernini, c. 1625(?), Narcissus, Schleissheim Gallery, nr. Munich (CGB '59); here a detail from a2nd 19, below Caravaggio, 1594-96, Narcissus, Borghese Gallery, Rome 19) and Pascal, comes the formulated order of Baroque. The faith-leap of the Pensées is by Cartesian calculation: What shall man do in this state? Shall he doubt whether he is awake, whether he is being pinched, whether he is being burned? Shall he doubt whether he doubts? Caravaggio had forged the regrouping in art. 20) Christofano Allori, 1610, Judith with the head of Holofernes, Pitti, Florence (CGB '48) But method was ascendent in the Italy of Galileo: the Carraci in Bologna and Rome, in Florence this Allori, heavy with the rhetoric of touch — mistress-model Judith carrying the artist's own deep-shadowed head. a2nd 19) Bernini's Narcissus (cf. Va19); here video narrows to a closer detail 2nd 19) Again, Caravaggio's Narcissus, upper detail; + V lower detail In music the shift is from the atonal shorelessness of Gesualdo, to the modulating chromatics of Monteverdi, at every moment on tonal course. Music: June 1996 Monteverdi, 1614, Lasciatemi morire (from repeat) 5v. madrigal on 1608 Arianna aria, Boulanger, Seraphim 60125 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V2nd 20) Again, Allori, Judith, two video details, below and above (from 20) 21) Same, a separate close detail of Holofernes head (CGB '48) 22) Ribera, 1620-30(?), Death of Adonis, Art Gallery, Cleveland (end Monteverdi) (The youthful Ribera, Spanish Neapolitan, stretching Caravaggio for this Death of Adonis.) 23) V23a) V23b) V23c) 23d) Bernini, 1622-25, Apollo and Daphne, full-length, Borghese Gallery, Rome Same, half-length Same, detail of Daphne Same, upper detail of Apollo and Daphne Bernini, 1665, Louis XIV, Versailles In sculpture Bernini established the heroic theater of regulated passion — as selfwilled and classical, as surging and restrained, as Waller's couplets in ''The Story of Phoebus and Daphne applied," for a century and a half the most admired copy of verses in the English tongue. The poet, too, …pursues…, the Nymph with his Harmonious Lay, Whom all his Charms cou'd not incline to stay; Yet what he Sung in his immortal Strain, Though unsuccessful, was not Sung in vain; All but the Nymph, that should redress his wrong, Attend his Passion, and approve his song. Like Phoebus thus, acquiring unsought Praise, He catcht at Love, and fill'd his arms with Bays. Yet how fiercely, in that context of courtly wit, finding its European center in the Paris of Louis XIV (whom Bernini would twice portray), 24) French-German Glass, c. 1200, Christ Throned, Dom, Straßburg (CGB '59); first, video details the oldest hunger of the West seized on Pascal, Music: June 1996 Perotin, lv. Conductus, Beata Viscera, opening, (Tinayre) Lumen 32011 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History wrenching him from the booming mainstream into the eddy William James would call of the twice-born — though neither the world-calcining stare of 1200 Strasbourg, nor Perotin's angular Byzantine have Pascal's clarity of rational terror: When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man... lost in this corner of the universe... incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified... It is the heart which experiences God and not the reason. (fade Perotin) 25) Fra Angelico, 1439-45, Transfiguration fresco, San Marco, Florence; + V detail Music: Dufay, c.1440(?), Flos Florum, close, Archive-2533291 How simple and pure, how grateful, in the Christ of Angelico, in the harmonies of Dufay, the first accomodations of the divine to temporal possibility. (end Dufay) 26) 26a) Guercino, 1640(?), Christ, Acad., Carrara, Bergamo; + V detail Bernini, 1661-63, St. Jerome, detail, Chigi Chapel, Siena Cathedral Music: Monteverdi, 1610, Duo Seraphim from the Vespers, SAWT 9501-2 By the century of Pascal, the God-man swells with embodiment: the eternal and infinite become on the stage of Guercino and Monteverdi as tactile as the enfleshed loves of Marino, or that ''soft and nectarous bosom" — "molle tuo nettareo seno" in which Scipione Errico wished to appease his languid spirits: Let sight yield to feeling, eye to mouth, Gaze and beholding perish with the light; The god is blind and finds his way by touch. (CGB) (fade Monteverdi) Pascal geometrizes that heightened fever of flesh, Donne's ''Batter my heart, three person'd god." a27) Vb27) 27) June 1996 School of Avignon, c. 1455, Villeneuve Pieta, whole, Louvre, Paris Enguerrand Charonton, 1453-54, Coronation of the Virgin, Hospice of Villeneuve-les-Avignon; + V detail Again, Villeneuve Pieta, central detail (cf. a27) Pascal: Humanist Reversal 10 �C.G. Bell V27a) Symbolic History Same, close detail of Christ's head Let poems of three centuries plumb the passionate vortex of sacred love. The most sustained English lyric of the 15th century, "Quia amore langueo” (“that I languish of love”), is enacted, like this Pieta of Avignon, on the visionary crust between heaven and hell: In a valey of this restless minde I sought in mounteine and in mede, Trusting a trewe love for to finde. Upon an hill than I took hede; A voice I herde, and neer I yede, In huge dolour compleininge tho, "See, derè soule, how my sidès blede, Quia Amore langueo.'' Upon this hill I fond a tree, Under the tree a man sittinge: From heed to foot wounded was he; His hertè blood I segh bledinge; A semely man to ben a king, A gracious face to loken unto. I askede why he had peininge. He seide "Quia amore langueo." Va28) b28) 28) Botticelli, 1495-1500, Pieta, detail: Mary at Christ's Head, Alte Pinakakothek, Munich (copy of CGB '59; from Michelangelo 53a) Same, whole (copy of CGB '59, from Michelangelo 53) Same, the Magdalene at Christ's feet (CGB '59) "I am true love that fals was nevere; My sister, mannès soule, I loved her thus; Because we wolde in no wise discevere. I lefte my kingdom glorious. I purveide for her a paleis precious; sche fleith, I folowe, I soughte her so; I suffrede this peine piteous, Quia amore langueo. ''I crowned her with bliss, and sche me with thorn; I ledde her to chaumber, and, sche me to die; I broughte her to worschipe and sche me to scorn; I dide her reverence, and sche me vilonie. June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To love that loveth is no maistrie. Her hate made nevere my love her fo. Axè me no question why, Quia amore langueo. Through Botticelli, passion has that ideality. 1st 29) Correggio, 1530-34, Jupiter and Io, whole, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna But when Correggio brought Io to sexual ecstasy in Jupiter's cloud-arms 1st 30) Michelangelo, 1537-41, Saved Soul Rising, detail of Last Judgment, Vatican, Rome the sacred was bound to follow, as in Michalangelo's detail of the ascent of a woman saved. 2nd 29) Again, Jupiter and Io, detail; + closer video detail Thus when the love songs of Solomon entered the Jewish canon as the dialogues of God and soul, the fusion heightened mystical and profane. With each translation, Vulgate, Luther, King James, the erotic spreads wider immortal wings. In English no love poem can compare with the Song of Songs: I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys... 2nd 30) Again, Michelangelo's Saved Soul Rising, detail (video pans from 1st 30) Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. [Quia amore langueo.]... Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether... 31) 31a) English, late 15th cent., Madonna, Winchester Cathedral (CGB '74) Massys, c. 1510(?), Madonna Standing with the Child and Angels, Courtauld Inst. Gal., London; video: detail only, with a return to the Winchester Madonna, detail Return, return, O Shulamite; that we may look upon thee. June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From the English Madonna of Winchester, late fifteenth century (with the quiet Tudor harmony still espoused by Byrd), Music: Byrd, c. 1580(?), Mass for Three Voices, opening of Agnus, ARC3533-133 (fade) 1st 32) El Greco c. 1595, Mary from Holy Family with St. Anne, Hospital of John the Baptist, Toledo (video uses V32) 32a) El Greco, c. 1585-90, Mater Dolorosa, Thyssen, Lugano V32b) El Greco, c. 1584, detail of the two Marys from Disrobing of Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59; cf. Mozart 10); here video returns to a closer detail of 1st 32 to the tenderest El Greco's (with the swelling flow of Palestrina): Music: Palestrina, pub. 1590, Mass: Aeterna Christi Munera, 2nd Agnus, opening, Argo ZRG-5186 (fade) art perfects the sensuous incarnation of Grace. At the same time, in the "Ascent of Mount Carmel" by John of the Cross, the climax of that God-swoon possesses a folk stanza 2nd 31) Again, Winchester Madonna, detail (so video, from 31) simple as the Winchester Madonna, or the "Quia Amore Langueo'': En una noche escura, con ansias en amores inflamada oh dichosa ventura! salí sin ser notada, estando ya mi casa sosegada. a2nd 32) J. Gossaert (called Mabuse), c. 1510(?), Night Nativity, old Seemann prints (cf. Now Alpha 91) For 2nd 32) F. Barocci, c. 1590(?), Nativity, Ambrosiana, Milan June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History How miraculously the ballad structure fills, setting grammar and all aswim: A escuras y segura por la secreta escala, disfrazada, O dichosa ventura! a escuras, en celada, estando ya mi casa sosegada. En la noche dichosa, en secreto, que nadie me veía, ni yo miraba cosa, sin otra luz ni guia, sino la que en el corazon ardía 1st 33) El Greco, c. 1600, St. Andrew, Zuloaga Mus., Zumaya (N. Coast of Spain) V33a) El Greco, 1590-95, St. John, detail from The Crucifixion, Prado, Madrid Aquesta me guiaba mas cierto que la luz de mediodía, adonde me esperaba quien yo bien me sabía, en parte donde nadie parecía. Oh noche, que guiaste, oh noche amable mas que el alborada, oh noche, que juntaste Amado con amada, amada en el Amado trasformada! 34) El Greco, c. 1608(?), Agony in the Garden, Cathedral, Cuenca; + V detail En mi pecho florido, que entero para el solo se guardaba, allí quedó dormido, yo le regalaba, y el ventalle de cedros aire daba. El aire del almena, cuando ya sus cabellos esparcía, con su mano serena, en mi cuello hería y todos mis sentidos suspendía. Quedéme y olvidéme June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History el rostro recliné sobre el Amado, cesó todo, y dejéme, dejando mi cuidado entre las azucenas olvidado. In no poem is translation more incommensurate: 2nd 33) Again, El Greco, St. Andrew, detail In the dark of night With love inflamed By luck, by chance I rose unseen From the house hushed in sleep. Safe in the dark By a secret stair My luck my chance And night for a veil I stole from the house of sleep, 2nd 33a) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Mary Magdalen, central detail, Scuola di San Rocco, Venice (cf. Giants in the Earth, 2nd76) By chance of night By secret ways Unseeing and unseen No light, no guide But the flames that my heart gave — Led by those rays Surer than day I came where one waits Who is known to me In a place none seemed to be. 2nd 33b) Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, detail of Christ and Mary, Sforzesca, Milan (CGB '80) Night that guides Purer than dawn Night that joins Lover and loved And the loved into Lover changed. June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In my flowered heart That is only his He lay in sleep Lulled by the breeze The fanning of the cedars gave. 2nd 34) El Greco, 1585-86, Agony in the Garden, National Gallery, London Down turrets that air With hand serene As it stirred in his hair Gave my throat a wound That took all sense away. I ceased, I was gone My face to his own All passed away Care and all thrown down There among the lilies where I lay. (CGB) 35) Bernini, 1644-52, Ecstasy of Santa Theresa, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome; + V detail (from V35) It is in Bernini that religion most displays that orgasm — ''Cupid in shape of a swain did appear,/ And showed her his arrow.'' But in the century now of Pascal's wager and of Crashaw's Theresa of the Flaming Heart: By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire, By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire; By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His... 36) 36a) V36b) Caravaggio, 1598-1601, Calling of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francese, Rome; first, video previews 37, Heads of Matthew and Christ Same, Calling of St. Matthew, left; + V detail Same, detail of young courtier In Caravaggio's epoch-making canvas, a hypnotic Christ calls Matthew from the money-tables — enactment of the 1600 revolt and humbling of earthly power. Herbert caught it in the dialogue of ''The Collar": June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I struck the board, and cry'd, No more, I will abroad... Sure there was wine Before my sighs did drie it: there was corn Before my tears did drown it. Is the yeare onely lost to me? Have I no bayes to crown it? No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted? All wasted? Not so, my heart: but there is fruit, And thou hast hands. 37) V37a) Same, Double: heads of Matthew and Christ Same, detail of Christ Call in thy death's-head there: tie up thy fears. He that forbears To suit and serve his need, Deserves his load. But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde At every word, Methought I heard one calling, Child! And I reply'd, My Lord. 38) V38a) V38b) 38c) P. Damoustier Sr., c. 1575, Unknown Man, Hermitage, Leningrad N. Hilliard, c. 1600(?), George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, Nelson Gallery, Kansas City El Greco, 1586, Burial of Conde de Orgaz, detail of a head, Santo Tomé, Toledo Caravaggio, 1608, Alof de Wignacourt, Louvre, Paris; video, detail only (cf. V38c) We have seen Renaissance liberation, with Montaigne, or in the portraits of his time, look, as into a mirror, to find a scar, a cicatrice, those melancholy suspensions of illusion Hamlet-Pascal gleaned from the Essays: Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is he who would act the angel acts the brute... Why do we follow ancient laws and customs? Is it because they are more sacred? No, but because they are unique... as we obey superiors, not because they are just, but because they are they are superior... June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We do not sustain ourselves in virtue by our own strength, but by the balancing of two opposed vices, just as we remain upright admidst two contrary gales. Remove one of the vices, and we fall into the other... 39) An. Carracci, 1590-1600, Self-Portrait on an Easel, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V details By 1600 the value crisis fans out from the Italy of this haunted Carracci self to the English School of Night: ''What Geomantike jaw howles in mine eares,/ The echoised sounds of horrorie?'' Marino: The never-blessed mortal who is born Into this life of misery discovers, Sooner than the sun, sorrow and weeping; his morn Of birth beholds him rage in swaddling covers Bound; a boy then, with pap not pleased Forever, under the whip he leads his days; When with advancing age that lash is eased, Chance and love impel him devious ways, Destroyed, renewed; penury, plague he bears; Tired and lifeless, stooped, a breaking wave, On a prop of wood he leans his antique years And crawls at last into the closing grave, Ravished away; wherefore I moan this message: "From the womb to the tomb is a brief passage." (CGB) 40) V40a) V40b) Velasquez, 1639, The Court Jester Calabacillas, Prado Velasquez, c. 1648, The Buffoon Don Sebastiano de Mora, Prado, Madrid Velasquez, 1656, from Las Meninas: head of a dwarf, Prado, Madrid "Dalla cuna alla tomba è un breve passo." As Shakespeare's clowns darken to Velasquez's court jester, that Marino ore of ''To be or not to be" reduces to Pascal's aphorisms: Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death… It is the struggle that pleases us, not the victory... We are falsehood and contradiction; we disguise ourselves from ourselves... Human society is founded on mutual deceit... Human life a perpetual illusion... A dream a little less inconstant... June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 18 �C.G. Bell a41) Symbolic History Velasquez, 1622, The Poet Luis de Gongora, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; video defers this portrait, as to V41a, replacing it here with a detail of 41 Morazzone, c. 1610, St. Francis, Brera, Milan; first, video detail Velasquez, 1623(?), Portrait of a Gentleman, Inst. of Arts, Detroit; with video return to another detail and again the whole of the Morazzone, St. Francis 41) V41b) Music Trabaci, c. Guild 129 1610-1620(?), Consonanse Stravaganti, Music The Marino of Spain was Gongora — De la brevedad engañosa de la vida — such violence as the Caravaggiesque (this Morazzone), or in music the Neapolitan Trabaci: The driven arrow does not seek the mark On which it fiercely bites — nor chariot round In festal course over the voiceless sand A goal predestined — with more secret work Than our impetuous age, muffled in murk, Lurches toward its end, If any stand In doubt brute as he is, of sense unsound The daily sun is the comet of his dark. — Cada sol repetido es un cometa — Will Carthage confess it, and you not bow? You are at odds, friend, if you go your ways Coursing for shadows and embracing snares. The hours will not suffice to pardon you, Those hours that are wearing out the days, The days that gnaw the leavings of our years. (CGB) 42) 42a) 42b) J. Callot, 1615, Temptation of St. Anthony, drawing, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (end Trabaci) Callot, 1633, from "The Miseries of the War," The Oak of Hanged Men, Dover Callot, 1634, The Temptation of St. Anthony, etching, British Museum, London; while the video shows details of slide 42; (see V42c, d) June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From Italy to the Gallic wit of Callot (to engrave, after this St. Anthony, the horrors of the Thirty Years War, his famous oak hung with fruit of corpses) we remain in the turbulent eddies that rim the Baroque jet — what turned Donne, brightest talent of 1600 England, into ''wits forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw," distilling from Shakespeare's "siren's tears'' and ''limbecks foul as hell within'' a denser potion: The worlds whole sap is sunke: The general balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the beds-feet, life is shrunke, Dead and enterr'd; yet all these seeme to laugh, Compar'd with mee, who am their Epitaph... Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with teares... ...O, selfe traytor, I do bring The spider love, which transubstantiates all, And can convert Manna to gall, And that this place may thoroughly be thought True Paradise, I have the serpent brought... Va43) 43) P. Lorenzetti, 1321-28, Deposition, St. Francis Lower Church, Assisi Same, detail As if, over the harmony Renaissance had dreamed, Gothic pain were flooding back: The twisted stark urgency of Lorenzetti's Deposition, of Machault's Crucifixus; Music: Guillaume de Machault, c. 1364(?) Crucifixus from Mass, (Deller) Vanguard HM-1SD the perennial ''Ubi sunt'': O foode of filthy woorme, oh lump of loathsome clay... Why gloryest thou so much...? but changed, that flat anguish of symbolic relations Va44) 44) 44a) June 1996 Rubens, 1612, Descent from the Cross, study for Antwerp Cathedral altar piece, Courtauld Institute of Arts Rubens, c. 1612-14, Lamentation over the dead Christ, Mus. Berlin-Dahlem; + V detail Rubens, c. 1620, storm detail from Philemon landscape, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien; + V closer detail Pascal: Humanist Reversal 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Renaissance-impregnated: Frescobaldi now, Music: Frescobaldi, pub. 1635, Ricercar dopo il Credo (Videro), HSL2072 or Rubens: body, robe, torch-lighted thews, the rhetoric and closure of space, no transrational loopholes. In a sonnet by de Gombaul such conglomerate force overvaults us: The voice that measures earth from pole to pole, The hope and terror of the quick and the dead, That drew from nothingness both body and soul, And made the whole world at a breath, a word; The voice that roots up cedars and tall firs, But leaves the white thorn and its blossoms whole, That spares the sheepcot and the lowly shed, And lays in ruins the pride of the Capitol; 45) Zurbaran, c. 1638-39, The Vision of Fra’ Pedro de Salamanca, Monastery of Guadalupe; first, video detail Great sky-resounding voice of the thunderer, To which the rock hills and oak forests roar Which guides to their right end all things that are, Which heights above and deepest places fear, And forms that are not yet, and shades who were — That voice calls, my soul, and you do not hear. (CGB) (fade Ricercar) As in Donne's "at the round earth's imagined corners...," physical infinity looms through Judgment. How that voice resonates between the first line and the last: La voix qui retentit de l'un a l'autre Pole... Mon ame, elle t'appelle, et tu ne l'entens pas. — The seen, the heard, overpowering as in Zurbaran's Vision of Brother Pedro of Salamanca. 46) June 1996 Zurbaran, c. 1629-30, Vision of San Pedro Nolasco, Prado, Madrid; + V detail [Alternates, V46 and V46a, could be used instead] Pascal: Humanist Reversal 21 �C.G. Bell V46b) Symbolic History Zurbaran, 1630, Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Carmen College, Jadraque (or V46b detail: upper spread) Music: Frescobaldi, 1627, Toccata quinta sopra i pedali, (Videro) GDB5214 But surely the Baroque disillusion crucial to Pascal was paired with a vindicating confidence in the ways of God and man; thus in the Pedro Nolasco vision, again with Frescobaldi, Zurbaran's lights beckon almost as serenely to the other world as in Vaughan's Silex Scintillans: I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright... O fools, said I... To live in grots and caves, and hate the day... But as I did their madness so discusse, One whisper'd thus, This Ring the Bride-groome did for none provide, But for his Bride. a47) 47) Gentilleschi, c. 1620, Three Martyrs, whole, Brera, Milan; + V details Same, closer detail of Tiburtius In Italy Gentilleschi gives his Vision of Three Martyrs a gleam like that of Vaughan's Ascension Hymn: They are all gon into the world of light... I see them walking in an air of glory... Resume thy spirit from this world of thrall Into true liberty. — the physical rayed through, the ''gilded Cloud'' of Vaughan's "Retreate'' — "through all this fleshly dresse/ Bright shootes of everlastingness." Happy those early days when I Shin'd in my Angell-infancy!... O how I long to travell back, And tread again that ancient track." June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That I might once more reach that plaine, Where first I left my glorious traine; From whence th' inlightened spirit sees That shady City of Palme trees... a48) 48) 48a) Rubens, c. 1615, Eldest daughter, Liechtenstein Gallery (CGB '59) Ch. Beale, 17th cent., Self from Sketchbook, Pierpont Morgan, N.Y. Rubens, 1637-40, Landscape by Moonlight, Courtauld Institute, London; video: detail only But if angel infancy is so near, Cartesian introspection must contain in psychic duality, with Pascalian loss, Transcendental blessing: the thirteen-year-old Cowley stealing to the fields to read and dream, and to write the ode that ends "I have lived today''; the pre-romantic self quietly attested in the sketchbook of Charles Beale; the nature rapture of Traherne: A Magnanimous Soul is always awake. The whole globe of the earth is but a nutshell in comparison of its enjoyments. The sun is its lamp, the sea its fishpond, the stars its jewels, men, angels, its attendants, and God alone its sovereign delight and... complacency... You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars. 49) L. de Jong, Dutch, c. 1670(?), Shooting Party, whole, Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74) Aelbert Cuyp c. 1660(?), A Hilly River Landscape, National Gallery, London Vermeer, 1660, Gentleman and Girl with Music, Frick Collection, N.Y.C. V49a) 49b) And as we have seen before with Elsheimer, late Rubens, Claude, so in Jan Both, Cuyp, this de Jong, the landscape of common occurrence will glow as if turned to light. Traherne, from Centuries of Meditations: The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting... The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me... The Men!... Immortal Cherubims!... and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 23 �C.G. Bell a50) 50) 50a) 50b) 50c) Symbolic History Vermeer, 1658-60, The Little Street, Delft, Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam Same, c. 1658, View of Delft, Mauritshuis, The Hague Same, 1665, Vermeer's Studio, detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien Again, Vermeer, View of Delft, central detail; which video replaces with details from the whole, of city and of sky Fabritius, 1652, View of Delft, National Gallery, London Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels; I knew not that they were born or should die... The City seemed to stand in Eden or to be built in Heaven... The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it... or from "Wonder" How like an Angel came I down! How bright are all things here... I nothing in the world did know But 'twas divine. In Vermeer's pictures — as Wordsworth would take up the theme — "The earth, and every common sight... did seem/ Apparelled in celestial light...", flowing with Traherne's "Seas of life, like wine." (end Toccata sopra i pedali) Even Bunyan, cramped with fear of earth's Enchanted Ground, still sheds some natural radiance on Christian's human shore. 51) Rembrandt, 1642, Nightwatch, central detail, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59) V51a) Same, left of center, man loading gun and girl richly dressed (from CGB '59; cf. Milton b56) 51b) Rembrandt 1631, Ascension of Christ, det., Alte Pinak., Munich 51c) Again, Nightwatch, a wider detail, including the previous ones; while video goes to the whole (from CGB '59; cf. Milton 56) Is. not Pascal's century, in and out, sacred and secular, the world's chief age of certitude? Even politics in the Dutch Republic, England, the New World, rode a Biblical wave in which the empires of Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome must yield to the Fifth June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Monarchy under the present Kingship of Christ. If that was the lunatic fringe, here is Milton, 1641: amidst the Hymns and Hallelujahs of Saints some one may perhaps be heard offering... in new and lofty Measures to sing… Thy marvellous Judgements... whereby this great and Warlike Nation... casting far from her the rags of her old vices, may press on... to be found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian People at that day when thou, Eternal and shortly-expected King, shalt open the clouds... (Church Discipline) And for that great harvest "had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already." History is the interpenetration of gyres in which Pascal challenges such hope — as from the studio of Rembrandt in the 1640's came the great civic "Night Watch'' 52) Rembrandt (or school), c. 1644, Christ at the Column, Wallraf-Richartz, Köln; + V details and a cluster of nude sketches, in one of which flesh is stripped again to Michelangelo's final core of martyrdom — against the surge of reason and earth, the old renege of space, air, pride, plume, glory ("quia absurdum est") It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to a body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created and that it should not be created... Who will unravel this tangle? Nature confutes the skeptics and reason confutes the dogmatists... Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied... Is this Christian faith of neo-Christian denial? And have we a cognate in music when Schütz puts off polychoral pomp for the Passions of his old age? 53) Caravaggio, 1596-98, Head of Medusa, Ufizzi, Florence His earliest compositions come from Gabrielli's 1600 Venice, where Mannerist energy spilled over into the method of Caravaggio, June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 25 �C.G. Bell 54) Symbolic History J. Heintz, 1599, Satyrs and Nymphs, whole, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) engendering first strains of Baroque — this Heintz, For 2nd 53) Again, Head of Medusa, detail Schütz' chromatic madrigal on the vipers of love: Music: Schütz, pub. 1611, Feritevi, opening, Dover, HCR-ST 7287 (then skip to close) For 2nd 54) Again, Satyrs and Nymphs, detail; + V closer details (copy of CGB '59; darker original in video file) (close of Feritevi) 55) Rembrandt, 1630, Jeremiah foresees the Fall of Jerusalem, detail, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59); video takes a wider view from Milton 12 (CGB '59), then a close detail from 55 Rembrandt, 1642, David and Absolam, Hermitage, Leningrad; with a final video return to 55, Jeremiah, detail 55a) By 1629 Schutz' Absalom commands as dark and affirming a glory as Rembrandt's 1630 Jeremiah — gold alchemized out of tragic mass: Music: Schütz ,1629, Fili mihi Absalon, from vocal section, Nonesuch H1600 (fade) But when Schütz discards that splendor 56) V56a) 56b) V56c) June 1996 Rembrandt, 1661, Risen Christ, Alte Pinakothek, München (CGB '59) Rembrandt, 1661, Christ with a Pilgrim's Staff, Metropolitan Museum, NYC Rembrandt, 1660(?), Titus in a Monk's Habit, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Rembrandt, 1661, An Apostle in Prayer, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio Pascal: Humanist Reversal 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History for the ravaged Germany of the 1664 Passions, he still nobly affirms. Neither in him, nor in late Rembrandt's reduction to mystery, do we encounter the Pascalian crisis of life doubt. Music: 57) Schütz, 1664, from St. Matthew Passion, Christ and Osterlamm chorus, ARC-3172 Rembrandt, 1654, Three Crosses etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; + V detail The pity of Schütz and Rembrandt is free of loss and terror. Pain here is as cosmically vindicated as with Milton. As Spinoza said: "The knowledge of evil is inadequate knowledge.'' Even in the starker immediacy of etching, the anguish of the Cross is curtained in aisles of radiance, by which it is spatially atoned. How far phenomenal dark, lifted on the wave of being, still declares the glory of God — 58) Goya, 1810-20, Disasters of the War #36, "Tampoco"; + V detail a contrast with Goya may suggest — after the experience of a hundred and fifty Pascalian years. The socio-religious revolutions have become secular; Cartesian wonder has become Cartesian bondage. What would Poussin, who gave his life to nature as Universal Reason, make of this space? With Swift and Voltaire reason itself has soured. It seemed bitter enough when Pascal sharpened Montaigne: Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Here, they do not even claim that sanction. Already, as in Dostoyevski, introspective malice breaks out. 59) Rembrandt, 1655, The Flayed Ox, Louvre, Paris; + V details Rembrandt's Flayed Ox has been belabored as his most tragic self-portrait, his ''existentialist illumination of the condition of man''; and perhaps it is his most Pascalian picture, most honed to the paradox of fact: Must we kill to prevent there being any wicked? This is to make both parties wicked instead of one... What will you say is good?... Not to kill? No; for disorder would be horrible and the evil would kill the June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History good. To kill? No; for that destroys nature. We have truth and goodness only in part and mixed with falsehood and evil. Yet the whole carnal realm, against Goya, remains God's burning recess. In music, the fiercest application of Frescobaldi's keyboard mastery was by the north German Frohberger, famous over Europe for the dissonant fire of his Toccatas and Suites: Music: Frohberger, c. 1650-60, from Toccata No. 3 in G (close), RCA VICS-14 A60) Rembrandt, c. 1629-30, Laughing Self, Rijksmus., Amsterdam (CGB '59); here video introduces B of the double (60, to follow) 60) Rembrandt, Double: [A] the 1629 Laughing Self, and [B] the 1665 Laughing Self 60B) Rembrandt, 1665, Self-portrait laughing, with a bust of Heraclitus(?), Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Köln; then the video once more repeats the two self-portraits, early and late (end Frohberger) In Rembrandt's laughing self portraits from early to late, the Medieval smile of grace (under a Brueghel transformation, as in the field of Montaigne's urbanity and Shakespeare's clown-life) takes the brunt of Baroque disillusion, and comes up in the 1665 Laughing Philosopher, weirdly suspended between Rabelais and Swift. If there is such a category as Pascalian comedy, this indescribable laugh-leer should define it: Quelle chimère est-ce donc que l'homme... what monster, chaos, contradiction, quel prodige! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth... pride and refuse of the universe — gloire et rebut de l'univers. But Moliere's progress from easy farce through the 1666 Misanthrope of the mocked ideal ("me laissez enfin/ Dans ce petit coin sombre, avec mon noir chagrin''), to Le Malade Imaginaire of 1673, in which the dramatist was seized with tubercular hemorrhage as he described such symptoms, himself playing the Imaginary Invalid — N'y a-t-il point quelque danger a contrefaire le mort? Is there no danger in counterfeiting death? — is a progress of Pascallan kind. June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 28 �C.G. Bell a61) 61) Symbolic History Tycho Brahe, pub. 1598, Great Mural Quadrant, in his observatory of Uraniborg Egyptian (XVIIIth Dynasty), c. 1570 B.C., Relief: Ikhnaton Adores Aton, Museum, Cairo; + V detail In our search for Pascal's cognates, we have underplayed what distinguished him most, that his reversal occurred in the context of Cartesian science, that realm newly "won from the void and formless infinite"; that he renders science back to faith. No doubt, in the Bible, the wonders of the world are invoked in God's praise (so Ikhnaton adores the sun orb): Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion... that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: the Lord is his name. (Amos) The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth forth his handiwork. (Psalms) — though already there may be doubt whether God is praised by ignorance or knowledge: Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? (Job) Va62) Dalmation Byzantine, mid-6th cent., Atrium and Baptistry of Euphrasius' Basilica, Porec, Istria, Yugoslavia (CGB '77) Same, interior of the Basilica (CGB '77) Same, mosaic apse (CGB '77) Antioch, 6th cent., Rebecca from Vienna Genesis, f. VII, 13, National Library, Vienna b62) Vc62) 62) Music: Byzantine Chant, Mt. Athos, Easter Eve, Distribution of Tapers, ARCHIV 2533 413 In any case, Early Christian Illusionism, after Greece and Rome, reflects, with Byzantine chant, the turn from earth-knowledge as a road to God: Tertullian: After knowing Jesus Christ, we need no investigation... Augustine: June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History another form of temptation assails me... a certain vain and curious itch... of making experiments by help of the flesh, which is masked under the title of knowledge and learning... What ensues is the Dark Age retreat into symbols. 63) (fade Athos chant) Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1450, John the Baptist in the Desert, Art Institute, Chicago; first, video details (cf. Va63 and Vb63) Music: Guillaume de Machault, c.1370(?), from Ma fin est mon commencement (instr.) SER SlC-6092 From that earth-alienation, the lean rebirth of Gothic (in music Guillaume de Machault) would spill over 1400, as in Sienese Giovanni di Paolo — where the Renaissance recovery of nature hangs between the alchemical nominalism of the Red Sea above, with the allegorical rock-desert into which John the Baptist walks (without the diminution of distance), and the exploratory pocket of recessive fields. (end Machault) a64) Vb64) 64) van Eyck, 1428-29(?), Francis receives Stigmata, detail, Sabauda Gallery, Turin (cf. also Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Fouquet, c. 1470, Joshua, The Fall of Jericho (with Loire landscape), Antiq. Jud., Nat. Bibl., Paris Fouquet, c. 1470, David hears of the Death of Saul, Antiq. Jud., Nat. Bibl., Paris; + V detail Music: Hayne van Ghizeghem, c. 1465(?), from A la audienche, second half, Seraphim SIC-6104 But the Van Eycks had already shown the expanse of nature, which Jean Fouquet, by 1470, applies in Biblical scenes, to the noble valley of the Loire. So music (here Hayne van Ghizeghem) harmonized its tonal space. While the humanists restored natural philosophy as pleasing to God. Pico della Mirandola: And nothing moves a man forward to religion and the worship of God more than the assiduous contemplation of the wonders of God... When we have explored these wonders bv means of this natural magic... we shall be inspired more burningly to the worship and love of the Artist. (end Hayne van Ghizeghem) June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 2nd 63) Bosch, c. 1507(?), Hell, detail, Alte Pinakothek, München (copy of CGB '59; cf. Michelangelo 55) V2nd 63a) Bosch, 1480-85, Crucifixion, Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts, Brussels (CGB '59); video: detail only V63b) Bosch, 1500-04, Visions of the Hereafter, detail: Tunnel to the Empyrean, Palazzo Ducale, Venice When Luther took the opposite tack, calling reason "the Devil's chief whore" (die höchtste Hure die der Teufel hat"), it was as if he would drive back to spaceless surrender: True Christian divinity... commandeth us not to search out the nature of God; but to know his will as set forth in Christ... When thy conscience standeth in conflict, wrestling against the law, sin and death... there is nothing more dangerous than to wander with curious speculations in heaven and there search out God in his incomprehensible wisdom... how he created the world, and how he governeth it. For 2nd 64) Bosch, 1510-16, Temptation of St. Anthony, detail, Museum of Art, Lisbonne As always about-face was impossible. Luther's tracts employ the rationality he opposed. Even Bosch's hell-holes would evince spatial command. And the century from Fouquet 65) 65a) Brueghel, 1557, Landscape with Parable of the Sower, National Gallery, Washington, D.C., (CGB '60); + V foreground detail) Same, detail of landscape background (CGB '60) Music: Palestrina, c. 1560(?), from the 8th Ricercare (Hypomixolydian) Nonesuch HC 73014 to Brueghel launches us on the dynamism we have often stressed, insular calm expanded to a world-drop, here for the Parable of the Sower — while Calvin, against Luther, programs science to the glory of God: His essence is indeed incomprehensible... but on all his works he hath inscribed his glory... Of his wonderful wisdom, both heaven and earth contain innumerable proofs; not only those more abstruse things, which are the subjects of astronomy, medicine, and the whole science June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of physics... Adepts, indeed in those liberal arts... are thereby enabled to proceed much further in investigating the secrets of Divine Wisdom... — A lead from the 16th-century ricercare (here Palestrina), with the the visionary soaring of Brueghel's 1557 panorama, (end Ricercare) a66) 66) V66a) 66b) A. Brouwer, c. 1635-37, Landscape by Moonlight, Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin Seghers, c. 1620, Mountainous Landscape, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail Harvey, pub. 1628, Experiment on the veins of a bound arm, from Circulation of the Blood Rubens, c. 1638, Cattle Drinking at Sunset, Louvre, Paris Music: Francesco Cavalli, 1656, from Sonata for 12 instruments, Musical Heritage Society 860. to the 17th-century ground-bass antiphonal Sonata (Cavalli), with the brooding cloud physics of the first infinite landscapes of Method: this Seghers, which Rembrandt may have owned and touched a little, from about 1620, when Descartes had glimpsed his "wonderful science," to redound with Newton to "the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.'' At the same time Harvey was conceiving the material flow of the blood from circulatory nature: The moist earth warmed by the sun gives off vapors, which, rising, are condensed, to fall again, moistening the earth. By this means things grow. So also tempests and meteors originate by a circular approach and recession of the sun. Thus it happens in the body by the movement of the blood... So the heart is the center of life, the sun of the Microcosm, as the sun itself might be called the heart of the world. (end Cavalli) Va67) 67) June 1996 Rubens, 1635-40, Landscape with the Chateau de Steen, whole; National Gallery, London; where the video previews 67b, Rubens, 1638, Landscape with Shepherd and Flock, National Gallery, London Rubens 1635-40, again Chateau de Steen Landscape, vertical detail, National Gallery, London (which video takes in sections, lower and upper) Pascal: Humanist Reversal 32 �C.G. Bell 67a) 67b) Symbolic History Caravaggio, 1609, Resurrection of Lazarus, detail, National Museum, Messina Rubens, 1638, Landscape with Shepherd and Flock, National Gallery, London ; which video here narrows to a sunset detail In these divine raptures, reason was continually leading itself on, turning Cartesian dream into Substance. When Gassendi wraps a universe of Lucretian atomic reduction in a sort of late-Rubens glow of vitalism: Whatever is in the fire existed first in the wood, but in a latent state... whatever substance is in the soul… first existed in the food, seed or other matter which produced it... Nature is not accustomed to pass from one extreme to another but by intermediate stages... unconscious matter becomes conscious by an exactly similar gradation... Pascal's rapier cuts the luminous haze: Man cannot conceive what a body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body would be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being... With the Cartesian fabric always subject to Pascalian doubt, is it only temperament which throws us from ''you never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins..." Va68) b68) Vc68) 68) V68a) 68b) Contrasting moonrise vidoed from a66, Brouwer's Moonlit Landscape Rembrandt, c. 1638, Landscape with a Church, Duke of Alba and Berwick, Madrid Ruisdael, c. 1660, The Jewish Cemetery, The Dresden Gallery version of this subject Ruisdael, c. 1660, The Jewish Cemetery, Institute of Arts, Detroit G. de la Tour, c. 1630-35, Mary Magdalen with a Candle, detail only of the skull she holds, Louvre, Paris Rembrandt, 1656 (fragment), The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam to ''The eternal silence of those infinite spaces frightens me"? Or is there a historical drama, like Herbert's "Collar," from ''I struck the board" to "Child..." which leads from one to the other? June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And what we seek is not simply the 17th-century darkening into prayer, Gryphius' "Der schnelle Tag ist hin — The swift day now is done. the night with banners blown Leads up a world of stars. Men of earth weary Forsake the fields of toil. Where birds and beasts were known, Dark broods and solitude. How has our time gone by!... Lord, when the labored body sleeps, let soul awake, And when the last come day will my such evening make, Gather me from the valley of shades to thee! (CGB) Not that, but the gall to stare through the impasto glazes with which Ruisdael irradiated Huyghen's formulable wave-fronts of light, his vector solutions of mass-imapct — to see (like the skull oi El Greco's Francis or La Tour's Magdalen) the phenomenal foreclosure of soul and God, the causal changelessness that attends all reasonings by symmetry and equation — Leibniz' mill, in which one would never find anything to explain perception. Blake's Urizenic determinism of "the same dull round'': such a loss as left no road but a gambler's desperation. 69) V69a) V69b) Photograph of Eagle Nebulae M 16 and Stars, Kitt Peak, Arizona Bok Globules, etc. in Lagoon Nebula, thought to be collapsing into stars; Scientific American, 1977 Nebulae, Orion and Horsehead, from Galaxies While nature seemed indifferent to which philosophy, of matter or spirit, to which emotion, of joy or fear. If Galileo's telescope had shown him all the stars and nebulae of modern astronomy, it could not have heightened his rapture: "Other stars in myriads. never seen before... The Galaxy or Milky Way... clusters of stars." But we have just quoted Pascal's response: "Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraye." Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her grand majesty... The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature... It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere... From the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is man in the Infinite? June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 34 �C.G. Bell 70) V70a) 70b) V70c) 70d) 70e) Symbolic History Hooke, 1665, Magnified Louse from Micrographia Mite photo, from Das Leben unter dem Mikroskop Volvox: protozoan colonies, with daughter spheres, Natural History Computer-graphics model of DNA, detail, Scientific American, October 1985 Hairy house mite, from Das Leben unter dem Mikroskop Birth of the Universe, Atomic and subatomic particles, Big Bang fireworks, Smithsonian, May 1983 But to show him another prodigy, equally astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. (Robert Hooke then preparing his Micrographia, to be published in 1665 — this louse.) Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humors in the blood, drops in the humors, vapors in the drops... Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss... In the womb of this abridged atom, let him see an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmaments, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in the last, mites, in which he will find again all that the first had... without end and without cessation... Our body... imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a cosmos, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach. How could this marvellous and prophetic vision have done anything but enrapture the recipient? Its microscopic study would be the delight of Leeuwenhoek through the last fifty of his ninety years, 71) V71a) 71b) V71c) 71d) V71e) V71f) 71g) V71h) June 1996 Microscopic Nature, c. 1702, Hydra, Alga spirogyra, and protozoan stentor, The Life of the Pond Protozoan Cilliate: Stylonchia, The Lower Animals Same, Vorticellas Same, Protozoan: Stentor Coeuleus Variant detail of 71, the polyp, Hydra Spirostomum and Paramecium, The Lower Animals Coral Alveopora, with damsel fish, Wonders of Life Amoeba and Paramecium, Our Amazing World of Nature Coral reef with saber-toothed Blenny, Our Amazing World of Nature Pascal: Humanist Reversal 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History beginning with his 1674 examination of pond water: In summer the water becomes whitish... I took up a little in a glass phial, and examining it next day, found green streaks, spirally wound, serpentwise... Among these there were besides many little animalcules... their motion so swift and various, 'twas wonderful to see... ...Two sorts had long tails, wherewith they were linked fast to little roots of duckweed. In structure, these little animals were fashioned like a bell, and at the round opening they made such a stir, that the particles in the water thereabouts were set in motion... Further, I discovered a little animal whose body was at times long, at times drawn up short... its eight horns made in a marvellous manner... …I saw with wonder quite 1000 living creatures in one drop of water. The same glissando from all to nothing would stir Leibniz to ecstasy: Every portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fish. But every branch of a plant, every member of an animal and every drop of the fluids within it, is also such a garden or such a pond... ad infinitum... There is therefore nothing uncultivated or sterile or dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion... 72) 72a) V72b) V72c) Rubens, c. 1642, lower left detail, corpses from Baucis Flood Landscape, Kunsthistorisches, Wien (CGB '59) Same, wider detail of the flooded stream (copy of CGB, 1600: The Tragic Divide 76) Same, most of the Flood landscape (from CGB 1600: The Tragic Divide 75; then video returns through a detail of 72a to the late Rubens' Landscape with Shepherd and Flock, from 67b, above) Rembrandt, 1636, Landscape with a Baptism, Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover Where Pascal clutches for the handrail: For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything... Limited as we are in every way, this state which holds the mean between two extremes is present in all our impotence. Our senses June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History perceive no extreme. Too much sound deafens us; too much light dazzles us; too many concords are annoying in music, too many benefits irritate us... Extremes are for us as though they were not. They escape us and we them. The word "thrill" is "thirl," to pierce. We have seen "the ethereal thrill" of incommensurate nature break over 1600 — from Tintoretto, through El Greco, to the storm-scapes of Rubens — this flood detail from a year after Pascal's birth. But Rubens was advancing toward a testimonial glow. Rembrandt transmutes the dark, like Milton: ''there plant eyes, all mists from thence/ Purge and erase.'' Va73) D. Teniers, c. 1660(?), The Rich Man being led to Hell, detail, National Gallery, London Bernini, 1645-52, Ecstasy of St. Theresa, detail, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome Salvator Rosa, c. 1670(?), Landscape with Tobias and Angel, National Gallery, London Rosa, c. 1650(?), Witch, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome Rosa, c. 1660(?), The Temptation of St. Anthony, Galleria Palatina (Pitti), Florence (video detail) b73) Vc73) Vd73) 73) The root-system of Pascal's reversal is widespread. But does any artist so precisely turn reason on itself, superimpose dread on confidence, sacrifice formulation to the existential: "This is our true condition"? As if Bernini had really drowned in Theresa's swoon; as if Calderon had dissolved glory into dream. Salvator Rosa lacks size, though his untamed nature would sway later centuries, and his witch scenes and temptations train Bosch on Goya, conscious as Milton's Sin and Death: Nor uglier follow the Night-Hag, when call'd In secret, riding through the Air she comes Lur'd with the smell of infant blood, to dance With Lapland Witches, while the labouring Moon Eclipses at thir charms... a74) 74) 74a) P. Puget, 1670-72, Milon de Crotone, Louvre, Paris Poussin, 1660-64, Winter, The Deluge, Louvre, Paris; with video details before and after the whole, including: Same, detail to the left, snake below, Ark above; + V detail of the Ark June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We are searching the general form of the Baroque crisis. In tragedy it would require the reappearance of snake-dread within Corneille's structure of heroic virtu. But that is to specify Jansenist-trained Racine, with his romantic mutation of pain: Phèdre, study of a damned soul, its sobbing excess only assuaged by what our actors discard, swallowing final e's in prose screams — the great formalities of meter and rhyme: Une femme mourante et qui cherche à mourir... Tout m'afflige et me nuit, et conspire à me nuire… Objet infortuné des vengeances céleste, Je m'abhorre encore plus que tu ne me detestes. Les Dieux m'en sont temoins, ces dieux qui dans mon flanc Ont allumé le feu fatal à tout mon sang... — an imagery acoil with labyrinths and monsters; hope itself gliding into Phèdre's bosom-womb like an adder: Et l'espoir, malgré moi, s'est glissé dans mon coeur. The snake-attended Deluge from Poussin's last years works such deliberate containment of outrage — a shock like that Voltaire and Enlightened Europe would receive from the earthquake of Lisbon; and, as in Pascal, the church-ark is the only hope. 75) V75a) Poussin, 1660-64, Summer, Ruth and Boaz, Louvre, Paris Poussin, 1644, Extreme Unction, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh For V2nd 74) a central detail from The Deluge (video from 74) For V2nd 75) Again 75, Summer, upper left detail (video from 75) But Poussin's Flood is the Winter of a seasonal four, of which the Summer Harvest of Ruth and Boaz, from the same time, shows the opposite bounty of nature under the tree of life and in harmony with God. It is a tribute to Pascal's "Know, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself," that with the announcement of his paralyzing truth, everybody did not abandon rational science and fall on their knees — ''parce que les principes opposée sont vrays aussy" — as true as Pascal's own projective geometry or probability. That first alarm of Fear and Trembling was the Janus face of a Cartesian Method which was far from having spent itself. To how many it must have seemed, as with Milton's Adam and Eve, that June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The World was all before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide... 76) 76a) Vermeer, 1699(?), Geographer (Mathematician?), Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt; + V detail Cuyp, c. 1670(?), River Scene with view of Dordrecht, Wallace Collection; + V detail of the sky Thus Newton, pushing the Calvinist program of a God-exalting science, enjoyed his greatest years of invention, as lighted by the earth-window as the variously-named Mathematician by Vermeer: In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the method of approximating a series and the rule for reducing any dignity of any binomial into such a series. In the same year, in May, I found the method of tangents... and in November had the direct method of fluxions, and the next year in January had the theory of colors, and in May following I had entrance into the inverse method of fluxions. And the sams year I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the moon, and… deduced that the forces which keep the planets in their orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve… All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since. . . a77) Vb77) Vc77) Vd77) 77) Sir Christopher Wren, 1673-1711, St. Paul's Cathedral, London from the S.E. (CGB '77); which the video takes as two details, above, then below Same, interior, Nave looking west Same, again exterior, from the S.E., but near and looking up (CGB ‘77) Same, from the S.E.: South Transept and South-West Tower (CGB '77) Same: Dome; which the video divides into below and above (CGB ‘77) Music: Purcell, 1694, Te Deum, opening, RCA VICS-1407 It was then, just after the death of Pascal and the fire of London, that Wren assumed the rebuilding of St. Paul's, as slow in finishing as Newton's Principia, and like that book, or Purcell's "Te Deum," a symbol of reasoned command. What specifies that command? Despite Newton's hatred of the word, he builds on predictive mechanism, a clockwork of equational forces: June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 39 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this — from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena... He ends with an assumed demonstration of the Being who "governs all things, not as soul of the world, but as Lord over all..." We have ideas of his attributes, but what the real substance of anything is we know not... much less... of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes... a god without dominion, providence and final causes... could produce no variety of things… And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy. How cleanly Pascal would have dispatched that double-talk. 78) 78a) Grinling Gibbons, c. 1680(?), Boxwood of Sir Christopher Wren, R.I.B.A. Collection; the video shows the upper half, then a close detail Kneller, 1702, Sir Isaac Newton, National Portrait Gallery, London In Grinling Gibbons beautiful boxwood, Wren, who kept Newton writing the Principia and "System of the World," exhibits the ascendent rationality and temporal claim of Restoration, Royal Academy, Purcell, Locke and Dryden. Yet in refinement of ironic sensibility, he implies Pascal. Under just such certitude, Berkeley would deny the external: such humanity in Swift would embitter to merely rational horses and odious ape men: (cut Purcell) when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases both in body and mind smitten with pride, it... breaks all the measures of my patience. a79) 79) V79a) 79b) June 1996 Magnasco, c. 1740, Christ and Peter on the Sea of Galilee, whole, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '75); while video defers this, showing here an upper detail of Christ from 79b Same, detail, Christ and Peter on the stormy Sea (CGB '75) Magnasco, c. 1740, matching Baptism of Christ, also National Gallery, detail of dove against rocks and waves (CGB '75); here video adds: stormtossed ship from a79; the whole of a79; then Peter from 79 Again, the scene of 79, but a detail of Christ only, beckoning (CGB ‘75) Pascal: Humanist Reversal 40 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Domenico Scarlatti, c. 1740(?) Sonata in F Sharp Minor, old Landowska album The sharpest art sign after 1700 that Pascal's spatial terror is working underground and must crop out again, is Magnasco's dissolution of landscape into a brushwork frenzy, where for all Christ's impassioned summons, Peter sinks. While Scarlatti and Bach intensify the chromatic bypass of tonal reason. If Pascal suffered some merely private malaise of womb-sickness and God-need, that flaw — like Kafka's ghetto-neurosis — gave him a vulnerability the future would increasingly share. (end Scarlatti) "God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can do nothing here: there is an infinite chasm between. A game is being played at the extremity of that infinite distance, where heads or tails will turn up: What will you wager? According to reason, you cannot do either; according to reason you cannot leave either undone... let us weigh the gain and loss in believing that God is... If you win, you win all: if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He is. a80) Vb80) c80) 80) Zurbaran, 1658, St. Francis in Meditation, Alte Pinakothek, München Here video previews slide 80: Pascal’s Death Mask, whole Ch. Le Brun, 1689, Small Nativity, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Pascal’s Death Mask, 1662, whole; here video shows a detail (cf. V80) Music: M.-A. Charpentier, c. 1670(?). from Dialogue entre Madeleine et Jesus, French Columbia (78) DFX 43 We cannot know if that faith-leap was backward or ahead; whether the earth-yea or earth-nay was the deeper motion of mind. But the Christian, since Paul, had to be thrown from the horse to be reborn; though the Baroque-humbling was less to the ground of earth-denial than to the pietistic caress of Charpentier's Dialogue between Christ and the Magdalen. Thus the talisman of conversion found on Pascal's dead body records: "renonciation totale et douce" — "renunciation total and sweet"; and "joy, joy, joy, tears June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of joy" — "joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie." (end Charpentier) June 1996 Pascal: Humanist Reversal 42 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 43 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Pascal: Humanist Reversal, Symbolic History, Part 22 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 22 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_22_Pascal--Humanist_Reversal Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/f9c7e02d3c94ba5f47beb303ee425d65.pdf ef2089ee58227faf01523604f5127d7e PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 21. Milton: Mind's Dark Glory CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 June 1995 Last Revised July 1996 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 21. Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 1) 1a) Rembrandt, c. 1629, Self Portrait in a Gorget, Mauritshuis, The Hague; with V details Rembrandt, 1629, Self-Portrait, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Music: H.Schütz, 1629, Sinfonia from Fili Mi Absalon, Symph. Sac. I, 13 Nonesuch H-1160 "The Egotism of such a man", said Coleridge, "is a revelation of spirit." He was not speaking of the Rembrandt of this 1629 Self-portrait, nor of the Schütz whose Lament for Absalon, of the same year, has a prelude for trombones; but of Milton — the youth Wordsworth imagined "with his rosy cheeks... And conscious step of purity and pride" — since childhood serious as his own Christ in Paradise Regained "to learn and know and thence to do/ What might be public good" — Milton, who in the "Nativity Ode," also of 1629, joined his "voice unto the Angel Quire" — his style, as he would say, "by certain vital signs it had… likely to live." What willful reason rays its god-space through the palpable obscure? (fade Schütz) 2) 2a) Rembrandt 1661, Self-Portrait as St. Paul, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59) Same, detail (video then returns to whole) Thirty-two years later, Rembrandt, in age and increasing neglect, turned as often to his own deep-shadowed form — a lighted Gospel witness, himself the Apostle Paul. While Schütz, in a Germany ravaged by thirty years of war, put off the lavish choirs and instruments of Venice, to deepen in his Passions the drama of solo song and choral motet: Music: July 1996 Schütz, 1664, Last recitative and Kyrie, close, St. Matthew Passion ARCHIV 3172 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 1 �C.G. Bell a3) b3) 3) Symbolic History Rembrandt, 1648, Supper at Emmaus, cropped; Louvre, Paris (video uses Va3) Rembrandt, 1661, Risen Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); video: detail only, cf Vb3 Rembrandt, 1660, St. Peter Denies Christ, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; first, V detail (end Passion) After the Civil War and its dangerous service, Milton ("eyeless in Gaza — under Philistian yoke"), returned from "they also serve who only stand and wait" to his old promise: "to celebrate in glorious and lofty Himns the throne and equipage of God's Almightinesse"; he wrote Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes — though as earth-betrayed as Rembrandt's Peter after the arrest of Christ. a4) 4) Rembrandt, 1658, Philemon and Baucis, National Gallery, Washington, DC (CGB '60) Same, detail of group around the table (CGB '60); + closer video details Yet as Jove and Mercury graced the hut of the pious Philemon and Baucis in Rembrandt's pagan parallel for Christ's sacrament, Milton's dark house received the invocation to light: "Bright effluence of bright essence increate": Music: John Jenkins, c. 1640(?), 6v. Fancy, beg. & end; Argo RG 73 ...but thou Revist'st not these eyes, that rowle in vain To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn; So thick a drop serene hath quencht thir Orbs, Or dim suffusion veild. Yet not the more Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt Clear Spring, or shadie Grove, or Sunnie Hill, Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief Thee Sion and the flowrie Brooks beneath That wash thy hallowd feet, and warbling flow, Nightly I visit: 5) 5a) Rembrandt, 1662-63, Homer Dictating (fragment), Mauritshuis, The Hague; + V detail Rembrandt, c. 1638, Landscape with Stone Bridge, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (which video follows with 6b below, Rembrandt's Mill — as if it were V5b) nor somtimes forget �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Those other two equal'd with me in Fate, So were I equal'd with them in renown, Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides, (This Homer, to whom Rembrandt also turned in his last decade.) And Tiresias and Phineus Prophets old. Then feed on thoughts, that voluntarie move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid Tunes her nocturnal Note. Thus with the Year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud in stead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the chearful waies of men Cut off, and for the Book of knowledg fair Presented with a Universal blanc Of Natures works to mee expung'd and ras'd, And wisdome at one entrance quite shut out. 6) 6a) 6b) (fade Jenkins and skip) Rembrandt, 1661, St. Matthew and the Angel, Louvre, Paris; first, video detail Rembrandt 1629-30, Artist in his Studio, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Rembrandt, c. 1650, The Mill, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; while video takes lower left detail of waves, etc. (cf V6b) — returning thereafter to a detail of 5a, Landscape with a Stone Bridge So much the rather thou Celestial light Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. As the angel to Rembrandt's Matthew, Milton's Heavenly Muse: July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ...dictates to me slumbring, or inspires Easie my unpremeditated Verse... (Paradise Lost IX, 22-3) If Baroque self is peculiarly a revelation of spirit, it is that from these Miltonic centers (as in Jenkins' fantasy on one theme) the tensile world orders itself in light and shade, like God's sensorium in Newton’s Query. (fade Jenkins) Va7) 7) 7a) V7b) Georges de la Tour c. 1630-35, Mary Magdalen with a Night Lamp, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80) Same, detail, Mary Magdalen with a Night Lamp George de la Tour, 1630-35, The Education of the Virgin, detail of Hand and Candle, The Frick Collection Same, whole of same picture, Frick So the tactile flows from the night-lighted Magdalen of Georges de la Tour, conceptual, as in the Meditations of Descartes: ...impossible to doubt that I am in this place, seated by this fire, clothed in a winter dressing-gown, that I hold in my hands this piece of paper... Yet like others... I sleep... I have dreamed I was in this place, clothed and before the fire, when I was naked in my bed... Though now I am awake; it is with conscious deliberation that I extend this hand... I see light, hear noise, feel heat. Suppose one says these sensations are false; it cannot be false that I think I perceive... Take this wax, just come from the hive; it has still the sweetness of honey, the smell of flowers; it is hard, cold, can be worked, when struck it sounds... Let it be placed near the fire... its flavor exhales, its odor evaporates, its color changes, it loses its shape, becomes liquid, struck it does not sound. Does the same wax remain? No one doubts it... Something remains, extended, malleable, moveable... an intuition of mind... 8) Velasquez 1618, Kitchen scene with Christ, Mary, and Martha, National Gallery, London; first, video details, cf V8a Let me close my eyes, stop my ears, turn my senses from things, efface them as empty and false; so in inward gaze... I will seek little by little an awareness of what I am... I am a thinking being and possess in my- July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History self an idea of God... the thinking cause of my being... since what is cannot be produced by what is not... Once I have discovered that God exists and that he is no deceiver, it follows that whatever I see clearly and distinctly must be true... With such clarity I see that the certainty and truth of all sciences rests on the knowledge of the true God. As in Velasquez' kitchen scene with the picture-window of Christ, Mary and Martha, the daily is secured by the divine presence. We know from his first biographer, that even Descartes' Method had the seal of prophetic dreams. 9) 9c) 9d) Velasquez, c. 1657-59, Las Hilanderas, Prado, Madrid; plus various video details, cf. V9a + b Velasquez, 1634-35, Surrender of Breda, Prado, Madrid; video: detail only Velasquez, c. 1620?, St. John in the Wilderness, Art Institute, Chicago Music: Frescobaldi, 1627, Aria, "La Frescobalda," Richard Stark Again in Velasquez's Weavers, the richer by forty years, the foreground vibrates in the myth of the alcove, where helmeted Minerva (before a tapestry of Titian's "Europa") blights overweening Arachne. While in music the noble falls of Frescobaldi's Aria spread over Europe, (close Frescobaldi) swelling the cadences of the Spanish harp. Music: Diego Fernandez de Huete, late 17th cent., Cancion Italiana from Archive 198-458 And in the rhyme-flexed grandeur of Calderon's La Vida es Sueño, 1635 ("My life stands in the level of your dreams"), substance is secured, as in Descartes, by a method of doubt which seems its negation. Like Beggar Sly taken in drink to be a lord, Sigismundo, oracle-haunted prince, who knows only a mountain prison, is conveyed in sleep to the palace as heir. He breaks into the predicted passions and is returned to wake in his rock fastness: De todos era señor y de todos me vengaba. Sólo a una mujer amaba... Que fué verdad, creo yo. en que todo se acabó y esto solo no se acaba. July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 5 �C.G. Bell a10) b10) c10) 10) Symbolic History Velasquez, c. I649-51, The Toilet of Venus, National Gallery, London; + V detail Velasquez, 1656, Las Meninas, detail, right of center, Prado, Madrid Same, from Las Meninas; detail of the artist Same, Las Meninas, whole (video, lower spread only) I was lord of all and I took vengeance on all, I loved only one, a woman... And that was true, I believe, For the rest has faded away, This only does not fade. (CGB) But it is just the conviction of insubstantiality — What is life but a frenzy? What is life but a cheat? It is a shadow, a story, And the greatest goods are not great; For we dream that we are dreaming, In a life that is dream throughout — (CGB) ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueno, y los sueños sueños son. — which brings him (by a leap like Pascal's wager) to value and nobleness: I say that I am dreaming, and that I wish to do well, since good deeds are not lost, even in dream — (CGB) Que estoy soñando, y que quiero obrar bien, pues no se pierde el hacer bien, aun en sueños. Music: July 1996 (fade Cancion Italiana) Diego Fernandez de Huete, cont. from Cancion Franzesa, ARCHIV198-458 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Fit, that Velasquez's masterpiece, alone in a small room in the Prado, can be viewed in a mirror; since the artist looks out, painting the real reflection in which the king* turns as he leaves the room, another picture of him, with the queen, glowing, as in a lesser mirror; while the proud painter, before our eyes, lifts a peep-show court into worldsubjectivity. *[Rather the marshal of the palace] Va11) 11) Velasquez, 1650, Entrance to the Grotto, Villa Medici, Prado, Madrid Velasquez, 1650, Pavilion of Ariadne, Villa Medici, Prado, Madrid; + V details Perhaps Velasquez's dream is most mysterious in the Villa Medici landscapes — that Cartesian dream of noble and reasoning substance, transforming the world into thought, as Milton's friend and colleague Marvel did in his poem on a Garden: (Where) all the flowers and trees do close To weave the garlands of repose... Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade... 12) 12a) 12b) (end Cancion Franzesa) Rembrandt, 1630, Jeremiah foresees the Fall of Jerusalem, whole, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59) Rembrandt, 1636, Samson Blinded by the Philistines, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt; then a video return to the figure of Jeremiah, from 12 Again Jeremiah, close detail (from CGB '59, Pascal 55) From Roman villa to religious North: Milton's life and Latinate art vault that span. But it was the dark-light span of Europe: Rembrandt's Jeremiah foreseeing the fall of Jerusalem. So Calderon's Rosaura peers into the prison of Sigismund: The door — or tomb-mouth rather — Stands agape, and from its center Night is born, of inner dark engendered... (CGB) July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History — desde su centro nace la noche, pues la engendra dentro. (Chains' sound within.) Or Milton, of Melancholy: Of Cerberus, and blackest midnight born, In Stygian Cave forlorn... Find out some uncouth cell, Where brooding darknes spreads his jealous wings... Here the phenomenal, later to appear the determinist outcast of Cartesian cleavage, is still felt, dreamed and held, an overflow of god-filled consciousness, its light and darkness palpable, its heightened oppositions reasoned and will-wrought into one. 13) Poussin, 1629-30, Narcissus and Echo, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); with three video details Such heroics of the tactile Baroque, the French share in a classical phase — Music: Charles Mouton, pub. 1698, Allemande, "La dialogue des graces sur Iris" (lute), Turnabout TV 34137S as when Poussin, in Rome, wills from Raphael and Titian tableaus Racine might stage, or French lutenists resound — a style to which Milton relates, in the Renaissance-love of his youth, at Horton, conjuring "Lycidas" from Latin, Greek, and Sannazaro: Return Sicilian Muse, And call the Vales, and bid them hither cast Their Bels, and Flourets of a thousand hues. Ye valleys low where the milde whispers use, Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart Star sparely looks, Throw hither all your quaint enameld eyes... Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed, And Daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the Laureat Herse where Lycid lies... 14) Poussin, 1630-33?, Cephalus and Aurora, National Gallery, London; + V detail, and again the whole July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Ay me! Whilst thee the shores, and sounding Seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou to our moist vows deny'd, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks toward Namoncos and Bayona's hold; Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth. And, O ye Dolphins, waft the haples youth. (end Mouton) Though in early Milton, as in all Baroque, the Classical a15) Rembrandt, 1644, Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery, National Gallery, London; while V takes upper details from 15 to follow: Rembrandt, Presentation in the Temple (cf. Va15) b15) Again from 15 to follow, a close detail of Simeon and the Holy Family 15) Rembrandt, 1631, Presentation in the Temple, whole, Mauritshuis, The Hague; or wider variant, V15 V15a) English Baroque (N. Stone), c. 1637, Portal of St. Mary's, High Street, Oxford (CGB '84) 15b) Sir Cristopher Wren, 1673-1711, St. Paul's Cathedral, London (CGB '77) meets the contrary dark space of Rembrandt, the pedal organ of Scheidt. Music: Samuel Scheidt, pub. 1624, Modus Ludendi organo pleno pedaliter, (close) from Vox: SVBX-5316 To love the high embowed Roof, With antick Pillars massy proof, And storied Windows richly dight, Casting a dimm religious light. There let the pealing Organ blow, To the full voic'd Quire below, In Service high and Anthems cleer, As may with sweetnes, through mine ear, Dissolve me into extasies, And bring all Heav'n before mine eyes. July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though what more suggests Rembrandt's 1631 Simeon temple — Oriental? Renaissance? Baroque? revaulted out of Gothic — comes later in Milton, when the fallen angels, by organ-pipe moulds, breathe such a temple from the gold-ribbed soil of Hell: Anon out of the earth a Fabrick huge Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet, Built like a Temple, where Pilasters round Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid With Golden Architrave... Va16) b16) Vc16) 16) (end Scheidt) Again St. Paul's Cathedral, Interior, Dome, painted by Thornhill c. 1710 Michelangelo and others, 1546-90, Interior, Dome, St. Peter's, Rome Egypt, 19th Dyn. c. 1250 BC, Death Temple of Rameses II, Thebes Egypt, 19th Dyn. c. 1250 BC, Rock Temple columns of Rameses II as Osiris, dawn light, Abu Simbel What are the time-space reaches of Milton's "fabrick huge"? "Reason," he said, "is but choosing." His was the first to shape, as from "veins of liquid fire," an entire world — Creation to Judgment, with theology, philosophy, poem and plot, even the suspensions of syntax and light-and-shade deployments of style — from the sensorium of inner power, and in resonance with the dark might of his own time and personal trial. Symbolic History takes perspective in his words: Egypt: Not Babilon, Nor great Alcairo such magnificence Equal'd in all thir glories... when Ægypt with Assyria strove In wealth and luxurie. (Paradise Lost I, 717 ff.) Though the monuments for Milton lie under sacred shadow: ...Locusts, warping on the Eastern wind, That ore the Realm of impious Pharaoh hung Like Night, and darken'd all the Land of Nile... (Paradise Lost I, 341-3) 17) Neo-Babylonian, 604-562 BC, Ishtar Gate of Babylon, Staatliche Museen, Berlin (video: upper-spread only) July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V17a) Same, detail, lion, from the facade of the throne room So when Satan shows Christ the kingdoms of the world: There Babylon the wonder of all tongues, As antient, but rebuilt by him who twice Judah and all thy Father David's house Led captive, and Jerusalem laid waste, Till Cyrus set them free... (P.R. III, 280-4) In that palace July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 18) Rembrandt, 1635, Belshazzar's Feast, National Gallery, London V18a) Same, video detail of Belshazzar Belschazzar saw the writing on the wall at the feast Rembrandt magnifies, he like Milton hammering the tyranny and luxury of the East into one Biblical bullion: High on a Throne of Royal State, which far Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl & Gold. Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd To that bad eminence... (Paradise Lost II, 1-6) Va19) Persian (Darius I and Xerxes I), 5th cent. B.C. Ruins of Persepolis Vb19) Persian, 518-460 B.C., Staircase leading to Audience Hall of Darius I, "The Immortals," Persepolis 19) Persian, 518-460 BC, Ruins of Persepolis, Columns and Gate of Winged Bulls Till Cyrus set them free; Persepolis His City there thou seest... (P.R. III, 284-5) Now Persia, the tyranny that had freed the Jews, turned on the other race who (in Miltonic tension) held the love and loyalty of the West: Xerxes, the Libertie of Greece to yoke ...over Hellespont Bridging his way, Europe with Asia joyn'd And scourg'd with many a stroak th' indignant waves. (Paradise Lost X, 307ff) Symbolic assault — Asia, Moloch and all — As when a Vultur on Imaus bred — (P.L. III, 431) ravening: Va20) Acropolis, 5th cent. BC ff., from Philopappou Hill, Athens (CGB '77) 20) Same, 420-406 BC, Erechtheum, Porch of Caryatids, Athens 20a) Same (Mnesicles), 437-431 BC, Propylaea, Entrance to the Acropolis, Athens (CGB '77) July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Where on the Ægean shore a City stands Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil, Athens the eye of Greece, Mother of Arts And Eloquence... (Paradise Regained IV, 238-41) It had been the goal of his travels: When I was preparing to pass over into Sicily and Greece, the melancholy intelligence which I received of the civil commotions in England made me alter my purpose; for I thought it base to be travelling for amusement abroad, while my fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home — (Second Defence) Recalled from that journey, he would address the Aereopagitica as to the assembly of free Athens: "where books and wits were ever busier than in any other part of Greece." It is always "Those Greeks a21) Roman 1st cent. BC to 3rd cent. AD, Forum, through the Arch of Severus to the Temple of Castor, Rome 21) Etrusco-Roman, c. 80 BC, The Orator Aulus Metellus, bronze, Archaelogical Museum, Florence; + V detail V21a) Another view of the Roman Forum, through mist and Romans, the objects of our admiration." Nor can it do more than heighten the Blakean puzzle of the poet's tie to Satan, that the Tempter in Paradise Lost — As when of old som Orator renound In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence Flourishd, since mute, to som great cause addrest, Stood in himself collected, while each part, Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue, Somtimes in highth began, as no delay Of Preface brooking through his Zeal of Right — (Paradise Lost IX, 670-7) persuades Eve; since in the Second Defence, Milton so addresses the revolutionary world: I imagine myself not in the forum or on the rostra, surrounded only by the people of Athens or of Rome, but... from the columns of Hercules July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to the Indian Ocean, I behold the nations of the earth recovering that liberty which they so long had lost... 22) Roman (Philomelion), c. 30 AD, Bust of Tiberius, Louvre, Paris V22a) Roman, c. 30 AD, Tiberius' Villa, ruins, Capri (CGB '80) 22b) Roman, 15-37 A.D., Cameo: "Gemma Augustea," Tiberius, after Panonian victories, greeted by the spirit of Augustus; Kunsthistoriches Museuen, Wien Milton knew the complexity of that loss: As cruel Tiberius would wish, "When I die, let the earth be rolled in flames." (Against Prelaty) This Emperour hath no Son, and now is old, Old, and lascivious, and from Rome retir'd To Capreæ... with purpose there His horrid lusts in private to enjoy, ...his Throne Now made a stye... (Paradise Regained IV, 90 ff.) Of which Christ tells the cause: That people victor once, now vile and base, Deservedly made vassal, who once just, Frugal, and mild, and temperate, conquer'd well, But govern ill the Nations under yoke... (Paradise Regained IV, 132 ff) 23) Roman, 161-180 AD, Equestrian Marcus Aurelius, Bronze, Piazza del Campidoglio, Rome, (video: detail only) V23a) Same, another view, closer detail Now it is Marcus Aurelius opposing Christian faith with pagan self-control, "Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophie": July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Stoic last in Philosophic pride, By him call'd vertue; and his vertuous man, Wise, perfect in himself... contemning all Wealth, pleasure, pain or torment, death and life... Ignorant of themselves, of God much more, And how the world began, and how man fell Degraded by himself, on grace depending... (Paradise Regained IV, 300 ff.) a24) Roman, 312-15, Head of Colossal statue of Constantine, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome Roman Christian, 4th cent., Genii among Grapes, vault mosaic, Santa Costanza, Rome Roman-Christian, c. 320 ff, Lateran Baptistery, Rome Vb24) 24) But corruption had begun with the church itself, that "universal tetter of impurity" Milton attacks in his Church-Discipline: there is nothing wanting but Constantine to reign, and then Tyranny herself shall give up all her citadels into your hands (aspiring Bishops)... as if the heavenly City could not support itself without the props and buttresses of secular Authority... with Constantine's wealth... Antichrist began to put forth his horns... Formerly (saith Sulpitius) Martyrdom by glorious death was sought more greedily, than now Bishoprics by vile Ambition are hunted after... On the Papal Empire Dante and Milton would blame, yet love its arts (this Lateran Baptistery, often renewed, gilded Roman still), 25) Russian Steppes, 6th-7th cent., Horseman?, silver-gilt, Historical Museum, Kiev; + V detail fell the Germans, pushed by the horse-Nomads of the Steppes: A multitude, like which the populous North Pour'd never from her frozen loyns, to pass Rhene or the Danaw when her barbarous Sons Came like a Deluge on the South, and spread Beneath Gibraltar to the Lybian sands. (P.L. I, 351-5) July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Dark Age metaphor of hellish legions loud with the organ voice. Va26) French Gothic, 13th cent., West Facade, Reims Cathedral Vb26) French Gothic, early 13th cent., North Window, Rose and Lancets, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59) 26) Same, North Window, detail of Rose, with Kings of Israel and St. Anne Neither Milton nor his age thought much of Gothic Christianity, Babylonian idolatry of creed-captive grace: Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous Wolves, Who all the sacred mysteries of Heav'n To thir own vile advantages shall turne Of lucre and ambition, and the truth With superstitions and traditions taint... (Paradise Lost XII, 508-12) The same "grim Woolf with privy paw" his youth had threatened with "that two-handed engine at the door" — though his art-soul espoused those "storied Windows" and "the studious Cloyster's pale". 27) Rubens, 1635-40, Tournament in the Courtyard of a Castle, Louvre, Paris; + V details What he had treasured most from Gothic was Chivalry: In Fable or Romance of Uthers Son Begirt with British and Armoric Knights… (Paradise Lost I, 580-1) From the Latin "Damonis" we know that around 1639 (when Rubens gathered this late fruit of the same vine), Milton's planned epic, in the vein of Ariosto and Spenser, was to have celebrated the matter later scorned in Paradise Lost: Not sedulous by Nature to indite Warrs... heroic deem'd... or to dissect With long and tedious havoc fabl'd Knights In Battels feign'd... 28) July 1996 English, later 14th cent.(?), Old Radnor Church, South Wales (CGB '65) Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 16 �C.G. Bell V28a) 28b) Symbolic History English, 13th-15th cent., York Minster from Southeast English, 14th cent., Merton College Library, Oxford (CGB '85) And of course it was within the late Gothic attested by almost any parish church of England (or Wales) that the humanization began which Milton ties to Chaucer's Parson and to the man who "after so many dark Ages" first broke "the huge overshadowing train of Error": And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our Prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliffe, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Husse and Jerome, no nor the name of Luther, or of Calvin had ever been known: the glory of reforming all our neighbors had been completely ours. (Areopagitica) Since for Milton, even now "in the reforming of Reformation itself," what does God do "but reveal Himself... as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?" 29) 29a) 29b) Florence, esp. 1300-1500, general view of the city, Italy (CGB '59) Brook in Vallombrosa, above Florence to the East (CGB '86) Dona Creti, 1711, The Astronomical Observations: The Moon, Vatican Collection At the same time, that other motion reached the height which made Renaissance Florence the Athens of the Western world. Milton writes of the 1638 visit, which produced his glowing Italian poems: In that city, which I have always most esteemed for the elegance of its dialect, its genius and its taste, I stopped about two months... (Second Defence) It was fall. What memories later crowded upon him: Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades High overarch't imbowr... (Paradise Lost I, 302-4) July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History and: ...the Moon, whose Orb Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole. Or in Valdarno to descry new Lands, Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe. 30) (Paradise Lost I, 287-91) Mino da Fiesole, 1453, Piero de' Medici, Bargello, Florence; first, video detail No time will ever abolish the agreeable recollections which I cherish of Jacob Gaddi, Carolo Dati, Frescobaldo... and many others. On his way home: I got safe back to Florence, where I was received with as much affection as if I had returned to my native country... Yet those men must have been politic shadows of the free humanity that spearheaded the Renaissance two centuries before. 31) Bronzino, 1545, Grand Duke Cosimo I, detail, Medici Palace (from the Uffizi), Florence V31a) Same, whole; though video crops it below Corruption had been swift. The Medici pawns of 16th century French and Spanish rule suggest the villanies of Jacobean drama: Revenger's Tragedy, The White Devil. Such the Neapolitan who protested that his civility had been restrained by Milton's speaking with so little reserve on matters of religion. 32) V32a) Michelangelo, 1536-41, Last Judgment, Hell detail, Sistine Chapel, Rome; + V closer detail (cf. V32) Same, Last Judgment, detail, Resurrection of the dead Michelangelo had flexed his might against that slipperiness. How could Milton, before the Sistine Judgment, but catch the battle roll of his own "Heroic Verse," "ancient liberty recover'd...from the troublesome... bondage of Rimeing": July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death, A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd, Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras dire. (P.L. II, 621-8) Though Milton is a century beyond Michelangelo in that Baroque loading which was gathering head 33) Giotto, 1306, Last Judgment, detail of the Damned, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (video: closer details only, below then above) from the Gothic precision of Giotto and Ars Nova (here Machault) — Music: Guillaume de Machault, c. 1350?, Motet: Hareu!, Seraphim: SIC6092 a clarity in which Dante's Hell-circles share (those sharp man-and-snake transformations in the bolgia of thieves — even the glowing mosques of the City of Dis incised, "red as if come from the fire") (fade Machault) Va34) Rubens, c. 1620 (copy), Fall of the Damned, detail, lower right, Gallery, Aachen (CGB '74) b34) Same, whole (copy of CGB '74, slide 28 of Period Styles; of which Video here takes a lower detail) 34) Same, detail, middle right, with Hydra (CGB '74) — from that, to the cloud-swallowed depths of Rubens and Schütz — Music: H. Schütz, 1625, Heu mihi, opening, Cantiones Sacrae, Nonesuch H-71062 that "darkness visible" King James rhetoric — clouds they are without water, carried about of winds... Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever — (Jude) had prepared for Milton's "vast typhoean rage": July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Seest thou yon dreary Plain, forlorn and wilde, The seat of desolation, voyd of light, Save what the glimmering of these livid flames Casts pale and dreadful? Thither let us tend From off the tossing of these fiery waves... (Paradise Lost I, 180-4) (fade Schütz) Va35) Detail of 35, lower left, Martyrdom 35) El Greco, 1580-82, Martyrdom of St. Maurice, Escorial, Spain (video: lower section only) 35a) El Greco, c. 1579, Allegory of the Holy Name, detail, lower right, National Gallery, London (Video takes its detail from V35a) The energy climax before that thickening, marks the Spain of El Greco and Lope de Vega, bound in opposite likeness with Shakespeare's England. Against that pitchy Cloud of infernal darkness, where we shall... never more hear the Bird of Morning sing — Milton lauds, in the closing prayer of his Church-Discipline, the felicity of "this Britannic Empire... with all her Daughter Islands about her," That we may still remember in our solemn Thanksgivings, how for us the Northern Ocean even to the frozen Thule was scattered with the proud Shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada, and the very maw of Hell ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that horrible and damned blast. a36) b36) c36) 36) N. Hilliard, 1576, An Unknown Woman Aged 31, miniature, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (which video precedes with a detail of 36, Oliver's "Sydney") Robert Peale the Elder, 1603, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales and Sir John Harington, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City English, c. 1580?, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Bodleian Library, Oxford Isaac Oliver, c. 1584?, "Sir Philip Sydney," Royal Collection, Windsor Music: July 1996 John Milton, 1601, — "Fair Orian, in the morn"; ARCHIV ST 2533 347 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And indeed, beside Counter-Reformation Spain, there is an airy freedom to Elizabeth's England, where Milton's father wrote a madrigal for the Oriana triumphs of the Queen — though already the family humor seems moral: "What lives those ladies led!" (fade Fair Orian) Music: Wm. Byrd, c. 1580-90(?), from Six-Part Pavan, SAWT 9481-A Ex "I was born," Milton wrote in the Second Defence, "at a time when the virtue of my fellow-citizens, far exceeding that of their progenitors in greatness of soul and vigour of enterprise... had succeeded in delivering the commonwealth from the most grievous tyranny, and religion from the most ignominious degradation." The pose and face of Philip Sydney over Hampton Court should not impugn his fiery quality, nor the lightness of a Byrd Pavan its magnitude of soul. Va37) Elizabethan (Robert Smythson), 1568-80 and after, Longleat, Wiltshire, from far off (CGB '59) 37) Same, Longleat and Park, Wiltshire, nearer (CGB '59) V37a) Same, close view of the building (CGB '59) Those great 16th-century mansions — Longleat in its Wiltshire park — carry their richness with a lightsome grace; and there is truth in what Milton wrote, even of the titan Shakespeare: If... sweetest Shakespear fancies childe, Warble his native wood-notes wilde... (fade Byrd) Though there was a darkening around 1600, even for Shakespeare. 38) Elizabethan and Stuart, early 17th cent?, Westwood House, near Droitwich, Worcestershire (CGB '59) V38a) Same, closer view of Front (CGB '59) Music: T. Tomkins, 1610-20(?), Pavan in A minor, EA-0028 From the mansions that dot the Island, take any built or rebuilt under the Stuarts — this Westwood House, now broken into flats — the assertive portals and curves of July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Milton's century creep in. And if we advance through the same years in a sequence of Pavans, we experience such a densening gravity of sound. Thus from Byrd to his pupil Tomkins — though we could cite as well Cooper, Dering, Ferrabosco. a39) Jacobean (Robt. Lyminge), 1607-11 & ff., South Front, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (copy of 1600, slide 18; video draws from the original) Vb39) Same, interior, The Marble Hall 39) Same, interior, The North Gallery 39a) Inigo Jones, 1638, Luminalia, Scene 1, Night, Trustees of Chatsworth Settlement, Derbyshire, England ; lower center, detail, moon and reflection 39b) Formerly pre-Tudor, 1456-86; changed to Jacobean, 1603-08, by T. Sackville, Spangled Bedroom, Knole, Kent Towred Cities please us then, And the busie humm of men, Where throngs of Knights and Barons bold, In weeds of Peace high triumphs hold, With store of Ladies... Comus, presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, with parts taken by the Lady daughter and Viscount sons of the Earl, seats the poet in chivalric pride, as of Hatfield House and the stately pavan (skip forward in Tomkins) as surely as his early poetry mellows from Shakespeare: Not only that "L'Allegro," but Milton's courtly masque, July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Sounds, and Seas with all their finny drove Now to the Moon in wavering Morrice move, And on the Tawny Sands and Shelves, Trip the pert Fairies and the dapper Elves... (Comus) As the Pavan in Tompkins receives a chromatic burden, (music) Milton suffuses Shakespeare's clear chalice with conscious touch. Night hath better sweets to prove, Venus now wakes, and wak'ns Love — 40) 41) (end Tomkins) Rubens, c. 1609, Self with Isabella Brandt, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); first, video detail Rubens, c. 1635, Helene Fourment and their Son, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; + V detail (CGB ‘59) Music: Scheidt, 1621, from Pavan in A, SAWT 9461-B On the exposed Continent the baroque flexing is stronger. Against Oliver's Sydney, even the lightest early Rubens — 1609, the artist with his first bride — deploys formulable masses. So the North German Scheidt concretizes the Pavanne. And in whatever gossamer of fabric and light the old Rubens wraps his young Helene and their son, we note, as with Scheidt's tonal rhetoric on the same chromatic motif, a weighty change of state, as from air to earth. (fade Scheidt) Va42) Inigo Jones, 1616-35, Queen's House, SE view, with Loggia front: Greenwich, London (CGB '74) Vb42) Again Queen's House, from the Thames with Wrenn & Webb, Naval Hospital (CGB '74); video detail only 42) Again the Queen's House, north front (CGB '74), + V detail 42a) Same, Queen's House, South Loggia (CGB '74); or from V42a (CGB ‘74) Meanwhile, in the London of Milton's youth, Inigo Jones, launching Palladio toward the proportionate hopes of 18th century, framed the perfection of the Queen's House in Greenwich. At the same time, English song, in quiet harmony with Caccini and Peri, moved from Dowlands' fullness of late Renaissance — July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 23 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Dowland, 1600, Flow my tears, A. Schøtz, HMV DB 5270 (fade) to the word-matched Baroque of Lawes' Comus settings: "Harry whose tuneful and well measur'd Song": Music: H. Lawes, 1634, Comus, close of "From the Heavens." M. Theriault & R. Stark (fade) 43) Same, Queen's House, interior, Spiral Stair (CGB '74) V43a) I. Jones and others, 17th cent., Queen's House, Naval Hospital, etc., from Greenwich Observatory (detail only of CGB '74 slide); then video returns to Spiral Stair Music: Jenkins, c. 1640(?), Fancy with continuo, beginning; Argo RG 73 (lst, side B) With the ease of Inigo Jones' spiral stair, that England mounts from Renaissance past, toward Enlightened and Romantic future, as gradually as ground-bass harmony infilters the retrospection of the English viol fantasy — from Byrd and Gibbons, through William Lawes and Jenkins to Locke and Purcell, as great a body of music as exists. Jenkins most of all, quietly writing throughout Milton's life, sounds what is called for in "L'Allegro": 44) English post-Gothic, c. 1630, Christ Church Stair, Oxford (CGB '59); first, video details And ever against eating Cares, Lap me in soft Lydian Aires, Married to immortal verse Such as the meeting soul may pierce In notes, with many a winding bout Of lincked sweetnes long drawn out, With wanton heed, and giddy cunning, The melting voice through mazes running; Untwisting all the chains that ty The hidden soul of harmony. And in the visual music of Christ Church stair at Oxford, the fan-vault of Tudor Gothic is revived for the palatial wreathing of 1630. (fade Jenkins) So William Lawes, killed fighting for the King against Milton's party, magnifies Taverner's "In Nomine." July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 24 �C.G. Bell a45) 45) Symbolic History Central detail, same Rubens as 45 (slide only) Rubens, c. 1615-17, Peasants with Cattle, National Gallery, London; while video begins and ends with the whole, shifting between to various details But in rugged boldness these six-part Consorts rival the expanse of Rubens: Music: Wm. Lawes, c. 1625?, close of In Nomine, 6 pt. Consort No.l; ZRG55 (end) Even bookish Milton claimed that Brueghel earth: While the Plowman neer at hand Whistles ore the Furrow'd Land, And the Milkmaid singeth blithe And the Mower whets his sithe, And every Shepherd tells his tale Under the Hawthorn in the dale. From polyphonic Rubens, organized all over the canvas, each part and detail a picture of its own, 1st 46) Rembrandt, 1638, Obelisk landscape, Gardner Museum, Boston; + V detail to the obelisk of Rembrandt, centered in the vortex of light against shade, is such a shift as Milton's, from the genial amble of "L'Allegro" to the controlled enormity of Paradise Lost, structured like a single sentence from opening theme to final vindication ("long is the way/ And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light"), as glowing a clair-obscure as Milton's landscape metaphor, when the fallen angels break up their conclave: As when from mountain tops the dusky clouds Ascending, while the North wind sleeps, o'respread Heavn's chearful face, the lowring Element Scowls ore the dark'nd lantskip Snow, or showre; 1st 47) Ruysdael, c. 1660, Landscape, Uffizi, Florence; to which video adds a preview of 2nd 47, Ruysdael, Cornfield If chance the radiant Sun with farewell sweet Extend his ev'ning beam, the fields revive. The birds thir notes renew, and bleating herds July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Attest thir joy, that hill and valley rings. Yet in music, Baroque so blends polyphony and ground-bass, that Miltonic and tenebrist might attends both — thus a polyphonic fantasy by Mathew Locke: for 2nd 46) Rembrandt, 1639, Stormy landscape, Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick (which video has preceded with another detail from 1st 46, the Obelisk Landscape) Music: M. Locke, c. 1660?, D Minor Suite,Opening, West. WGS-8242 (fade) against a German ground-bass Sonata of about 1670 (with Ruysdael) 2nd 47) Ruysdael, c. 1660?, Cornfield; Gallery, Aachen (CGB '74) V2nd 47a) Ruysdael, 1660's(?), Coup de Soleil, Louvre, Paris (here video adds from 1st 47: Ruysdael, Uffizi Landscape, a close detail) Music: German, c. 1670, from lst mvt. Sonata for Viola d'Amore, AS-19 (close) "That which purifies us," says Milton, "is trial, and trial is by what is contrary." 48) Veronese, c. 1580?, Annunciation, detail, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '75); first, video close-up of angel Contrary as a Puritan's sensuous love for Catholic art. From Tasso's Gabriel (time of this Veronese), who "shooke his wings with roarie May-dewes wet" (Fairfax), through Crashaw's Marini: July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Heaven's golden-wingéd herald late he saw To a poor Galilean Virgin sent: How low the bright youth bowed, and with what awe Immortal flowers to her fair hand present — comes the messenger of Milton's "Nativity Ode": With Turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing, And waving wide her mirtle wand, She strikes a universall Peace through Sea and Land. 49) Carracci, c. 1598, St. Anthony tempted and saved, National Gallery, London; + V details 49a) Salvator Rosa, 1660?, St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness, Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow V49b) Barocci c. 1590?, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, Vatican Museum, Rome Music: de' Cavalieri, 1600, Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo, III (from "Il fuoco"), ARCHIV 2708 016 Dei Cavalieri's Oratorio of Soul and Body, saved and damned; Carracci's St. Anthony tempted and blessed — where heaven fronts Tasso's opulent devils: He lookt like huge Tiphoius loos'd from hell Againe to shake heav'ns everlasting frame; as inflated by Marini: His eyes the sullen dens of Death and Night ...(where) a dark drove Of Dragons, Hydras, Sphinxes, fill the grove — ("al foco") to that Baroque contrast Milton, even before his Italian travels, gave its lushest cognate: The lonely mountains o're, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament; From haunted spring, and dale Edg'd with poplar pale, The parting Genius is with sighing sent, With flowre-inwov'n tresses torn The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (skip in music) Since: Our Babe to shew his Godhead true. Can in his swadling bands controul the damned crew... a50) 50) Caravaggio, 1594-96, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, whole, Doria Gallery, Rome; + V angel detail Same, detail of Madonna and child, with landscape and pool And all about the Courtly Stable, Bright-harnest Angels sit in order serviceable. (fade dei Cavalieri) There would be no Milton without such clandestine caress — Caravaggio, Marini, Monteverdi — Music: Monteverdi, 1610, Vespers, Laudate Pueri, opening, SAWT 9501/2 A the sensuous as never before: Eve, reflected in the pool: ...a murmuring sound Of waters issu'd from a Cave and spread Into a liquid Plain... I thither went ...and laid me downe... to look into the cleer Smooth Lake, that to me seemd another Skie... A Shape within the watry gleam appeerd... (Paradise Lost IV, 453 ff.) Through art's soft Italian touch Va51) Attr. Bernini, c. 1650?, Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, Louvre, Paris 51) Bernini 1615-16, Monsignor Giovanni Batista Santoni, S. Prassede, Rome; + V detail (as through Bernini's Monsignors) Milton sought the strength for which Wordsworth would invoke him: (fade Vespers) July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ...thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee — on his tour declaring his faith to "the composed and wary magnanimity of the Italian." Chiabrera was writing of Columbus: Great souls chosen for a glorious work In their elected labor take delight, Nor can the petty curb of common blame Deflect the noble from the path of fame. (CGB) But it was safe to praise Columbus. What of Campanella, long in prison for a grandeur like Milton's own? — Since power and knowledge cannot move But as love fire the will; That Trinity I praise and ever shall: The Primal One of Wisdom, Power, Love. (CGB) Va52) Bernini, c. 1637-38, Bust of Pope Urban VIII, over-life-size, Gallery Barberini, Rome (CGB '86) 52) Same, black and white, head, from another angle Urban VIII was Pope. Bernini carved him the year of Milton's visit. In the Aereopagitica the Italy of that face becomes an argument against censorship: their learned men... did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought... 53) Rubens, 1622-23, Marie de' Medici at Marseilles, Louvre, Paris; first, video details: below, then above The Scots revolted against the Prayer Book, and Milton returned to an England where flattery of high Church and State swelled the new art of the balanced couplet. So the famous Waller — who attained as they said, "in his eighteenth year... a style which July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History will perhaps never be obsolete" — inflated Prince Charles' 1621 sea-danger to almost the height of fustian that Rubens bestowed on Marie de' Medici, Queen-Mother of France: Now had his Highness bid farewell to Spain, And reacht the Sphere of his own Pow'r the Main. Five Years later Waller hailed what proved a naval disaster: Where-e'er thy Navy spreads her canvas Wings, Homage to thee, and Peace to all she brings... In Milton's words: "the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite." a54) 54) 54a) 54b) Van Dyck, 1621-22, Self Portrait, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); video, detail only Van Dyck, 1639, Sir Thomas Wharton, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V detail Vouet, c. 1634, Ceres, with Harvesting Cupids, National Gallery, London Van Dyck, c. 1635-40, James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood Music: William Lawes, 1634, Triumph of Peace, Symphony, Nonesuch H1153 Rubens' pupil Van Dyck was at the court painting Cavaliers ("Gather ye rosebuds while ye may"): Shall I, wasting in despair, Die because a woman's fair... If she be not fair to me, What care I how fair she be? and: Why so pale and wan, fond lover? Prithee, why so pale? If when looking well can't move her, Looking ill prevail?... Now the irony of "Lycidas": Were it not better don as others use To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair? turns in the pamphlets to attack: what "flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar Amourist." (end Lawes) 55) 55a) 55b) 55c) Attributed to Rembrandt, 1645, A Man Reading, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; first, video detail Double: (A) Botticelli (copy?) 1478, Giuliano de’ Medici, Portrait Academy, Carrara; and (B) 1490, St. John the Baptist, detail, from Altar of Madonna, Saints and Angels, Uffizi, Florence Rembrandt, 1653, Faust in his Study, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Rembrandt, 1631, Scholar in Lofty Room, National Museum, Stockholm; + V detail Music: Albert, 1640-50, Kirchenkantata, Ritornello, old Tinayre Album, Columbia 7073 D Whether or not by Rembrandt, the searching Man with a Book defends (with Albert) the other side, Evangel against Cavalier, reenacting on the expanded stage the Florentine rift of a century and a half before, between Medici and Savonarolla. (fade Albert) And now Milton, with the prose he called his left hand, took up the trumpet to "blow a dolorous... jarring blast." Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright and to examine each matter... Truth is... a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and... though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresy... Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties... July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a56) Rembrandt, 1642, Nightwatch, detail of man armed with a pike, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59); + V wider view of same, from 56 b56) Same, vertical section left of center (CGB '59); video: upper part only) 56) Same, whole (CGB '59) V56a) Rembrandt, 1648?, Young Woman in Bed, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an Eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam: purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms. Rembrandt also in his prime celebrated the Guard of his Dutch Republic, turning the usual portrait row into a sect-of-one search for the dissevered body of Truth. What blind gabbling it too must have occasioned for all who lacked the trust which is Milton's axiom of freedom: "Who knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty?" A faith hard to hold through the fury that greeted those pamphlets of free church, free state, free marriage. Va57) El Greco, c. 1570, Christ Cleansing the Temple, National Gallery, Washington, DC 57) Rembrandt, 1626, Christ Drives the Money Changers from the Temple, Pushkin Museum, Moscow; + V detail The Cleansing of the Temple had become a symbol for Reform and Counterreform: thus with El Greco, or with this 1626 Rembrandt. Compare the violence of Milton's sonnet: I did but prompt the age to quit their cloggs By the known rules of antient libertie, When strait a barbarous noise environs me Of Owles and Cuckoes, Asses, Apes and Doggs. As when those Hinds that were transform'd to Froggs Raild at Latona's twin-born progenie Which after held the Sun and Moon in fee. July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Va58) Bosch, 1515-16, Christ Bearing the Cross, detail of Christ and mockers, Musée des Beaux Arts, Ghent 58) Same, closer detail: three mockers But this is got by casting Pearl to Hoggs; That bawle for freedom in their senceless mood, And still revolt when truth would set them free. License they mean when they cry libertie; For who loves that, must first be wise and good; But from that mark how far they roave we see For all this wast of wealth, and loss of blood. But if men are such brawling hogs (as Bosch had painted them a century before Rembrandt), how is the temple to be cleansed? The Peasant War had led Luther from Christian Freedom to revolutionary reversal: "Reason must be deluded, blinded and destroyed." 2nd 57) Again, Rembrandt, another detail of Money Changers So Hobbes, Milton's older contemporary, by a Machiavellian materialism of motive and a logic of atomic reduction, proves that men cannot, like bees, find natural agreement, but must snatch at artificial covenant against greed, hatred and "the condition of Warre... of every man against every man." 2nd 58) Again, Bosch, Bearing the Cross, whole; video: details only, upper and lower right Thus nothing but the Satanic Leviathan of unquestioned tyranny prevents the contrary worst: "continual feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short." But though Milton would repeat in Paradise Lost the passionate servitude of the fallen: "true Libertie/ Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells"; and in Paradise Regained, how "to free/ These thus degenerate, by themselves enslav'd?" — it did not undermine his search for a59) Durer, 1500, Self as Christ, Pinakothek, Munich July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History b59) Wouwermans, 1646, Cavalry Making a Sortie from a Fort on a Hill, National Gallery, London c59) Samuel Cooper, c. 1650-55?, Portrait of Robert Lilburne, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Vd59) Cooper, 1655?, Oliver Cromwell, miniature, National Portrait Gallery, London 59) Cooper, c. 1657, Oliver Cromwell, Duke of Buccleuch Collection (video, detail only) "The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth." The Messiah of Paradise Regained has dreamed of liberation: "to subdue... proud Tyrannick pow'r/ Till truth were freed, and equity restor'd." Not all the Nimrod hunt of war — "On each hand slaughter and gigantic deeds... scattered.../ With Carcasses and Arms th' ensanguin'd Field" — estranged Cromwell's Latin Secretary from the cause. Only the manifest danger of freedom's turning on itself: O citizens... if after being released from the toils of war, you neglect the arts of peace... your peace will be only a more distressing war... your very bowels will be continually teeming with an intolerable progeny of tyrants... (Second Defence) and to Cromwell (here in Samuel Cooper's miniature): if you, who have hitherto been the tutelary genius of liberty... should hereafter invade that liberty which you have defended... a most destructive blow will be levelled against the happiness of mankind... Helpe us to save free Conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose Gospell is their maw. July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against the temptations of his place, Cromwell tried to deserve the praise of that sonnet: "our chief of men" — repeatedly exhorting Parliament in Miltonic words: Is it ingenuous to ask liberty and not to give it? What greater hypocrisy than for those who were oppressed by the bishops to become oppressors themselves... 60) Wrenn and others, 1694 & ff, Naval Hospital, through gate, Greenwich (CGB '75); first video detail of gate latch V60a) Same buildings, looking towards the gate (CGB '75); video shows only the building to the right 60b) Wrenn, I672-79, interior, St. Stephen's, Walbrook, London Music: Purcell, 1692, Allegro of Symphony, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, Vanguard SRV 286 SD So ends what Thoreau would call "the last significant scrap of news" from England. Though much continued under the pomp of Restoration. Now the blind regicide, unhanged, returned to his lonely epic task. As if, through the Purcell of trumpet display, we should hear the dying falls of those da gamba fantasies with which his composing began; (end Allegro) a61) Rembrandt, 1660, Esther, Hanan & Ahasuerus, Pushkin Museum, Moscow Vb61) Rembrandt, 1661, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, detail, National Gallery, Stockholm c61) Rembrandt, 1659, Moses with Tables of Law, Berlin-Dahlen Gamäldegalerie, Berlin 61) Rembrandt, 1650, Man with the Golden Helmet, Staatlische Museen, Berlin; + V detail Music: Purcell, 1680, opening, Fantasy 5, B flat minor, ARCHIV 3007 and be drawn back to the tenebrist weight of Rembrandt and of Milton — 1ike his own Noah, "the only son of light in a dark age" — as Wordsworth would take it up: Uttering odious truth, Darkness before, and danger's voice behind, Soul awful! if the earth has ever lodg'd An awful Soul. July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory (fade Purcell) 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But did even Milton shun one truth: — that a God of the absolute, who reasons (as Pope would quip) "like a school divine" against the quest of knowledge claimed in the Aereopagitica, has no choice but to "retire... and put not forth his goodness" while Satan takes up the suppressed resolve, not to crook the servile knee and sing forced hosannahs: What though the field be lost? All is not lost: the unconquerable Will... Fall'n Cherube, to be weak is miserable Doing or Suffering... Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n. (Paradise Lost I, 105-6, 157-8, 330) For 2nd 60) Desjardins (Martin van den Bogaert), c. 1665(?), Bust of Mignard, Louvre, Paris The whole of Baroque exhibits wilful arrogation, and Milton overweens more than the vaunters of Bernini outwardness (as Heroic-couplet Dryden is reported: "This man cuts us all out, and the Ancients too.") No doubt he must pay the cost of proud command. For 2nd 61) Rembrandt, 1655, Self, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) But that he shares with Rembrandt, whom moderns more and more esteem; while everybody from Pound down knocks Milton, righteous pole of the Western big-top. It seems that, against Rembrandt, 62) W. Faithorne, 1670, Milton, engraving, National Portrait Gallery, London; + V detail V62a) Engraving of Hegel, c. 1820; then video returns to a detail of 62, Milton's face July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Milton suffered some repressive closure — as if the soul-body and moral war had made a battleground of his heart. We have said he was the first to rear a universe from the immanence of Self. Was he not also the last? Since no one after could conceive himself, on every front, of thought, poetry, politics, an instrument of God's final purpose in the world. The later god-possessed, Goethe, Hölderlin, Hegel, Whitman, inherit divided realms: "The owl of Minerva flies only in the deepening dusk." But to control so much, and lose love's center, raises the "Gerontion" question: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" Even the Aereopagitica grounds strength on the test of NO. Va63) b63) Vc63) 63) Michelangelo, 1497, Bacchus, Bargello, Florence, (upper detail of slide) Same, whole view, from the front (video, upper half only) Same, profile; + V detail from a63 Same, Head of Bacchus, full face He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain... That denial becomes the crux of Milton's works. Perhaps only Michelangelo, in the Florentine cleavage of Medici and Savonarola, had set abandonment so voluptuously against itself — this Bacchus of his youth fattening the soil for Comus ("To roule with pleasure in a sensual stie"): Within the navil of this hideous Wood, Immur'd in cypress shades a Sorcerer dwels Of Bacchus, and of Circe born, great Comus... And here to every thirsty wanderer, By sly enticement gives his banefull cup... How can Milton build but with the passion the restrainer, as Blake says, "stole from the Abyss"? Comus: July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Wherefore did Nature powre her bounties forth With such a full and unwithdrawing hand... And set to work millions of spinning Worms, That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk To deck her sons...? 1st 64) Titian, 1523, Bacchus and Ariadne, National Gallery, London (slide show crops the whole; video shows whole (from 2nd 64), + a closer detail) But all that energy — Midnight shout, and revelry, Tipsie dance, and Jollity. Braid your Locks with rosie Twine Dropping odours, dropping Wine — subsists in Comus under the disapprobation and animadversion of "lean and sallow abstinence": The wonted roar was up amidst the Woods, And fill'd the Air with barbarous dissonance... From the Bacchic art of Titian, 1st 65) Utewael, 1607, Diana and Actaeon, copy of upper part, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) (video: whole, from 3rd 65) through the Mannerist ballet of 1600 (these nymphs of the chase at the transformation of Acteon), 1st 66) Rubens, 1630-40, Diana and her Nymphs Suprised by Fauns, detail, left; Prado, Madrid, (video: whole, from 3rd 66) down to the fleshy rapes of Rubens, 1st 67) Poussin, 1636-37, Bacchanalian Revel before a Herm, detail, left, National Gallery, London (video: whole, from 2nd 67) or Poussin's formality of touch — it is hard to find a foreclosure like Milton's — from the mild prudery of "Lycidas," July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Rough Satyrs danc'd, and Fauns with clov'n heel, From the glad sound would not be absent long, Va2nd 66) b2nd 66) 2nd 66) Rubens, 1635-37, Slaughter of the Innocents, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Same, lower right detail (CGB ‘59) Again, Rubens, Nymphs Surprised by Satyrs, detail, right (video: left detail) to the Paradise Lost excoriations of Stuart licence: And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs, And injury and outrage: And when Night Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine. Witness the Streets of Sodom... (P.L. I, 497-503) But drive farr off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his Revellers, the Race Of that wilde Rout that tore the Thracian Bard... (P.L. VII, 32-4) 2nd 65) Again, Utewael, Diana and Acteon, detail, lower right (video from 3rd 65) 2nd 65a) Rubens, c.1636?, Shepherd Scene, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB 59) Against that inversion set the Elizabethan: Weelkes' madrigal in the Oriana collection to which Milton's father had contributed. Whether this music belongs to the swirl of late Renaissance, or deploys (as might almost seem) the weight of Rubens' first Baroque — its force is life-affirming. Music: Weelkes, 1601, As Vesta Was (Oriana), close, Argo ZRG-643 2nd 64) Again, Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, whole; + V close detail V2nd 64a) A. Caracci, 1588-89, Venus and Adonis, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) 3rd 65) Again, Utewael, Diana and Acteon, whole, (CGB '59); video: center detail only Va3rd 66) Rubens, 1636-40, Dance of the Peasants, Prado, Madrid July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 39 �C.G. Bell 3rd 66) 2nd 67) Symbolic History Again, Rubens, Nymphs Surprised by Satyrs, whole (video, right detail only) Poussin, Revel before a Herm, whole (video details right then left) (close of Weelkes) The close of Comus tries to validate a festive joy: To triumph in victorious dance O're sensual Folly, and Intemperance. But the staid lady and youths mince it in an "earth cumber'd... the wing'd air dark't with plumes." 68) Blanchard, c. 1630, Angelica and Medoro, Metropolitan Museum, New York City (CGB '74); with video details In post-Renaissance Christendom, the conscious validation of flesh may overween — Shakespeare's "a green goose a goddess." As Blanchard, with Cartesian touch, strokes Ariosto's erring Angelica: Milton inflates the sensual as man's imparadising claim: half her swelling Breast Naked met his under the flowing Gold Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight... Smil'd with superior Love... (P.L. IV. 495-9) nor turnd I weene Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the Rites Mysterious of connubial Love refus'd: Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk... Haile wedded Love... (P.L. IV, 741 ff) The very angel glows rosy red when Adam asks how spirits mix by touch. Va69) Vb69) Vc69) Vd69) July 1996 Coptic, 5th cent. A.D., Angel Contending with a Demonic Leda and the Swan, Coptic Museum, Cairo English Romanesque, early 12th c., Adam and Eve, fresco on Chancel wall, St. Botolph's, Hardham (Sussex) Gislebertus (Burgundian), c. 1120-40, Eve, St. Lazare, Autun Michelangelo, 1508-11, Temptation of Man, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican, Rome (slide show has combined Va, c and d69 into a single triple: a,c,d69) Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 40 �C.G. Bell 69) Symbolic History Mabuse, 1523-26, Adam and Eve, drawing, Albertina, Vienna; + V details Christianity had fought the brush fire of sex since before the Coptic relief of an Angel contending against Leda and the Swan. But neither in the Catacombs nor in the early Middle Ages (Pneumatic Eve deflated to angular skin-bags), nor in the dreamromance of that Eve at Autun, is the fall sexualized; even the force-forms of Michelangelo (Eve encrotched athwart the conspicuous male) keep body clean. It seems to go with the Protestant-tending North that Mabuse's 1525 torrid Eve reaches for both fruits at the same time. But this is fabliau-comic; Milton's reason does not smile: Against his better knowledge, not deceav'd, But fondly overcome with Female charm... As with new Wine intoxicated both They swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel Divinitie within them breeding wings Wherewith to scorn the Earth: but that false Fruit Farr other operation first displaid. Carnal desire enflaming... (Paradise Lost IX, 998 ff.) 70) Rembrandt, 1639, Adam and Eve, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; + V details In Rembrandt, touch raises the same danger. By a verism almost grotesque, he dodges; though the light on what Milton will call "those mysterious parts" flirts the bait the poet devours: There they thir fill of Love and Loves disport Took largely, of thir mutual guilt the Seale, The solace of thir sin, till dewie sleep Oppress'd them, wearied with thir amorous play. (Paradise Lost IX, 1042-5) 71) Rembrandt, 1636 (reworked 1650), Danae, Hermitage, Leningrad; + V details As Rembrandt knew, Jove's coming to Danae in a shower of gold had become a symbol of bought love, the same which Milton opposed to the hailed "connubial": ...not in the bought smile Of Harlots, loveless, joyless, unindeard, July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours... (P.L. IV, 765-7) The leaning cupid Eliot would take up ("From which a golden Cupidon peeped out") weeps and wrings his hands. But the Olympian glow of the natural body, makes Adam's To the Nuptial Bowre I led her blushing like the Morn... (P.L. VIII, 510-11) mawkishly unclean. Was Milton's luck with Eros so poor? 72) Sir Peter Lely, c. 1650-60?, Portrait of a Woman, Carrara Academy, Bergamo V72a) Coques, c. 1670, Portrait of a Man, National Gallery, London (video: detail only) V72b) Coques, c. 1680, Portrait of a Lady as St. Agnes, National Gallery, London (video: detail only) V72c) Rubens, c. 1635, Bathsheba at Fountain, Gallery, Dresden (video: detail only) 72d) Rubens, c. 1615, Sampson and Delilah, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Let this unknown English lady take us back to 1643, when the poet left his house and pupils, to return with a seventeen-year-old wife from the Royalist stronghold of Oxford. She fled to her family in a few days. Milton wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: it may yet befall a discreet man to be mistaken in his choice... The soberest and best governed men are least practised in these affairs... many who have spent their youth chastely... while they haste so eagerly to light the nuptial torch... may easily chance to meet, if not with a body impenetrable, yet often with a mind to all other due conversation inacessible... nay, instead of being one flesh, they will be rather two carcasses chained unnaturally together; or, as it may happen, a living soul bound to a dead corpse... Only when the Royalist cause was ruined, and Milton was in high place, did the girl, father and all, rejoin the household. It was long after Mary Powell's death that Adam lectures hapless Eve: He never shall find out fit Mate, but such As some misfortune brings him, or mistake... Which infinite calamitie shall cause To Humane life, and houshold peace confound. July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Paradise Lost X, 899 ff.) Or Sampson, Dalilah: To break all faith, all vows, deceive, betray, Then as repentant to submit, beseech... If in my flower of youth and strength, when all men Lov'd, honour'd, fear'd me. thou alone could hate me Thy Husband, slight me, sell me, and forgo me; How wouldst thou use me now, blind... Va73) Charles Beale (English), c. 1650?, Young Girl, draped head, from his sketchbook, Morgan Collection, New York City; though video has shown first a detail of 73: Jane Myddleton 73) Samuel Cooper, c. 1665, Jane Myddleton, Beauchamp Collection, England Milton had a second wife. who died in childbirth after 15 months. This is not a portrait of her, though of that time. Already England could foreshadow the human immediacies of Jane Austen: Methought I saw my late espoused Saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave... But O as to embrace me she enclin'd I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night. Despite the second wife, or the serviceable third, denial holds the center. Not only Comus is founded on the "yet abstain" of the Aereopagitica. a74) Double: [A] Blake, c. 1799-1800, Eve Tempted by the Serpent, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; & [B] Blake, 1807-08?, Paradise Regained: First Temptation, Collection T.H. Riches, Esq. (video takes these singly) 74) Blake, c. 1804 (copy of 1815), Title page to Milton, Rosenwald, Library of Congress; + V detail 74a) Guercino, c. 1650?, St. John in the Desert, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74); digital replaces this Guercino with V74b Rosa V74b) Rosa, c. 1660?, River Landscape with Apollo and the Sibyl, Wallace Collection, London 74c) Blake, c. 1808, Satan calling up his Legions, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (video detail only) July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In ParadiseLost it is Satan to Eve: "Die?...By the Fruit? it gives you life to Knowledge..."; in Paradise Regained, Satan to Christ: "All men are Sons of God... I also" — both trials requiring the pre-judged negative. Not even Samson can fulfill his mission without once more "fencing his ears" against "Dalilah's sorceries." No wonder Blake had to revive that "ruin'd man" from the Polyp of Ulro, that he might "break the Chain of Jealousy from all its roots." The glory of the great Baroque is also its "misplaced concreteness" — as if the radiant universe of besouled transcendence could be grasped in the spatial causality and fugal syntax of assertive non-contradiction. So Bacon, Locke and Newton deify (as Blake saw it) "the vegetable glass of nature." So (he wrote) "In Milton the Father is Destiny, the Son a Ratio of the five senses, and the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!" But of Milton only could Blake add (in warring identification): "he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it." a75) Claude Lorrain, 1630-35, The Herdsman, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (video: close detail, lower left only) 75) Claude Lorrain, c. 1635, Landscape with a Goatherd, National Gallery, London (video detail lower right only, with return to a landscape detail from a75, The Herdsman) 75a) same, Goatherd, lower section V75b) Lorrain, 1645-46, The Judgment of Paris, detail of landscape, right of center, National Gallery, Washington, DC; with return to Herdsman, left portion Music: Purcell, 1680, 5v Fantasy on one note (lst half), ARCHIV 3007 In Paradise Lost, in Claude, in Purcell, is it bondage or transcendence when thought, down tensile fields, gropes the new syntax of consciousness? Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, With charm of earliest Birds; pleasant the Sun When first on this delightful Land he spreads His orient Beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flour, Glistring with dew; fragrant the fertil earth After soft showers; and sweet the coming on Of grateful Eevning milde, then silent Night With this her solemn Bird and this fair Moon, And these the Gemms of Heav'n, her starrie train: July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 44 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (skip forward in music) But neither breath of Morn when she ascends With charm of earliest Birds, nor rising Sun On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, floure, Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers, Nor grateful Evening mild, nor silent Night With this her solemn Bird, nor walk by Moon, Or glittering Starr-light without thee is sweet. (Paradise Lost IV, 641-56) (fade Purcell) After Purcell's Fantasy on one Note, the polyphony of searching modulation finds a last controlled amplitude in the Ricercare the old Bach wrote on King Frederick's tune. Music: J.S. Bach, 1747, 6v Ricercare from The Musical Offering, Westminster WL 5070 Va76) Rembrandt, 1631, His Mother as Prophetess Hannah, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59) Vb76) Rembrandt, 1640, Holy Family, detail, Louvre, Paris c76) Rembrandt, 1634, Etching: The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (with video details) Vd76) Rembrandt, 1665, Christ and Woman of Samaria, Staatliche Museen, Berlin e76) Rembrandt, c. 1639, The Entombment of Christ, Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow; video: detail only Vf76) Rembrandt, 1639, The Resurrection of Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich 76) Rembrandt, 1636, Christ's Ascension, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) video, upper detail only So the Miltonic simile reaches out and rounds on itself: His Legions... Thick as Autumnal Leaves... in Vallombrosa... or scatterd sedge Afloat, when... Orion... hath vext the Red-Sea Coast, whose waves orethrew Busiris and his Memphian Chivalrie, While... they pursu'd The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld... Carkases And broken Chariot Wheels, so thick bestrown Abject and lost lay these... (Paradise Lost I, 301-312) Thus the inversion and stretch of the opening sentence — "Of Mans First Disobedience" (with all hanging clauses and phrases:) "and... of... whose... into... and... with... of... till... and... Sing Heav'nly Muse..." — mirrors the long inversion and quest of July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 45 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the poem, until the angel at the close melts history into Divine plan: "O goodness infinite... That all this good of evil shall produce... more wonderful Then that by which creation first brought forth Light out of darkness." And as Christ had said in Book III: "Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsom grave," now all "the Starres of Morn... see him rise... fresh as the dawning light." 77) 78) Claude Lorrain, 1668, Hagar Expelled, detail, lower left, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, (CGB '59) Same, Hagar Expelled, whole (CGB '59); while between 77 & 78, video mingles details of the two And as "Lycidas" after grief and blessing returns to today and tomorrow, calm: Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th'Okes and rills, While the still morn went out with Sandals gray... At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew: To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. so Paradise Lost settles from the deep passions of Rembrandt, into the elegiac peace of Poussin and Claude, which had always paired in Milton with tenebrist might — this late and luminous Claude — Hagar banished into silver-gray: We may no longer stay: go, waken Eve; ...from the other Hill... The Cherubim descended... Gliding meteorous, as Ev'ning Mist Ris'n from a River o're the marish glides... In either hand the hastning Angel caught Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd. They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat, Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes: Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; The World was all before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide: They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow, Through Eden took thir solitarie way. 79) Rembrandt, 1668-69, Return of the Prodigal Son, Hermitage, Leningrad July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 46 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V79a) Rembrandt 1636, Sampson Blinded by the Philistines, detail, State Museum, Frankfurt V79b) Rembrandt, 1626, Tobit and his Wife, video detail of Tobit, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59) 79c) Again, Return of the Prodigal Son, upper half Milton had always thought, along with the epic, of the drama, "wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign." And as Rembrandt in his last year felt his way into the Return of the Prodigal, Milton took up, like a suffering of his own, the blind trial and death-victory of Samson: O loss of sight, of thee I most complain! Blind among enemies, O worse then chains, Dungeon, or beggery, or decrepit age!... O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse Without all hope of day!... The Sun to me is dark And silent as the Moon When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave. As in the Oedipus Colonos of Sophocles, the death of the hero leads the Chorus beyond tragedy: Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble. Va80) Rembrandt, Double: [A] 1629, Self Portrait in a Gorget; and [B] 1669, Last Self Portrait, both Mauritshuis, The Hague 80) Rembrandt, 1669, Last Self Portrait, Mauritshuis, The Hague (or V80) 80a) Faithhorne, 1670, Portrait of John Milton, National Portrait Gallery, London (cf. slide 62) V80b) Rembrandt, 1657, Self Portrait, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 80c) Again 80, last self, detail As Spinoza knew, that is the only form Tragedy can take in the eternal rightness of Reason: "It is the nature of reason to conceive things under the species of eternity... that July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory 47 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History is, intellectual love toward God is part of the infinite love with which God loves himself." But Spinoza's love, like the last self-portrait of the dying Rembrandt, may go beyond that egotism which, to add a word to Coleridge, is a somber revelation of Spirit. In the formulated pride of Baroque, where Rembrandt moved always to inclusion, did Milton, proudest of all, let selfhood exclude and foreclose? Or had Eve's "Forsake me not thus, Adam," and true repentant tears besouled also for his blindness the great wheel of right? — All is best, though we oft doubt, What th'unsearchable dispose Of highest wisdom brings about, And ever best found in the close... His servants he with new acquist Of true experience from this great event With peace and consolation hath dismist, And calm of mind all passion spent. July 1996 Milton: Mind's Dark Glory (close Bach Ricercare) 48 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 49 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Milton : Mind's Dark Glory, Symbolic History, Part 21 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 21 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_21_Milton--Mind's_Dark_Glory Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8400052347b22e63ce9ca1843dc0a0b4.pdf 9e47334dcb1ceffbb9bd6e9724228aeb PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 20. Baroque Formulation CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 January 1993 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 20. Baroque Formulation 1) Guercino, 1621, Aurora ceiling fresco, vertical section, Casino Ludovisi, Rome (video, center-spread only) Same, horizontal view of whole (video, horses only) Same, detail of 1 (video then returns to the horizontal whole of 1a) 1a) 1b) MUSIC: Monteverdi, 1607, Orfeo, Toccata into Prologue, ARC-3035 If Baroque is to signify a period style (that, more or less, of the 17th century), its character cannot be the faulted irregularity of the word's origin, whether from a strained syllogism or a lopsided pearl; we must deepen our search for its quality, at the same time allowing that no element, neither abandon nor control, tactile realism or ideal grandeur, space, radiance, chiaroscuro, or in music monody, homophony, chromatics, can specify a style, but only the ethos-bearing configurations in which such moments are combined. (Music) It is by idea that we recognize, date, and name: as Guercino's Aurora, 1621, Monteverdi's Orfeo, 1607. Not only the space-crowding and shadowed passion of this Guercino render it Baroque; (Fade music) since what it rivals, 2) Guido Reni, 1610 ff., Aurora, Rospigliosi Palace, Rome; + V details the 1610 Guido Reni, MUSIC: Monteverdi, Orfeo, cont., Lasciati i monti, ARC-3035 is of the same style-horizon, and yet two centuries would extoll its classical ordering — as richly formal, as voluptuously academic as the Parnassus Milton evokes at the close of Comus, 1634: 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To the Ocean now I fly, And those happy climes that ly Where day never shuts his eye, Up in the broad fields of the sky: There I suck the liquid ayr All amidst the Gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree: Along the crisped shades and bowres Revels the spruce and jocund Spring, The Graces, and the rosie-boosom'd Howres, Thither all their bounties bring, That there eternal Summer dwels, a3) Poussin, 1631, Realm of Flora, Gallery, Dresden: detail of group center-left (first, a video detail of Flora, standing) Same, whole picture 3) And West winds with musky wing About the cedar'n alleys fling Nard and Cassia's balmy smels. Iris there with humid bow, Waters the odorous banks that blow Flowers of more mingled hew Than her purfl'd scarf can shew, And drenches with Elysian dew (List mortals, if your ears be true) Beds of Hyacinth, and roses Where young Adonis oft reposes, Waxing well of his deep wound In slumber soft, and on the ground Sadly sits th' Assyrian Queen … MUSIC: Orfeo, continued: Mira deh Mira, and Ahi Caso acerbo, opening A classic joy, complicit, as in the Orfeo or in Poussin's Realm of Flora, 4) 4a) 1/1993 Same, detail to the right, with Hyacinthus and others Slide: closer detail of Hyacinthus alone; or video pan detail of 3: far left, the suicide of Ajax Baroque Formulation 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History with the ripe sob of grief. What these works share — in light and calm, in shade and pathos — is the swell of heroic formulation, what stretches the Orfeo between flown recitative and figured bass. (Fade Orfeo.) Va5) Annibale Carracci, c. 1603, Flight to Egypt, Doria, Rome, with frame arch entire (CGB '86) 5) Same, with part of frame arch (CGB '86) 5a) Same, detail of barge (CGB '86) 5b) Poussin, 1648-51, Landscape with a Snake, National Gallery, London MUSIC: Orfeo, Act III, Sinfonia III and Possente spirto, opening, ARC-3036 Indeed, a polar tension of the age we call Baroque — like every such, spectrumblended in artists who seem opposed — sets on one side the balance taught by the Eclectics: this 1603 Carracci Holy Family come to Egypt, like Monteverdi's Orpheus, by Charon's barque. ("Possente spirto") All his life Poussin would seek that dignity of landscape planes; a6) Claude Lorrain, 1645-6, The Judgment of Paris, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V detail of landscape to the right Claude Lorrain, c. 1655(?), Cephalus and Procris, National Gallery, London; + V detail 6) Claude would suffuse its rural fact with Arcadian vision; while music from Monteverdi (Fade violins) to the French Chambonnieres, MUSIC: Chambonnieres, c. 1660(?), Chaconne (Landowska) V. 15180 wakes such strains as Virtue does in Comus: At last a soft and solemn breathing sound Rose like a steam of rich distill'd Perfumes, And stole upon the Air, that even Silence Was took ere she was ware, and wish't she might Deny her nature, and be never more, Still to be so displac't. I was all eare, 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death … (Fade Chambonnieres.) Va7 Caravaggio, 1605-06, Death of the Virgin, Louvre, Paris (video: center detail only) b7) Same, closer detail of Mary (video: horizontal spread) 7) Caravaggio, 1602-04, Entombment of Christ, detail, Vatican 7a) Caravaggio, 1600-01, Conversion of St. Paul, detail of Paul struck down; Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome (cf. V7a) V7b) Caravaggio, 1598-1600, Martyrdom of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome (video: center only) Against that measured tread, Caravaggio, by 1600, had forged the counterpole of Tenebrist passion. But the same Orfeo which gave us classical parallels, darkens to chromatic pain. MUSIC: Orfeo, from Act II, I languidi lumi and chorus, ARC-3035 The same Comus which twined Hesperian gardens, initiates the brooding vindication of Paradise Lost: (Chorus: Ahi caso acerbo) But evil on it self shall back recoyl, And mix no more with goodness, when at last, Gather'd like scum, and setl'd to it self It shall be in eternal restless change Self-fed, and self-consum'd, if this fail, The pillar'd firmament is rott'nness, And earths base built on stubble. a8) Same, Martyrdom of St. Matthew, detail of killer Vb8) Caravaggio, 1609, Raising of Lazarus, detail, Mus., Messina 8) Rembrandt(?), 1651(?), Descent from the Cross, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. 8a) Rembrandt, 1648, Supper at Emmaus, detail, Louvre, Paris (cf. V8b) V8c) Rembrandt(?), 1657, Crucifixion, Clark Museum, Williamston, MA (video returns to a detail of 8, Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Already the prophet scourging "The dark Idolatries/ Of alienated Judah," and "Moloch, horrid King besmear'd with blood/ Of human sacrifice …" The deepening of that naturalism of light and shade as it spreads from Caravaggio to the solemn pity of Rembrandt, does not alter whatever conscious formulation flexed the bow of the Great Baroque. Pagan and Christian, south to north, runs one groundswell of mighty style, as when Monteverdi's operatic song sires the Pietistic German of Heinrich Schütz: "For you are my Helper, my Helper and my Saviour, my God …" MUSIC: Schütz, 1636, close of Cantata "Eile Gott" (Psalm 40), (Meili) AS-28 (end) 9) German, c. 1030, MS 1640, f 117v, Christ on the Sea of Galilee, Hessische Bibliothek, Darmstadt; + V detail V9a) Regensburg or Salzburg, c. 1040, Christ on the Sea of Galilee, Staatsbibliothek, Munich (with video return to 9) In six centuries we have come from the symbolic calligraph of this storm on the Sea of Galilee, the boat of the world on the fallow waves (fealu wegas) of Germanic wandering — Cynnewulf: "anxious the struggle/ To bring our barks to land over the dire sea surges/ The Son of God our rescue." Here he sleeps in the presaged Leviathan of death and hell. MUSIC: Catalan, 11th cent., from "In eadem quippe," Gerona MS, Musical Heritage, OR-433 While the sequences and tropes of 1000 contract all things to the Dark Age center of Gregorian voice and parallel melisma. (Fade Catalan.) 10) V10a) V10b) V10c) V10d) Rembrandt, 1633, Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Gardner, Boston Schönfeld, c. 1640, The Flood, Mus. Kassel: two details only v.d. Neer, River Town Ablaze, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74) Details of 10: Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee Rembrandt (and Flinck), 1636, Sacrifice of Isaac, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) (video: detail only) MUSIC: 1/1993 Schütz, 1636, same Cantata, “Eile mich”, opening, AS-28 Baroque Formulation 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The same scene in Rembrandt confronts the new physics with the life-imperative of Protestant will: Schütz, Eile Mich, Gott zu erreten. Fleming has such a storm poem ("Des Donners wilder Plitz schlug von sich manchen Stoss"): The lightning from its cloud struck endless blows; Mortal men stood wan; the torn sky trembled Resounding to the crash; earth under crumbled, Sank below my feet; the cracked ground uprose To meet my fall, yawned tomb-wide, to enclose My pilgrim days. I took to the sea: tumbled In rage it swelled cliff-high; my carrack, humbled, Broke mast and split and settled to its close. (Skip to "immer sagen") Before, behind, on all sides round was fear; Above destruction and beneath the grave; There was no mother's son to help or save; And yet I was unbowed, thought life as dear, Nor fled impending death or when or where, Safe in the arms of my Redeemer's care. (CGB) (Close organ phrase.) 11) Cologne, c. 1400, St. Veronica's Veil, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; + V detail Within the shorter span, set Veronica's nakpin, Rhenish early 15th century — and the Christe Eleison from Dufay's first mass — MUSIC: 12) Dufay, c. 1420, 3rd Christe Eleison, Missa sine Nomine, Lyrichord LLST7234 (Fade Dufay.) Fetti, c. 1620, Veil of Veronica, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V details against Fetti's handling, about 1620 — with the Crucifixus from Carissimi's Mass for Five and Nine. MUSIC: Carissimi, c. 1650(?), from Crucifixus, Missa a Quinque et a Novem, MHS-1110 So Marino's Adone asserts the primacy of the tactile: 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Every other sense can be deluded by false objects; this one only is true, faithful minister and father of delights; the others possess parts of the body; touch extends its power through the whole, and in universal act, seizes on all things. (CGB) (Fade Carissimi.) 13) Michelangelo, 1513-16, Moses, detail, S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome No wonder the turn to Baroque was once assigned to Michelangelo. But the transpersonal might of his Renaissance ingathering is far 14) Rubens, 1603-4, Judas Thaddaus, Prado, Madrid (video: detail only) from the conscious rhetoric of the century of Rubens, or of Milton's blind touch: In darkness, and with dangers compast round, And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Vist'st my slumbers Nightly, or when Morn Purples the East … (Paradise Lost, VII) 15) V15a) Persian, c. 1400(?), Jonah and the Whale, Metroplitan Museum, NYC Double: [A] Japan, 607 A.D., Bronze Buddha, Horgu-ji, Nara; and [B] Kamakura, 1328, Shinto deity as Bodhisattva, Fine Arts, Boston (video returns to 15, Jonah and the Whale The spatial filling-in of the symbolic is not confined to the art-history of the West. The whole current of the later world may have run that way, as in the Japanese garden refinements of the Buddha. To pass from this 1425 Persian representation of Jonah, as flat as Gothic, 16) Iran (for Shah Tamasp), 1527-28, Rustrum Cleaves a Witch, Book of Kings, Metropolitan Museum, New York City (video shows detail only) to the adventures of the Book of Kings a hundred years later, is to parallel the Italian Renaissance — as Gentile Bellini's sketch of a Turkish artist might remind us — in touch with the Moslem East. 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 7 �C.G. Bell 17) Symbolic History Simone Martini, 1315-21, Madonna from the Maestas, Palazzo Publico, Siena Same, wider section V17a) But only Europe goes from thinness and ideality MUSIC: Jacobo da Bologna, c. 1340, Fenice fu, close, ARC-3003, or AS-59 (already in 14th century Ars Nova and Simone Martini exploring later modalities), (Close Fenice fu.) Va18) 18) El Greco, 1577-79, The Trinity, upper detail, Prado, Madrid Same, closer detail of Father and Son through a dynamic crisis, both symbolic and physical — so Victoria and El Greco — MUSIC: Victoria, pub. 1605, from Kyrie of Missa Pro Defunctis, Vox DL-690 (Close) 19) Francesco del Cairo, 1630-35, Herodias, detail, Metropolitan Museum, New York City (CGB '74) V19a) Same, whole, including frame (CGB '74) 19b) Bernini, 1668-70, Angel with Scroll and Crown of Thorns, S. Andrea delle Fratte, Rome MUSIC: Frescobaldi, 1630, from Voi Partite mio sole, (Meili) AS-79 to an art of volitional command, as causally flexed as the moments of a Newtonian force array. So the tragedies of Corneille turn on heroic obligation — family against king, love against honor; as when the Cid discovers in the insulter of his father the father of his love: Miserable vengeur d'une juste querelle — Whichever way, fierce anguish follows me … I draw the sword of pain, To seek, alas, the father of Chimene. (CGB) Frescobaldi's recitative plucks the reflective chords of the viscera. (Close Frescobaldi.) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 8 �C.G. Bell 20) 20a) V20b) For V20c) Symbolic History Rembrandt, 1629, Self Portrait, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '53) Rembrandt, c. 1634, Self Portrait, Uffizi, Florence Rembrandt, c. 1628, Self Portrait, Stattl. Kunstsammlungen, Kassel Video goes here to a21 (see below) At the center of the change lies the validating subjectivity of the infinite self, as much a point of departure for Rembrandt, 1629, as for Descartes' "wonderful science" — its 1619 discovery, in the famous "room with a stove", described in the Method, of 1637: As for the opinions I had received up to that time, I thought it better to make a clean sweep and throw them all away. … Thus, seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was ready to suppose that there was no such reality as they give us images of; and because reason can err, even in geometry, I rejected what before had seemed the surest proofs; moreover, since such thoughts as come to us waking can also visit our sleep, I resolved to treat all that had entered my mind as no more real than the figments of my dreams. But in the act of thinking all was false, it came to me as necessary that I, who did that thinking, must be real. Thus observing that the truth: I think; therefore, I am, was so certain that no extravagance of the skeptics could ever shake it, I took it boldly for the first principle of the philosophy I was in search of … [Discourse on Method] a21) 21) Rembrandt, 1630, Self Portrait, bareheaded, Aerdenhout, Holland (video returns to a close detail of 20, 1629 Self Portrait, Munich) Rembrandt, 1628, Man in a Window-lighted Room, National Gallery, London; + V detail By an axiomatic leap the self Descartes discovers is not merely the doubter, dreamer, nightmarer (from whom little in the way of certainty could be deduced), but an eternal thinking substance, clear and sufficient assurance of God and causality, with its mathematical plotting of world, perception, and all, along equational abscissas of space and time: All points of those curves … which admit of precise measurement must bear some rapport to all points of a straight line, a relation which can be expressed by means of a single equation… If then we should take successively an infinite number of values for the line y, we should obtain an infinite number of values for the line x, and therefore an infinity of different points, such as C, by means of which the required curve could be drawn… 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 9 �C.G. Bell 22) 22a) V22b) 22c) Symbolic History Rubens, c. 1638(?), Sunset with Cattle, Louvre, Paris Ruisdael, 1660-70(?), Sunset in a Wood, Wallace Collection, London Claude Lorrain, 1660, Juno, Io, and Argus, National Gallery, Dublin (CGB '74) Rembrandt, 1643, Etching: The Three Trees, Rijksmuseum In ordered infinitude the landscape from this late Rubens through Claude, Rembrandt, and Ruisdael matches the science from Galileo to Huygens, Leibniz, and Newton. Descartes' System of the World must have been one of the proudest of these constructions. He burned it when Galileo was condemned; but a guarded summary appears in Book V of the Methode: I showed how the greatest part of the matter in the original chaos must, in accordance with natural laws, dispose and arrange itself in such a way as to present the appearance of heavens; how in the meantime some of its parts must compose an earth and some planets and comets and others a sun and fixed stars… I next came to speak of the earth and to show how … mountains, seas, fountains, and rivers might naturally be formed in it, the metals produced in the mines and plants grow in the fields; and in general, how … things purely material might, in the course of time, become such as we at present observe them … How far that looming space of thought takes us 23) Jan van Eyck, 1435, Landscape detail from Madonna with Chancellor Rolin, Louvre, Paris For V23a - a24) Video repeats 22c, Rembrandt's Three Trees 1st 24) Zurbaran, 1633(?), Cup and Three Vases, Prado, Madrid from the naive delight observation had opened for Jan van Eyck, through a sacred loggia beyond the Virgin and a donor's praying hands; or what giant intrepid will exchanged this magic kingdom for that weighty republic of cause? 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Galileo best states the axiom of material validity which dignifies the new world, and which lifts the still life to an apotheosis of the actual — Spinoza's "Reality and Perfection … one and the same." 1st 25) Hugo van der Goes, 1476-78, Portinari Altar, detail of wheat and flowers, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) Sagredo, Galileo's priest of establishment, has expressed the old weightless geometry "where mere size cuts no figure." But it does not explain the physical, leaves it to Reason's antagonist, "the irrational imperfections of the material." For Va2nd 24) Zurbaran, detail of 24, Cup and two of the vases 2nd 24) Same, detail of the cup (to the left, with saucer) Salviati saves us by incorporating the mathematical logos in the motions and forces of things, converting bondage into glory. But he can only redeem the physical by its idealization: "Since I assume matter to be unchangeable and always the same." It is that incarnate axiom which haloes the tactility of a Zurburan goblet and bowl. 2nd 25) Memling, c. 1480, Chalice of St. John the Evangelist, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V detail Where a 1480 Memling Chalice of St. John, as perfect in observation, abides in the mystery of symbol, the cup of that snake-fallen body Christ drank as Second Adam — the same snake Moses raised on the rod, to become the Rood. For 1st 26) Tintoretto, 1548, St. Mark rescues a Saracen, detail, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59) At the climax of the whirl which led from spaceless hovering to material formulation, Bruno, burned in 1600, as Inquisition sapped the terminal freedom of Venice, acclaims himself Hermetic seer of a God-irradiated universe, For 1st 27) Tintoretto, 1550-3, Creation of Animals, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59) daring as Tintoretto's charged effluvia of light: 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Behold now, the man who has pierced the air and penetrated the sky … who has broken down those imaginary divisions between spheres … and thrown wide the doors of truth … stripping the veils and coverings from the face of nature… For 1st 28) Same: Expulsion detail of The Fall (CGB '59) All those creatures who may not gaze upon the lights of heaven, but are destined to dwell in the infernal circles of Pluto's dark prisonhouse, when they hear the dread summons of Alecton's furious horn, spread wide their wings and veer away in rapid flight toward their abodes. For 1st 29) Tintoretto, 1577, Moses Strikes the Rock, ceiling, Scuola San Rocco, Venice (CGB '48) But those who were born to see the sun, full of thanksgiving at the end of the loathsome night, dispose themselves to receive in the very center of their eyes' crystal globe the long expected rays, and with unaccustomed gladness in their hearts, lift up hands and voices to adore the East … For 2nd 28-27) Tintoretto, c. 1562, Removing St. Mark's Body from Alexandria, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59) [V2nd 28 only, since V2nd 27 shows a view of the Sala del Collegio, other than the CGB of 2nd 26, below.] Such the confidence of Vieta's algebra, 1591: "This Universal Mathematics enables us to attack the proud problem of problems … For there is no problem which cannot be solved.” In music that climax of late-Renaissance, everywhere exploring polychoral and instrumental masses, chromatics, even recitative — what Monteverdi would establish as conscious Baroque — attends Giovanni Gabrielli, Venetian teacher of 1600 Europe. With the old Harvard performance of his "In Ecclesiîs," our slides advance through Tintoretto to the final explosion of El Greco: MUSIC: 1/1993 Giovanni Gabrielli (pub. 1615), In Ecclesiîs, Cambridge CRS 201 (accompanied by all of the following slides) Baroque Formulation 12 �C.G. Bell 2nd 26) V2nd 26a) Va3rd 27) b3rd 27) 3rd 27) 3rd 28) Va2nd 29) Vb2nd 29) 2nd 29) For 1st 30) For 1st 31) V1st 31a) For 1st 32) 1st 32a) 1st 33) Symbolic History Venetian (da Ponte, Veronese, etc.), c. 1575, Sala del Collegio, Doge's Palace, Venice (CGB '48) Same, Sala dello Scrutinio, Ceiling, 1580 ff. (CGB '48) Tintoretto, 1566, The Finding of the Body of St. Mark From the same, detail: the Saint appears; Brera, Milan Tintoretto, 1588-89, Sleep of St. Mark ("Pax tibi Marce"), Accademia, Venice (CGB '59); + V detail: angel above Same, detail of the lighted figures below (CGB '59) Tintoretto, 1565, two pans from a crucifixion detail of the vast Scuolo di San Rocco canvas, Venice (CGB '59) Tintoretto, 1562-6, two pans from St. Mark Rescues a Saracen at Sea, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59, of the whole; CGB detail of an oarsman used above as 1st 26) Tintoretto, 1581-84, Venice Queen of the Sea, Sala del Senato, Doge's Palace, Venice (CGB '48); video: two details only Tintoretto, 1592-4, The Last Supper, Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice El Greco, 1570-75, Annunciation, Prado, Madrid El Greco, 1579-84, Disrobing Christ, Munich (CGB '59) El Greco, 1610-14, Opening of the Fifth Seal, detail, upper half, Metropolitan Museum, New York City Same, detail, center right (CGB '74, from 1600, 2nd 3) El Greco, 1613-14, Betrothal of the Virgin, Museum Bucharest (preceded by a video detail of the upper half) (End Gabrielli) This Betrothal of the Virgin is one of El Greco's last pictures. Here humanity has been purged, as by Shakespeare's wheel of fire. 2nd 32 and 2nd 31) El Greco, 1608-14, View and Plan of Toledo, upper detail, Museo del Greco, Toledo But the tragic alchemy of 1600 was accompanied, in the Spain of El Greco's adoption, by an ultimate transcendence of the comic — Cervantes there writing the strangest and wisest book of the Western world. Like every ultimate, Don Quixote defies art-cognates; yet it is tied to the late Renaissance vast and mysterious expansion of the value world. 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 30) Tintoretto, c. 1590(?), Crucifixion, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V detail, left Tintoretto's play of electric powers in a still symbolic space of dark portends the Don's descent into the Cave of Montesinos, with his other dream adventures: A vast lake of boiling pitch, in which an infinite multitude of fierce and terrible serpents are swimming, from which a doleful voice is heard: O Knight, who gazest on the dreadful Lake … make known thy valour by casting thyself into the midst of these black burning surges … or thou art not worthy to behold the wonder of the seven castles seated under these gloomy waves. 2nd 30a) Tintoretto, 1592-94, from the Last Supper, detail, upper left, Flambeau and Angels, San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice — wonders actualized in the masquerades of Part II: Now the night grew darker and darker, and several shooting lights were seen glancing up and down the wood, like meteors or glaring exhalations from the earth. Then was heard an horrid noise … 3rd 31) 3rd 32) 2nd 33) El Greco, 1584-86, Burial of Count Orgaz, detail of the dead body, Santo Tome, Toledo Same, wider detail of the Burial Group and Mourners Same, the whole: Burial below, Heaven-Arch above (Note: from these three slide-show images, plus six others in the video file — a3rd 31, 3rd 31a, 3rd 31b, 3rd 31c, 2nd 33a, and 2nd 33b — the video draws a sequence of twelve Orgaz visuals.) Staggering, the transcendence by which a ground of resigned dying sustains the vital fulfillment of Erasmus' High Folly, where Quixote's madness — to offer my arm and person against whatever danger fate presents … in this Age of Iron to restore the Age of Gold en esta nuestra edad de hierro para resucitar en ella la del oro … becomes, for all its uncertainty ("subject to the discipline of blows, hunger and thirst … rags, want, and misery," and "I do not know what success I may have in this depraved 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History time"), the soul's calling: "the religious soldier to be preferred before the religious monk"; so killing sheep as if they were armies, Quixote's grinders knocked out by the slung stone, Sancho peering in when the Balm of Fierabras brings up the knight's gorge and drowns them both in vomit, are raised to the loveable courage of the adventure of the Lions — humanity past fiction, spirit above sainthood. Yet, as in El Greco's Burial of Count Orgaz, nobility is swirled in another judgment, so in Quixote the imperative of self-dedication breaks to a death-humbling — the very sky-aspiring transvalued by return to the common ground of Christian (and tragic) faith. Such human grandeur under dissolution of form peaks the Renaissance watershed to the great Baroque. 34) V34b) 34c) Veronese, 1573, Feast in the House of Levi, Accademia, Venice; + V detail (made from slide V34a) Veronese, 1562-64, Wedding at Cana, detail of center: musicians, Louvre, Paris Same, Wedding at Cana, detail to the left Conceive the expansive opulence of late Titian, Tintoretto, this Veronese, caught up in the action, description, language of Don Quixote, most of all when Part II swells incalculably beyond Part I — Camacho's feast a mere sign: The first thing that blessed Sancho's sight there was a whole steer spitted before a fire that seemed a flaming mountain; round it six capacious pots or ample coppers, in which entire sheep seethed as conveniently as pigeons … 35) 36) V36a) 1/1993 Rubens, 1636-38, The Great Kermess, whole, Louvre, Paris (video draws two details from this slide: right and left above) And for drink Sancho told above threescore great skins of wine … The scent of the fried meat put him in such a commotion he could hold out no longer, but accosting one of the cooks, he begged leave to sop a luncheon of bread in one of the pans … "Take a ladle, man, and skim out a pullet or two." … "I see no ladle, sir," said Sancho. "Blood and suet," cried the cook, "what a helpless fellow …" Same, detail to the left; video: left-below (cf. CGB '80: V35-36) Again, Veronese, Wedding at Cana, detail of far right (video here repeats 35, The Great Kermess, whole) Baroque Formulation 15 �C.G. Bell 36b) Symbolic History Again, The Great Kermess, detail of dancing figures He soused into a pot with a kettle, fishing up three hens and a couple of geese at a heave: "Here, friend, take this, and make shift to stay your stomach with this scum until the time to eat …" — conceive that abundance (called Mannerism, but to what a manor born) never again to be paralleled in wealth of imagination, spilling over into the coagulations of Rubens' Kermess; but the whole humorous outpouring 37) El Greco, c. 1600, Portrait of a Bearded Man, Prado, Madrid as if taking place in Inquisition and Colonial Spain, and through the dream-gate of El Greco's dynamic idealism — in that image we almost feel the fitness of Cervantes, stretched from the Venetians, through El Greco, 38) V38a) Rubens, 1603, Duke of Lerma, sketch, Louvre, Paris; + v detail El Greco, 1603-07, Adoration of the Shepherds, detail, Prado, Madrid toward the youthful proud consciousness of Rubens. And it was in the chivalric and ecstatic Spain of 1603 that the painter-diplomat sketched this armed and mounted Duke of Lerma — one of those nobles who by Cervantes' supreme invention of his fiction's coming to life as read, might have entertained the actual Knight of the Woeful Figure. Though Lerma and Rubens seem of the new age, across the formulating divide, where Don Quixote, like English Shakespeare, had clung to the dream transitions of the Platonic past. 39) Carlo Maderno, 1607-14, Façade of St. Peter's, Rome Rubens was traveling from Rome, center of the histrionic concretion of Baroque: the 1612 façade of St. Peter's, which like all conscious gestures may protest too much. MUSIC: 40) 1/1993 Anerio, c. 1600(?), from Introit, Requiem Mass, G-DB 1572 ("et tibi") Bernini, 1624-33, Baldachin, looking up to Michelangelo's 1546-64 Dome, St. Peter's, Rome (Video inserts upper part of 2nd 40, Baldachin and Choir, and from slide 41, detail of a Baldachin bronze angel, Bernini, 1624-33) Baroque Formulation 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But in the complementarity between the Baroque force of Bernini's Baldachin and the solemn Renaissance of Michelangelo's dome — which was the Sistine Choir invoking, 50 years ago, when they stretched the motets of Palestrina and his school, here Anerio? (Fade Anerio.) 2nd 39) Again, St. Peter's Façade: a Papal Blessing (CGB '48) Surely the forging of Baroque (as of Cartesian thought, or of tonality from the church modes) must reduce, under billowing might, complexities of nuance. So Benevoli's 53-part Festive Mass of 1628, for six contrasting choirs with instruments and basso continuo — against the dynamic weft of Gabrielli — heaps up merely harmonic voices in columnar masses of sound. MUSIC: Benevoli, 1628, Mass for Saltzburg Cathedral, from the Qui tollis, Epic LC-3035 2nd 40) Again, Bernini's Baldachin: from the Nave, to the Choir 41) Slide: Bernini, 1624-33, Bronze angel from the Baldachin. Video: detail of 1st 40: Column of Baldachin, looking up to Dome; and just before it, a detail of V1st 40, variant of the same (CGB '86) 42) Pietro da Cortona, 1633-39, Glorification of Urban VIII, whole ceiling, Barberini Palace, Rome; (CGb '86) + V detail 42a) (Fade Benevoli.) Same, closer detail, with Barberini heraldic bees (CGB '86) In painting, the deployment of Renaissance techniques for cumulous assertion crowns the stair hall of the Barberini Palace with Pietro da Cortona's praise of its Urban VIII — flattery not the least conspicuous brilliance of the Baroque. Cortona's model a43 and Vb43) From Correggio, 1526-30, Assumption of the Virgin, angel details, Cathedral, Parma 43) Same, detail, including the Virgin (video divides into two details.) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History was Correggio. But the Correggio ceiling breathes the fresh discovery of 1530. So the polyphonic swirls from Fevin and Gombert to Victoria's "O Magnum Mysterium" etherealize the pomp they mediate. MUSIC: Victoria, pub. 1572, from O Magnum Mysterium (Allelluya), HMV-L1017 (Close) What of Palestrina? 44) Raphael, 1513-14, Sistine Madonna, Gallery, Dresden Is his tie to the Sistine perfection of Raphael, from eleven years before he was born? 45) Titian, 1516-18, Assumption of the Virgin, I Frari, Venice Or does his taking up the rhetoric of the century, from Titian's 1518 Assumption, 46) El Greco, 1577, Assumption (with frame), Art Institute, Chicago to the always more swelling ascents of his own time (Baroccio, this 1577 El Greco), anticipate the Baroque? For 1st 47) Guido Reni, 1616-17, Assumption of the Virgin, Vatican (In slide show, this goes to 2nd 47; 1st 47 becomes Guido Reni, c. 1607, Coronation of the Virgin, National Gallery, London) Yet not even these have the conscious mass and assertion, which first appear after Palestrina's death, as in Guido Reni. For 2nd 46) Choir of I Frari, 1330-1417, with Titian's Assumption of the Virgin Altarpiece, Venice (in slide show, also 2nd 45) With such proclamation altars, spread over a hundred years, V for 2nd 45) Baroccio, Night Nativity, Ambrosiana, Milan we seek the affinities of the Sanctus of Palestrina's most famous mass, mythically associated with the Council of Trent and the vindication of polyphony. 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 44) Again, Raphael, Sistine Madonna; video: two details only MUSIC: 3rd 45) V3rd 45a) Palestrina, by 1555, Sanctus, Missa Papae Marcelli, ARC-3182 Again, Titian, Assumption; video: center of picture Correggio, 1523-28, Madonna called "Il Giorno," detail, Galleria, Parma Correggio, 1530, Nativity called "La Notte," detail, Gallery, Dresden Again, Baroccio, Night Nativity, detail of V for 2nd 45 Again, El Greco's Assumption of the Virgin (from nearer) Detail of Reni's Coronation of the Virgin (slide: 1st 47) Reni's Assumption of the Virgin [cf. V1st 47] (video shows two details) Michelangelo and others, 16th cent., St. Peter's from the Janicula (south side), Rome (CGB '86) Michelangelo, 16th cent., Dome-vaultings, St. Peter's, Rome V3rd 45b) Va3rd 46) 3rd 46) Va2nd 47) 2nd 47) 1st 48) V48a) (Close Palestrina Sanctus) For 3rd 47) Guido Reni, c. 1627, Immaculate Conception, Metropolitan Museum, NYC (CGB '74); video: detail only That hosanna, even in formal triumph, less suggests Guido Reni's Miltonics — So maist thou be translated to the skies, And give resounding grace to all Heav'ns Harmonies — Va2nd 48) Vignola and della Porta, 1568-84, Façade of Il Gesu, Rome (CGB '86) 2nd 48) Same, interior (variant views for video and slide show) than the Counter-Reformation solemnity Michelangelo passed to Vignola and della Porta. The barrel vaults and dome of Il Gesù, reared 1568-84, in the lifetime of Palestrina, draw late-Renaissance to a gravitating center of the Baroque, and a shrine of its 17th century art — 1st 49) Palladio, c. 1550, Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, Italy, (CGB '59) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History models of the future fulfilling the style of the past. So with Palladio's mid-century villas or Tasso's heroic Conquest of Jerusalem: Floods clap their hands, on mountaines dance the pines, And Sions towres and sacred temples smile, For their deliv'rance from that bondage vile. (Fairfax) 1st 50) Palladio and Veronese, 1561-62, Villa Barbaro (called Maser), Fresco, Lady and Nurse, as on a Balcony, Northern Italy So too with Veronese's 1561 decoration of Palladio's Villa Maser. Later Baroque imitation cannot obscure the free dynamic of its Venetian Renaissance. 1st 51) Raphael, 1511, Galatea, Farnesina, Rome; video: detail only MUSIC: Seb. Festa, pub. 1526, Se'l pensier, close, Nonesuch H-71097 Set the pagan recovery of Raphael, with the Frottole emergence of the Festas, 1st 52) Pietro da Cortona, 1637, The Age of Gold, Pal. Pitti, Florence V1st 52) Fresco with frame (CGB '48); + V details (52 & V52 are used alternately here and below, for video and digital) MUSIC: Monteverdi, 1632, Zeffiro torna, opening, Boulanger, VM-496 (or LP) against Pietro da Cortona's Age of Gold, more than a century later. The history of the madrigal is encompassed between them, from clear dawn, to the proclaimed wreathing of earth-moods, as Monteverdi turns the form to operatic duet and chaconne. (Fade Zeffiro.) 2nd 51 and for 2nd 50 slide) Again, Raphael, Galatea, whole Yet the 1590 madrigals from Monteverdi's inspired youth — this to the words of Tasso, "Ecco mormorar l'onde," and in the always unsurpassed Boulanger performance, recall the pure ease of high Renaissance. V for 2nd 50) Again, a detail of V1st 52: Cortona, The Age of Gold 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History With which style, which century, do they compare? Va2nd 49) Palladio, c. 1558, Villa Foscari, called "Malcontenta," Italy 2nd 49) Palladio, c. 1550, Villa Rotonda, down entrance lane (CGB ‘59); video also repeats, from 1st 49, that view of the Rotonda (CGB '59) MUSIC: 3rd 50) V3rd 50a) V3rd 50b) 3rd 51) 2nd 52) 53) 54) Monteverdi, pub. 1590, Ecco mormorar l'onde, MV-496, or Ser. 60125 Veronese, 1561-62, Salon, a frescoed corner, Villa Maser, Asolo Same, Maser, frescoes, Sala di Bacco, landscape detail Same, fresco from a side room, Hunter at a door Again, Raphael, Galatea, detail (video: above and below) Again, Cortona, Age of Gold, detail (video takes two details, above and below from V1st 52) Domenichino, c. 1610(?), The Chase of Diana, detail of the hunt, Borghese Gallery, Rome Same, foreground detail of bathing nymphs (CGB '48) (Close Ecco mormorar l'onde) For 2nd 53-54) Again, Domenichino, Diana's Hunt, whole; + V detail: bathing nymphs If Palestrina looked back, Monteverdi's sequence over a descending bass swells toward Domenichino's heightened Baroque: Diana's nymphs of the chase, and of the pool. 55) V55a) Tintoretto, 1578, Ariadne, Bacchus and Venus, Anticollegio, Doge's Palace, Venice Titian, 1556-59, Diana and Acteon, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh We have said no element defines a style. The change in music might seem to be from free polyphony to the harmonic binding of figured bass. When the inwrought play of Tintoretto's 1578 Ariadne, rich as the Tasso that flowed into Spenser's Bower of Bliss: Two naked Damzelles (in the fount he spied) … As that faire Starre, the messenger of morne, 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History His deawy face out of the sea doth reare: Or as the Cyprian goddesse, newly borne Of th' Oceans fruitful froth, did first appeare: Such seemed they… — Va56) 56) Caravaggio, c. 1600, Amor Victorious, detail, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Caravaggio, c. 1596, Lute Player, Hermitage, St. Petersburg shifts to Caravaggio's light-centered seduction of touch, is it like the tightening into recitative? And does Ben Jonson's ripest lyric parallel that conscious moulding? Slow, slow fresh fount, keep time with my salt teares; Yet slower yet, O faintly, gentle springs; List to the heavy part the musick beares, Woe weeps out her division, when she sings… Where the debt to Tasso is already through the baroque of Marini. Va2nd 55) 2nd 55) MUSIC: Titian, 1560, Diana and Callisto, Kunsthist. Mus., Vienna (CGB ‘59) Again, Tintoretto, Ariadne, Bacchus and Venus, detail Luzzaschi, c. 1580(?) (pub. 1601), O Dolcezze, SAWT-9466-B But what do we mean by a shift from the polyphonic? There had been lute songs throughout the Renaissance. The accompanied madrigals of Luzzaschi, performed at Ferrara in the '70s and '80s, push toward the Dowland style-verge of the century to follow. (Fade Luzzaschi.) Va2nd 56) Caravaggio, 1591, Sick Bacchus, detail, Borghese Gallery, Rome Vb2nd 56) Caravaggio, 1591-94 (?), Musicians, detail, Met. Mus., New York City 2nd 56) Again, Caravaggio, The Lute Player, detail, Hermitage Yet the Florentine continuo experiments of 1600 had still to forge a reductive concentration, stretched on the rack of heroic recitative. Caccini: MUSIC: Caccini, pub. 1601, Amarilli (close) MIA 1 (End) Peri: MUSIC: 1/1993 Peri performed 1601, Gioite al canto mio, (refrain) from Euridice, MIA 1 (Fade.) Baroque Formulation 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Like everything in the Baroque, Caravaggio's shadowing Va57) 57) Leonardo da Vinci, 1503-06, Madonna of the Rocks, detail to the right, with the Angel, National Gallery, London Same, Madonna of the Rocks, detail of the Angel's head has Renaissance parentage. But how far the inner-glow of Leonardo's twilight is from Caravaggio's logic of the physical. As far as Caccini from his lute-song origins — Cara: MUSIC: a58) b58) Vc58) Vd58) 58) M. Cara, c. 1500, from S'io siedo a l'ombra, Candide CE-31017 (Fade) Double: [A] El Greco, 1603-05, Madonna, detail, Hospital de la Caridad, Illescas; and [B] Caravaggio, 1605, Madonna of the Serpent, detail, Borghese Gallery, Rome Double: [A] El Greco, 1608-14, Angels from Baptism, Hospital de S. Juan, Toledo; and [B] Procaccini, c. 1610, Magdalen, Brera, Milan El Greco, 1608-14, Assumption over Toledo, detail, El Greco Museum, Toledo El Greco, 1603-05, Coronation of the Virgin, detail, Hospital de la Caridad, Illescas El Greco, 1608-14, Baptism of Christ, detail of Angels, Hospital de San Juan Bautista, Toledo (cf. [A] of a58) Even with the chromatics of 1600, as revolutionary as El Greco's astigmatism or Caravaggio's chiaroscuro, it is not half-tone progression which differentiates (any more than it was monodic song), but rather the formal method of its handling — how changed from late Mannerist to Baroque (both about 1610) — from Gesualdo, with El Greco — MUSIC: Gesualdo da Venosa, 1600-10(?), Ora pro nobis close of Ave, dulcissima Maria, (Deller), VICS 1364 (End) from that frenzy of spirit, 59) V59a) 1/1993 Procaccini, c. 1610(?), Magdalen, Brera, Milan; video: detail only Gentilleschi, c. 1610, Saint Cecilia and the Angel, National Gallery, Washington, DC (CGB '75) Baroque Formulation 23 �C.G. Bell V59b) Symbolic History Guercino, c. 1620-25, Angels Weeping over Christ, detail, National Gallery, London (detail of duplicate from Mozart 51) to the swooning flesh of Procaccini, with a phrase from Viadana, also to "dulcissima Maria": MUSIC: L.G. Viadana, pub. 1615, O dulcissima Maria, opening, ARC 3217 (Fade) As that Italy radiates to the North, 1st 60) Elsheimer, c. 1598-1600, Baptism of Christ, National Gallery, London (Video uses whole, then detail, of angels above; slide show, for 1st 60, substitutes Elsheimer, c. 1599, Rest on the Flight, Berlin-Dahlem Museum — a detail of which becomes V60a.) or northerners are drawn to the peninsula, artists like Elsheimer create transitional Baroque from Gothic line and Renaissance ideal. So Kepler's Epitome of Astronomy blends mathematical induction with speculative overreach … If Earth was to move like a planet, what was required (against Aristotle's ethereal bodies perfecting their circles by angelic intelligence) was a physics of the heavenly built on the inertia of earthly mass. Such an earth-physics would first be published by Galileo in 1638. By that time, Kepler had based his astronomy on God-given wheels, invoking Gilbert's magnetism only to squeeze them to the ellipses his calculations had revealed. For 1st 61) Rubens, c. 1610(?), Annunciation, Dublin Gallery (CGB '74) (Video adds the original 61, now 2nd 61 in the slide-show: Rubens 1609-10, Annunciation, Kunsthist. Mus., Vienna (CGB '59) A wild Rubens blend of the ideal and empirical, Kepler staggeringly reckoned from Brahe's observations the three enduring laws, meanwhile juggling the ratios, roots, and powers of planetary size, mass, intercept, motor virtue (of which he could know nothing) trying to bring the orbits and archetypal reason into line: "stamped with the adornment of harmonic proportions." 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In music, Praetorius effects such a vast synthesis of Gothic and Venetian, polyphony and recitative. We take a phrase from his setting of Luther's "Vom Himmel hoch": 2nd 60) Slide show has the original 60: Elsheimer, Baptism, from which the video makes a closer detail of the angels above MUSIC: M. Praetorius, pub. 1619, from the Polychoral Vom Himmel hoch, Nonesuch H 71242 2nd 61) Rubens, 1608-09, Annunciation, Vienna, (CGB '59); video: detail only 62) Same, Rubens, Annunciation, detail of Angel (CGB '59) (Close "sagen will") Rubens rapt angel of 1609 marks the divide to inertial mass. 63) V63a) 63b) El Greco, 1570-75, Boy Lighting a Candle, Capodimonte Museum, Naples Same, detail El Greco, 1612-14, Adoration of the Shepherds, detail: Head of a shepherd, Prado, Madrid (closer detail of V38a) Up to that point, the material search itself had swirled with trans-reality: — El Greco's 1570 boy lighting a candle, the night climax of Bruno's Candelaio, or even the porter in Macbeth: If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. Knock, knock, knock. Who's there in the name of Beelzebub… Drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things … Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine … So Bruno's compatriot, Nola, choir-master at Naples, limns three blind beggars singing for alms: MUSIC: 64) V64a) 1/1993 Giov. Domenico da Nola, c. 1560(?), Tre Ciechi siamo, close, Everest 3179 Caravaggio, c. 1594, The Fortune Teller, Louvre, Paris Same, detail of hands Baroque Formulation 25 �C.G. Bell V64b) 64c) 64d) Symbolic History Le Valentin, 1620(?), The Cheat, Dresden Gallery, detail (first videod backward: revised ‘94 — preceded by 64c below, + V detail — and followed by 64d) Caravaggio, 1594-95, Cardsharps, Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth Georges de la Tour, The Cheat, Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth By the turn of the century, Caravaggio has put such realism on the shore where Ben Jonson's Fox and Alchemist make it lawful prey — Volpone's clever Mosca to the doddering deaf Corbaccio: Mosca: Corb: M: C: M: C: M: C: Volp: M: C: M: C: M: C: 65) Georges de la Tour, c. 1620(?), Fortune Teller, Met. Museum, New York City (The slide of the whole, CGB '79, with details, four in the slide show, two more in the video file, provide nine video images, varying the a65, b65, 65, 65a and 65b order of the slide show.) M: C: 1/1993 You're very welcome, sir. How does your patron? Troth, as he did, sir; no amends. What! mends he? No sir, he is rather worse. That's well. Where is he? Upon his couch, sir, newly fall'n asleep. … I have brought him an opiate here, from mine own doctor, 'tis but to make him sleep. [Playing sick] Ay, his last sleep, if he would take it. He has no faith in physic … I often have Heard him protest that your physician Should never be his heir. — Not I his heir? Not your physician, sir. — O no, no, no. I do not mean it … How does his apoplex? Is that strong on him still? — Most violent. His speech is broken and his eyes are set, His face drawn longer than 'twas wont. — How? how? Stronger than he was wont? Drawn longer than 'twas wont. Baroque Formulation — No sir; his face — O, good! 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History M: C: M: C: MUSIC: Is ever gaping, and his eyelids hang. — His mouth — Good. A freezing numbness stiffens all his joints And makes the colour of his flesh like lead … Good symptoms still … sure I shall outlast him! Orl. Gibbons, Fantasy on the Street Cries, "New Mussels," ARC-3053 Marvellous, the comic vigor, as that delight in the actual and its castigation strikes root in the North: Fantasies on Street Cries, Weelkes, Deering, this Gibbons; the overflow of the Jacobean stage up to the Puritan closure: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A trick to Catch the Old One, the boiling Kermess of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1615) — though with vignettes as sharply focussed as this La Tour Fortune Teller, locket cutter, Gypsy thieves. "I would fain see that cutpurse you talk of," says Jonson's silly Cokes in the play; while Nightingale the Ballad Singer draws the crowd — Trash ("Will your worship buy any gingerbread"), Leatherhead the toy-man, fat Ursula, Mooncalf, and all — so that Edgworth, his accomplice, can pluck the dandy clean. As in the picture: "A man might cut out his kidneys and he never feel 'em." (Fade Gibbons.) 66) El Greco, c. 1610-14, View and Plan of Toledo, detail, Greco Museum, Toledo (Video begins with Va66, a wider detail) Again the 1610 transition: from El Greco's giddy perspectives, or in Shakespeare, "the dread summit of the chalky bourn" imagined from the flat stage of Lear: Gloucester: There is a cliff whose high and bending head Looks fearfully in the confined deep; Bring me but to the very brim of it … Edgar How fearful And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low … I'll look no more Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong … 67) 1/1993 François de Nome, called "Monsu Desiderio," 1623, Ruins with St. Augustine legend, Private Collection, London Baroque Formulation 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History — through the visions of the so-called Monsu (eddies of nightmare formed under the jets of Baroque reality; yet reality takes the lead) 68) V68a) Rubens, 1618-20, Landscape: Ruins of the Palatine, Louvre Poussin, c. 1629-30, Narcissus and Echo, Louvre; + V detail — to Rubens' ruins of the Palatine. So Webster's Duchess congeals the electric malice of Lear to a brooding earth-presence — summoning the echo with which Monteverdi had answered Orfeo's "ahi, pianto" and "guai." MUSIC: Monteverdi, 1607, from Orfeo, Act V, two echoes, ARC 3036 (Fade.) For 2nd 67) Variant, Monsu, Ruins, National Gallery, London; + V detail Webster: — 2nd 68) Yond's the cardinal's window. This fortification Grew from the ruins of an ancient abbey; And to yond side o' the river lies a wall, Piece of a cloister, which in my opinion Gives the best echo that you ever heard, So hollow and so dismal, and withal So plain in the distinction of our words, That many have supposed it is a spirit That answers. Detail of Rubens, Palatine; + closer V detail — I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history: … but all things have their end: Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, Must have like death that we have. — "Like death that we have." — Now the echo hath caught you. — It groaned, methought, and gave 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History A very deadly accent. 1st 69) Caravaggio, 1607-08, Beheading of St. John the Baptist, whole, Cathedral, Valletta, Malta V69a) Same, detail to the right, men behind bars — "Deadly accent." — I told you, 'twas a pretty one: you may make it A huntsman, or a falconer, a musician, Or a thing of sorrow. — "A thing of sorrow." — Ay, sure, that suits it best. — "That suits it best." Va70 Left of same picture: video details, above and below 70) Same, detail of the face of the old woman — 'Tis very like my wife's voice. — "Ay, wife's voice." — … I would not have you go to the cardinal's tonight: Do not. — "Do not." … — Echo, I will not talk with thee, For thou art a dead thing. — "Thou art a dead thing." — My duchess is asleep now, And her little ones, I hope sweetly: O Heaven, Shall I never see her more? — "Never see her more." — I marked not one repetition of the echo But that; and on the sudden a clear light Presented me a face folded in sorrow … 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History This Caravaggio face 2nd 69 and 2nd 70) Same: Beheading group (of which video shows also a detail); while V for 2nd 70 returns to the whole picture (from 1st 69) is from his 1608 Beheading of John, where the villainy which had fascinated the Renaissance assumes the weight of body. So the tragedy of revenge, from Kyd — "O life! no life, but lively form of death" — to Webster — "My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,/ Is driven, I know not whither." Let the content and structure of the sonnet attest that upheaval of values: 71) 71a) Parmagianino, 1535-37, Portrait called Antea, Capodimonte Museum, Naples Same, upper detail; + V: two more details Nothing was ever simple, but one pole of Mannerism was the balance treasured from Renaissance, the fitting of matter to form, perfect in this Parmagianino as in Surrey, Spenser, early Shakespeare — the end-stopped claspings of sonnet rhyme: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st; So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 72) 72a) 72b) 72c) 1/1993 Beccafumi, c. 1524, Fall of the Rebel Angels, Pinacoteca, Siena Same, detail below Same, middle detail (video makes two: right and left) Same, upper detail (digital then repeats the whole) Baroque Formulation 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The other Manneristic pole is the outbreak of wild alchemical force, Beccafumi's 1524 Fall of the Rebel Angels, Renaissance-Gothic aimed through El Greco at Blake. While Shakespeare's crisis wrenches the syntax of the sonnet almost to the sprung stress of Hopkins: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoy'd no sooner, but despised straight; Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait, On purpose laid to make the taker mad: Mad in pursuit, and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and prov'd, a very woe; Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows, yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. 1st 73) Rubens, c. 1620, Small Last Judgment, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59; of which the slide show uses a middle detail) In Rubens, the fire-frenzy conglomerates, a saturation point, as earthly engrossment heightens the violence of salvation. Va2nd 72) Michelangelo, 1536-41, Last Judgment, struggling figures from the lower right, Sistine Chapel, Vatican For 2nd 72) Same, Saved souls; video: detail only Michelangelo had felt it: "Rend the veil, break down the wall" — Squarcia'l vel tu Signior, rompi quel muro"; even Ariosto had toyed with the fallen need of force: 2nd 73) 1/1993 To render pity to hearts penitent Is ours below, to draw them up with love, Maugre their own will, is God's, above. (CGB) Again, Rubens, Small Last Judgment (CGB '59); slide show now presents it whole, video in three spreads: upper, middle, and below Baroque Formulation 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Now as world-nature thickens toward Descartes, the impossible stretch for a God whelmed in bulk — "As though heav'n suffered earthquakes, peace or war" (Donne) — curdles in Judgment paradox: At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise From death, you numberlesse infinities Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe; All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow, All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine … (conscious rhetoric, buckling the pentameter) 74) 74a) Rubens (or copy), 1619-1620, Crucifixion sketch (for the Church of the Recollets, Antwerp), Aachen Gallery (CGB '74); + three video details Procaccini, 1618-20, Raising of the Cross, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (video: detail only) As at the forge of Rubens, Donne violates the sonnet for a salvation conceived as rape: Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, 'and bend Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new. I, like an usurpt towne, to 'another due, Labour to 'admit you, but Oh, to no end, Reason, your viceroy in mee, mee should defend, But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue, Yet dearely 'I love you, 'and would be loved faine, But am betroth'd unto your enemie, Divorce mee, 'untie, or breake that knot againe, Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you 'enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. 1st 75) Rembrandt, c. 1660, Self-portrait with palette, Kenwood House, London; video: large detail and face detail only 75a) Rembrandt, 1661, Homer Dictating, Mauritshuis, The Hague; + v detail 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History MUSIC: Mathew Locke, c. 1665, Fantasy 5, G Minor, chromatic opening, Westminster WGS 8242 By mid-century the chromatic, in Mathew Locke, moves under brooding control. While with blind Milton the sonnet has passed its crisis; Renaissance articulation convolves into the vaulted reach of consciousness: (Skip to chromatic rise.) When I consider how my light is spent, E're half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide, Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd I fondly ask. But patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies, 1st 76) Rembrandt, c. 1656, The Artist's Son Titus reading, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59); video: detail only God doth not need Either man's work or his own gifts; who best Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his state Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o're land and ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and waite. (Fade Locke.) V2nd 75) Again, 1660, Self-portrait with palette (here, whole, from 1st 75) 2nd 75a) Rembrandt, 1669, detail of the last Self-portrait, Mauritshuis, The Hague — as darkened as Rembrandt, neglected in gathering age; yet as deeply sure of self, ordered earth, and causal God — Descartes' lonely doubter, who closes his meditations: "qu'il y a un Dieu … et qu'il n'est point trompeur" — And I ought not to doubt the truth of these presentations … for since God is no deceiver, it follows necessarily that I am not herein deceived … Under the great assertive thrust 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 76) Again, Titus reading, a closer detail by which the faith postulates have moved into time, making their peace with thinking self and causal world, an entire realm of human and earthly good is as quietly assured as the lights on Rembrandt's Titus, reading. 1st 77) Elsheimer, c. 1609(?), Tobias and Raphael, National Gallery, London Perhaps Elsheimer, in Caravaggio's Rome, first took the glow of that transcendental paradise, where Tobias is guided by the angel — a promise Gibbons harmonizes in a 1623 Song of the Church: "Oh, my love, how comely now": MUSIC: O. Gibbons, 1629, Oh, My Love (a phrase) ARC-3053 a78) Elsheimer, c. 1610(?), Two Childhood Guardians (from a set of six), Petworth House; with V details 1st 78) Poelenburg, c. 1620(?) (after Elsheimer), the same Guardian Saints, Pitti, Florence (CGB '48) How humbly Poelenburg takes it up — twin guardians of natural childhood, angel and saint. While Herbert, from his rural parish, sounds the quietest benediction. V2nd 77) Two video details from slide 77: Elsheimer, Tobias and Raphael V2nd 78) Poelenburg, two other Guardian Saints from the Pitti set of six (these, CGB '86); + V detail ; digital, double only; after Domenichino (While the slide show, for 2nd 77 and 2nd 78, uses Domenichino, c. 1612, Tobias Landscape, National Gallery, London; see Va1st 80, below) Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky; The dew shall weep thy fall to-night For thou must die. Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye; Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie; 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History My music shows ye have your closes, And all must die. Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like a seasoned timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives. 79) Bernini, 1657-66, Cathedra Petri or High Altar, St. Peter's, Rome (video: lower detail only) The Baroque arose out of Renaissance and humanism. However the grand manner vaunt the inflations of creed and court, its chordal and spatial loyalties were to the temporal good. Beyond the mammoth holies Bernini applied to St. Peter's, lay the Rome Va1st 80) Domenichino, c. 1612, Tobias Landscape, National Gallery, London (detail of slide 2nd 77-78, above) For 1st 80) Claude Lorrain, 1631, Flight to Egypt, Belvoir Castle, Leics. (better the whole of 2nd 80) where the landscape of recovery spread from Elsheimer and Carracci to Domenichino, Poelenburg, this early Claude. So the fortissimo of Monteverdi's Exultent caeli cradles his tenderest "O Maria," in an epiphany of power and heart. a2nd 79) Again, Bernini, Cathedra Petri, upper detail, St. Peter's, Rome; video uses the top of 1st 79 2nd 79) Same, Cathedra Petri, detail of the Dove window and Angel Glory; video details the center of this slide MUSIC: 2nd 80) Monteverdi, 1629, from Exultent Caeli, Decca SDD 363 Claude Lorrain, c. 1631, Rest on the Flight, Clark Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; video and digital detail (with "O Maria" — fade.) 1/1993 Baroque Formulation 35 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 36 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Baroque Formulation, Symbolic History, Part 20 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 20 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_20_Baroque_Formulation Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fad610448a734f3bff5cd9a8d9fc85a5.pdf c11856417131273e34feb7d7871d423a PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 19. 1600: The Tragic Divide CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 May 1994 Last Revised June 1996 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 19. 1600: The Tragic Divide (Shakespeare) a1) Michelangelo 1536-41, The Last Judgment, detail, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome For 1st 1) Cornelis van Haarlem, by 1588 (copy?), two followers of Cadmus devoured bv a dragon, Ovid Metamorphoses, III 1-151, National Gallery, London It is current to think of history as made by those who enact it; but enacted, it builds a landscape of the causal must-be: "there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come." In that topology of spirit, there are watersheds and mountain divides — none more charged, "twixt...extremes of passion," than that through which the arts and thought, the very space and humanity of the West, passed around the century mark of 1600. That range, which is the apocalyptic inturning of Renaissance pride and power, For 1st 2) El Greco 1608-14, view and map of Toledo, detail, Museum, Toledo El Greco scaled in painting, Giordano Bruno in flaming act and word: "He who in himself sees all things, is all things." In poetry, the radical violence of Marino, Gongora, de Sponde and Donne finds its height and depth For 1st 3 and 2nd 2) El Greco c. 1610?, view of Toledo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (video: detail only) in the storm and madness of Shakespeare's King Lear: 5/1994 1600: The Tragic Divide 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Let the great gods That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads Find out their enemies now. Tremble thou wretch, That hast within thee undivulged crimes, Unwhipped of justice. Hide thee, thou bloody hand; Thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue That art incestuous. Caitiff, to pieces shake, That under covert and convenient seeming Has practiced man's life. 2nd 1) 3rd 2) 2nd 3) Music: El Greco 1610-14, St. John's Vision: the Fifth Seal, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (CGB '74); first, video detail Same, close detail of figures, center (CGB ‘74) Same, of figures to the right (CGB '74) Gesualdo 1611, Aestimatus sum, opening. (Craft) Col. Y 32886 Close pent-up guilts Rive your concealing continents, and cry These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man More sinned against, than sinning... In music. the chromatic venture is at its peak in Gesualdo da Venosa — here from the 1611 Responsories. (on "liber") Va4) Same, Vision (CGB '74; upper spread of 2nd 1) 4) El Greco, 1605, Adoration of the Shepherds, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 4a) El Greco, 1612-14, Adoration of the Shepherds, Predo, Madrid; copy in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (fade Gesualdo) In El Greco after 1600, Apocalypse and Nativity stir the same frenzy. So in Lear the comic and tragic are fused and transcended. With Lear going mad: "Hast thou given all to thy two daughters? and art thou come to this?" Edgar pretending to be mad: "This is the foul fiend Flibertigibbet: he begins at curfew and walks till the first cock"; the Fool clowning like a madman: "Prithee nuncle. be contented; 'tis a naughty night to swim in" — we are caught in the delirium of a chromatic capriccio, where sorrows lighten with electrical play. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 5) French, Tapestry, c. 1510, Sight, from The Lady and the Unicorn, Cluny, Paris; + V detail V5a) Same, from Lady and Unicorn Tapestries, Hearing (video: detail only) In that crucible of transformations the dreaming thin idealism of the Gothic past is consumed — the 1500 poignance of The Lady and the Unicorn, with de la Rue's "Incessantly my poor heart laments": Music: a6) 6) Pierre de la Rue, c. 1510(?), Incessament mon povre cueur lamente, (Cape) EMS 213 Poussin, c. 1628, Inspiration of the Poet, right detail, Louvre, Paris Same, whole (video takes these from a lighter slide, V6) and is reborn in the spatial earth and human confidence of the Baroque: Music: Louis Couperin 1650-60(?) from Chaconne, Suite in D, Leonhardt, VICS-1370 Louis Couperin's chordal celebration of our mastery — like Rubens, like this Poussin, pride made art, art ripened into pride. The deities praised in Cymbeline are temporally responsive, temporally benign: Laud we the gods, And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils From our blessed altars. Publish we this peace To all our subjects... a7) b7) c7) 7) (fade Couperin) S. Vouet Tapestry, 1627, Finding of Moses, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Arras Tapestry, c. 1430, Offering of the Heart, Cluny, Paris Again a7, Vouet Moses (video: detail only) Double: [A] Arras Heart, b7; and [B] detail of Vouet Moses, a7 Music: Dowland, 1600-04, Lachrimae Antiquae pavan, viols and lute, VICS-1338 It is the contrast I experienced long ago at a tapestry exhibit in the Metropolitan, where, standing at the portal of two rooms — in one the dreaming flatness of late Gothic June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (this most refined allegory of The Offering of the Heart), in the other the Cartesian vaunts of Baroque (this 1627 Finding of Moses, designed by Vouet and woven in the preGobelin factories of the Louvre) — I thought of Shakespeare (with the musical glory he invokes, this Dowland) a bridge over that style-gap, as between two separate civilizations, though indeed they were one; the grandchildren of the first manor could actually have been working in the second. (fade Dowland) 8) 8a) 8b) English, c. 1590(?), Elizabeth I, "Ditchley Portrait," National Portrait Gallery, London; + V detail Jacobean, 1607-11 ff., Robert Lyminge (for Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury), The Library, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire Again 8, Elizabeth I (video: detail only, from 8) So Elizabeth stands on her island between the Gothic flatness and the opulence to follow — This... demi-paradise... This precious stone set in the silver sea... Against the envy of less happier lands... The Armada cloud is at her back, before her the sunlit calm of Good Hope, which the late plays wrest from storm and ignorance, "these surges/ Which wash both heaven and hell." Thus Bacon in the New Atlantis: The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes... and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible. Though the pictorial flatness reminds us how far the Medieval stars still ruled over Shakespeare's nativity. 9) Elizabethan, late 16th cent., Sheldon Tapestry, rural pleasures (video: two details only, one from V9a) His early songs, Sheldon tapestries, the plaintive turns of lute and virginals (Farnaby's "Dreame," "His Rest") carry the inconsequent bright awakening through the century: Music: June 1996 Giles Farnaby, c. 1590(?), "His Dreame," (Dolmetsch) Col 5713 1600: The Tragic Divide 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady-smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then on every tree Mocks married men, for thus sings he, Cuckoo. Cuckoo, cuckoo. O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear. a10) 10) 10a) (cut Farnaby) Rubens, c. 1608(?), Samson and Delilah, National Gallery, London (video: detail only) Rubens, c. 1608, Mulay Ahmad, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; first, V detail Tintoretto, 1579-81, Temptation of Christ, Sala Grande, Scuola di San Rocco, Venice Music: T. Tomkins, published 1622, from "When David Heard," Odyssey 32 16 0171 But Shakespeare died in the volitional grandeur he helped to form — as of Tomkins' Absalom or of this Mulay Ahmad painted by Rubens five years after Othello had dignified his own crime and self-punishment: (fade Tomkins) It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul — Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars — It is the cause... And say besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th' throat the circumcised dog, And smote him — thus. But such human power still walks the symbolic stage, as in old moralities, between a star-fretted heaven and the cellar traps of hell. The expanded Renaissance earth al1) Giselbertus, 1130-40, detail of Weighing of Souls from the Last Judgment, Cathedral of Autun, Saone-et-Loire June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 5 �C.G. Bell b11) 11) Symbolic History Hans Reichle, 1602-07, Lucifer detail, bronze St. Michaels' Group, façade of Zeughaus, Augsburg French Romanesque, c. 1075, Soul between Devil and Angel, St. Benoit sur Loire reels under the Dark Age battle. It is that demi-devil Iago, the negation of Jahwe's "I am that I am," who has so ensnared Othello, body and soul, that he cries for the lash of fire: Whip me ye devils From the possession of this heavenly sight... On the same "bank and shoal of time" where flights of angels are to sing the sweet Prince, Hamlet, to his rest, Lady Macbeth, summoning spirits to take her milk for gall, goads her tempted thane to "jump the life to come." Banquo: The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray 's In deepest consequence. From the earliest carvings of Romanesque, 12) 12a) Hieronymus Bosch, 1500-02, Good and Evil Angels, detail of the Haywain, Prado, Madrid; + V closer details Same, entire Triptych (video: center panel only, from V12a) to 1500 Bosch and beyond, the reappearing pair of Good Angel and Bad from the scaffold of God and the scaffolds of World, Flesh, and Belial attend Mankind in The Castle of Perseverance. Even Marlowe's Faustus sits in his study between the same prompters: Good: Faustus, repent, yet God wil pitty thee... and the Evill: Ay, but Faustus never shal repent. In Shakespeare the Medieval ground lies most exposed in the early Histories — Hastings: June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History O momentary grace of mortal men, Which we more hunt for than the grace of God! Who builds his hope in air of your good looks Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast. Ready, with every nod to tumble down Into the fatal bowels of the deep. 13) El Greco, 1578, Adoration of the Holy Name, The Escorial, Spain 13a) Same, detail lower right (while video shows from 13: first, upper half, then two lower details, then the whole); 13a is from El Grecol's Sketch, National Gal.lery, London. Music: Pomponio Nenna, c. 1610(?), Tenebrae, Responsoria, Nonesuch H-71277 In that ghostly forehall to the Day of Wrath (chromatic now with all Pomponio Nenna shared with Gesualdo), El Greco's Philip II (though cushioned) prays to the Holy Name, over the Leviathan mouth of hell. Mad Tom: Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness. Pray, innocent, and beware the foul fiend. For both Lear and Gloucester the turning point is prayer: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are... ...I have ta'en Too little care of this! and: Heavens, deal so still, Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man ...feel your power quickly. So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough. Charity itself become Utopian! 14) 14a) El Greco, c. 1610, Laocoön, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '75); + V upper left detail Same, Laocoön, center detail (CGB '75); video returns first to 14 June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Under a conscious pagan surface of plural gods and daemonic nature — (skip in Nenna to "Exclamans") As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport — and far transcending the opposite tragic truth, the wheel of retributive justice — The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to plague us — Lear more than any other play builds a Christian mystery of love out of humbled pride: Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all. From the same time, El Greco's Laocoön turns the Homeric fable and recovered Hellenistic carving to a sacred involvement of the human family in the toils of the godsnake. 15) Same, closer detail of Laocoön (CGB '75); with video details (also from V15a and 14) Gloucester: Let me kiss that hand — Lear: Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality. But can El Greco's fevered art rise with Lear through Christ and the woman taken in adultery: Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand; Why dost thou lash that whore? to the old king's waking in Cordelia's care?: (close Nenna) Do not laugh at me, For as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia... Pray you now, Forget and forgive; I am old and foolish. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 8 �C.G. Bell 16) 16a) Symbolic History Jacob de Gehyn II, 1603, Devil Sowing Tares, pen and ink, Staatl. Mus., Berlin Bertoia Parmese, 1570-72, Judgment of Paris, detail, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '75) On Shakespeare's stage, as in any perspective field by his contemporary Jacob de Gheyn, the devil may be sowing symbolic tares. Where is the cave in Macbeth called Acheron? is Hamlet mad or sane? how does the 24 hour action of Othello go with the time implied: "What keep a week away, a month"; "The deed of shame with him a thousand times committed" — in 24 hours? If these flights rest on Medieval earthlessness, they show such mastery of earth's dimensions as the spatial foreshortenings of Tintoretto and the Mannerists. Where the causal mingles with the symbolic, the dramatic why broods "yet hanging in the stars." 17) English late 13th cent., Harlech Castle, Wales; first, V detail Music: 13th cent., In Seculum Artifex, "Jolly Minstrels," VICS-10049 The history Shakespeare chronicles begins with King John, 1200, a time when even the secular held the chivalric distance of sacred surrender. If the crisis of tragedy in Shakespeare is a crisis in Christendom, what it requires (over the Judgment ground) is a world-affirming grandeur as far from Harlech Castle as is 13th-century song from chordal pomp or the mighty line. (fade In Seculum) Va18) Jacobean, 1607-11 (Robert Lyminge), Hatfield House, South Front (detail), near London (slide show substitutes a18, Hardwick Hall, 1590-94, South Front) Same, Hatfield, interior, The Long Gallery Again, a18, Hatfield exterior, wider view Vb18) 18) Music: William Byrd, c. 1600(?), In Nomine à 5, (viols, Jaye) Turnabout, TV 34017 Whereas in the history plays, everything from Constance Plantagenet — Here I and sorrows sit, Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it — June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to the fall of Wolsey — I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory — might be enacted in the Jacobean courtyard of Hatfield House to the swelling harmonies of a Byrd In Nomine. (fade Byrd) 19) Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, February, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V details Yet for all his vastness, Shakespeare is happy heir to the naive vitalities of Gothic: this Limbourg winter, the birds, the drifted road, the woman blowing her nails: When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipped and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit, tu-who, A merry note. While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. 20) Flemish MS, c. 1510, February, Grimani Breviary, St. Mark's Library, Venice; + V detail The Grimani variation moves a hundred years toward the fulness of Shakespeare's nature and clowns: When all aloud the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw. When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit, tu-who, A merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History By Shakespeare's birth that Gothic observation was opening 21) 21a) 21b) P. Brueghel, 1565, Hunters in the Snow, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) Same, detail of bird and mountains, upper right Same, detail of hunters, lower left (CGB '59) to the recess of Brueghel, the foreground hill dropping to a valley under snow peaks and the bird's wing, a funnel of force into which we, like the hunters, are drawn. So the winter of Gawain and the Green Knight, 1390 — When clear cold water, shed from the clouds, Froze before it could fall to the fallow earth... And clattering from the crest the running stream Hung over his head in hard icy-ikkles — broadens through Douglas, 1510 (CGB): Over crags and dark brows of the broken rocks Hung long icicles like giant hoary locks... And the wild geese also were clacking and crying, In the dark night above the city flying; through Sackville's 1563 Induction, The naked twigs were shivering all for cold, And Spenser's Winter, Chattering his teeth… Whil'st on his hoary beard his breath did freeze, to Shakespeare's: ...the icy fang And churlish chiding of the winter's wind... 22) P. Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Dance, detail of piper, Kunsthistoriches, Museum, Wien; video: first, central detail from the whole, see Va22 June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All over Europe, as the Renaissance deepens, the features of Shakespeare's world take form: folk life in Brueghel gaining in volume, as from mystery plays and farces, through Rabelais, toward Sancho Panza, Bottom, Dogberry: Come hither neighbor Seacoal… You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch. Therefore bear you the lantern. This is your charge. You shall comprehend all vagrom men... 23) 23a) 23b) 23c) Elsheimer, 1609, Night Flight to Egypt, whole, Alte Pinakothek, München Same, Night Flight, detail of sky (cf. Giants 80; while V takes a detail from 23) Rubens, 1637-40, Landscape by Moonlight, Courtauld Institute; + V detail Again 23, Elsheimer, Night Flight, cropped (CGB '59) Music: Dowland 1612. From Silent Night, close, (Deller) SRV-306 SD On the Keplerian divide of 1600, German Elsheimer turns nature to an infinite starry dark, a Sidereal Messenger, as rich and Italianate as the chromatics of Dowland's "From Silent Night". Hard to realize, in the nocturnal glory of the Juliet balcony scene: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? that the only scene-painting is in Romeo's vow: by yonder blessed moon... That tips with silver all these fruit tree tops. A description slightly extended in The Merchant of Venice: The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise... and Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide (end Dowland) 12 �C.G. Bell 24) Symbolic History Mantegna, 1474(?), Gonzaga Court, Ducal Palace, Mantua; first, V detail To nature must be added the Renaissance court, jester (here dwarf) and all. It begins, with Mantegna's 1474 fresco of the Gonzagas, to have the right Twelfth-Night look, the combined retinue, if Duke Orsino had married the Countess Olivia. a25) 25) Titian, 1532, Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, Palazzo Pitti Moretto da Brescia, c. 1525(?), "Alas I desire too much," National Gallery, London V25a) Veronese (1553-4) Juno pours gold on Venice, Doge's Palace, Venice (CGB '59) The individual Claudios and Benedicks first perfect the airs in which even the 19th century conceived them, when the followers of Giorgione — Titian, Lotto, Moretto — painted such portraits as this inscribed: "Alas, I desire too much." Not only The Merchant of Venice, where Portia is the golden fleece and everything hinges on gold, not only Shakespeare, but the whole northern late Renaissance is artfully Venetian. 26) P. Pourbus, c. 1580(?), Court in a Park, Wallace Collection, London; with V details Music: Morley, 1595, Now is the month of Maying, Westminster XWN 18764 Like a Morley "fa-la-la," Pieter Pourbus blends north and south in this mannered banquet in a park, 1581, as if the jester Touchstone had lured all the "country copulatives" to an As You Like It hymen, by Jaques’ "ducdame" burden — an "invocation to call fools into a circle." (cut Morley) a27) 27) 27a) 27b) N. Hilliard, 1572, Man aged 24, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Hilliard, c. 1590(?), George Clifford, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; + V detail Hilliard, 1588, "Shakespeare as Mercury," Victoria and Albert Museum, London Hilliard, c. 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh, miniature, National Portrait Gallery, London Music: June 1996 William Byrd, c. 1590(?), Wolsey's Wilde. Landowska, G-AD 1014 (78) 1600: The Tragic Divide 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In England the same blend produces the best match for the airier moods of Shakespeare. Hilliard expresses as finely as anyone the high Platonic idealism which lingers somehow from the Lady of the Unicorn and the Offering of the Heart: Romeo: I dreamt my lady came and found me dead — Strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think, And breathed such life with kisses in my lips, That I revived and was an emperor. (Romeo and Juliet, V, i) (fade Wolsey's Wilde) If only we could find (like a chest of old viols) actors so clean ("speak the speech... trippingly... beget a temperance that may give it smoothness"), perhaps even Hamlet could be restored to the veiled nuance of consort-tone, with which the revival of early instruments has blessed the harmonies of Byrd. 28) 28a) 28b) English, c. 1590, Tomb of The Good Earl of Warwick, St. Mary's, Warwick English Tomb Effigies, c. 1576, Monument to Alex Denton, d. 1576, and his first wife Anne, died in childbirth, 1566, Hereford Cathedral, South Transept (CGB '84) Again 28, Earl of Warwick tomb, detail Music: William Byrd, c. 1590(?), Earl of Salisbury Pavan, viols, G-DB 2416 (78) In death as in life a dignity, ultimate containment of the tragic storm: O here Will I set up my everlasting rest; And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh... The agony of Marlowe's Faustus returns to the choral ground: Cut is the branch that might have growne full straight, And burned is Apollowes Laurel bough... Even in Lear a moral order survives in which the gored state can be maintained. Like this effigy of Warwick, Wolsey carries nobility into the grave. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I feel within me A peace above all earthly dignities, A still and quiet conscience... 29) 29a) Hilliard, c. 1590(?), Man leaned against a tree, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; + V detail Spanish, 1486, Tomb of Don Martin Vasquez de Arce "el Doncel," Siguenze Cathedral; + V detail It is surely a gift of Shakespeare's "blessed plot, this realm, this England," that the dainty groupings of Rosalind and Orlando, Viola, Feste, Orsino — If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it... That strain again — it had a dying fall — could revive, after Lear, in the romance deepening of The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline: Fear no more the heat o' th' sun, Nor the furious winter's rages: Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone and ta'en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 30) 30a) (close Salisbury Pavan) El Greco, 1594-1604, Female Portrait, Johnson Collection, Museum, Philadelphia Double: [A] Botticelli, 1482, Birth of Venus, detail of head, Uffizi, Florence; and [B] attributed to El Greco, now to Sofanisba Anguissola c. 1585, Woman with Ermine, Stirling, etc., Museum, Glasgow Yet also in that island the wormwood of El Greco's "La Desilusionada" had fallen. The lightly balanced joy of the early comedies slides into a vortex of evil; the clowns thicken to the bawd and pander Pompey Bum: "Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?" Troilus, "The argument of a cuckold and a whore," bequeaths us nothing but Pandarus' diseases. As if Botticelli's Venus had been infected with such a brand as takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love, June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And sets a blister there... a31) Caravaggio, 1607-08, Beheading of St. John the Baptist, Malta (video: left group only) Same, detail, head of old woman Same, closer detail of left group Double: [A] Caravaggio, 1586-98, head of the Medusa, Uffizi, Florence; and [B] El Greco, 1590-1600, Crucifixion, detail, Angel and Magdalen, Prado, Madrid (1996: this has been replaced in the slide show and video by 31a, Double: [A] Caravaggio, 1600, Fleeing youth from Martyrdom of St. Matthew, S. Luigi dei Francese, Rome; and [B] El Greco, 1605-10, Stunned guards from Resurrection, Prado, Madrid) b31) 31) V31a) Yet we search in vain for a specific inception of what has been called the "Baroque disillusionment" — however the more than Othello rhetoric of dark — O heavy hour! Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of sun and moon, and that th'afrighted globe Did yawn at alteration — fan out from Caravaggio's 1600 Rome and Naples. Earth's betrayal is ubiquitous: it fell on Abelard, Petrarch, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Spenser, as on Jonson and Donne: "all in fragments, all coherence gone." The pain of Fulke Greville's If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have found more easy ways to good, appears in Shakespeare's earliest tragedy — and the least resolved — Titus Andronicus: O why should nature build so foul a den, Unless the gods delight in tragedies? What changes, even with pain, is the style — Caravaggio's Tenebrist weight, against the space-dissolving whirls of El Greco. Is Shakespeare affined to both? 32) Michelangelo, 1492, Battle of Centaurs, Casa Buonorotti, Florence; + V detail June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Florentine embodiment had set the terms for the crisis of 1600. In Michelangelo's beginnings, 1492, year of Lorenzo il Magnifico's death and Columbus' discovery, power wars on itself. heightened and consumed. The phases of cathartic pain — Hybris, Dikê, Soteria — swell toward an incarnate Trinity: Hegel's Fathering Idea, alienating Passion, synthesis as Comforter; for Blake the Innocence, dire Experience, Renewal of prophetic history. 33) Michelangelo, 1508-12, Adam Created, detail, Sistine ceiling, Vatican The dawn hope Michelangelo drew from that Florence: Pico's human wonder, man lifting himself on the wings of choice beyond the stars. While Shakespeare's early rapture is Platonic love, transplanted from the same humanist ground: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. 34) Michelangelo, 1530-33(?), "Young Giant" (1st Captive), Accademia, Florence; + V detail But Michelangelo's liberation strikes on a rock of impossibility as hard as any in Shakespeare: Down, down I come, like glistering Phaeton, Wanting the manage of unruly jades... Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence... He that hath suffered this disordered spring Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf... a35) 35) Michelangelo, 1542-50, Conversion of Paul, Pauline Chapel, Vatican Same, detail of Paul Pathos and glory fuse: Michelangelo's Paul thrown down and struck blind by the lightning of God. So Gloucester's reversal in Lear: "I stumbled when I saw... our mere defects/ Prove our commodities." His dying reunion with Edgar, "His flawed heart... burst smilingly," is the clue to Lear's immortal insight. as he dies, that Cordelia is coming to life: "Look on her, look, her lips,/ Look there, look there." "Upon such sacrifices... the gods themselves throw incense." June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 17 �C.G. Bell 36) 36a) Symbolic History Michelangelo, 1542-64, Rondanini Pieta, Castello Sforzesco, Milan; first, V detail of Mary's head from 36a Same, upper detail Music: Vicentino, 1567, Heu mihi, opening, Vanguard. HM - 34 SD Though it is in his last broken Pieta, from the time when Vicentino first rounded the chromatic sea, that Michelangelo went beyond what any other artist, in any other image, has ever made of tragedy: No, no, no, no; come let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness... And we'll wear out In a walled prison, pacts and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by th' moon... a37) 37) (fade Vicentino) Michelangelo, c. 1539, Brutus, whole bust, National Museum (Bargello), Florence (for this color whole, the video uses Va37, a black-and-white detail of the face) Same, Brutus, a black-and-white view of the shoulder and full face What broke the Rondanini Pieta, applied an infinite torque, even to revived antiquity. Like Michelangelo's Brutus, Shakespeare's Romans have a flawed grandeur unknown to the pagan past. North's Plutarch: Antonius spake... Of all them that had slain Caesar. there was none but Brutus only that was moved to do it, as thinking the act commendable of itself... the other conspirators... for some private... envy... against Shakespeare: This was the noblest Roman of them all. All the conspirators save only he Did that they did, in envy of great Caesar; He only, in a general honest thought, And common good to all, made one of them. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him, 38) Rembrandt, 1661, Conspiracy of Julius Civilis, National Museum, Stockholm; first, a video detail, from Va38 that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, this was a man. Only the great can parallel the great. The next depicted conspiracy of such magnitude comes from as far after Shakespeare as Michelangelo was before him — and in the deepened formal contrasts of Huyghens’ light and shade — it is Rembrandt's mutilated Oath of Julius Civilis (Batavians, in this case, against Rome). 39) Roman late Republican, c. 35 B.C., Bust of Mark Antony, Museum, Narbonne But Antony is the Roman whom Shakespeare most titanically reshapes. Set this Republican bust of him against Cleopatra's praise: His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm Crested the world... or Antony's going off: Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish, A vapour sometime, like a bear or lion... They are black vesper's pageants... thy captain is Even such a body... 40) 40a) Double: [A] Roman c. 20-10 B.C., Livia(?) (or Octavia?), Copenhagen; and [B] Graeco Roman (Africa) c. 40 B.C.(?), head of Cleopatra, Cherchel, Algeria (video also shows 40A singly) Single 40B, again Cleopatra This matron on the left — Octavia, or her sister, Augustus' Livia — fits Enobarbus' description: "Octavia is of a holy, cold, and still conversation." (Menas) "Who would not have his wife so?" (Enobarbus) "Not he that himself is not so; which is Mark Antony... "He will to his Egyptian dish again..." Against the female policy of June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Rome, this Hellenized Cleopatra (right), as ideal as sensuous, might give a base for Shakespeare's soaring: "Age cannot wither her." But for the fatal extravagance of their love — "The crown o' th' earth doth melt... O withered is the garland of the war" — for images of the sensuous swoon and lethal rapture, "full-drawn, ascendant, like the word expire" a41) b41) 41) Michelangelo, 1520-34, Night, from the Medici Tombs, Florence (detail of face from front and below; while video shows profile detail of Va41) Same, Night, frontal view of head and torso; while video, Vb41, shows the stretched-out body Same, Night, profile, vertical of head, arm, breast; from which video takes a close up, then a frontal head and body from V41a, returning to a profile and breast of 41) (Wilbye's "Draw on Sweet Night") — Music: Wilbye, 1609, "Draw on Sweet Night," (Deller) Quintessence PMC7143 where can we turn but to Michelangelo — the sleeping Night for which he wrote: Caro m’ é ‘l sonno... Sleep is dear to me, and better to be stone... Therefore do not wake me; alas, speak low — (CGB) Pero non mi destar, deh: parla basso! — a carving we can seriously contemplate, even as we read of Cleopatra’s “dateless bargain to engrossing death”: (fade Wilbye) Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have Immortal longings in me. Now no more The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip. Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear Antony call... I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life... — (O eastern star!) June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Peace, peace. Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep? — (O break! O break!) As sweet as balm. as soft as air, as gentle — O Antony! 42) Titian, 1538, Venus of Urbino Uffizi, Florence; + V detail (note alternates: CGB '59 slide, with gold frame, and without, V42) Titian, as different from Michelangelo as Venice from Florence, runs a similar threefold course, however richly its phases overlap. He begins with sensuous delight. Though Juliet, Portia, and the rest do not appear on stage in so frank a pose as this, Shakespeare shows as much in the double-play which constitutes his bawdry: What, with my tongue in your tail? Nay come again Good Kate... We shall ne'er win at that sport, and stake down. O that she were An open et cetera, thou a poperin pear. I would I were thy bird. — Sweet, so would I; Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing. 43) Titian, 1570-76, Tarquin and Lucrece, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna Titian's later life is a deepening involvement in that tragic century. By 1570 his Tarquin and Lucrezia, in shade and flaming impasto, has more of Othello than of Shakespeare's mannered Rape of Lucrece: Yield to my love; if not, enforced hate, Instead of love's coy touch shall rudely tear thee... 44) Titian, c. 1570 ff., Shepherd and Nymph, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59) June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But a third phase is implicit in those post-tragic works where primordial and heroic forms loom through a brushwork like incandescent passionate flakes. In one of the last and greatest of his pictures, Titian returns to the Arcadia of his youth, as if to show, with Cervantes in Part II of Don Quixote, the cost of a profound well-being. This pastoral, 2nd 43) Tarquin and Lucrece, detail with the Lucrece of the same time, might form a Winter's-Tale pair: from jealous rigor: if powers divine Behold our human actions, as they do, I doubt not then, but innocence shall make False accusation blush, and tyranny Tremble at patience... Look down, And see what death is doing — 2nd 44) Shepherd and Nymph, detail (CGB '59) to the recreated Enna of a shearing feast: O Proserpina, For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall From Dis's wagon: daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty... You gods, look down, And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter's head. 45) Pol de Limbourg, 1413-16, August, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly (video: lower detail only) In the brittle poignance of Gothic there was no room for that shadowed epithalamium of the conscious heart. What Pericles calls "the shores of mortality" had not been widened for its "great sea of joys". Between the "naked villainy" and "holy writ" of Richard III, a thin soil, vernal with flowers, brightens the rock of our wretchedness. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 22 �C.G. Bell a46) 46) Symbolic History Master of the Rohan Hours, c. 1418-20, Death and Judgment, Bibl. Nat., Paris, details of corpse, to which video adds detail of God and whole (Va46) Double: [A] again, a46, Rohan Master's Death and Judgment; and [B] Holbein (Hans the Younger), c. 1525, Dance of Death, woodcuts, The Old Woman #19 (video replaces the double with a detail of B, the Holbein) The happiness, which in early Shakespeare remains inconsequent — "Lord what fools these mortals be" — yields, in 1400 miniatures and poems, at the slightest erosion, to the old bleached skull: The lif of this world Is reuled with wynd, Wepinge, derknesse, And steriinge; With wind we blomen, With wind we lassun; With weopinge we comen, With weopinge we passun. With steriinge we begynnen, With steriinge we enden; With drede we dwellen, With drede we wenden. The whole age of faith had voiced that lean tragic ground, yet could not rise to the proud forms of tragedy. Although from first-Gothic to Chaucer, from this Rohan Hours page to Dürer and Holbein, the quickening life pulse sharpens a cadaver-dance and death's head contemplation — a47) 47) 47a) Durer, 1521, St. Jerome, Museum Nat. de Arte Antiga, Lisbon H. Golzius, 1614, "Quis evadit, nemo", drawing, Pierpont Morgan, New York City; + V details Giorgione, 1505-10, Sleeping Venus, detail, Gallery, Dresden Music: Gibbons, 1618, close "Behold thou hast made..." (Deller) VICS1551 it is only in the time of Shakespeare (of the verse anthems of Byrd or of this Gibbons), when the romance of late-Renaissance has gauded the doublet and plumed the cap, June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History plumped lip and cheek and brightened the eyes of mortality, that the sun of glory, as in this Golzius, lures the tragic tulip from the skull: Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of this excesse, Eat up thy charge? Only then that Hamlet — as the gravedigger singing In youth when I did love, did love, Methought it was very sweet, throws up the skull of Yorick, "a fellow of infinite Jest," at whose lips the child-prince had hung ("Where be your gibes now? Your gambols?") — can weigh loss against an As-You-Like-It dawn, when he had courted the fair Ophelia in ideal love, before the Ghost walked or flesh was so far sullied: But look, the morn in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill. a48) 48) 48a) El Greco, 1584-1610(?), St. Gerome as Cardinal, Museum Bonnat, Bayonne Elizabethan, c. 1570(?), Pleated picture, Mary Stuart and a skull (two views), National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh Jacob de Geyn II, c. 1600(?), Seated Gypsy(?), Prof. Altena, Amsterdam Of course tragedy is reared on the old pessimism of earth. But what exploits of power have wrought, from Dark Age Alcuin's "vermibus atque cibus", Hotspur's fall of pride: "For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart." So in this pleated picture, its corrugations viewed from left and right: Mary Queen of Scots and a death's head — (Shakespeare) Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry, Distinguish form... Thus Macbeth meteors to the tragic ground: Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. 49) (end Gibbons) H. Eworth, English 1591 (copying from 1550), Sir John Lutrell, Dunster Castle, Somerset; first, a video detail (cf. V49) If contempt of the world is one pole of the tragic tension, man's belief in its worth is the other. An age of great tragedy takes its tone from that stretch. Sir John Lutrell strides the ocean under the laurel favor of the gods, one of those Elizabethans a contemporary described: "free, stout, haulte, prodigall of life and blood." 50) 50a) Tintoretto, c. 1550(?), Sebastiano Veniero, Prado, Madrid Tintoretto (attr.), c. 1560(?), Portrait of a Sculptor, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) From Italy north runs a wave of self-validating pride: Tintoretto's Venetians; Marlowe's aspirers, robed in the mighty line — Tamburlaine: Nature that fram'd us of foure Elements, Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspyring minds... Still climbing after knowledge infinite... a51) 51) Andrea del Sarto, 1527, St. Michael Weighing Souls, Predella panel, Four Saints' Altar, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail Titian, 1545, Portrait of Pietro Aretino, Pitti Palace, Florence; + V detail But the titan will — "Here, Faustus. try thy braines to gaine a deitie" — strikes on the Satanic compact: Adders and Serpents, let me breathe a while: Ugly hell gape not, come not Lucifer. Ile burne my bookes, ah Mephastophilis. (Exeunt with him.) Titian's Aretino, "poison-flower of the Renaissance," fits Jonson's Volpone, Shakespeare's fallen Angelo: June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before High Heaven As make the angels weep. Va52) Hilliard, c. 1600(?), George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, Nelson Gallery, Atkins Museum, Kansas City Titian, c. 1570, Punishment of Marsyas, Mus. Naz, Kromeriz, Czech. Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Milan (video takes a detail from 36, above) Tintoretto, 1587, Self-Portrait, Louvre, Paris; + V detail b52) c52) 52) There lies the crux of tragedy: man, on the old morality stage, blown to such "fantastical puff-paste": It will come. Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep. What such currents have washed over they reduce to scoured rock, bones of the once assertive. But there remains a shattered Pieta, gathering incredible tenderness in its ruin: "No cause, no cause"; or some last death mask, as of Gloucester or Lear, inalienably noble — Tintoretto's final self-portrait, pride divinely broken and affirmed, reaching beyond itself with matchless power: O sun, Burn the great sphere thou mov'st in. Darkling stand The varying shore o' the world... 53) English (Droeshout), pub. 1623, First Folio engraving of Shakespeare; + V detail Laughable, in the flash of Promethean genius and thunder of tragic words, to turn back the pages to the quiet impersonal mask of the folio engraving. Beyond the giants of the Continent forged in the furnace of spiritual war, could the sweet swan of Avon, in the easy success of his investments and art, opening trim lips to the curse and blessing of all that lives — Thou must be patient; we came crying hither. Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air We wawl and cry... — June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 26 �C.G. Bell 54) 54a) 54b) 54c) Symbolic History Double: [A] Hilliard, c. 1590, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, National Portrait Gallery, London; and [B] Rembrandt, 1629, Self, Dean Cavat Collection, London Again, Hilliard's Dudley, the single A of 54 Again, Hilliard and Rembrandt, the Double 54 Again, Rembrandt, Self, the single B of 54 mediate the deepening of humanity and art, as from Hilliard about 1590 (left), with Morley — Music: Morley, 1600, "It was a lover and his lass, (Cuenod) Westminster WL5085 a realm of Puckish caprice and changing loyalties, And those things do best please me That befall preposterously, where moral questions hardly arise, and happy endings can grace the discomfiture of testy Egeus, Malvolio, even of Shylock's malice (fade Morley) — to Rembrandt, 1628 (right), with Schein — Music: J.H. Schein, 1623, from Die mit Tränen säen, near start, MHS 4288 over the moral divide, so causally aware, that reconciliation is hard to come by, must be paid for at a commensurate, almost at a tragic price: Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper... (fade Schein) Only fifteen years separate that Tempest utterance, which basses the world's trespass, punishes, and rewards, 55) School of Parmagianino, c. 1560(?), Allegorical Landscape, detail, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '75); + V detail and return to the whole from the tetrameter yearning of Oberon and Titania: June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then my Queen, in silence sad, Trip we after the night's shade. We the globe can compass soon, Swifter than the wandering moon. — Come my lord, and in our flight, Tell me how it came this night, That I sleeping here was found, With these mortals on the ground. As if from Platonic withdrawal, all things earthly "Like far-off mountains turned into clouds" (this 16th-century transreal dance of spirits), weightless as the astronomy of angelically guided spheres, 56) 56a) 56b) Rubens, c. 1630, Feast of Venus, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59); + V detail English Tapestry, 1611, detail from Four Seasons, Hatfield House Again 56, Rubens' Feast of Venus we rode the voluminous and life-affirming masque of Rubens' Feast of Venus toward the astronomy of Newton's gravitating masses. So Shakespeare: You nymphs called Naiads of the windring brooks, With your sedged crowns and ever-harmless looks, Leave your crisp channels... You sunburnt sicklemen of August weary, Come hither from the furrow, and be merry... Though what we need is not simply a dance of nymphs and reapers, but the whole "majestic vision" of The Tempest. 57) Jacob de Gheyn II, c. 1600(?), Witches' Kitchen, Staatliches Museum, Berlin (video: three details only, from left to right) Between the two, lies the nightmare passage of De Gheyn and Macbeth, energized out of Bosch's demonic seizure: Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air... Round about the caldron go; In the poisoned entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Sweltered venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i' th' charmed pot... Finger of birthstrangled babe, Ditch-delivered by a drab... Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble... 58) 58a) Jacob de Gheyn II, c. 1600(?), Sleeping Nude, A. Ulrich Mus., Brunswick Spranger, c. 1600(?), Venus and Adonis, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In De Gheyn that souring fell also on flesh, Titian's voluptuous ideal loaded with "the strong'st suggestion our worser Genius can": "It is not words that shakes me thus — pish! — noses, ears and lips." What wrenches love, from Donne ("Spermatique issue of ripe menstruous boils") to Swift ("Oh Celia, Celia, Celia shits!") rages in the tragedies: The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With a more riotous appetite... 59) Jacob de Gheyn II, c. 1600(?), Witch and Familiar on a Monster, Christ Church, Oxford; + V detail As in de Gheyn's witch visions, the pure offering of the heart, that "silly sooth" of the "old age," becomes the imposthume of Hamlet's fever: Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty. The new fulness of flesh heightens the task, with the need of vindication. Donne's "dialogue of one" from the "Ecstasy" of his own love and marriage: "To our bodies turn we then," 60) Rembrandt, 1635, Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, etching, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; + V detail and return to the whole "Else a great prince in prison lies," will not answer for Milton's Fall or Rembrandt's wife of Potiphar: (Leontes) No barricado for a belly. Know't; It will let in and out the enemy With bag and baggage. (and Iago) Didst thou not see her paddle with the palm of his hand?... Lechery... 61) Rembrandt, 1668, Jewish Bride, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (CGB '59); + V detail June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But it was not true of Hermione, nor of Desdemona. The muddy imputation falls off under the death-cadence of an old song: "sing, willow, willow, willow." Rembrandt, too, in one of his last works, as if looking back, "dallying with the innocence of love," reconstitutes, in embodied, earth-shadowed harmonies, that blessedness of the soul: As I hope For quiet days, fair issue, and long life, With such love as 'tis now... 62) Hilliard, 1572, Elizabeth I, National Portrait Gallery, London; + V detail Our pictures have ranged over Europe; yet even in Shakespeare's island, where art after the Reformation lagged, we might trace the threefold transformation. The ideal phase fares best. Hilliard's Elizabeth has the refinement of Spenser's: Tell me. have ye seene her angelick face, Like Phoebe fayre? Her heavenly haveour, her princely grace can you well compare? The Redde rose medled with the White yfere, In either cheeke depeincten lively chere. Her modest eye, Her Maiestie, Where have you seene the like, but there? 63) 63a) Isaac Oliver, c. 1600(?), Nymphs and Satyrs, drawing, Royal Collection, England Same, Nymphs, etc., center detail; while video takes two details from 63 The deepening comic bacchanal that runs from Titian to the compound mass of Rubens pairs English Oliver with a wicked Wylbie madrigal on satyrs: "Fain wouldst thou turn and yield them their delight." Music: 64) Wylbie, 1609, from "Fly not so swift", (Randoloh) Westminster L 5221 (fade) Lagneau, c. 1600-10, Young Man in a Fur Cap, Beaux Arts, Lille; first, video detail While the to-be" "pale cast work is a man... "gloire et rebut," June 1996 introspection which throws over many works of 1600 a "To-be-or-notof thought" (Lagneau's morbid youth) — Hamlet's "What a piece of paragon of animals... quintessence of dust," suggesting Pascal's later "Pride and garbage of the universe" — 1600: The Tragic Divide 30 �C.G. Bell 65) Symbolic History Hilliard, c. 1600(?), Man against Flames, Victoria and Albert Museum, London stretches the lightness of the English miniature in Hilliard's Man holding a Locket against a Background of Flame: The time is out of joint, O cursed spite, That ever I was born to put it right... Look here upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers... 66) Tintoretto, 1591-92, Christ on the Sea of Galilee, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (the video omits this whole, going to 66a, detail) Same, detail: Sea and Ship; + V closer detail Preview close-up of 67, El Greco Landscape; then a video return to 66a 66a) V66b) Music: Giovanni Gabrielli, c. 1610(?), Quem Vidistis (near close), Eng. Decca SDD 363 (cf. London STS-15256) Even the masterly assault on the physical universe, that superscript of light on darkness, which Tintoretto passed (like a harpoon of St. Elmo's fire) to Cretan El Greco, who bore it to Spain — while music built to the vast chromatic chords of Giovanni Gabrielli, on which brasses blazon, voices leap and trill — 67) El Greco, c. 1610, Toledo Landscape, detail, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City El Greco, Laocöon, detail of background (taken from slide 14) V67a) such a storm as Lear was invoking: Blow winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage, blow... ...all germenes spill at once That makes ingrateful man — 68) 68a) 68b) (fade Gabrielli) Sir Nathaniel Bacon, c. 1600, Rocky Landscape, Ashmolean, Oxford Sir Nathaniel Bacon, c. 1620, Self, from Gorhambury Collection, Earl of Verulam Closer view of 68, Bacon Landscape; first, video detail June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History even that has a humble English cognate in a little landscape by the painter amateur, Nathaniel Bacon. So too the musical daring of Italy spills over the north, mostly in smaller forms — Weelkes, "O care": Music: a69) 69) Weelkes, 1600, "O Care, thou wilt despatch me, opening, Decca STS 15165 (fade) Claude Lorrain, 1630's, Tiber above Rome, detail, British Museum, London Same, Tiber, whole, watercolor Music: William Lawes, c. 1635(?), Sonata #8, opening, Arco ZRG 555 The storm has passed in the music of William Lawes. What went into the 1600 vortex was the thousand year old doom of the world, intensified by the new glory of that world condemned. What comes out is the causal order of human command, the landscape of harmony, most luminous in Claude Lorrain. 70) Inigo Jones, 1638, Scene for Luminalia, Chatsworth Estates And here too, in English art, Inigo Jones' night scene from Luminalia, an ink-wash randomly splashed, holds the chrysolite of the classical dream ("What seas, what shores...") The music of the spheres! List my Marina. 71) Rubens, c. 1615-17, Shepherd with flock in woods, National Gallery, London Such the volitional grandeur of the 17th century, in which Shakespeare died — Rubens' early pictures entering London about the time Prospero took his leave of it: Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves, And ye that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him When he comes back... by whose aid — Weak masters though ye be — 72) Rubens, c. 1620(?), Philemon and Baucis, storm detail, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Wien (video uses V72, an older detail; replace?) I have bedimmed The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Set roaring war. To the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt... (Rubens in ten years to unleash his own tragic storm) But this rough magic I here abjure. a73) 73) Rubens, 1635-37, Landscape with Rainbow, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Rubens, c. 1638, Landscape with Shepherds and Flock, National Gallery, London; + V detail of sunset Music: William Lawes, Sonato #8, 2nd Movement, Air, Arco ZRG 555 and when I have required Some heavenly music — which even now I do — To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book... Rubens too issuing, in age, to the light-streaming landscape of recovery and reconciliation. (cut Lawes) In The Winter's Tale the way to that sunlit pastoral is over the flap-dragoning sea: a74) 74) Rubens, c. 1624, The Storm, detail, Franz König Collection, Haarlem Rubens, c. 1624(?), Shipwreck of Aeneas, Berlin-Dahlem Museum; + V details I would you did but see how it chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the shore... And if the chromatic scale, as so many have said, is such a chaos and devouring gulf, it is exactly over that ocean of formlessness that the ordered tonalities of major and minor had to be sought. The defiance and victory of that voyage have ultimate expression in the Chromatic Fantasy by Sweelinck, Dutch organist, who died in 1621. It builds, with Rubens’ night storms, a peak of energy in all art. Music: Sweelinck, c. 1610-20(?), Chromatic Fantasy, opening and close, SVBX-5316 (1) June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 33 �C.G. Bell 75) 76) 76b) Symbolic History Rubens, c. 1620-25(?), Philemon and Baucis Landscape, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (CGB '59); with video details (one from 72) Rubens, same, Philemon and Baucis, stream detail (CGB '59); + V details (as V76a) Same, Rubens' Philemon and Baucis, detail of drowned mother and child, lower left (CGB '59) (skip in music) a77) 77) 77a) Rubens, c. 1618, Battle of the Amazons, detail, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (copy of CGB '59, Larger Declaration 35) Rubens, c. 1628(?), Thunderstorm at night, Neuerburg Collection, Hamburg; + V detail Again, Rubens' Storm, whole (cf. a74) (end Sweelinck) The probability matrix we likened at the start to a folded landscape of spirit looms in its bewildering complex of dimensions. The vectors of all phases are at every moment alive and working. Shakespeare, El Greco. Gesualdo, then Sweelinck and Rubens, seem to have scaled the energy peak of the range. a78) b78) 78) 78a) Jos de Momper, 1600, Vista from a Grotto, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '75) de Momper, c. 1600-1610(?), Mountain Landscape, detail, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Same, Mountain Landscape, whole (CGB '59) N. Hilliard, c. 1595, an unknown poet, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Music: Gibbons, c. 1610(?), Fantasia "In nomine" à 5, opening, ARC 3052 But there were easier passes through the same divide, into the silvery landscape Momper had brushed with Prospero's vision; as Gibbons filled the demi-paradise of English houses with strains of proud melting — Baroque substance still lightened by Gothic insubstantiality. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air! And like the baseless fabric of this vision The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep... (fade Gibbons) The brave new world is 1st 79) Michelangelo, 1556-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforzesco, Milan; here video substitutes a detail from 3rd 79b (CGB '80) humanized and sustained only by what it won from tragedy. In that miraculous infolding of heart, by which Lear and Cordelia prepare for a restoration they do not live to enjoy, a beatitude of earth is born of its own denial. a80) Titian, c. 1570, Madonna and Child, National Gallery, London (or Va80, detail) 1st 80) Rembrandt, 1668, Jewish Bride, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (copy of 61, CGB ‘59); video: detail only So substantial an Innocence, won from the lair of Experience, could not have appeared in the earlier plays; it was an element unknown to the world, then being shaped by the titans of 1600. For the arts are no less exploratory than science, open realms of being, shoulder out time, forge truth. In the sacred tenderness of the old king's waking — Cordelia: O you kind gods, Cure this breach in his abused nature, Th' untuned and jarring senses, O wind up Of this child-changed father — an earthly love (Rembrandt's saving ground) 2nd 79) Again, Rondanini Pieta, detail: the faces, with Mary’s left shoulder; while video shows an upper detail of 2nd 79a 2nd 79a) Same, frontal full-length color (so too the video) is alchemized, as from the last pity of Michelangelo: Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead. June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Let Monteverdi, at the close of his 5-voice "Zeffiro torna," sound that expansion of possibility. By a storm-crossing of the chromatic sea (Donne's "new Philosophy calls all in doubt"), we reach a harbor 2nd 80) Again, Jewish Bride, figures cropped (CGB ‘59); video: closer detail of the man only of utopian tones. Donne: "No man is an Island, intire of itself; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine." And Campanella: "The sun strives to burn up the earth, not to produce plants and men, but God guides the battle to great ends." Music: Monteverdi, 1614. close of "Zeffiro torna," Cambridge CRS 1708 3rd 79) Again, Rondanini Pieta, view from the right of the whole curving statue 3rd 79a) Same, detail of the two faces; video of Mary’s only 3rd 79b) Same, from right, upper detail (CGB ‘80); since video previewed this slide for its 1st 79, it returns here to a detail of that 1st 79 slide for its V3rd 79b 3rd 80) Again, Jewish Bride, detail of hands (close Monteverdi) As the Shepherd says in The Winter's Tale: Thou mettest with things dying, I with things new born." June 1996 1600: The Tragic Divide 36 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 37 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1600 : The Tragic Divide, Symbolic History, Part 19 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 19 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_19_1600--The_Tragic_Divide Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/22845d346798a9a04da7da4364afc297.pdf d8f33d854daec04edd10e80d5d3f25f2 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 18. Period Styles: A Review of the Incarnate West CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 June 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 18. Period Styles: A Review of the Incarnate West a1) Double: [A] Ugarit (Syria), c. 2000 B.C., Archaic idol, silver and gold, Aleppo Museum; and [B] Delphi, c. 475 B.C., Charioteer, Mus., Delphi; + video detail of the double (see Va1), and a closer detail of the head of A (from A of Va1) b1) Greek bronze, c. 475 B.C., Charioteer, almost profile, head and shoulders, Mus., Delphi Vc1) Greek, Attic (Phidias, etc.), 447-432 BC, detail of maidens, E. Parthenon frieze, British Museum, London 1) Attic, 430-20 B.C., Eleusinian Votive Relief, National Gallery, Athens (CGB '77 lacks contrast; video uses V1, detail only) Western culture is bred of yoked opposites: Græco-Rome and Yahwe-East. The Greek word for beautiful is καλοσ, which is also the word for good; and it becomes, for Socratic reason, identical with knowing — ugliness and evil reduced to deceptive masks of ignorance. So in the Republic: Then the just is like the wise and good, and the unjust like the evil and the ignorant... Then virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice the disease and weakness and deformity of the same... or the Protagoras: since all virtues are knowledge, including justice and temperance and courage... Music: Mesomedes, c. 130 A.D. (or Byzantine?), Hymn to the Sun (close), Decca 20156 A (78) 6/1995 Period Styles 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Against the Attic celebration of that harmony (where the Goddess Demeter gives the king of Eleusis the sacred grain, while Kore crowns him) — 2) Roman 78-81 A.D., Vespasian invests Domitian, Cancelleria Reliefs, Vatican; video: detail only Double: [A] Parthenon, 447-38, Bearded Horseman, West frieze in situ; and Etrusco-Roman, 1st cent. B.C., Head of a man, Vatican 2a) the Roman will to apply Greek knowledge and beauty for the legal ordering of self and world, seems a leap, as from Homer to Virgil, from vibrance to discipline, as weighted as Mesomedes' Hymn to the Sun, or Vespasian's choice of Domitian for his heir. (close Hymn to the Sun) Yet what are these contraries but lobes of the twofold Classical command, for which Plutarch paralleled the lives of Greeks and Romans: it becomes a man's duty to pursue and make after the best and choicest of everything... virtue creating at once admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doer... so we have thought fit to spend time and pains in writing the lives of famous persons — a3) Sumerian, c. 2600 B.C., Naked Orant, from Khafaje, Temple of Nintu, Baghdad Museum Vb3) Syrian from Megiddo (Palestine), c. 1350-1200 B.C., Statuette, probably a ruler of Megiddo, Oriental Institute, Chicago 3) Phoenecian, c. 1200 B.C., bronze Divinity (from Beirut?), Louvre, Paris; + video detail Music: Jewish Music, traditional, Kaddish for Passover, etc., Decca 20156 B (78) Are they not equally opposed to the earth-searing zeal which had been building up for two millenia in the Semitic crescent — beauty and good as far apart as yaphey and pov, as far as Egyptian bondage from the Beautiful in his cloak of many hues — all that pride thrown down and exalted by the Unnamable: The earth saw and trembled. The hills melted like wax at the presence of the Lord. [Psalm 97] Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. [Isaiah 60] Va4) Wider view of the frescoes of slide 4 4) Graeco-Syrian (Iran) lst cent. A.D., Sacrifice to the Palmyrene Gods, from Dura Eurotus fresco, Nat. Mus., Damascus 6/1995 Period Styles 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V4a) Same, head of a priest (cf. Early Christianity, 13) Let that build through the ferment witnessed in art by the lst-century frescoes from Dura on the Euphrates, through the Teacher of Righteousness of the Dead Sea Scrolls, through Christ, John, and Paul to a symbolic flame in which this realm, Rome and all, fuse in revelation: Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. (I Corinthians) (fade Kaddish) 5) Roman, c. 180, Bust of the young Commodus, Vatican Mus., Rome; + video detail So bring it to bear on the soul-hunger and itch of flesh which the Græco-Roman overreach and inward erosion had become: — Longinus of the third century, with a statue of Commodus: As some children always remain pigmies...our tender minds, fettered by a just servitude, are unable to expand... And Paul: Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools... Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts... 6) 6a) Early Christian, later 5th cent. (Africa or Spain), Mosaic to Optimus, Museo Paleocristiano, Tarragona, Spain Roman Christian (Milan), 5th cent., mosaic detail, an Ancestor of Christ, Capella Sant' Aquilino, San Lorenzo, Milan Seed that moody decay with the faith-paradox of Augustine's City of God: It is incredible that Christ should rise again in the flesh and carry it up to heaven with Him. It is incredible that the world should believe this; and it is incredible that this belief should have been effected by a small sort of poor, simple, unlearned men... The proofs, the persuasions, lay 6/1995 Period Styles 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History not in words, but in wonders... If all the world believed without miracles, that remains a miracle as great as the rest. (XVIII, vi) a7) 7) German, 6th cent., Horseman Ornament, Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe Lombard, later 6th cent., King Agilulf and warriors, gilded copper, Mus. Naz., Florence While the barbarian overthrow of the outward fulfills the Judgment-turn of spirit. Jerome: By their speed they outstripped rumor, and they took pity neither upon religion, nor rank, nor age, nor wailing childhood... but filled the whole earth with slaughter and panic. But already this 6th century Lombard King Agilulf was baptised, throned and sworded like Judgment God in the anomaly of warrior Christianity — as if the trumpet of radical texts, deflected in the Dark-Age gyre of force, summoned through doom toward earthrenewal. 8) Roman Christian, 3rd cent., statuette of the beardless Christ, Thermae, Rome; + video detail Music: Gregorian, Tenebrae factae sunt, opening, Solesmes, V-M 87 That would be the first task for the West, to convert the twilight farewell of late-classical Christianity — as in the Gregorian Tenebrae, or this 3rd century beardless Christ in the Roman Thermae — (fade Gregorian) 9) Double: [A] Northumbrian end of 7th cent., Ruthwell Cross, detail; and [B] French Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1120-50, Tympanum Christ, detail, Vezelay V9a) Ruthwell Cross, whole carving: Mary drying Christ's feet 9b) Again B of 9: Vezelay, Christ detail; first, video closer detail of the head through the upsurge rooted in the Dark Ages, this 700 Ruthwell Cross (left) with the runes carved on it: "syllicre trêow/ on lyft laeden leohte bewunden,/ beama beorhtost" — to the intensity of the 12th-century dawn: the Judgment Christ of Vezelay (right) with Perotin. 6/1995 Period Styles 4 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Perotin, c. 1200, from Beata Viscera, Tinayre, Lumen 32011B Here memories of the sweet and sour of Hellenism, its refinement and question, do not arise, as with Tertullian and Julian the Apostate, either as an evil to be shunned or good to be pursued. That is all drowned. Surrender is as automatic as the stark reserve of primitive style, the mounting of stripped earth, self and desire, on affirming creed. So within the single-voice line of Perotin's Beata Viscera, we have come as far from Gregorian as from pole to pole. (fade Perotin) If the Period Styles of the West find their archetype in God's assumption of flesh and world, how fiercely that first coming stares through space and time. a10) Vb10) 10) 10b) V10c) 10d) Amiens, c. 1230, Quatrefoil (Lust?) from socles of Portal of the Virgin, Amiens English MS, early 14th cent., Creation of the Animals, detail, Illuminated French Bible of Holkam Hall, MS Ad. 47682 f. 2v., British Museum, London Franco-Spanish, late 13th cent., Blessed in Paradise, Main Door Tympanum, Cathedral, Leon; + V details (thus V10a) Same, lower detail Exeter Cathedral, c. 1360, Façade, detail (CGB '80) Gothic, 1391-95 and ff, Square and Drapers' Hall, Cracow Music: Pierre de la Croix, c. 1290(?), S'Amours-Au Renouveler, close Ducretet Thomson 320 C 107 The second task was to widen the faith grip, to diversify the life it contains. In that Gothic ambivalence of joy and denial, the springtime of earth smiles creedacceptance. So Ars Nova music reaches from this Pierre de la Croix, through de Vitry, to the century's end. By 1300, this Paradise Tympanum of Leon Cathedral teems with the life Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hito, would pour, about 1330, into his Book of Good Love — (end Pierre de la Croix) Music: 6/1995 Philippe de Vitry, c.1330, Garrit gallus, Norton Hist., Volume I Period Styles 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History such lusty matter as Snubnose the Tough, mountain cowgirl, who lugs the priest to her hut and feeds him for a bout: Comamos deste pan duro; Después faremos la lucha — narratives gemmed with festal poems (CGB): Día era muy santo de la pascua mayor — It was the holy day of Easter; The sun came golden from the grove And men and birds and flower-clusters Welcomed him, chanting to love — cantando al amor. Had not Jean de Meung's continuation of the Romance of the Rose called forth the orders and ranks which Chaucer, a hundred years later, would set on Pilgrimage? — (fade de Vitry) Music: Grimace, c. 1390, Alarme, alarme (Deller) Everyman 298 SD Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress, Nun, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Man of Law, Franklin, Shipman, Doctor, Wife of Bath, Parson, Plowman, Miller, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner, Host, Alchemist, and more. (fade Grimace) 11) Giotto, 1297-1300, Miraculous Spring, detail of a boy drinking, St. Francis frescoes, Assisi [video draws detail from the whole, Va11] Next was to craft and shape those suspended vitalities, to give them the modes and proportions of the dimensional — a task which, as Vasari stresses, dominates Italian painting from early Giotto (this detail of a boy drinking at St. Francis' miraculous spring), 12) Giov. Bellini, c. 1500-05, The Barque of Love Allegory, Accademia, Venice; first, video detail Music: Dalza, pub. 1508, from Tastar de Corde, lute, L'Oiseau Lyre, SOL 325 to the Leonardo-tide of 1500 — this Giambellini Barque of Love. While music in its passage from Ars Nova toward the temporal modes of major and minor, fills the chords of Dalza's lute preludes. (end Dalza) 6/1995 Period Styles 6 �C.G. Bell a13) 13) Symbolic History H. Bosch, 1503-04, Garden of Delights, a central detail; Prado, Madrid Bosch, 1503-4, Love-bubble detail, Garden of Delights, Prado, Madrid; + V closer detail (video draws from V13, a wider detail) Music: Josquin des Pres 1500-10(?), from Allegez moy (6v) Seraphim SIC-6104 (1) Nor was the translation of symbol into the sensuous language of earth confined to Italy; it equally possessed the 1500 North. The globe of Bellini's watery Venus is curiously matched, the same years, by the bubble calm of Bosch's secret lovers. So, like Josquin's "Allegez moy" ("dessoubz la boudinette — under the belly button") (music), an English lyric weaves its moony Beulah: In arms he hent That lady gent, In voiding care and moan; That day they spent To their intent In wilderness alone. 14) 14a) (fade Allegez moy) S.German, c. 1515, Talheim Altar, angel detail, Landesmuseum, Stuttgart; + V detail Mathias Grünewald, Madonna in the Garden, upper detail, Church of Stuppach, Würtemberg In the happy convergence of sacred and secular, the Talheim Altar angel smiles ravishingly, the "In dulci jubilo" receives Sicher's organ setting, while Skelton applies the poetry of Mary to a fetching girl: Music: Fridolin Sicher, c.1500, In dulci Jubilo, Weinrich; Musicraft GM 127 A Star of the morrow gray, The blossom on the spray, The freshest flower of May... It were an heavenly health, It were an endless wealth, A life for God himself, 6/1995 Period Styles 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To hear this nightingale Among the birdes small Warbling in the vale, "Dug, dug, jug, jug! Good year and good luck!" With "Chuck, chuck, chuck, chuck!" 15) (close Sicher) French, c. 1340-45, Three living and three dead, Prayerbook of Bonne de Luxembourg, Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum, N.Y.C.; + V details But that Incarnation heightens also the woes of flesh. Death, in the Dark Ages, had been the hope of devotion. As life aspires from that ground, 14th-century Pucelle — or a follower — illuminates the living and the dead: three proud horsemen, confronted by three corpses — as Chaucer, a few years later, would take it up, in the clean irony of the Pardoner's Tale: "Now sires," quoth he, "if that ye be so lief To find out Death, turn up this crooked way... See ye that oak? Right there ye shall him find..." 16) 16a) N.M. Deutsch 1517, Death & the Maiden, grisaille, Kunstmuseum, Basle; + V detail Bosch, c. 1504, The Last Judgment, upper part of central panel of tryptych, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna After 1500, the eruption in Holbein, Baldung Grien, this Deutsch, of life's claim and Dance of Death seizure, heightens toward the vortex of the tragic stage. The same Skelton who had warbled for Isabel, keens "Upon a Dead Man's Skull": Our days be dated To be check-mated With draughtes of death Stopping our breath: Our eyen sinking Our bodies stinking, Our gummes grinning, Our soules brinning... O goodly Child Of Mary mild, 6/1995 Period Styles 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then be our shield! That we be not exiled To the dun dale Of bootless bale, Nor to the lake Of fiendes blake. Va17) 17) 17a) 17b) 17c) Memling, 1479, St. John in Patmos, with the Horsemen of the Apoclaypse, from right wing of Baptistry, Catherine Altar, Hospital, Bruges Varying detail of same, from which video shows head of John and three Horsemen Same, from The Vision of John: Fourth Horseman, Death, with Hell following after H. Bosch, 1510, Prodigal Son, Boymans Museum, Rotterdam H. Bosch, 1480-85, Crucifixion, Royal Museum, Brussels (CGB '74); video: upper section only The central wonder is the meeting of two modes of reality: Medieval and Renaissance. Nature, never better rendered (as in Memling's Vision of John), fulfills itself in Revelation: here the Horsemen of War, Famine and Death, with Hell following after. So an English poem of 1500 lifts a romance wandering to the anagogical: He bare him up, he bare him down, He bare him into an orchard brown. In that orchard there was an halle That was hanged with purpill and pall. And in that hall there was a bede, It was hanged with gold so rede. And in that bed there lithe a knight, His woundes bleding day and night. 18) Q. Metsys, c. 1500 (Replica), Salvator Mundi, Gallery, Aachen (CGB '74) By that bede side kneleth a may, And she wepeth both night and day. And by that bede side there stondeth a stone, Corpus Christi wreten there on. 6/1995 Period Styles 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History — That wounded Knight the Body of Christ. So, in this Metsys variant of a lost Jan van Eyck, we see the mirrored "omnivoyant" of God as man become the Western archetype. If our culture has a focus it must be there, in the threefold Coming, Passion, and expected Resurrection of a divine, self-enmeshed in flesh and world. For 1st 19) Indian, 12th-14th cent. A.D., Dancing Shiva, "Lord of the Dance," Museum, Portland, Oregon Or is it always impossible to fix the oneness of a culture — as of the namebearing families and species of nature, which we still may recognize, through all their variety, like the known face of a friend? Spengler and Toynbee thought to line up cultures as you would the repetitive life-cycles of a plant. For 1st 20) Chinese (Sui), 581-618, Standing Bodhisattva, Art Museum, Atami But plants reenact what evolution has staked out for them. Whereas history is at the exploratory tip of evolution itself, that tree which elaborates the new. Its recurrences waver through a growth-web of branchings. For 2nd 19) Hindu (Gupta), 5th cent.(?), Idealized Buddha, detail, British Museum, London; + V detail In this basalt Buddha, we have simultaneously to experience a neo-Platonic and early-Christian parallel, in soul's withdrawal from the vale of Maya, and a difference in the sensuous langour here, of soul's ecstasy; to observe a oneness with the whole family of Buddhist cultures spread over Asia and through a thousand years, and the signature, in this caressed volcanic rock, of the 5th-century Gupta school of North India. 2nd 20) Chinese (Tang), 672-5, Seated limestone Buddha, Feng-hsien-ssu Temple, Lung-men, Honan How richly other and same is this colossal limestone from a century or so later and 2500 miles away. With what triumph the mystic avatar is here seated on the ceremonious refinements of Tang and Confucian Honan. 21) 6/1995 Japan, Kamakura Period, 1328, Shinto deity as Buddhist priest, Fine Arts, Boston; with video details (cf. V21) Period Styles 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Again, after six centuries and more, in Kamakura Japan, with how immediate a life-grace this Shinto deity assumes (in painted wood and with crystal eyes) the guise of Buddhist priest. A whole civilization emanates from him: rock gardens and perfect houses, silks and flowered screens, the poetic courtliness that gives the loves of Genji the art of a calligraphic scroll. We remember in the West the gradual assimilation of the Dark Age fierce Christ to the suavities of every day, and we ask: Was the entire, related earth ripening toward the temporalities it now militantly demands? 1st 22) Mosan-French 11th cent.(?), Head of Christ, Museum of the Basilica of Notre Dame, Tongres For the West, if its essential motion is the reading over of the eternal kingdom into the actual, its incarnate one should exhibit two phases: as its modes are still mysterious and earthless (this 11th century crucified Christ from the region of the Meuse, in Belgium), 1st 23) Rembrandt 1661, detail of half-length Risen Christ,Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB from a2nd 23, from which video draws its detail) or as even its mysteries take flesh in the here and now. It is in the many-dimensioned continuum which leads from the Romanesque-Gothic beginnings through the deep personalization of Rembrandt's 1661 Risen Christ, that we must define a spectrum of period styles. 2nd 22) Mosan, 11th cent., Head of Christ, detail; + V closer details Music: Catalan 1162, 1 v., Conductus for Count Berenguer IV, MHS OR 433 (close of instr. & voice) Where each pole of that suspended one-many must be seeded with its opposite — Carolingian already called a Renaissance; that human penetration of the sacred, shaping (before 1100) the haunting pity of the Tongres Christ; or in music soon after, this planctus for the death of Berenguer. (close Conductus) a2nd 23) Rembrandt, 1661, Risen Christ, half figure, München (copy of CGB '59; see Pascal 56) 2nd 23) Again, Risen Christ, Head detail, with robe on the chest (CGB '59); from which video makes closer details 6/1995 Period Styles 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While late Rembrandt magnifies light, space, drama, by their seeming sacrifice to the Christ mystery. So the Passions of the old Schütz, about 1664, strip the polychoral to a single voice, as of chant: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Music: Schütz, c. 1664, from St. Matthew Passion, "Mein Gott," ARC-3172 (fade) but charged with the tensile will of Baroque. Like yin-yang, the plot from Romanesque to this. 24) Mozarabic, 975 (Leon), Hell from a Beatus Apocalypse, Cathedral, Gerona; + V detail Music: Mozárabic, 10th(?) cent., close of Creed, from "unam sanctam," ARC-ST 2533 163 If the primary cleavage is of the timeless against time, ring first the changes of last and changeless things — Apocalypse; yet even Apocalypse would rear in time a spatial throne. At Dark Age ground, before 1000, the Hell of a Mozárabic Beatus Commentary presents in symbolic depiction (with this Silos Creed) the literal nothingness of the earth to be dissolved. (end Creed) 25) Bandol and Battaille, c. 1373-81, Destruction of Babylon, detail, Angers; video: details only, below and above Music: School of Machault, c. 1380, Degentis vita, opening, (Munrow) ARC-2565 052 Leap 400 years of Romanesque and Gothic to the Angers Apocalypse, and in music to the school of Machault. Here expression, always more earth-embodied, still serves the non-dimensional. How gradual at first, how hyperbolic at last, the empowering which by 1600 would break all stabilities of the geocentric but God-centered world. (fade Degentis Vita) 26) 6/1995 Dürer, 1496-98, Apocalypse, The First Four Trumpets Sound, Berlin, etc.; from this whole the video takes details only, ranging from God to trumpeters Period Styles 12 �C.G. Bell 26a) 26b) Symbolic History Same, First Four Trumpets, lower section, from which video takes two details Dürer, 1496-98, Apocalypse, The Whore of Babylon, detail, upper right Music: Obrecht, c. 1490(?), Hosannah, Missa Fortuna Desperata, Decca DL 79413 Dürer, 1496, time of the Masses of Josquin, or of this Obrecht, holds the symbolic line of Gothic. But when the first four trumpets sound, the sky shattering like glass, the cloudy firmament rolled up as a scroll, the things of nature blown like withered leaves, it is the created real which takes the cyclone of spiritual doom, the dimensional earth on which the fires fall — as the Christian struggle, then assuming passionate body, swept the new men and nations, economies, science, in the whirl of its religious wars. (end Obrecht) a27) 27) El Greco, 1610-14, The Vision of St. John, Opening of the Fifth Seal, Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.; + two V details Same, close detail of figures to the right (copy from CGB '74, 1600 2nd 3); to which video adds a similar group detailed from a27 Music: Giov. Gabrielli, pub.1615, from Timor et tremor (close) Angel 36443 Though the climax delays another hundred years (the great style-divides suspiciously hugging the centuries); it flames in the last works of El Greco and of Giovanni Gabrielli — as if what Renaissance art and thought had dared — Bruno's infinite universe of besouled material worlds: this earth, sun and moon, planets and innumerable stars — were swept in the Muskostrom of now physical doom. (end Gabrielli) It is the dynamic divide between the explosive Mannerism of late-Renaissance 28) V28a) 28b) 6/1995 Rubens, c. 1620, Fall of the Damned, Aachen Gallery replica (CGB '74) of the Alte Pinakothek original, Munich Rubens, c. 1620, Small Last Judgment, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (here upper half, but videoed from the whole (CGB '59; see Baroque 2nd 73) Again, Fall of the Damned, lower section (video, panning on 28, goes from a close detail to a wider spread; slide show uses a CGB '74 detail: a wheel of bloated sinners Period Styles 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History and another country with more gravitational laws. Music: T. Merula, c. 1640, Capriccio cromatico, close, Mus. Guild 129 In Rubens, 1620, the Last Judgment itself is a pagaent of corporeal triumph and display. For more than a hundred years the pomp of Baroque churches, the might of fugal music, the causal order of the universe, would assert the timeless and spaceless by a phenomenal opera (how majestic its scenery, how reasoned its chords) staged exactly to the converse values. (end Merula) 29) Limbourg Brothers, c. 1416, Hell, Tres Riches Heures, p. 91, Chantilly; with video details Music: Dufay, c. 1420, Creed (close) Missa Sine Nomine, "et in spiritum" Lyrichord LLST 7234 Perhaps the half-way mark from Dark Age symbol to Rubens' blubber Hell (and curiously, like that Fall, a fountaining blast and fiery tongue of the damned; though in the clarity of Gothic wit, its counter-pole) is this Pol de Limbourg about 1416. While in Dufay's earliest Mass (Dufay, who would later bring Renaissance almost to the embodied force of Josquin) we hear the 1420 continuance of such angular thinness and mood-suspension — those double leading-tones and bare fifths of Ars Nova. Let both stand midway in that first phase of the twofold West — the enfleshment of eschatology. (end Dufay) 30) French Ivory carving, 13th cent., Castle of Love, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; with video details Against which, the arts of earthly joy had been springing from the judgment ground, preparing for the Western incarnation's second phase. Music: 13th c. motet on Adam de la Halle's tune "Robins m'aime" Seraphim SIC-6052 Though in this 13th-cenutry mirror case of the Castle of Love, as in the music of triple runs hung over bare-fifth loyalty — this motet based on Adam de la Halle's "Robin loves me, Robin has me" — in these, as in the a-causalities of dream-romance, delight is as brittle, as thin, as its spatial rendering. (end Adam de la Halle) 6/1995 Period Styles 14 �C.G. Bell 31) Symbolic History Pol de Limbourg, c. 1415, May, Tres Riches Heures, Musée Condé, Chantilly; with video details Music: Binchois, c. 1425-30, De plus en plus, close (Cape) Anthologie Sonore 39 In the museum- (and concert-hall-) without-walls, moments — the dawn birth of 1400 — are always ours; as the dream lovers, in May of the Tres Riches Heures (and to Binchois' "De plus en plus") issue from the castle through a little wood, into a hawthorneflowered space, which first gives them ground to think their pleasures real. Charles d'Orleans: Summer's harbingers have come — Les fouriers d'Esté sont venus Pour appareillier son logis, Et ont fait tendre ses tappis De fleurs et de verdure tissus. 32) (end Binchois) Titian, c. 1519, The Bacchanal of Andros, Prado, Madrid; video: details only (cf. V32a, b, c) Music: Willaert, c. 1535(?), Ricercare, 3-v. #7 Schott, (close), MHS 913 A hundred years, and even myth, Titian's Bachanal of Andros, stakes out a summer shore for the rapt enfleshment of the dance of wine and love. That dynamic of sense — as in the Ricercares of Willaert, is a battle call, which turns the 16th-century to a field of moral war. (end Willaert) 33) 33a) 33b) Rubens, c. 1632(?), Castle Park with Figures, detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59); with video details, as Va33 Rubens, 1631, Rubens' Garden, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Return to 33, Castle Park, right section (which video divides to above and below) Music: 6/1995 Wm. Lawes, c. 1635, from Pavan (l & 3), Consort no.8 in G, violin, theorbo, etc. Argo ZRG 555 Period Styles 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History By the Cartesian 17th, Rubens complements enfleshed Apocalypse with a liferapture, where chivalric dream and pagan myth lift this moated castle, the artist, his wife and guests, on a validating wave of present good. (music skip) Like Royalist England, William Lawes, Jonson's "Penshurst": Thou hast thy walks, for health as well as sport; Thy mount, to which the dryads do resort, Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made Beneath the broad beech, and the chestnut shade... Herrick's "Come, my Corinna, come, let's goe a Maying": See how Aurora throwes her faire Fresh-quilted colours through the aire: Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see The dew bespangling herbe and tree... (fade Lawes) That may have been the prime of the European fruitful earth. 34) Gainsborough, 1748-50, Robert Andrews and his Wife, National Gallery, London; + V details Music Thos. Arne, c. 1740(?), "Oh, the transport of possessing”, from "Suleiman and Zaide," Technichord-2 No. l0 Since by the 18th century of Gainsborough, Fielding, this Arne "Transport of possessing" — though the Glorious Revolution, Locke and Common Law have laid a firmer base, both in philosophy and custom, for the freehold pride of cornucopian ground — the skeptic edge of Enlightenment already undercuts the Lord and Lady Booby of the sunlit heritage. (fade Arne) 35) Moritz von Schwind, 1858, Morgenstunde, Schack Gal., Munich (CGB '59); first, video details Music: Brahms, 1869, from Alto Rhapsody (major melting, voice and Chorus) RCA VLM 1146 With Moritz von Schwind's mid 19th century Waking — as in those tearful meltings into the major which Schubert taught Schumann, Liszt, this Brahms — the 6/1995 Period Styles 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History wedding of expected joy has been over-extended. So parents used to say, when children could not stop giggling: "Your tickling string is hanging out, and it's going to get stepped on." (fade Brahms) 36) 36a) 36b) Toulouse-Lautrec, 1900, Messaline, Bührle Foundation, Zürich; with video details Same, detail, the upper half of the figure (only in the slide show) Joan Miró, 1938, Self-portrait (as cosmo-chaos), J.T. Soby, New Canaan, CT (replacing the 36b of earlier videos: Toulouse-Lautrec, 1891, "A la Mie," Fine Arts Museum, Boston Music: Mahler, 1888, from lst Symph., 3rd Movement, VOX VBX 116, face 2 By the end of the century the overstretching breaks in Nietzschean scorn. Thus from Brahms to Mahler. Is Toulouse-Lautrec's "Messaline" named for the silk, or for Emperor Claudius' cruel profligate? Or is it exactly the silken opulence centuries had been in search of which stirs this consciously late-Roman surfeit of flesh and venom of soul? As in Pound's Blast: They howl. They complain... That the twitching of three abdominal nerves Is incapable of producing a lasting Nirvana. If the earth-titan for whom Mahler named the First Symphony is the alienation of that God who took on time and flesh, what Resurrection (his title for the Second) was at hand? (fade Mahler) 37) French, 942-84, Sainte Foy Reliquary, Conques, Auvergne; + V detail So far, we have felt out the dual incarnation of the whole. In that continuum we have now to trace and name the century-by-century changes of the style moon. First we lay it down, as if it were true — though birth was stirring even there — the stripped negation of the Dark Age ground. Dogmatic reduction (we say) has become with the Christianized tribes of the North the automatic home: this jewelled reliquary of Sainte Foy throned over the mortal shroud. 6/1995 Period Styles 17 �C.G. Bell 38) Symbolic History Nicholas of Verdun, 1181-83, Enamel Resurrection, Klosterneuburg, Austria; first, video details As shoots of Romanesque-Gothic spring from that ground, they work in creative tension with its otherworldy creed. Year by year the bare field of damnation and prayer gathers more of earth's compromising life. Nicholas of Verdun's 1180 Resurrection raises God into time. So scholasticism reshapes the faith it acclaims, planting reason in Tertullian's paradox: "Incarnation sure because impossible." Reason, like digestion, can dissolve its own frame. So with the speculation of the Greeks. But medieval question begins and ends in dogma. (Digital varies the following Laos slide-sequences.) 39) V39a) 39b) French Gothic, 1160-1205, Laon Cathedral from the S.E., Nave and West Towers (CGB '59); video, detail only Same, W. Front, street view: Rose and Portal (detail from CGB '74, Gothic II, 52) Same, West Front, South side of South Portal: Joseph, Mary with Christ, and Simeon (CGB '59); while video shows, from the same tympanum, Mary, Angels, and Dove (from slide 40a) It is the protection of the transrational fabric from the energy to be released there which makes possible the giant constructions of Gothic and Renaissance — a dialectical buttressing of which the Cathedral is an outward sign. Consider Laon, with Thomas Aquinas' triple vaultings over the insoluble One as Father, Word and Spirit, both changeless and active in the world: It would seem there cannot be any procession in God... For procession signifies outward movement. But in God there is nothing subject to motion...no diversity... On the contrary, Christ says, from God I proceeded... I answer... as outward procession to external matter... inward procession to the intelligible word... one with the source whence He proceeds... 40) 6/1995 Same, from Central Portal and bay, detail of Mary and Christ with Saints (CGB '59); while video shows lower detail from the South Tympanum, Period Styles 18 �C.G. Bell 40a) Symbolic History Annunciation, etc. (again from slide 40a), then picks up the statues of 39b, from the same portal, with a detail of Simeon, Mary, and Christ Same, Tympanum of the West Front, South Portal (CGB '59), already featured by the video, which here details the Mary and Child of the Central Portal (from 40), returning to the whole S.W. Tympanum, and so to a flash of the West Towers It would seem that procession cannot be called generation... On the contrary, it is said: This day have I begotten thee... I answer: …not generation from non-being to being... but the origin of a living being from a conjoined living principle... as a man proceeds from a man... (But procession does not end with the Word; there is another, of the Spirit, called the procession of Love. Lest we slide to a pantheism of infinite processions:) I answer: Divine processions can be derived only from actions which remain in the agent, one with his essence... relations to creatures are not real in Him... (Creation thus withering like a pricked baloon. What then of God's body?) A divine person signifies a relation as subsisting... Numerical terms denote in God... a transcendental multitude... (Sursum Corda! The Greek one-many has been seated in spirit!) In such fiats of daring the Organum of Perotin vaults over modal Gregorian, pillared on the transhuman perfection of bare chords. 41) V41a) V41b) 41c) Same, Laon, interior, Choir and Nave, looking SE (CGB '59) Same, section of the south side of the Nave (CGB '74) Same, looking due east, from Nave into Choir (CGB '74) Same, Choir only, with Rose and Lancets (CGB '74); of which the video shows only the Rose Window Music: 42) 6/1995 Perotin, c. 1200, from Organum Triplum, Alleluia, SAWT 9530a (end Alleluia) French Gothic, c. 1260, Crusaders receive Host, inside portal, Cathedral of Rheims; video, detail only Period Styles 19 �C.G. Bell 42a) Symbolic History Roman de Fauvel, 1316, Carnival sports, MS fr. 146, f. 34r, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris Everywhere temporality is trained on the mystical. The civic and national work in the hierarchies of chivalry and church, as these Rheims Crusaders receive the symbolic host of earthly vanity and divine reward. Even the pre-science of Bacon takes the cover of scholastic authority. Goliard poetry flowers in the monastic garden. "Sumer is icumen in," lively and cunning canon, has alternate words of pious Latin. How sprightly, to lute, pipe and viol, the Worcester "Alleluia psallat." a43) 43) East Anglian, early 14th cent., whole Beatus Page, Psalter of the St. Omer family, British Museum, London Same, upper right detail; from these and three other slides (Vb43, Vc43, V43a) the video pursues a sequence of four details only Music: English, c. 1300 (Worcester) Alleluya psallat (instr.) EMS201 Sacred manuscripts, the cathedrals themselves, break into marginalia of fighting, drinking and love; while the secularized drama, issuing from the church doors, fills the holy ground with juggling and profane farce. That these sports can be embraced on a Psalter's Beatus page, as the Tumbler in the French miracle devotes his dance to our Lady, allows them a freedom from responsibility which after the Renaissance they could never claim; while their doubtful charter (comments here on the Fall, and the Drunkenness of Noah) sharpens their joy, heightening everywhere the plangent clash of Gothic. (end Alleluya psallat) 44) 44a) French Gothic, c. 1300, St. Jacques, detail, Musée, Beauvais; first, video detail French, 13th cent., painted ivory, Angel, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80) Music: Fauvel MS, 1316 (but music earlier), Motet, Zelus familie, ARC 2723045 (2 b) Meanwhile, below all, remains the other center, suffusing primitive functionality with a haunting and unresolved enigma, neither happy nor sad, but beyond and above 6/1995 Period Styles 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History both, the mystery of the May morning, of bare chords, the archaic smile, Lancelot's night with Guenevere in the country from which no stranger returns. (fade Zelus familie) 45) Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533, The Ambassadors, National London; with video details, including one of the skull Music: Gallery, Susato 1551, Pavane La Bataille (Munrow) Angel S36851 Of course this liberated energy ultimately dissolves the frames in which it is born, or formulates others of conscious responsibility, replacing the supermundane and nontemporal with the pride of man and earth. Though the dark sonorities of Susato's Battle Pavan, like the distorted skull in the foreground of Holbein's Ambassadors, would summon Renaissance grandeur to the enobling brunt of tragedy. This humanist shift occurs in a four hundred year complex, of which we have now to define the stages. (fade Susato) 46) 46a) 46b) Double: [A] French, c. 1220, plaster copy of lost St. Peter head from Notre Dame, Paris; and [B] Andrea Bonaiuti da Firenze, c. 1365, "Boccaccio" head, Spanish Chapel, Florence; + V singles Double: [A] 13th cent., Chartres; and [B] 14th cent. Siena Pal. Pub. (video then returns to 46: St. Peter and "Boccaccio" head) G. Pisano, 1302-10, detail of Prophet, from upper zone of the Pulpit, Cathedral, Pisa Consider the divide between 13th-century Gothic (in music, Ars Antiqua) and the late-Gothic of the 14th century. In the cast (left) from the original Notre-Dame St. Peter, about 1220, the released force, the personality, is hierarchical, one with the transrational synthesis of faith. Even troubador song and chivalric romance seem born outside time: their logic is of selfless devotion, and it is to the crypt of silence that they return. Whereas, in the so-called Boccaccio head from the Spanish Chapel in Florence (mid-14th century), secular force and person stretch an already loosening ascetic creed. So town-dwarfing cathedrals yield to the civic claims of towered Italy and the trading North, Thomas Aquinas to the agitations of Wyclif; literature expands to Petrarch, Machault and Chaucer, music to the exploratory modulations of Ars Nova. Yet all this vigor retains from the Medieval some half-spaceless enigma of the earth-pilgrimage. 6/1995 Period Styles 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Between these style-faces towers their 1300 boundary, the Divine Comedy, both Gothic synthesis, and the liberating revolt of the new man. 47) V47a) Erwin v. Steinbach c. 1300, façade design, detail, Strasbourg Cathedral; video: lower part only English (Ely) early Decorated esp. 1322-42, Choir, Octagon, and Lantern, Crossing seen from the south, Cathedral, Ely (CGB '77); with video return to 47, upper part For Ars Antiqua we have heard Perotin with the Cathedral of Laon. Now with the Ars Nova "Amen" of the Tournai Gloria, let us range later Gothic, from Erwin von Steinbach's 1300 Strasbourg façade design, through Italy and France, and back to Ely crossing with its octagon. This art quickens with ingenuity; while the pure chord fabric of music widens for the progressive inventions of hocket. Music: Ars Nova, c. 1320, Tournai Mass, Gloria, Amen, SAWT 9517-A Ex 47b) 47c) 48) V48a) Va49) 49) Va50) Siena Cathedral, upper façade, completed 1380 (CGB '48) Same, Nave, interior, esp 1229-64 Orvieto Cathedral, 14th cent., upper façade, (CGB '84) Same, Choir, interior (CGB '84) Giotto, 1303-06, Scrovegni Chapel, interior, Padua Giotto, 1304-06, Adoration of the Magi, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua Andrea (Bonaiuti) da Firenze, 1343-77, fresco: Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas with Arts and Sciences, Spanish Chapel, Florence (CGB '59) 50) Again, Spanish Chapel frescos: Harrowing of Hell (CGB '59) V50a) Same, Church Militant and Triumphant, lower detail (copy of CGB '59, see 18th Century 65) 51) French, 14th cent., carving, Madonna, Senlis Cathedral (CGB '59) a52) English Decorated (Ely), 1322-42, exterior, Ely (CGB '77; cf. V47a, above) 52) Same, interior, Crossing with Octagon, Ely (CGB '77) V52a) Same, a more flood-lighted view of the Crossing (1994 video insert) Like that Gloria, the Gothic dome of Ely is twenty-five years past what we have called the 1300 divide. For 1st 53) 6/1995 Period Styles 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Florence, esp. 13th-15th cent., General view of the city ( detail from CGB '59, Milton 29); here video also previews Giotto's Campanile, Florence (CGB '48; see 2nd 53) But since, in the continuous rebirth within Gothic, the same question will be posed by 1400: how to distinguish the 14th century from the 15th, which for all its medieval heritage, we call Early Renaissance — let us stake out the farthest advance of Italian Ars Nova and School of Giotto toward the natural harmonies to follow. Art offers an array of softening grace, from Giotto's tower, finished fifty years after his death, 1st 54) Nino Pisano, c. 1365-68, Madonna del Latte (lighter version), Museum of San Matteo, Pisa through the observation of Andrea and Nino Pisano — this Madonna del Latte, tender as Dante's Stream-of-Grace metaphor: "No infant so quickly turns its face to the milk...as I to dip eyes in that water..." — 55) Altichiero, 1390-95, fresco: Saints present members of the Cavalli family to Madonna and Angels, central section, St. Anastasia, Verona; video draws from Va55, the whole fresco in fresco, the increasing immediacy ties this Altichiero to the 1390 miniatures of dei Grassi. For 2nd 54) Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1385-95, The Visconti Hours, BR 90, Marriage of the Virgin, Bibl. Naz., Florence; video: lower section only While of recorded music, Landini's "Gram piant' agli occhi" most ripens toward the suavities of Dufay. Music: 2nd 53) 3rd 54) 2nd 55) 6/1995 Landini, c. 1370(?), Gram piant' agli occhi, ARC 3003 Giotto and after, 1337-87, Campanile, Florence (CGB '47, from the dome of the Cathedral) Madonna del Latte (darker version); video shows a detail of each slide, the light and the dark Again, Altichiero's Virgin and Saints; video shows only closer details Period Styles 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V2nd 55a) Again, from The Visconti Hours: Marriage of the Virgin, closer detail a56) Again, Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1385-95, The Visconti Hours; BR 48, Birth of the Virgin, det., Bibl. Naz., Florence 56) Double: [A] Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1385-95, The Visconti Hours, Vol. I B.R. 48, Birth of the Virgin, det., Bibl. Naz., Florence; and [B] Jan van Eyck, c. 1422(?), Birth of John the Baptist, Mus. Civ., Turin 56a) B of 56; video: details only Dei Grassi died a year after Landini. In his Visconti Hours (left), the intimate International Style makes its furthest Italian and 14th-century advance. But here we have coupled it with a comparable birth from the Turin Miniatures (right), probably by Jan van Eyck and some thirty years later — over the threshold of Chaucer's pilgrims, when music too has ripened from the fifth-based poignance of Landini (fade Gram piant' aqli occhi), to Dufay's triadic counterpoint. Music: Dufay, c. 1433, from Alma Redemptoris Mater (Cape) AS 35 In each art, Early Renaissance defines itself: within the old context of sacred myth and authority, the harmonious and observational, by quiet infiltration, have possessed the body of an ostensibly Medieval universe. The revealed assumes the fabric of physicality; while the moods and details of earth find the consistency of their own ordering — though that order remains insular, not yet proclaimed of the whole. 57) 57a) 57b) Double: Brancacci Chapel frescoes, c. 1425: [A] Masolino, Sin of Adam and Eve, and [B] Masaccio, Expulsion of Adam and Eve; Chiesa del Carmine, Florence; + V detail of double (from V57) Masolino, Sin of Adam and Eve Masaccio, Expulsion of Adam and Eve, detail (fade Dufay's Alma) Yet in the Rebirth ferment of the Florence of that time, the revolution of human power grows more absolute, in theory and practice. As we face the frescoes on either side of the entrance to the Brancacci Chapel in the church of the Carmine, across the Arno — the linear thin continuance of Masolino's Sin of Adam and Eve (left), against the tragic might of the young Masaccio's Explusion (right) — the conscious divide of 1425 piles itself on the style-shift of 1400, quietly attested (in Masolino) by the soft space and personality of International Gothic. But where the actual and embodied has made (in 6/1995 Period Styles 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Masaccio) the breakthrough Alberti's Treatise on Painting ties to flesh: "as long as breath remained to it, whoever spurned the flesh would spurn life itself" — how can we call such an awakening "insular"? 58) V58a) 58b) Donatello, c. 1430, Portrait of Niccolo da Uzzano, Bargello, Florence Donatello (with Rosso, and Ciuffagni), 1415-22, Prophet with a Scroll, detail of head, Mus. dell' Opera del Duomo, Florence Donatello, c. 1455, Youthful St. John the Baptist, Bargello, Florence At its boldest — here Donatello's Bust of Uzzano, about 1430 — it must seem that the humanist transformation is complete. We have to remind ourselves that this force is cultivated in the shelter of an unchallenged faith-frame, its daring permitted by ambiguity of values. So in Valla's "Dialogue of Free Will", which Calvin and Leibnitz would praise, reason heretically denies freedom, but within a fable of Tarquin and the Oracle, and over a return to Patristic surrender: "How is the pot to question the Potter?" We remain in the immediacy of rebirth — the secular as unvalidated antithesis in Catholic creed. Only by what would seem a backward step, the zeal of Reformation against that double talk, would we enter the late Renaissance phase of struggle. Whereas the century of Donatello a59) 59) 59a) Gentile da Fabriano, 1422-23, Adoration of the Magi, altar, detail, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) Gentile da Fabriano, 1422-23, Adoration of the Magi with Predella (on video, Predella is cut), whole, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) Same, Procession detail, above, to which video adds a return to much of the central panel runs a sequence of naive delights — Music: N. Grenon, c. 1420(?), "Noe" close of "Nova vobis gaudia," SAWT 9505A earth and man not yet bound to self-responsibility for thought and act. In Gentile da Fabriano, in an isorythmic Noel by Grenon (both about 1420), we wake to child-renewal of the Garden. The Kings who kneel below have come through Tuscan hills above, like hunters, mounted, with leopards and falcons, with hound and horn. 6/1995 Period Styles 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (end Grenon) a60) Vb60) Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459, Procession of the Magi, Medici Palace, Florence (slide shows vertical left section, with Cosimo and Piero de' Medici below; video shows only that detail, using Va60) Same, detail with John VII, Emperor of Byzantium That century heightens the realism without restating the aim. The walls of the Medici Chapel, under Gozzoli's legend of the same Epiphany, celebrate the "bel viver fiorentino." But that life is wider than Florence. Let us range Europe again, with Dufay's "Se la face ay pale" Kyrie (c. 1450) — from Ghiberti's doors to van der Weyden's Bruges, and back to the Tuscan complement. Music: Vc60) 60) V60a) a61) 61) Va62) 62) 62a) 63) 63a) Dufay, c. 1450, "Se la face ay pale," from Kyrie, AS-25 Same, Magi frescoes, right: from wide vertical section, video shows upper part, Procession winding into the hills Same, detail with Lorenzo de' Medici Same, detail of mounted youth with a leopard Again, Medici Chapel frescoes, from the Chancel, detail of an Angel Ghiberti, 1425-52, Shepherds from Abraham and Isaac, East Doors, Baptistry, Florence (CGB '48) Roger v. d. Weyden, 1455-60, Annunciation, from the Magi Altar, Alte Pinakothek, München (CGB '59) Same, detail of Mary (CGB '59) Roger v. d. Weyden, 1440, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, Fine Arts Mus., Boston [or CGB '59, whole and (unused) details of the Munich replica, see video file V62a, b, c, d] Baldovinetti, 1460-62, Nativity, SS. Annunziata, Florence Same, detail, left, landscape [or V63 (unused) alternates, CGB '86] Perhaps the most loveable picture of all for innocence and observation is Baldovinetti's fresco of the Birth by a ruin on a limestone ledge over the Val d'Arno, which by such mixed techniques as Leonardo would pursue, has almost faded off the wall. In this, as in everything, it speaks that Florence: Quant'è bella giovinezza Che si fugge tuttavia! 6/1995 Period Styles 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 64) Hugo van der Goes c. 1480(?), Death of the Virgin, Gröningemuseum, Bruges; with video details 64a) Same, a more balanced detail Music: Tinctoris, c. 1475(?), from Kyrie, Christe Eleison, Missa 3 vocum, Seraphim SIC-6104 In late 15th-century Flanders, two painters press (in opposite directions) toward the human consciousness of 1500. Van der Goes' Death of the Virgin, painted not long before his own death of melancholia, invokes the darkening tessitura of Ockeghem, or of this Tinctoris three-voice Kyrie. Even an anonymous English poem projects such imploration: Sodenly afraid, Halfe waking halfe sleping, And gretly dismayd, A woman sate weping, With favour in her face far passinge my reson And of her sore weping this was the encheson. Her sone in her lappe lay, sche seid, slein by treson, If weping might ripe be, hit semed then in seson... 65) 65a) (end Christe eleison) Memling, 1489, Martyrdom of St. Ursula, St. John Hospital, Bruges; video: details only — central, above, below Memling, 1489, Reliquary of St. Ursula, St. John Hospital, Bruges Music: Pierre de la Rue, c. 1500(?), Sanctus, Missa Ave sanctissima Maria (6v) Seraphim, SIC 6104 Against the passionate realism of van der Goes, Memling quietly enriches temporal celebration. So with the wreathing of sacred polyphony over the Europe of Josquin des Pres. As if, in this Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, the glow of figures, fabrics, reflecting armor, and background space, continually voiced the overlapping delight of Pierre de la Rue's six-part "Holy, Holy, Holy." (music) Yet all that earth-praise flowers in the reliquary shrine of church containment. Va66) 6/1995 Leonardo da Vinci, 1498, Cartoon of the Virgin and Child, with Anne, National Gallery, London Period Styles 27 �C.G. Bell 66) 66a) Symbolic History Leonardo da Vinci, 1508-10, Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Louvre, Paris; + V detail and closer detail Same, detail of Mary and Anne; from which video takes only the head of Anne, with a mountain background So the island harvest matures to High Renaissance, that 1500 point of balance where a now-conscious humanism serves the old absolute which still embraces it. In this Leonardo, Mary draws Christ back from the lamb of his Sacrifice; Anne, the lap of prophecy on which she rests, smiles acceptance — and before a landscape, which, as so often with Leonardo, exhibits the whole of earth-history: mountains reared by the erosion that wears them down. Where else does tragic knowledge clothe itself in such shadowed smiles? (cut Sanctus) For which the unrecorded Italian music would be Tromboncino's Lamentations. a67) 67) 67a) Botticelli, c. 1478, Head of Flora, Primavera, Uffizi, Florence Double: [A] Botticelli, c. 1478, Head of Flora, Primavera, Uffizi, Florence; and [B] Leonardo, 1510, Head of Anne, from Virgin and Child, Louvre, Paris (video adds a closer detail of Flora) Leonardo, 1510, Head of Anne, from Virgin and Child, Louvre, Paris; + V return to a detail of Mary and Anne Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), from Fortuna Desperata, Vielle trio, Allegro 14 Botticelli was born only seven years before Leonardo, grew up in the same Florence; his Spring, with the equivocal thin smile of this Flora (left), Roman goddess of flowers and of prostitution, was painted about 1478, when Leonardo was already exploring what would ripen to the 1510 Anne (right). And yet a single composer, Isaac, at the Florentine court, exhibits both modes: in his ballades the poignant grace of Gothic: (close Fortuna Desperata) Music: Isaac, 1492, "Quis dabit capit meo aquam," Pt. I, bars 15-32, Decca DL 79413 in his great Laurentian elegy, the converse mystery of fullness. (fade) 6/1995 Period Styles 28 �C.G. Bell a68) b68) c68) 68) 68a) Symbolic History Carpaccio, Ursula's Dream, head of the sleeping saint (detail of 68); video adds entire left side of 68 Gerard David, c. 1506, Virgin of the Annunciation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; first, a video detail Giovanni Bellini, c. 1490, from Madonna with Saints Katherine and Mary Magdalen, detail of the Magdalen, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59) Vittore Carpaccio, 1495, Ursula's Dream, whole, Accademia, Venice (CGB '59); + V detail of the Angel (from V68) Same, detail of the sleeping St. Ursula (CGB '59) Music: L. Compere, pub. 1519, from O bone Jesu, Seraphim SIC 6104 (side 5) The achievement of 1500 is the cultivation of Renaissance rich repose, over a creed of Judgment "and the life of the world to come." Such the Praise-of-Folly urbanity by which Erasmus outraged Luther. In music there is the Frottola and Lauda harmony of chord progression reared on the heritage of the church modes — a homophony also cultivated by the Flemings, as here by Compere. With painting that calm horizon extends from the North (Memling and David) to the Italy of Leonardo, Perugino, Luini, Giovanni Bellini, early Raphael, Giorgione. This Carpaccio Dream of Saint Ursula, enshrines its Venetian style-center. (end Compere) But the mutant of Gothic force Savonarola had sowed in Medici Florence, would rise through Ursula's sleep of dreams. Va69) Michelangelo, c. 1525-30, Tomb of Giuliano de' Medici, Medici Chapel, S. Lorenzo, Florence b69) Michelangelo, 1520-34, Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, Medici Chapel, S. Lorenzo, Florence 1st 69) Same, detail of Lorenzo's head V69a) Detail of a69, head of Guiliano de' Medici Music: Pere A. Vila, pub. 1557, Fantasia, viols, 2nd half, Candide CE31068 By 1530 that fruitful island of suspended values is yielding to an expansive struggle of new against old, the old enfleshed by the new, a tragic birth, where the 6/1995 Period Styles 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History physical and human modes of the modern are stretched in the whirl of Medieval contempt of earth and timeless faith. In the flexing of Michelangelo (this pensive Lorenzo from the Medici Tombs), in the always more conscious control of musical space (a swelling Tiento by the Catalan Vila), we enter the Tensile phase of late Renaissance. a style which, with its Dynamic sequel, strains under the name of Mannerism. (end Vila) Va70) Double: [A] Pontormo, c. 1527, Angel and Mary heads, details of Annunciation, S. Felicita, Capponi Chapel, Florence Vb70) Pontormo, c. 1527-28, Madonna and Child with Infant St. John, Uffizi, Florence 1st 70) Pontormo, c. 1525-30, St. Jerome, Niedersachssisches Landesmuseum, Hannover V70a) Same, detail of upper body and head 70b) Pontormo, 1525-28, Deposition, Church of S. Felicita, Florence; video: center spread only with a closer detail (cf V70c) Music: Cipriano de Rore, pub. 1550, from Madrigal: Ancor che c'ol Partire, (Deller) Bach Guild S-5051 Of Florentine early Mannerists, Pontormo most sensationally breaks with High Renaissance, twisting the nude penitence of Jerome smiting his breast with the stone, into a manic war with its framed space and barren landscape ground. In music, the degree inflection by which Josquin for expressive grief had wrenched the modes, advances (about 1540) through Willaert to the passionate chromaticism of Vicentino, or of this de Rore. (end de Rore) For 2nd 69) Titian, 1545-46, Pope Paul III and his nephews, detail, Capodimonte Mus., Naples For 2nd 70) Tintoretto, 1548, Miracle of St. Mark, Accademia, Venice Reformation disrupting the North, counter-Reformation tightening the South; under both, a confident and now aroused humanism struggling in science, politics, philosophy, for freedom and the power to build — in this turmoil, every stress communicating itself through the cultural ambience to each point of expression — 6/1995 Period Styles 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Europe rises to a might of creativity, as giant men are pressed up from the whirling mass, flesh of that hypostasis of spirit. 71) Titian, 1559, Rape of Europa, Isabella S. Gardner Museum, Boston; + V details Venice heads the 1560 shift from the Tensile bow of Michelangelo toward El Greco's Kinetic arrow. With Titian's great myths, with the Ricercare of Andrea, first of the Gabrielli, the tethered is unleashed. Music: 72) A .Gabrielli, c. 1560(?), from Ricercare del 12 tono, [old] Columbia 60366 Titian, 1559, Diana and Actaeon (Bridgewater), National Gallery, London; + V detail (end Gabrielli) Though the unleashing brings on the dark of tragic storm. To tie this passion to its archetype, 73) 73a) Early Christian, late 3rd cent., detail of an Orant between Shepherds, Major Cemetery, Rome (video: upper part only) Early Christian, mid-3rd cent., Orant from the Crypt [miscalled] of "La Velata," fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome oppose, from its Christ beginnings, one of those mild Crucifixion allusions in Catacomb art, with the Gregorian Tenebrae, of which we have heard the opening — how quiet even the voice-leap of the dying cry, "My God, my God!", the drop through diabolic tritone to acceptance: "Et inclinato capite" — Music: 74) 74a) Gregorian, 5th cent. and after, Tenebrae, cont., Solesmes, VM-87 (fade) Titian, 1573-76, Last Pieta, whole, Academy, Venice Same, left detail; with V74a, variant, and V74b, detail of vault place that against the embodied agony, the last Pieta by Titian, from his nineties, with Ingegneri's mighty rhetoric of the Tenebrae: 6/1995 Period Styles 31 �C.G. Bell Music: 75) 75a) 75b) Symbolic History Ingegneri, c. 1575(?), Tenebrae, old Strasbourg Choir, Col. FRX 56 Same, Last Pieta, lower spread of the whole (CGB '59) Same, upper left section of 75 Same, central group from 75 [using the five basic slides, with two video variants, a sequence of twelve video images has been framed] (end Ingegneri) Those vast forces (over the 1600 divide of Bruno, El Greco, King Lear). a76) 76) Bernini, 1674, Monument to the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, S. Francesco a Ripa, Rome Same, detail of upper body and head; with video details from a76 and 76, + V76a have only to set, as in Cartesian formulable array, to precipitate another style-century, the 17th, billowed up on the conscious assertions of Baroque. "To try to render figures expressive," said Bernini, "I... put myself in the same attitude that I want to give the figure..." In him, in Grandi's "O vos omnes", causal reason and vindicating will dramatize the incarnate passion. Music: 77) V77a) 77b) Alessandro Grandi, 1621, O Vos Omnes (instrumental opening), Nonesuch H-71329 G.G. Bernini, c. 1622, Self-portrait, Galleria Borghese, Rome Bernini, 1655, Self-portrait, Galleria Borghese, Rome Bernini, c. 1668, Gabriele Fonseca, Fonseca Chapel, S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome But no sooner has that world-shaping introspection appeared in Cartesian confidence than it casts the shadow of Pascalian doubt. Its cloud-capped towers and solipsistic self are vulnerable; the reason that exalted them may let them down. In the heroic axioms, as at the wings of a temporal stage, the future of rococo mockery and romantic pain wait their cue. As Eliot says in "Gerontion": History has many cunning passages... Gives too late What's not believed in, or if still believed, 6/1995 Period Styles 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In memory only, reconsidered passion. Va78) Gregorio de' Ferrari, 1684, Summer (center det.), ceiling fresco, Pal. Rosso, Genoa b78) Sebastiano Ricci, 1707-8, Medici Escutcheon, fresco, Pitti Palace, Florence 78) Double: [A] Magnasco, c. 1720, Punchinello and Son, Gatti-Casazza Collection, Venice; and [B] Gregorio de' Ferarri, 1684, Autumn, detail of Bacchus, Palazzo Grapallo, Genoa (revised video holds B after the double, V78B, while the first videos, instead of the double, used another Magnasco: 1710-20, Girl and Musician before a fire, Italico Brass Collection, Venice) 78a) Italian late Baroque (Juvarra, Turin), 1718, Great Stairway of the Palazzo Madama, Turin (CGB '84) Music: Alessandro Scarlatti, c. 1700-10(?), Affetuoso, close, 6th Concerto Grosso, in E major, ARCHIV 198 442 Again around the century mark (now of 1700) the ever-present change of history sharpens toward another quantum break. The massive Baroque vindication of divine order yields, in Ricci of Florence, to Rococo wit, sentiment, Enlightened play; art darkens in Magnasco, as in the satires of Swift; it lightens, in the frescoes of de Ferrari in Genoa, this Autumn, to the airy artifice of Tiepolo and the France of Louis Quinze. And already the Concerti Grossi of Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico's father — this "Affetuoso" close of the last — enter the courtly salon where rational disillusion and heart's revolutionary hope would both be entertained. (close A. Scarlatti) 79) 79a) V79b) L. Carrogis, c. 1760, David Hume, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; + V detail Piranesi, 1750, Self at the age of 30, engraving Piranesi, 1745 and 1761, Le Carcere XIV, 2nd state, detail, National Gallery, Washington D.C. What has so nonplussed the 1760 empiricist David Hume? Is it the ruffled repletion of some Johnsonian meal? Or is this the moment recorded in the Appendix of his Treatise on Human Nature when, having pursued through years and volumes a system based on simple, atomistic perception (though one might have guessed perceptions are ingatherings already tinged with self and world), he discovered (true to the logic he had played) that he stood in contradiction (what Kant would call antinomy), no way (having 6/1995 Period Styles 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History started with the disconnected) to account for any composition, self, or substance, even to the power to think or say "I am": If perceptions are distinct existences... no connections are... discoverable... all my hopes vanish when I come to explain .the principles that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness... For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding. a80) 80) V80a) 80b) 80c) Phil. Otto Runge, 1805-06, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, right side (which video narrows to a detail of an Angel in a Tree, Kunsthalle, Hamburg Same, whole; video: first a detail of Joseph, then the whole, then a narrowing to the central group Frank Kupka, 1911-12, Discs, Museum of Modern Art, Paris Franz Marc, 1913-14, Deer in the Forest, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlruhe Again, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, central group (CGB '86); video takes from this a detail only, of Mary and the Christ child Music Beethoven, 1826, close lst movement, Quartet No.14 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131, Col. M5L 277 So the transcendental imperative would become what the spirits demand of Faust, to reconstitute the lost world within: Baue sie wieder, In deinen Busen baue sie auf! Thus Runge renews Incarnation from imagination, nature and romantic heart; Beethoven sublimes sacred polyphony in the C Sharp Minor Quartet. It is the aspiration which (through all 19th-century thickening of the bourgeois and material — and even in Nietzschean complementarity with that) spirals from 1800 Beethoven to 1900 Schönberg, from Runge and Friedrich to the Cubistic, Orphic, and Blaue Reiter dissolution of spatial things — as Goethe's cry of spirits: "Build it in inwardness!" would take, in our century, the voice of Rilke: Is it not this you wished for, earth, to be reborn in us invisible? Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar in uns erstehn? 6/1995 Period Styles 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Was it the Resurrection of the god who had entered time and flesh? Or could the Incarnate himself foretell the countdown of that Resurrection? As Yeats asks of Leda, "so mastered by the brute blood of the air": Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? 6/1995 Period Styles (End Beethoven) 35 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 36 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Period Styles : A Review of the Incarnate West, Symbolic History, Part 18 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 18 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_18_Period_Styles--A_Review_of_the_Incarnate_West Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c015e517b8b8e1fd3245aeaaf2b6c203.pdf 9101b0e032cb506240dcf879279e357f PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 17. Michelangelo: Storm Center CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 17. Michelangelo: Storm Center 1) 1a) Michelangelo, 1513-16, Moses, San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome Same, Michelangelo Moses, detail If history appears as an evolving field of force, its most charged sequence has been in the culture of the Christian West, and insofar as that power records itself in the arts, Michelangelo stands at its peak, an incarnation of dynamic will. Any of his works, here the Moses, of 1513 to '16, is not simply an art-object, but an energy-organizer at all levels of the creative stair. It is in some way a self-portrait, personal to its maker; as specific to its generation, it exemplifies also a period style, say Florentine Renaissance; third, it is an image of Western man, protagonist of our culture from its Medieval beginnings to today; last, an embodiment of world force, it actualizes something divine — the shaping thrust of nature, as Michelangelo put it, of God. Music: 2) 2a) Josquin des Pres, 1515-20, close of Absalon, Nonesuch H 71216 Sistine Chapel, 1475, with Michelangelo ceiling (1508-12), and Judgment (1536-41), Vatican, Rome Same, detail of Michelangelo ceiling (Josquin des Pres — compared by their contemporaries with Michelangelo — David's lament for Absalon.) (end Josquin) So history sounds the resonances of art as symbolic form: person, period style, culture, world soul. If we ask of the person, Michelangelo, it is the Sistine Chapel which gives most immediate answer. Under the vault of the Creation (1508 to '12) all tales of this daemonically driven man become August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �2 C.G. Bell Symbolic History credible: the titanic bent of his person, his pride in dealing with Pope Julius, himself a violent man; it no longer surprises us that he could shut himself up in the chapel and paint for years, hardly admitting his patron, the Vicar of Christ. 3) 3a) Michelangelo, 1508-12, Sistine Ceiling, The Prophet Jeremiah, whole, Vatican, Rome; + V detail Same, Jeremiah, detail of head These tensile forces build with Michelangelo's own words and the things reported of him to a single surge. To feel it we may focus on any of the represented Prophets, Jeremiah say, and at the same time rehearse one of Vasari's typical stories: Late in Michelangelo's life the consuls responsible for rebuilding St. Peter's wrote: "As regards the progress and designs and prospects of the new basilica, the deputies know nothing whatever, Michelangelo despising them worse than if they were outsiders." When he was brought before the Cardinals he revealed that three windows of travertine were to light the vault. "You never told us anything about that," said the cardinal. "I am not obliged to tell your lordships or anyone else what I intend to do," replied Michelangelo; "your business is to take charge of the expenses and to see that no one steals. The building is my affair." Va4) Sistine Ceiling, 1st bay, two Nude figures 4) Same, left figure [Note video variant, V4] Or we may consider the Dialogues of Francisco de Hollanda, where Michelangelo says of his mission (and he is the first to speak in these terms): A man cannot attain to excellence... if he be not singular or distant, or whatever you like to call him. As for those other meek and commonplace spirits, they may be found without the need of a candle in all the highways of the world... 5) Same figure, detail of head [Note video variant, V5] In the same dialogue he says of his art: Good art is nothing but a replica of the perfections of God and a reflection of His art; it is a harmony and a melody which only the intellect can understand, and that with great difficulty... August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �3 C.G. Bell 6) Symbolic History Sistine Ceiling, whole 1st Bay, Light from Dark If these were Michelangelo's sentiments, is it any wonder that this Messiah of Art, in the first scene of the Sistine Creation, the Separation of Light from Darkness, hit on a new and implicitly heretical conception? 7) French, mid-13th cent. MS, Cod 2554, f50v, God Creating, National Library, Vienna In contrast to a 13th-century God, who creates with the effortless calm of spirit, 2nd 6) Again, Sistine Ceiling, Light from Dark, detall of Jehovah; + V detail the Sistine Jehovah initiates the world in the brute involvement of body. In Goethe's words: "In the beginning was the deed." Curious that another Renaissance revolutionary, toward the end of the century, the Englishman Marlowe, should describe Hero's first experience of physical love by a simile of creation, conceived in the spirit of Michelangelo: ...She strove; This strife of hers, like that which made the world, Another world begot of unknown joys... For 2nd 7) French Illumination, c. 1250(?), God Creating, Genesis, title page, St. Louis Bible, Cathedral, Toledo How far from the 13th-century Genesis is the divine strife by which the Sistine vault proclaims dynamic primacy. Va8) Sistine Ceiling, whole (though the video crops to about five scenes) 8) Same, detail of three central scenes Its very space is folded in perspectival battle. Look how any of the alternating small scenes (as here at the center), with its border figures seated as on sculptural supports — how each shapes, above and below, its own recess, of which the mouldings define a fit meeting point. But the adjacent large scenes are spilled over from each side by those cornices, so that they exist in a sort of negative space. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �4 C.G. Bell 9) Symbolic History Whole of Sistine Ceiling, seen from the entrance Against the Baroque formulation of an entire ceiling from one point of view, Michelangelo's summoning of space from the old spacelessness, buckles the vault in corrugations of generative strain. 10) 10a) Sistine Ceiling, Head of God Creating the Sun and Moon Same, the arm-spread figure of God The head of God making the sun and moon is one of the most concentratedly violent. Like the Moses, it fuses something of Pope Julius and of Michelangelo himself in a fury of the embodied divine. We may relate it to a letter the artist wrote his brother about the same time, displeased with some mishandling of family affairs: I wish to tell you that for the last twelve years I have wandered miserably through Italy; I have supported every shame, suffered every hardship, worn out my body with every toil, and risked my life itself a thousand times for the single purpose of advancing my family. Now that I have begun to raise it up a little, it is you, and you alone, who desire in a single hour to destroy and pull down all I have spent so many years and such labour building up. By the Body of Christ, but this shall not be! I am ready to wipe away ten thousand such men as you are whenever it is necessary. And now, be wise, and do not vex to wrath one who has other causes for anxiety. a11) 11) Sistine Ceiling, Nude figures from Separation of Land from Waters, 3rd bay Same, of these, the agitated nude to the right; video: detail only Michelangelo was renowned for that "terribilità." It permeates not only his art but his life. His first biographer, Condivi, writes of his daily habits: He has always been extremely temperate in living, using food more because it was necessary than for any pleasure he took in it; especially when he was engaged upon some great work; for then he usually confined himself to a piece of bread, which he ate in the middle of his labour... While he was in full vigour, he generally went to bed with his clothes on, even to the tall boots, which he has always worn, because of a chronic tendency to cramp… At certain seasons he has kept these boots on for such a length of time, that when he drew them off the skin came away together with the leather, like that of a sloughing snake... August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �5 C.G. Bell a12) 12) Symbolic History Sistine Ceiling, Deluge, detail, right Same, detail, left Turning away all the artists summoned from Florence to assist him in the technique of fresco, packing them off home, Michelangelo tackled the ceiling alone, with only a boy to help him mix paint. Vasari tells how he got so used to looking up that if he was given anything to read he would automatically raise it and hold it over his head. And Michelangelo says as much in a satiric poem (Symonds): My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in, Fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly Grows like a harp; a rich embroidery Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin... So foul I fare, and painting is my shame. For he never forgot that he was a sculptor driven to painting as to an art he despised. 13) 13a) Sistine Ceiling, Adam from the Creation Same, Adam, upper detail Such is the man of violence and sorrows who saw himself and was already seen by his contemporaries, as in some way justifying his archangelic name, a type of the creating divine. Vasari gives it the theistic expression of the time: "The great Ruler of Heaven... resolved... to send to earth a genius universal in each art... that the world should marvel at the singular eminence of his life and works and all his actions, seeming rather divine than earthly." Music: 14) Ganassi, pub. 1543, Ricercare for Viol, Seraphim SIC 6052 From the same fresco, the hands of God and Adam He was the symbolic life-giver, born in an age already aware of itself as a time of rebirth, aware too that the generative energy it felt centered somehow in the visual arts, in the representational conquest of bodies in space, artistic herald of the Western science of power — music too first reaching toward instrumental and fugal pomp (Ganassi). (close Ganassi) August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �6 C.G. Bell 15) 15a) Symbolic History Michelangelo, 1501-03, David, whole, from his left, Accademia, Florence (CGB '86) Same, David, whole, from his right (CGB '86) Music: Cabezon, c. 1540(?), Diferencias on El Cavallero AS-40 It was this Michelangelo who in his youth (forty years before Spanish Cabezon's variations on El Caballero) could take the great block of flawed marble hacked and spoiled by his predecessors and liberate the David (1501-3). Again it is Vasari who says: "This revival of a dead thing was a veritable miracle" (end Cabezon) a theme Pater would treat more pantheistically, in relating the Sistine Creation of Adam to the David August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �7 C.G. Bell 16) Symbolic History Michelangelo, 1530-33, Fourth Captive, for Julius' Tomb, "Young Giant Awakening," Accademia, Florence (CGB '86); + V detail (while the slide show substitutes a double, 16a: two views of the same captive; so digital and the unfinished Slaves: This creation of life — life coming always as relief or recovery, and always in strong contrast with the rough hewn mass in which it is kindled, is in various ways the motive of all his work... And as his persons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so... with him the very rocks seem to have life. Surely, in the organ Ricercare, from the first Cavazzoni, through Cabezon, to the Gabrielli, giant forms struggle for release. Cavazzoni: Music: Marco Antonio Cavazzoni, 1527, Ricercada, SVBX 5322: 1-2 Thus, long before Pater and the 19th century, Michelangelo's own metaphor of the creative artist informing stone suggests a more than Platonic mystery, 17) Same, Captive III (Bearded Giant), upper portion, Accademia, Florence by which both artist and stone become agents and collaborators, realizing the impulsion of a deeper will. This is the Michelangelo Emerson would make part of the universal striving of spirit to realized form: The passive master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned. a18) 18) (fade Cavazzoni) Same, Captive III, detail of head Same, Captive II (Atlas), Accademia, Florence (CGB '86) Andrea Gabrielli: Music: Andrea Gabrielli, c. 1550(?), Canzona, near close, Period TE 1133, Side 5 He builded better than he knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History And we should not forget that this last line is suggested by the technique Michelangelo followed in his carving, and which he has touched on in various sonnets: Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto Ch' un marmo solo in sè non circonscriva: Where is the shape of the best artist's dream? It is sleeping somewhere in the uncut stone; And the task of the hand that serves the brain Is to strike off the excess and free the form. (CGB) (end Gabrielli) The attempt to reveal, in the first of our modes, Michelangelo as person has veered to the fourth, Michelangelo as agent of world-spirit — 19) Michelangelo, c. 1524-26, Vestibule of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence what even in architecture buckled the articulations of Renaissance, turning this vestibule of the Laurentian Library — its curved and balustraded stairs spilling into a vertical space of thrustback columns, pilasters, blind windows, and broken pediments ("the limbs of architecture," Michelangelo wrote, "are derived from the limbs of man") — into as radical a point of departure, 20) Michelangelo, 1526-33, Double: Tombs of [A] right: Lorenzo and [B] left: Giuliano, Medici Chapel, S. Lorenzo, Florence as in sculpture the archetypal polarity of the Medici Tombs: Lorenzo, pensive thinker (right), with twilight Morning and Evening; against active Giuliano (left), with the extremes of Night and Day. In recorded music, the first fruit of such tensile ingathering is in Ortiz's Ricercada Quinta, published in Rome, 1553, as performed on Anthologie Sonore by Boomkamp and Bodky. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �9 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Ortiz, pub.1553, Ricercada Quinta, Anthologie Sonore 40 20a) Same, Tomb of Lorenzo, A of 20 20b) Same, Tomb of Giuliano, B of 20 For 2nd 19) Michelangelo, Double: [A] Lorenzo and [B] Giuliano dei Medici (video doubles full-length figures; slide show, half-length) 2nd 19a) Same, Double: details of heads (order reversed) a2nd 20) Same, Dawn, from Lorenzo Tomb (slide show, colored; video, B&W) For 2nd 20) Same, Double: Twilght and Dawn, from Lorenzo Tomb 21) Same, Night, from Giuliano Tomb 22) Same, Day from Giuliano Tomb 23) Same, detail, shoulder and head of Day (end Ortiz) Though even in this tortional Day, the conjuring of Michelangelo as world-spirit must assume historical modes for its operation: the tragic embodiment of Renaissance, within the God-projective daring of the Christian West. That the West has a character is as easy to feel as it is hard to formulate. 24) Triple: [A] Greek (Ægina), 480 B.C., Bronze warrior's head, Acropolis Museum, Athens; [B] Greek, c. 350 B.C., the so-called Mausolus from Halicarnasus, detail, British Museum, London; and [C] Roman 1st cent. A.D., Male Portrait, Palazzo Capitolino, Rome When we look at the human image as it records itself in art, it is clear that Greek sculpture in its early phases (left) was essentially free of introspective personality; and that when, in the Alexandrian period, introspection appears (center, c. 350 B.C. "Mausolus") it is as a weakness, a sensuous yearning and nostalgia — darkening, after the crisis of Republican Rome (right) to a weighty obligation, a stoical cause of gloom. 25) Double: [A] Attic, c. 600 B.C., Dipylon Head, National Museum, Athens; and [B] German, c. 1060, Bronze Crucifix, Head of Christ, Abbey Church, Essen-Werden In Western civilization on the other hand (right), some kind of subjective personality is present from the first, and manifests itself throughout as a phenomenon of power August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Werden Christ, 11th century). Whereas an Archaic Greek Kouros (left), similar in stylized abstraction, is clean of any such inwardness. 26) French Gothic, c. 1210, Head of Samuel, from N. Portal, Chartres; + V detail This sense of the private soul as a creative energy, as something positive and divine, runs from the Romanesque origins to our own day. Every style-study must unite and differentiate. Within the West as a whole, we move from the sacerdotal Gothic (Chartres about 1210, Samuel — in music, Perotin); Music: 27) Perotin, c. 1200, from Beata Viscera, "O mira novitas," (Tinayre) Lumen 32011 (fade) Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1512, Self-Portrait, red chalk, Biblioteca Reale, Turin; + V detail through the humanistic Renaissance (1512, Leonardo, Self — in music, Festa); Music: 28) C. Festa, 1514, from Lament for Anne of Britanny (adapted for Maximillian, 1519, by Senfl) ARCHIV 3223 (close) Rembrandt, 1660, Self at Easel, Louvre, Paris; + V detail the darker introspection of the Great Baroque (c. 1660, Rembrandt, Self — in music, Schütz); Music: 29) H. Schütz, c. 1645, from the Symphonia, from the Seven Words ARCHIV 198408 (close) P.O. Runge, 1804-05, Crayon Self Portrait, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; + V detail the Romantic liberation of intuitive ego (1804, Runge, Self — in music, Beethoven); Music: 30) Beethoven, 1808, Pastoral Symphony, opening of 2nd Movement, (Walter) Odyssey Y33924 (fade) Van Gogh, 1888, Self, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; + V detail to the Modern immolation of that ego in an act of triumphant despair (about 1890, Van Gogh — with Debussy in music). August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �11 C.G. Bell Music: 31) Symbolic History Debussy, 1893, String Quartet, from the 2nd Movement, Nonesuch M1007 (fade) Attic, c. 480 B.C., The Blond Boy, Acropolis Museum, Athens Yet beside the Greek idealized art-man (Athens, about 480 BC), so far from celebrating the confessions of soul-in-flesh, these shadings grow indistinct — 32) 32a) Albrecht Dürer, c. 1500, Self in fur-collared robe, Alte Pinakothek, München; + V detail Dürer, c. 1510, Nude. Self as study for Christ at the Column, Schloss Museum, Weimar the Western man blends into one dynamic image: focus of the human paradox — from Abelard and Dante through Villon, Quixote, and Hamlet to Faust — of the tragic waste and glory of personality. This image (Dürer, Self) is in some suggestive way also a Christ-image and, painful as the recognition may be, an image of Lucifer as well. It has the stamp of the incarnate god upon it, of a god who has immersed himself in body and time, and not so much to his Platonic loss as to his dæmonic gain. For that seems to be the archetype to which it is related, and without which it could hardly have converted the pagan weakness, Augustine's "abyss of conscious personality," into such a well of selfaffirming power. 33) 33a) 33b) 33c) Michelangelo, c. 1513, The Dying Captive, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80) Same, from his right (CGB '80) Same, upper detail Same, detail of face Music: Juan Vasquez, pub. 1560, Lagrimas de mi consuelo, lst version, MMG-1103 For Michelangelo, he portrays such secret depths by every curve of shaped stone — here from the Julius tomb, one of the two captives actually finished, about 1513. So too the music of expressive passion, which Josquin called Musica reservata, spread from his Absalon, through the always more chromatic daring of Willaert and de Rore, to all parts of Europe — as, around midcentury, to the Spain of this Vasquez "Lagrimas." Here sound and image voice what Santayana has translated from Michelangelo — in four lines the romantic flaw and glory of the Incarnate West: August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �12 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Ravished by all that to the eyes is fair, Yet hungry for the joys that truly bless, My soul can find no stair To mount to heaven, save earth's loveliness. Gli occhi mie', vaghi delle cose belle, E l'alma insieme della suo salute Non anno altra virtute C'ascende al ciel che mirar tutte quelle... 34) (close Vasquez) Roman Christian, c. 325 ff., Rotunda of Santa Costanza, Rome (CGB '86 variant, so far not used) Music: Gregorian (Apostolic?), Mass XII, close of Gloria, (Solesmes) London 5633 In architecture, the round-arched Roman-Christian temple (here Santa Costanza, 325 and after), which retained — with Gregorian — a certain classical measure and harmonious ease, (end Gloria) 35) French Gothic, 1212-41, South Aisle of Rheims (CGB '59) Music: Perotin, c. 1210, from 3-voice Diffusa est gratia: "benedixit te Deus," (Cape) AS 65 b (78) gives way to the skyward reachings of Gothic (Aisle of Rheims) — the bare chords, driving triple rhythm, and, lilting through that sternness, the mystery of Perotin's organum. So Aristotle's ethic of the mean opens to an ethic of charity, which does not aim at the reasonable, but at the infinite extreme. 36) French Gothic, 1195-1218 ff., Choir buttressing of Bourges Cathedral (CGB '84); so video, from V36; while slide show uses a wider Sam Adams' view Already in the Medieval town and under the tutelage of self- and-world-denial, the Western giant is stirring. Yet how lean and stripped the timeless aspiration of Gothic buttressing, this Bourges — severe as the Dies Irae: Tuba mirum spargens sonum... The great horn thundering doom August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �13 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Through the shires of the tomb Gathers all before the throne. (CGB) 37) Same, Bourges, interior, windows (CGB '84) How spaceless the vision of liturgical lights in dark, inner silence in the functional shell — mystical as the Dies Irae: Fount of pity, be saviour to me... Salva me, fons pietatis. 38) (close Perotin) Michelangelo and others, 1550-64 ff., St. Peter's, from the Janicula, Rome (CGB '86) Music: Victoria, c. 1590(?), Salve Regina, close, (2 choirs, etc.) Tel. AWT 6 3537 In contrast, the apse of St. Peter's, which Michelangelo finished late in life, with the crossing and projected dome, encloses, in a nobly reasoned display of outward mass, 39) Same, St. Peter's interior, Nave to Choir, especially vault, Rome a tragic solemnity of space — let the mind strip off the incrustations of Bernini's Baroque. From Gothic to this, from Perotin to Papal polyphony (here Victoria), advances — as from Dante to Milton — Michelangelo's Donation to the sacred, the physics of volitional power. (close Victoria) So as Gothic ripens to Renaissance and Renaissance flexes to Baroque, 40) 40a) 40b) Double: [A] Græco-Roman (Pompeii) 1st cent. A.D., Idyllic Landscape, National Museum, Naples; and [B] Rubens, c. 1624, Het Onwaer (The Storm), Franz Konig, Haarlem Again, Pompeiian Landscape, A of 40 Again, Rubens' Storm, B of 40 August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �14 C.G. Bell Symbolic History that surf breaks always more wildly on the shore of the world. Even mathematics begins its progress from the Apollonian forms of Euclid to the Dionysiac frenzy of the infinite and infinitesimal, the calculus of motion. For all this, the landscape (though Michelangelo neglected it), gives a visual sign, densening through centuries of withdrawal and return from the Pompeiian soft dreamworld — Virgilian and Ausonian realm of the shades, "sola sub nocte per umbram... et... silva in magna" — to Ruben's vortex (which is equally that of the burned heretic Bruno) of god-irradiated matter in illimitable space. From the first heaving up of the spires in the 12th-century towns, to the blasting off of moon rockets today, a perilous chemistry unfolds in the crucible of the Western world. 41) N.E. France, early 10th cent., St Matthew, from MS 4, Walters Gallery, Baltimore It is kindled in Celtic and Germanic Christendom. In this Saint Matthew from the darkest century, the 10th, mystical force, denying the earth fabric it would increasingly transform, burns in the hieratic containment of creed. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History But with every tick of the style-clock, 42) Rhine-German, end of 13th cent., Prophet left of Main Portal, Strassburger Minster that power, entering the world, assumes more spatial and human validity. Consider the type of bearded and prophetic age: 1300, Strasbourg — a lean Gothic energy, bearing still the enigmatic stamp of timelessness; 43) Double: [A] Donatello, 1412-15, St. John the Evangelist, detail of head, Duomo Museo, Florence; and [B] Michelangelo, 1513-16, Moses, detail of head, St. Pietro in Vlncoli, Rome 1412 (left): Donatello's Evangelist: a calm filling-out of human command; 1515 (right): Michelangelo's Moses: giant assertion controlled by incredible will. In this pair, the maturation of Western spirit peaks in the harmonious assertion of Renaissance and Florence. a44) 44) Benci di Cione, etc., 1376-82, Loggia dei Signori (dei Lanzi), Florence Same, Loggia dei Lanzi, another view (CGB '86) Music: Gherardello, c.1340(?), from a Gloria (from 3rd Qui Tollis, without Amen) MHS 3634 Let this 14th-century Loggia, later named for Cosimo's Lancers, guide us, in that peerless city, to the Piazza of the Signoria, where Michelangelo's David would take its place. Exiled from the Tuscan center, Dante (whom Michelangelo would memorize) had brought Aquinas' Medieval synthesis to a Gothic peak, at the same time seeding it with the radical individuality of Renaissance — thereby initiating the bold transitions of Petrarch and Boccaccio, of Ars Nova music (here Gherardellus), as of this columned hall. 45) Double: [A] Michelangelo, 1489, sketch, after Giotto's Assumption of St. John, Louvre, Paris; and [B] Giotto, 1325-30, same detail from that August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �16 C.G. Bell 45a) Symbolic History Assumption, Santa Croce, Florence [video then separates the sketch and a larger section of the Giotto fresco] Giotto, Assumption of St. John, whole of B of 45 In Florence art had been spearheaded for two hundred years, through Vasari's three periods: the first, "a new beginning." Among Michelangelo's earliest sketches is a copy of the great-robed figures on the left in this Ascent of John the Evangelist, from Giotto's last phase, 1325 to '30, that Dante-time, when music also advanced from the Old art to the New. (end Gherardello) 46) 46a) Double: [A] Masaccio, 1425-26, The Tribute Money, detail, Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence; and [B] Michelangelo, c. 1493. sketch from same, Graph. Samml., München Again, Masaccio, The Tribute Money, whole Music: Dufay, 1453-4, Lament for Constantinople, last third, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC 6092 In another sketch the 15-year-old Michelangelo studies this fresco by Masaccio, formative genius of Vasari's second period — his massive 1425 figures accompanied by the full humanity of Dufay's triadic chords. 47) 47a) Masaccio, 1426, Crucifixion, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples Simone Martini, 1340-50, Double: two Magdalens [A] from Deposition, Museum, Antwerp; and [B] from Entombment, Berlin-Dahlem Galerie, Berlin Yet Masaccio himself reveals why Vasari, tracing the techniques of representation, would call the 15th century transitional. His Crucifixion projects on the gold ground of Byzantine an exploratory Renaissance nude, a voluminous mourning Mary, and a leaner Fra Angelico John, with a Magdalen whose red-robed Gothic cry roots in the symbolic space of Simone Martini, Duccio, and beyond. (close Dufay) 48) Caravaggio, 1602-04, Deposition, Vatican, Rome Music: August 2, 1995 P.F. Cavalli, 1656, Messa Concertata, from Crucifixus, SAWT 641931 Michelangelo: Storm Center �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History If the 1600 goal was the formulated rhetoric and muscled volition of embodied Baroque (Caravaggio and Cavalli), (close Cavalli) a49) 49) 49a) Michelangelo, 1504, Tondo, Holy Family, Ufizzi, Florence (CGB '59) Same, Holy Family, upper half only (CGB '59) Same, Holy Family, closer detail we recognize, as by touch, the importance of Michelangelo's 1504 fulfillment of Vasari's Third Style: "art has achieved everything possible in the imitation of nature." In this Florentine tondo, the Patriarchs who wait behind the time-wall of Redemption become nude athletic Greeks. Here the creative energies of the West, sacred or profane, determinedly shift their locus from the timeless into time. So Josquin des Pres' "Et Incarnatus est" — "and was made flesh." Music: 50) 50a) 50b) Josquin des Pres, 1515-20(?), Missa Pange Lingua, from the Credo: "Et Incarnatus est," Decca DL 9410 (close Josquin) Strasbourg, c. 1300, Prince of this World and Foolish Virgin, full length, W. Portal of Cathedral; + V half length Same, detail of Prince Same, double: faces of [A] Prince and [B] Foolish Virgin Music: English, 13th cent., from Estampie, (Binkley) SAWT 9432 No doubt the joy of earth is ubiquitous, but in medieval dance, as in the Strassburg portal, where the Tempter Prince offers the smiling foolish Virgins a wormeaten apple, joy floats, an irresponsible vanity, in the ascetic containment of creed. So Aucassin in the 13th-century romance, when the priest tells him to give up Nicolette and be saved, says it is only the old priests and the poor and crippled who grovel at the altars and in the old crypts, who go into Paradise. But into hell will I go, for into Hell go the fair clerks and knights killed in the tourneys and in the great wars... and the gentle ladies who have two or three lovers along with their noble lords. And there go the gold and silver, the furs and cloth of vair, and the harpers and rulers of this world. With these let me go, if only I have Nicolette, my sweet friend whom I love so well. (end Estampie) August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �18 C.G. Bell a51) 51) 51a) Symbolic History Botticelli, 1478, Spring, detail of three Graces, Ufizzi, Florence; video, upper detail only Same, Spring, whole Same, Spring, right detail Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), Fortuna Desperata, 3 viols, opening, Allegro 14 If the early Renaissance, under classical example, witnesses a blossoming of such joy in life, it remains — as in the Ballades of Isaac — suspended in the old faith, where the loves of earth hardly claim validity. Botticelli's poignant realm of The Spring (1478) lures from that Gothic tapestry of line, as ideal, as frail, as Poliziano: Love to the kingdom of his mother came, Where light battalions of his brothers wing, There the smiling Graces hold their reign, And beauty weaves flower-garlands for her crown; There lusty Zephyrus, pursuing Flora, Wheels and sets green fronds and herbs aflower. (La Giostra, 67): 52) 52a) (CGB) (fade Isaac) Michelangelo, 1497, Bacchus, full length, Bargello, Florence (video works from variant V52); + V detail, half length Same, Bacchus, detail of Faun Music: Dalza, c. 1500, from Piva, lute duet, (Rooley and Tyler), L'Oiseau-Lyre SOL 325 even Michelangelo's Bacchus (1497), the paganly drunken work of his youth (like all the clear acumen of Machiavelli's politics or the voluptuous diversions of the Papal or other courts — Dalza's lute dances), exists under a cleavage of values, as the great heroes and lovers burn in Dante's Hell. This ambivalence has its purest expres- August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History sion in the circle of Lorenzo de' Medici (died 1492), where Michelangelo was trained. One pole is asserted by Lorenzo's carnival poems: The beauty of youth is a brief flower That is always fading away; Love and be happy while you may, For tomorrow is not sure. (CGB) Chi vuol esser lieto sia: Di doman non c'è certezza. 53) 53a) (end Dalza) Botticelli, 1500-10, Pieta, Pinakothek, München (CGB '59); + V detail Same, Pieta, lower right detail (CGB '59) Music: Josquin des Pres, c. 1490(?), from the Stabat Mater: "Eia mater," AS 73 The counter-pole is announced by the reformer, Savonarola. It was his call to penitence (sharp as Josquin's Stabat Mater) that broke Botticelli, wrenching him from the orange groves of Venus to the anguish of the late Pietas and then, it appears, out of art altogether. For already in the Florence of Michelangelo's youth, the opposition that would dominate the following centuries — Renaissance and Reformation; Cavalier, Puritan — had come to its sharpest focus. Inflamed by the carnival processions and songs, Savonarola invented a sacred inversion of that frenzy, a religious carnival with bonfires of pagan art and vanities and the chanting of popular tunes transformed to pious hymns. It was a movement of heretical reform, anticipating the Calvinist reversal of Renaissance and, like the Calvinist, 54) Same, Pieta, lower left detail, feet (copy of CGB '59; see Pascal 28) inevitably democratic: it is in the rough measures of the common crowd that Savonarola's exhortations come to us: 0 anima cecata — che non trovi riposo, tu se' da Dio odiata — pel tuo viver vitioso: August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �20 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Blind soul of man — you have lost your peace, Under curse and ban — for your godless ways; From Christ your spouse — your soul has strayed, 55) 55a) H. Bosch, 1504, Hell fragment detail, Pinakothek, München (CGB '59) Schongauer, c. 1480-90, engraving, The Temptation of St. Anthony, Public Library, New York City Not asked his aid — let mercy go. Woe, woe, woe, God's fear you do not know. (CGB) There are parallel stirrings all over Europe, as in the hell-fury of the visions of Bosch. As for Michelangelo, he was twenty-three when Savonarola was burned; his first painting, Vasari says, had been a copy of Schongauer's Gothic Temptation of St. Anthony; and he was so possessed by the penitential voice, that it echoed through his later life, sounding again and again in his art and poetry. (end Stabat Mater) 56) 56a) Michelangelo, 1536-41, Charon, detail, Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel, Vatican; + V detail Same, Double: [A] Death and [B] Hell details It was the basic polarity, not only of the sixteenth century, but of the Christian West, each pole, as always, penetrating and empowering the other — Promethean energy and pride, and the self-abasing surrender to holy love and fear. Certainly it was the cross of Michelangelo; his personality and works are strung in that tension. Music: Morales, c. 1540(?), from Emendemus in melius: "Attende," (Turner) ARCHIV S-2533 321 So in his age and the dark beginning of the Counter Reformation, (when the implorations of Josquin had densened to Morales), Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint his Last Judgment, reviving with more personal violence the old powers of Death and Hell. The ambivalence under which this painting 57) 57a) 57b) Same, Judgment, whole Same, The Saved, rising, far left Same, upper spread of the whole Judgment; + V detail of nude figures August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �21 C.G. Bell Symbolic History was conceived is illustrated by the problem of the nude figures. Aretino, inventor of the newspaper and a writer of malign sway, sometimes called "the scourge of princes" and later "the poison flower of the Renaissance," had written Michelangelo an open letter of fawning praise (1537, telling him how to paint the picture, and asking for a sketch. Michelangelo never replied. After a series of such affronts, Aretino began a campaign against the painting (letter of November 1545) as lewd and heretical, belonging in a bagnio or stew rather than in the Papal Chapel. This from a man who boasted of living in a Venetian stew which his own sister managed, and whose bawdy dialogues satirize the stews of the Renaissance Church. For Aretino exhibited the worst Catholic cleavage of the time, an opportunistic hovering between pagan voluptuousness and hypocritic religiosity. It was as if he had formed himself in the Borgia image. 58) Same, detail of Christ and Mary; first, video return to upper spread While Michelangelo, like the Protestant he was accused of being, followed the more dangerous path, determinedly unifying the poles of Renaissance and Medieval, body and spirit. (end Morales) 59) 59a) Same, Judgment, details of britches, front and back Same, closer detail, front (video adds the lower section of 59) The result of Aretino's campaign was that Michelangelo's painting was saved from destruction only by being "purified". A painter thereafter called the "britches tailor" was hired to daub in robes here and there, concealing certain portions of the figures, one might say in the nick of time. But the conflict which led to this result was not initiated by Aretino. It had begun before in Michelangelo himself; it had its roots in his art and soul. He had been in his youth an admirer both of Lorenzo il Magnifico and of Savonarola. 60) Same, Hell, detail with Minos; + V detail of V60a When he first came to Rome he had written an attack on papal corruption under Julius II — as he would paint, in the Judgment, Pope Paul III's master of ceremonies as Minos, Hell-Guardian, wrapped in his own snake-tail. Here helms and swords are made of chalices: The blood of Christ is sold so much a quart: His cross and thorns are spears and shields; and short August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �22 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Will be the time before his patience cease... Who wears the robe is my Medusa still... The holy banner only leads to ill. (after Symonds) 61) 61a) Michelangelo, 1530 (copy), Leda and the Swan, National Gallery, London Daniele da Voltera, 1565, Bronze bust of Michelangelo, detail, Bargello, Florence Music: Willaert, pub. 1545, from Dulces Exuviae: Dido's Lament, Odyssey 32 16 0202 At that time Michelangelo was celebrating Pope Julius in the projected Tomb, as he was to celebrate the Medici in Florence. The very man moved to the religious passion of the late poems, painted the destroyed Leda and the Swan (1530), preserved in copies — one of the most erotic works of the age; though all his works (with Willaert's setting of Dido's love-death), hymn the Eros of touch (end Willaert): "No stair to heaven but earth's loveliness". So Michelangelo had known the moral cleavage, had subsumed it and laboured to unite the severed realms. When hypocrisy in the guise of virtue accused him of Lutheran obscenities, he was impelled forward, 62) Michelangelo, Judgment, Flayed skin, detail, Sistine Chapel, Vatican as if leaping the centuries, toward some Blakean reversal of values. On the skin which is held by the flayed Saint Bartholomew, Michelangelo has painted what is evidently a weirdly tormented portrait of himself. 63) 63a) 63b) Same, detail of St. Bartholomew holding flayed skin (with video variant, V63) Titian, 1545, Portrait of Aretino, detail, Pitti Palace, Florence Again 62, Flayed Skin At the same time the gross and somehow sinister figure of the saint, crouched on the hell side of Christ, vindictively raising the knife — like one who has stolen into these circles of religion and judgment, or, more terribly, belongs there — has been given the sensual and violent features, the gross lips and beard (recognizable from Titian's portrait), of Michelangelo's own metaphorical flayer, Aretino. As an early critic of the painting said: (M. Pitti, 1545) "There are a thousand heresies, signally St. Bartholomew's beardless skin." August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �23 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus the artist breaks with the embodied institutions of the faith on which, in his old age, he increasingly depends. a64) Donatello, double: [A] 1427-35, Jeremiah, detail, (CGB '86); and [B] 1455, Magdalen, detail (CGB 86); both: Duomo Museo, Florence (video uses two single slides) For 1st 64) Michelangelo, c. 1550-56, Pieta, Duomo Museo, Firenze; (CGB '86; or V64, old black & white) The sequence of pride and humility not only characterizes the historical movement of Renaissance and Counter-reformation. It had been the central experience of the Middle Ages: the lusty defiance of Aucassin, who would no doubt before his death come grovelling in rags to those very crypts he had despised. That was the life-cycle of the Archpoet, Abelard, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Donatello, Botticelli, perhaps even of Leonardo. But in Michelangelo it becomes increasingly evident that the old return to faith is in fact a new departure, springing from the titanic will. In him it is not so much a change of direction as a fulfillment of the individual and creative quest. He had always been dissatisfied with the realized. Now he presses beyond the embodiments of art (Florentine Pieta, 1550-56) — a65) Double: [A] G. Pisano, 1301, Mystical Christ, from Pulpit, Pistoia; and [B] Giotto, 1325-30, St. John's Ascension, detail, Santa Croce, Florence 1st 65) Michelangelo, c. 1550-56, Florentine Pieta, upper half: Nicodemus, Christ, and Mary (CGB '86) [the slide show having inserted b65, another view of the whole] embodiments advanced about 1300 by Giovanni Pisano and Giotto, when Dante, looking down from the sphere of stars, had seen the earth "such that he smiled at its vile semblance." e vidi questo globo Tal, ch'io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante... Chaucer had followed in the death of Troilus: And down from thennes faste he gan avyse This litel spot of erthe, that with the se Embraced is, and fully gan despise August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �24 C.G. Bell Symbolic History This wrecched world, and held al vanite To respect of the pleyn felicite That is in hevene above. Such is the Gothic ground of acceptance. But when Michelangelo makes it the theme of his last poems: "Teach me to hate this world so little worth," the pulse has changed. Some Renaissance imperative of conscious person and ennobled flesh has deepened the struggle. Like the fall to humility of Lear, so mighty, so passionately arched against its own surrender, Michelangelo's Christian yielding becomes the immolation of heightened pride. This is written in the late poems, as in the last self-portrait, Michelangelo as Nicodemus, brooding over the dead Christ. For 1st 66) Same, Nicodemus, detail of face, as Self-portrait (CGB '86) Io parto, a mano a mano Crescemi ognor più l'ombra, e'l sol vien manco, En son presso al cadere, infermo e stanco. I pass now, day to day, Each day augment to dark, and the sun grows cold; I hover on to the fall, infirm and old. (CGB) For 2nd 65) Florentine Pieta, looking up, from the statue's left side (CGB '84) In this tensile darkening so personally his own, Michelangelo was the profoundest resonator of Counter-Reformation experience — his the shade and burden of that tragic mid-century. For 2nd 64) Same, upper two thirds, black & white Music: Gombert, pub. 1539, from Confitemini Domino, (Tinayre) Lumen 32021 Did God born and crucified point into the world or out of it? Would our mortal flesh, by that Incarnate archetype for the West, be consumed or glorified? Was the Kingdom of God within us or beyond? If that was always the stretch of Christianity — how heightened after 1200 by Joachim's Coming of the Spirit in time; how magnified after 1500 by a groundswell of world and body, at once affirmed and denied. 3rd 65) Same, heads of Christ and Nicodemus, black & white August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �25 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In Michelangelo, against the sensuous mastery of represented passion, comes a violence of soul breaking with all representations of sense. In recorded music, nothing so affirms the tensile mastery as Tinayre's rendition of the Confitemini by Gombert, most exalted of post-Josquin polyphonists. 2nd 66) Same, Nicodemus as Michelangelo, black & white detail (video: V2nd 66) (end Gombert) But is Gombert's weaving too smooth for the old Michelangelo? a67) 67) 67a) 67b) Michelangelo, c. 1556, Palestrina Pieta, whole; video, see Va67 (CGB '48) Same, upper half (CGB '48) Michelangelo c. 1499, Pieta, St. Peter's, Vatican (or V67a), whole Michelangelo, 1526-33, Tomb of Lorenzo dei Medici, head of Evening, San Lorenzo, Florence (or V67b, horizontal) Music: Vincentino, 1567(?), from Heu mihi: "Miserere," Bach Guild HM 34 SD On the other side is the tonal defiance of the Chromaticists, of whom Vicentino by 1555 had composed motets and Lamentations entirely in the half-tone scale (not to mention his theoretical quarter tones). Here the expressive element itself becomes a gulf where the old Modes go down, while the major and minor keys "remain, despairing of the port." Who but Michelangelo could so have fused the antinomies? (end Vicentino) For him it was the time of the late unfinished Pietas: this, about 1556, formerly from Palestrina. As Vasari says: his judgment was so exacting that nothing satisfied him. He finished few statues in his manhood, the completed ones having been done in his youth. Of course Michelangelo's reasons for leaving works unfinished varied from case to case. But the larger significance remains — as with all vital drifts, emergent from the particular and accidental. 68) Michelangelo, 1545-50, Crucifixion drawing, British Museum, London August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �26 C.G. Bell 68a) 68b) Symbolic History Same, 1550-55, another Crucifixion drawing, with Mary and John, Louvre, Paris; while video takes an upper detail of 68 Again, Florentine Pieta, detail of Nicodemus, Christ, and Mary (B&W) The late drawings, perhaps, give the clearest sign of his break with the determinate. Here is no question of a recalcitrant material, forced abandonment, lack of funds. The artist might have rendered his vision with whatever finish it required. Yet even in so swift a medium, he preferred to hint by cloudy blurrings, at solemnities beyond expression. Through the account of a French traveler, Blaise de Vigenere, we can visualize the old sculptor in the penurious drabness of his room, standing sleepless nights before the marble, a cardboard hat with a candle in it for light, using no models, measurements, or pointings, but breaking into the stone 69) 69a) Michelangelo, c. 1556, Palestrina Pieta, whole (CGB '86) Michelangelo, 1550-56, Florentine Pieta, another view (CGB '84); while video repeats Palestrina Pieta, upper half (CGB '48) from slide 67 from the front and sides, as if to reach for the enshrouded form. De Vigenere wrote: I saw Michelangelo at work. He had passed his sixtieth year [he was actually seventy-five] and although he was not very strong, yet in a quarter of an hour he caused more splinters to fall from a very hard block of marble than three young masons in three or four times as long. No one can believe it who has not seen it with his own eyes. And he attacked the work with such energy and fire that I thought it would fly into pieces. With one blow he brought down fragments three or four fingers in breadth, and so exactly at the point, that if only a little more marble had fallen, he would have risked spoiling the whole. And spoil it he frequently did, at least to his own judgment, chipping too deep or striking a flaw; then the work would be abandoned, one of many pregnant becomings, stone ruins testifying to a search for the ungraspable, more poignantly expressive than all the completed works others were so facile in. a70) b70) Michelangelo, 1550-56, close detail of Florentine Pieta, with chipped arm; while video shows such a detail from b70 Same, upper half, with same cracked arm (CGB '86); while video varies 68b August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �27 C.G. Bell 70) Symbolic History Same, Florentine Pieta, whole, 1900 photograph Sometimes, more terribly, the sculptor would become the enraged Saturn devouring his children, as with the Florentine Pieta on which De Vigenere had probably seen him working, and which Michelangelo intended for his own tomb. It is Vasari who lets us reconstruct the scene of the violent old man, having come to hate this ripest but imperfectible work of his hand, raging over it in the dark room, breaking it with the mallet — the brooding face of Nicodemus sorrowing over the Christ, the artist's image of himself and his sorrow — yet stranger still, hinting at God the Father suffering over his world ("for it repenteth me that I have made them"), or as Lear would take it from Jehovah: "crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once that makes ingrateful man" — so the sculptor stands, the work in fragments before him, and as Vasari says, "would have smashed it to atoms, had not Antonio his servant asked for it." Thus it was turned over to a clever botcher, Tiberio Calcagni, who as a price for cementing it together tried to "finish" it, spoiled the figure of the Magdalen with polishing, and would have ruined it all except by good luck he caught the plague and died. a71) b71) 71) 71a) V71b) 71c) Again, Florentine Pieta, horizontal detail of a70, showing the damaged arm Same, Head of Nicodemus, side view Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforzesca, Milan; while video uses V71, from a B&W photograph Same, upper half of the statue, seen from the side; while video details the upper half of V71, just above Same, side view, upper part, from whole side view (CGB '80; cf. NOW: The Rooted Future 128) Same, Rondanini Pieta, front view of the two heads Indeed, the universal process, of which we have made Michelangelo and his art paradigms, is not merely a building, but a destroying; the Promethean daring goes hand in hand with the Phætonian fall. And this returns us to the Western history of which Michelangelo was a part. For the concept of artist as protagonist of creative spirit is a product of the way of thought Michelangelo and his age initiated, of the Renaissance assertion of human power in an articulated world of time, space, and causality, and this assertion was to run its course through sundry debacles and somber spiritual returns, of which none is more deeply moving than the tragedy and transcendence of the late Michelangelo, in whom the youthful pride of the Renaissance David grows to the August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History brooding but noble mask of Nicodemus, and then abandons outward form in the dimensionless grief of the Rondanini Pieta (1550-64), this unfinished marble sabotaged and remade six days before the artist's death. Against that twice-quoted line: "soul can only mount by the beauty of earth," comes the break of a final sonnet: Not any mastery of paint or stone Can ease the heart that sees how love divine Spreads on the cross to gather us his arms. (CGB) Nè pinger nè scolpir fia più che quieti L' anima volta a quell' amor divino Ch'aperse, a prender noi, 'n croce le braccia. In music the chromatic shorelessness of Vicentino would climax in Gesualdo's Responsories, 1611. Music: 72) Gesualdo, 1611, "Tristis est anima," opening, (Craft) Columbia ML 5234 El Greco, c. 1575-77, Pieta, Johnson Collection, Museum of Art, Philadelphia; + V detail (fade Gesualdo) For 2nd 71) Double: [A] Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Milan; and [B] Cimabue, c. 1283, Crucifixion, Refectory, Santa Croce, Florence Here pride is so broken on the wheel of fate, that we are simultaneously thrown back to the Byzantine and Medieval spaceless image and forward to the post-Renaissance surrender For 2nd 72) Double: [A] Again 72, El Greco Pieta; and [B] Rembrandt or school, c. 1644, Christ at the Column, Walraf-Richartz Museum, Köln; slide show adds 2nd 72a, single of this B, Rembrandt's Christ at the Column and return — to this El Greco, or philosophically to Pascal — that whole current which, down to our own day, penetrates humanism and comes out on the other side. For the world's proudest civilization has perpetually humbled itself before the lean figure of selfsacrifice and earthly negation, the stripped Christ at the Column, for whom Rembrandt too would fall out with form and color. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �29 C.G. Bell 73) Symbolic History Michelangelo and others, c. 1550-90, St. Peter's Dome, interior And yet it is strange, the work to which Michelangelo turned with most intensity at the close of his life was most assertive — the construction of the dome of St. Peter's. Despite the opposition of enemies (or perhaps on that account) he would not give it up. As he said: "many people believe, as I do myself, that I have been placed at this post by God. I will not leave it..." Did the impersonality of the dome, which needed for its realization only to be engineered, lead the artist beyond that frustrating involvement in the image of man? 74) Roman (Hadrian), 118-128 A.D., Pantheon, interior, Rome (CGB '86) He was obviously aware of the series of mystically directed domes, from the Pantheon, formed as Christianity opened its inner space in the soul of Rome, 75) Byzantine (Justinian), 502-62, Hagia Sophia, interior with dome, Constantinople (CGB '77) through Hagia Sophia in 6th-century Constantinople, 76) Brunelleschi, especially 1420-36, Santa Maria del Fiore, Dome and Chapels, Florence (CGB '84); slide show uses another view, showing the whole Dome to the proud Brunelleschi dome of the Florence of his youth. It is as if he sensed the symbolic values Yeats has expressed in his poem "Byzantium": 77) Michelangelo, etc., c. 1550-90, St. Peter's Dome, as by moonlight, Vatican A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �30 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Was the demand of spirit which drew him to the dome, that ultimate vaunt and abstract music to the divine, a78) Vb78) c78) 78) Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforza Castle, Milan (CGB '80) Same, from the side, upper half (CGB '80; detail of NOW: The Rooted Future 128) Same, another view of the two faces; while video details from Vc78, an underexposed slide of the two figures (CGB '80) Same, side view, detail of heads (CGB '80) also fulfilled in the last broken carving of his age? The Rondanini Pieta leaps past art, sending up an incredible flash in its surrender. Here is the denial that reverses itself in human value, as when Lear's pride is crushed: "Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds in the cage." This pity and transcendence has gone beyond the Medieval breaking of pride and its somber return to faith, just as Shakespeare was to go beyond that and beyond Renaissance tragedy. Did Michelangelo also win through into a new realm of reconciling tenderness? It is hard to know. Certainly he did not live in quite the time or place to make of that emergence a utopian romance. Shakespeare was the first to come far enough out of the Renaissance vortex to sing the brave new world of human love, wisdom, and power beyond. But Michelangelo has hinted at something in these fragments shored against his ruin. For 1st 79) Michelangelo, 1501-04, David, from his left, Accademia, Florence (CGB '86) Conversely, in the youthful David, from the time of his own pride and the last free pride of his city, Florence, he inevitably suggested the tension and debacle to follow, which was already laboring in his soul. That is what makes the David more than a wellwrought image of civic power. The whole Michelangelo is there, in that tour de force of his youth, just as the whole man is in the last fragmented work of his age. 1st 80) Same, David, head, full face It is the strangely troubled face of the David that foreshadows the future, as the poignance of Botticelli invited Savonarola. If this is the Promethean giant, he bears with him the old Augustinian flaw and ground of reversal: "Even this testimony, that God humbles the proud." August 2, 1995 Michelangelo: Storm Center �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 79) Same, David, front, knees to head (CGB '86) Humbles, and yet, to add heresy to Augustine — by that humbling translates them into gods. "Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the gods themselves throw incense." Yet why call it heresy? Had not Paul said: "Because the creature itself shall also be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God"? And was not this the fire through which the classical Prometheus walked, and emerged: Dante, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Blake — avatars of Messianic flesh. 2nd 80) Same, David, head and shoulders (CGB '86); to which slide show adds a closer detail of 1st 80, the David, full face; also digital Or, from the time of the David itself, Josquin's Hercules Mass: Music: August 2, 1995 Josquin des Pres, c. 1499(?), close of Kyrie, Hercules Mass, AS 73 Michelangelo: Storm Center � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 32 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Michelangelo : Storm Center, Symbolic History, Part 17 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 17 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_17_Michelangelo--Storm_Center Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/659d7c1d1f448e3c704dfe8102a36834.pdf 0b79d71dad8b5f17514ba1cf20321d3b PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 16. Giants in the Earth (16th Century) CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 September 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 16. Giants in the Earth (16th Century) 1) Giulio Romano, 1530-32, Fall of the Giants, frescoed room, corner and two walls, Palazzo del Te, Mantua (CGB '86) Same, detail, stream and Giant under rocks, (CGB '86); video brings in another detail from the last slide of the show, 80+1. 1a) Music: Ant .de Cabezon, c. 1540, Tiento de Primer Tono, Videro on HMV DA 5207 In The Winter's Tale, the living Hermione is presented as a statue "by that rare Italian master Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity, and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape." In this 1530 Mantuan vault, his heaven-storming giants fall under the rocks of Pelion and Ossa. (music) In the tientos of Cabezon, we feel what turned the loves and thought of that century toward Prometheus, Icarus, Phaeton and Faust. 2) Titian, 1543-44, David and Goliath, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice; + V detail) (music continued) There were giants in the earth in those days...when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men. And when the spiritual force stored in medieval creed-condensers struck through the physical, it stirred Gargantuan prodigies: the arts of space and mass, Hermetic and Lucretian science, Reformation, Utopias, world conquest, Platonic love, the Age of Gold. In the dark gathering of the fugue, or the late works of Michelangelo, in this Titian, the very crushing of pride evokes powers unknown before — giants most of all giants in their overthrow. (close Cabezon) 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �2 C.G. Bell 3) 3a) Symbolic History Double: Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1496, Drawings: [A] Helicopter and [B] Lifting Power of a Wing, Inst. of France, Paris (video takes A and B singly) Francisco Goya, 1815-24, Modo de Volar, Proverbs 13 Call Leonardo the first of the titans — one who, with mirror-writing and smiling secrecy, left us in doubt how far he enacted the myth of Icarus: if well made ... and turned swiftly, the said screw will make its spiral in the air and it will rise high. On another page, a man's descent measures the lift of a starched linen wing: when he has great wings attached to him, by exerting his strength against the resistance of the air, man is enabled to subdue it and to raise himself upon it. Tomorrow morning on the second day of January 1496 I will make the thong and the attempt. (The vision would haunt Goya after three hundred years.) While in Tansillo's mid-century sonnet — "Poi che spiegat' ho l'ale al bel desio" — Icarus becomes the symbol Bruno would appropriate for his Heroic Furies. 4) Michelangelo, 1533, Fall of Phaeton, drawing, Windsor Castle V4a) Same, detail (Paralleled by the Phaeton of Michelangelo's 1533 drawing): Since first my soul beat wings to the high desire, The vaster sense of air beneath my tread, The swifter pinions to the air I spread, Till spurning earth, toward heaven I aspire. Not Daedal's son warns with example dire That I descend or bow my threatened head; For though with him I plummet earthward dead, What is life's candle to this funeral pyre? I hear my heart's voice through the dusky air: Whither, O fearless darer, would you dare? Not without wreck this giant temerity. Fear not, I answer, what the ruin may be. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Hold secure to the clouds and calmly die, Content if heaven allow a death so high. (CGB) It was the aspiration that raised Bruno toward his 1600 blaze. 5) Leonardo da Vinci, 1473, Tuscan landscape, drawing, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail On August 2nd, 1473, the twenty-one-year-old Leonardo walked out of Florence and sketched what he saw. What opened was the organic fabric of the world — in the Notebooks, an animism defiant as the space toward the right of the picture: The body of the earth like the bodies of animals is interwoven with a network of veins which are all joined together, and are formed for the nutrition and vivifying of this earth and its creatures ... Have you seen how the water that drips from the severed branches of the vine and falls back upon the roots ... enters into the power of its mover and rises up anew? ... So the sea ... through passages of the earth, returns upward. 6) 6a) Leonardo da Vinci, 1512-16, Deluge: Water and Rocks, drawing, Windsor Castle; + V detail Leonardo da Vinci, 1508-10, from Virgin and Child with St. Anne: detail of mountains to the left; Louvre, Paris Forty years later, the bearded old man, in abstract sketches and notes, endows Deluge with the cataclysmic necessity of science: Let the fragments of a mountain have fallen into the depths of one of the valleys and there form a barrier ... the swollen waters coursing round the pool which confines them and striking against various obstacles with whirling eddies, leap into the air in turbid foam and then, falling back, cause the waters where they strike to be dashed up...so that the angle of reflection will be equal to the angle of incidence ... waves of the sea at Piompino all of foaming water. Such dark recurrence Agricola framed in a geology I once turned to blank verse: So water working down the block plateau Cuts deep in shale and leaves the granite whole, Rearing the mountains, which upreared, the rain That cut vales cuts in turn, and levels all to plain. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �4 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus I perceive the universal sway: By the same power that builds, all things decay. (CGB) 7) 7a) Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1490, Grotesque Heads, drawing, Windsor Castle Leonardo da Vinci, 1483-99(?), Drawing of a cannon foundry, Windsor Castle V7b) Rubens, 1615, copy of Leonardo da Vinci's 1503 destroyed Battle of Anghiari; Louvre, Paris 7c) Same, detail of a warrior's head Leonardo's grotesques share in the Gargantuan future of his Notebook fable: "I will create a fiction which shall express great things." (So Rabelais, paraphrasing Erasmus' Folly: "Jests ... not so foolish as would appear ... stuffed with high conceptions ... allegorical.") Leonardo: In the month of June there appeared a giant who came from the Libyan desert ... When he fell ... the people, believing he had been killed by some thunderbolt, began scurrying over his huge limbs and piercing them with wounds. He, being roused ... set his hands on the ground and lifting up his awful countenance, placed a hand on his head. Perceiving it to be covered with men sticking to the hairs ... he shook himself and sent the men flying through the air like hail ... Then he stood erect, trampling them with his feet ... The black visage terrifying ... swollen bloodshot eyes under lowering brows ... a snout-nose widenostrilled, stuck with bristles ... between huge lips, a mouth like a cave... That energy would run from the affirming laughter of Rabelais to the grieved negations of Swift — the Brobdingnagian breast. 8) Michelangelo, 1509, Delphic Sibyl, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican; (video uses instead a wider whole, Va8, and a close detail, V8a) Music: H. Isaac, 1507, close of Sancti Spiritus — Imperii proceres, SAWT 9561 The rival Florentine giant was Michelangelo. It was above the entrance wall that he began the Sistine Ceiling. This Delphic Sibyl, about 1509, has the proportioned 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History containment of his earlier Madonna's, though already, as in a ceremony motet by Isaac, everything flexes with grandeur. (end Isaac) a9) Michelangelo, c. 1511, Creation of Light, with Jonah below; Sistine Ceiling, Vatican Same, detail of Jonah and the Whale 9) MUSIC: A.Brumel, c. 1512(?), 12-voice Missa "Et ecce terrae motus", from Gloria (Munrow) Seraphim SIC-6104, side 4 In a Brumel Gloria, Isaac's four voices have been magnified to twelve. And when Michelangelo, after two years of painting the always expanding vision of Creation, conceived the last of the Prophets, Jonah, under the tortional twist of the creating God, himself in ecstatic tortion, overflowing his vaulted space, foreshortening it into depth — an expansion which dwarfs the flabby damnation whale — that anagogical theophany of soul-from-hell as light-from-darkness, empowered an exuberant might of body. (close Brumel) 10) Roman-Christian, later 3rd cent., Jonah and the Whale; Museum, Cleveland; + V detail Music: Ambrosian, 4th cent. ff., from Alleluia...venêrunt, ARC 2533 284 Against which, from the earliest Christian centuries, Jonah's mystical delivery, as by Christ's descent, from the Limbo-leviathan of eternal death, melts (with the Roman heritage of Attic skills) in melismas of Ambrosian "alleluya" — those "Jubilus" melismas which stirred and troubled Augustine. (fade Ambrosian) a11) 11) Apollonius of Rhodes, c. 50 B.C., Belvedere Torso, back, Vatican Gallery, Rome (CGB '86) Double: [A] Belvedere Torso, and [B] Michelangelo, 1513-16, Heroic Captive, Louvre, Paris; video also shows A singly There had been giants before that melting. When the Apollonius Torso was brought to the Belvedere by the Medici Pope Clement VII, Michelangelo found in it the type and inspiration of his own pathos of body. So the Promethean poem of Lucretius, recovered by Poggio Bracciolini, pointed beyond god-fearing habits and tabus: 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History When human life lay prostrate on the earth...a man of Greece ... against the lowering gods ... dared traverse in mind the immeasurable universe ... beyond the flaming walls of the world. (Like the ripple of muscles in the torso, that "flammantia moenia mundi.") Yet when Lucretius was replanted in the infinite search of the Christian West, it reached — in Tansillo's Icarian flight: "Amor m'impenna l'ale," "Love plumes my wings," and "Eternal the honor if mortal the leap," or in the infinite worlds of Bruno's thought — as far beyond itself, as Michelangelo's struggling giants exceed the might and longing of Græco-Rome. a12) 12) 12a) M. Grunewald, c. 1512-15, Resurrection, detail, from Isenheim Altar, Colmar Same, Resurrection, whole panel; + three V details Double: two details from the same Grünewald altar: [A] from the Crucifixion, and [B] again from the Resurrection, as in a12 (video takes these separately) Music: Taverner, c.1525, 6-voice Gloria tibi Mass, irom Benedictus, V-LM 6016 Out of the religious immediacy of the Gothic North, Grünewald, Michelangelo's contemporary, shapes as radical a claim of death and nature raised to spirit, as any in the hermetic doctrine of signatures by the Swiss Paracelsus, self-styled "Prince of Philosophy and Medicine." The winding sheet that enfolds Christ shifts in an unparallelled symbolism of color from the gray-blues and browns of earth, death and the grave, up through incarnate blood, to become the received and transmitted glow of pure sol, alchemical gold, poured from the face and hair of the man-god. From Grünewald's Crucifixions to this, is from Scotch Dunbar's "Timor mortis conturbat me," to the aureate leap of his dawns: Up sprang the golden candle matutine And spread his beams out pure and crystalline ... 13) 13a) A. Altdorfer, 1518, Resurrection, St. Florian Altar, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna Same, center detail (from these, video makes a succession of three details) Music: 9/1995 (end Benedictus) Taverner, same mass, Hosannah Giants in the Earth �7 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The skies rang with shouting of the larks, The ruddy heaven, overspread with silver bands, Gilded every tree, leaf, branch and bark. As in the besouled world of German Altdorfer, Dunbar's dawns are the Resurrection, his Resurrection, dayspring: "Done is a battell on the dragon blak" — He for our saik that sufferit to be slane And lyk a lamb in sacrifice was dicht, Is lyk a lyone rissin up againe, And as a gyane raxit him on hicht; Sprungin is Aurora radius and bricht, On loft is gone the glorius Appollo, The blissfull day depairtit fro the nycht: Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro... How greatly music after Josquin hosannahs that auroral Lion and Giant. So Taverner. (end Hosannah) 14) 14a) 14b) V14c) A. Dürer, 1511, Adoration of the Trinity (All Saints Altar), Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; + V details Same, detail of lower right, with Dürer (CGB '59) Same, upper detail, Trinity Same, whole altarpiece, with its carved frame The heaven stormer was Europe, and at its heart the cosmic humanization of God. About the time of Michelangelo's Jonah and tortional Light from Dark — Dürer, here standing on the curved earth (lower right) shows the causal measure of the sacred universe. Copernicus, born two years after Dürer, was writing his Commentary through the same years, though its publication was delayed. We cannot say his observations were better than Ptolemy's — certainly not his mathematics. His science takes its strength from what would culminate in Leibnitz: the world-marriage of causal Reason and Faith. Copernicus' God prefers the simplicity and beauty of sun-centered circles: "How exceedingly fine is the godlike work of the best and greatest artist." Still, the unknown elipses required corrective epicycles: "thus thirty-four circles suffice to explain the entire structure of the universe and ballet of the planets." How much God would have preferred his circles to be seven. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 15) Triple (right to left): [A] Dürer, 1519, Maximilian; [B] Clouet, c. 1520, Francis I; and [C] (Rubens, from a lost) Titian, c. 1525?, Charles V 15a) Hans Holbein the Younger, 1536, King Henry VIII, Thyssen Col., Lugano 15b & c) Singles: B of 15, Fancis I; A of 15, Maximilian Music: Luis Milan, Pavana III from El Maestro, 1535, Candide CI 31068 To what pavan of pomp, humanist light and reason seemed now to enter the lists of state: Maximilian, Francis I, Charles V. We should add Henry VIII of course, whose meeting with Francis at the 1520 Field of the Cloth of Gold Shakespeare would recount: ...when Those suns of glory, those two lights of men, Met in the vale of Andren ... Men might say Till this time pomp was single, but now married To one above itself ... all in gold ... ...every man that stood Showed like a mine ... Though as the play allows, the glittering. chivalries ministered "communication of a most poor issue" — statecraft reenacting the fiasco of Faust. Those cultured kings (against our television hacks): Maximilian with his six languages, art, music — friend and patron of the skilled and wise — for all their great aims, what a hash they made of Europe. (cut Milan) Under the knightly mask, the opportunism of Machiavelli: — Kaiser Maximilian, 1511: nothing would better become us than to receive the papal office ... we have decided to raise up to three hundred thousand ducats ... through the Fugger Bank in Rome ... our crown jewels as security ... 16) 16a) Dürer, 1520, Portrait of Jakob Fugger, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; + V detail Grünewald, after 1520, Satiric Trinity, drawing, Staatliche Museen, Berlin If Fugger... (here Dürer's portrait of Jacob, shrewd capitalist prototype) 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �9 C.G. Bell Symbolic History wishes to know how we will redeem those treasures ... the estates of the Empire ... hereditary principalities and lands ... a third of all our income from the papacy until it is paid. What Fugger money in fact secured was the election of Charles V; nor did this Jacob's 1523 demand for payment help the continuing indulgence scandal: It is...clear as day that your Imperial Majesty could not have acquired the Roman Crown without my help ... I humbly petition ... that the sum of money due me together with the interest should be discharged and paid to me without further delay ... With Capital, why not the counter-giant of socialism? Geismayr, leader of the Peasants' Rebellion in Tyrol, thought to dissolve clergy, privilege, cities, and business, in a classless purity of faith: All smelting houses and mines ... which belong to nobles or foreign merchants, such as the Fuggers ... shall be confiscated and given over to public ownership ... This is Geismayr's constitution when he dreams in his chimney corner and imagines himself a prince. 17) 17a) Hans Holbein, 1527, Sir Thomas More, Frick Gallery, New York City; + V detail Jean Clouet, c. 1535, Guillaume Budé, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Music: Brumel, c. 1510(?), O Domine (Requiem & Elegy), SAWT 9471 A ex No wonder Thomas More, painted by realist Holbein, lets his Utopian narrator despair of counselling princes: If I should propose to any king wholesome decrees ... how deaf hearers, think you, should I have? Rather, he dreams like Geismayr of a communism both early Christian and modern: where possessions be private, where money beareth all the stroke, it is hard and almost impossible that there the weal public may justly be 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History governed and prosperously flourish ... For who knoweth not that fraud, theft, brawling, strife, murder, treason ... die when money dieth? And though More wears velvet and fur with a great chain of gold, he clothes his sober citizens like Huguenots or Puritans, and sets them, after six hours of common work, to wholesome exercise, then to lectures and solemn music in their public halls. (fade Brumel) Everywhere the drive for heaven turns to the world. a18) 18) Dürer, 1521, The Four Apostles, Alte Pinak., Munich; + V detail Same, detail of John the Evangelist and Peter (video: detail of John only, from V18a) As Luther comments on Galatians (and Dürer shows it in his Apostles): When I have this righteousness ruling in my heart, I descend from heaven as the rain making fruitful the earth: that is to say, I come forth into another kingdom, and I do good works ... If I be a householder, I govern my house ... Yet Luther's zeal stiffens to self-righteousness: I teach those things only which are commanded me from above ... therefore my doctrine is true, sincere, certain and of God ... Therefore whatever doctrine teaches not as mine does, must needs be false, devilish, accursed. Calvin most clearly phrased how the new faith should raise the will by its very denial: that man ... in miserable necessity ... should aspire to the good of which he is destitute, and to the liberty of which he is deprived; and should be roused from indolence with even more earnestness, than if he were supposed to be possessed of the greatest strength. Were not the energies of Christendom sprung from the start of Incarnate paradox? 19) 19a) 9/1995 Moslem architect Sinan 1550-57, Mosque of Sultan Suleyman, interior, Istanbul (CGB '77); + V detail "Blue Mosque" of Sultan Ahmet I, 1609-16, Istanbul, Turkey (CGB '77) Giants in the Earth �11 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Turkish "Whirling Dervish", ney and tambur phrase, with chant opening, Nonesuch H-72067 What are we calling giant? The Soliman Mosque erected in Constantinople from 1550 to '57 points the question. Are not those vast and airier rivals of Hagia Sophia more gigantic in impact than anything from Renaissance Europe, though St. Peter's was then building, and is larger? Yet surely there are clues here to the dynamic imbalance by which Istanbul would fall behind, with the rest of the Orient, and be Westernized. The city had been taken by the Ottomans in 1453. Turkish conquest would go on for a century, reaching almost to Vienna, while Europe pursued its Machiavellian broils. But at the Byzantine heart, the late 15th-century arcades of the Topkapi Palace look to Tuscany and Venice. What was mighty in the West was a ferment of ideals and hopes, Christian free humanism, transforming self and world. Though against sultanic display — (fade Turkish chant) 20) Giovanni Bellini, 1514-15, Orpheus, Circe, Pan and Luna, National Gallery, Wash. DC (CGB '60; video uses whole, from Va20, CGB '60); + V detail Music: Cara, c. 1500, from Occhi Miei, "O dolce passion," Nonesuch 71701 the quieter harmonies of Italian Renaissance seem hardly overweening. 1500 witnesses, in all the arts, a style of articulated repose, into which older painters (here Giovanni Bellini) move, or where the younger (as Raphael) begin. It affines Sannazaro's Arcadia to the chordal music of the Frottole and Lauds — this Cara. (end Occhi Miei) But that calm throbs with pastoral and neo-Platonic dream — stirring the perfection Quixote was bound to espouse next to chivalry, the Age of Gold. So Corteccia for the Medici: "O begl' anni dell' oro, O saecol divo, vedrovv' io mai?" 21) Giorgione (finished by Titian?), c. 1510, Fête Champêtre, Louvre, Paris; + V detail from V21a Music: 9/1995 Arcadelt, pub. 1537, Il bianco e dolce cigno, Deller, BGS-5051 Giants in the Earth �12 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Meanwhile, as in art from Bellini to Giorgione and Titian, the frottole repose advances, with the mingling of North and South, to the swelling dynamic of the madrigal. Arcadelt is transitional: "Il bianco e dolce cigno." 22) Raphael and school, 1519(?), Isaac, Rebecca & Abimelech, cropped, Loggia, Vatican;+ V detail To learn what is Promethean here, listen to the chords: these full triads of the heart sound music's utopian claim. 23) Correggio, c. 1525, Jupiter and Antiope, Louvre, Paris (video goes from a detail to the whole) Here, an erotic swan excess: "I would die a thousand times a day." (end Arcadelt) With the same pictures: this Correggio, 2nd 22) Again, Raphael, Isaac, Rebecca, and Abimelech, whole the romantic Raphael's most romantic scene, when Abimelech saw Isaac with Rebecca, 2nd 21) Giorgione, Fête Champêtre (slide show details the figure to the left; video repeats the whole, adding the upper body of the left figure) and the Giorgione — let us savor a sonnet by Molza (CGB): Now spring returns to clothe the native hill And in the valley spreads her finery, And odors such as breathe from Araby Her garland tresses on the wind distill; 3rd 22) Raphael, Isaac, Rebecca and Abimelech, detail At this dear season to my window sill Chloris comes with the sun... Vestiva i colli e le campagne intorno La primavera di novelli onori, E spirava soavi arabi odori Cinta d'erbe e di fiori il crine adorno; Quando Licori a l'apparir del giorno... 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �13 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 23) Correggio, Jupiter and Antiope, detail 2nd 23a) Titian, c. 1515, Sacred and Profane Love, Borghese Gallery, Rome Gathering purple flowers with her hand — "In guiderdon di tanti ardori" ... — "In recompense for so much love," she murmurs "These I have culled, and with them here adorn you." Typical, the rift between that love-sweetness and the fact of Molza's Roman court life (his Modena home and family deserted) down to his death by the new plague of syphilis, and a last dreaming elegy in pure humanist Latin. 24) Lor. Lotto, c. 1498, A Maiden's Dream, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V details below and above: Va24 and V24a As the Gothic landscape ripens in Lotto to Renaissance mood, Della Casa turns Petrarch's mystery to sensuous caress: O sonno, o della queta, umida, ombrosa Notte placido figlio. Not even in Sydney — "Come sleep! O sleep, the certain knot of peace!" — had English quite refined such sounds: "oblio dolce de mali/ Si gravi." Though Wyatt and Surrey, too, steep Petrarch in Renaissance shadow: Alas! so all things now do hold their peace! Heaven and earth disturbèd in no thing ... The nightès car the stars about doth bring. Calm is the sea; the waves work less and less ... 25) Double: Raphael [A] 1504, Madonna dell' Granduca, Pitti, Florence; and [B] 1507, Madonna of the Goldfinch, Uffizi, Florence; + video singles and a detail Music: 9/1995 Giacomo Fogliano, c. 1510, from Ave Maria, Vanguard BG-680 Giants in the Earth �14 C.G. Bell Symbolic History From 1504 to '7, Raphael was blending Umbrian, Flemish, and Leonardo in what would hold its own for centuries as the ideal Madonna — a form of womanly grace, of which later artists might say (as Galeazzo di Tarsia did of Italy) "Membrando la fatal vostra beltate" — "Remembering your fatal beauty." At the same time the homophonic lauda melodized, as in Fogliano, a timeless "Ave Maria". (fade Fogliano) 26) 26a) Raphael, 1514-15, Portrait of Castiglione, Louvre, Paris Florentine, 16th cent., Machiavelli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence Humanism from the first had invoked eternal presences. A hundred years before this Raphael portrait of Castiglione, Platonic Courtier, Bruni had written of his chance to study with the Greek Chrysoloras: Thou mayst gaze on Homer, Plato and Demosthenes ... converse with them and receive their admirable doctrine. So Machiavelli, exiled to his farm, writes (1513) to Vettori, how, after a day of snaring thrushes, doing chores, reading by a spring, gabbling with rustics at the inn: When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, Va27) 27) V27a) 27b) Raphael, 1510-11, Parnassus, from right side, Segnatura, Vatican Same, left side; video: detail only (V27) Raphael, 1509-10, School of Athens, center and right side; Vatican, Rome Same, detail of central figures and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of ancient men of old, where I am welcomed kindly and taste the food which is mine alone, and for which I was born. I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world and my cares, the troubles of poverty, and the fear of death; I live again in their company ... From their conversation ... I have composed a small book on Principalities ... 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Raphael's Parnassus and his School of Athens are the art- actualizations of those immortals first seen by Dante in the Noble Castle of Limbo, their light conquering the hemisphere of darkness. And it was from later residence there that Rabelais' Gargantua (1534) must have conceived the Abbey and order of Theleme, its one clause and rule: "DO WHAT THOU WILT" -Since men that are free, well-born, well-bred ... have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth to virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice; and it is called honour. 28) V28a) Michelangelo, 1508-12, detail from the Flood, Sistine Ceiling, Vatican Same, another detail Music: Josquin des Prez, c. 1494(?), Hosannah, Ave Maris Stella Mass, DL 79435 Upon the already elevated repose of the early century, and especially of Raphael, Michelangelo's mighty forms broke, at the Sistine unveiling, with undeflected challenge. Similarly, the ease of Italian harmony was entrained in the canonic rush of Josquin. (fade Josquin) 29) Raphael, 1514, Fire in the Borgo, detail; Vatican, Rome V29a) Same, whole, from which video also takes its 29 detail The result in Raphael fills the later Stanzas of the Vatican with muscled nudes: an Aeneas carrying Anchises, with other anomalies of a Papal miracle when the old Vatican loggia burned. Music: Constanzo Festa, c. 1527(?), from Deus, venêrunt gentes, DL79428 It was Festa in music who absorbed Josquin into the 1500 Italian, creating the high Roman style, for which Palestrina has been disproportionately praised. 30) Raphael, 1518, The Vision of Ezekiel, Pitti Palace, Florence; + V detail (music) In his last great works, whether the huge Transfiguration or this small cloud-borne Ezekiel, the soft genius of Raphael ventures like Tansillo-Icarus in the sonnet: "Scorning earth, I beat wings to the sky" — "E spregio il mondo, e verso '1 ciel m'invio." 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �16 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Flaminio: Who would have thought it possible, after such centuries of darkness, that so many lights should have arisen in a single time? (fade Festa) Va31) 31) V31a) Piero di Cosimo, c. 1510(?), Perseus and Andromeda, whole; Uffizi, Florence Same, center of scene (CGB '59) Same, a wider variant (CGB '59) The consciousness of Renaissance seizes even on the outmoded matter of Chivalry, whether of Perseus or St. George, the Crusades, or the Peers of France, working it up in literature to the Romantic Epic. Pulci's Morgante was a giant (as Don Quixote would say, "though disproportionate, affable and well-bred"); the Roland of Boiardo and Ariosto is a man, yet his love-mad actions in the Orlando Furioso are Quixote's giant model in the Morena, when those naked sommersaults give Sancho more than he might report to Dulcinea. In England it is Spenser — Ariosto through a Protestant filter: The Red Cross Knight in the den of Errour: (She) wrapping up her wrethed sterne arownd, Lept fierce upon his shield, and her huge traine All suddenly about his body wound That hand or foot to stirre he strove in vaine: God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse chaine. 32) 32a) Tintoretto, 1558, St. George and the Dragon, National Gallery, London; first, V detail of the princess, below Same, detail of St. George and the Dragon Music: V. Galilei, c. 1580(?), Il vostro gran valore (Gerwig) VICS-1408 If Spenser had looked for a picture to illustrate his Faerie Queene, he could hardly have found a better than Tintoretto's St. George, where the romance wonder of Ariosto becomes a moral allegory: like the defence of Una (or truth) from the fiend. And pointing forth, lo yonder is (said she) 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The brasen towre in which my parents deare For dread of that huge feend emprison'd be, Whom I from far see on the walles appeare... With that they heard a roaring hideous sound... Three passion days the Red Cross Knight fights, wounds the brass-plated monster with his steel, but is thrown down, to rise recovered, first from the Well of Life and then from the Tree, on the third day transfixing the dragon through his hollow maw: So downe he fell, and like an heaped mountaine lay. From this billowing groundswell (as from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, or the lute monodies of Galilei), (end Galilei) a33) 33) 33a) Mantegna, 1497, Parnassus; Louvre, Paris (CGB '80) Mantegna, 1504, Triumph of Virtue over Vice, Louvre Paris (CGB '80) Same, detail of Vices (CGB '80); with video details from 33a and 33 Music: V. Capirola, c. 1517, Ricercar Il (Ragossnig) Archiv 2533 173 to return to Ariosto, is to enter a thaumaturgy of Gothic poignance in High Renaissance: the lute ricercare of the early l5OO's (Capirola): Mantegna's last painting of Virtue and the Pool of Vice; Orlando's dream of Angelica upon the Dante-Petrarch flowered strand: (CGB) He took such present pleasure in his dream As lovers feel, possessing their desire — A moment only — then a tempest came And bore the flowers and leaves down heavy air ... His love was lost there, and the bordered stream, Whelmed in dark and cloud, and without reason; While he went up and down sounding her name Demanding of the echoing fields and forests: "Who has changed my sweetness into poison?" 34) Same, detail (left) of Mater Virtutum imprisoned in an olive tree (the warning cry); digital having first added two Vices: Va34 And then he heard his lady, and she too cried, 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �18 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Weeping, she called upon him for his aid. He hurried to the sound; it shifted place. He turned again, still seeking, back and forth, In bitter sorrow for his vanished solace; And then another voice came from the North: "Abandon hope of happiness on earth." At this appalling cry he wakes, he stirs, And finds himself, as in his dream, in tears. (CGB) (fade Capirola) How could such magic fail to seed wonders over Europe? 35) 35a) V35b) Master of the Vyssi Brod Cycle (Bohemian) c. 1350, Birds, from Christ in the Garden, National Gallery, Prague Master of the Middle Rhine, c. 1410, Paradise Garden, detail, right side, Städelsches Inst. Frankfurt Same, whole The natural life that had vollied from Gothic North to Ars Nova South and come back North enriched toward Renaissance — as with Chaucer, or the first bird Virelais of late 14th-century France Music: Jean Vaillant, c. 1390, Par maintes fois, Nightingale phrase SAWT 9466B that vigor ripening, as in Oswald von Wolkenstein, to the tenderness of Tyrolean heart — Music: Oswald v.Wolkenstein, c. 1410(?), from Der Mai, ARC 3033 (fade) dips south once more, a36) Vb36) 36) V36a) French Tapestry, c. 1510, Lady and the Unicorn Tapestry #6, Musée de Cluny Same, detail of falcon French Tapestries, c. 1510, Noble Pastorals, Preparing Wool; Louvre, Paris From another Noble Pastorals tapestry, a courtly pair, detail and so returns to France in the space and robes of 1500, the frottole chords and rythms, to take, in Jannequin's 1528 Song of the Birds, the gusto of Francis and Rabelais. Here is 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History the Nightingale couplet, with an entrance of the refrain. While tapestry details hold the screen, from the Noble Pastorals and the Chase of the Unicorn. Music: a37) Vb37) 37) 38) V38a) Jannequin, 1528, from Chant des Oiseaux (Boulanger), Decca DL 9629 Franco-Flemish, early 16th cent., Tapestry III, Hunt of the Unicorn, detail: pair of partridges, Cloisters, Metropolitan, NYC Same, detail of waterfowl Same, Tapestry IV, det. Woodcock and Duck Same, Tapestry III, detail of Hunter sounding Horn French (Touraine), c.1505(?), Tapestry, The Garden of Love, from Chateau of Le Verger, Musee des Gobelins, Paris Grangousier's friends could not have warbled better over their cups. 39) 39a) English Tudor, 1523, Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire, England (CGB '63); + V detail Cornwall, 1485-1539, Cotehele House, kitchen In the new kingdoms feudal castles shed their walls, looking to the villas and gardened palaces of Italy. Compton Wynyates sets the mode in Henry VIII's England: the mullioned-windowed hall in a wooded land, with church, farm, village — the great house built in the brick and half-timbering of the rural cot. A description of evening in Nevill's "Castell of Pleasure," 1518, restores that nature and mood: The nyght drew nye the day was at a syde My herte was heuy I moche desyréd rest Whan without comfort alone I dyd abyde Seynge the shadowes fall from the hylles in the west Eche byrde under boughe drewe nye to theyr nest The chymneys from ferre began to smoke Eche housholder went about to lodge his gest The storke fering stormes toke the chymney for a cloke... Curfew was ronge; lyghtes were set up in haste ... Which were playne precedentes that day was clerely paste. Va40) 40) 9/1995 Chateau de Chenonceau, over the Cher French Renaissance, 1518-27, Azay-le-Rideau Chateau, Indre-et-Loire Giants in the Earth �20 C.G. Bell 40a) 40b) Symbolic History Niccolo dell' Abbate, c. 1558-60, Euridice and Aristaeus, detail, National Gallery, London Leeds Castle, 13th c. and 1512, Maidstone, view from the South East France was more formal, and from Leonardo down more open to Italy. But the Chateaux of the Loire were as close to forest and chase, fields and harvest, as the court poet Marot in his 1539 Eclogue to the King, where he tells of his youth in that still wooded land (Villon's old cry of vanity, "de ma jeunesse folle," here Renaissanceaffirmed): Sur le printemps de ma jeunesse folle, Je ressemblois l'arondelle qui volle Puis ça, puis 1à ... Such the European blend of nature and custom, that Spenser can describe his English boyhood by varying Marot (as Marot had learned from Florentine Poliziano: Nel vago tempo di sua verde etate ... Viveassi lieto in pace e in libertate.) Spenser: Whilome in youth, when flowrd my joyfull spring, a41) Vb41) 41) 41a) V41b) dell' Abbate, c. 1550-55, Galerie Henri II, Chimney wall with hunting scenes, Fontainebleau (CGB '59) French-Italian, c. 1513-40, Galerie Francois I, Rosso Fiorentino, Mythological scene, Fontainebleau (CGB '59) Same, another bay, with Education of Achilles (CGB '59) Jean Coulombe, 1485, Tres Riches Heures, November, Acorn Harvest, Mus. Conde, Chantilly Galerie Francois I, Fontainebleau, general view (CGB '59) Like Swallow swift I wandred here and there ... I went the wastefull woodes and forest wyde, Withoutèn dreade of Wolves to bene espyed. Even in the gilt and panelled galleries of Fontainebleau, the legends painted by Rosso Fiorentino, Primaticcio, dell' Abbate, have absorbed, as from stream and forest, the freshness Spenser translated from Marot: 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �21 C.G. Bell Symbolic History O quantefoys aux arbres grimpé j'ay ... How often have I scaled the craggie Oke, All to dislodge the Raven of her neste: How have I wearied with many a stroke The stately Walnut tree, the whils the rest Under the tree fell all for nuts at strife: For ylike to me was liberty and lyfe. (Though the last line is Spenser's alone.) 42) 42a) School of Fontainebleau (Niccolo dell' Abbate?), c. 1560, Wheat-Threshing, Mus. de Fontainebleau; first, V detail P. Brueghel the Elder, 1565, Wheat Harvest, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City And it is also at Fontainebleau that art-cultivation of nature is expressed in a harvest landscape as real as Du Bellay's "Song of the Wheat-Winnower to the Winds": A vous troppe legere ... J'offre ces violettes ... (as Lang closes it): Ah, winnow with sweet breath, Winnow the holt and heath Round this retreat; Where all the golden morn We fan the gold o' the corn, In the sun's heat. The New World did not simply offer itself; it was opened by the swelling Prothalamion of that love: Against the Brydale day, which is not long: Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song. 43) 9/1995 French MS, c. 1260(?), Saul smites the Ammonites, MS 638 f. 23v, Pierpont Morgan Library; + V detail Giants in the Earth �22 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History French, 13th cent., La Quinte Estampie Real (Munrow),"Crusades" Argo ZRG 673 In crusading chivalry, the battle-joy of the North had refined itself into art. Isrealites and Ammonites take the arms of Franks and Moors. Bertran de Born had voiced that keenness in the poems Pound flung at an age weary of war: "it pleaseth me to the heart when I see strong castles besieged,/ And barriers broken and riven." As revived in a sestina: Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash! And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing, Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing ... Va44) 44) (fade Estampie) Altdorfer, 1529, Battle of Alexander, whole, Alte Pinakothek, Munich Same, vertical expanse right of center, from which video takes horizontal spread With what physical depths the tide of Renaissance endows that fabled stour: Altdorfer's Alexander, Jannequin's Battle of Marignan, both of 1529. Music: a45) 45) 45a) V45b) 46) Jannequin, 1529, from the Battle of Marignan (5th voice, Verdelot, 1549) Angel S37025 Same, detail of mounted lancer (CGB '59) Same, Chariot of Darius in flight (CGB '59) Same, Alexander in pursuit (video repeats, from 45 and 45a, closer details of Darius and Alexander, and again, Darius and Alexander) Same, upper right, camp and city, landscape and sky Titian, 1548, Equestrian Charles V, whole, Prado (video takes two details only) (end Jannequin) The battles of Bible and myth yield to Titian's Charles V, at the actual victory of Mühlberg; yet he holds the mythic stance, Othello's "Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war," which Baroque and even Napoleonic heroes would cling to. It is almost the lusty make-believe of Pantagruel against the Dipsodes: "How Panurge" and three others "vanquished and discomfited six-hundred and three score horsemen very cunningly" — winding them in with ships' cables to a trap of gunpowder. For 2nd 45) Battle of Alexander, detail: sun over sea and land (variant of V45b) 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �23 C.G. Bell Symbolic History What buoys up the make-believe is the expanding giant reality of man and world. Magellan had just rounded that globe; Copernicus had set it revolving in planetary space. 2nd 46) Music: Titian, Charles V, mounted, detail (video: 46 whole and detail of head from V2nd 46a) Willaert, c. 1635(?), Ricercare (3-voice Schott #6), Musical Heritage Society 913 To an always mounting blazon of art and music (this Willaert ricercare), even those inadequate kings who stride the curved horizon play Shakespearean hero-roles: ...methinks it were an easy leap To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon. 47) Patinir, c. 1515(?), Landscape with Charon's boat, Prado, Madrid In Patinir, the rounded Magellanic margin first stretches a Bosch dream — Charon ferrying a soul toward a fiery shore. The boldest pre-Columbian prophecy, in Pulci's Morgante, 1482, is communicated by a fiend, Astarotte: Hung among the stars by god's mystery, The world has everywhere the form of a wheel, And as it draws all things to its center, You can sail beyond the gates of Hercules, And come at last to the other hemisphere, With castles and kingdoms unknown to us here. (CGB) 48) 48a) P. Brueghel, 1558(?), Fall of Icarus, Royal Gallery, Brussels (CGB '59) Same, detail to the right: Icarus (video returns to 48) So the Altdorfer we have seen, and, by 1558, Brueghel's Fall of Icarus, where the widening earth, the galleon-traffic of the sea, leaves the old myth only a few plumes, a drowning flash of legs, "White feathers...the Gulf claims." Though if Icarus is so discounted, the global flight goes on. 49) 9/1995 Double: World Maps, [A] Germanus, 1487, and [B] Desceliers, 1550, British Museum, London (video separates V49 A and B, then takes a detail of B) Giants in the Earth �24 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thus two printed maps, Germanus from 1487, the Eurasian landmass, with Africa to the Cape of Good Hope filled in with the names Dias had just given, the hemisphere of water unknown; and from 1550, Desceliers, the Mercator projection, but for Australia and parts of Asia, almost as we would draw it today. (end Willaert) 50) Japanese, c. 733, Vajrapani, Todai-ji Temple, Nara, Japan And where for centuries Buddhist guardian dæmons had warned venturing aliens from sacred shrines — as this Vajrapani in the Todai-ji Temple of Nara, Japan — 51) Japanese-Western, c. 1600, Enamel screen, Music by a Harbor; + V detail suddenly mission schools were teaching Christianity and the Western arts. Did lute romances even there sound the new grandeur of man — Milan's "Durandarte"? Music: 52) 52a) Luis Milan, 1536, Durandarte, opening (Meili) Vict. M-495 (3) (fade) Russian, 1505-09, Cathedral of Archangel Michael, Kremlin, Moscow Brunelleschi, 1432, shell decoration on Lantern of Cathedral, Florence (CGB ‘48); video returns to the Cathedral of Archangel Michael At the heart of the unyielding fastness of Russia, the Kremlin, this 1509 Cathedral of Michael, on an otherwise Byzantine mass, displays the scallop shells of Italy (as from Brunelleschi's lantern on the dome of Florence); at the same time Russian chant took the passion for Roman harmony which would end with the Cossacks' swelling the Psalms of David for the audiences of America. 53) Russian, mid-16th cent., Church Militant Icon, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Music: Russian traditional, from First Psalm of David, old Col. DBX 12 Though in the Church Militant ikon of the time of Ivan, the force already flowing from Venice just stirs the surface, or perhaps the depths, of what Henry Adams would still call that Eastern vis inertia. (fade Russian Chant) 54) 54a) 9/1995 Peter Brueghel, 1565, The Dark Day (Feb-March), Kunsthistoriches, Vienna; + V detail Same, another detail Giants in the Earth �25 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In Spanish-Inquisition Flanders, Brueghel had advanced from the early Icarus to the stupendous landscapes of the months, this "Gloomy Day", from which the ultimate storm-scapes of Rubens would take their cue. In English the mightiest poem from the same time is Sackville's "Induction": The wrathful winter, 'proaching on apace, With blustering blasts had all ybared the treen And old Saturnus, with his frosty face, With chilling cold had pierced the tender green; The mantles rent, wherein enwrapped been The gladsome groves that now lay overthrown, The tapets torn, and every bloom down blown. ...small fowls flocking, in their song did rue The winter's wrath, wherewith each thing defaced In woeful wise bewailed the summer past. . When lo, the night with misty mantles spread, Gan dark the day and dim the azure skies... It taught me well all earthly things be born To die the death, for nought long time may last; The summer's beauty yields to winter's blast. Va55) 55) 55a) Peter Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Dance, detail to left; Kunsthistoriches, Vienna Same, closer detail Same, whole On the cresting life-wave comic and tragic blend. If the dishe be pleasaunt, eyther fleshe or fishe, Ten handes at once swarme in the dishe. And if it be flesh, ten knives shalt thou see, Mangling the flesh and in the platter flee. To put there thy handes is perill without fayle, Without a gauntlet or els a glove of mayle. Ofte in such dishes in court is it seene, Some leave their fingers, eche knife is so kene. On a finger gnaweth some hasty glutton, Supposing it a piece of biefe or mutton. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �26 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Whatever Barclay's Eclogues, about 1510, owe to the humanist pope Piccolomini, they stand on the huge slope of farce that leads from the Middle Ages through Rabelais and Brueghel to Cervantes and Shakespeare. 56) Peter Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Wedding Feast, Kunsthistoriches, Vienna; + V detail (cf. V56) With Rabelais that farce takes the prodigious flesh it can only have where the sons of God have gone in to the daughters of men: L'occasion & maniere comment Gargamelle enfanta fut telle. Et si ne le croyez, le fondement vous escappe... The occasion and manner how Gargamelle gave birth was this; and if you do not believe me, may your bum-gut fall out. Her bum-gut indeed did fall out ... from eating too many tripes ... Grangousier bade his wife eat sparingly, because she was near her time ... Notwithstanding, she did eat sixteen quarters, two bushels, three pecks and a pipkin full. What a filthy deal of loblolly was this, to swell and wamble in her guts ... While they were drinking, she began to be a little unwell in her lower parts... a57) 57) Rubens, c. 1618, Silenus drunk, detail of mother giving suck, Alte Pinak., Munich (CGB '59) Same, whole (video details Silenus) The midwives, groping her below, found some peloderies of a very bad savour, which they thought had been the child, but it was her fundement which had escaped from eating too many tripes. Whereupon an ugly old trot made her a medicine so binding that all her arse-pipes were so oppilated, stopped and obstructed you could scarcely have opened them with your teeth, which is a terrible thing to think on... Rubens crests the monstrous vindication of body — a Gargantuan tie especially in the riotous baroque (though we have trimmed it) of Motteux and Urquhart's Rabelais. After the thin Gothic nudes, Titian and Rubens. Falstaff also poses the question how bulk serves exuberance. Apt we call it humor. And Renaissance languages, most of 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �27 C.G. Bell Symbolic History all English, with "Latinate verbocination," ("To such exsufflicate and blown surmises,/ Matching thy inference"), laid on enormous weight, yet trained it on home truths. 58) 58a) 58b) 58c) Triple: [A] Giovanni da Bologna, 1569-81, Allegory of the Apennines, Villa Demidoff, Florence; [B] Momper, c. 1580(?), L'Eté (mountain as head), Collection R. Lebel, Paris; and [C] Roman, 1592, carved doormouth of Casa Zuccari (CGB '86) Roman, Door-mouth (58C shown singly) da Bologna, Allegory (58A shown singly) Momper, Mountain as head (58B shown singly) From garden giants (Giambologna's "Apennines" through Momper's manmountain called summer, to the door-mouth of the Casa Zuccari in Rome — we search the portentous overflow of symbol into body, the coincidence of humanist learning with huge codpieces; of Pantagruel's Tartarean guts — the time he was sick and swallowed seventeen workers in copper balls, who opening springtraps came out with lanterns and spades, and groping and falling through a horrid infectious gulph smelled their way to the fecal blockage, dug it up, cleaned it out with baskets, and so reentering their copper spheres were vomited forth — the link between that and the great-souled letter Pantagruel receives from his father, exhorting to unbounded knowledge and virtue, to study all history, languages, manners and chivalry, law, mathematics, science: For knowledge of the works of nature, let there be no sea, river, or fountain of which you do not know the fishes, all fowls of the air, trees and shrubs of the forest, plants of the earth, all metals hid in its depths ... let me see thee a bottomless pit of knowledge ... As in the thought of Paracelsus, no limits here, no abstract denial or separation of soul from earth and practice. a59) b59) 59) 59a) 9/1995 Venetian Byzantine, c. 1225(?), Creation Mosaic, Vestibule, San Marco, Venice (CGB '66) Same, another detail (CGB '66) Double: [A] detail of b59; and [B] Raphael 1508, Adam and Eve, Ceiling, Segnatura, Vatican, Rome Raphael, Adam & Eve (59B shown singly) Giants in the Earth �28 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Byzantine Chant (Athos), Easter Eve, from a Lauds psalm, Archiv 2533 413 B The revelational order, like the starry spheres, has broken. In the mosaic domes of Byzantine Venice, where the creation of earth and Biblical life of man circles its Godcenter, the quest of delight reduces to an Eden episode and banishment of those angular breast-fallen, flesh-denying nudes — all poignance of wish and loss gathered in rings of eternal gold. Where is the cry Ausonius distilled from the long earth-love of Greece and Rome (fade Mount Athos chant) — to fill out Raphael's Papal ceiling — "collige, virgo, rosas," "Maiden, pluck the rose," Music: Costeley, pub 1570, from Mignonne, allons (at "las, las") Boulanger, Decca DL 9629 which Poliziano would revive with Quattrocento tenderness, "Cogliam' la bella rosa del' giardino," and the Rebirth send abroad from Florence: Ronsard's "Mignonne, allons voir si la rose"; Spenser's translation from Tasso: "Gather the rose of love, whilest yet is time"; down to Marvel's cormorant defiance: "And tear our pleasures with rough strife,/ Thorough the iron gates of life"? (fade Mignonne) 60) 60a) 60b) Primaticcio in Fontainebleau, c. 1560, Ulysses and Penelope, Wildenstein; + V detail Primaticcio, c. 1550(?), fresco from the bedroom of Mme. d'Etampes, at Fontainebleau Jean Goujon, 1548-49?, "Nymphe de la Seine," relief from a fountain, Louvre, Paris Against the ascetic leap beyond death, the cry of time and flesh takes new imperative, as in the gaze of Primaticcio's Ulysses; however late it is to tell Penelope: "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may." In that field of passionate impossibility, no poem has more beauty than the Ronsard sonnet Yeats would redo: When you are old and gray and full of sleep ... Though we have still to translate it: When you are old, at evening, carding wool, 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �29 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Bent to the glow of fire and candlelight, You will say, marveling at this verse I write, "Ronsard sang of me when I was beautiful." There will not be a servant of them all, However spent with labor and the night, But starting at my name will praise your fate — As one whom fame acclaims and ever shall. My bones will be under ground; my ghost above Rest in the twilight of the myrtle grove; You will be hunched at the fire, old and gray, Regretting my love and your proud disdain. The time that passes will not come again; Believe me: pluck the rose of life today. (CGB) 61) Jean Cousin, c. 1560(?), Eva Prima Pandora, Louvre, Paris; + V detail That imperative is hurled against the recorded fate: "You old and gray": Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain. So Cousin's snake-wreathed, skull-propped Eve as first Pandora: Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandellè Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant, Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant: Ronsard me célebroit du temps que j'estois bellè. Lors vous n'aurez servante oyant tellè nouvellè, Desja sous le labeur à demy sommeillant, Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s'aillè resveillant, Bénissant vostre nom de louange immortellè. Je seray sous la terre, et fantosme sans os, Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos: Vous serez au fouyer unè vieille accroupi 62) 62a) Titian, 1540-60(?), Venus of Pardo, Louvre, Paris Same, detail; + V closer detail Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain. Vivez, si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain: Cueillez des aujourd'huy les rosès de la vie. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �30 C.G. Bell Symbolic History No doubt the poem exceeds French art of the time, requires the tragic radiance of Correggio's Antiope, or this Titian Venus of Pardo — the crux of Age of Gold — as in Tasso's Aminta. "S'ei piace, ei lice," "If it pleases, it is allowed" — against a world which grows old and sad — "Il mondo invecchia, e invecchiando intrisce." What power of the Rebirth makes that desired Arcadia so real? "Amiam" — Let us love, for the sun dies and is born, But for us its brief light Fades, and sleep brings on eternal night:— (CGB) "e'l sonno eterna notte adduce." 63) Double: [A] French, c. 1320, Vierge de la Celle, detail, Louvre, Paris, and [B] Michelangelo, 1521-34, Medici Madonna, detail, San Lorenzo, Florence No doubt the magnified embodiment we are calling giant was implicit in the mangod reach of the Middle Ages. Already this Mary of painted limestone (left; French c. 1320) smiles the sensuous poignance of Gothic humanization, though the archaic smile of the Greek Korê is not more mysteriously suspended. To set, against its wistful ethereality, the mood and brooding weight of Michelangelo's 1530 Medicean Madonna, is to touch the very pulse of prophetic enfleshment. 64) English Gothic, 1320-25, Lady Chapel windows and vault, Cathedral, Wells (CGB '84) Music: English, early 14th cent., 3-voice Jacet granum, Nonesuch H 71292 As in dialectic theology, so in Medieval discant (here English early l4th century), or in the always more ingenious vaulting of cathedral stone (this Lady Chapel of Wells), we feel the stretching of that bow of spirit. In music, indeed, all later styles had to shape their being from the Gothic store. (fade Jacet Granum) 65) Spanish Renaissance Gothic, c. 1500, Condestable Chapel, Vault, Burgos; + V details Music: Alonso de Alva, c. 1500, Ut queant laxis, Angel S-36926 That architecture could have done likewise Spain makes startlingly clear. In the 1500 Condestable chapel of Burgos, as in this Spanish polyphony, articulate Renaissance 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History has been achieved without the intervention of the classical. Alonso de Alva) 66) (fade Spanish, 1568, Gothic Dome of Burgos Cathedral, crossing, Spain; + V details Music: Josquin des Prez(?), c. 1520, from Inviolata ... Maria, Seraphim SIC-6104 While the Crossing of Burgos, 1568, within the same Gothic (and Moorish) idiom, has solemnized a wreathing as grand as the many-voiced summits of polyphony — from this 12-part Inviolata attributed to Josquin, (close Inviolata) through Gombert, Willaert, Morales, to the mightiest of all, Tallis' Spem in Alium whose 40voices fuse in a chordal enormity of passionate lowing, as of the brazen cow in which the tyrant of Syracuse burned his victims. Music: a67) 67) Tallis, c. 1570(?), from Spem in Alium (toward close), (78) HMVDA 1921-22 P. Brueghel, 1563, Tower of Babel, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna Double: [A] Anglo-French (Paris), c. 1425, Tower of Babel, Add. MS 18850, British Museum, London; and [B] Brueghel, Tower of Babel, a67; + V detail of [B] The concept of a 40-voice fabric is as far from the century before, as folk plays from Rabelais, or this illuminated Tower of Babel quaintly harried by the angels from the 1563 Brueghel, where the claim of the mighty ones in the earth is spatially enacted. a68) English late Perpendicular (Tudor), 1446-1515, King's College Chapel, exterior from the southwest (CGB); cropped from wide-angle Va68 b68) Same, interior, looking up: windows and vault (Sam Adams' slide) Vc68) Same, wide-angle interior, looking west (CGB '77) Vd68 and e68) Same, west window, and closer: video shows upper part (CGB '77) 68) Same, whole interior with organ loft, black and white (cf. V68, color) (end Spem in Alium) Though perhaps Tallis' greatest music is in the 5-voice Lamentations of Jeremiah (here in the epoch-making Deller recording). 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �32 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Tallis, c. 1575(?), First Lamentation of Jeremiah, opening and close, (Deller) Bach Guild 551 These passionate implorations might span the Continent of that tragic century, from the 1500 Gothic spatiality of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, For 1st 69) Double: [A] Michelangelo, 1536-41, from Last Judgment, Upper part, and [B] Beaufort Chapel, Warwick, variant (video shows singles and detail of 69A) V69a) Fountains Abbey, view from the East, North Yorkshire 69b) Same, Presbytery, looking East to the thunderhead of Michelangelo's Judgment in Counter Reformation Rome (of which a crude variant clouds a wall of the also late Gothic Beaufort Chapel in Warwick). (skip to "Jerusalem") Tallis, like Byrd, was a Catholic, writing in an England where despoiled monasteries enforced Shakespeare's metaphor of age: "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." 1st 70) Michelangelo, 1550-56, Pieta, upper half, Duomo Museum, Florence; + V detail of Nicodemus How could the titan calmly revealed in the Renaissance island of 1500 knit incarnate thews but in Judgment tragedy and the war of values, which darkening to the Lear storm would found, confound, and fortify the airy earth-freedoms first dreamed? As Milton would say: "What purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary." (end Tallis Lamentation) Va2nd 69) Michelangelo, detail of Judgment, the damned beat down 2nd 69) Same, a Soul weighed down It is in Christian denial of his Promethean self and art that Michelangelo made the syntax of the sonnet a poetic battleground of hope and fear: Giunto è già '1 corso della vita mia Con tempestoso mar, per fragil barca, Al comun porto, ov' a render si varca Conto e ragion d'ogni opra trista e pia. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �33 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Already now across tempestuous seas' Uncharted course my brittle bark has blown To the common port, where all come to own Account and cause of goods and trespasses. Wherefore the loving fancy's subtleties, That made of art an idol and a throne, Break in deception — snares, too late known Such bitter sweets as to damnation please. Amorous thoughts, long since proved vanities, What are you now, if double death incline, One sure, one doubted, both foretasted harms? a2nd 70) Michelangelo, 1555-64, Rondanini Pieta, Sforzesca, Milan Vb2nd 70) Same, profile detail (copy of CGB '80) 2nd 70) Again, Nicodemus head Not any mastery of paint or stone Can ease the heart that sees how love divine Spreads on the cross — to gather us — his arms. (CGB) Nè pinger nè scolpir fie più che quieti L'anima volta a quell' amor divino Ch'aperse a prender noi 'n croce le braccia. How far this last Michelangelo self, Nicodemus as lamenting world-father, has come from that youthful morning with Leonardo, Pico and the rest, in Medici Florence; how tragically pushed self's prophetic claim. a71) 71) Raphael, 1511-12, detail of Madonna of Foligno, Vatican Titian, c. 1510, Gypsy Madonna, Kunsthistorisches, Vienna (CGB '59); + V detail Music: Josquin des Prez, pub.1504, Coment peult (instr.) Archive 3223 What High Renaissance had reached for, in neo-Platonism, Josquin's Musica Reservata, in Raphael, or as here, in the first works of Titian, was the earthly eternity of divine beauty and good — what Sydney would give Sapphic measure in his remaking of Sannazaro's 1500 Arcadia: If the sencelesse spheares doo yet hold a musique, 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �34 C.G. Bell Symbolic History If the Swanne's sweet voice be not heard, but at death, If the mute timber when it hath the life lost, Yeldeth a lute's tune, Are then humane mindes priviledg'd so meanly, As that hatefull death can abridge them of powre, With the voyce of truth to recorde to all worldes, That we be her spoiles? a72) 72) (fade Josquin) Titian, 1565, Self Portrait, Prado, Madrid Titian, 1565, Self, in an Allegory of Prudence and the Ages of Man, National Gallery, London; first, V detail Music: Lassus, c.1560, Penitential psalms: Domine, ne in furore, ARC2533 290 (B) The embodiment of that Promethean claim would lead those devotees through fields of lowering actuality (as Don Quixote would exclaim: "I do not even know how chivalry can work in so depraved a time.") In the sonnet, the crisis would run from Michelangelo to Campanella, to Gongora in Spain; in England to Shakespeare, and thereafter to Donne. The raptures of idea and form — Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Suppos'd as forfeit to a confined doom buckle under the assault of fact: Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born ... ... maiden virtue rudely strumpeted ... ... captive good attending captain ill... Thus Titian, nearing 80, self-portrayed, in an allegory of Prudence and the Ages of Man — 73) V73a) Titian, c. 1570, Crowning with Thorns, Alte Pinak., Munich (CGB '59) Same, detail (CGB '59) Titian, climaxing a productive life which reached from the laude and frottole repose of 1500 to the star-crossed pathos of the last Passion pictures — a darkening so widely 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �35 C.G. Bell Symbolic History shared, we seize almost at random, from a generation of music, on Lassus' Penitential Psalms. 74) Veronese, 1578, Battle of Lepanto (of 1571) detail, Accademia, Venice The age-long threat of Moorish invasion broke in Lepanto, where Cervantes was maimed and then taken into slavery. But there was a symbolic Lepanto of new against old, and Cervantes was not the only giant of the spirit who fought there. In some such engagement Bruno went up in flames, Galileo went captive behind inquisition walls. (fade Lassus) 1st 75) El Greco, 1590-95, St. John, detail from Crucifixion, Prado, Madrid It is hard for products of Enlightenment to realize that the religious heightening is no less titanic than the worldly, no less fraught with earth-transforming danger. Bruno was a churchman; and who knows if the mystic frenzy of El Greco had been translated into thought and word, how heretical it might have been? Was not John of the Cross accused for those amorous meetings with Christ where the loved into Lover was changed? 1st 76) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Night landscape with St. Mary of Egypt, Scuolo San Rocco, Venice (or V1st 76, lighter) 76a) Same, detail of Mary V76b) Tintoretto, 1583-87, Night landscape with St. Mary Magdalen, Scuolo San Rocco, Venice In Tintoretto it is Mary of Egypt who shares a night as God-tinctured as when Juan de la Cruz ascended Mount Carmel: En una noche escura, con ansias en amores inflamada ... It is the night Tasso pooled with moonlight, silence and love: What dewdrops, what tears ... Quai lagrime eran quelle...? The woods and streams are quiet 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �36 C.G. Bell Symbolic History and without wave the sea... Sien muti i baci e muti i miei sospiri... Or in his Jerusalem, the Erminia brooding which Fairfax has gleamingly rendered: Invested in her starrie vaile, the night In her kinde armes embraced all this round, The silver moone from sea uprising bright Spred frostie pearle on the canded ground: And Cinthia like for beauties glorious light, The love-sicke Nymph threw glistering beames around, And counsellors of her old love, she made Those vallies dumbe, that silence, and that shade. E secretarii del suo amore antico Fea i muti campi e quel silenzio amico. Va2nd 75) El Greco, 1597-1600, The Annunciation, detail, Collection of Thyssen, Lugano 2nd 75) Greco, 1603-05, The Nativity, detail, Illescas, Hospital de la Caridad Since the mid-century chromatic experiments of Vicentino and Lassus, music had explored the mode of dramatic emotion and crepuscular melting. In Marenzio's setting of Petrarch's night sonnet, "Solo e pensoso i piu deserti campi," what vast glimmerings of the plasmic world have been explored since Petrarch. The upper voice runs a half-tone scale from G to high G and back to C, setting all the other voices nocturnally awash. Music: 2nd 76) 2nd 76a) 2nd 76b) 77) 77a) 9/1995 Marenzio, 1599, Solo e pensoso, chromatic opening, BGS 5051 Double: [Tintoretto, [A] St. Mary of Egypt, (76), and [B] St. Mary Magdalen (V76b) Tintoretto, detail of V76b, Mary Magdalen, background (or V2nd 76a) Tintoretto, detail of 76, St. Mary of Egypt, background (cut Marenzio) Pierre Dumonstein, c. 1580, Portrait of a man, Mus. Jacquemart André French School, late 16th cent., Portrait of Montaigne, Musée Condé, Chantilly; video then returns to detail of 77, Dumonstein Giants in the Earth �37 C.G. Bell 77b&c) 77d) 77e) 77f) 77g) Music: Symbolic History Double: Jacques Callot, etchings, [A] 1622, A Duel, and [B] 1617, Couple Promenading; both from Capricci di Varie Figure, British Museum, London (video takes them singly) Francois Clouet, 1560-70, Diane de Poitiers, detail, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (CGB '75) Nicholas Beaugrais, c. 1560-80, Apocalypse Window, Royal Chapel, Vincennes Castle, Near Paris Callot, 1617-22, Capricci #62, Old Shepherd Piping, etching Dumonstein, detail of head (see 77) Claude le Jeune, before 1600, Revecy venir du printans (Boulanger) Decca DL 9629 Let this unknown Frenchman of the late century (with Claude le Jeune's measured Spring song) remind us of that modest giant, Montaigne. In his essay on Presumption, he asks, with regard to a self-portrait Renate of Sicily has sent Francis II: Why is it not as lawful for every man else to pourtray himself with his pen, as it were for him to do with a pensell? How can Montaigne in that portrayal neglect the scar he calls his "cicatrice" — in Hamlet's words — that "the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." At a time when the resolve of the Protestant Bourbon was beseiging and starving Catholic Paris, that flaw becomes the virtue of a civilized man: Le peuple se trompe ... Grandeur of soul consists not so much in mounting and pressing forward, as in knowing how to govern and circumscribe itself. There is no science so arduous as to know how to play the man, to live this life. For my part I love life, and cultivate it, such as it has pleased God to bestow it on us ... I accept with gratitude what nature has done for me ... the great omnipotent Giver ... all goodness himself, has made everything good... Transcendental humors affright me...Who would escape being men, do not transform themselves into angels but into beasts... 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �38 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet how Transcendental in the later sense is this perfection of being ourselves "without miracle, without extravagance ... gay and sociable ... nor let music be wanting ..." (end Claude le jeune) 78) Agostino Carracci(?), c. 1590, Portrait, Self(?), Alte Pinakothek Munich; first, V detail No less the product of a giant century than the radical powers being then suppressed in Italy. Pomponazzi, early in the century, had expressed the fate to follow: The philosopher is a very Prometheus. Seeking to penetrate the secrets of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares, forgets to eat and sleep, is derided of all men, held for a fool and unbeliever; harried by inquisitors, he becomes the gaping stock of the common crowd... A prophecy fulfilled in Bruno: And so I spread wide pinions to the air, Nor fear the impasse of glass or crystal sphere, Piercing the heavens to the infinite. And as I leave this globe and mount the vast, Beating my way across the ethereal waste, I lose the care of every common sight. (CGB) 79) Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, Night arrest of Christ in the Garden, Musée Conde, Chantilly; + V detail The last Promethean work of Renaissance was the grappling with the starry universe. The first representation of that fathomless night nature had been in the Tres Riches Heures at the start of the 15th century. By 1440 Cusanus was formulating it: and although our universe is not infinite, nevertheless, one cannot conceive of it as finite; it is not enclosed in boundaries, nor is the earth its center nor any sphere of the stars its circumference ... It has its center everywhere, its circumference nowhere, because God is its circumference and center, He who is everywhere and nowhere ... Plato, in fact, said the world is animate; and if one conceives God as its soul — without immersion — much of what we have said will be clear. 80) 80a) 9/1995 Elsheimer, 1609, Flight to Egypt by night, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; video also takes a detail from V80 (CGB '59) and a starry one from 80; so digital, as z a &b Moon Surface from Apollo 15 Command Module; digital has Io here Giants in the Earth �39 C.G. Bell 80b) 80c) Symbolic History 1930s print, Jupiter as seen from one of its moons; here luna surface Volcanoes on Io, moon of Jupiter, radio photographed by Voyager I, here Jupiter As Elsheimer (1609) stretches out that starry sky, Bruno's soaring expands the cosmos of Cusanus: For us consists the Universal sphere as a single all over-spreading, infinite, immovable continuum, in which numberless spheres or particular worlds exist. There is but one sky, one immeasurable worldspace, one matrix, one universal connective, one ether region through which the whole moves. In this become visible innumerable stars, constellations, world bodies and suns ... Of these our earth is one, yet not a single one is the center, for the universe is in all directions equally immeasurable ... The earth and all other constellations have their own soul, which again is but a part of the World Soul. By 1610 Galileo's Sidereal Messenger communicates the shattering news of telescopic sights. He had begun the true exploration of worlds in space. other stars in myriads ... never seen before ... the body of the moon ... thirty times larger ... like the face of the earth itself ... everywhere full of vast protruberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities ... four planets, neither known nor observed before my time, which have their orbits round a certain bright star ... (The moons of Jupiter.) Va80+1) G. Romano, 1530-32, Fall of the Giants (here video takes a detail from slide 1, see opening); digital veries the order of these 80+1) From the same frescoed room, another scene; + a closer V detail Of the enterprise of the century, as of the later West, two things had been clear from the start, that it was giant and that it was perilous. They knew of old, those myths of titans in the world. As once I applied the symbol of this picture: And all whom superstitions of the dark Had thundered down for daring — Icarus Sun-melted, Phaeton Jove-destroyed, Prometheus Of the fire and Lucifer of morning, Niobe made tears and Semele love-burning — 9/1995 Giants in the Earth �40 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Rose divinely, winging west with the dawn... We feel the fatal angels strike the tower, Or through the slant rifts of the rock-hurled hail, Glimpse dreads of distance where our running kind Shot with his lightnings fall, and the mountains drown. 9/1995 Giants in the Earth � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 41 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Giants in the Earth (16th Century), Symbolic History, Part 16 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 16 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_16_Giants_in_the_Earth_16th_Century Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1dd39c8b9963c09aa94bee47d9d1b58d.pdf 716674ebfeca62f797679c8b521a8c78 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 15. 1500: Explosive Balance CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 September 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 15. 1500: Explosive Balance 1) Leonardo da Vinci, 1483 ff., Bombard with shrapnel, Ambrosiana, Milan Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), Alla Battaglia, Decca DL 79424 1500 goes off like one of Leonardo's shrapnel shells, hurled from the foul bombard, shedding small shot, "causing," he writes, "great terror to the enemy, with great loss and confusion." The martial music of Isaac, 2) Rubens, 1615, copy of Leonardo, 1503, Battle of Anghiari, Louvre, Paris the unfinished frescoes of battle, in which Leonardo and Michelangelo vied on the walls of the Florentine Palazzo Vecchio, set the type of force for centuries — as Rubens made this copy, from a copy of the lost Leonardo. (fade Isaac) Va3) Leonardo, 1503-5, Mona Lisa, whole, Louvre, Paris 3) Same, Mona Lisa, detail Music: Mantuanus, c. 1495, Frottole, Un Sonar, NY Pro Musica, Decca 79435 How does Renaissance, a point of balance between old and new, cultivating in all arts the myth of calm — Leonardo; 4) Giorgione, 1505-10, Sleeping Venus, Gemäldegalerie , Dresden Giorgione; this Mantuan frottole of winds and waters, "Lirum, bililirum"; Sannazaro's Arcadian dream, "Alma beata e bella," "Blest and beautiful soul, who freed from bonds" — how does that promise admit of so fierce a cleavage? (fade Frottole) 9/1995 1500: Explosive Balance 1 �C.G. Bell 5) Symbolic History Pisanello, c. 1415(?), Luxuria, drawing, Albertina, Vienna Was it the turbulence of shooting in a hundred years the narrows of such a transformation as from Pisanello's 1415 Luxuria, lean Gothic lust burning its sinful allure? — Scotch Dunbar of 1500 still working in that vein: Sum kissis me; sum clappis me, sum kyndnes me proferis ... And a stif standand thing staiffis in my neiff... And Marlowe's Lechery flaunting it to the century's end: I am one that loves an inch of raw mutton better than an ell of fride stock-fish... 2nd 4) Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, detail; video, first a closer detail Was Renaissance everywhere islanded in a brimstone which syphilis would fire from the New World; so that Machiavelli's Mandragola-seduction might curl the fingers of Giorgione's acceptance: What your cunning, my husband's folly, a mother's venality and the wickedness of a confessor, has won me to for a night ... I wish to have forever. 2nd 5) Again, Pisanello, Luxuria, detail Not to mention the dialogues of Aretino, where of whores, nuns and wives, only whores ply an honest trade. 6) 6a) 6b) Riemenschneider, 1495, Eve from the Marienskapelle, half-length, Museum, Würzburg French MS, 1450(?), Vapor Bath, MS Franc. 289 Fol 414, Bibl, Nat., Paris Again, Riemenschneider, Eve (head and bust) Music: Glogauer Liederbuch, c. 1477-88, Ich bin erfreut, Archive 3033 On the other side, the purity of flesh lured the North too, as in the famous public baths and love-mystic heresy of Adamites. In the June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Germany where Luther was growing up, Riemenschneider and the Glogauer Songbook wreathe the voluptuous Garden: "not under the law but under grace" — "nicht unter dem Gesetz, sondern unter der Gnade." 7) 7a) H. Bosch, 1503-4, Garden of Delights, from center, Prado, Madrid Same, a closer detail (1996 video revision) (fade Glogauer) While in the art of Bosch, counterpole to the Italian, equally sought after in Spain, the landscape of venery is composed to such a Garden of Delights, that what stands in the triptych between eating forbidden fruit and choiring in musical hell, has been thought one of those Adamitic celebrations of Eros. As the upstaging of sex implies, the bombard of 1500 a8) 8) Verrocchio, 1479-88, The Colleoni, seen from the south, on its pedestal; Venice (CGB '48) Same, front view, nearer, from below; + V detail, V8a Music: Isaac, Alla Battaglia, as above, conclusion is not merely the intensification of war, of those Italian and European battles from which Machiavelli learned lessons as shrewdly real as the Colleoni by Leonardo's master, Verrocchio: Men must either be caressed or else annihilated ... War is not to be avoided, and can be deferred only to the advantage of the other side ... A prince should therefore have no other aim or thought but war ... the end justifies the means ... 9) 9a) Double: [A] Mantegna, 1449-54, Soldier from Martyrdom of Christopher, Eremitani, Padua; and [B] Leonardo, 1503, Study for the Battle of Anghiari, Budapest (slide show first takes these singly, then the double) Leonardo, C. 1488-90, Study for the Sforza Monument, silverpoint, etc., Royal Library, Windsor Castle (video then repeats the double, 9) It may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger and covetous of gain ... June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So-called virtues may lead to ruin, so-called vices to security; Caesar Borgia's cruelty united the Romagna. It is not merely that such satanic realism, passed down in the faith-world, as from Mantegna's soldiers to Leonardo's Anghiari sketches, marks the deepening war, until the French sack of Milan destroys Leonardo's Equestrian Sforza, and Boiardo in Florence breaks off the make-believe of his Orlando: Yet even as I sing, O saving God, I see all Italy in flame and fire From these bold Gauls, come down again rough-shod Across our country, wasting everywhere... (CGB) 10) (end Isaac Battle) Double: [A] Honnecourt, 1225-50, Diagrammatic figures, Sketchbook XXXV, Bibl. Nat., Paris; and [B] Leonardo, c. 1492, Vitruvian Man, Accademia, Venice; + singles [slide show takes A before the double, B after; video presents double, detail of A, repeat of double, then B] Less crucial the literal war than the symbolic, that reason, long dutiful to creed, even in Roger Bacon, empiricist: We perceive by the first proposition of Euclid that if the Person of God the Father be granted, a Trinity of equal persons presents itself — as unchecked by brute fact as Honnecourt's 13th-century geometries (left) — reason now seated in the earth-fabric, takes the lead from revealed archetypes: Leonardo, as in the Proportions of Vitruvian man, making that natural bondage the object of our love. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So the battle to be joined is not of Florence against Pisa, or of Milan against France; it is the battle of values. 11) Roman (Etruscan), 2nd cent. B.C., Scipio Africanus(?), Louvre, Paris "In ancient times," Machiavelli writes in the Discourses, "men were stronger ... which I believe founded upon the difference of their religion and ours ... The Pagan religion deified only men who had achieved great glory, such as commanders of armies and chiefs of republics ... placing the supreme good in grandeur of soul, strength of body, and all such qualities as render men formidable." (Though this 2nd-century B.C. bust called Scipio Africanus is not as strong as Michelangelo would have made it.) 12) Roman Christian, later 3rd cent., Good Shepherd statue, Cleveland; + V detail (as in slide V12a); digital puts detail first "While our religion glorifies more the humble and contemplative than men of action, placing the supreme happiness in humility, lowliness, and a contempt for worldly objects ... These principles seem to have made men feeble." Yet even Nietzsche, who followed that line, admits a working paradox, by which denial has stretched the bow of spirit. 13) Norman-French, c. 1320, Dragon and Beast cast into Hell, Apocalypse MS, Cloisters, NY Music: G. de Machault, Hocquetus David (from bar 105), OL-3 Like the hocket dissonance of Guillaume de Machault, the dragon and beast of the Cloister Apocalypse inflame their Leviathan depths with a force unparalleled in the ancient world, a vulcanism that flung up towers of church and state. (end Machault) June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 5 �C.G. Bell Va14) Symbolic History Nardo di Cione (with Orcagna?), c. 1355, Hell detail, Lake of Blood; S. Maria Novella, Florence (CGB '59) Orcagna, 1360, The Damned in Hell, fragment; Santa Croce, Florence 14) "Where are all the great Florentines," Dante asks of Ciacco in the mud of the third Circle, and hears: "Deeper, among the darker souls, weighed down by sundry crimes." And we see them, "magnanimous" Farinata, Tegghiaio, Brunetto Latini: "You taught me how man makes himself immortal" — great-souled heroes, in hell. Thus Machiavelli: Doubtless these means are cruel and destructive... neither Christian nor human ... and to be avoided... The life of a private citizen would be preferable to that of such a king... 15) 15a) 15b) 15c) 15d) Florentine, 1492, Death-mask of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Medici Palace, Florence Mantegna, c. 1470(?), Engraving: Bacchanalia, with Silenus; + V detail Michelangelo, 1535-41, Double: details from the Last Judgment, [A] Death Mask, and [B] a Devil's head in Hell; Sistine Chapel, Vatican (digital: only Death's head) Botticelli, c. 1485, Madonna of the Pomegranate, detail, Uffizi, Florence (video: detail of head only from V15c) Verrocchio, c. 1480, Lorenzo dei Medici, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (while video repeats [A] of 15, the Death Mask ; not digital Nevertheless, if one wishes to maintain power, it is this that is required. As much as any work of art, the death-mask of Lorenzo il Magnifico records that value-cloven pride: mind reaching out to Copernicus in Poland and Columbus in America; the carnival passion of Lorenzo's own songs (CGB): Music: Isaac, c. 1490(?), Donna di dentro, New York Pro Musica, Decca DL-79413 Here we are now, old and young, Glad and lusty, female, male; Hail to Bacchus, Venus, hail; Join in pleasure, dance and song; (music down) the vanity he faces through it all: June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Sola sta ferma e sempre dura Morte — Nothing holds, nothing endures, but Death; the alternate words for tunes of delight: (again up) How great your beauty and your goodness, Virgin, merciful and holy — Lorenzo himself being patron of doom-preaching Savonarolla. 16) A. Pollaiuolo, c. 1470, Hercules and the Hydra; Uffizi, Florence How brief and undercut that keenness Florence and the Medici had fostered: Pollaiuolo's Hercules, like Botticelli's Spring and Leonardo's science — courage, beauty, intelligence — on the whirls of corruption Machiavelli saw and succumbed to, putting Borgia's treacherous henchman, Michelotto, in command of the Florentine militia, for a sellout with hardly a battle. (end Donna di dentro) a17) 17) 17a) Donatello, 1445-48, Entombment of Christ, stone relief, Sant' Antonio, Padova Niccolo dell' Arca, c. 1485(?), Pieta, detail, S. Maria della Vita, Bologna; + V closer detail Prato Master, c. 1430-40, Unbelievers, detail, Cathedral, Prato (video briefly returns to the detail of 17) Music: Compere, pub. 1503, Crucifige, de Van, etc., AS-80 Crucifige! Donatello pierced the Renaissance in Padua. Penitence veers back from the North, as Savonarolla is called to San Marco from Ferrara. But in this dell' Arca Pieta and the Passion motets, reform rides humanist liberation. So the trumpet that roused Savonarolla was Virgil's warning from the severed roots: Heu! Fuge crudelis terras, fuge litus avarum — Fly, fly the ruthless land, the shore of greed. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance (fade Crucifige) 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History No medieval voice rages in those sermons against pagan Florence and the Church of Rome: they have not only destroyed the Church of God, but built up another ... of sticks, Christians dry as tinder for the fires of hell ... The only hope that now remains to us, is that the sword of God may soon smite the earth. As the dying Lorenzo turned his back on that holy arrogance, lightning struck the cathedral dome, a comet flared, the Florentine lions fought and the most beautiful was killed. 18) Florentine, early 16th cent., Death of Savonarolla (1498), S. Marco, Florence "Give the people of Florence their freedom," said Savonarolla — already risking mobrule, opening private houses to the search for vanities. Well, he would learn at his own trial how much his populace cared for justice and truth. While Machiavelli, observing the fires from the Palazzo Vecchio, would write: "all unarmed prophets fail." 19) Botticelli, 1500-5, Mystic Crucifixion, Fogg, Cambridge, Massachusetts; + V detail Savonarolla: In my imagination I saw a black cross over the Babylon of Rome, and on it was written Ira Domini, and above it rained every weapon and hailstones and stones, with thunder and lightning ... and dark and abysmal weather. And I saw another cross, a golden one, that came from the sky to earth over Jerusalem, and on it was written Misericordia Dei, and there the weather was serene, clear, and very bright ... And I saw angels arrive with the red cross ... Botticelli's break with the Medici past reflects those doomsday sermons. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 8 �C.G. Bell 20) 20b) Symbolic History Italian, 1450-55 and 1492-5, Room of the Liberal Arts, Borgia Apartments, Vatican; + V detail (which the slide show replaces with 20a, Pinturicchio, 1492-1503, fresco from the same apartments — also added to video in '96) Raphael, 1517-18, Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals; Uffizi, Florence; first, video detail Music: Tromboncino, c. 1500, Ostinato vo seguire, Nonesuch 71071 Savonarolla's attack was on the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. It is hard, from the restraint of his Vatican apartments, or of the Tromboncino that might have been played there, to picture the Nero of whom we read: he vying with his bastard Caesar for the favors of daughter-sister Lucrezia; of their famous poisonings; or how that Cesare with the bow of Apollo shot prisoners as they dodged in the courtyard, while the golden-haired Lucrezia and the Pope looked on. Then Pius, and the warring Julius II, Michelangelo's patron, and in 1513 the banqueting Medici, Leo X: "Since we have been given the Papacy by God, for God's sake let us enjoy it." — whom Luther would address in 1520, between rage and naive hope: (end Tromboncino) Leo, most blessed father...I have never thought ill of you personally ... I have called you a Daniel in Babylon ... but I have truly despised your see, which neither you nor anyone else can deny is more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom ... the most shameless of all brothels, the kingdom of sin, death and hell. a21) 21) Signorelli, 1499-1500, The Damned, Cathedral, Orvieto; plus V lower detail Same, vertical near center (from these and a closer slide, V21a, the video draws two details, one above and one below) Music: June 1996 Josquin des Prez, c. 1500(?) (pub. 1519), from Miserere, AS-107/8 1500: Explosive Balance 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is not that Gothic energies, from Savonarolla to Counter-Reformation, cease or slack off, but that they clothe themselves in carnal fabrics. Sodomite Signorelli flexes the Medicean arts in a foreshadowing of Michelangelo's darker Judgment. At a time as complex as any in world history, Europe becomes a voltaic pile, stretched over electric fields of north-south, Gothic-classic, Christian-humanist, medieval-modern — blending hues in every heart and work; while power explodes to the New World and implodes in Protestantism — how is such a folded convolution to be exhibited at all? The amplest ingathering is in the music of Josquin des Prez. 22) 22a) Dürer, 1498, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Woodcut, Berlin Same, detail [video takes its detail from 22] His Miserere-forging of angular rythm and massive chord, impels Dürer's Four Horsemen, that Gothic apocalypse — the Angers tapestries lashed to physical storm — down over the Italy of Signorelli and of Michelangelo, where Dürer made art pilgrimages, and Josquin passed most of his productive life. (end Miserere) a23) 23) Dürer, 1514, Melancholy, Washington, D.C. Same, whole engraving Music: engraving, detail, National Gallery, Josquin des Pres, c. 1498(?), from Dulces exuviae, DL 9410 But there is another Josquin and another Dürer: this laurel-crowned Melancholy heaped round with attributes of thought, idleness, suicide; Josquin's handling of Dido's last love lament, "Dulces exuviae" — as if, in classical renewal, Lucretius' ennui must deepen (under the rays of light over ocean) to the brooding flaw of Hamlet. (fade Dulces Exuviae) June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 10 �C.G. Bell a24) 24) 24a) Symbolic History Bramante, 1502, Tempietto di S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome Bramante, 1480-90, S. Maria presso S. Satiro, interior, Milan Same, another view It is most of all in architecture that 1500 Europe is cloven by the Alps. The classical orders, coffered vault and dome dominate Bramante's Italy. But if we seek in music, where no classical orders survived, a comparable cleavage, what is most Italian — those chordal lauds and frottole that point to operatic song — were written not only by Tromboncino and the rest, but by Flemish Josquin. Music: a25) 25) 25a) Josquin des Prez, c. 1490(?), In Te Domine Speravi, (opening phrase), Angel S-36926 (fade) French Flamboyant, 1500 ff., N Transept of Beauvais, central portion, color French Flamboyant, 1500 ff., N. Transept of Beauvais, night-lighted; + V detail French, 15th cent., Flamboyant Rose Window, Sainte Chapelle, Paris (CGB '59) While in the North, Gothic spills over 1500 in a lacy network of stone, often (as here at Beauvais) completing 13th-century structures. While late Gothic verse ties knots of rhyme: (Henryson) "Superne/ Lucerne,/ Guberne this pestilens;/ Preserve/ and serve/ That we not sterve thairin;" (or Dunbar) "Haile yhyng, benyng, fresche flurising!/ Haile Alphais habitakle!/ Thy dyng ofspring maid us to syng/ Before his tabernakle." For a musical parallel, it is again Josquin who twines the contrapuntal as well as anyone. Thus the six-voice canonic close of the motet Benedicta: Music: a26) 26) Josquin des Prez, c. 1510(?), Benedicta es caelorum regina, close ARC-2533 110 Late Gothic, 1387 ff., Milan Cathedral, section of Façade and South side (CGB '80) Italian Gothic, 1386-1887, Pinnacles over the crossing, Cathedral, Milan June 1996 (end Benedicta) 1500: Explosive Balance 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Even in architecture, the geographical divide is deceptive. Through the whole Renaissance and into the centuries after, Milan Cathedral was sprouting minarets over a city given to the smooth accords of Bramante and Leonardo. 27) 27a) Tudor Ceiling, 1478 ff., on Norman 1141-80, Christ Church Choir, Oxford (CGB '86) Same, another view (while video and digital detail slide 27) While the tendrilled fans applied now to churches of the North, build a ceremonious earthly bower within the inherited sternness of the Medieval. So the plainsong floreations of Wolsey's choirmaster, Taverner, enwreathed the Tudor transformation of Christ Church Norman Choir. Music: 28) V28a) 28b) Taverner, c. 1525(?), "Aromata" from Dum transisset sabbatum, Argo RG-316 Jörg Syrlin the Elder, 1469-74, Pythagoras in the Church of Ulm; + V detail (cf. V28) Same, double: [A] Cimmerian Sibyl and [B] slide 28, Syrlin's Pythagoras Same, Cimmerian Sibyl from the Ulm Choir stalls In the stained glass soaring of Ulm, Syrlin's minstrel Pythagoras sings as with personal passion. (So many songs caught up in sacred masses): Western wind, when wilt thou blow, That small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again! Like the German, "Es ist ein Schnee gefallen": A deep snow has fallen Before the snows are due, Boys pelt me with snowballs, My path is lost in snow. My house yawns at the gable, Our years have made it old, The doorbolts are broken, My little room is cold. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Sweet love, in loving pity, Shield me from my woe; Fold me to your body, And let the winter go. (CGB) Ach Lieb, lass dich's erbarmen, Daß ich so elend bin, Und schliess mich in dein Arme! So fährt der Winter hin. 29) 29a) 29b) 29c) Double: [A] Hugo v. d. Goes, 1476-8, Portinari Altar, detail, Uffizi, Florence; and [B] Ghirlandaio, 1485, Adoration of the Shepherds, detail, Santa Trinita, Florence Detail similar to A of 29, from Hugo v.d. Goes Altar (CGB '59) Again, 29, Double A closer detail from the Ghirlandaio Adoration (cf. B of 29) About 1478, the Portinari Altar by Hugo van der Goes of Bruges was set up in Florence. The realism which delighted the town climaxed in the shepherds (left), pressing in, as from carols and mystery plays: When Wat to Bedlem cum was, He swet, he had gone faster than a pace; He found Jesu in a simpell place, Betwen an ox and an asse. (He was a gud herdès boy) Ut hoy! For in his pipe he made so much joy. Seven years later Ghirlandaio, to whom Michelangelo was apprenticed, painted his harmonious response. These familiar shepherds enter into a stable thatched over a classical ruin, where the feed-trough is an inscribed sarcophagus. No wonder they have the conscious measure of Poliziano's pastoral vignettes: June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To see the rustic as he tends his sheep Unbar the gate for the passing of his flock. Or delle pecorelle il rozo mastro Si vede alla sua torma aprir la sbarra... 30) 30a) M. Schongauer, c. 1485(?), Adoration of Shepherds, Gallery, Berlin-Dahlem Same, detail (video makes two details from slide 30) In the homespun ripening of this Schongauer, which Dürer would make Lutheran, we have a German version of what Renaissance Christendom, with Erasmus as its ablest spokesman, everywhere hoped for, a kind of Biblical humanization by quiet reform: The sun itself is not as common and accessible to all as is Christ's teaching ... I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. And I would that they were translated into all languages ... that the farmer might sing some portion of them at the plow, the weaver hum them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveller lighten the weariness of his journey with such stories as these. 31) Maitre de Moulins, c. 1498, Madonna in Glory, central panel of triptych, Moulins Cathedral That heritage of faith freed and naturalized is a 1500 starting point. Let the threevoice canon from Josquin's Ave verum corpus, in its first Dijon recording, with the Maitre de Moulins' Virgin in Glory, express what was shared from Memling to Metsys and from Perugino to Raphael: Music: 32) 32a) 33) Josquin des Prez, late 15th cent., (pub. 1503), 2nd phrase of Ave Verum Corpus, old VM-212 (1) Same, detail, top left: angel Same, detail, lower right: angels Same, detail, center: Madonna and Child (here video returns to the whole panel; not so digital) (end Josquin) The formative genius of the 1500 enrichment was Leonardo, June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 14 �C.G. Bell 34) 34a) Symbolic History Leonardo da Vinci, 1483-86, Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Same, detail, Madonna and angel; + V detail of angel (V34a) and he had entered the promised land (Vasari's "terza maniera") twenty years before. Music: Fr. Bossinensis, c. 1495(?), Lauda, New York Pro Musica, Decca 79437 In music the shift was from the medieval painting: to render "a proportioned and indeed, who came to the service of Sforza lyre, applies (with Aron and Gafori) the adding of parts to what Leonardo stressed in harmonious view of the whole." Leonardo as a musician playing a fantastic skull-shaped same spatial sense to music: "the union of proportional parts sounded simultaneously." In the 1500 Laude, how like the sfumato, which shadows Leonardo's space, is the melting of tonal fullness in complicities of minor. (fade Bossinensis) Can we draw from Leonardo's Notebooks the heart of that mystery? a35) 35) Same, upper section of the whole Same, detail of rocks Shadow partakes of the nature of universal things, which are all more powerful at their beginning and grow weaker toward the end ... And drawn on by my eager desire, having wandered for some distance among the overhanging rocks, I came to the mouth of a huge cavern before which for a time I remained stupefied ... my back bent to an arch, my left hand clutching my knee, while with the right I made a shade for my lowered and contracted eyebrows; and as I leaned one way and then the other to see if I could discern anything ... suddenly I was aware of two contrary states, fear and desire, fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see what marvels it might contain ... Longing for the source ... like that of the moth for the light ... a36) 36) 36a) Leonardo 1481-2, Adoration of the Magi, central group, Uffizi, Florence Same, detail of Leonardo self and two heads (cf. also V36a) Same, closer detail of the two heads In the god-like expansion of nature and man, something has replaced the demon adversary of Christian good. What Leonardo saw from his summit of thought was not June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History only the fury of war ("Della crudelta dell' Omo") but deeper, the smiling enigma of force — as in Carnot's Second Law — that energy quickens by its own decay: Force I define as an incorporeal agency, an invisible power ... It is born in violence and dies in liberty; and the greater it is the more quickly it is consumed ... It desires to conquer and slay the cause of opposition, and in conquering it destroys itself ...Without force nothing moves. (Axiomatic, that in the 1500 dream of calm, where Satan slacks off, entropy appears.) For the strongest contrast of that South and North, against Leonardo, 1452-1519, a37) H. Bosch, c. 1490, Death of a Miser, Nat. Gal., Washington, DC (CGB '60) 37 Same, Central portion (CGB '60) [video takes this first, then a detail from a37] set Bosch, c. 1450-1516, deep in transreal Gothic, what spoke at the same time in Everyman, English morality play from the Dutch: Here shall you se how Felawshyp and Jolyte, Bothe Strengthe, Pleasure, and Beaute, June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Wyll fade from the as the floure in Maye; For ye shall here how our Heven Kynge Calleth Everyman to a general rekenynge. Give audyence, and here what he doth saye... [God] Where are thou Deth, thou myghty messengere? … Go thou to Everyman, And shewe hym in my name, A pylgrimage ... The structures are medieval. But as in a process of mineralization, every grain has been replaced; in the cast of art and drama Bosch meets with Leonardo. 38) Dutch(?), c. 1440, Mouth of Hell, 99 from Cath. of Cleves Hours, P. Morgan Library, NY; + V detail For centuries his forbears had been filling in and individualizing Gothic (this 1440 Hell-gate as mouth and arse), fitting Christian vision to the feel of man and matter. The moral fact boiling from the church close to the square in all those guild towns may be measured by the stage direction in The Castle of Perseveraunce: "Loke that the Devil have gunne-powder brennynge in pypys in his handis and in his eris and in his erse whan he gothe to battayle." 39) H. Bosch, 1503-4, Triptych of Delights, closed, Creation, Prado, Madrid; + V detail; not digital So the created earth painted on the closed wings of Bosch's Garden of Delights may be medieval in conception — an egg of land and water, cloud and sky, closed in a crystalline shell — but its space reaches into the future, wonderful as the iconography with which Bosch peoples it. Revolution floats in amniotic calm, before the battle of values begins — visionary as Ockeghem's Mass for the Dead. Music: June 1996 Ockeghem, c. 1480(?), from Missa pro defunctis, Ubi est Deus tuus, ff., ARC 2533-145 1500: Explosive Balance 17 �C.G. Bell 40) 40a) Symbolic History Bosch, same, central panel, plus detail: procession around a pool Same, closer detail (revised into video in 1996) (fade Ockeghem) 1500 Dunbar's grosser sins: Then Idleness at the second call Came like a sow from a mud hole; He had a sleepy snout. Many a swag-bellied sluggish glutton, Many a lazy slut and sloven Were servants in his rout... (CGB) 41) 41a) 41b) 41c) Same Bosch, whole triptych open Same, left panel, lower detail Same, central panel, detail Same, right panel, upper half of Hell The spread altar reaches from Adam and Eve through the pursuit of happiness, to a hell landscape of Satanic mills. Obrecht's Marian Mass for 3 to 7 voices, and tied by a cabala of number symbols, has that spectral vastness. Music: 42) 42a) Obrecht, c. 1500(?), Marian Mass, from 2nd Agnus, ARC 198-406 (fade) Same, top of Hell Detail of same, blood-red stream (here video takes two details from 42) But it is the older Ockeghem who rides the hell-energy cresting under halcyon calm: "save the soul from fiends and from the lake of hell" — "de manu inferni et de profundo lacu." Music: Ockeghem, again Requiem Mass, "de manu inferni", etc. (fade) A window into the soul of Europe on the verge of colonial conquest and Protestant war. And with Bosch — as if sprouted from the aspri sterpi of Dante's wood of suicides — compare Gawain Douglas, 1501: My ravished spirit in that desert wasteful Drew to the margin of a river hateful, June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That like Cocytus, the ugly stream infernal, With its vile water made a hideous trouble, Spilling overhead, blood red, and impossible It should have been a river natural ... 43) Bosch, 1505-6, St. Anthony Triptych, center detail, Lisbon, Portugal This loathly flood like rumbling thunder routed, Wherein the demon fish so elvish shouted Their wild yelps deafened and benumbed my hearing; At those grim monsters my weak spirit doubted. None through the soil but spunky trees there sprouted, Combust, barren, bloomless, no leaf bearing, Old rotten runts wherein no sap was working, The most part waste, with withered branches moulded; It was a den well fit for murderers' lurking. 44) 44a) Bosch, 1510 ff., detail (lower right), Temptation of Anthony, Prado, Madrid Again, Bosch, Triptych of Delights, from central panel, Lovers in a bubble Wherefore I was myself right sore aghast ... The whistling wind blew many a bitter blast; The bare limbs rattled; I could scarcely stand. Out through the wood I crept on foot and hand. The river stank, the trees they clattered fast. That soil was nought but marsh and slime and sand. (CGB) Small wonder if earthly joy, stemming such a demonism as would haunt succeeding centuries, should be ensphered by Bosch in vegetable bubbles. 45) 45a) Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1506-7, Youth in masquerade dress, Windsor Castle Giorgione, c. 1504, Madonna enthroned, with St. Liberale and St. Francis, Castelfranco, Veneto Was not the humanist hope of Leonardo and his time so islanded? — the 1507 symposium Castiglione celebrates in The Courtier, a discourse opened by della Rovere, who would kill his sister's lover next year, a cardinal then for smiling at him, and connive, it was said, at the sack of Rome; while Bembo, poet-climber and libertine, afterwards Papal secretary and Cardinal, closes it with a paean to Platonic love: June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History let us climbe up the staires, which at the lowermost steppe have the shadow of sensuall beautie, to the high mansion place where the heavenly, amiable and right beautie dwelleth, which lyeth hidden in the innermost secretes of God ... a46) 46) Same, detail of Madonna and landscape Same, detail of landscape only Meanwhile the dawn has come, nature espousing the flight of the soul: When the windowes then were opened on the side of the Pallaice that hath his prospect towarde the high top of Mount Catri, they saw already in the East a faire morning like unto the colour of roses, and all starres voyded, saving only the sweete Governesse of heaven, Venus, which keepeth the boundes of the night and day ... Though the gleaming nature of this Giorgione background was dawning everywhere — even in English poetry: Tyll at the laste I came to a dale Beholdyinge Phebus declynynge lowe and pale, With my greyhoundes in the fayre twy lyght I sate me downe for to rest me all nyght. 47) 47a) Flemish, end 15th cent., Romance of the Rose, Garden entrance, MS Harley 4425 f. 12b, Brit. Mus., London; + V detail (V47), ‘96 revision Giorgione, c. 1504, detail of St. Liberale from Castelfranco Madonna, Veneto That is from Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure, Graunde Amoure's quest for love and virtue — still, like this Flemish miniature (also of 1500), cultivating the Garden of The Romance of the Rose: (Hawes) Amyddes the garden ... there was resplendysshaunt A dulcet sprynge and mervaylous fountayne ... Besyde whiche fountayne the most fayre lady La bell pucell was gayly syttynge... In the interfusion of Gothic and Rebirth, the airy transparency of the miniature ripens, as the myth of chivalry swells toward Ariosto. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 20 �C.G. Bell a48) 48) Symbolic History Dürer, 1489-90, St. John's Cemetery, Nuremberg, stolen from Bremen Kunsthalle Dürer, 1494(?), The Wire-drawing Mill, Berlin-Dahlem From 1490 on Dürer had applied those skills to a landscape liberation of the forest-cleared and fruitful Germany, before the outbreak of religious wars — against Hell Bosch, a faith as natural as Cornish would voice in Tudor English: Pleasure it is To hear, iwis, The birdès sing, The deer in the dale, The sheep in the vale, The corn springing; God's purveyance For sustenance It is for man. Then we always To give him praise, And thank him than, And thank him than. 49) 49a) Leonardo da Vinci, 1494-7, Last Supper, S. Maria d. Grazie, Milan Same, center section (video draws this detail from 49) The easy polarities of century and geography blur; 1495 finds both Bosch and Dürer in the North, in Italy the Piagnoni beside Leonardo. Though what was uppermost was humanist — the Christian myth composed to classical drama. In Josquin's deep Lament for Ockeghem, nymphs of the woods and streams join in the Requiem Aeternam: Music: a50) 50) 50a) 51) 52) 53) Josquin des Prez, 1495, Deploration sur la mort d'Ockeghem, pt. 1, ARC 2533 145 Same, group on Christ's right Same, group on Christ's left Same, the figure of Christ Leonardo, c. 1495, Study for Head of Christ, Brera, Milan French, c. 1500, Entombment, L'Epines, near Rheims (CGB '59) Same, detail (CGB '59) June 1996 (end Part I, Deploration) 1500: Explosive Balance 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a2nd 52) Again, Leonardo, Last Supper, Christ detail (while video holds to 53, Entombment detail) 2nd 52) Again, L'Epines Entombment With Josquin's lament, written in Italy to a French poem, for a Flemish master, we have ranged Leonardo's Last Supper, most famous picture in the world, with this anonymous Entombment carved in a pilgrimage church near Rheims. How Christian Platonism has quieted Gothic pain. Erasmus: He is the true theologian who teaches ... that all good men should be loved and cherished equally as members of the same body, that evil men should be tolerated if they cannot be corrected ... that those who mourn are blessed and should not be deplored, and that death should even be desired by the devout, since it is nothing other than a passage to immortality ... 2nd 51) Leonardo, Study for the Head of Christ From the same essay: What else is the philosophy of Christ, which he himself calls a rebirth, than the restoration of human nature originally well-formed. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Christ study, as in most of his works, Leonardo proclaims that restoration. V3rd 52) Again, L'Epines Entombment, whole (while slide show goes directly to 3rd 53, below) The new tomb grows shadowed and calm — as in Stephen Hawes: After the day there cometh the derke nyght, For though the day be never so longe At last the belles ryngeth to euensonge ... 3rd 53) Again, L'Epines Entombment, detail (slide show uses 3rd 53 here and for the preceding entry) The transforming death poem had been written in Italy in the 1480's by the imprisoned politician and humanist Collenuccio. Though the close turns to Christ, who in dying made death sweet and beautiful ("Dolce e bella morendo fe' la Morte"), the body of the ode invokes Platonic release 54) Tullio Lombardo, after 1501, head, Guidarello Guidarelli Tomb, Accademia, Ravenna; plus digital detail as "sacra", "splendida", "generosa", "inclita," the comfort of the soul come pure from heaven, weary of a world of tumultuous and elemental war. This hymn to death — for every shipwrecked soul the port of healing: O porto salutar, che sol conforte D'ogni naufragio il mal, splendida Morte swells with the personal pity and anodyne which caused the statue of Guidorello, warrior, who died in 1501, to be kissed and prayed to as to a romantic saint. a55) 55) Raphael, 1509-10, Leonardo as Plato, School of Athens, Vatican, Rome Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1512, Self Portrait (red chalk), Royal Library, Turin In the general amplification, not only Pico della Mirandola acclaimed man as unlimited self-maker: June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Thou, restrained by no narrow bounds, according to thy own free will, in whose power I have placed thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself ... Ficino had extended the Platonic flight to a temporal progress toward Godhead: the soul desires, endeavours and begins to become God, and makes progress every day...Hence our soul will sometime be able to become in a sense all things; and even to become a god. How could Machiavelli, facing the 1512 Leonardo, think Christianity had sapped will and drive; where the inner dynamic, against the Classical, was so recklessly advanced? 56) Peter Vischer, 1509-19, St. Paul from the Sebaldus Tomb, Nürnberg Whatever wrought the change was active also in the northern towns. Peter Vischer cast this St. Paul in Nuremberg about the time Leonardo sketched his own image and Raphael chose it for Plato's in The School of Athens — conscious nobility seeding itself over Europe. Yet in that augmentation a deeper cleavage, as between reason and heart, was to rack the century. It is the separation of enlightened conforming humanism 1st 57) Dürer, c. 1510(?), Self as Christ at the Column, drawing, Schloss, Weimar from militant conscience as categorical guide. "I laid a hen's egg," said Erasmus; "Luther hatched a bird of another kind." Dürer's possession by the nude self as the Man of Sorrows, recalls Luther's insistence as he tore up the Bull: "so hilf' mir Gott, ich kann nicht anders." For 2nd 56) Again, Vischer, from the Sebaldus Tomb, St. James the Younger suppose [Erasmus had answered Luther on Free Will] that in a certain sense it is true ... that God works both good and evil in us, and rewards His own works in us and punishes His evil ones. What a door to impiety this pronouncement would open ... if spread abroad in the world. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a2nd 57) Dürer, 1522, Self as the Man of Sorrows, drawing, Kunsthalle, Bremen 2nd 57) Again, Dürer Self as Christ at the Column, detail Against that dialectic prudence, Luther flames in Christ-seizure: God foresees, purposes, and does all things according to his immutable, eternal and infallible will. By this thunderbolt free will is utterly dashed to pieces ... Peace and tranquility of flesh are, with you, of greater consideration than the Word of God ... Let me tell you this ... I am seeking an object so great it ought to be maintained and defended through death itself, even if the whole world should be hurled into chaos and reduced to nothing. And yet Erasmus, in his strangest work, In Praise of Folly, reaches, like Dürer's Christ-man, toward the revelation of comic paradox — Lear's fool, Cervantes' mocked knight as saving clown. 58) Bosch, 1515-16, Christ Bearing the Cross, Beaux Arts, Ghent; + V detail (from b59) Since in praising folly "in a way not wholly foolish," Erasmus juxtaposes three masks: the laughable (as of "old women in heat") which opens to the life-giving illusion of Sisyphus: "all things are presented by shadows, yet this play is put on no other way"; the mask of depravity, which he castigates; and third, in the last reversing chamber of the Silenus, the noble follies of Platonic thought and Christian charity, where a taste of future happiness drowns our knowledge of the world. Bosch's 1515 Bearing of the Cross has no weirder transition. Va59) b59) 59) Same, close detail of Bad Thief and Mockers Same, wider central detail Same, close detail of St. Veronica and a mocker In taking up the weight of the new century and of Leonardo's grotesques, late Bosch prepares for the Protestant agony: earth and soul so fallen that man is mere stercus, a pile of dung, which only the snow of Christ can cover, so that God looking down may see the purity of his own salvation. Luther: June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The human will is a beast between. If God sit thereon, it wills and goes where God will ... If Satan sit thereon, it wills and goes as Satan will. Yet how satanically ambiguous God's Lutheran sitting: "When I fart in Wittenberg, they smell it in Rome." a60) 60) Altdorfer, 1520-25, The Nativity, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; + V detail Altdorfer, 1510, Rest on the Flight, Staatl. Mus., Berlin-Dahlem; + V detail From 1500 to 1520, before the North became a battleground, the life that would polarize and harden, swirls in the temporal wake of art-loving and indulgence-peddling Rome. Is there a richer delight than in the fairy-tale Christianity Altdorfer shares with folk song: Es ist ein' Ros' entsprungen Aus einer Wurzel zart ... Luther too joins that dance in his Gabriel hymn: Vom Himmel hoch da kom ich her, Ich bring euch gute newe mehr ... Not to mention the Rose of Sharon wonder of his Bible: "Ich bin eine Blume zu Saron und eine Rose im Thal." Luther's favorite musician was Senfl, whose most fetching piece is a Christmas Bell Song. This Catholic joy smiles the immediacy of Protestant birth. Music: June 1996 Senfl, c. 1525(?), Bell Song (Das Glaut zu Speyer), AS 51 1500: Explosive Balance 26 �C.G. Bell 61) Symbolic History Altdorfer c. 1525, Madonna in Glory, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V details [V61a, a detail, Madonna and Child (CGB '59) not yet used Same, detail of Angel musicians to the left, revised into video ‘96, (CGB '59) Same, detail of Angel musicians to the right (CGB '59); video: smaller details only, above and below Grünewald, 1511-15, Isenheim Altar, center, detail of Angel Concert, Colmar Same, whole center panel, Angel concert and Madonna and Child Same, another Angel musician Same panel, detail of Madonna under the Baldachin a62) 62) a63) 63) V63a) 63b) (end Senfl) In Grünewald, joy sharpens with the prick of pain. So the great Faust-cry of Hutten: "The spirits awake, there is love and joy in living" — "Die Geister erwachen; es ist eine Lust zu leben" — sounds from the breaking wave. History is powered by tragic excess — Reformation only to be pushed by a temperament capable in its prime of Luther's imperative of Freedom: I declare that neither pope, nor bishop, nor anyone else, has the right to impose so much as a single syllable of obligation upon a Christian man without his own consent ... Why were Christ and all the martyrs put to death? ... because, without consulting the preservers of old knowledge, they brought forth a new thing ... 64) 64a) Grünewald, c. 1506-8(?), Small Crucifixion, Nat. Gal., Washington, D.C. (CGB '60); + V detail Same, right detail (CGB '60) and after, of lashing out at the poor who had taken his freedoms to heart: Against the thieving and murdering Hordes of the Peasants: Who so can, strike, smite, strangle or stab, secretly or publicly ... such wonderful times are these that a prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed than another with prayer ... (The poor thereafter to call him not Luther but Lügner — Liar.) June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Grünewald legend has this core of truth, that Mathis Der Maler did go Lutheran, against his church, his patron and his daring art. Music: Taverner, c. 1525(?), Magnificant (opening), AS 91` And in England, the fiercest genius of music, Taverner, repented, after 1528, of "Popish Ditties," destroyed what he could, and closed his life breaking church windows and despoiling altars. (fade Taverner) a65) b65) 65) Hans Holbein the Younger, 1519, Portrait of B. Amerbach, Kunstmuseum, Basel L. Cranach the Elder, c. 1502, Portrait of Dr. Johannes Cuspinian, detail, Reinhart Collection, Winterthur Same, whole picture What survives that visionary adventure? — the humanist North roused to Erasmus' (1509) "Age of Gold": Reason is as great as a king ... a divine counsellor, presiding in its high citadel, remembering its origin, it thinks of nothing sordid, of nothing base ... Hutten, a precursive Tom Paine, summoning German youth: June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Come hither all ye who want to be free. Here the tyrants shall be smitten, here the bondage shall be broken. Where are you, freemen? Where are you nobles? Men of great names, where are you? Luther: Every Christian is anointed and sanctified in body and soul with the oil of the Holy Spirit — an early portrait by Cranach, 1502, fresh with that morning — what remains, when genius is consumed in polemic? As Erasmus (1521) would complain: And the more I loved the inborn ability of Hutten, the more I grieve that it was snatched away from us by these disorders ... For what did it avail to have Reuchlin, burdened enough thus far, weighed down with heavier ill will? ... Luther could have taught the evangelical philosophy with great profit to the Christian flock ... if he had refrained from those things which could only end in disturbance ... 66) 66a) L. Cranach the Elder, 1550, Self Portrait, Uffizi, Florence; video: first a close detail Same, detail of head and shoulders The last portrait of Cranach, half a century later, gives a solemn answer: in the deeper hardening of Europe, of which Erasmus grieves in his last letters: The Anabaptists, a race of men frenzied and devoted to death, have inundated lower Germany ... Vives writes that John Vergara, together with Brother Tovar and several other learned men, is in prison. You know, I imagine, that the three most learned men in all England are in jail: the bishop of Rochester, the bishop of London, and Thomas More, a dearer friend than any other I have ever had — man withdraws into a stronghold of consciousness: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott"; "Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu Dir" — "From the depths of need I cry to thee". 67) Spanish, B.C. to modern, Barcelona, View of Barrio Gotico; video: first details, below and above Old Barcelona summarizes 2000 years in the history of Spain. What is visible ranges from Roman at the heavy-walled base, through Gothic and Flamboyant, to a June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History filigree of rococo at the crown; though buried below are cyclopean walls of the preGreek, Greek shards and marble, traces of Carthage; while the city spreads beyond to the Art Nouveau fantasies of Gaudi. The Spain of Colonial conquest rested on that base, with all the levels of period style. 68) 68a) Spanish Romanesque-Gothic, 1188 ff., Portico de la Gloria, Santiago de Campostello; + V detail Same, closer detail Music: Ripoli MS, c. 1200, Credit Frigus, 2-voice Easter Conductus (vocal entrance), MHS-OR-433 At the end of the 12th Century at Compostello, Romanesque is shading into Gothic, as in France, but with an archaic wild excess. And in the contemporary conducti from Ripoli, note-against-note chords dance Isle-de-France rhythms. (fade Credit Frigus) 69) 69a) 69b) Spanish MS, 1415, Rafael Destornes, Judgment page, Barcelona Missal, Cathedral Library, Barcelona (video: upper half only) Same, lower detail, Hell Same, upper detail, Saints (here video shows the whole) Music: Barcelona, end of 14th cent., Agnus Dei, close, Candide CE-31068 By 1400, French, Italian, and Flemish have fused as everywhere into an International Gothic, which in Destornes sets up one of many signs on the way to Bosch. In Catalan music also, the Hocket of Machault and the Italians softens toward familiar style. (close Agnus Dei) 70) Bartolomé Bermejo, 1490, Pietà of Archdeacon Desplà, Cathedral, Barcelona; + V detail During that century the most impassioned realism was absorbed from Avignon, Flanders and the north Italian, to toughen in Bermejo, 1490 — as in the music of de la Torre — to a Cid militance of carnal faith: "Adoramos Te Senor". June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 30 �C.G. Bell Music: 71) 71a) Symbolic History Ferdinand de la Torre, c. 1490, Adoramos, Tinayre (refrain), Lumen 32020 (fade) Alejo Fernandez, c. 1520, Virgin of the Navigators, Alcazar, Seville; first, video detail: ships below Spanish, 15th cent., Castle Valencia de Don Juan, Leon Music: Juan del Encina, c. 1515(?), Una Sañosa Porfia, Cape, EMS-219 At this point the daring of a Genoese navigator opened the New World to a crusading energy which had barely consolidated a sub-continent broken by Dark Age invasions, Moors, and chivalry. All the nations of Europe have been mad, and so variously no one could name the maddest, but the Spanish must rank high. What went over the sea in German imperial dress and with all the financing and skill of Flemish bottoms, under the protection of course of the Papal Virgin, had the outward style and softness of high-renaissance Italian; but it bore from the windy uplands where Gothic Moorish castles were still being built and ballad laments of the fall of Granada sung a chivalric mysticism that would lash Conquistadores from Mexico clear to Panama and Colorado. (fade Encina) 72) Classic Teotihuacan, 1st cent. B.C. to 3rd cent. A.D., view of Teotihuacan For ships from the engineering West to encounter the stone age was not so remarkable. What must have staggered the moral being was to confront a civilization in some way higher than their own, though evolved in isolation from a primitive base and without even the use of the wheel: cities larger and richer than theirs, an astronomical calendar, libraries of religion and law, and an art that left Dürer speechless when he saw its spoils in Antwerp: a civilization with an already mythic past, Teotihuacan, deserted a thousand years before, its Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and Street of the Dead called by the living Aztecs work of the Gods; 73) Classic Maya, c. 800, Temple of the Cross, Palenque (Jean Coureau) a New World of wonders, spread out in time and space — six-hundred miles south and east the Maya ruins, Upland, Lowland, Peninsula, lost in forest — Palenque, sun-lit, under a leafy sea, a life, music, and poetry fabulous then, irrecoverable now. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 31 �C.G. Bell 74) Symbolic History Classic Maya, c. 800, Sacred Cigar Smoking, Temple of the Cross, Palenque (CGB '78); + V detail; not digital Though the carved plinths and stele, as this from the Temple of the Cross at Palenque, some death-god or panther-priest smoking a ritual cigar — cult scenes alive with what Christendom had long since banished into hell — recover one thing for us instantly: the crusading Christian jolt in the presence of a tradition so refined and so idolatrously savage, alien as the Popol-vu sequence this relief suggests, when Hunter and Seven Hunter (and later Hunter and Jaguar Deer), gone to the Underworld House of Darkness where the gods hot-seat them and laugh like a swarm of flies, are given cigars they must smoke all night and return in the morning unconsumed. 75) Aztec, 15th cent., Coatlicue of the Serpent Skirt, Arch. Mus., Mexico; + V detail And as if to raise the strain beyond psychic endurance, the antithesis had grown in the Aztec empire to such sublimity and terror as this colossal Goddess of the serpent skirt, found later under the charred ruins of what had been the greatest city in the world, drives home — a more than Moloch, more than Bhagavad Gita divinity of vulture and snake, a monolyth of rattle, talon and fang, which all the human sacrifices of Montezuma's rule of art, justice, and wisdom could not appease. 76) 76a) French Romanesque, early 12th cent., Knight spears a demon, Tavant, Indreet-Loire Gerona Beatus, 975, f 134 v, Christian warrior spears a snake What could Christian chivalry do, pledged since Roland to archangelic war — this knight spearing a devil in the 12th cent. frescoes of Tavant — Columbus too having told the Cuban chief (where no Caribs would survive) that "the first cause of his coming was to instruct them in godly knowledge and true religion" (though he was then amassing gold) "and especially to punish the cannibals and such mischievous evildoers" — what could that conquering Inquisition do with a mystery as beyond its ken as the plumed serpent, but melt into bullion its ornaments and idols, and gathering from cities and libraries all codices, pictographs and writings, to the priestly censing and sprinkling, eradicate, in one giant auto-da-fe, the entire civilized evidence of a world they would occupy — as a virus takes over the genetic mechanism of the host. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While Luther at the same time threw his inkwell at the devil, to exorcise what blasted him within. 77) Post-classic Maya, 15th cent., Tulum, evening, coast of Yucatan (Enrique Franco) By 1518 Juan de Grijalva was exploring westward from the island of Cozumel. His chaplain describes towns on the coast of Yucatan, and to the south a walled city, the ruins now of Tulum: next day a little before sunset, we perceived far in the distance a town or village so big that the city of Seville could not appear larger or better; and a huge tower was seen in it. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It was the beginning of the thrust that would take Cortez to the throne of Mexico. 78) 78a) H. Bosch, 1503-4, Delights Triptych, Hell, detail, Prado, Madrid; + V detail Bosch, c. 1504, Last Judgment, Hell detail, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna At the heart of that conquest lies an exploit, weird as the Satanic invention of cannon in Paradise Lost. When the assault hinged on gunpowder, the cavalier Montaño, with four other Spaniards, climbed to the three mile high crater of Popocatépetl, and was lowered in a basket, repeatedly, four hundred feet into a deeper hell-hole of smoke and flame, to scrape off sulphur from the lava walls. That fiery brimstone fed the final massacring charge on Mexico City. Palpable, that the damned eruption Bosch divined in panels fondly acquired by the Spanish crown, powered the reduction of new worlds. In Irving's Columbus, as signs of land multiply and no land appears, the sailors think them signs of the devil, "delusions beguiling them on to destruction"; a79) b79) Leonardo, 1513, Girl pointing in a landscape, Windsor Castle; first, V detail Double: Leonardo [A] 1513-16, John, Louvre; and [B] 1483-86, Angel from Madonna of the Rocks, Louvre [here video repeats a79, Girl pointing] while Columbus praises "the goodness of God in thus conducting them by soft breezes across a tranquil ocean ... with fresh signs guiding them to a promised land." Against jealous temptation, the kindly Rewarder of the temporal quest. And the proof was at hand, the land, though it, too, might seduce with power. But whatever the backward urge or forward danger, the die was cast; Leonardo's angel and John were smiling, his girl pointing across the stream, his bearded face was wise with futurity. 79) 79a) Giorgione, 1504-10, La Tempesta, Accademia, Venice [somewhat cropped in the video] Same, detail, with both figures (while video shows separate details, woman, then man) June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 34 �C.G. Bell 79b) Symbolic History Same, double: closer details of the man and woman (while video returns, through a lower spread with both figures, to the whole) Music: Again, Mantuanus, c. 1495, Lirum bililirum, Decca DL 79435 Giorgione learned it from Leonardo, the accord of nature and man, this Gypsy and Soldier (his own birth illegitimate), like a Rest on the Flight with a nude Mary and profane Joseph. Was that enchantment as merely ideal as the Pastoral Elegy Sannazaro now wreathed in the harmonies Milton would love and pursue? — Thee shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves, With wilde thyme and the gadding vine o'regrown, And all their echoes mourn. — I fiumi il sanno e le spelunch' e i faggi ... And like "Lycidas", Sannazaro's lament leads to an Arcadian paradise ("Where, other groves and other streams along,"): Altri monti, altri piani, Altri boschetti e rivi Vedi nel cielo, e più novelli fiori ... Till all that heaven rejoices To hear their new and unaccustomed voices ... If any spirit of love among you dwell, Oaks of shade and gloom, Cast here a shadow for this quiet tomb. (CGB) Se spirto alcun d'amor vive fra voi, Quercie frondose e folte, Fate ombra alla quiete ossa sepolte. 80) 80a) Giorgione, "La Tempesta", background, with lightning Same, closer detail of lightning What is the gift of art if not to make dream real? But the symbolic dream, of total, ambiguous reality. Giorgione's Gypsy Family, the richest strain of Venetian HighRenaissance, takes its usual title — La Tempesta — from its cloud and lightning sky, a demon flash in the beckoning of calm. June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Leonardo: Force is of brief duration, because it desires perpetually to subdue its cause, and when this is subdued it kills itself ... One ought not to desire the impossible ... (close Mantuanus) June 1996 1500: Explosive Balance 36 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 37 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1500 : Explosive Balance, Symbolic History, Part 15 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 15 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_15_1500--Explosive_Balance Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/16341f5be9aaa8097211adb056f7ea2f.pdf 3d5ea8c3e090cc00ac8da4d7b1f84d42 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 14. 15th Century: Early Renaissance CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 July 1994 Last Revised January ‘96 �1 Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 14. 15th Century: Early Renaissance 1) Giovanni dei Grassi, c. 1398, Annunciation, Visconti Hours, National Library, Florence; + V detail Soon after 1400, Ciconia, Flemish-born Italian, closed his career with the ceremony motets, which initiate in music the spatial clarities of Early Renaissance. Music: Ciconia, 1400-10, O Virum — O Lux — O beate Nicholae, SAWT9505 At the same time art formed an horizon of humanizing sacred brightness — the International Style — from this 1398 Dei Grassi, in Italy, 2) Broederlam, 1393-99, Annunciation, from reredos, Museum, Dijon; first, video detail through Burgundy and France (this Dijon Broederlam), 3) English Alabaster relief, c. 1420?, Annunciation, Cathedral, Wells; + V detail across the Channel, to the winsome alabaster reliefs of England; 4) Cologne, c. 1410, Madonna, etc., Johnson Collection, Philadelphia (CGB '74); first, video detail back to Cologne, where the softest jewelling of all runs from this 1410 Madonna, 5) Lochner, c. 1435, Madonna in a Rose Arbor, Walraff-Richartz Museum, Cologne; + V detail to the ultimate child-wonder of Lochner, as late as 1440. So we might return by the Rhine and Danube, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �2 C.G. Bell 6) Symbolic History Fra Angelico, 1434-35, Coronation of the Virgin, detail, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); + V closer details to the gold-leaf devotions of Fra Angelico, in Florence — 7) Ghiberti, 1404-09, Annunciation, North Door, Baptistry, Florence; first, video detail city of Classical recovery in Gothic grace. (End Ciconia) Here Ghiberti's early work on the Baptistery doors had opened the century. 8) Michelangelo, 1497-99, Pieta, whole, St. Peter's, Rome; + V detail By its close, art gathers its force in Michelangelo's first Pieta, music in the death-lament which Isaac, Fleming at the court of Florence, wrote for Lorenzo il Magnifico, died 1492: Music: 9) 10) 11) Isaac, 1492, "Quis dabit capiti meo aquam?" last section, Decca DL-79413 Same, detail: Mary's head; + V detail of 11 Same, detail: Christ's hand; + V detail of 8 Same, detail: Christ's body; + V return to 8, first a detail, then the whole (close Isaac) At such advance of consciousness in the science of incarnate sway, we heirs to its later pride feel a shudder of tragic awe. 12) Lascaux Cave 20,000 B.C., wall of main hall, detail, animals; video: close detail only As if the whole rational-realist thrust of civilization were an age-old mistake, some Luciferian fall from mythic immediacy. So it was at the Greeks that Charles Olson, in his Black Mountain lectures on history, pointed the finger of Nietzschean blame: "Man lost something just about 500 B.C., 13) 7/1994 Franz Marc 1913, Deer in the Forest, Phillips Gallery, Washington D.C.; + V details 15th Century: Early Renaissance �3 C.G. Bell Symbolic History and only got it back just about 1905 A.D." Music: Alban Berg 1920-6, from 3rd Mvt, Lyric Suite, V-LM-2531 (As in Marc's magic forest, Berg's Lyric Suite, Rilke's "Exposed on the peaks of the heart"?) Of uncleft consciousness indeed there moves Many about, many a qualmless hill-beast, Moves and delays. And the great inviolable bird Circles the summit's virgin refusal. But here, Unsheltered, here, on the peaks of the heart... (CGB) 14) (fade Berg) Double: {A} Michelangelo 1522, Fury, black chalk, Uffizi, Florence; and {B} Francois Rude 1833, Head of La Guerre, Arc de Triomphe, Paris Surely, if we pursue the revolution by which a Michelangelo hell-fury becomes the summons of a national Arc de Triomphe, arrogating its brazen Book of Law and iron Book of War over space, time and cause — who would not ask where history went wrong? 15) Double: {A} Aegean, c. 2000 BC, Head of Cycladic idol, Louvre, Paris; and {B} Greek (from Delos), c. 100 B.C., Bronze head, National Museum, Athens; and video detail (from V15B) And the modern appeal to the pre-Greek, Cycladic and abstract, is of a piece with Olson's oblique claim, that at the beginning of the Periclean century something happened, by which man was broken from the functionalities of nature and tribe; that it was philosophic scrutiny of self and world which stamped the brow-furrowing of consciousness on centuries to follow. Though if that palpable resolve to compose symbolic reality to the deliberate measure of man, was a mistake, 16) 7/1994 Egypt, Old Kingdom, Dynasty V, c. 2400 BC, Ranofer, Prophet of Ptah (head), Egyptian Museum, Cairo 15th Century: Early Renaissance �4 C.G. Bell Symbolic History it was not made once only, but before and after: 2400 BC, when Egypt became the cradle of civilization by great discoveries that way; 17) Greek (Attic), c. 490 B.C., Korê of Euthydicos, Acropolis Museum, Athens subsequently, by the Greeks, this Saphic Kore of 500 BC; and again (marking another 2000 years) as Christendom emerged from the trance of medieval seizure. And strange — if mistake — that it should produce, in each case, an expression of such vernal delight: the Archaic smile renewed 18) 18a) Baldovinetti, c. 1450(?), Madonna and Child, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); + V details; with a digital return after 18a Baldovinetti, 1460-62, detail of Arno Valley, Nativity fresco, Vestibule, Santissima Annunziata, Florence [revised into video, ‘95] in this Baldovinetti Virgin, as pure as fetching, seated on some Florentine height over the discovered Val d'Arno. So the beauty of earth, an orphic voice through Dante's dead land — "La dov' esser de' giocondo" — "There, where one ought to be happy" — blooms in 15th-century Poliziano: To behold the valleys and hills and air pure, Grass and flowers, rivers cold and clear; To hear the birds sing and the waters sound And low wind murmuring among the fronds; See apples heap the earth and bend the trees, And the ripe wheat run in billows like the sea. (CGB) (E le biade ondeggiar come fa il mare.) As if a drunk who must end in murderous sick despair (our ravaged civilization of the "Bateau Ivre") could still look back to a morning age, when the first Promethean draughts had awakened to life and love, in what remains perhaps the most loveable of our centuries, the fifteenth. 19) Bernardo Daddi c. 1335?, Madonna etc., detail, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (CGB '75); + V details Trace the waking from the century before. In a Daddi Madonna, the burning mystery of Dante's praise: 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �5 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio: Maiden and mother and daughter of your son, Humble and exalted beyond every creature, Determined goal of eternal counsel — (CGB) termine fisso d'etterno consiglio — Music: Landini, c.1360(?), Va pure, amore; organ & harp, Zurich, Odys. 3216017 has lightened (like the music of Landini) through Boccaccio, O regina degli angioli, O Maria: Mary, Queen of the angels of heaven, Adornment of the sky, whose smiling features, Star of the sea, guide into their haven Wanderers from the way, your witless creatures... (CGB) (cut Landini) 20) V20a) Botticelli, c. 1485, Madonna of the Magnificat, detail, Uffizi, Florence; (video closer detail only); then Same, cropped whole from video file toward the 15th century ease of Belcari's sacred plays: Lily of May, flower of blessedness, With chastity and all the virtues else Adorned, of every kind and loveliness — We honor you above all saints and angels. (CGB) What Botticelli would culminate in this Magnificat Madonna — Europe refining from the Gothic past some Beulah wedding of earth and heaven: "You shall no more be called Desolate...for your land shall be married." 21) 22) 7/1994 Jan van Eyck, c. 1425, Madonna in a Church, Dahlem Museum, Berlin; + V detail Same, a closer central detail 15th Century: Early Renaissance �6 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Bruges, 1425: Jan van Eyck's church remains mystical; that sun shines from the north, as on Dante's Paradise; but it irradiates, like daily realities, the Gothic lines, the angels in the choir, the pageant Queen. Such the light in an English Advent poem: I sing of a maiden That is makeles, King of all kinges To her sone she ches. He cam also stille There his moder was, As dew in Aprille That falleth on the grass. He cam also stille To his moderes bour, As dew in Aprille, That falleth on the flour. He cam also stille There his moder lay, As dew in Aprille That falleth on the spray. Moder and maiden Was never non but sche; Well may swich a lady Godes moder be. Music, if nothing else, would make us treat 15th century Europe as a whole. To hear what those angels might be singing in the van Eyck choir, we turn to Dufay, 23) V23a) Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1427-29 (double), {A} Singing angels; and {B} Angels playing instruments, Altarpiece of the Lamb, Ghent Same, detail of A of 23, singing angels Music: Dufay, c.1430(?), Gloria ad modum tubae (Munich) AWT 9439 at the same time bringing the musicians nearer, as in the Ghent Altar of the Lamb. Yet Dufay's Gloria in the manner of trumpets, with canon above and ostinato below, 24) 7/1994 Luca della Robbia, 1431-38 (double), Choirboys from the Cantoria, Duomo Museum, Florence; for the double, video takes details, reversing the order: see A and B of V24 (CGB '86) in video file; digital adds to double one detail 15th Century: Early Renaissance �7 C.G. Bell Symbolic History is from about 1430, when Italianate-Flemish Dufay was with the Papal choir. So Luca della Robbia's Florentine choirboys would serve as well. 25) Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459, Angels and background detail, Medici Chapel, Florence; digital adds one detail (CGB '86) Or Gozzoli's angels, past mid-century, from the Medici Chapel; 26) Piero della Francesca, 1470, Angel musicians from the Nativity, National Gallery, London or Piero della Francesca's, from the London Nativity. 27) Luca della Robbia, Cantoria (double), Dancing, Duomo Museum, Florence; video replaces with details of singles V27 {A} (CGB) and V27 {B} in video file; digital adds to double, one detail (CGB '86) As worship turns to dance, it will be Luca della Robbia again; 28) Donatello, 1433-38, Cantoria of Dancing Genii, Duomo Museum, Florence; with V details or from Donatello's facing Gallery, the more bacchanalian abandon of dancing Genii. (end Dufay Gloria) This is new wine in the old faith bottles — 29) Fra Filippo Lippi, c. 1460(?), Madonna with Angels, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); + V details, cf. V29a and V29b (CGB '59) Browning's Brother Lippo stealing in from a night frolic to paint On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast With his great round stone to subdue the flesh. It is Vasari who tells how Lippi chose the novitiate Lucrezia as model for a Prato Madonna, finished nun, as it were, with the picture, took her off to be his mistress, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �8 C.G. Bell Symbolic History thereafter portrayed as Mary, and their lively urchins as Christ and the angels — religion as sprightly as Charles of Orleans' Confession: My gostly fader, I me confesse, First to God and then to you, That at a window — wot ye how? — I stale a cosse of grete sweteness... 30) Fouquet, c. 1450, Agnes Sorel as Mary Enthroned, Louvre, Paris; + V detail But I restore it shall doutless... And that to God I make a vow... While French Fouquet turned Charles VII's Agnes Sorel to a Mary of pneumatic bliss — a levity naive as its embrace in faith: Chiamo il dolce Gesù e canto, canto — But to Mary mild and Jesu child, I sing, I sing... (CGB) 31) Fra Filippo Lippi c. 1441-47, Coronation of the Virgin (video alternates the whole with details from that and from 32) Some years before the meeting with Lucrezia, Lippi had painted the Uffizi Coronation of the Virgin, in which, by the startlingly personal St. Lucy below (with her children), the later affair seems prefigured. For Browning this is "the Prior's niece who comes/ To care about his asthma..." Oh that white smallish female with the breasts, She's just my niece — whom Lippi has chosen for this picture: "I shall paint/ God... Madonna.../ Ringed in a bowery flowery angel-brood / ...i' the front... a saint or two" — 32) Same, Lippi Coronation, detail front, right (old hand-colored Alinari photo) the artist himself then (as Browning thought), in his monk's robe come up, as from a dark stair, mazed, until that "sweet angelic slip of a thing" intercedes: "This man did the work" (as on the scroll) "iste perfecit opus". Such the Ave Regina Dufay troped for himself: "Miserere supplicanti Dufay"; 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �9 C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Dufay, 1464, from Antiphon, Ave regina caelorum, Miserere... Dufay (Planchard) MHS 4743A (fade) or the lighter greeting of his Month of May Rondeau, "Karissime Dufay vous en prye..." Music: Dufay, 1423-29, from Ce Moys de May, (Cape) EMS 206 (fade) 33) Double: {A} Lippi(?), c. 1435, Monks from a fresco, Carmine Cloister, Florence; and {B} Lippi, 1460-64, Girls at the Dance of Salome, Duomo, Prato; + V details from V33 {A} and V33 {B}) It is likely that in the fresco fragment in the Carmine Cloister (left) the young Lippi has represented his delight in whatever is perceived (Browning, from Vasari): First every sort of monk, the black and white, I drew them, fat and lean. . . 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �10 C.G. Bell Symbolic History While as late as the Prato frescoes, two girls whispering of Herodias' demand for John the Baptist's head, make such discovery unforgettable. 34) Fra Angelico & school, 1447-50, St. Laurence giving alms, detail, Capella Nicolina, Vatican, Rome (video: lower spread of whole V34, then closer detail) Was not Lippi's art-sire, the saintly Fra Angelico, entering Renaissance by the same observational road? — his mid-century St. Laurence distributing alms dominated by the blind beggar (right), where spirituality springs exactly from heightened sense. So Browning's Lippi, studying the watchmen, calls for "a bit of chalk". 35) French Gothic c. 1230, Faggots for Winter, West Front, Notre Dame, Paris; first, video detail Music: Perrin d'Angecourt, 13th cent., "Quant voi a la fin d'estey," AS-18 We have seen the secular hauntingly suspended in the synthesis of creed, sharp as this winter from Notre Dame. In a Goliard poem: "De ramis cadunt folia," the bleak time burns with love; so too with Perrin d'Angecourt, 13th century Troubador. (close d'Ancecourt) 36) Lorenzetti c. 1340, Winter, fresco border, Palazzo Publico, Siena; + V detail Music: Guillaume de Machault, c.1360(?), Rondeau, Puis qu'en oubli, (Cape) ARC 3032 In Lorenzetti's 14th-century Winter the mystery is distilled through a realism, strange as the "smoky rein" in Chaucer, which keeps Creseyde at Pandarus' house for the consummation required. So Dante in the Vita Nuova speaks with the ladies who pity him: And as sometimes we see water fall mingled with white snow, so it seemed their talk issued forth mingled with sighs. Guillaume de Machault's double-leading-tones, 37) 7/1994 Lorenzetti, c. 1340, detail from Good Government in the Country, Palazzo Publico, Siena; (video: first a closer detail, using Va37) 15th Century: Early Renaissance �11 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Lorenzetti's panorama of a well-governed countryside, have offered such exploratory translations of reality. Each detail of that vast spread — In Augoste in a hygh seysoun, Quen corne is corven wyth crokes kene — holds the dream of spacelessness. 38) (fade Machault) Pol de Limbourg, 1413-16, July, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly (first, V details: reaping, then shearing) Music: Arnold de Lantins, c.1420?, Puis que je voy (Cape), AS-39 With the 1400's estrangement ebbs. The Calendar of the Tres Riches Heures, Burgundian Rondeaux (this Arnold de Lantins), breathe natural air. Even the plays of 1400 Flanders accomplish the human passage: Sandareen tells her new knight of her seduction by the baron who has cast her off; she speaks in the metaphor of a blossoming tree from which a falcon has robbed one flower; and he says one flower is nothing, to speak of it no more, it will not set him against the tree he loves. In English the greatest poetry of the seasons is from Gawayne and the Green Knight. We trim to summer and the coming on of fall: After, the sesoun of somer wyth the soft wyndes, Quen Zeferus syfles hymself on sedes and erbes; Wela wynne is the wort that waxes theroute, When the donkande dewe dropes of the leves, To bide a blysful blush of the bryght sunne. 39) Same, October, Tres Riches Heures; + V detail Bot then hyghes hervest, and hardenes hym sone, Warnes hym for the wynter to wax ful rype; He dryves wyth droght the dust for to ryse, Fro the face of the folde to flyghe ful hyghe; Wrothe wynde of the welkyn wrasteles with the sunne, The leves lancen fro the lynde and lyghten on the grounde, (those alliterations heightening every mood — as in the miniature, the face of the sower of winter wheat) 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �12 C.G. Bell 40) Symbolic History Same, December, Tres Riches Heures; (video has details only, below and above) And al grayes the gres that grene wats ere; Then al rypes and rotes that ros upon fyrst, And thus yirnes the yere in yisterdayes mony, And wynter wyndes again, as the worlde askes, no fage... (The 1400 castle rising behind, like the one Gawayne sees over the December woods: Towers set up between, pinnacled ful thick, Turrets with carved tops and chalkwhite chimneys.) 41) Same, April, Tres Riches Heures; with video details Gawayne must precede the Tres Riches Heures. But Charles d'Orleans, English captive, here writing in French, more than matches its period harmony: Le temps a laisié son manteau De vent, de froidure et de pluye, Et s'est vestu de brouderie, De soleil luyant, cler et beau... Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau Portent, en livrée jolie, Gouttes d'argent et d'orfaverie, Chascun s'abille de nouveau, Le temps a laissié son manteau. 42) (fade de Lantins) Grimani Breviary, c. 1510, April, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; + V details. Music: Josquin des Pres, c.1500(?), from La Spagna, 5-voice basse danse, Seraphim SIC-6104 (3) With Lang's rendering — The year has changed his mantle cold Of wind, of rain, of bitter air; And he goes clad in cloth of gold, Of laughing suns and seasons fair... All founts, all rivers, seaward rolled, The pleasant summer livery wear, With silver studs on broidered vair; The world puts off its raiment old, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �13 C.G. Bell Symbolic History The year lays down his mantle cold — we have moved from the Limbourg Calendar to its Grimani translation a century later (time of Josquin), in the robes and haze of bourgeois realism — such a filling-in as that of Arthurian romance over the three-hundred years from Chrestien to Malory. (end La Spagna) 43) Pol de Limbourg, January, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V details and return to the whole. Music: Ciconia, c. 1405-10, from O Rosa Bella, (Deller) RCA VLM-6016 Since the Tres Riches Heures — here January — like Ciconia's 1400 setting of "O Rosa Bella" — has still a trace of the old chivalric suspension of space, time and cause. When Chrestien's Lancelot, seeking Guenevere, has crossed the sword bridge into "the land from which no stranger returns," he is viewed from a tower window by King Bademagu, "very scrupulous and precise about honor and what was right," and by his son and opposite, the Queen's captor, Meleagant, "who never wearied of villainy, treason and felony." (end Ciconia) 44) Grimani Breviary, c. 1510, January, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; + V details and return to whole; digital first gives a double of 43 and 44 In Malory, 1470, there is no good king Bademagu and no symbolic land. With an armed force Mellyagraunce surprises the Queen at Maying and takes her to his castle seven miles from Westminster. Launcelot gets word. Mellyagraunce's archers shoot his horse. He forces a driver to take him up in what for Chrestien was the mysterious cart. From a bay window, the Queen aspyed by his shelde that he was there hym self sir launcelot du lake; and thenne she was ware where came his hors ever after that charyot, and ever he trade his guttes and his paunche under his feet. Allas sayd the quene now I see well and preve that wel is hym that hath a trusty frend. As in the Grimani densening, the very knights and queens accept the probabilities of the middle class. 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �14 C.G. Bell 45) 45a) Symbolic History Jan (and/or Hubert) van Eyck, 1422-24 (or 1413-17?), Baptism, from the Tres Belles Heures de Notre Dame, Museo Civico, Turin; video has details only (cf. Va45), returning to a cropped whole after 45a (cf. V45b) Same, Voyaqe of St. Julian, from "Turin Hours", section of same MS burned in 1904 Music: Dunstable, c.1420(?), from O Rosa bella, (Cape) ARC-3052 If there are turning points in history, the van Eyck miniatures from the Turin Hours — by one or both brothers and surely from the 1420's or before — are the point of departure for all the realism (trees, water, atmosphere and distance) to follow. They succeed the Limbourg brothers as this Dunstable "O Rosa Bella" does the Ciconia (just heard) — not finer, not better, but polyphonically, sensuously, melodically advanced. As Martin le France wrote, Dufay and Binchois, against the early century of Carmen and Cesaris: Have assumed the English style And followed after Dunstable. (end Dunstable) That mutation of 1425 differentiates the New Europe 46) Rublev, Russian, 1422-27, Trinity, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow from everything that had gone before. The 1400 softening of International Style had cognates as far as the Byzantine — most tellingly in Russia. Though the gentlest art of the West seems physical beside the mystic accord of Rublev's weightless angels, forming (at their Abraham supper) the flower-frail round of a Trinity. 47) Claus Sluter, 1395-99, Head of Christ, Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon; + V detail In Europe that horizon of grace becomes, as with Sluter, a Renaissance launching ground. Thus the incarnate Christ which crowns his Dijon Fountain. Music: 7/1994 Apt MS., late 14th cent., Jesu nostra redemptio, 1st stanza, SAWT9505 15th Century: Early Renaissance �15 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Apt "Redemptio" hymn, the revolution of immediacy takes the same center. The melody has risen from medieval tenor to descant; the bass settles down, seeking faux-bourdon chords; second progressions begin to yield to those of the fourth and fifth; that simple ordering of harmonic space founds the Renaissance Lauda: (cut Apt MS) 48) Belbello da Pavia, c. 1412-30(?), Creation of Eve, Visconti Hours, National Library, Florence (video: details only, cf V48) Music: Joh. Simon de Haspre, c.1400(?), "Ma doulce Amour," Odyssey 32-160178 History moves by the precipitation and inbreeding of opposites: Gothic flamboyance spills into the very years of humanist solemnity. Thus the miniatures of Belbello, completing the Visconti Hours, with the terminal dissonances of Ars Nova: de Haspre. (fade de Haspre) 49) Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1430(?), Entombment, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; first, video details Siena is the most startling art-bastion of a Gothic-Byzantine heightened by new experiment. In Giovanni di Paolo's Entombment, Peter does not interrupt, but casts a trans-real shadow on the gold light itself of the grave. Music: Cyprus, c.1420, Amen (close), from the Gloria, A.S. 126, B In music, the French court of Cyprus, until its 1426 sack by the Sultan, tops the isorythmic brilliance of the school of Machault — from the Amen of a Gloria. These pockets of fantastic continuance are not merely backward-looking. Their symbolic agitation, gathering material force, will break into the Renaissance again and again, as Savonarola would stir Medici Florence, or Mannerist distortion climax in El Greco. (end Amen) 50 7/1994 Lorenzo Monaco, 1413, Nativity, Predella of the Coronation, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '48); + V detail 15th Century: Early Renaissance �16 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In Florence the lingering transition works wonders of mystical sweetness, Monaco, Gentile, Fra Angelico. Brolo's hymn to the Virgin, "O Celestial Light", melodizes the starry blend. Music: 51) Va52) 52) Bart. Brolo, c. 1410-20(?), O Celestial Lume (close), AS-l, (#8 in US) Gentile de Fabriano, 1423, Shepherds from the Nativity, detail, Predella of Magi Altarpiece, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '48) Fra Angelico, c. 1425-30, Gate of Light, top left of Paradise Garden, from Last Judgment, San Marco, Florence Same, Paradise Garden, whole; and video details (from 52 or V52) (end Brolo) It is the celestial light of that chant which the saved enter in Fra Angelico's paradise, most childlike of those blessed gardens so much preferred to hell by Villon's mother: "La joye avoir me fay, haulte Deesse." What came from the Song of Songs, through the well-spring of Revelation and the smiling depth of Dante's shores "painted with spring's miraculous colors", has grown as artlessly innocent as the Mary of the Lauds — "Madre e Sposa,/ candida olente rosa" — herself that orchard enclosed, its fragrant herbs, its clear fountain of life: (Belcari) "viva fontana e chiara vena." 53) Claus Sluter 1394-1404, Well of Moses (David, Jeremiah & Zachariah), Champmol, Charterhouse, near Dijon The quantum leaps of history are not entirely localized. We cannot say when the limpid grace was penetrated by the humanist wedge. There had been Claus Sluter in Dijon, precocious as English Chaucer. Va54) Vb54) 54) Brunelleschi, esp. 1420-36, Dome of the Cathedral, Florence, detail Roman, esp. Hadrian, 120 AD, Pantheon (rear), Rome (detail of CGB '86) Again, Brunelleschi, Cathedral with Dome against a cloudy sky While, in Florence, Renaissance center, Brunelleschi's dome has not lost the bareness of the 1368 plan, that stamp of God's Gothic barn, which gives it a strength over all other domes. Vasari stresses Brunelleschi's 1403 sketching from Roman temples and measuring of the Pantheon. But Hadrian's brooding cement mass could hardly have suggested the levitational soar of Santa Maria del Fiore, its curve, as Vasari quotes 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �17 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Brunelleschi, that of a pointed arch. Whatever Rome inspired, the double shell of this ribbed and self-buttressed vault looked for its engineering to the Gothic North. 1st 55) Masaccio 1425-26, + V closer detail Tribute Money, detail, Carmine, Florence; And Masaccio's noble art — by whatever blend of Giotto, nature, the Classic — fulfills Medieval incorporation: to sanctify these sensuous presences. Had not Paul and John promised a glorified body, in which we shall be sons of God and like him? Had not Thomas Aquinas (II of II, 23, 1) made Charity Friendship, under the daring of cohumanity with God — quoting Christ: "No longer will I call you servants, but my friends"? As for music, there was nothing antique to recover. Renaissance had to shape its forms from the polyphony of the Middle Ages. Va2nd 54) Again, Brunelleschi's Dome, nearer view (from 1st 54) For 2nd 54) Same, Cathedral of Florence, interior, nave (CGB '86) It was Dufay who wrote the motets for the 1436 consecration of this cathedral. Their swelling four-voice canons share in its grandeur. Yet a witness to that pomp paraphrases 12th-century Suger on the anagogical gift of the New Light: During these moments I enjoyed so much delight that it partaking on earth of the life of the blessed. Music: seemed to me I was Dufay, 1436, Nuper Rosarum Flores (last 4-voice section) BASF 30249 2nd 55) Again, Tribute Money, detail, head of John 56) Uccello 1436, Equestrian painting of Sir John Hawkwood, Duomo, Florence; first, video detail (with Dufay "Amen" close) Humanist assertion, Roman recovery, civic pride meet in sacred containment. Uccello had just painted the equestrian Hawkwood in the Cathedral where Dufay's music was performed. And in the "Amen" of that praise of Florence, the condottiere vaunt seems made in chords. 57) 7/1994 Donatello, 1443-53, Gattamelata (from below), Piazzetta, Padua 15th Century: Early Renaissance �18 C.G. Bell V57a) V57b) Symbolic History Same, detail: profile from the left (cf. 14th Century 74) Same, another view, upper spread Literature, after the 14th century, ebbs, weighed down by too much Latin revival. Yet Alberti, humanist architect, breaks Gothic continuance with the first sonnet of Renaissance rhetoric and universalizing consciousness. Petrarch's residual bareness: Solo e pensoso i piu deserti campi — Vo misurando a passi tardi e lenti — Alone and sad I measure empty fields — yields to a motion almost that of Shakespeare: "Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by." (Alberti, with Donatello's Gattamelata): Io vidi gia seder nell'arme irato Uom furioso, e pallido tremare... I saw of late an armed and furious man That for his anger trembled and was pale, Va58) 58) Same, detail, profile, from the right Same, detail of the horseman And eyes I saw whereof tears trenchant ran For too great heat that did the heart assail; And I beheld a lover so long brood That he for sorrow could not weep or wail, Nor rarely saw those that could touch no food Because of hunger that had made them frail; I saw a vessel float and veer with wind Which wind too great did founder in the flood, And watched the greyhound as he coursed the hind For too great swiftness lose her in the wood. Thus I beheld how nature doth dispense To most of wishing, least of consequence. (CGB) 1st 59) Masaccio, 1423-27, The Trinity, Santa Maria Novella, Florence (video: CGB '59 glazed slide, V59) Perspective typefies the new ordering, art-precursor of natural science. Here Masaccio applies Brunelleschi's conception. How the vault looms, viewed, like the great 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �19 C.G. Bell Symbolic History robed figures, from below; while the cross, breaking that system, meets us head on. This theoretic space, this space of mind, will make as clear as possible the divergent modes of Florence 60) Jan van Eyck, 1434, Arnolfini Marriage, National Gallery, London; + V details. and (against it) of Flanders — Jan van Eyck's contemporary space of eye. In this Arnolfini betrothal the capture of reality proceeds by awakened sense and skilled hand — in textures, shadowing and touch, beyond anything Italy would produce for generations. Though if the recessive lines of floor, ceiling, window, bed, are in fact plotted, they form, as in the school of Giotto, separate convergences. Of course, an interior scanned by an actual viewer will have as many meeting points as the fixes of the scanning eye. What is in question is not reality itself, whatever that may mean, 2nd 59) Again, Masaccio Trinity, upper detail (video pans this from 1st 59 or V59) but space heroically formulated by the mathematics of Florentine mind. It is that universal grasp which lifts the Masaccio to the verge of awe. Meanwhile, in both pictures, the new techniques become sacramental; they reconstitute devotion. This frontal Father, the kind of image Cusanus would call "omnivoyant", viewing all viewers, brings the sacred into spatial grandeur. 2nd 60) Again, van Eyck, Marriage (video: details only, from 1st 60 and V2nd 60) Yet even the van Eyck records a sacrament of marriage (Panovsky): the clogs ("put off your shoes, for this is holy ground"); the single candle for the Eye of God; the painter as witness, seen in the mirror ("Jan van Eyck was here"). If what revolutionizes faith in Masaccio is the theoretical and classical, here it is the pietistic pervasion of the Brothers of the Common Life. 61) Double: {A} Venetian, finished 1434, Ca d'Oro, Grand Canal; and {B} Alberti, 1446, Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, + V single of {B} Such counter-thrusts compose the time-wave. Within the bounds of Italy, Venice and Florence present a complementarity. In Venice the Gothic tracery of the Ca d'Oro finished 1434 (left); from Florence twelve years later, the Rucellai Palace by Alberti, with 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �20 C.G. Bell Symbolic History its classical pilasters and rustic masonry — share in the individual and worldly emergence. 62) Flemish Civic Architecture, 1402-54, Hotel de Ville, Brussels From the same years, the town hall of Brussels — extending the European axis from Tuscany to Flanders — speaks the North in no way backward, its Flamboyant stone spired to a search as boldly Faustian. Va63) 63) Fra Angelico, 1430-34, Descent from the Cross, detail of Christ, San Marco Museum, Florence Same, whole; + V central detail (from V63a) Music: Dufay, 1452, Qui tollis, Missa "Se la face ay pale," Seraphim S-60267 (Munrow) Art and music convey the embryonic interworking of that web of commerce and skills, letters and science. Let this Descent from the Cross, begun by Lorenzo Monaco before 1425 and finished by Fra Angelico, be the Florentine harbinger. For music we choose, from Dufay's 1450 return to Italy, the Qui Tollis from his first tenor Mass, "Se la face ay pale" (brilliantly sung by Munrow's Consort). We cannot tell if Angelico's expressive composition, with even the central rise of the foliated frame, (fade "Se la face ay pale" Mass) 64) Roger van der Weyden, 1435-40, Descent from the Cross, Prado, Madrid; with video details (video using V64, of greener coloring) Music: Dufay, 1472, Qui tollis, from Missa "Ave regina caelorum" MHS 4743A suggested (perhaps through a woodcut?) Roger van der Weyden's Prado Descent, with its central rise and framing filigree. Here, although the shallow space and gold ground look backward, the fleshed and robed passion of these sufferers surges ahead. So in Dufay, the fabric of sound deepens over twenty years to the Qui tollis of his last mass, "Ave regina caelorum," sung at the dedication of the Cathedral of Cambrai. (fade "Ave regina caelorum") 65) 7/1994 Ghiberti, 1425-52, East Doors, detail of Eve, Baptistry, Florence 15th Century: Early Renaissance �21 C.G. Bell V65a) V65b) Symbolic History Same, Creation & Expulsion of Adam and Eve Same, Upper four reliefs (with video return to 65, closer detail of Eve) Music: Italian, 15th cent., Perla Mia, Nonesuch 71071 In music, the aesthetic balance of Italy — as influential, as in the other arts — works through the humbler forms of Laude and Frottole. One piece, "Perla mia", may stake out the hidden claim (the words, and perhaps the tune, by Giustiniani from the early century, the setting, it seems, somewhat later) — such smooth harmonies as Ghiberti wrought into the final doors, those Michelangelo thought worthy to be the gates of Paradise. Throughout the century the great Northern composers are in continual touch with this melodious soul of Italy. (fade Perla Mia) Va66) Vb66) 66) Bourges, 1195-1260, Cathedral, from south-east Same, Piers and Vaults (Sam Adams' slide); also digital Same, interior, Nave and Choir (CGB '84) Music: School of Paris, c. 1240, 2-voice Melisma, Ille, last section, (Tinayre) Lumen 32,013 Over 200 years, the Gothic architecture of the North had unfolded from the structural severity and mystical distance of 13th-century Bourges, — this theology of triune lights (with a school of Perotin melisma) — (close Ille) Va67) 67) Norman to Perpendicular, 1094-1500, spire 15th cent., Norwich (CGB '84) Same, interior, 14th cent., apse and windows, 15th cent. vault; + V detail Music: Worcester Harmony, c. 1310, from Puellare Gremium, History of Music in Sound II, RCA-V LM 6015 to foliate, through the next century, the traceried wealth of England — so Norwich choir — music sweetening from the Worcester Fragments, around 1300, (fade Puellare) to Benet, on the eve of Dunstable. Music: 68) 7/1994 John Benet(?), early 15th cent., from Sanctus "Jacet granum" Nonesuch H-71292 (fade) German, esp. 15th cent., Nave and aisle of Ulm (CGB '59) 15th Century: Early Renaissance �22 C.G. Bell V68a) V68b) Symbolic History Jorg Syrlin the Elder, 1469-74, Double: [A] Pythagoras; and [B] the Cimmerian Sibyl, from the stalls of Ulm Cathedral German 15th cent., nave to aisles, St. Georgskirche, Nördlingen, West Germany (CGB '59) Music: Paumann, c. 1450, end of Benedicite, (Tinayre) Lumen 32012 By 1450 those Gothic branchings had ripened, as here at Ulm, a columned and lighted pre-reformation hall. While the blind organist Paumann wreathed the Benedicite in triadic harmonies. (close Paumann) By the paired Rebirth of North and South, this last Gothic shares in the spatial ease of early Renaissance — 69) Apulian, c. 1160, aisle to nave, Bari Cathedral (CGB '84); + V return to Ulm interior (detail of columns and vault from 68) more than all the round-arched precursors of Italian Romanesque, from Lucca and Florence to this 12th century Cathedral of Bari in Apulia. What if they are called Protorenaissance? That proto goes centuries back, as to a solemn crypt — as far from the lightening of Ulm, 70) V70a) Brunelleschi, 1436 ff., aisle and nave of Santa Spirito, Florence (CGB '59); video: upper detail only Same, another view (CGB '84); then video returns to 70, lower detail, Aisle and Nave as from Brunelleschi's lofty liberation of the Roman Basilica from the weight of Rome. In music, Dunstable, who worked on the Continent, influenced from Italy and known there, spearheaded such 1425 changes. His "Veni Sancte Spiritus", "Come Holy Spirit", esteemed and sung through the century, gives mystical love the breath and hypnotic weaving of sensuous sound. Of the sustained Cape recording we hear only the closing section. Music: 7/1994 Dunstable, c. 1425(?), Veni Sancte Spiritus (bar 121 ff.) VLM 6016 (2) 15th Century: Early Renaissance �23 C.G. Bell 71) V71a) Symbolic History Donatello, 1411-13, St. Mark, Or San Michele, Florence Same, detail of head, new angle When Michelangelo praised Donatello's 1412 St. Mark, it was not for Roman face, nor for Gothic robe, but for sacred humanization: "It would have been impossible to have rejected the gospel if preached by such a straightforward man as this." 72) Masaccio, c. 1426, Peter and John heal the sick, Carmine, Florence (video divides to details, above and below) Masaccio's concern with earth, to show common men in the commonest alley of Florence, does not preclude but empowers a deeply religious art. Peter and John walk forward, wrapped in thought; Peter's shadow heals the sick and lame. 73) V73a) Same, detail of Peter and cripples (video works from V73) Same, face of the cripple huddled on the ground One, risen, prays; another rises; a third huddles, the uplifted face lighted around caves of mouth and eye. 74) Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, 1426-27, Mary detail, Altar of the Lamb, Ghent; first, video detail of face (close Dunstable) Over the contrast already made, of medium and style, the brothers van Eyck serve the same transformation. Everything of the world, stuff, jewels, hair, lends light and touch to the heavenly. 75) Same, God, detail, Altar of the Lamb; + V detail Here, also from the Ghent altar, is another of Cusanus' omnivoyants: If I strive in human fashion to transport you to things divine, I have found nothing better than an image which is omnivoyant... such... I call the icon of God. This picture, brethren, ye shall set up in some place... and each of you shall find, from whatsoever quarter observed, that it looks at him as if it looked at no other... 1st 76) Roger Van der Weyden, 1450-60, Deposition, Uffizi, Florence 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �24 C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Flemish succession of mid-century, and in creative exchange with Italy, the humanization of the gospel proceeds — here Van der Weyden, from during or after his Florentine stay. 1st 77) Fra Angelico, 1439-45, Noli me Tangere, San Marco, Florence V1st 77a) Fra Angelico, c. 1440, Annunciation, San Marco, Florence In Italy too; as the powers of Masaccio fill out the forms of Gothic tenderness, the 'forties and 'fifties fruit in saintly celebration, as present as Angelico's garden where Christ greets the Magdalen. In music Ockeghem, Dufay's successor, holds an all-time summit of heavenly polyphonic weaving, the serene stretching and enhancement of Dunstable's fabric. The works of the Florentine organist Squarcialupi are lost. The Italian pieces that remain, from Romanus of 1416 to Gaffurio toward the end of the century, are not recorded. Va2nd 76) Roger Van der Weyden, c. 1430-35, Annunciation, Left Wing of the Magi Altar, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) 2nd 76) Again, Van der Weyden, Deposition, detail (video works from 1st 76) In any case, the Flemings were dominant; and there is no one, before or after, who could suspend such a web of besouled breathing as Ockeghem. Here the "Qui tollis" from the Mass: "Ecce Ancilla Dei". Music: Ockeghem, c.1470(?), Qui tollis, Mass: Ecce Ancilla Dei, 21512-1 BAS- 2nd 77) Fra Angelico, Noli me Tangere, detail, San Marco, Florence V2nd 77a) Beato Angelico, 1439-45, fresco, Coronation of the Virgin, upper detail, San Marco, Florence 78) Domenico Veneziano, c. 1450, Madonna and Saints, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) In Veneziano the old triptych turns to a colonnaded space, in which a calm of form and pastel color 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �25 C.G. Bell 79) Symbolic History Piero della Francesca, 1463-65, Resurrection, cropped, Borgo San Sepulcro; + V detail looks to Piero della Francesca: this Resurrection of God in Olympian flesh and Robe. (Music: Quoniam) Here, with as rapt an omnivoyant as art offers, we conclude Cusanus' vision: As in a mirror, an icon, a riddle, 80) Same, Piero, head of Christ I see life eternal, which is nothing else but that blessed regard, that gaze of love which never ceases to behold.me, even the most secret places of my soul. 81) Fouquet, 1453-55, Trinity in Glory, Hours of Etienne Chevalier, Chantilly, + V detail In mid-century France, Fouquet has shown forth the rose-courts of blessing. And Cusanus: For with Thee to behold is to give life, to inflame by love's imparting, and in imparted flame, to let me drink the dew of gladness, drink and be infused with the fountain of life, copartner with Thee and thy Son in immortal bliss, 82) Memling, 1479, Baptism detail, Left Wing, St. Catharine Altar, Bruges the source of all delights, the maximum, undeprived, of every rational desire, than which a greater cannot be conceived. By 1480, in Bruges, Memling clothes the simple Coming in a fruitful ease of earth and waters. 83) V83a) Botticelli, 1481-82, Adoration of the Magi, center detail, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '60); cf. V83, same, wider view (CGB '60) Same, closer detail of Madonna and landscape (from CGB '75) At the same time in Florence, Botticelli refines the mystical to an aesthetic of starred fabrics and translucent veils. (end Ockeghem) 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �26 C.G. Bell 84) Symbolic History Jacobo della Quercia, 1425-38, "In the Sweat of thy Brow," bronze relief, doors of San Petronio, Bologna But Gothic had been stretched from the start between peace and frenzy, the peace enriching its texture, the frenzy more material in drive. By the 1430's, della Quercia's bronze doors in Bologna have passed the bequest of power to Michelangelo. 85) Double: [A] Masolino and [B] Masaccio, both c. 1425, Temptation and Expulsion, details, Brancacci Chapel, Carmine, Florence In the Brancacci chapel of the Carmine, we feel it like a Gospel command — that passage from the Gothic line and mystery of Masolino's innocent Temptation, to the tragic expulsion of Masaccio. Masolino had chosen this pupil and collaborator; yet how those quiet sinners of his Eden must have gazed across the chapel toward their nobler expulsion — "Paradise well lost!" 86) Pisanello, c. 1435, St. George and the Princess fresco, Sant' Anastasia, Verona; + V closer detail with gibbet So too in Pisanello's 1435 fresco of St. George and the Princess: with the housing of beatitude, force too knits its fabric. The attack is of realism itself, a keenness of seeing and being which arose out of Gothic (that gibbet here against the sky) — until all the Magdalens and beggar rogues of soul-levelling Christendom meet in Villon and Fat Margot: 87) Pisanello, same fresco, detail of gibbet only, two hanged men Come back, whenever you're in rut To this brothel where we hold our state. (CGB) Retournez cy, quant vous serez en ruit, En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat! Or, to match Pisanello's detail: I am Francois, I confess, Born in Paris, near Pontoise, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �27 C.G. Bell Symbolic History And by six feet of hemp-grass, My neck will learn the weight of my ass. (CGB) 88) Andrea del Castagno, 1447, Last Supper, center, Convent Santa Apollonia, Florence (video shows first a closer detail from Va88, then draws a wider center from V88, of the whole) In Florence before mid century, the pastel calm of Veneziano is complemented by Castagno, here from a Last Supper. "Can you minister to a mind diseased?"; Castagno: "I will set its diseases visibly before you." Among the variegated marble panels of this room, that where Judas sits (across from Christ), traces the hell-whorls of his jealous thought. Va89) 89) Francesco Cossa (or del Cossa), c. 1470, Month of March, middle detail, Schifanoia Palace, Ferrara Same, detail of a peasant As the factual comes to parity with its faith containment, an expression is first possible (as in the Ferrara Months, by Cossa, about 1470), lean and hard as Gothic, yet already of Breughel's Renaissance earth. Dante had led the way, as in the metaphor of Inferno 24, where a peasant takes the frost for snow: ...when the hoarfrost on the ground copies the likeness of her white sister… and the peasant who needs fodder rises and looks out and sees the fields all whitened, and turning back to the house, smites his thigh... (CGB) 90) Same, March vineyard; + V detail By the time of these Cossa frescoes, such calendar observation (this March Vineyard) was the life of Mantuan (Turberville's translation, 1567): The man that earst did sowe And tillde his stonie soile, hath let a fielde his plowe And takes his ease: the wearie ground it selfe doth slumber nowe. The Shephierd having shutte his dores, and caught his cloake Keepes house: Neara eke doth sitte 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �28 C.G. Bell Symbolic History at home in smothering smoake At Chimnie nooke, and plies hir pottage Pot apace... 91) Rohan Hours, c. 1425(?), January, detail, National Library, Paris In the Rohan Hours, from about 1425, such realism had incised, within Gothic, the biting winter of Villon's Legacy: Sur le Noel, morte saison: (Kinnell) Near Christmas, the dead time When wolves live on the wind And men stick to their houses Against the frost, close by the blaze... 92) Fouquet, c. 1450, Medallion Self-Portrait, Louvre, Paris; + V detail In Fouquet's Medallion, self assumes that edged precision. No wonder the Testaments so worked on Pound and Eliot — Villon in the first (called Small) penning his bitter bequests until the ink is frozen and the candle blown out; in the second, called Great, Villon himself burnt-out: En 1'an de mon trentiesme aage — In the thirtieth year of my age, Having drunk my fill of shame... Written in the year 'sixty-one When the good king delivered me From the harsh prison of Meung... (CGB) 93) Pollaiuolo, c. 1470, Hercules and Antaeus, Uffizi, Florence I spit phlem as white as cotton, Gobs as big as tennis balls... Thanks to God and Jacques Thibault Who gave me cold water... underground... (CGB) In Florence that carborundum would hone Pollaiuolo's Hercules and Antaeus to a scalpel — 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �29 C.G. Bell 94) 94a) Symbolic History Pollaiuolo, c. 1460(?), Girl's profile, Poldi-Pezzoli, Milan; + V detail Pollaiuolo, c. 1475, Apollo and Daphne, National Gallery, London Music: Dufay, c.1440-50(?), Adieu m'amour, Cape, EMS-206 under which beauty thins to the wistful delight of the Poldi-Pezzoli girl, mostly attributed to that same anatomist Pollaiuolo. As if for all freshness and joy Dufay's "Adieu m'amour" were sounding. So the wailful brightness of Villon's best-known ballade, "des dames du temps jadis": Dictes moy ou, n'en quel pays, Est Flora la belle Rommaine... Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? Of which Rossetti, for all his "yester-year", caught something; Where is Echo, beheld of no man, Only heard on river and mere — She whose beauty was more than human? But where are the snows of yester-year? 95) English, c. 1460, Sculptured corpse from Beckington Tomb, Cathedral, Wells (CGB '84) (fade Adieu m'amour) Villon's ballade is introduced by a description of death, sharp as those tombs where (sometimes) worms and mice crawl from the sculptured corpse — yet of strange beauty (Symons): No, I am not, as others are, Child of the angels, with a wreath Of planets or of any star. My father's dead, and lies beneath The churchyard stone: God rest his breath! Va96) 96) V96a) 7/1994 Donatello, 1455-58, Mary Magdalen, upper half, Duomo Museum, Florence (CGB '86) Same, head, another view Same, detail of hands 15th Century: Early Renaissance �30 C.G. Bell Symbolic History I know that my poor old mother (And she too knows) must come to death, And that her son must follow her... After comes the old Helmet-maker, with Peaked chin, and cheeks all waste and dead, And lips that are two skinny rags — (Swinburne) elsewhere compared with this Donatello Magdalen. Though the Magdalen might stand as well for Villon's mother in her "Prayer to our Lady": I am a woman, very old and poor; I know nothing; I cannot read at all. a97) 97) V97a) Stef. Lochner, 1440-45, Last Judgment, upper detail of saved, WallrafRichartz Museum, Köln (CGB '74) Same, detail of damned and gorilla-devil (CGB '74); while V97 uses a central detail of saved and damned (panned on the video from 98, the whole) Same, lower detail of saved soul and angel, panned from a97 Music: Dufay, c. 1450, Mass "Se la face ay pale" sancto Spiritu, (Munrow) Seraphim S-60267 from Gloria, "Cum But when I go to church, I see on the wall A painted heaven where harps and lutes are, A hell also, where damned spirits boil. One gives me happiness, the other fear. Give me the happiness, Goddess of the sky, To whom all sinners should render, without guile, Theirs and themselves in love and humble prayer — And in this faith I mean to live and die. (CGB) Va98) Vb98) 98) Same, Lechery detail from Usury and Lechery slide (CGB '74) English perpendicular Gothic 15th c., Doom Painting, c. 1475, St. Thomas Church, Salisbury (CGB '86) Lochner Last Judgment, whole (CGB '74) — Lochner's Judgment reviving for us, with the vigor of a Dufay Gloria, what was painted in all the churches of Christendom, the timeless drop, without which the action of Renaissance loses its stretch and tuning. As the Helmetress says of earth's joy: 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �31 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Que m'en reste il? Honte et pechié. (close Gloria) For 1st 99) Donatello, 1445-48, Pieta, bronze relief, Sant' Antonio, Padua; which video prefaces with 2nd 99, Donatello, Padova Crucifix, upper half In Donatello's Christ, in Villon's Everyman-self, the rising tragic twist is of the enobled, but mortal frame (Symonds): Whoever dies, dies with much pain; For when his wind and breath are sped, His gall breaks on his heart, and then He sweats, God knows that sweat of men! (No need to ask how God knows.) Son fiel se creve sur son cuer, Puis sue, Dieu scet quelle sueur! Significant for the whole Pascalian reversal of Promethean Renaissance, that Donatello, spearhead of pagan recovery and sensuous enfleshment, should also have led in the break to penitential force. From his Padua altar, 1st 100) Mantegna, c. 1490-95, foreshortened Dead Christ, Brera, Milan the Passion whirl spreads and mounts through Mantegna, from the early frescoes to this foreshortened Dead Christ. And in music too the stress of the humanist wedge driven into Gothic swells toward the late century and Reformation. Curious, that where we invoked Ockeghem, supposed canon-tormenter, for floating ease, we call on Obrecht, supposed softener, for the fevered counter-pole. 2nd 99) Music: Donatello, 1444, bronze Crucifix, upper half, Sant'Antonio, Padova; while video takes a closer detail Obrecht, c.1480-90(?), 3rd Kyrie, Missa Fortuna Desperata, Decca DL 79413 2nd 100) Again, Mantegna, Dead Christ, cropped 101) Botticelli, 1495, Deposition, Poldi-Pezzoli Museum, Milan; + V details 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �32 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Such the cry of contrition which shook Botticelli and burned Savonarolla. 102) Cosimo Tura, 1474, Pieta from the Roverella Polyptych, Louvre, Paris; + V detail (close Kyrie) And already by the '70's, in the Ferrara from which Savonarolla would move to Florence, Cosimo Tura had forged, from Gothic and Donatello, an anticipation of Mannerist and Baroque, strange, as in later literature, Gongora and Donne. 103) Antonella da Messina, 1475, Crucifixion, Beaux Arts, Brussels; with video details (cf. V103a) Music: Obrecht, c.1480-90(?), 2nd Agnus, Missa Fortuna Desperata, Decca DL 79413 Yet through the same years, Antonella da Messina, absorbing into Sicilian postGothic the space of Florence, with the nature and oil techniques of Flanders, was preparing (even in this Crucifixion) for the rich calm of Venetian high Renaissance. While Northern composers (here from the Agnus of the same Obrecht Mass) have steeped their counterpoint (fade Obrecht) in the chordal expressiveness of Italy: Music: Italian Frottola, c. 1490(?), from Rusticus, ut asinum..., AS 77 here a peasant's lament for his dead donkey (and had those humanists heard that early Christians vere rumored to have worshipped a crucified ass?) (fade Rusticus) 104) 104A) 104B) Quadruple: used in old 80 slide show, and now in digital; it combines 104A and 104B as listed below. From these, the video opens with singles of the Donatello (Va104), and of the Angelico (from Vc104) Double: {A} Donatello 1415-16, St. George, head, Bargello, Florence; and {B} Michelangelo 1501-04, David, head, Accademia, Florence Double: {A} Fra Angelico 1434?, Angel of Annunciation, Magi Panel, San Marco, Florence; and {B} Botticelli 1501, Mary from Mystical Nativity, National Gallery, London If the style-work of the 15th century is the articulation of humanist islands within the eddying continuance of Medieval faith, it is in Florence that the unconscious change 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �33 C.G. Bell Symbolic History (drop added to drop until crystallization nears) most dramatically presses toward conscious reordering. There the precursive souls, from Donatello (St. George, 1415) to Michelangelo (David, 1501-4), magnify the reasoned assertion of power. While others, from Angelico (1430) to Botticelli (1500) refine the spirit and line of Gothic, but with such ripening of the sensuous and aesthetic, as involves them in the same vortex. 105) Double: [A] Mantegna (above), c. 1468, Triumph of Silenus, British Museum, London (Engraving); and [B] Donatello (below), 1455-57, Bacchic Revel, base of Judith, Piazza della Signoria, Florence; first, video singles Music: Josquin, before 1500(?), from El Grillo, New York Pro Musica, Decca DL 79435 The polarity, working to climax, had shown itself in Donatello. On the pagan side — with Josquin's frottole, "El Grillo" — come Lorenzo de Medici's satyrs and nymphs in Bacchic dance: Or da Bacco riscaldati, Ballon, saltan tuttavia — taking up the levity of Donatello's sportive relief (below) — no doubt seen by Mantegna on his 1466 Florentine visit (compare his Triumph of Silenus, above). (fade El Grillo) 106) Donatello, 1455-57, Judith and Holofernes, bronze, Piazza del Signoria, Florence; with video details (first, below; then of Holofernes) Yet Donatello's carousing amorini Music: Josquin des Pres, close of Mass, Ave Maris Stella, Decca DL 79435 adorn the base of his most puzzling late bronze, Judith hacking off the head of Holofernes. That harrier of Israel dies drunk. The cushions beneath him seem spouting wine skins. So the Bacchantes in Poliziano's pioneer Opera (Isaac's music lost) display the head of deviant Orpheus: "Evoé Bacco, Bacco". Over all sex-death puzzles of this bronze pillar of flesh, one thing is clear, that the tension of the century and of Donatello himself, between pagan delight and penitential seizure, 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �34 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 107) Same, upper detail of Judith; video uses V107 (same, different framing) V107a) Same, another view, upper detail only has been spanned in a prophetic monument. But Josquin too worked over that divide: against the Grillo, and from the same Petrucci record, his Mass, Ave Maris Stella, raises the plea to the Lamb of God to a last strident cry. (close Josquin) Such Savonarolla's "Oimè": All Italy has asked the Judgment of war and plague... Return to Jesus Christ, his Mother and meek Spouse; Quit the inveterate vice of your godless ways. (CGB) 108) Botticelli, 1474, Adoration of the Magi, Uffizi, Florence (cf V108, CGB '59); + four video details (three from V108a and V108b) No one lived both myths, pagan and Christian, more poignantly than Botticelli. His 1475 Medicean Adoration of the Magi assumes the bel viver of his master, Lippi. Old Cosimo kneels to the child; in front, his son Piero (both dead by that time) faces the radiant Giuliano, soon to be murdered in the Pazzi conspiracy. Far right, looking out, we cannot miss the proud painter, Alessandro. Far left, Lorenzo, citizen-ruler holds court. Poliziano, prodigy of Renaissance poetry, fawns on him — a caress even Lorenzo's horse toothfully resents. (Digital adds 108c, Botticelli's Giuliano — see Face and Landscape 34 or 34a; then 108d, central detail of Venus from the Spring) Perhaps a year after this painting, Giuliano's love for Simonetta (Vespucci by marriage) would come to the climax of the January 1476 tournament, over which he, victor, would crown her queen. On April 26th of the same year, Simonetta's death of consumption ranked their love with Petrarch's and Dante's. On the second anniversary of her death, Giuliano's assassination turned it to myth. As Poliziano had written (for Giuliano): She seemed Minerva in act, Venus in face... a109) 7/1994 Botticelli, 1478, Primavera (Spring), whole, Uffizi, Florence; + V detail (using Va109 center) 15th Century: Early Renaissance �35 C.G. Bell 109) Symbolic History Same, Botticelli Primavera, upper left quadrant; + V detail: (to which add close-up of the little cloud, from V109a) or in La Giostra: Candida e ella, e candida la vesta, Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba... In Botticelli's Primavera, realm of that Simonetta Venus, Mercury with his wand disperses gathering clouds. How Dante's simultaneous levels of literal, political, moral and anagogical meaning, might reconcile our critics: — If Simonetta comes to this grove through the dispersed cloud of death, it remains Tuscan elysium, from which Good Counsel would banish clouds to ensue. As Striggio would write for Monteverdi's Orfeo more than a century later: "Deh, sommi Dei,/ Non torcete da noi benigno il guardo." 110) Botticelli, c. 1842, Pallas and the Centaur, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59; video shows upper half only So with Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur: the contention of political or moral ignores the same Dante-to-Can-Grande. No doubt the delivery of Reason from man-beast is guided by Minerva; yet her dress, adorned with the Medici emblem, surely hints at Lorenzo and some feat of diplomatic control. 111) Botticelli, 1483(?), Venus and Mars, National Gallery, London; + V detail Is the control more threatened in this Mars and Venus of perhaps a year later? It is cheerful when Venus as Humanitas prevails over Mars as discord. So at Alexander's marriage (Lucian) cupids played with his armor. But this loved-out Giuliano-Florence is in jeopardy. He sleeps, while those lusty satyrs with the lance stir up a hornet's nest. That the pun on Vespe (wasp) suggests the patronage of Simonetta's Vespucci, can only complement the danger, which, as in Biblical prophecy, is both past and future. 112) 7/1994 Botticelli ,1490, Head of St. John from Madonna of San Barnabas, Uffizi, Florence 15th Century: Early Renaissance �36 C.G. Bell Symbolic History By 1490, in the head of St. John from the Barnabas altar, Botticelli wakes to the fullness-of-time being announced by Savonarolla in his San Marco sermons of that year: The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord." 113) Botticelli, c. 1494-95, Calumny of Apelles, Uffizi, Florence; + V details (using V113, Uffizi slide?) By the old view, Botticelli's reconstitution (c.1495) of Apelles' Calumny, described by Lucian — an innocent man slandered before a Midas-eared king and dragged to judgment, with the blackrobed penitence to follow, and the final pure revelation of naked truth — was aimed, on the political level, at the papal censure of Savonarolla: Botticelli (here his late works confirm Vasari) shaken by those Apocalyptic sermons. A strange caution, to discredit that, while making an issue of this hall, carved with pagan and Christian subjects — as if the painter had not devoted those years to reading and illustrating Dante, whose Purgatory reliefs enforce, by just such polarity, the cleansing of politics and spirit. 114) Double: Botticelli 1492-97, Dante drawings, {A} Inferno 18 and {B} Paradiso 6, E. & W. Berlin (video singles only; see file) Perhaps Botticelli bore his share of Calumny as well: as in Vasari's story: "Without any education, and scarce knowing how to read, he writes a commentary on Dante!" But who else pursued almost to the point of starving, soul's ascent from the rank grovelling of the Bad Ditches, to the flame-geometry of Beatrice's Empyrean? In soul as in paint, where was the link, but in Botticelli, to Leonardo and Michelangelo? 115) Piero della Francesca, c. 1455, Bearing the Sacred Wood, Frescoes of the Legend of the Cross, San Francesco, Arezzo (video: detail only) From mid-century (as under the pastel calm of Piero della Francesca — here one of the Arezzo frescoes, where a laborer carrying the timber destined, centuries after, for the true cross, becomes a mystic prototype of Christ) 116) 7/1994 Piero della Francesco, 1465(?), portraits of Federigo de Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Uffizi, Florence 15th Century: Early Renaissance �37 C.G. Bell Symbolic History what was heightening force and counterforce was the emergence of the new man (new woman) — the harmonious space of Piero's religious art complemented by the transforming boldness of his portrayed patron, Federigo de Montefeltro of Urbino, here with his Sforza wife. 117) Double: {A} Hugo v.d. Goes, c. 1471(?), head from Magi Adoration, BerlinDahlem; and {B} Mantegna, 1480, head of archer from St. Sebastian, Louvre, Paris As the century advances, such assertion swells under the visible interpenetration of Flemish realism and the revived antiquity of Italy — (left) one of the Magi from a Hugo van der Goes altar, about 1470, in the tradition of van Eyck and van der Weyden, though already humanized from the South; and (right) ten years later, absorbing and Romanizing that Flemish skill, this archer from Mantegna's St. Sebastian. 118) Double: {A} Fr. Laurano, c. 1470, Battista Sforza, Bargello, Florence; and {B} Pollaiuolo, c. 1475, Giuliano da Medici, Bargello, Florence (with video singles: B, then A) In Florence, two portraits, from 1470 and '75, by Laurano and Pollaiuolo, of a Sforza daughter and a Medici son, juxtaposed, enact Renaissance drama. But what Machiavelli would concentrate in the 1518 Mandragola, had been voiced before 1500 and in Spain, in the tragi-comedy of the high-born Melibea and her seduction by the somewhat lower Calisto, with the help of the old bawd Celestina. Calisto's passion: If God would give me, for the sight of you, a seat among his saints in heaven, I would not take it; his idolatry when asked "Are you a Christian?" I am a Melibean. I acknowledge no other deity in heaven while she remains on earth; Melibea's proud purity: Vete, vete de ahí, torpe — Go, wretch; I cannot tolerate one who would plant in me the delights of illicit love; her vulnerability to Celestina, that hag "who could move stones to lechery by her art" — shape tragedy: 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �38 C.G. Bell 119) Symbolic History Double: French Renaissance, c. 1455, Figures from the House of Jacques Coeur, Bourges; first, V details of the singles: Va119 and Vb119 (CGB '81) "My daughter, why have you left me to despair, weeping and lonely in this vale of tears?" — "¿Por qué me dejaste triste y solo in hac lachrymarum valle?" In France, with Jacques Coeur, merchant-prince of Bourges — his motto "A vaillans coeurs, riens impossible" — Renaissance assertion, battling Medieval Fortune and the brittle world, had sowed that tragic field. Founder of French trade with the Levant, rescuer of the national currency, who financed Charles VII's wars and fought at his side to oust the English from Normandy, who built chapels and established colleges — Coeur, betrayed by the King and accused without pretext of plotting and poisoning, was tried by his enemies, fined what might now be a hundred million dollars, and thrown into prison, his goods divided among the king's favorites. After five years he escaped, but died of sickness as he led a fleet against the Turk for the relief of Rhodes. At the windows of his Bourges house, these carved servants, man and maid, look out for their master's return. 120) Double: {A} G. da Milano, 1365, Birth of the Virgin, Santa Croce, Florence; and {B} Ghirlandaio, 1486-90, Birth of St. John the Baptist, Santa Maria Novella, Florence; alternating with video singles, or details (V120A and V120B) Music: Osw. v. Wolkenstein, from 14th-cent. Italian, Ave Maria (instr.) ARC-3033 Measure in Florence that advance of earthly assurance — here two sacred births: (below) of the Virgin, by Giovanni da Milano, later 14th century — with von Wolkenstein's transcription of Italian Ars Nova; (fade v. Wolkenstein) Music: 7/1994 H. Isaac, pub. 1506, Missa la Spagna, Agnus Dei, Seraphim SIC 6104 15th Century: Early Renaissance �39 C.G. Bell Symbolic History (above) Ghirlandaio's 149O Birth of St. John the Baptist — with Isaac's Mass formed of Spanish dances — attuned to this coffered room, festive with robed ladies, where a fruitbearing girl billowing in, seems almost to have arrived from Magna Graecia. 121) 121a) Ghirlandaio, 1486-90, Visitation fresco, central section, Santa Maria Novella, Florence Same, upper detail It is what this outdoor scene from Ghirlandaio's same Santa Maria Novella frescoes perfects: this meeting of Elizabeth and Mary by a walled piazzale across the Arno — those heady youths leaning over, where something like the Old Palace towers from below. 122) Memling, 1489, Reliquary of St. Ursula, view of one side, St. John's Hospital, Bruges; + V detail In Bruges that late-century enrichment peaks to the gold-housed and jewel-bright miniatures of Memling's Reliquary of St. Ursula — Christian life and martyrdom (as in Isaac's dancing Agnus Dei) aglow with delight. (end lst Agnus) 123) Memling, 1489, Same, 1st scene, Arrival in Cologne (video: details only, below and above) Music: Isaac, 1484, reset c.1500(?), Isbruck, ich muss dich lassen, Syntagma SIC-6052 Memling's individual scenes, this Arrival in Cologne (with the death-annunciation in the upper chamber) are as feelingly suspended between the poignance of the story and the gladness of earth, as Isaac's homophonic farewell to Innsbruck: "Isbruck, ich muss dich lassen". 124) Pinturicchio, 1503-08, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini frescoes, East Wall Library, Duomo, Siena (CGB '86) In Italian magnification of Flemish precision, Memling's reliquary sequence expands to the architectural and perspectival vistas with which Pinturicchio, soon after 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �40 C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1500, muralled the Sienese Cathedral library — such tour-de-force panoramas (from the life of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, left, the a125) 125) Same, Aeneas Journey to Basel, fresco; + V detail of travellers (from Va125) Same, Pinturicchio, Journey, upper part, detail of storm Journey to Basel, with its background of harbor and storm) as if the "open road" of Isaac's songs — (fade Isbruck) Music: Isaac, before 1500(?), from Tmeiskin was jonck, I,5,B2b AS (33RPM) "Glück ist in allen Gassen"; with this refrain from his Flemish "Tmeiskin was jonck" — (refrain and fade) were spun quod libet to a glad Missa Carminum. Music: 126) Isaac, c. 1506(?), Missa Carminum, 2nd Hosannah, MHS 1777 (end Hosannah) Luca Signorelli, 1499-1504, Resurrection of the Dead etc., Duomo, Orvieto (CGB '84); + V detail Music: Josquin des Pres, pub.1519, from Miserere, AS 107(A) Yet here as earlier, the claim of earth advances an always more physical doom. So, with Pinturicchio, comes an Umbrian complement, Signorelli — his masterpiece the Apocalypse fresoces at Orvieto — this Resurrection of the Dead. It is a mood to which Josquin continually returns: "Miserere!" (fade Miserere) 127) Gutenburg Bible, c. 1454, Illuminated Page, Proverbs, New York Public Library (video shows first two details, inserting between them: V127a) 19th century color engraving of the 1450 event; so returns to 127, 2nd detail, then whole) Why is this manuscript so mechanical, its illuminations so dull? The question is unfair, since this landmark of progress is the Gutenberg Bible, printed in German Mainz about 1454. It is mechanical because it was set from moveable type and could be reproduced toward a limit which in our time pumps books on and off the cartel shelves 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �41 C.G. Bell Symbolic History like the tasteless apples of a supermarket. Dull in illumination because it no doubt employed what Adam Smith would acclaim as the time-saving principle of division of labor. The multiplied power of Renaissance was to rest on the output of the press; but it will remind us how history dismantles one wall to build another that (as in Greece, bardic memory disappeared with the written word) the sacred and aristocratic glory of the parchment manuscript could only go under in Europe's forward rush. a128) Verrochio and Leonardo, 1472-75, Annunciation, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); + V detail Vb128) Verrochio and Leonardo, c. 1473, Baptism of Christ, Uffizi, Florence; close detail: head of the Leonardo angel to the left 128) Same: Baptism of Christ, whole, (video shows center spread only) Music: Pierre de la Rue c.1500?, Sanctus from the Missa Ave sanctissima Maria, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC 6104 Meanwhile, a genius was growing up in Medici Florence who would bring Renaissance thought, science and art to such a harmony as in the spacings of de la Rue's six voice Sanctus. The old account of Leonardo as Verrocchio's apprentice painting a beautiful angel (left) in the master's Baptism (c. 1473?) has been confirmed by Bode's study of the oil glazes — 129) Same, Baptism, detail of Angels and Landscape (which video draws from 128) which, with X-ray analysis, has also given the landscape above to Leonardo. In this luminous spread of water under rocks, the boy seems to have envisaged what would become the geology of his notebooks: 130) Same, Landscape detail (or V130) 130a) Leonardo, c. 1505, Mona Lisa, detail, Louvre, Paris V130b) Leonardo, 1508-10, from Virgin and Child with St. Anne, detail with background, Louvre, Paris I perceive that the surface of the earth was from of old entirely filled up and covered over in its level plains by the salt waters, and that the mountains, the bones of the earth, with their wide bases, penetrated and towered up amid the air, covered over with much high-lying soil. Subsequently incessant rains have... stripped bare part of the lofty summits... so that the rock finds itself exposed to the air... And the 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �42 C.G. Bell Symbolic History earth from the slopes and mountains has raised the floors of the seas... and caused the plain to be uncovered... Cusanus "privative infinity" sheds privation, becoming almost the cosmos "Won from the void and formless infinite". (cut de la Rue after "Sabaoth") 131) 131a) Leonardo, 1513-16, John the Baptist as Smiling Precursor, Louvre, Paris; + V detail Leonardo, c. 1514, Self, red chalk, Library, Turin (video, detail only) As the wisdom of age had touched the boy, child-promise smiles on the old Leonardo — this Louvre St. John as Precursor — with Pico della Mirandola: Let a certain holy ambition invade the mind so that we may not be content with mean things but may aspire to the highest things and strive with all our force to attain them: for if we will to, we can...He who is a seraph, that is, a lover, is in God; and more God is in him, and God and he are one. Though the smile is ambiguous in Leonardo's Notebooks: Behold now the hope and desire of going back to one's own country or returning to primal chaos... of the man who looks forward to each new spring... and does not perceive he is longing for his dissolution... as elements... imprisoned...long for the source... What has the Precursor precursed? a132) Leonardo, c. 1483 ff., Great Crossbow on Carriage, Ambrosian Library, Milan 132) Leonardo, 1483 ff., Scythed car and armored tank, British Museum, London V132a) Leonardo, 1483 ff., Bombard with shrapnel, Ambrosian Lihrary, Milan It would be as in Shelley: Although a subtler sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew. Had not most of the 1482 letter to Sforza promised instruments of war: 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �43 C.G. Bell Symbolic History I have plans for destroying every fortress...not founded upon rock... for making cannon... engines for attack or defence... ships which can resist the fire of cannon... armoured cars... which will enter the serried ranks of the enemy with their artillery... and behind these the infantry will be able to follow without opposition... Talents applied, more than his art, in the service of Il Moro and Cesare Borgia — that Caesar, Machiavelli also would have enabled. In the floating Utopia of High Renaissance, the modern world, with its explosive potentialities, is born. 133) Dürer, "1500," Self as Christ, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; with V details So with person. In this Dürer, inscribed 1500, Cusanus' omnivoyant God-man becomes the deepest reflection of the mirrored self. As Eckhart had said in a passage that would stir Luther: "God has become man in order that I may become God." Was that not the call of the Luther Bible: "zu der herrlichen Freiheit der Kinder Gottes"? The first history of music on records (the Parlophone "2000 Years") paired, with the Dufay Trumpet Gloria already heard, Josquin's Et Incarnatus from the Missa Pange Lingua — "and was made man." Music: Josquin des Pres, c.1500-10(?), Et Incarnatus, close, Parl. R-1019 Thus — Berlin chorus and all — the Western Incarnation takes up the cross of the world. 134) Michelangelo, 1536-41, Last Judgment, detail of Trumpeting Angels, Sistine Chapel, Rome; first, video detail Music: Cabezon, c. 1540-50, opening, Tiento de 4 Tono, Videro, GSC52 A Michelangelo, in the storm to follow ("Tuba mirum spargens sonum"), felt also in the Tientos of Cabezon, must have dreamed sometimes of the Lorenzo de' Medici Florence of his youth. (fade Cabezon) 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �44 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Va135) Botticelli 1482, Birth of Venus, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59); detail of Venus, upper half from slide 136 135) Same, whole picture (which video crops) Music: Isaac, c. 1485(?), Helas, 3-v, viols (Cape), AS-43 There Botticelli had brought Gothic line to an ultimate clarity of nostalgia in joy — leaves, waves, blown roses, the pure Platonic nude — as Poliziano had described in La Giostra, that unfinished romance which carries in germ the whole future of paganizing poetry and art: A woman born of the waves, lovesome and free In every act, in her face more than human, Wafted by lively zephyrs to the shore Upon a shell, while heaven smiles upon her... (CGB) 136) Same, figure of Venus (CGB '59); here video takes from 135 Venus and the figure to our right) You would have sworn the goddess came from the wave, Gathering with her right hand her golden hair, The other lifted, the sweet fruit to save From greedy spoil; and as she touched the shore With sacred feet, seen herbs and flowers pave The barren strand... (CGB) 137) 138) Same, detail of figure to the right (CGB '59) Same, detail of figures to the left (CGB '59); to which video adds Venus' face (again from 136), with a return to 135, the whole picture ...and marked with what light air Three nymphs accost her and her coming hail And close invest her in a starry veil. (CGB) Michelangelo could have remembered the music too, Isaac — not the brooding Lamentation but ballades sighed by the viols, as wistfully glad as the receding curves of Botticelli's shore. In that backward looking, even Michelangelo, or whoever, after him, has been most partisan in the embattled grandeur of Promethean consciousness, might drop, like 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance �45 C.G. Bell Symbolic History Milton's Adam and Eve, "som natural tears." Isaac Helas) 139) (fade Flemish, c. 1460-70, Virgin and Child with Mary of Burgundy, detail, Hours of Charles the Bold, National Library, Vienna (Landsburg), (video ranges from whole over various details) Since part of every soul must yearn (like the imprisoned elements) for a naive anonymous grace — here from Mary of Burgundy's Book of Hours, the daily reading in that same book become an allegorical window. Such quiet pre-selfhood lightens an English wedding fragment from the time: The maidens came When I was in my mother's bower; I had all that I would. The bailey beareth the bell away; The lily, the rose, the rose I lay. 140) Same, Mary of Burgundy, whole (while video continues with details) The silver is white, red is the gold; The robes they lay in fold. The bailey beareth the bell away; The lily, the rose, the rose I lay. And through the glass window shines the sun. How should I love, and I so young? The bailey beareth the bell away; The lily, the lily, the rose I lay. — As frail, as bright, as the unmatched maiden of the other poem: ...As dew in Aprille That falleth on the spray. Moder and maiden Was never non but sche; Well may swich a lady Godes moder be. 7/1994 15th Century: Early Renaissance � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 46 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 15th Century : Early Renaissance, Symbolic History, Part 14 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 14 of the Symbolic History Series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_14_15th_Century--Early_Renaissance Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/13a3f6b41c31910812b583216545994a.pdf 669ffc000efd5ac51cbe1d8dcc741d45 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 13. 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 September 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 13: 1400 — Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 1) Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1425-9, Adoration of the Lamb, from the Altarpiece of St. Baron, Ghent; first, video detail, center 1a) Same, detail, upper left V1b) Same, detail, upper right 1c) From the same altarpiece, Panels of Just Judges and of Knights of the Cross Music: Dunstable, Ave Regina Coelorum, close, Cape, ARC 3052 Twenty-five years after Chaucer’s death in 1400, and the Van Eyck Adoration of the Lamb heightens the features of his world: the force of robed leaders, commoners, churchmen — I saw his sleves purfled at the hand With fur ...he was a fair prelaat — in a landscape of precise spring — such human filling in of Gothic symbol as Dunstable, also by 1425, achieves in harmony. (end Dunstable) Yet what the proudest, earthiest, lustiest of those Chaucerian characters was headed toward 2) William the Englishman 1180-84, East Chapel (“Becket’s Crown”), Canterbury Cathedral English Norman, c. 1100, Crypt, Canterbury Cathedral William the Englishman, 1179-84, Trinity Chapel Ambulatory, Canterbury Cathedral 2a) 2b) was Canterbury, 12th century shrine of Becket — sacramental blue and gules burning in the vaulted gloom — from that time when even the popular burden was “Worldes blis ne last no throwe.” Music: 9/1995 English 13th cent., “Worldes blis ne last no throwe,” RCA V-LM6015 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is of the essence also of the Waning of the Middle Ages, that the ground of Contemptu Mundi still sounds under Chaucer: This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we been pilgrymes, passing to and fro. ("Knight’s Tale") (fade Worldes Blis) Meanwhile English architecture, by a kind of skeletal adaptation had reached from Canterbury toward the open clarity of a stately hall. 3 or V3) Early English, 1250-60, Five Sisters Window, York Cathedral (CGB ‘80) First was Early English, 1250, the lancet heightening of the Five Sisters Window in York — just as English thought in Bacon took its own more earthly-immediate way. 4) 4a) Decorated, 1286-1306, Octagonal Chapter House, Wells Cathedral Same, especially the fan vaulting (CGB ‘84) Second the Decorated, as in this 1300 Chapter House of Wells, generates out of Geometric the Curvilinear wreathings which would inspire French Flamboyant — while in thought Duns Scottus led Occam to the empirical outwardness and spiritual intuition aimed at Renaissance and Reformation. It is no clearer, on the surface, how Occam’s study of suppositio (one thing’s standing for another), with its hair-splitting — as of “mobile confused distributive suppositio” from “immobile confused distributive suppositio” — widens creed for a future Cartesian structure reared on causal reason, Va5) Same as 5, video detail of the lierne vaulting (CGB ‘84) 5) Perpendicular, 1337-57, Choir of Gloucester Cathedral with great East Window; Digital adds east window detail than how the marvelous involution of lierne vault, culminating, mid-14th century, in Gloucester Choir, can shape Renaissance out of Gothic; yet the passage from Canterbury apse to the wide-windowed fabric of Perpendicular, must emerge, like the chordhumanizing of music, as a shift from other-worldly severity, through sacramental purity and elaboration, toward earthly vigor in the now Nominal scholastic frame. a6) English Perpendicular, 1337-1412, Cloisters, Gloucester Cathedral June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 2 �C.G. Bell 6) 6a) Symbolic History Late Perpendicular, 1426-80, Divinity School, Oxford (CGB ‘80) Same, 1445-88, Duke Humphrey Library, above the Divinity School, Bodleian, Oxford From which the road is open to the 15th-century perfection of a ceremonial space (as music from its Gothic resources brought the polyphonies of Dunstable), here the Oxford Divinity School, smaller than the great Perpendicular cage carved out of the Romanesque choir of Gloucester. Thus followers polish gems from Chaucer’s great mine — the Scot Henryson that bright windy night after hail, when he made The Testament of Cresseid: I mend the fyre and beikit [baked] me about, Than tuik ane drink my spreitis to comfort, And armit me well fra the cauld thairout; To cut the winter night and mak it short, I tuik ane Quair [Book] and left all uther sport, Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious, Of fair Creisseid, and worthie Troylus. 7) 7a) Flemish Civic Gothic, 13th cent. (rebuilt after World War I), Cloth Hall and Belfrey, Ypres Again, Hubert and Jan van Eyck 1425-9, Adoration of the Lamb, Patriarchs and Prophets to the left, Ghent From Siena and Florence to London (as here in Flemish Ypres), guild and trading life had reared civic halls, thronged by Chaucer’s time with all his faculties: the Merchant with his forked beard, determined to keep the sea open between Orwell and Middleburg; the Seargeant of the Law, quoting the statutes and cases since King William, and for whom all was fee simple in effect; those guildmen clothed in one livery; and churchmen in so many — bustling the belfried square. Va8) Jean Pucelle, 1343, whole of f. 25, Belleville Breviary, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; first, video detail, upper left 8) Same, lower left, Cain and Abel, etc. 8a) Luttrell Psalter, 1335-40, Harvest Cart Going Uphill, British Library, London 8b) Misericord Carving, c. 1400, Sow and Piglets, Worcester Cathedral June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In poetry too, as in the arts, the mundane style had been ripening over the North since the late 13th century, as in Ruteboef (“Dieus m’a fait compagnon a Job”): God has companioned me with Job When he wiped me at a swab Clean of all I had. This right eye that was my best, Webbed and blind, has left me lost, To grope my road... And now my wife has borne a brat And my horse slipped on a slat And cracked his leg: The nurse is at me like a plague, Grabbing money by the bag, For baby’s pap and souse, Or he’ll be back to yell in the house. (CGB) A sentiment paired, after 1400, in the Second Shepherds Play: I have more cradles to rock than ever I had... A house full of young fat, The devil knock their skulls flat, Woe to him has much brat And little bread... (CGB) The lively details of sacred art. a9) Peter Parler aus Gmund, 1379-93, Self from the triforium, Cathedral, Prague Vb9) English Carving, c. 1380(?), Effigy of St. John the Baptist, detail, from old church of St. Nicholas, now in Hereford Cathedral (CGB ‘84) 9) C. Sluter, c. 1390, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, Chartreuse, Dijon (CGB ‘80) 9a) Same, upper detail; video pans on slide 9, while slide show works from an old photo (formerly V9); digital, like video, pans on 9 In the ground of self- and earth-denial we are watching the rise of a vital antithesis, of self and earth as modes of Western assurance and power. In the age of Chaucer they still claim the sacred embrace. Let us begin at the end with the Retractions the poet appended to the Parson’s Tale: I biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; and namely of my June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History translacions and enditynges of wordly vanitees, the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns... (a list follows of most of his works) and many a song and many a leccherous lay; that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne... that I may been oon of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved... Music: French, early 15th cent, from Tuba Gallicalis, Nonesuch H-1010 In this proudest portrait of Chaucer’s time by the chief sculptor of full-robed human force, Claus Sluter’s 1390 Philip the Bold of Burgundy is on his knees. With Chaucer, what he repents of is not simply what we would call sin, but the earthly fabric to which his commitment is so strong: the art he cultivates, the music of the Tuba Gallicalis. (end Tuba Gallicalis) 10) 10a) E. Anglian (Norwich), c. 1330, Nativity from Life of Virgin, Cluny, Paris Same, detail (can be videoed from 10) Music: English, c. 1310, Agnus Dei, Seraphim, SIC-6052 (2,5) The backward-looking part of every Christian treasured an etherial thinness, where sacred and secular dream timelessly — islanded in contempt of the world, the sensuous poignance of the real (English, 1330): June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Nou skrinketh rose and lylie flour, That whilen ber that suete savour In somer, that suete tyde; Ne is no quene so stark ne stour, Ne no levedy so bryht in bour, That ded ne shal by glyde. Whoso wol fleyshlust forgon, And hevenè blis abyde, On Jesu be is thoht anon, That therlèd was ys side. 11) (fade Agnus Dei) Simone Martini, 1325-26, St. Clare, S. Francesco, Lower Church, Assisi; + V detail In Simone Martini’s Ars Nova Italy, that distance is refined like an aesthetic perfume, of which Chaucer’s 1370 Book of the Duchess distills a Northern essence, reaching back, past the Romance of the Rose, toward Chrestien’s “land from which no stranger returns.” It is there, deeper than dream psychology, that the Man in Black reveals what we have already learned: 12) 12a) Spanish, 14th cent., Queen Elisenda de Moncada tomb, Pedralbes Monastery, Barcelona S. Martini, 1333, Entombment of Christ, detail, Staatliche Museen, Berlin “I have lost more than thou weanest.” “Allas, sir, how? what may that be?” “She ys ded!” “Nay!” “Yis, be me trouthe!” “Is that youre los? Be God, hit ys routhe!” And with that word ryght anoon They gan to strake forth; al was doon For that tyme, the hert huntyng... We have a sudden insight that the modes of joy and pain, the very modes of feeling, of being, shift like styles of dress. Medieval grief is sharp, fragile, enigmatic. 13) 13a) Sebastiano del Piombo, c. 1517, Pieta, Museo Civico, Viterbo, Italy Same, upper detail Far from the voluminousness of a l6th century sorrow. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 6 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Willaert, pub. 1539, O Crux Splendidior, opening, Odyssey 32 16 0202 Its landscape of shadowed space (del Piombo) did not exist in Chaucer’s experience, any more than a solemn music of chordal grief (Willaert, 1539). These realms had no more been explored than Columbus’ America. (fade Willaert) 14) Visigoth to 14th cent. but esp. 13th cent., Porte de l’Aude, Wall of Carcasonne V14a) Same, another view Chaucer’s first period, before the Ars Nova impact of the Florence he visited in 1373, looks to the older Gothic and Chivalric. Let the fortifications of Carcasonne and two scenes of the chase, with “Au tens pascour,” as vigorous a secular motet as the late 13th century offers, revive that Ars Antiqua. Music: French, late 13th cent., Au tens pascour — Lautre jour, AS 71 1st 15) E. Anglian, c. 1300, lower detail of Beatus Page, Peterborough Psalter, Bibliotheque Royale, Brussels 1st 16) Upper-Rhine, c. 1320, Manessa (Minnesinger) MS, Walther von Thüfen, upper detail; University Library, Heidelberg (end Au Tens pascour) 2nd 15) Again, Peterborough Psalter,whole Beatus Page; video: lower half only To shift from the Peterborough Psalter, 2nd 16) Again, Walther von Thüfen, whole page (here video also repeats 14, of Carcasonne) or the Minnesinger delights of Walther von Thüfen — or from the fortifications of Carcasonne — 1st 17) 1st 18) June 1996 Italian Gothic, 1297-1310, Palazzo Publico, Siena (CGB ‘86, from the town heights); while video takes a detail from V1st 17, a wider view over town and countryside (CGB ‘86) Simone Martini, 1328, Guidoriccio da Fogliano, horseman, center of the fresco, Palazzo Publico, Siena (V1st 18: shows more background) 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V1st 19) North Italian, 1329, Equestrian monument of Can Grande della Scala, with pedestal, Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona to the city halls of Italy, here Siena, is to feel the sudden stretching of Chaucer’s tetrameter in the House of Fame (c. 1375-80?) when the line straight out of the Divine Comedy breaks in: “O Thought, that wrot al that I mette...” Thus the Eagle lifts the poet to a vastness where he loses the poem. In later works he speaks the fulness of pentameter: To Troie is come this woful Troilus. Just so the Gherardellus Caccia against the older motet, or the new horseman, Guidoriccio (and then Can Grande), against the old: Music: 2nd 17) 2nd 18) 2nd 19) 1st 20) 21) Gherardellus de Florentia, c. 1360, Tosto che l’alba, Decca DL 79428 Closer view of the Palazzo Publico and tower from the square itself; while video takes a closer detail from the lower part of 1st 17 (CGB), adding from the same slide a detail of the upper part of the tower Detail, upper front, of the Guidoriccio, horse and rider, which video and slide show share Upper part of Equestrian Can Grande — of which video takes a closer detail (front) Pisan (Traini) c. 1348, Allegory of Death, detail of Hunt, from old Alinari print, Camp Santo, Pisa; + V closer detail Pisan (Traini), same, whole fresco (1938 Alinari colored photo) (end Gherardellus) 2nd 20) Left side of 21, with Hunt, etc.; with various video details, from 20, 21, and V2nd 20 For 2nd 21) Central part of 21: beggars, Death, corpses, etc., with various video details 1st 22) Lower right of 21: Death advancing toward the Garden of Delight; with video preview of the Alinari print of the Garden 3rd 21) Varied detail of 21: beggars, Death, corpses, and souls; with close video details from Va3rd 21 and V3rd 21a (soul tugged by angel and devil) 3rd 21b) Upper left detail of hermits June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 8 �C.G. Bell a2nd 22) June 1996 Symbolic History Detail of music in the Garden 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 9 �C.G. Bell 2nd 22) Symbolic History Same, whole Garden of Love from the fine old Alinari print (From the 9 slides of the show and 4 video extras, the video shapes 14 views of the fresco.) The mid-century Pisan Allegory of Death (a bad reproduction made before it was ruined in the last war) epitomizes late Gothic — a moral vision, yeasty with new life. Where the rock gulley of the fallen world sprouts ephemeral flowers, a troop of hunters encounter three corpses. They draw back; one holds his nose. Above the coffins, a hermit displays the scroll of our vanity. And the whole scene opens for us: right of center, a bat-winged Death swings her scythe over mounds of bodies. Beggars, the blind and halt, petition her to take them — “cumber-worlds” like forsaken Troilus: “Delyvere now the world.../ Of me, that am the wofulleste wyght...” Capricious as Fortune (“That holds but by a wire”) she advances into the orange grove of delight, where Cupids, already on the wing, lead long-fingered ladies (Langland: “And ye, lovely ladyes, with youre longe fyngres”) in music and courtly love. Death mows. And the moisture-laden souls breathe from the mouths, to be borne up and away by angels, or stuffed by demons in the flaming hill; or as twice in Dante, tugged, above and below. Better in this brunt to join the Dark Age hermits on the hill. So Petrarch brings his spent years to a pious close: Now I go grieving for the days on earth I passed in worship of a mortal thing... But regret cannot quench the flames of a lifetime: vegghio, penso, ardo, piango, e chi mi sface sempre m’è inanzi per mia dolce pena... I wake, I brood, I burn, I weep; she who wounds me Is with me always in my honied grief. (CGB) Chaucer too brings the Troilus to a poetic Retraction: June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History O yonge, fresshe folkes, he or she, In which that love up groweth with youre age, Repayreth hom fro wordly vanyte, And of youre herte up casteth the visage To thilke God that after his ymage Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a faire, This world, that passeth soone as floures faire. 23) Jan van Eyck, 1427-29, Eve, detail, altarpiece, St. Bavon, Ghent; + V closer detail (video closes with a double of Adam and Eve, from V23a) But that wise counsel melts in the burning touch Chaucer’s art was part of: Hire armes smale, hire streghte bak and softe, Hire sydes longe, flesshly, smothe, and white He gan to stroke, and good thrift bad ful ofte Hire snowisshe throte, hire brestes rounde and lite: Thus in this hevene he gan hym to delite, And therwithal a thousand tyme hire kiste, That what to don, for joie unnethe he wiste. In the deepening incarnation of late Gothic, Chaucer looks back to 1300 psalters and forward to the Van Eyck Eve, painted twenty seven years after his death. 24) Limbourg Brothers, 1413-16, Eden, detail, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly Even the Limbourg Eve follows him by 13 years; yet in sensuous caress Chaucer may surpass the bubble Eden of the Tres Riches Heures: Wher is myn owene lady, lief and deere? Wher is hire white brest? Wher is it, where? The beauty and question of earth cuts the age of faith like a sword. 25) 25a) Lor. Maitani, 1310-30, Creation of Eve, Façade, Duomo, Orvieto (CGB ‘84) Same, detail (also CGB '84); while video uses V25 and V25a The antecedent refinements are in trecento Italy — Maitani, on the façade of Orvieto. In music it is Landini, blind organist of Florence who smoothes Ars Nova progressions almost to the limpid grace with which the 15th century begins. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 11 �C.G. Bell Music: 26) Symbolic History Landini, c. 1370(?), Gram piant’ agli occhi, opening, (Cape) AS 63 Andrea Bonaiuti, 1365, girls dancing, detail from the Spanish Chapel, Florence; + V detail from V26a (cut Landini) A sweetness rivalled in Chaucer’s English: Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe, That hast this wintres wedres overshake, And driven away the longe nyghtes blake! 27) 27b) Same, whole fresco, Triumph of the Church, Spanish Chapel, Florence; + V details and a return to the whole (replacing slide 27a: same fresco, detail of dancing girls and adjacent allegory) Most of the same fresco from bottom up through the gate of heaven (CGB '59), from which the video selects the figures by the Church, below In Boccaccio’s Decameron a joy-loving company withdraw from the scythe of the Black Death in Florence; yet even the escape is planned in the church of Santa Maria Novella, to which the ladies return when their ten days of story telling are done. And if we ask the context of these Spanish Chapel dancing girls, we find them to the right, in an allegory of the Triumph of the Church (through the cloister of that same Santa Maria Novella); we see their child gaiety yield, just above, to music and thought, from which a man in green rises (Boccaccio, Chaucer) to kneel, nearer center, and prepare by confession for Christ’s judgment gate, over the Cathedral of Florence — the plan lately agreed on, 1366-8, though the dome would not be built for sixty years. From the triple portal spilled all phases of medieval life. Even Chaucer’s most ribald characters have their sacred tie. Like Troilus, “withinne the temple... pleyinge,” they play on pilgrimage. a28) b28) 28) English (Westminster), c 1265-70, Douce Apocalypse, Lamb opens the first seal, MS page 13, Bodleian, Oxford English Carving, c. 1380(?), St. John the Baptist, now Hereford Cathedral (CGB ‘84; cf. Vb9, above); + V detail Again, Douce Apocalypse, The Temple Opened in Heaven, page 41, Bodleian, Oxford June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History When the visionary soul of England, revealed in the Douce Apocalypse about 1270, expands to the new century, Judgment finds in Langland a witness solider than this St. John: In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne, I shope me in shroudes as I a shepe were, In habite as an heremite unholy of workes, Went wyde in this world wondres to here. Ac on a May mornynge on Malverne hulles Me byfel a ferly of fairy me thoughte; I was wery forwandred and went me to reste Under a brode banke bi a bornes side, And as I lay and lened and loked in the wateres, I slombred in a slepyng it sweyved so merye. Thanne gan I to meten a merveilouse swevene, That I was in a wildernesse wist I never where, As I bihelde in-to the est an hiegh to the sonne, I seigh a toure on a toft trielich ymaked; Va29) Vb29) 29) Italian MS, later 14th cent., Picture of Dante’s Hell; video: detail only English, c. 1400, MS of Marco Polo, scene of Venice, Bodleian, Oxford Jean de Bandol and Nic. Bataille, 1379-81, Four Horsemen, Apocalypse Tapestries, Angers; + V detail A depe dale binethe a dongeon there-inne, With depe dyches and derke and dredful of sight. A faire felde ful of folke fonde I there bytwene, Of alle maner of men the mene and the riche, Worchyng and wandryng as the worlde asketh. Music: Guillaume de Machault, c. 1370(?), 4v Motet, Christe qui lux es — Veni creator spiritus, close (Munrow) ARCHIV 2723045 (3-b) Like Piers the Plowman, like Guillaume de Machault’s four-voice cry for Christ the Light and Creator Spirit, the Angers tapestries body forth Apocalypse. What bore on Rome and the early Church, Nero and the Legions, seats itself in the corruption and crisis, the expected radical reform of the estates of Europe and France: it is the good — Langland’s Piers, Chaucer’s Farmer and Poor Parson — who face the Horsemen, or the Dragon. (close Machault) June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 13 �C.G. Bell a30) Symbolic History Same, Four Apocalypse scenes, with one of the seven Bishops of Asia, Angers Tapestries Detail of such a group (underexposed; CGB ‘89) from which the video hints dimly at the symbolic borders, above and below; digital omits this Again, from the Angers Tapestries, same Bishop of Asia; video: detail only Vb30) 30) The clustered fours of scenes, with the canopied Bishops of Asia, are framed, like Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, in a symbolic space, a top border of angels, stars, clouds; a base of flowered earth; between, the anagogical Coming is of here and now. The very spirit butterflies of the seven churches display the married wings of Anjou lillies and Bretagne ermine. 1st 31) Chartres Cathedral, c. 1210, Devil and Sinner, from the South Portal Gothic from the first had symbolic immediacy. Take Hell and the Deadly Sins. What happens over four hundred years from Chartres 1st 32) Rubens, c. 1620, Fall of the Damned, Alte Pinakothek, Munich; whereas video draws from the Aachen copy a group of Gluttons (CGB '74) to Rubens is the fleshly engrossment of a spiritual dread, an orgy of amplification, which the time of Chaucer and Langland focuses. 2nd 31) Again, Chartres, another Devil and Sinner The Ancren Riwle, like Chartres, is of about 1210: The sluggard lies asleep in the devil’s lap, his dear drab, his minion. The fiend lays his muzzle close to his ear, and prompts him just as he pleases. 2nd 32) From the Aachen Gallery copy of Rubens' Fall of the Damned, a group of gluttons (CGB '74); here video shows only closer details Spenser’s 1590 procession of the Sins is squeamish of its flesh: ...loathsome Gluttony... on a filthie swyne; His belly was up-blowne with luxury... And all the way, most like a brutish beast, He spued up his gorge, that all did him deteast. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Faerie Queen I, iii, 21) It is Ben Jonson’s pig-woman, fat Ursula (Bartholomew Fair), who plays the Rubens’ role: Is she your quagmire, Daniel Knockem? is this your bog... Twere like falling into a whole shire of butter... Ursula: Hang ‘em, rotten roguy cheaters, I hope to see ‘em plagued one day — poxed they are already, I am sure — with lean playhouse poultry, that has the bony rump sticking out like the ace of spades or the point of a partizan, that every rib of ‘em is like the tooth of a saw; and will so grate ‘em with their hips and shoulders as — take ‘em altogether — they were as good lie with a hurdle... (Ursula falls with the pan) Curse of Hell, that ever I saw these fiends! Oh! I ha’ scalded my leg, my leg, my leg, my leg! I ha’ lost a limb in the service!... Are you under-peering you baboon! Rip off my hose, an you be men, men, men! 33) Freiburg Master, c. 1300, Lust, West Porch, Freiburg Minster; with a video detail If we move in by a century from either side, we come, around 1300, to the Freiburg Lust, her suggestive hand rutted by the hoof of a goat; or in Manning, Handling Sinne, the couple who lived by the church: One night there he knew his wife, In fleshly deed, such was their life; But God was displeased; he willed it nought, So near the church, such deed were wrought: They might no more be pulled asunder Than dog and bitch — at which men wonder... (CGB) 34) Grünewald, 1515, Temptation of St. Anthony, detail, Isenheim Altar, Colmar; video splits to details, below and above On the 1500 side, it is Grünewald, with Dunbar’s Dance of the Sevin Deidly Synnes: Priests came in with bare shaven necks, Then all the fiends laughed and made gecks, Black Belly and Bawsy Brown. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Lechery, that loathly corse, Came snorting like a big-bagged horse — With him, an ugly crew... They led each other by the terses; If they fouled with their erses, There was nothing you could do. (CGB) 35) Taddeo di Bartolo 1393, Lust, from Sadistic Hell, Collegiata, San Giminiano; + V detail Midway, are the earthy Sins of Langland: Lechery — Each maid I met with, I made her a sign Seeming to sinward; some I would taste About the mouth, grope some beneath, Till our wills were one, and to work we go... I lay by the loveliest and loved them never after... (CGB after Coghill) In Italy the grotesquerie mounts from Dante’s brawls around the boiling pitch and the fart of Malacoda (Bad-tail), “del cul fatto trombetta,” to the 1393 San Giminiano sadistic hell, where the devils handle their bad-tails “in swich manere it may nat been expressed.” 36) Same, detail of the dung-glutton Usurer, San Giminiano Or where the squatting fiend dungs gold into the pursed-out Usurer. As Langland says: For a whore of her arse-winnings may better tythe Than an arrant usurer, so help me God. But it is the drunkenness of Glutton for which Langland is best known. 1st 37) Genoa MS, late 14th cent., Tavern, from De Septem Vitiis, Ad. MS 27695, 14r, British Museum, London Under school-of-Giotto fertilization, as in this manuscript also of the Sins, a surge of late-Gothic realism parallels Chaucer’s third style. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1st 38) Beauvais, late 15th cent., Misericord, Wife wheelbarrows a drunk husband, from Abbey of St. Lucien; now Musée Cluny, Paris (CGB ‘80) Turn up the choir seats in the churches. From about 1380 on, the misericords the priests had carved there were of the foibles of flesh — a drunk husband trundled home in a wheelbarrow. 2nd 37) Same, Tavern scene, detail Here is Langland’s Gluttony: There was laughyng and louring and ‘let go the cuppe,’ And seten so til evensonge and songen umwhile, Tyl Glotoun had y-globbed a galoun an a jille. 2nd 38) Drunk in a Wheelbarrow detail (video draws from 1st 38) His guttis gunne to gothely as two gredy sowes; He pissed a potel in a pater-noster-while, And blew his rounde ruwet at his rigge-bon ende, That alle that herde that horne held her nose after, And wusched it had be wiped with a wispe of firses... 39) V39a) H. Bosch, 1475-80, Gula, from Seven Deadly Sins, Prado, Madrid Same, but a wider view of the table of Sins He stumbled on the thresshewolde and threwe to the erthe. Clement the cobelere caughte hym bi the myddel, For to lifte hym alofte and leyde him on his knowes; Ac Glotoun was a gret cherle and grym in the liftynge, And coughed up a caudel in Clementis lappe; Is non so hungri hounde in Hertford schire Durst lape of the levynges so unlovely thei smaughte. Bosch begins his work, around 1475, with the Seven Deadly Sins, still in the spirit of Langland. In English literature the 15th century is called Chaucerian; and indeed, the crucial turn was taken, in all the arts, by 1400. a40) June 1996 Peter Parler aus Gmund, 1380-85, St. Cyril, St. Vitus’ Cathedral, Prague 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1st 40) Bohemian, Peter Parler and circle, c. 1385, Portrait Bust of Wenzel von Radecz, Triforium carvings, Prague Cathedral The late-century realism of the Parlers in Prague speaks the independence running from Wyclif, translator of the Bible, 1383 — Lord! What cursed spirit of lying stirreth priests to close them in stones or walls for all their life, since Christ commandeth to all his apostles to go into the world and preach the Gospel — to Huss, whom the Council of Constance seeded by fire. Langland of false priests: Thow myghtest better mete the myste on Malverne hulles, Than gete a momme of here mouthe but money were shewed. And “I will become a pilgrim, and wander as wide as the world lasts/ To seek Piers the Plowman, who can put down Pride.” Even courtly Chaucer upholds the Lollard Parson: But riche he was of hooly thoght and werk... …Cristes loore and his apostles twelve He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve. 1st 41) Parler Circle, 1375-78, Emperor Charles IV, Triforium, Prague Cathedral Though another of the Prague heads, this of the smiling Emperor Charles IV, goes as far toward Renaissance, reminds us how deeply and humanly one are Renaissance and Reformation, a wave with divided crests. 2nd 40) Again Wenzel von Radecz, closer view Thus triadic fauxbourdon Music: 2nd 41) 2nd41a) V2nd 41b) 3rd 41) Apt MS, later 14th cent., Jesu, nostra redemptio, close SAWT 9505 A Ex Again, P. Parler, Charles IV bust, closer view Peter Parler, 1380-85, Prince Wenceslas profile, Prague Cathedral Same, Prince Wenceslas, full face Again, Charles IV, another of the whole bust and filligree Ars Nova: June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 18 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History English, late 14th cent., Johannes Alanus, last phrase from “Sub Arcturo,” Phil. SAL 3722 meet in Dunstable; the bluntness of Piers Plowman and early refinement of Chaucer meet in The Canterbury Tales. What had separated out of Occam and Dante would rejoin again and again, as the Medici and Savonarola fuse in Michelangelo. “Here is God’s plenty,” Dryden said of Chaucer. And Kahler: A new alertness of sense — all senses for the first time flung wide — an untramelled life-delight, give him a power to see and record, far in advance of his age. Though to be born in advance means, as with Thoreau, “in the very nick of time.” How else could Prague Cathedral (1375) endow an emperor with so Chaucerian a smile? What is the source of that canny well-being? Bifil that in that seson on a day, In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage To Caunterbury with ful devout corage, At nyght was come into that hostelrye Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye, Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle... 1st 42) Loisel and Privé, 1397, Connetable du Gueslin, St. Denis; + V detail That observed reality hangs in the oblique blessing of faith, permits a transmoral keenness, as with Pandarus, or when Chaucer’s Miller insists on his tale of bawdry: The Millere, that for dronken was al pale, So that unnethe upon his hors he sat, He nolde avalen no man for his curteisie, But in Pilates voys he gan to crie, And swoor, “By armes, and by blood and bones, I kan a noble tale for the nones... Bothe of a carpenter and of his wyf...” 4th 41) Again, Emperor Charles IV in his niche, with coat of arms Music: French, late 14th cent., “Contre le Temps,” Seraphim SIC-6052 (2-9) June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In music a like suspension enriches four decades from Machault to Dunstable with dancing harmonies explored in a last loyalty to the bare fifth chord, as in this late 14thcentury “Contre le Temps”. If such vitality wells from the folk, it fills the arts of church and court: here an emperor; 2nd 42) Again, Connetable du Gueslin there the High Constable of France. 43) 43a) 43b) (fade Contre le Temps) Jacquemart de Hesdin, 1406-09, Grandes Heures, f42, det., Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris English late Gothic, late 14th cent., Grotesque: The Blue Man, Roof boss from the Gt. Cloister, Canterbury; here video returns (with the Lochaimer Lied) to a closer detail of 43 Célebre Angevin, 15th cent., Carving on Maison d’Adam, Angers It is in the sacred books of princes, the Duc de Berry’s Great Hours of the Virgin, that fabliaux grotesques swell toward Peter Brueghel, called Peasant. Is this the mock priest of whom the Wife of Bath said “Ther is noon oother incubus but he,” or Nicholas bared at the window? For that Chaucerian element take a German 1450 tupping song: a peasant goes to the woods with his axe; the nasty priest comes to his wife; rhythm tells the rest: Music: Lochaimer Liederbuch, 1452-60, Es fur ein pawr gen holcz, ARCHIV-3222 (fade Lochaimer) Against that cursed up-and-down — “He priketh harde and depe as he were mad” — 44) Franco-English, late 14th cent., Chaucer reads to the court, Troilus MS, Corpus Christi, Cambridge; + V detail June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Chaucer reads to the modish knights and ladies of Richard II’s court — one of the artcaterpillars of the garden. Why not the gilded dawn from the “Knight’s Tale,” dear to early Shakespeare, who would stage the fall of gracious Richard: The bisy larke, the messager of day, Salueth in hir song the morwe gray, And firy Phebus riseth up so bright That al the orient laugheth of the light, And with his stremes dryeth in the greves The silver dropes hangynge on the leves... 45) Franco-Flemish, c. 1465, Palamon and Arcite, René d’Anjou’s Livre du Cuer, Vienna; first, video detail Or the scene of the friends looking from the tower at Emily gathering flowers, as in this 15th-century illustration of the same Boccaccio story. What joins the Knight and Miller is the closing prayer — “God save al this faire compaigny!” and “The tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!” To balance in faith Romance-of-the-Rose idealism and peasant force. 46) Franco-Flemish 1320-30, Luxuria, Dahlem Museum, Berlin; + V detail What diversity that unreformed church could hold. Here is Absolon, parish clerk, “that jolif was and gay,” twenty years before Chaucer was born. It is a theme treated also in a 1400 poem: Jankin at the Agnus Bereth the pax-brede: He twinkled but said nowt, And on my fot he trede, Kyrieleyson. Benedicamus Domino, Christ from shame me shilde: Deo gracias, therto — Alas! I go with childe, Kyrieleyson. 47) Limbourg Brothers, c. 1413-16, February, detail, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V closer detail June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Where two peasants warm themselves in the February cottage of the Tres Riches Heures, we pick up the quaint connection — the Wife of Bath’s unflagging interest in “oure bothe thynges smale” — which are not just to tell a female from a male, nor for purging of urine, but to give us as many a merry fit as Solomon was refreshed withal: I will bestow the flower of all my age In the acts and in the fruit of marriage. 48) 48a) Parler Circle, 1375-78, Anne of Swidnica, Triforium, Cathedral, Prague Same, a different view and lighting; + V detail Music: Alanus, late 14th cent., Sub Arcturo (opening), Phil. SAL 3722 This motet by John Alan (Alanus), Chaucer’s English contemporary, the Prague bust of Anne, wife of the smiling emperor (pilgrims all), share the naive joy of Chaucer, a delight aware — in the legacy of faith and resignation — of facts which would darken later joy. The sensuous awakening is nowhere fresher than in mismatched Alisoun: Fair was this yonge wyf, and therwithal, As any wezele hir body gent and smal... Hir filet brood of silk, and set ful hye. And sikerly she hadde a likerous ye. Ful smale ypulled were hire browes two, And tho were bent and blake as any sloo... Hir mouth was sweete as bragot or the meeth, Or hoord of apples leyd in hey or heeth. Wynsynge she was, as is a joly colt, Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt. 49) Lochner, 1447, Lady, detail, Presentation in the Temple, Hessische Landesmuseum, Darmstadt V49a&b) Same, wider details: of the Lady's group, and of the Presentation Whit was hir smok, and bryden al bifore And eek bihynde, on hir coler aboute, Of col-blak silk, withinne and eek withoute. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The tapes of hir white voluper Were of the same suyte of hir coler... A brooch she baar upon hir lowe coler, As brood as is the boos of a bokeler... (fade Alanus) In Lochner’s 1440 spelling out, that visual delight still grows, innocently resilient, on the church margin of the grave. V & D a50) Tomb: Eleanor of Castile, 1292 bronze, west minster Abbey 50) French, from Amiens, c. 1402, Cadaver tomb, Cardinal Jean de la Grange, Mus. Calvet, Avignon 50a) Beckington cadaver tomb, c. 1450, detail, Wells Cathedral (CGB ‘84) The grave too takes new force. Early Gothic tombs favored earthlessness. As body mounts on Fortune’s wheel, its wrongs and corruptions prepare, by a Dance of Death, for the tragic stage. Here is the memento mori of Cardinal de la Grange, died 1402. There cam a privee theef, men clepeth Deeth, That in this contree al the peple sleeth... The rioters in the Pardoner’s tale encounter him: An oold man and a povre with hem mette... “Why artow al forwrapped save thy face? Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age?”... “Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn! Allas! whan shul my bones been at reste? He points them to the wood where they find the treasure for which they stab and poison one another. Even Moral Gower touched on greatness when he told of the “Trump of Death.” 51) Claus Sluter, 1404-05, mourning monk, from the Dijon Monument to Philip the Bold, Cluny, Paris; + V detail June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The fleshing-out marks every institution. Sluter, Fleming active in Dijon, is the greatest art contemporary. His mourning monk from the Tomb of Philip the Bold has just the cut of Chaucer’s churchmen: This ilke monk leet olde thynges pace And heeld after the newe world the space. A realism which as before finds its Gothic limit in Van Eyck: 52) Jan van Eyck, 1436, Canon van der Peale, from Madonna, Musée Communal, Bruges His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas, And eek his face, as he hadde been enoynt. He was a lord ful fat and in good point; His eyen stepe, and rollyinge in his heed, That stemed as the forneys of a leed... A fat swan loved he best of any roost. 53) English, 1348, Tomb of Hugh, Lord Dispenser, detail, Tewkesbury Abbey With chivalry Chaucer may cling to the idealism of the past. Though a child when this Tewkesbury tomb was carved for Hugh, Lord Dispenser, he presents a Knight of such high calling (though some have scrupled at his battles): he loved chivalrie, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie... He was a verray, parfit, gentil knyght. a54) b54) 54) Probably Flemish in Paris, 1412-13, Effigy of Pierre d’Evreux-Navarre, detail, Louvre Same, Pierre’s Wife, Catherine d’Alençon, detail, Louvre Same, Pierre d’Evreux-Navarre and his Wife, full figures, Louvre (but half figures videoed from V54) Where this 1412 Pierre d’Evreux-Navarre seems a schemer of the new century — more a Man of Law than a Knight, meek as a maid, who never spoke villany to anyone. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History His wife, with her ten pounds of coverchiefs on her head — Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe. She was a worthy womman al hir lyve — might be contending with the Wife of Bath who knows best “the olde daunce.” While the study of the couple as such reminds us how many of the Tales deal not with chivalric romance, but with the chief problem of the middle class, marriage. 55) German, c. 1340, Knight and Bride, carving, Rottweil, Chapel Tower; + V detail German, 1340, love-troth, exchange of rings — Chaucer’s Knight invokes that domestic dream: And thus with alle blisse and melodye Hath Palamon ywedded Emelye. And God, that al this wyde world hath wroght, Sende hym his love that hath it deere aboght… And Emelye hym loveth so tendrely... That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene Of jalousie or any oother teene... 56) 56a) Bohemian, 1363-65, Charles IV and Anne, over the door of the Chapel, Karlstejn Castle, Prague Same: wider view of the Chapel door and decoration More apt, after problem tales of marriage, is the trusting solution of the Franklin’s Tale, which by trial and honour re-cements a union in such “soverereyn blisse” as Charles IV and Anne set Master Theodoric to paint above the chapel door of Karlstejn Castle. 57) 57a) 57b) 57c) 57d) French, c. 1390, Double: [A] Charles V of France; and [B] Jeanne Bourbon; upper details of standing sculptures, Louvre Same, detail of Jeanne Bourbon Same, detail of Charles V Same, full length double; while video returns to 57: busts Another detail of Charles V June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From Paris, 1390, comes a sadder couple. We have quoted the Wife of Bath before with this Jeanne Bourbon: Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme... The flour is goon, there is namoore to telle; The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle... While the confessional smile of her husband, Charles the Wise, explores such psychological depths as Chaucer’s “gentil Pardoner” with his yellow hair and gelding voice: For though myself be a ful vicious man, A moral tale yet I you telle kan, Which I am wont to preche for to wynne... Like the corrupt church which channeled such art, the Pardoner gives his fabulous sermon, concluding — as he brings out variants of Boccaccio’s “feather of Gabriel” (or Heywood’s “buttock bone of the Pentecost”) — lo, sires, thus I preche. And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche, So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve, For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve. a58) 58) English or French, c. 1395, Wilton Diptych, National Gallery, London; right panel: Virgin and Child, with Angels; while video first shows (from V58) the whole Diptych, then a central spread of a58 (using either slide) Same, the whole Diptych: Richard II introduced to the Heavenly Host; of this, the video narrows to a detail of Richard and Mary, then returns to the whole (frames are too bright in 58; video uses V58) We have still to mention the sacred gem of Chaucer’s time, The Pearl. Both it and the Gawain are by a poet of Western dialect, difficult, but as beautiful as the music the dreamer heard on the flowered grave of his daughter: Yet thoght me never so swete a sange As stylle stounde let to me stele. There his body falls: June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Fro spot my spyryt ther sprang in space, My body on balke ther bod in sweven; My goste is gon in Godes grace, In aventure ther mervayles meven. Taught by Dante, he sees across the stream, in the jewelled company of the Lamb, His precious perle wythouten spotte. The Wilton Diptych, also of the late century, shows Richard II introduced to such a band on such a shore. 1st 59) Franco-Flemish, c. 1390-1400, St. Christopher, van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp As for the clear stream down crystal cliffs, a late century St. Christopher wades in such bright water. We know, as we cross 1400, the perfection of that nominalist focus on particulars. 1st 60) Dirk Bouts the Younger, c. 1480(?), St. Christopher, Alte Pinakothek, Munich In Dirk Bouts the observation grows precise, without losing preternatural clarity. Style surfaces in art. 2nd 59) Again, Franco-Flemish, c. 1390-1400, St. Christopher, detail Through the abstraction of language, can we assign Chaucer or The Pearl a place in that spectrum? This is their century. 2nd 60) Again, Dirk Bouts, St. Christopher, detail Is this theirs, or Villon’s earth-emergence? 61) French MS, c. 1400(?), Lancelot du Lac, f.7, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris So with Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight: from the flatness of the Chivalric tradition (this Lancelot of the same time) — June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse... With alle the wele of the worlde thay woned ther samen, The most kyd knyghtes under Krystes selven, And the lovelokkest ladies that ever lif haden — 62) Franco-Flemish, c. 1465, Love gives Desire the Heart of the King, Le Livre du Coeur d’Amour, National Library, Vienna; + V detail (V62a) it ripens toward the intimacies of the fifteenth century Book of the Heart of Love — as Love here at night, the lady seducer at dawn comes to Gawayn’s bed: And Gawayn the god mon in gay bed lyges... And as in slomeryng he slode, sleghly he herde A littel dyn at his dor... Hit wats the ladi, loflyest to beholde... And ho stepped stilly and stel to his bedde, Kest up the cortyn and creped withinne, And set hir ful softly on the bed-syde... a63) 63) Simone Martini c. 1340?, Virgin of the Annunciation, whole seated figure, Royal Museum, Antwerp; video: upper half only; digital: double, Angel & Virgin Same, half figure; while video shows a close detail For that filling in of the concordantly human, set one of Simone Martini’s haunting Virgins (her response to the “Ave” equivocal as Lorenzo of Florence’s 14th century “Hosannah") Music: 64) Lorenzo of Florence, c. 1350(?), close of Sanctus, Seraphim SIC6052 Jan van Eyck, 1432, Virgin of the Annunciation, upper half of the figure, Altar, St. Bavon, Ghent; + V detail: head of Virgin (V64a) against Jan van Eyck’s devout Handmaiden of the Lord — while Dufay, in his Alma Redemptoris Mater, gives the scene his tenderest 15th-century chords: Music: Dufay, c. 1433, Alma Redemptoris Mater, close, (Cape group) ARCHIV 3003 That span of eighty years Chaucer divides. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 28 �C.G. Bell a65) 65) 65a) Symbolic History Gaston Phebus, c. 1405-10, Le Livre de la Chasse, Hunting and Killing the Fox, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; + V detail Same, Hunting deer Same, Coursing the Stag In music it is Ciconia, born before, died after — Flemish-Italian, like Chaucer a blend of North and South. His madrigal warning foxes against dogs seems early, though such 14th-century sharpness spills over the century in Gaston Phebus’ Book of the Chase. Music: Ciconia, c. 1380-90(?), I cani son fuori, beginning, MHS 899 Chaucer’s visionary hunt in “The Franklin’s Tale” is so stylized: Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer; Ther saugh he hertes with hir hornes hye, The gretteste that evere were seyn with ye. He saugh of hem an hondred slayn with houndes And somme with arwes blede of bittre woundes... Or the Green Knight’s chase while Gawayn is sleeping: The does dryven with gret dyn to the depe slades... What! thay brayen, and bleden, bi bonkkes thay deyen... Hunteres with hyghe horne hasted hem after... 66) 66a) 66b) V66c) 66d) (fade Ciconia) Boucicault Master, c. 1405-08, Flight to Egypt, whole page with border, MS 2 f90v, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris Same, upper spread Same, lower spread Same, detail: landscape only, with another video detail Same, the inner picture, without the flowered border That jewelled nature widens in the Canterbury Prologue, to a harmony of the vernal and peopled earth: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the younge sonne Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So priketh hem nature in hir corages); Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. By 1400, the Amen of Ciconia’s Gloria, in sequential phrasing of voiced harmonic space, parallels this Boucicault Master’s 1405 conquest of the dimensional earth. Music: Ciconia, c. 1400(?), from Gloria (Amen), Telefunken SAWT-9544-A Here the essential truth of Renaissance is caught in works almost contemporary with Chaucer. 67) Limbourg Brothers, c. 1413-16, May, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly One speaks of the International Style as preparing for 1425 — for the Van Eycks in Bruges, for Masaccio in Florence. So music moves toward Dunstable and Dufay. In Burgundy the Tres Riches Heures is the masterpiece of that transition. 68) Jacobo della Quercia, 1414-19, Rhea Silvia, from the Fonte Gaia, Palazzo Publico, Siena (CGB '86) In Tuscany the early work of Della Quercia as graciously points the way. With these comes Ciconia’s last and richest piece, the “O Rosa Bella”, which Dunstable also would set. a2nd 67) Again, May of the Tres Riches Heures, center spread 2nd 67) Again, Tres Riches Heures, close detail of the same May June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 30 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Ciconia, c. 1405-10, O Rosa Bella, first half, Deller, RCA Victor LM6016 2nd 68) Again, Rhea Silvia, upper half of slide 68 a69) Jacobo della Quercia, 1406, Tomb of Ilaria del Caretto, viewed from her right, detail, Duomo, Lucca (CGB ‘80) 69) Same, whole Tomb, viewed from her left 69a) Same, upper half of the figure, viewed from above (fade O Rosa Bella) Della Quercia’s 1406 tomb of Ilaria del Caretto initiates a type as much of the Renaissance as Shakespeare’s Juliet. Does Chaucer’s Prioress, with her love-brooch (of which no Roman apologist should rob her) live at all in that new world? On which ther was first write a crowned A, And after Amor vincit omnia. Va70) Ghiberti, 1401, Abraham and Issac, model, center spread of whole, Bargello, Florence Same, detail of Abraham and Isaac 70) The tide did not wait for 1425. It was in the first year of the century that the contest for the Baptistery doors brought this winning model from the 20 year old Ghiberti. England was not so far but that Sir John Hawkwood had lately led the forces of the Florentine Republic. Had not the Pardoner come all hot from Rome, the veil of Our Lady and the sail of St. Peter in his wallet? If the Island he came to was backward in antique recovery; 71) 71a) English Misericord, c. 1360(?), Smiling Expulsion, Worcester Cathedral Same, upper detail its humblest arts (from Occam down) could reshape Christianity to affirm the life of the world. In this Worcester Misericord, Adam and Eve and the angel who drives them from the garden smile — Felix Culpa: Adam lay ibounden, Bounden in a bond; Four thousand winter Thought he not too long; And all was for an appil, June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History An appil that he tok, As clerkès finden Wreten in here book. Ne haddè the appil takè ben, The appil taken ben, Ne haddè never our lady A ben hevenè quene. Blessèd be the time That appil takè was; Therefore we moun singen “Deo gracias!” 72) Limbourg Brothers, c. 1414-16, Eden, Tres Riches Heures, Chantilly; + V detail It is not just a modern insight that the bubble-Eden of the Limbourg Brothers is also a womb, from which the expelled are born into the wayfaring Pilgrimage of the world. What Wycliff and Hus had begun would culminate in Milton: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised, and unbreathed... where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” 73) 73a) Massaccio, c. 1426, Expulsion, Brancacci Chapel, Carmine, Florence Same, Expulsion, detail, waist up June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History By 1426 Masaccio had molded the body and passion of man’s explusion into a tragedy of regenerative nobility. What heightens the sorrow gives the clue. Adam and Eve are coming into light. As is said in Lear: “Out of heaven’s benediction to the warm sun.” In the cloud-cold of England, a symbolic claim. 1st 74) dei Grassi and Belbello, c. 1380-1420, Nativity Page, from Visconti Hours, National Library, Florence; while video takes a detail combining the stable scene with the angels and shepherds on the heath All over Europe now, from 1380 on, as the juggler in the old romance danced for Our Lady, humanized piety plays sacred games. How thin, after Giotto, the miniatures of dei Grassi and Belbello; yet how instinctively earthborn. 1st 75) English, 1410-20, Shepherds from the old Choir Stalls, Exeter (CGB ‘80) 1st 75a) Same, Shepherds, detail, upper right (CGB ‘80); + V closer details In 1400 England, rood-lofts and choir stalls later destroyed (this surviving fragment from Exeter) enact guild drama — The Second Shepherds’ Play: (each enters complaining) We silly shepherds that walk on the moor... No wonder, as it stands, if we be poor... As ye ken We are so lamed Hard taxed and maimed... By these gentry men. (CGB) The second, of marriage: These men that are wed have not all their will... In bedroom or bed they say not their fill... If I read e’er epistle, I have one for my dear As sharp as a thistle, as rough as a briar... (CGB) The third against floods and Fortune: Was never since Noah’s flood such floods seen... (CGB) a2nd 74) 2nd 74) June 1996 Again, Visconti Hours, from Nativity Page, shepherds, below Same, Shepherds and Nativity, center; first, video Nativity detail 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So Mak appears, and as they are napping, steals a sheep, which he and his wife wrap in swaddling, as if she had borne a child. Across the guild-stage Christ lies in the manger, while here Gill croons over “a horned lad in cradle.” After a vain search, the shepherds try to kiss Mak’s child, and the cheat is discovered (“He has a long snout”). On the heath once more, they are sent to Bethlehem by the angel. 2nd 75) Same as 1st 75, Exeter Shepherds; + V details of faces Hail, comely and clean! Hail, young child! Hail, Maker, as I mean, of a maiden so mild... Have a bob of cherries! The second: A bird I have brought to my bairn. Hail, little tynemop, Of our creed thou art crop! I would drink on thy cup, Little day starn. And the third: I bring thee but a ball: Have and play withal And go to the tennis. (CGB) 76) English, c. 1400, Flagellation, Retable, Norwich Cathedral; + V detail The acuteness that shapes that delight caricatures Christ’s torturers. It is again Bosch who would culminate what is here begun: lst Torturer: 2nd Torturer: 3rd Torturer: 4th Torturer: Lift up this tree among us all. Yea, and let it into the mortice fall, And it will burst his chest. Yea, and tear him limb from limb! And it will crack each joint in him, Let see now who does best. (CGB) a1st 77) German, c. 1400, Crucifixion with Saints, Pähl Altar, Bavarian National Museum, Munich; + V detail June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 34 �C.G. Bell 1st 77) Symbolic History Master of St. Veronica, c. 1400, Large Crucifixion, detail, WallrafRichartz Museum, Köln (CGB '74); digital uses whole At the core of these 1400 Passions, whether Flemish, English, German, most of all, of the soft-eyed broodings from Cologne, simple pity redeems Gothic pain, as when Mary speaks in the Wakefield (or Townley) play: Such sorrow for to see, My dear child in thee, Is more mourning to me, Than any tongue can tell. The terminal complexities of Ars Nova lose touch with this human breadth developing in the North: Music: Matteo da Perugia, c. 1390(?), “Amen” from the Gloria, O.L. 1 (close) Its voice is the plain fauxbourdon of England: For 2nd 76) German or English, early 15th cent., Crucifixion, Courtauld Inst. of Art Music: England, c. 1400, Old Hall Credo, “Patrem,” Col. DX 582 (78) (fade) Or as polished and disseminated from Avignon: 2nd 77) From 1st 77, Veronica Master, Crucifixion, upper detail; where video then picks up the Saints on Christ's right (John, Mary, Peter), the slide show returns to the Crucifixion panel of a77, Pähl Altar Music: English, late 14th cent., Kyrie de Angelis, opening, SAWT 9505 AEx (fade) It was not only the leaders and the great who turned Europe from earthless devotion; it was the Gothic folk, working in common piety, to ground the Christian legend in the time, space, and cause of mortal possibility. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 35 �C.G. Bell a78) b78) 78) Symbolic History Claus Sluter, 1395-99, Moses and David, from the Moses Fountain, Chartreuse de Champmol, Dijon Same, from Moses Fountain: David, Jeremiah and Zachariah Same, Moses detail If we return, within that ground, to the strongest artist of Chaucer’s time, to Sluter, whose Moses fountain in Dijon mediates whatever is monumental from Donatello to the Baroque, fulfilling the manhood promised from Occam — The pope may not deprive men of liberties conferred on them by God or by nature — to the praying Lollards — When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? — we may seem to have left Chaucer behind, a jesting courtier. Though in fact the poem it was said he wrote on his deathbed, the “Ballad of Good Counsel,” is the greatest expression of the new self-reliance. He speaks to his pilgrim soul: Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall! Know thy country, look up, thank God of all; Hold the high way, and let thy spirit lead; And truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread. a79) 79) Franco-German, c. 1300, Head of a Prophet, Main Portal, Strasbourg Same, another head from a prophet holding a scroll To mark how far we have come from the lean, fierce abasement of a century before, set Strasbourg against Sluter, and with it an English poem, also of 1300, on the vanity of the world: Were beth they biforen us weren, Hundès ladden and hauekès beren And hadden feld and wode? The richè levedies in hoerè bour That wereden gold in hoerè tressour With hoerè brightè rode; Eten and drounken and maden hem glad; June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Hoerè lif was al with gamen i-lad, Men kneleden hem biforen, They beren hem wel swithè heyè And in a twincling of an eyè Hoerè soulès weren forloren. Va80) 80) Again, Moses Fountain, side view of Zacharias Same, Head of Zacharias from the Moses Fountain, Dijon From that, to the amplitude of Sluter’s Zacharias, or Chaucer’s self-rule — as if Dante had come from mountain hierarchy to this plain of the forthright man: Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste out of thy stal! Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al; Hold the heye way, and lat thy gost thee lede; And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. June 1996 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer) 37 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 38 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1400: Pilgrims All (Chaucer), Symbolic History, Part 13 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 13 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_13_1400--Pilgrims_All_Chaucer Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/97ffcb53537aa508ce7e7dd395a20093.pdf 543a5bc6c2cc4a1799b3bb72ddc40e10 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 12. Ars Nova: 14th Century CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 September 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 12. Ars Nova: 14th Century 1) 1a) Chinese, attributed to Li ch'eng 10th cent., but probably 11th cent., Buddhist Temple in the Mountains, detail of hanging scroll, Kansas City Same, closer detail of the Temple In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. Coleridge's Road to Xanadu led from Purchas' Pilgrimage through the "green and fountainous wilderness" of Bartram's Florida; but the actual journey to the Khan's summer palace at Shandu, north of Peking, was described by Marco Polo, with other marvels of the opulent East — tales for which the Venetians of 1300 called him "Marco Millione," fable-monger. The architecture of that China has largely perished, but pictures, from the 9th century down, display a space and atmosphere unparallelled in Dark Age Europe. 2) Spanish (Asturian), c. 845, exterior, Church of S. Miguel de Lillo Europe, shortly to transform the world, juts from the landmass of Asia and Africa (linked by racial migrations even to America) like the eye of a potato. And through the Dark Ages — as in this forest outpost of the Byzantine, a small 9th-century church near Oviedo, in the rim of Spain not quite conquered by the Moors — the geographical disproportion might equally have applied to the culture. 3) 9/2/95 Mexican, Totonac, before 9th cent., El Tajin (CGB '75) Ars Nova: 14 Century 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Over how much of the globe were those the centuries of great temple-building civilizations: in Mexico the forest and upland cities whose offshoots would astonish Spanish conquerors, even after 600 years, when Europe had peaked to the Renaissance — here one of many pyramids at El Tajin, north of Vera Cruz. 4) Japanese, c. 749-60 (rebuilt c. 1700), Buddha Hall of Todai-Ji And all over Asia, religious houses, monasteries and abbeys, with gilded idols, as Marco Polo says, "in masterly style" — this from 8th-century Japan (rebuilt about 1700, after a fire), the Great Buddha Hall of Todai-Ji — a transplant from Tang China, like the silk painting and poetry, or the music of the bamboo flute. Music: 5) Shakuhachi played by Goro Yamaguchi, from "A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky," Nonesuch 72025 (1/2 through) Chinese, c. 9th cent. (Tun-Huang), Kuan-yin leading a soul toward Paradise, British Museum, London From China, about the 9th century, Kuan-yin leading a soul toward paradise; 6) 6a) Japanese (Kamakura), 13th cent., The Descent of Amida, Kyoto, Zenrin Ji Same, detail ['95 video addition] from Japan, 13th, the mystical descent of Amida. (fade Shakuhachi, on low note) 7) Indian (Orissa), c 975 A.D., Mukteswara temple at Bhubaneswar Music: "Ritual for Attaining the Quality of Spiritual Adepts" (close), Mus. Anthol. of Orient, Tibet I (BM 30 L 2009) In the then Buddhist center of India, the Mukteswara temple at Bhubaneswar — with ritual music preserved in Tibet. 8) 8a) Cambodia, early 12th cent., Angkor Wat, Temple to Vishnu (or V8) Same, c. 1200, Buddha figures in former Vishnu shrine ['95 video addition] From the jungles of Cambodia, where the Kingdom of the Khmers rose toward the 12th century climax of Angkor... 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (fade Buddhist Ritual) 9) Mohammedan (Abbasid), 842-52, Minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra; video uses V9, a wider view Or the power of Islam, spread at its height from the Indus through Spain, with its centuries of Moslem and Jewish lore: Avicenna on geology, precursing Leonardo by 500 years: Mountains may be due to two different causes. Either they result from upheavals of the earth's crust, such as might occur in violent earthquake; or they are the effect of water, which cutting for itself a new route, has denuded the valleys... (An argument still pursued in Goethe's Faust.) How these world glories overshadow 10) Asturian Spain, c. 845, interior, Santa Cristina de Lena, near Oviedo all Christian Europe could vault in its time of troubles — Music: Mozarabic, 9th cent., lst Lamentation, MHS 1584 the followers of Charlemagne barely holding out against Moors, Vikings, Magyars. Here an interior of another 9th-century church of Asturian Spain, with the Mozarabic chant which, as revived, can hardly be distinguished from Gregorian. (fade Lamentation) Who could have guessed the germinal force of that backward landmass, that potato's eye? 11) 11a) Norman French, c. 1151, Geoffrey Plantagenet tomb-plaque, Le Mans Cathedral; first, video detail of face, Va11 ['95 video addition] Same, upper half of the figure Yet from the first Crusade, the earliest reaching of Romanesque toward Gothic, the scale is tipped. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 3 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 1193, "Je nuns hons pris," AS 18 Through the enamel flattening of a tomb-plaque in Le Mans, Geoffrey Plantagenet draws the sword of redeemed heraldic self, the fleur-de-lys, the rampant lion — keen as the Trouvère cry of his grandson Richard Coeur-de-Lion from his Dürenstein captivity. a12 & 12) Arnolfo di Cambio, 1277, Statue of Charles I of Anjou, King of Sicily, Capitoline Museum, Rome; three-fourths and full-face views, with video detail of a12 [so 1995 video] (cut Richard Coeur-de-Lion) The earth-assertion is bolder by the Italy of Dante's youth: here, from his Valley of Princes, "colui dal maschio naso", Charles of Anjou, carved, 1277, by Arnolfo di Cambio, architect of the Cathedral of Florence. Thus from the close of Dante's De Monarchia: Twofold are the ends which unerring Providence has ordained for man: the bliss of this life, typified by the earthly Paradise, and the bliss of life eternal... And since none, or very few, can reach temporal happiness unless mankind enjoys the tranquility of peace... this must be the constant aim of him who guides the globe and whom we call the Roman Prince, in order that, on this threshing floor, mortals may exist free and in peace. As if the travels of Marco Polo had set the half-barbaric but exploratory West, already individual, outward, utopian, Va13) 13) 13a) V13b) 13c) Li Ti, c. 1150, Hunter Retuning in the Snow, whole (Iris) ['95 video revision] Same, a central detail Chinese, Yen Hui (Yuan), 13th cent., Taoist Immortal, in crippled beggar's body, sees himself taking the Sky Road, Kyoto, Japan ['95 video revision] Same, detail Chinese (Sung), 11th-12th cent., A goddess carried away on a Phoenix, Museum, Peking Music: 9/2/95 Shakuhachi, again "A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky," near close, Nonesuch 72025 Ars Nova: 14 Century 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History against the continuance of an Eastern passive, meditational way, its roots coeval with the soul-search of the Greek and Alexandrian — the Tao Te Ching (CGB, from Waley): The way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way... All things, however they flourish, return to the root from which they grew; This return to the root is called Quietness. Quietness is called submission to Fate... Only one who rids himself of desire sees the Essences... The ten thousand things are born of Being, but Being itself is born of Not-being... Therefore the sage arrives without going, Sees all without looking, Does nothing, yet achieves everything... (close Shakuhachi) The West as if created to revolutionize that Oriental transmission of quietist dream — 14) Dante Death Mask, 1321, one of three supposed copies, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence [or V14, wider view] down to the Victorian blatancy of Tennyson's claim: "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." In all history two cities stand out as transformational, Athens and Florence; and while no maker can be isolated in such an interplay, Florentine Dante (of this alleged death mask) comes as close as any to world-center. 15) Michelino, 1465, Dante and his Book, Cathedral, Florence Thus the next century saw him, by the domed and towered town, guide to the eternal realms, Hell, Purgatory, the starry spheres, which his art has humanized, mediating the incarnate birth everywhere nascent in Gothic Christianity — a birth which reached at once toward Reformation and Renaissance. 16) German Gothic, 1290-98, Head of a Prophet, Strasbourg, W. Front The North was no less roused: Roger Bacon, 1271 — like the prophets of Strasbourg: 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History More sins reign in these days than in any past age... The Holy See is torn by deceit and fraud... The new Orders, horribly decayed, follow lechery, gluttony, pride... Princes, barons, knights, oppress one another and the people with wars and exactions — the people more debased than tongue can tell... The ancient philosophers, though without quickening grace, lived incomparably better than we... Among the wise there is no doubt but that the church must be purged. Yet that lean monastic reproof a17) 17) 17a) Giovanni Pisano, 1302-10, Prophet from the Pulpit, Pisa (A of 17) Double: [A] Pisano, Prophet from the Pulpit, and [B] Bernini, 1620, Head of Neptune, detail, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Bernini: B of 17; while video has shown the Double, then A; again, Double, then B, detail swells in the Divine Comedy to such deliberate might as Giovanni Pisano gave the prophets of the Pisa pulpit (left) or the Pistoia inscription: Giovanni carved it, who does no empty works — born of Nicola but blessed with greater science — him Pisa bred and gave knowledge over things of sight. While Dante's Peter flames against his Church: Rapacious wolves dressed in the robes of shepherds Are seen from here in all the Christian pastures — Avenging wrath of God, how long, how long? (CGB) (Paradiso XXVII) No wonder the opening prophecy of a saving greyhound, VELTRO (V and U interchangeable) would seem a Lutheran anagram: LUTERO. And as Pisano's gesture of assertion points over 300 years to Bernini's conscious Baroque (right); so Dante's St. Peter has only to widen the bellows and open the stops of Milton's cloudier organ, to become in "Lycidas" that "Pilot of the Galilean Lake": He shook his Miter'd locks, and stern bespake, How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain, Enow of such as for their bellies sake, Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold... 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Blind Mouthes! 18) Double: [A] Hellenistic, 1st cent. B.C., Medici Venus, Uffizi; and [B] G. Pisano 1302-10, Temperance, Pulpit, Pisa; + V detail of Double In Dante's Ulysses, recovery of the antique seeds the future: "And of our oars made wings for the mad flight." So Giovanni Pisano's Temperance (right) remakes the Classical Venus de Medici (left). "Instead of looking in the same direction as her body and thus affirming her existence in the present," Kenneth Clark writes in his book on The Nude, "she turns and looks upward over her shoulder toward the promised world of the future." Clark does not pursue how that sowing of negation raises a body of actual flesh and blood, energized by the unfolding of Christian paradox — as, in Weber and Tawney, Christendom hosts the Capitalism it condemns. a19 and 19) G. Pisano, c.1284-96, Sibyl (contrasting details of the head), Cathedral Museum, Siena It is somehow the hallmark of the Divine Comedy to give life-glory to what is theologically disclaimed: Paolo and Francesca, lashed on the dark wind — (compelling as Giovanni Pisano's Sibyl): When we read how the desired smile was kissed by such a lover, (Quando leggemmo il disiato riso/ esser baciato da cotanto amante), this one, who will never be parted from me, kissed my mouth all trembling (la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante.) The book became our gobetween; that day we read in it no further (quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante). 1st 20) Norman French, 1195-99, Richard Coeur-de-Lion's Chateau Gaillard on the lower Seine Music: French, 13th cent., Dance, (Cape) AS 16 (A,2) When the blood of the North, northern poetry and dance, the chivalric castle — here Richard Coeur-de-Lion's Chateau Gaillard over the Seine — (fade French Dance) respond to the stimulus of Italy, Roman, Byzantine, Moorish — 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a21) Italian, c. 1240, Frederick II's Castel del Monte, Apulia, from a distance, over pine trees (CGB '84) 1st 21) Same, Castel del Monte, from closer (CGB,'84) Music: Italian, 14th cent., Lament of Tristan, AS-16 (B,2) they take the heightened torque of conscious mind and person: — the Castel del Monte, built for Frederick II fifty years later in Apulia — a pride like that to which Dante compares the giants who rim the pit of lowest hell and whom Jove still threatens when he thunders. Even the musical dance, in the Italian Lament of Tristan, 14th century, draws its passions to the formal contrast of supertonic against tonic phrase. (fade Lament of Tristan) 2nd 20) Music: 9/2/95 Chateau Gaillard, nearer view of 20, Again French, 13th cent., Dance Ars Nova: 14 Century 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The French 13th-century dance has not a shadow of that consciousness. So too with plot. In the old French romance of "The Palfrey," the timeless is hardly stretched by human will. The knight does not scheme to get the rich vavasour's daughter, nor she to avoid the knight's uncle, her father's choice. It is the vavasour who requests the knight's horse to bear his daughter. In self-sacrifice the knight accedes. Moonrise misleads the bridal party; the horse, "with the will and guidance of God," brings the girl through dreamlike forests to the castle of her love. In that plot nothing is plotted. (close Estampie) 2nd 21) Again Castel del Monte, view of portal (CGB '84) A century later, in Boccaccio's "Falcon", also of a wealthy woman and a poor man, stellar chance admits the tug of will: Frederigo wills to sacrifice his falcon to his love; Madam Giovanna wills to marry him for his act. (close Lament of Tristan) 22) 22A) 22B) 22c) Double: [A] French Gothic, mid-13th cent., Shepherd from the Old Jubé, Chartres (CGB '80); and [B] G. Pisano, 1302-11, Musica, from the Pulpit, Cathedral of Pisa A of 22: Shepherd, Chartres; video: detail only B of 22: Musica, Pisa; video: detail only G. Pisano, c. 1312, Head of Temperance, from Margaret of Luxenbourg's Tomb, Priv. Collection (here video repeats the Double, 22) Such aesthetic form-shaping assimilates the Pastourelle of 13th-century France to the Italy of the "sweet new style." The French poem has the naive charm of the shepherd of the old Choir Screen at Chartres (left): Riding out the other day From Saint Quentin to Cambrai, I saw a shepherdess who stood, In a wood, Her color like the rose in May, Who sang: I have a true love Deft and gay, Though I am dark of hue. (CGB) En non Deu, J'ai bel ami, 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Cointe et joli, Tant soie je brunete. When Dante's friend Cavalcanti seized on the form, "In un boschetto trovai pastorella" ("In a small wood I found a shepherdess"), its passion sets a torch to the earthdenials where it burns: [Pound] She drew me on to a cool leafy place, Where I gat sight of every coloured blossom, And there I drank in so much summer sweetness It seemed Love's god connived at its completeness. Menommi sotto una freschetta foglia, La dov' io vidi fior d'ogni colore; E tanto vi sentio gioi' e dolzore, Che Dio d'Amor mi parve ivi vedere. Such arts of the profane have not survived, though flesh makes a related plea (right) in the smiling translucence of Giovanni Pisano. 23) 23a) Arnolfo di Cambio, c. 1281, Thirsty Old Woman, Perugia Giotto, 1306, Injustice, detail, Arena Chapel, Padua; + V closer detail Wherever the Gothic flame strikes, it kindles, in the timeless, a revelational realism — thus Arnolfo di Cambio's Old Woman from a fountain, unforgettable as Dante's swollen counterfeiter in the fever of dropsical thirst: You who pass by, pity the grief of Master Adam. I had what I desired in life; Now I crave a single drop of water. Always with me are the little streams That down their cool rills murmur to the Arno From the green summits of the Casentine, And parch me worse in memory than this fever. (CGB) In the polytonal modulations of Giovanni da Cascia, music, about 1320, explores such descriptive intensities: here the setting of a single word for gloomy thickets, "cupi" — thick as Dante's wood of suicides in the Inferno: "Non fronde verde, ma di color fosco;/ non rami schietti, ma nodosi e 'nvolti;/ non pomi v'eran, ma stecchi con tosco..." Music: 9/2/95 Giovanni da Cascia, c. 1320, from Per larghi prati, Phil 802904 Ars Nova: 14 Century (fade) 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As these chords stretch a residually bare-fifth structure, a24) 24) Giotto, 1297-1300, St. Francis' Miraculous Spring, Upper Church, Assisi, especially the mountain background [cf. Va24 video revision, '95] Double: [A] Roman, c. 10 A.D.(?), Temple of Minerva, portico, Assisi; and [B] Giotto, 1300, Homage to St. Francis, Upper Church, Assisi the art of Giotto and his followers reaches for the basis of its earthly claim. Cennini's advice almost a century after this Giotto St. Francis — how to paint a mountain: set up a jagged rock in the studio and paint it large — reminds us that the very seeing of objects was suspended in the nominal (mountain is rock). Could Giotto's eyes have shown him the Augustan temple in the square of Assisi as slim and weightless as he has painted it, though he could walk every day under its actual brooding mass? How great, then, the recovery which Renaissance required. a25) 25) Giotto, 1297-1300, Christmas at Greccio, whole, Assisi; + V detail Same, Christmas at Greccio, closer detail of Cross Music: Again, Giovanni da Cascia, same passage, but starting earlier at "entrando" So with Dante's explanation of spots on the moon, where he invokes the strangest experiment with mirrors, to dismiss material cause in favor of an immediate and occult operation of God's virtue. Or Giotto's startling naturalism: the Greccio cross suspended against the sky, made surreal by the tensionless ring placed not where it should be, but where it will show, on the back side of the pole. a26) 26) 26a) Giotto, 1304-06, Marriage Feast at Cana, Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel, Padua; + V detail Double: details of a26 and 26a (video takes these singly, as shown) Giotto, 1304-26, Meeting at the Golden Gate, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua; + V detail Everywhere causal imagination lays hold of a world shrouded in faith acceptance. Why did they run out of wine at the Feast of Cana? Giotto's glutton answer (right) is as naively comic as Dante's Ciacco in Hell, or Belacqua dawdling and joking on the slopes of Purgatory. (close da Cascia) 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History On the other hand, at the joyful meeting of Joachim and Anna before the Golden Gate of Jerusalem, it is from symbolic transreality that the hooded dark figure of Sibylline prophecy interrupts a delight from which Mary, with the sword that pierced her heart, would spring. 27) Giotto, 1304-06, Three Heads of Christ, from Scrovegni Chapel, Padua 27a, b, c) Same, right, left, and center details, separately Here, as in the pocket tragedies of Dante, a realism of Gothic suspension — what we can only call symbolic realism — drives a temporal wedge into the eternal kingdoms. The projection of person into creed, which marks these Christ-heads from Giotto's Padua Chapel — (left) from the hypnotic raising of Lazarus; (far right) lashing the moneychangers out of the temple; (center) the mystic removal from accusing Caiaphas: "Thou hast said" — no less attends Dante's passage "through an eternal place": his fury on the wrathful Styx: "I saw him so fanged by the muddy people, that still I thank and praise God for it." — his pity for the noble damned: "Are you here... Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?" — up to the smiling peace of Piccarda, lost and found: "E'n la sua volontade è nostra pace." 28) 28a) Double: [A] Roman Christian, mid-3rd cent.(?), Resurrection of Lazarus, Catacombs of St. Callixtus, Rome; and [B] Giotto, 1304-06, Lazarus fresco, cropped, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua; + V single of A B of 28: Giotto, Lazarus fresco; + V detail In two treatments of the Raising of Lazarus, that heightening of drama looms (as in recorded masses our Solesmes-droned incipits break to polyphony — here the Tournai Creed). Music: Missa Tournai, c.1300-30, Credo, opening, SAWT 9517-A Ex (fade) On the left, the scene from the Catacombs of St. Calixtus (3rd century) dissolves classical outwardness in Gospel mystery: "If it were not so, I would have told you." But Giotto's Padua fresco, from which we have just detailed Christ's summoning face, in its bold grappling with the scripture ("Lord, by this time he stinks"), matches Dante's most startling encounters — Buonconte da Montefeltro, in Purgatory: 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 1'angel di Dio mi prese. . . God's angel took me; and a spirit of hell Cried: "You of heaven, with right do you rob me? You take this shadow to eternal weal For one small tear that defends him from me; But on his hulk I will work otherwise. (CGB) (So the charged sky, loosing floods, sweeps the corpse down the Arno.) 29) Double: [A] Irish, c. 800, Temptation of Christ, Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin, + V detail of single; and [B] Duccio, 1303-11, Temptation, from the Predella of the Maesta, Frick Collection, New York City; + V single In this pair, the Kells' Temptation of Christ, about 800 (left) offers a first emergence of drama from the Dark-Age symbolic and caligraphic; yet how could this cockroach Satan, this bodiless Lord of 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Flies, stage a real temptation? If we leap from that over 500 years, the Temptation from Duccio's Maesta (right) penetrates Sienese Byzantine (about 1305) with the already advancing spearhead of Giotto. Here the allegorical kingdoms of this world begin to spread themselves before the dramatic precursor of Milton's conscious Messiah. 30) Double: [A] S. Italian, c. 1260, Mosaic detail, Apse, Salerno Cathedral; and [B] Giotto, 1304-06, Wedding Procession, detail, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua; first double, then 30A and 30B, singles How truly Vasari saw Giotto as the turning point from Byzantine to the new nature and humanity. From the apse mosaic of Salerno Cathedral (left), we sample what he calls "that gross and incompetent age," inherited from the Greek and Roman fall: the great artists having died out... the few Greeks who survived, belonging to the old but not the Ancient world, could only trace outlines on a ground of color... Over and over again they produced figures in the same style... standing on tiptoe and staring as if possessed... as can be seen in every old church in all the cities of Italy. While, Giotto's Bridal Procession of the Virgin, in its melodious dignity of space, renews the wonder of Vasari's praise: And it was indeed miraculous that in those days Giotto could paint with such sublime grace, especially when we consider that he learned his art, so to speak, without any instructor. Though there is a liability in separating Gothic observation from the old Godpossession of supernatural forms. Giotto's miracle is his harmonization of the sacred — his deification of earth's beauty. 31) 31a) Triple: [A] S. German, c 1290, Queen Emma, Emmeramskirche, Regensburg (CGB '59); [B] Duccio, 1308-11, St. Catherine, from the Maesta, Museo del Duomo, Siena; and [C] Botticelli, 1483-85, Madonna of the Magnificat, detail, Uffizi, Florence Duccio, St Catherine, B of the triple 31 By 1300 the saintly queens of transalpine Gothic (this Emma of Regensburg, left) had brought the chivalric to such refinement as would sweeten through Duccio (center), 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the St. Catherine of his Maesta, about 1310 — as in poetry through Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura — toward the Simonetta Virgins of Botticelli (right). Thus Petrarch of Laura in Paradise: God's chosen angels and his spirits blest, Tenants of heaven, when my lady died, Came in sacred wonder to her side: "What light is this, what glory manifest?" (CGB) Like Dante, Petrarch makes his lost love an intercessor: Lady in bliss, pray that I may join you. 32) 32a) Giotto, 1306-10, Madonna Enthroned, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) From the same, Angel to the right (from CGB '59, Dante 32a; digital: both angels) Such, in Giotto's enthroned Madonna, is the rapturous fusion of earth and heaven, in a glorified art-body. Petrarch, at the last, would turn from love's idolatry to Christ alone ("no hope in any other" — "tu sai ben che 'n altrui non ò speranza"); but what would move Wyatt ("The long love that in my thought I harbor") and Surrey ("Swete is his death that takes his end by love") was that "worship of a mortal thing," which gives the Laura sonnets their incarnate sheen, as of Giotto's flower-bearing angels. 1st 33) 9/2/95 Giotto, 1304-08, Noli me tangere, from Resurrection, Arena Chapel, Padua Ars Nova: 14 Century 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It was an evocation everywhere latent in the analogies of Gothic love. Chaucer's early elegy, The Book of the Duchess, draws its bowers of Zephyrus and Flora from the French Romance of the Rose: As thogh the erthe envye wolde To be gayer than the heven. By that suspension (as in Giotto's Christ and the Magdalen) precision floats in a mystery of suggetive mood — Chaucer's hound through the forest to the man in black, That sat and had yturned his bak To an ook, an huge tree. 1st 34) Simone Martini, c. 1340, Frontispiece of Petrarch's "Virgil," Ambrosiana, Milan; + V detail 34a) Giotto, 1304-06, Annunciation, double: half-figures of [A] Angel and [B] Virgin, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (cf. whole-figure double, Dante 28) 2nd 33) Detail of 33, Giotto's "Noli me tangere" [video dwells on the above slide and this] 2nd 34) Detail of 34, Simone's Virgil (video skips this detail, used with 1st 34) 35) Ambrogio Lorenzetti, c 1340, St. Dorothy, Pinacoteca, Siena 35a) Same, close-up of face (cf. Mozart 8) [Note: video somewhat varies the placement of the above slides, 34-35a] Such veiled artistry reaches its height when Petrarch by the stream hears the voice of Laura. Perhaps Simone Martini, painting in Avignon this frontispiece for a Virgil commentary owned by Petrarch, his friend, best catches its illumination of nature [CGB]: If birds' lament, green leaves' or tendrils' stir To the soft sighing of the air of summer, Or through the wave-wash at the petalled shore Of a clear stream, crystal's liquid murmur Sound, where I sit bowed to the forest floor — Her, whom heaven showed and earth now covers, I see and hear and know, as if the power Of her live voice responded from afar: "Why do you spend yourslf before your years?" She asks in pity. "Or wherefore and for whom 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Pour the wasting river of your tears? You must not weep for me. My life became, Dying, eternal; and to eternal skies, The dark that seemed to close them cleared my eyes." Se lamentar augelli, o verdi fronde mover soavemente a l'aura estiva, o roco mormorar di lucide onde s'ode d'una fiorita e fresca riva, là v'io seggia d'amor pensoso e scriva; lei che '1 ciel ne mostrò, terra n'asconde, veggio et odo et intendo, ch'ancor viva di sì lontano a' sospir miei risponde: "Deh perché innanzi '1 tempo ti consume?" mi dice con pietate: "a che pur versi degli occhi tristi un doloroso fiume? Di me non pianger tu, che' miei dì fersi morendo eterni, e nell' eterno lume, quando mostrai de chiuder, gli occhi apersi." That dawn-in-Purgatory shimmer, as in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Dorothy, music, too, marvellously parallels in the spectral equivocations Dante's friend Casella may have taught the "First Generation" of Petrarch's time. 36) Score: Jacobo da Bologna, c. 1340, "Lux purpurata radiis," last page (video: details only) The last page of Jacobo da Bologna's Lux exhibits the techniques. Next to last bar: the "double-leading-tone" chord: G#, C#, E, the sharped G leading to A, the sharped C to D, a bi-tonal suspension before the bare fifth close. (Music: last bars of the "Lux...") Such enigmatic minors, under rhythmic runs, with the syncopated pulses called hocquetus or "hiccough" (bar 55 and faster in 61 and 63) stamp the whole piece with the compelling search of Ars Nova; all are illustrated in the performance of this last page. (Music: same piece, last page - end) 37) 37a) 9/2/95 Simone Martini, 1325-26, Musicians from Knighting of St. Martin, Lower Church of St. Francis, Assisi Same, detail of heads Ars Nova: 14 Century 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The piece, the rendition we require, could not be better exhibited than in the musicians Simone Martini paints in the Knighting of St. Martin — an expectance of gaiety in sadness, both dissolved in the bare-fifth distance of the eyes — as if de Van, Archimbaud, and Bonté had studied the fresco before they recorded in 1937 for L'Oisseau Lyre. Chaucer, too, had come, by Italian mediation, from the timeless immersion of The Book of the Duchess to the ambivalence of Pandarus: "I have a lusty wo, a joly sorrow"; the dramatic poignance of Troilus' speech to the moon: "Iwis, whan thow art horned newe,/ I shall be glad, if all the world be trewe". Let us hear the whole Jacobo da Bologna motet, moving from these musicians 1st 38) Simone Martini, 1333, Annunciation, double detail: [A] Angel and [B] Mary; Uffizi, Florence to Simone Martini's Annunciation, where the intended moods, as of Mary, may never be fathomed, yet imperatively advance the question. 2nd 37) Again, Simone Martini, Musicians, St. Martin Chapel, Assisi, top half Music: 2nd 38) 39) 39a) 40) 40a) 41) 41a) Jacobo da Bolgna, c. 1340, "Lux purpurata radiis," OL-2 Again, Simone Martini, Annunciation, central panel (CGB '59) Same, Angel, upper half, with lilies (CGB '59) Same, Virgin, upper half (vertical Alinari detail) Same, Angel, horizontal upper detail Same, Virgin, similar detail; for which the video uses V40a: Same, Virgin, vertical of the whole figure Same, Angel, vertical of the whole kneeling figure Same, the whole Altar, showing the frame [Note: in the above sequence, the video varies the order of slide images] (end Lux) European culture has evolved by circulation. When Sienese Simone went to Avignon, the current of Gothic that had quickened the Italian new art, flowed back to quicken the North, as Chaucer would learn from Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 18 �C.G. Bell 42) 42a) 42b) 42c) V42d) Symbolic History Double: [A] Taddeo Gaddi, 1332-38, Presentation of the Virgin, S. Croce, Florence; and [B] Pol de Limbourg, c.1416, Purification of the Virgin, Tres Riches Heures, Musée Condé, Chantilly Taddeo Gaddi, Presentation, A of 42 Pol de Limbourg, Purification, B of 42 Double ['95 insert]: [A] T. Gaddi, Drawing (after 42), Louvre, Paris; and [B] Pol de Limbourg, Purification, repeat of 42b Lorenzo Monoco, 1413, Adoration of the Magi, Predella of the Coronation of the Virgin, Uffizi, Florence ['95 insert] How far that Italy inspired the Burgundian, a comparison of Taddeo Gaddi's Presentation of the Virgin fresco, about 1335 (left). with Pol de Limbourg's miniature, about 1415, will imply. After Giotto's massive advance, his school seems almost to lose ground. Yet the imitative and softening continuance quietly confirms an observational base by which the style of 1400, all over Europe, would prepare for the next great natural thrust of Masaccio and the Van Eycks. So from Gaddi (perhaps through the drawing now in the Louvre ) the Giottesque livens to the Duc de Berry's Tres Riches Heures. From this International crest, the style-tide (as in music) was already returning to the Italy of Lorenzo Monaco, Gentile da Fabriano, Fra Angelico. a43) b43) 43) Taddeo Gaddi, 1332-38, Vault of Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence Romanesque, early 13th cent., Fresco of battle, simulating tapestry, Cathedral of Aquileia, near Trieste Taddeo Gaddi, 1332-38, Annunciation to the Shepherds, Santa Croce, Florence; + V detail Music: Solage, c. 1370(?), (Avignon), from Fumeux Fume, Seraphim SIC6092 (face 3) Two conquests seem related: in music, of expressive modulation (here 14thcentury Solage); in painting, of light through darkness. By the deceptive ease of words, 12th-century Chrestien had told how a thousand men in search of Erec rode toward Limors "in the moonlight shining clear"; as Dante later had touched the glowing mosques of Dis with prophetic chiaroscuro: "red as if come from fire... as you see in this low hell." 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But the first known art depiction is by Giotto's pupil, Taddeo Gaddi, a fresco of shepherds on the night ground lighted by an angel glowing in the sky to which Boccaccio's Latin Eclogue "Olympia" offers a radiant parallel: when the poet's lost daughter appears as a spirit, lighting the shepherds' cottage and refulgent wood: "Look, the beeches are untouched, the leaves luxuriant and hazels verdant in the flaming light." (end Solage) a44) 44) Piero della Francesca, 1452-59, Constantine's Vision, lower spread, San Francesco, Arezzo Same, whole; first, V detail of angel, from v44a ['95 video addition] Music: Ockeghem, 1475(?), Intemerata Dei Mater, close of lst section, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC 6104 (face 6) It was a magic the Renaissance would perfect (as Ockehgem the noble deepening of tessitura). Skipping Pol de Limbourg's Burgundian Gethsemene, with torches and a starry sky, we reach the Italian middle term, Piero della Francesca's 1455 Dream of Constantine. Vasari: Above every other consideration of skill and art is Piero's representation of Night, where he depicts an angel in flight, foreshortened with his head downwards, bringing the signs of victory to Constantine, who sleeps in his tent... as revealed in darkness by the angel's light. Through such imitation of nature (Vasari says) artists have reached "the perfection we see today." a45) 45) 45a) Raphael, 1513-14, St. Peter's Escape from Prison, Vatican, Rome; center & left of fresco; + V detail: angel, center Same: slide shows the whole; video returns to the left side (cf. V45) Same, left section, guards, moon on armor; + V lower detail Music: Josquin Des Prez, c. 1415(?), Huc me sydereo, opening, ARC 2533-360 Thus (contemporary with Josquin's motet of Christ's descent from the stars) Raphael, in the Vatican fresco of St. Peter's escape from prison, kindles on armor the 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History gleam of torches and moon — a magic to which literature also would aspire: Spenser, when the Red Cross Knight goes into Errour's "darksome hole": his glistring armor made A little glooming light, much like a shade... a46) 46) (fade Josquin) Simone Martini, 1328, Guidoriccio, detail, Palazzo Publico, Siena Same fresco, whole (video gives the whole, then the detail) In the cities of Italy, freed by the decline of the Empire and the 1305 withdrawal of the Papacy to Avignon, we seek the terms of that first clear Western rush of spirit into time. At its core is the tension of new humanism and old faith. The same Simone Martini who curtained beauty in ritual gold, painted in the public hall of Siena the pride of Guidoriccio, an oriflamme of force, against the unvalidated bare expanse of Middle-earth. The same Petrarch who gave mystery to love, revived the heroic in his Latin poem Africa, was crowned Laureate in Rome, wrote the first patriotic ode of the modern West, a call to Cola di Rienzo to restore the empire to honor: a47) b47) 47) Simone Martini, 1325-26, St. Martin before Emperor Julian, Chapel of St. Martin, Lower Church, Assisi Same frescoes, detail of Emperor and Saint, from the Knighting of St. Martin Bonino da Campione, c. 1363-70, Tomb of Bernabò Visconti, Castello Sforzesco, Milan; + V detail For you, as for no other, fate unfurls The banner of its good, immortal fame: I say you have the power to redeem The noblest state that ever ruled the world. (CGB) In life as in art, this eruption of tonal vigor in the modal void prompts Petrarch's ambivalent cry (Phisicke against Fortune, Twyne translation, 1579): There is no warre woorse then this, no not civile warre: For that is between factions of citizens in the streetes of the cities, but this is fought within the minde, betweene the partes of the soule. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Boccaccio also lived that strife, in which the claims of heaven and earth stood almost at parity. Even his De Casibus, written as a penance for the Decamerone, and to teach the vanity of earth, precurses Renaissance tragedy in its fall of the great (see Farnham): "The human mind has a fiery vigor, a celestial origin, an insatiable desire for glory." In Milan, the Visconti tomb mounts the mailed fist of power on the grave. 1st 48) Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1337-40, Good Government in the Country, section to the left; Palazzo Publico, Siena In Petrarch's 1336 letter on the ascent of Mont Ventoux, the romance of man and nature — Leonardo, Goethe, Thoreau — pierces the Medieval. So in the vast panorama of Good Government in the Country by that Sienese painter-humanist, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the Dimensional table unfolds, contending against spacelessness. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 22 �C.G. Bell 49) Symbolic History Chinese Buddhist, 8th cent., landscape from Queen Vaidehi's meditation at sunrise; Cave 172, Tun-huang, W. China Of course, from the silk route in the Asian highlands of West China, Buddhist frescoes from 600 years before might have staggered the Dark Age traveler with a preview of that space the West must search for. Though if Marco Polo had passed the cave-city of Tun Huang, he would surely have felt the quiet of all the East had refined from the Classical — 2nd 48) Again, Lorenzetti, Good Government in the Country, right (or V2nd 48) 2nd 48a) Same, Good Government, detail of wheat harvest; digital: left, moutains against the lunge of the embryonic West . So the often quoted yet still amazing passages of Petrarch's mountain climb: Nothing but the desire to see so conspicuous a height drew me on... There is a summit higher than all the others... I stood there almost benumbed, overwhelmed by a gale of wind and the wide and open view... Clouds were gathering below my feet... the Alps were frozen stiff and covered with snow... One could see the sea and the waves that break against Aigues Mortes... The Rhone River was directly under our eyes... But these are excerpts, wrenched from a frame of moral and Christian symbol: on the vanity of life, the waste of years; finally, as Augustine opened the Bible in the garden, Petrarch opens his Augustine to a page which admonishes against the climb itself: "And men go to admire high mountains, oceans, stars, and do not heed themselves." 2nd 49) Tun-huang, Landscape, whole, with Queen seated below Where Queen Vaidehi, imprisoned by her son, sits in meditation before a vision of the (now oxidized) rising sun — the whole outward realm mild inwardness. 50) 50a) 9/2/95 A. Lorenzetti, same, detail of party leaving the city gate A. Lorenzetti, c 1345(?), view of Castle and Lake, Museum, Siena Ars Nova: 14 Century 23 �C.G. Bell 50b) Symbolic History A.Lorenzetti, 1331, detail from St. Louis of Toulouse admitted to the Franciscans; frescoes in San Francesco, Siena In the foreground party leaving Lorenzetti's 1340 town, it is the actual which is contended for — to order the phenomenal by a rule of hand and mind. So in the search that would bring mathematical science out of theology and alchemy, Nicholas of Oresme, about the same time, was examining the Breadths of Forms, how rates of change can be graphed as curvatures: ...no two changes whereof one is uniform or uniformly non-uniform, while the other is uniformly non-uniformly non-uniform, are to one another in a rational proportion, since one is pictured by a rectilinear and the other by a curvilinear figure. Analytical geometry and calculus lurk in that insight of the backward West. It is the "Human Comedy" of Boccaccio, the Decameron, which exemplifies Ars Nova realism. In its plots of will and wit, reality sharpens the modes of the transreal: 51) 51a) 51b) Lorenzetti, 1337-40, Good Government in the City, whole, Palazzo Publico, Siena (video may vary the following details) Same, detail of a street, a Lady on a white horse Same, detail of buildings and meeting streets so too in Lorenzetti's Well-governed City. Boccaccio: under guise of confession and pure conscience, a lady makes a solemn friar her go-between, he ignorant of the matter... 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We must not ask how an attractive wife, left on her own when her husband is out of town, can need such a stratagem. From her balcony she admires, desires. Hardly a plot of wit if she could drop the man a note. She goes to a friar, his observed companion: "Father, tell your tall acquaintance, whatever his name, to let me alone. I scorn his solicitations." The friar summons his friend: "I have it from the lady, the rich merchant's wife: she can hardly stand on her balcony without your pestering her." The roused youth seeks the balcony, smiles. 52) 52a) Same, closer detail of the Lady on a horse Same, foreground center, detail of dancing ladies Back goes the lady, hot-foot, to the friar: "He has sent me this purse and girdle. Return it; I am not as he thinks." Her gift conveyed, a last move remains: "Holy father, I know not how he has learned that my husband is out of town, but last night he stole into my garden, climbed the tree to my bedroom window, so that I had to shut the casement. Either you stop him, or I tell my kinsmen." Once more the priest's rebuke: "Rake-hell! Because her husband's out of town, you climb the tree to her window." Night has only to fall for the puzzle-plot to be solved. 53) 53a & b) Anglo-French, c 1425, page of the Flood and Drunkeness of Noah, Bedford Book of Hours, British Museum, London Same, vintage and drinking below; Ark detail above As that ingenuity spreads north, it generates a fabliaux realism of nature under stylized devices (this Noah page from the Bedford Hours). In Chaucer's "Miller's Tale," the clerk, Nicholas, who sings to the psalter ("and Angelus ad Virginem he sang"), Music: English, c. 1300(?), Angelus ad virginem, RCA V LM-6016 (I,4) boards in the very house with Alisoun, and the carpenter-husband is so much at Osenay the two can frisk it as they please, Queynt-catching, holding by the haunch-bones: (fade 1voice opening) "Lover, love me all at once." (to 3-voice close) Why then that incredible device of Noah's flood, the great tubs hung in the attic for the night they all sleep there, until Nicholas and Alisoun descend for their pleasure; why the counter-plot of Absalon, jolly clerk pleading at the window: "Speak, sweet bird", until the hot coulter scalds Nicholas' tout — why, but that his screaming "Water!" may wake the cuckold as to the 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Biblical flood, to cut loose the tub and break his leg as he crashes through the floors? (end Angelus ad Virginem) a54) b54) 54) English Carving, c 1380(?), St.John the Baptist, Hereford Cathedral, from old Church of St. Nicholas, (CGB '84) English Gothic, 1220-60 (spire 1334), Cathedral, Salisbury (CGB '86) Same, the tower and spire (CGB '66) But in those last works of Chaucer, northern Gothic, having absorbed the Italian, stands on the threshold of 15th-century humanization. Two phases precede that fulness, the perfection of high Gothic, and the impact of Ars Nova. For High Gothic — with the close of a 1300 Motet to St. Thomas of Canterbury — we range Salisbury tower, Worcester nave, and a scene from the Douce Apocalypse. Music: 55) 56) English, c. 1300, from "Thomas gemma Canturiae," (Deller) Nonesuch H-71292 English, 12th-14th cent., Worcester Nave and Choir (CGB '74) English MS, c. 1265-70, Douce Apocalypse, p.58, Mystical Vintage, Bodleian Library, Oxford; + V detail (close Thomas motet) Into the lilting and linear sweetness of that Ars Antiqua, 57) French-Italian, c. 1343-47, Fish Pool, fresco, Papal Palace, Avignon Italian late-Gothic unmistakably drives. We pick it up from mid-14th century in an Avignon fresco (surely the Pope, like Chaucer's Franklin, "had many a bream and many a pike in stuwe"); while the Amen of an English Gloria asserts the new rhythms and double-leading-tones. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 26 �C.G. Bell Music: 58) Symbolic History English, c. 1370, Gloria, Amen, (Deller) from BGS 70680 Bohemian, c. 1350, Nativity from Vyssi Brod Altarpiece, National Gallery, Prague; video: detail only (close Gloria) (Here a Nativity from Prague.) As such vitality spreads over Europe, 1st 59) Master of the Rohan Hours, 1420(?), Portrait of Louis II of Anjou, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris two trends appear, complementing the 1400 expansion of consciousness. One, of the court, points (like the works of Chaucer) to Renaissance; 1st 60) Master Bertram, 1379-83, Creation of Animals, Panel from the Grabow (or St. Peter’s) Altarpiece, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; video: detail only the other, of the people, points (like Langland's Piers Plowman) toward Reformation. Both feature in Froissart's History. 2nd 59) French, c 1360, Portrait of John the Good, Louvre, Paris This 1360 portrait of John the Good of France suggests, in Froissart, the preRenaissance ruler, Count Gaston de Foix, who combines Frederick II's political boldness with the devotions of a faithful son of the Church. "More gallant deeds of arms," he says, "have been performed within these last forty years, and more wonderful things have happened, than for three hundred years before." 2nd 60) Master Bertram, same alterpiece, Rest on the Flight to Egypt, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; + V detail While all over northern Europe, the humbler religious arts (here Meister Bertram, 1379) draw from Gothic itself the simple humanity and active piety which spoke in the Peasants' Revolt in England, 1381. "The mischief," says Froissart, "was all through the too great comfort of the commonality." 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History A crazy priest of Kent, John Ball, excited crowds in the market place: "My good friends, matters cannot go well in England until all things shall be in common. Are we not all descended from Adam and Eve? Yet by our labor they support themselves in pomp... We must ourselves seek to amend our condition. a61) 61) a62) Le Mans, 14th-15th cent., South Transept with window (CGB '74) French Gothic, early 14th cent., Rose and Lancets of North Transept, Amiens Amiens, 14th-15th cent., South Transept, with window (CGB '76) Music: Ars Nova (French?), c. 1320, Opening of Gloria, Messe de Tournai, SAWT-9517 The change to the 14th century is least felt in architecture — that high Gothic soaring over town-center hard to supercede. Though construction went on, and transepts especially, at Beauvais, Le Mans, this north window at Amiens, display a lighter openness a bolder filigree. In music, the Gloria of the Tournai Mass about 1320, initiates that brilliance. (fade Tournai Gloria) But the masterpiece of French Ars Nova is the Mass Guillaume de Machault wrote late in life (some like to think for the 1364 Coronation of Charles V — 62) a63) 63) Albi, Southern France, 1282-1365, Cathedral interior (painted 1500-10) Hannequin de Bruges and Nicholas Battaille, c. 1373-81, Apocalypse Tapestries, 41st scene, Chateau d'Angers, France Same, detail of the 7-headed beast about when this vaulting of Albi was carried through in Italian Gothic — its polychrome completed after 1500). Machault too had learned from Italy, as from the French Ars Nova of de Vitry. His Mass thews the organa of Notre Dame with the rhythm of quavers against wholes, and with that double-leading-tone chord, by which the entire Credo is fiercely punctuated — its cadences, as in Jacobo da Bologna, a bi-tonal homing-in on both tonic and dominant (here Deller). Music: Machault, c. 1364(?), Mass, from Credo "Et in unum... saecula", (Deller) BG-LM 1 SD (fade Deller) Stirring, with the isorythmic acerbities so stressed in De Van's older recording, to associate the Apocalypse tapestries of Angers, late-Gothic at its most forceful, hung 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History between two realities — medieval symbol blazoning the art-force of concrete Rebirth. Thus the tremendous Amen which closes the Creed. a64) 64) 64a) a65) 65) Same Angers school, Angel from an Apocalypse, Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, California Again Hannequin and Battaille, Fall of Jericho, Angers Angers Tapestries continued, Fall of Fire Same, St.John and beast, left detail of 65 to follow Same, St. John, Beast and Woman, whole Music: Va66) 66) Guillaume de Machault, Messe de Notre Dame, close of Credo, (De Van) AS-3 (end De Van) Video pans first to the Woman, from right side of 65 Double: [A] Angers Tapestries, from 65, closer detail of the Woman; and [B] Franco Flemish, c. 1400, Crescent Madonna, from Philip the Bold's Prayer Book, Brussels; + video 66B, and slide, 66A) Yet the designer Bondol, who so far sacrificed softness to Apocalyptic strength, was, like Machault, in touch with that other advance of late Gothic. So his Virgin seated on the moon and crowned with stars (left) slightly yields to the Flamboyant grace which by 1400 would perfect a flower-ultimate: this Crescent Madonna (right) from the Prayer Book of Philip the Bold. Thus even Machault's driving Creed relents for the "Ex Maria Virgine." Music: Machault, Mass, cont., Ex Maria, from Credo, AS-3 (fade) Indeed, this Gothic Mass, in a contrasting performance by the lyrical Cape group, lures to that other pole — 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 29 �C.G. Bell 67) Symbolic History Giottino(?), c. 1360, Pieta Uffizi (CGB '59); video: close detail only the rich humanization of mood flowing from 1360 Florence 68) French late-Gothic, c. 1375, from Altar Frontal of Narbonne, Pieta and Harrowing of Hell, Louvre, Paris and generating in many northern centers (here the altar frontal of Narbonne), a passionate harmony of God in the world. Such is the homely wonder by which, in Langland's Vision, Piers the Plowman becomes Christ, Come with a cross before the common people. And right like in all limbs to our Lord Jesu. 2nd 67) Again, Giottino, Pieta, central section (CGB '59); first, video of the whole, from 1st 67 So the softer Machault: Music: Machault, Mass, lst Agnus, (Cape, etc.) ARC-3032 2nd 68) Again from Narbonne Frontal, detail of Pieta; video adds V66B 2nd 68a) Again, B of 66, Crescent Madonna ('95 insert) a69) Vb69) c69) 69) 69a) (end 1st Agnus) Bohemian, 1348 (completed in the 19th cent.), Karlstejn Castle, SW of Prague Same, interior, Chapel of the Holy Cross Master Theodoric, c. 1364, Church Father, Karlstejn Chapel Master Theodoric, c. 1363-65, Magi, detail of Mary and Child Same, closer detail of the face of Mary, Karlstejn Chapel In the visual arts, the center of that ripe Incarnation was probably the Prague into which the reformer Hus was born. The works Master Theodoric painted in the Holy Cross Chapel there just before 1365 seem, by their shadowing and touch of flesh, of a later date. Music: 9/2/95 Jan of Jenstejn, c. 1385, Decet huius cunctis horis, with Bourdon, (Deller) BG-680 (last 2 stanzas with Amen) (close) Ars Nova: 14 Century 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet what they attest was happening all over Christian Europe: the timeless mystery was being reenacted in the immediacy of here and now. Thus, from the late century, this melodious sequence on the Visitation by Jan of Jenstejn, Archbishop of Prague, with improvised Bourdon, filling out the progressions of triadic chords. 70) 70a) Bohemian, c 1395, Limestone of St. Peter of Slivica, detail, National Gallery, Prague Same, detail of the face In this Bohemian Peter about 1395, by a nameless master, we have quietly turned — within faith itself — from the hierarchic severity where Gothic began, to a kind of Brotherhood of the Common Life — that lay-community and school founded in the Low Countries about 1380, where Thomas à Kempis and Cusanus and Erasmus would be trained — a Christ Imitation as heartfelt as the words of John Hus from Constance: I entreat you, as touching the truth of God, which I did preach and write from the utterances of the saints, that ye cleave fast to it... I entreat the lords to show mercy unto the poor, and be righteous towards them. I entreat citizens to conduct their trade righteously... I entreat teachers that, leading godly lives, they may instruct their.pupils faithfully... I entreat you to love one another, to suffer not the good to be oppressed by violence, and to grant truth unto all... I have written this letter to you in prison in chains, awaiting on the morrow to be condemned to death, having full hope in God, that I may not swerve from the truth of God... In what gracious manner the Lord God is with me amid sore temptations, ye shall know when we meet in His presence in joy... We have come midway in the journey of the West. To sense the import of this threshold, we frame it in a sequence of heads — 71) 9/2/95 Carolingian (Swiss), 9th cent., Apostle from Johanneskirche, Müstair, Grisons Ars Nova: 14 Century 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History with musical closes, where the tonal dynamic mounts toward the assertion by which the West would revolutionize the world. And first, in seeming denial of what is to follow, the Gregorian cadence (Kyrie, 4th mode) avoids the tensile quest of tone-center, as this 9th-century apostle of Müstair dissolves all claims of earth and self in an aether of God-hope. Music: 72) Close of Kyrie III (Pentecost Mass), Solesmes, Decca 7543 French Gothic, c. 1260, Phillipe II (August) detail, Rheims Later Romanesque and Gothic launch the arrow of creative act: Thomas Aquinas: "This is the earthly goal of man... that upon the tablet of the soul the order of the universe and all its parts may be enrolled." In King Philippe II of Rheims, (13th century), as in Perotin's rhythmic organizing over stretched-out Gregorian, already, within the tightening of creed — its first viable road — the Western gold rush is on. Music: 73) Perotin, c. 1220(?), "Viderunt," close, lst Quadruplum, Rokseth Memorial Album, O.L. 230-31 Bonino da Campione, Barnabò visconti Tomb Milan, bust of 47 above So much so that sequent modifications seem mere changes of style — the 14thcentury defiance of Dante's heroes stretching the bounds of hell. Thus the doubleleading-tone cadences of Ars Nova, with this detail from the equestrian already seen, the armored Visconte of Milan. Music: 74) Gherardellus, c. 1350, Caccia, close (Cape etc.) ARC 3003 Donatello, 1447-53, Gattamelata, detail, Padua; video: head only By the 15th century of Donatello and of Dufay's Mass L'homme armé, the Armed Man, the fullness of incarnate self operates in a last Machiavellian cleavage — temporal giants emergent in the old creed. Music: Dufay, c. 1460(?), close of Hosannah, Messe "L'Homme armé," Ducretet-Thomson 320 c 108 That first assurance was insular. 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 32 �C.G. Bell 75) Symbolic History Alesandro Vittoria, 1586, Bust of Doge Niccolo da Ponte, Seminario, Venice The Venetian, closing a tragic century of philosophic struggle and religious war, deploys its somber powers more vastly in the music of Gabrielli, the universal realism of the art of 1600. Music: 76) Giovanni Gabrielli, 1615, In Ecclesiis, close, Angel S-36443 Andreas Schlüter, 1704, Bust of Frederick II of Hesse, Schloss, Bad Homburg; video: detail only And still the proclamation would be, if not heightened, fleshed and inflated to the 1700 breaking point of heroic virtú: Schlüter's Elector of Hesse, with a tympanic ultimatum from Lully's Te Deum. Music: 77) Lully, c. 1670, Te Deum, close, London, DTL 93043 David D'Angers, 1838, Bonaparte, bronze, Angers Museum Even there the compulsive ardor did not peak, but rose, after the trough of 18thcentury manners and mockery, to the breaking wave on which the art, thought, and music of the time of Napoleon was borne — Music: 78) Beethoven, 1817-24, Ninth Symphony, Finale, close, (Weingartner) Col. SL-165 N. Korean, 1974, Opera photo: "Fate of a Self-defense Corps Member"; video: detail only a frenzy of expectation, of utopian demand, which would exorcise, by the export zeal of Marx, all over the East and rising Third World, the vestiges of ancient adherance — as in Malraux's La Condition humaine — the last opium dream of quietist refinement. 79) 79a) 9/2/95 Italian, 13th-14th cent., Towers of San Giminiano, through Fall trees, Tuscany; + V detail Another view of the same towered town Ars Nova: 14 Century 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History How the future kindles in the 1300 departures of Italy: — When the horn sounds, like Roland's, in Dante's Inferno — ...io senti' sonare un alto corno — and through the dusk the giants who stormed heaven seem, over the rim of lower hell, such towers as bristled all Italy then in the rivalry of pride (preserved in the fossilized city of San Giminiano, here through autumn leaves) as error fled, fear grew upon me... Like Montereggion of the twelve towers, rose, half-sunk in earth, the terrible Giants, whom Jupiter still threatens when he thunders — (CGB) torregiavan di mezzo la persona li orribili giganti cui minaccia Giove del cielo ancora quando tuona — San Giminiano, where Dante went as ambassador before he was banished — how it casts a time-shadow: Here and higher we have set our stamp All over the rock island of Manhattan. Prophetic as Petrarch's invoking God for his Italy: Saviour, hear my plea: By the pity that brought you down, Give this earth your care, Our blessed human shore; And may your truth here sound — Such as I am — through me. (CGB) 80) 80a) Bonino da Campione, mailed fist of Bernabò Visconte, close detail of the horseman of 46 Same statue, detail of horse and rider (after an intermediary video detail) It is less the mailed fist (the German word Faust) of the Visconti twice seen, than the spirit, energized over the polarity of the embodied Kingdom, the Word working in the world ("In the beginning was the Deed"). If that is the war of which Petrarch said there is no worse, what can we do but sing — Ars Nova — "Benedicamus Domino"? 9/2/95 Ars Nova: 14 Century 34 �C.G. Bell Music: 9/2/95 Symbolic History Italian, mid-14th cent., Benedicamus domino, beginning and end, SIC-6052 Ars Nova: 14 Century 35 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 36 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ars Nova : 14th Century, Symbolic History, Part 12 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 12 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_12_Ars_Nova--14th_Century Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8f351f398a97711d984cc349cf747630.pdf ae6cda809a8568043f2bb01838f367d8 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 11. Dante: Threshold of 1300 CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 June 1993 Last Revised June ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 11. Dante: Threshold of 1300 a1) 1) Double: [A] Chartres, 1210-20, North Portal, Simeon (head); and [B] Giovanni Pisano, c. 1290, Simeon (head), Cathedral Museum, Siena Pisano, Simeon, head and shoulders (CGB '86); + V detail Over the 13th-century horizon of France, England, Germany, Spain — Italy brings a dawn of human possibility: "It was the start of morning and the sun was rising up" — "Temp'era dal principio del mattino,/ e'l sol montava 'n su..." Giovanni Pisano's Simeon, about 1290, hails the temporal incarnation: "For mine eyes have seen... the glory of thy people." Thus Virgil to Dante at the summit of Purgatory [Dante translations in this program are by CGB]: Your will is upright, free and whole; It would be a fault not to do its bidding; Therefore I crown and mitre you lord of your own Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio... Per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio. How far the spatial attack has moved toward Michelangelo, 2) 2a) Simeon, Chartres French Gothic, 1200-40, North Portal, Prophets, Chartres (CGB '59) we measure against the Chartres Simeon of about 1220, looming into time but not temporal, transforming time, flesh, stone, to the substance of things unseen: Not in casque nor yet in cowl, Not in battle nor in Bull, But on the road from Jericho I come with a wounded man. (Waddell) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That Northern waking held the leanness of sacred surrender — nec in bysso nec in cuculla, nec in bello nec in bulla; de Jericho sum veniens...-- For 2nd 1) Pisano 1301, The Pulpit of Pistoia, Jeremiah, head V2nd 1a) Double: [A] Chartres c. 1210, North Portal, S. Modeste (head); and [B] Pisano ,1297, Miriam or a Sibyl, Cathedral Museum, Siena V2nd 1b) Double: [A] Chartres, c. 1210-20, South Portal, S. Theodore (head); and [B] Pisano, c. 1290, Habakkuk (head), Cathedral Museum, Siena beside the pentameter weight of Dante: Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio. If the Divine Comedy is the Gothic cathedral of literature, it is a signed cathedral of prophetic self-awareness. Beatrice calls its author by name, "Dante"; while he says of his book: "the sacred poem, to which both heaven and earth have set their hand, so that for many years it has made me lean." For 2nd 2) Double: [A] Chartres c. 1210, North Portal, Melchisedech (head); and [B] Pisano 1297 ff., Moses, Pisa, Baptistery The powers this Gothic synthesis incorporates have crossed a threshold of personality a3) 3) 3a) View over Florence from Piazzale Michelangelo (CGB '59) Arnolfo di Cambio & Brunelleschi 1300 ff. & 1420 ff., Pal. Vecchio & Duomo, Florence; first, video detail Giotto and after 1337-87, Campanile, Florence (CGB '48) toward the free claim of life, love, and self-rule. Music: Gherardellus c. 1350, Caccia, AS-59, music up, then faint Florence, 1300: Jubilee year of Dante's passage through an eternal place, "per luogo eterno" — to be told thereafter in the exile which taught him "how much the bread of others tastes of salt, and how hard is the going up and down of another's stairs." He June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History begins: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" — "In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, where the true way was lost." What dispensation does this prophet bring, to pair him, as he says, with Aeneas founder of Rome and Paul founder of the Church, to whom it was also granted to descend and return — if not the poesis of blessing, fulfillment of Joachim de Floris' indwelling spirit: "Liberta va cercando" — "he goes searching liberty.” (music up) That age a portal also in music, though this Gherardellus "Caccia", like much of what survives, is of the next generation. (end 1st canon) Va4) French Gothic 12th & 13th cents., View of Apse, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '59) 4) French Gothic 1200-40, West Front, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '80); video: detail only 4a) French Gothic 1163, Ambulatory, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '59); video: detail only Music: Perotin c. 1220?, 4v. Conductus, Deus Misertus, de Van, AS-99 There was as much force, as much ambition, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, but a force differently disposed to the individual and secular. (music up) Such the frame of the Thomistic Summa, in which Dante's poem shapes new heaven and earth. Or the barer solemnities of Perotin's Ars Antiqua (fade Perotin) — a5) 5) 5a) Arnolfo di Cambio 14th cent. & Brunelleschi 1420-36, Apse and Dome of the Cathedral, Florence (CGB '84); + V detail Florence 14th-15th cents., Nave of the Cathedral (CGB '86) Same, choir (CGB '86) whereas, in the Ars Nova Caccia, spaced canonic entries fill, over a trombone ground, fifths and triads of massive chords. Music: June 1996 Again, Gherardellus, Caccia, closing Ritornello (end) Dante: Threshold of 1300 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In 1296, when Arnolfo di Cambio took on the construction of the Cathedral, whose magnified arcades would not be domed for more than a century, the city fathers proclaimed: The Florentine Republic, soaring ever above the conception of the most competent judges, desires that an edifice should be constructed so magnificent... that it shall surpass anything of the kind produced in the time of their greatest power by the Greeks and Romans. So Dante's Ulysses stirs his followers to sail the globe: "O brothers," I told them, "who through all chances, A thousand perils have come to the west, For this small remnant of the senses' vigil Our fate allows us, let us here resolve Not to deny the experience of knowledge, Beyond the sunset to the unpeopled world. Consider your race, the seed of your generation: You were not made to pass your time as beasts, But to hold the way of courage and of wisdom... a6) French Gothic, c. 1270, North Rose Window, Notre Dame, Paris; first, video detail 6 or V6) French Gothic, c. 1270, South Rose Window, Notre Dame, Paris (slide show, detail; video, whole rose) It is in mystical transparency that the old Gothic most fulfills its abstract vision, Music: French, c. 1260, Descendi-Gaude-Alma, Lum. 32027, close a geometry of light Dante applies in his last canto to the Trinity: O luce etterna che sola in te sidi — Eternal light that always self-abiding. Self-understanding and self-understood, Alone and three-in-one burns love and smiling (te ami e arridi) — June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That circle which as light in light appeared, As a reflected light of light begotten, Under the circumspection of my stare, Within itself and of its own pure color, Assumed the human likeness which we bear, So that my eyes were wholly fixed upon it... For that symbolic kaleidoscope, a7) Arnolfo di Cambio, 1294 ff., & Giotto, 1320-25, Santa Croce, Peruzzi & Bardi Chapels with frescoes, Florence Vb7) Giotto 1325?, Death of St. Francis, Santa Croce, Florence (pre-war, whole) 7) Same, Death of St. Francis (post-war, fragment); + V return to Vb7 V7a) Pisano 1302-11, Pulpit, Pisa Cathedral, Judgment: whole relief 7b) Same, Judgment, relief, detail the church of Dante's Florence keeps the frescoed walls of Romanesque; but what Giotto paints there summons to impassioned drama. So in Dante all rungs of the eternal ladder flex with life and dying — del Cassero stabbed: I ran to the marsh and the reeds and mire So tangled me that I fell, and there I saw A lake form on the earth from my own veins. The fate of Pia in a single line, which Eliot cribbed: Siena mi fe; disfecemi Maremma. So too the descriptive caccias of Giovanni da Cascia, Florentine composer born five years after Dante. Music: Giovanni da Cascia, c. 1325? from Con bracchi assai, 2nd stanza, (Munrow) Argo ZRG 642 But the intensity of the Italian awakening, its life, loves and hates, is preserved as nowhere else in the Divine Comedy. Here, tightened in the Catholic structure, is the ferment of Guelf and Ghibelline, nobles, merchants — boldness as always straitened in rigor. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 5 �C.G. Bell a8) b8) 8) 8a) Symbolic History Pisano, 1301, Atlas, Pistoia, S. Andrea, Pulpit (video: Va8) Pisano, 1284-96, Habakkuk (detail), Cathedral Museum, Siena Attr. Arnolfo di Cambio, 1298 ff., Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (CGB '48); + V return to a3, View over Florence Dante Death Mask, c. 1321?, profile, Palazzo Vecchio Into those timeless realms the great Florentines surge with a defiance which is their grandeur and their sin. So Farinata rises from his burning tomb: "Vedi 1à Farinata che s'è dritto" — Look there, Farinata, who has raised himself up; From the girdle to the crown you see him clearly. Already I had fixed my eyes upon him; He heightened his chest and lifted up his forehead, Like one who had the whole of hell in scorn, And asked me proudly: "Who were your ancestors?" As Dante meditated these words, over the Tuscan town from which he was exiled, bore up the sunlit height of the Signoria's tower, breaking the inner silence like a clarion at dawn — the chivalric strength of the French castle in a new and assertively civic form. At this turn of the century, Florence, of all Italian cities most vigorous in economic and public life, becomes the center of advance for all Europe. The leadership of Paris is broken; we are swept forward, as by an eager crowd, into the forehall of Renaissance: "O mente che scrivesti ciò ch'io vidi" — O Thought that wrote all that I saw, Here let your nobility be shown. (end Giovanni da Cascia) What are the elements of that alchemy? Va9) Pietro Cavallini 1293, Last Judgment, Three Figures, Santa Cecilia, Rome 9) Same, Single Figure (video: detail only, from V9) A time x-ray might read them like layers of paint from the robed figures of Cavallini's Judgment, 1293 — Cavallini, a Roman who seems to have influenced Giotto June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History and been swayed in turn by the younger genius; they are Classical, Early Christian, Byzantine, Northern Gothic, Italian Rebirth. First, Classical: 10) Roman (Augustan), 13-9 BC, Ara Pacis from north, Frieze, Magistrates and Priests, Rome (CGB '86); + V detail Trying to climb the mountain "which is the beginning and end of joy," Dante meets the shade of Virgil, who "lived at Rome under the good Augustus, in the time of false and lying gods" — "al tempo degli dei falsi e bugiardi". That meeting, that guidance, herald a new art. Aquinas' scholastic use and subordination of his classical master, Aristotle, turns to a drama of love, in which Dante weeps at the very coming of Beatrice — 11) Roman Christian (Carthage?), c. 400, Sarcophagus of Orantes, Tarragona, Spain of Revelation — since it is then that Virgil, "sweet father," must return to the noble castle of bondage — pagan virtues being only magnificent vices — Augustine: "a happiness in this life based on a virtue as deceitful as it is proud." And what the angels chant is the saddest phrase from the Aeneid, on the death of Marcellus, at which it is said Octavia and Augustus broke into passionate weeping: 12) V12a) Giotto 1306-10, Madonna and Angels, detail of an angel, Uffizi, Florence (CGB '59) Giotto 1306-10, Madonna Enthroned, Uffizi, Florence; first, video detail [for copy of CGB '59 original, Ars Nova 32, see 2nd 12, below] "Manibus date lilia plenis" — "Give us lilies with full hands" — a lament lifted in Dante by an exclamatory "O" into a mystery beyond grief or joy: "Manibus O date lilia plenis." Again with Giovanni da Cascia. Music: V2nd 11) June 1996 Giovanni da Cascia c. 1325, from Nel mezzo a sei paon, verse 4 a, (Cape) RCA VLM-6016 (fade) Sarcophagus of Orantes, detail Dante: Threshold of 1300 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We have been lured by Dante's synthesis through Early Christianity, For 2nd 10) Roman (Augustan), 13-9 BC, Augustus leads sacrificial procession, detail, south side, Ara Pacis again to the Roman Peace, under which the institutions of his world, Empire and Church, took form. And as he was driven by those beasts of sin down through hell-center before he could climb again, history was forced from Augustus' Virgilian altar and its human claim to virtue, 3rd 11)Again Sarcophagus of Orantes, detail down the spiral of denial (this Christian sarcophagus sent from Augustine's Carthage to Spain) to the ground Virgil himself must voice in Dante (Purgtorio. III): "State contenti, umana gente, al quia" — Let man rest content with how, not why; Could he have seen the whole, there was no need For Mary to give birth; and you have witnessed Such whose longing is their grief. I speak Of Plato, Aristotle, many more..." At this he bowed his head, dispirited. 2nd 12) Again, Giotto Madonna of V12a [of which the video shows only the angels below] Yet for three centuries before Dante, before this Giotto, speculative soul had been pushing up, bold as the Faustian vine described in Paradise IV, while Beatrice smiles: And therefore questioning at the root of truth Always puts up a living sprout, Whose nature drives us on from height to height. This sprouting (with the Divine Comedy, as with Giotto), gives Gothic an enfleshment so ideal and sensuous, 13) Fra Angelico 1434, Death and Assumption of the Virgin, Gardner Museum, Boston; + four video details Music: June 1996 Dufay, 1426?, from Vergine Bella (Petrarch), (Cape), ARC 3003 Dante: Threshold of 1300 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History that the Florentine refinements of the next century, here Fra Angelico, seem kindled. Thus the early work of Dufay (this setting of Petrarch's "Vergine Bella") ripens from Italian Ars Nova. In Angelico's symbolic Death and Assumption, the Apostles (below) close the post-and-lintel space of Mary's dying. But Christ in the center receives her infant soul — "figlia del tuo figlio"; while to the right, the raised palm of eternal life points through horizontal closure to the spire of such a Flamboyance as everywhere turns the Paradiso into living flame. 14) 14a) V14b) 14c) Botticelli, c. 1492-7, Divine Comedy drawings, Paradiso I, Kupferstichkabinet, East Berlin Same, Inferno XV, The Violent Against Nature, Vatican Library Same, Paradiso VI; again, Berlin Same, Paradiso XXXII; again, Berlin Botticelli would treasure that aesthetic mysticism to the end of the Quattrocento — nowhere more poignantly than in the drawings for the Commedia — witness the ascent with Beatrice from the garden that crowns Purgatory. In the context of the other designs, this initiates a leap from the busy crowding of the circles of punishment, toward the unfinished blankness which would more and more attest the empyrean. Had not Dante scaled those heights by the extrapolation of inadequacy? — "My sight greater than our speech"; "So snow in the sun dissolves the imprint; so with wind on the light leaves, the Sibyl's oracle was lost": Così la neve al sol si disigilla; così al vento nelle foglie levi si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla. Va15) 15) V15a) (close Dufay) German Romanesque & Transitional, 1004-1185 ff., Bamberg Cathedral Same, a closer view (CGB '86), from which video takes a detail S. German (Bavaria), 12th-14th cents., Michaelsberg, Bamberg (CGB '86) In the Gothic charge skyward, we have distinguished, around the French center, two layers. With the 12th century, that burgeoning stretches the Romanesque, as the Ottonian Kaiserdom is stretched at Bamberg — or the archaic empire by Barbarossa, Henry VI, Frederick II, who loom still in Dante: June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History This is the light of the great Constance, Who from the second blast of Swabia Conceived the third and ultimate energy. (Par. III) 16) German Gothic 13th-19th cents., Spires of Köln in mist (CGB '74); which video turns to details, below and above; digital adds to 16 a detail of 14 While in the 13th century, which at Cologne spills into the 19th, the high Gothic wave from the Ile de France points trellises of stone — such defiance of gravity as when Dante fixes his eyes on Beatrice (hers on the spheres) and his live body, lighter than air and fire, targets upward toward its happy mark: "Have you not known that each of us is a worm/ Born to form the angelic butterfly" — "a formar 1'angelica farfalla?" 17) 17a) V17b) French Gothic, 1243-48 (Pierre de Montreuil), Sainte-Chapelle, Paris (video takes horizontals, below and above) Same, apse windows; video, above, from vertical slide (CGB '59) Same, window detail from another vertical (CGB '48) What had intervened was mid-century Paris, an ultimate Lux Nova, earth, in the May morning and Gothic smile, transparent with heavenly sheen. Did Dante recall the Sainte-Chapelle (still fresh, still unrestored) when he saw paradise, first in its shadowy presages — "son di lor vero umbriferi prefazii" — a stream of sparks flowing between flowers? And I saw light in the form of a river, A river of fire between two shores Painted with spring's miraculous colors; And from that river fountained living sparks And poured across the banks, and in those flowers Immersed themselves, like rubies set in gold. He dips his eyes. That flow of God through time gathers to a timeless round: Nel giallo della rosa sempiterna, Che si dilata ed ingrata e redole Odor di lode al sol che sempre verna Into the yellow of the eternal rose That dilates and breathes the gracious odor Of praise, in waves, to the sun that always makes It spring, hushed and full of speech, I was drawn. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 10 �C.G. Bell Va18) 18) Symbolic History Sainte-Chapelle, cont. Chancel and Apse-glass; video first shows detail, below Sainte-Chapelle, cont. Statue with window behind (CGB '59); + V detail As in all Gothic, the relation to earth is ambiguous. Judgment goes on sounding, from Helinant's "Vers de la Mort" to the English "Earth out of earth is wonderfully wrought." Yet earth and heaven brighten together. Sacred motets dance like virelais; virelais smile angel innocence; in both, triple runs melt with piercing delight into perfect chords. Here from Adam de la Halle's "Li dous regars de ma Dame": June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 11 �C.G. Bell Music: 19) Symbolic History Adam de la Halle (1230-88), Li dous regars, Cape etc. EMS-201 (end) Sainte-Chapelle, cont., Chancel Canopy with Angels (CGB '59) Compare an Alleluya where the Alle and the luya are pulled apart and stuffed with psallite cum: "Alle psallite cum luya": Music: French (or English?), mid 13th cent., Alle psallite cum luya, Lumen 32027 20) 21) 22) Sainte-Chapelle, cont. right window-wall and apse (CGB '59) Sainte-Chapelle, cont. detail from glass, one scene (CGB '48) Sainte-Chapelle, cont. window-wall, looking up (CGB '48) 23) French Gothic late 12th - 16th cent., Chartres, West rose and towers (CGB '59) Same, whole West front, with the towers V23a) (end Alle) Before the infection of high-rise, the town-dwarfing French cathedrals — a Flamboyant tower perhaps, Renaissance angel or cupola, crowning Romanesque and Gothic — spoke how small a post-Columbian age fulfilled the living Medieval. No wonder building slacked off at the center, physical and spiritual space preempted. 24) French Gothic 1220-80, Cathedral of Amiens, Apse airview V24a) Same, Apse (CGB '74); video shows upper spread only 24b) Same, whole West front Yet the rational buttressing of faith which had reared Amiens and the Summa could not rest there. Reason, in Siger and the Averroists, must stake out its own realm: "The world is eternal; the will acts from necessity; happiness is in this life, and only philosophers are wise" — theses twice condemned at Paris. Yet Dante, Thomistic synthesizer, is so attuned to birth, that he places Siger, condemned by the Inquisition in 1277, among the brightnesses of Paradise; it is even St. Thomas, his bitterest accuser, who is made to introduce him: "This is the eternal light of Siger, who lecturing in the street of straw, demonstrated enviable truths." June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 12 �C.G. Bell a25) 25) 25a) 25b) Symbolic History Naumburger Master, c. 1260, Adelhied, Wife of Otto I, detail, Meissen Naumburger Master, c. 1260, St. John the Evangelist, detail, Meissen German Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1190-1208, Mother & Child from Liebfrauenkirche, Halberstadt Again, St. John, detail; + V return to 25a, detail of Mary Music: Hildegard of Bingen, c. 1150, from O Jerusalem, Hyperion A66039 Also Joachim de Floris; Dante could hardly omit so arch-especial a spirit — though his Everlasting Gospel had been variously charged. It had inspired century of radical mysticism, unorthodox as Siger's radical reason. Its richest art sign is the prophecy of the smile: the Master of Naumburg's Evangelist wreathes the Coming in the warmth of now. So the German deepening of God-with-us, from the hymns of Joachim's contemporary, 12th-century Hildegard of Bingen, through Berthold of Regensburg, to Meister Eckhardt in the time of Dante: ...there is an agent in the soul, untouched by time and flesh, which proceeds out of the Spirit and which remains forever in the spirit and is completely spiritual. In this agent, God is perpetually verdant and flowering with all the joy and glory that is in him ... For the Nowmoment in which God made the first man and the Now-moment in which I speak, are in God the one and only Now … (close Hildegard) V25c) Giotto, 1304-6, Angel of the Annunciation, detail, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua; Digital: Giotto 1325-30, St. John's ascension, detail, S. Croce, Florence A fusion Dante gives the aesthetic clarity of Florence. 26) 26a) 26b) German, c. 1300, "Self Portrait", West Towers, Cathedral, Freiburg Giovanni Pisano, 1312-14, Madonna della Cintola, Prato Cathedral German (Rhine), 1329, Head from Rood Judgment, Cathedral, Mainz (while video details 26, Freiburg "Self") Duns Scotus taught at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne around the time of this 1300 Freiburg "Self-portrait". In him the Scholastic instrument sharpens to a pre-Kantian critique: the God Anselm found in reason is only cause of causes. His other attributes, as Trinity, mercy, goodness, stand in contradiction and rest on faith alone: "We cannot June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History know God, but we can love Him, and that is better than knowing." Only against the remembered conscious might of Giovanni Pisano and Dante do these northern harbingers pipe thin: Long is ay and long is ho, Long is wy and long is wo... The late century shift in poetry a27) 27) V27a) 27b) Rheims, c 1240, Statues from West Front (copy of CGB ‘74, Cycles ‘56); + V detail Same, head of Maidservant, West Front, Rheims Rheims, 1245, Smiling Angel, Guardian of St. Denis Rheims, Interior, West Rose and Carvings (CGB '74) is always exemplified by the Romance of the Rose. Music: French c. 1230? Chanson de toile, Bele Doette, Cape etc., EMS 201 Guillaume de Lorris' 1235 opening has the chivalric mystery which smiles even on the face of this Rheims maidservant, or in the songs of the loom, Bele Doette: And now the wicket of that entry A maid of grace unlatched for me — Roses enwreathed her gold tiara; In her hand she bore a gay mirror. "My name," she said, "is Idleness; I have no care but to live in bliss, To gather garlands, and comb and dress." She made me welcome to that place Which was an earthly paradise. (CGB) Va28 and Vb28) June 1996 (fade Bele Doette) Angel and Mary of the Giotto Annunciation, from 28 Dante: Threshold of 1300 14 �C.G. Bell 28) 28a) 28b) Symbolic History Double: Giotto 1306, Annunciation, [A] Angel and [B] Mary; Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Giotto, 1304-6, Resurrection, detail, Noli me tangere, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua Correggio, 1518, Noli me tangere, Prado, Madrid Music: Giovanni da Cascia (?) c. 1230, Io son un pellegrin, Meili, AS-l With what sensuous immediacy French romance ripens to Dante, Giotto, the music of da Cascia: "I am a pilgrim who goes crying for alms." Loris' Idleness becomes the Leah of whom Dante dreams, gathering flowers to adorn herself at the mirror of contemplation. And then he sees her in Earthly Paradise, Matilda, across the stream: "You make me remember where and what Proserpina was, that time her mother lost her and she lost the spring" — (music) Tu mi fai rimembrar dove e qual era Proserpina nel tempo che perdette la madre lei, ed ella primavera. A Gothic yearning in delight which Milton could only wonder at, and be raised above himself: Not that faire field Of Enna where Proserpin gathring flours Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis Was gatherd ... (end lo son un pellegrin) 29) 29a) 29b) Jean Strasbourg Master, c. 1300, St. Louis and his Wife, Dahlem Museum, Berlin; + V detail French Gothic, mid 14th cent., Personification of Lust, South Transept, Auxerre Cathedral Orcagna c. 1360, The Blind and Halt appeal to Death, Santa Croce Museo, Florence In the Romance of the Rose two generations lead from that aristocratic source to de Meun's bourgeois continuation — such June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a compendium of realism and sense as feeds two centuries of late-Gothic — as in art, this Strasbourg St. Louis and his wife: The praise of my beauty was everywhere; There were night knockings at my door. Brawls, when I ditched one for another, Lopped off limbs and lives together... My body was so strong and supple, It could have minted coins in double; But I was foolish, young, and chary And had no schooling in love's theory. Experience has made me sage, In which I have spent the flower of my age. Wise too late; the day has waned; The door that swung cleaves to the jamb. Unvisited I wait alone, No loving touch from any one. Youths untiring of me once Pass me by without a glance; Or if they see what they adored, "Wrinkled hag" is their best word. (CGB) 30) 30a) 30b) French, c. 1390, Charles V and Jeanne Bourbon as St. Louis and his wife; Louvre Same, detail of Jeanne Bourbon Arnolfo di Cambio c. 1281, Thirsty Old Woman, from a fountain, Perugia Realism a century later reflects that 1280 shift: Charles the Wise of France (as St. Louis) with his wife — or Chaucer's Wife of Bath, enfleshed out of Jean de Meun: Experience, though noon auctoritee Were in this world, is right ynogh for me To speke of wo that is in mariage... Of which I am expert in al myn age... But age, allas! that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith... The human miracle, mediated by the age of Dante. But Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote... June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History That I have had my world as in my tyme. a31) 31) Pol de Limbourg & Brothers, 1413-16, The Astrological Man, Tres Riches Heures of Jean Duc de Berry, Mus. Condé, Chantilly Donatello, c. 1455, Mary Magdalen, waist up, Duomo Mus., Florence Even Villon's phallic helmeter, who sees her mirror image young and old, is of the same mine, though the Renaissance of body ("Petiz tetins, hanches charnues" — "round little breasts, fleshy haunches") intensifies, as in Donatello's Magdalen, a dance of death: The shoulders humped and ruinous, Breasts, alas, quite fallen in; Haunches like the breasts gone lean... (CGB) Les espaulles toutes bossues, Mamelles, quoy? toutes retraites, Telles les hanches que les tetes... 32) 32a) Franco-German c. 1300, Tempter & Virgins, West Portal, Strasbourg (CGB '59); + V detail Original Strasbourg Tempter, Cathedral Museum, detail (CGB '59) Music: Pierre de la Croix, end of 13th cent. S'amours — Au renouveller, Secular Motet, Blanchard, Duc.Tom. 320c107 The realism of Strasbourg is a century and a half before Villon's claim and cry of flesh — an eruptive vitality on a cathedral door, where the Prince of this World offers the foolish gay virgins an apple in which he grins at the worm, Dante's "vermo reo che il mondo fora". Though this humor of damnation is closer to Aucassin's "I want to go to hell with the fine ladies and noble lords"; or to Chaucer's nest of friars under the devil's tail: "Sathanas... Shewe forth thyn ers, and let the frere see/ Wher is the nest of freres in this place!" 33) 33a) Strasbourg Portal, cont., A Virtue Strasbourg Portal, cont., A Young King The 1300 shift is from sacred incorporation to the release of individual and secular energies in the loosening faith-frame. At Strasbourg, Virtues sharp-browed as holy virgin satyrs, kings keen as falcons, explore a drama of capricious force. While June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History music, in the more complex time divisions of Pierre de la Croix, seems another such heraldic lion, reared against residual bonds. It is the northern transition to Ars Nova, the new art. (cut de la Croix) 34) Pisano c. 1295, Miriam (or a Sibyl?) detail, Duomo Mus., Siena (CGB '86); + V detail [video and digital use V34, a wider horizontal — plus a detail] Facing which, Giovanni Pisano reminds us again of the full dynamic of love in Dante — seed of virtue and vice: Amor, sementa in voi d'ogni virtute e d'ogni operazion che merta pene. So Paolo and Francesca, borne on the dark wind, like doves to the sweet nest: "O living creature, gracious and benign," che visitando vai per l'aere perso noi che tignemmo il mondo di sanguigno... "Love took him... love took me... love brought us to one death." "Amor... amor... amor... That day we read in it no further." 35) 35a) English Gothic, 1180-1330, Wells, view from the northeast (CGB '66) English (Wells), c. 1293-1306, Decorated Chapter House, especially Vault (CGB '84) Music: English c. 1310, Rosa fragrans, roundelay, from V-LM 6015 In England a quieter harmony, in the Lady Chapel and Chapter House of Wells, 1300 and after, balances, within Gothic, an enlightenment of ease. So with the "Rosa Fragrans", a roundelay to Mary. (music continuing) 36) English Norman to Decorated esp. 14th c., Chaddsley Corbett Church (CGB '65) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Typical, the perfection of the small, wooden-roofed church, the comfort of every parish, where in France small churches mostly ape the large. Chaddsley Corbett already implies the well-being and liberal autonomy of the middle which made Shakespeare's island "this blessed plot, this realm, this England". 37) English c. 1300-20?, Queen Margaret, half length, Lincoln Cathedral [video starts with a half-length from V37b, of the whole] Same, detail of the face Same, whole statue in its niche V37a) V37b) The Lincoln Queen Margaret is perhaps of the early 1300's. Its human naturalness suggests the music of the third and sixth, intervals which the English theorist Odington, of the same time, first justifies, and on grounds of appeal: "Voices lead them forth into a Rosa sweet mixture." (end fragrans) Yet this filling in of the human context accepts the old containment. What it would take to break that limitation a38) Giovanni Pisano, 1302-11, The Theological Virtues, (Faith?), detail; Pisa Cathedral Pulpit G. Pisano, c. 1312, Margaret of Luxembourg Tomb, whole G. Pisano 1301, detail of a Sibyl, Pistoia Pulpit 38) V38a) was a Promethean thrust. Music: Lorenzo da Firenze, c. 1340?, Sanctus, Syntagma, Seraphim 6052 Giovanni Pisano's last work, the now fragmentary tomb of Margaret of Luxembourg (c. 1312), shapes the flesh and person of some soul rising on the slopes of Purgatory. It is there that the composer Casella sings Dante's Canzona, "Amor, che nella mente mi ragiona," which, if it survived, might complete a cognate trio. Having nothing of Casella's, we settle for a "Second Generation" Sanctus by Lorenzo of Florence. It claims, for all the chordal advance of the English, another realm of consciousness. a39) 39) G. Pisano, 1301, detail of another Sibyl, Pistoia Pulpit G. Pisano, c. 1312, head of Margaret of Luxembourg June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Vita Nuova, or New Life of 1294, Dante tells of his first meeting at the age of nine with the eight year old Beatrice: She appeared clothed in a most noble color, the humble and becoming crimson of the blood, cinctured and adorned in a style suited to her youthful age. At that instant I say truly that the spirit of life which dwells in the most secret chambers of the heart began to tremble with such violence that it appeared fearfully in the remotest pulses, and trembling spoke these words: "Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi." ("Here is a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me.") (end Sanctus, skipping 1st Hosanna) 40) French, early 12th cent., Lust and Despair, Church of Tavant (Indre-et-Loire) Go back a century and a half to Abelard's no less personal History of my Calamity: And now, my friend, I am going to expose to you all my weakness... There was in Paris a young creature... formed in the prodigality of nature... Heloise... I saw her... I loved her... We were united first in the dwelling that sheltered our love and then in the hearts that burned within us. That earlier love was broken on the rack and wheel of medieval contempt of the world, appearing as profane, self-condeming fire. 2nd 39) Again Margaret of Luxembourg Tomb, detail of Margaret Whereas in Dante, personal love is sacredly affirmed. As he promised in the Vita Nuova, Beatrice is glorified as no other woman: both Holy Wisdom and the smiling actuality of a remembered love: Garlanded with olive over a white veil, My lady appeared to me, a brightness clothed, Under a green mantle, in the color of living flame; And my spirit which for a long time now Had not been overcome with such an awe, Trembling and speechless as before in her presence... Of its first love again felt all the power. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 20 �C.G. Bell 2nd 40) Symbolic History Again, Tavant, Lust and Despair, detail Where Abelard (if the letters are his) wrote to Heloise: I satisfied my wretched desires in thee... Weep for thy Saviour, not for thy seducer; for thy Redeemer, not for thy defiler... 41) Spanish Romanesque, c. 1125?, Annunciation, San Vicente, Avila; + V detail Of course, the incorporation of earthly beauty had already begun in the 12th century and would be the flame of Gothic. It is Peter the Venerable who, taking Abelard's body to Heloise, opens paradise to their love: Thus, dear and venerable sister in God, him to whom you were united, after your tie in the flesh, by the better and stronger bond of divine love... the Lord now takes in your stead, or as another you, and warms in his bosom, for the day of His coming... to restore him to you by His grace. 42) Upper Rhine, c. 1320, Konrad v. Altstetten, Manessa Minnesinger MS, Heidelberg; first, V detail Music: Jehannot de l'Escurel, d. 1303: A vous, douce debonaire; Cape, VLM-6016 How the brief delight of flesh has flowered since then: Upper-Rhine, time of Dante, with the "Douce debonaire" of Escurel, executed in Paris, 1303. (cut Music) a43) 43) Duccio, 1308-11, The Annunciation, National Gallery, London Duccio, 1308-11, Maesta, Christ and Magdalen, Duomo Mus., Siena Most of all in Italy, beauty was sanctified — as by Guido Guinicelli, who, in the Canzone Dante echoes, "Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore", when demanded of the old God, "by what idolatry did you take vain love for Me?" answers: "No fault of mine if you gave love your semblance." What had prepared for that tender enactment? In this "Noli me tangere" by Duccio (1308-11) the flame of Gothic line penetrates the Byzantine. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 21 �C.G. Bell 44) Symbolic History Byzantine, 12th cent., St. John from Deesis Mosaic, Hagia Sophia, Constantinople; first, V detail That Byzantine which — spread from its Eastern revival over Italy — gives the New Art an immediate Dark Age ground, an unleavened weight two centuries in France had almost smiled away, ascetic base for the "high seriousness" Arnold praised in Dante: I saw this threshing-floor that frets our hearts Stretched from the high hills to the river's mouth... a45) Vb45) 45) June 1996 Tuscan, 12th Cent., Badia Fiesolana, Florence Baptistery, 11th cent., whole; Florence (CGB '84) Same, closer detail (CGB '84) Dante: Threshold of 1300 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While from the 11th century down, the Romanesque birth in Pisa and Florence had reached for the proportions of Renaissance, as if to arrive there without Gothic intervention. So the Badia of Fiesole, or San Miniato al Monte, or the Baptistery where Dante says he broke a font to save one drowning, "nel mio bel San Giovanni" — from the Florence of his great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, when the wealthy (Paradiso XV) "were content with bare leather, and their womenfolk with spindle and thread." a46) 46) Cimabue, 1278-80, St. Francis, detail of Fresco, Madonna and Angels, Lower Church, Assisi Giotto, 1297-99, St. Francis frescoes, Dream of Innocent III, Assisi But the French tutelage had already begun. It was from Abelard that Arnold of Brescia took the passion which roused Rome; and St. Francis had, as it were, St. Bernard for stern father and for romance mother, troubador song. That so individual a love should have been chartered by the church rather than being pushed, like his followers, into heresy, was a miracle requiring the explanation of Innocent III's dream — as Giotto would paint it a century later — of Francis holding up the tottering Church. 47) Antelami, 1204-11, David among the Blessed, Baptistery, Parma In the art of St. Francis' own time, Antelami, also swayed from Provence, shows such worship of the natural as Francis in his far-reaching free-verse hymn: Altissimu, omnipotente, bon Signore... Be praised, O Lord, with all of these thy creatures: 48) Antelami, cont., Reaper (June from the Seasons), Parma First of all for our noble brother the sun, Who lightens the day here about us; He is fair and bright with rare splendor And stands for a sign — Most High — of thy dominion. Be praised, O Lord, for sister moon and the stars... ...for our brother the cool wind, And airs moist and serene and all weathers, The sustenance and nurture of thy creatures. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 23 �C.G. Bell 49) Symbolic History Antelami circle(?), c. 1210, Grape Harvest, Month of September, Ferrara, Cathedral; + V detail Be praised, O Lord, in gentle sister water, Who is helpful and kind and very clean and comely. Be praised, O Lord, in swift brother fire, By whom the night is beautified and brightened, And he is lusty and red and strong and jocund. Be praised, O Lord, in our sister mother earth, Who bears nourishing fruits and colored flowers and simples... 1st 50) Giotto, 1297-99, St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, Assisi, detail Be praised, O Lord, for our sister the death of the body... And may we serve Thee in the bonds of meekness. (CGB) a51) Apulian, mid-13th cent., Bust of Emperor Frederick II, detail, Civic Mus., Barletta (video details from 2nd 51a, the whole) 1st 51) Apulian, 1239, Head of Pier delle Vigne, from Arch of Frederick II, Capua The rebirth counterpole was Frederick II's revival of Rome, which founded the modern state. Here is his answer to Papal calumny: Let those who shrink from my support have the shame as well as the galling burden of slavery. Before this generation and the generations to come, I will have the glory of resisting this tyranny. This bust from his destroyed Triumphal Arch is probably of Piero delle Vigne, who appears among the suicides in Dante's Hell: "I... held both keys of Frederick's heart." But the whole attempt was hounded into hell by the winds of a bleak season, such as blow even in the statuary — no direct road to antique recovery. 2nd 50) Again, Giotto, St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, whole The Mirror of Perfection tells us that Francis wished to supplicate Frederick for the love of God and me, to make a special law that no man should take or kill our sisters the larks, nor do them any harm; likewise that all the podestas or mayors of towns and the lords of castles and villages should require men every year on Christmas Day to throw grain June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History outside the cities and castles, that our sisters the larks and other birds may have something to eat. Va2nd 51) Frederick II bust, whole, preview of 2nd 51a For 2nd 51) Bonaventura Berlinghieri 1235, Stigmatization, from St. Francis Panel, Church of S. Francesco, Pescia 2nd 51a) Again, Frederick II bust, whole Curious if the supplicant had come a few years later when Frederick was lopping the hands and feet off certain papal messengers. In the faith-grip gentle Francis, emaciated with fever and fasting, is stigmatized on the rock hill by the seraph of fire; while enlightened Frederick, accused antichrist, rages at the clergy: "slaves to the world, drunk with self-indulgence." 52 or V52) Nicola Pisano, 1260, Pulpit, Baptistery, Pisa; + V detail Yet it was from Frederick's court in Apulia that poetic currents flowed to Tuscany, and that Nicola Pisano brought the massive Roman sarcophagus style of the 1260 Pisa pulpit — another premature and perhaps abortive lunge at Renaissance. RomanesqueByzantine and revived Classic are here; the missing element 53) Master of Naumburg, c. 1260, Last Supper, West Choir Screen, Naumburg Cathedral June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History is Gothic. All over northern Europe that quest was finding its way: in the Master of Naumburg about the same year, by the German genius for observation. 54) Nicola Pisano, 1260, Nativity, from the Pisa Pulpit While the marble forms of Nicola Pisano reach for the stateliness of an unknown future, to fall back in mannered grandeur to the unthawed weight of Dark Age Rome — nobly still-born. 55) French Gothic, mid-13th Cent., Nativity, old Choir Screen, Chartres (CGB '81) France burned with the art that could thaw, the love that could give them life. In the immediate grace of this melting, the smile runs through cheek, arms, hand, every fold of the robe. 2nd 54) Again, Nicola Pisano, Nativity, detail Imagine a chemistry by which that spark could be poured through the hollow fullness of the father, Nicola; 2nd 55) Again, Chartres Nativity, variant photo (V details the CGB 1st 55) see it slide, gleaming, into solution there; the shapes stretch themselves, swirl, 56) 56a) 56b) Giovanni Pisano, 1302-11, Nativity, det. Pulpit, Cathedral, Pisa Giovanni Pisano, 1312-14, Madonna della Cintola, detail, Altar of Chapel of Holy Girdle, Prato, Cathedral Giovanni Pisano, c. 1312, Head of Temperance, fragment, Margaret of Luxemburg Tomb, private collection, Switzerland and become those of the son, Giovanni, in the other pulpit, of 1302-11, where the smile wreathes the body in sensuous flame. It is the smile which runs through all grades of Dante's Heaven: "il riso del universo" — "the smile of the universe"; "lo splendor degli occhi suoi ridenti" — "the splendor of her laughing eyes", a smile that can make paradise itself: "For in her eyes burned such a smile, I thought I plumbed with mine the depth of my grace and paradise." It crowns Purgatory with the coming of Beatrice; it hovers with yearning tenderness, "the desired smile" of romance, over the shadows of hell. By some June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History inexplicable transmutation, that Dark-Age "flying world", for all its violence and the brunt of timeless rewards, grows benign and glad: "nell' aere dolce che dal sol s'allegra." 57 or wider V57) Nicola Pisano, 1260, Sampson, from the Pulpit, Baptistery, Pisa In both pulpits Sampson is the heroic nude. In Dante it is Ulysses who turns the classical to infinite search. Nicola's Sampson has the frame but lacks the force — the will and desire that drove Me on, to discover the ultimate secrets Of man, both of the evil and the good. So I put out upon the high sea's peril... 58) 58a) 58b) 58c) Giovanni Pisano, 1302-11, Sampson, from Pulpit, Cathedral, Pisa; + V detail Andrea da Firenze, c. 1365, Sailboat, from Peter Walking the Waves, ceiling of Spanish Chapel, Florence Again, G. Pisano, Sampson, detail (video: closer detail, with return to whole) Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1337-9, Good Government in the Country, detail; Palazzo Publico, Siena We set our vessel's stern against the morning And of our oars made wings for the mad flight, Always a little on the left hand gaining. Already night saw all the stars that circle The other pole, and our own dropped so low It did not rise above the ocean floor. Five times the light that waxes under the moon Was kindled and was quenched since first we entered The ocean guarded by the pillared pass, When there appeared before our eyes a mountain, Brown with the distance, and it seemed so high That I had never witnessed such another. And we were glad, but gladness turned to grief; For out of the new land came a great whirlwind And on the fore part of the vessel beat. Three times it made it whirl with all the water; The fourth, the poop went up, the prow went down; And the sea closed over us as it pleased Another. Hemmed in the allegory where that mountain is Purgatory, not open but to Grace, what sweeps through the passage like wind in the sails is a paean to the reckless voyage, June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "il folle volo". And Giovanni's Sampson-Hercules, for all his Gothic rib-cage, has the torque Michelangelo was to learn from. Though what art can loom like the "nova terra" over the round of water: "Una montagna, bruna per la distanza ..."? 59) V59a) Giunta Pisano, c. 1250, Crucifix, detail S. Domenico, Bologna, Cimabue, 1277-80, Crucifixion fresco, S. Francesco, Assisi (video returns to a closer detail of 59) As Byzantine broke to Gothic passion, there arose in Umbria, 1259, a frenzy of penitential flagellants, a mania of atonement, in which Jacopone da Todi, a lawyer whose wife had been crushed under a scaffold, went smeared with tar and feathers, like a beast on all fours, lived to compose the "Stabat mater dolorosa/ juxta crucem lacrimosa," "The Mother of Sorrows stood under the cross in tears," and, in Italian, the angular, savage tenderness of "The Crucifixion": Now the Mother and John One grief has thrown down; Arm in arm they are found At the cross of the Son. (CGB) Or his cry for the lash of disease, his punishment for God's death: Che me creasti en tua diletta Ed io t'ho morto a villania. 60) S. Italian Miniature, c. 1280-90, Chivalric Scene, Petrarch's Livy, Bibl. Nat., Paris Against which the lighter fancies of Gallic illumination enter with the play of Folgore di San Giminiano's sonnets on the seasons: Horses are galloping, coursers of Spain; And men, clothed all in the fashion of France, Sing and dance in the manner of Provence... (CGB) 61) Coppo di Marcovaldo, c. 1266-8, Madonna and Child, S. Martino ai Servi, Orvieto (video: upper part only) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Italian feat is to blend in two generations those three style currents: Romanesque-Byzantine, the Gothic wave, classical revival; and the resulting leap, as by Trotsky's law of combined development, is from Coppo di Marcovaldo (c. 1266), 62) Cimabue, c. 1280(?), Madonna Enthroned, fresco, Lower Church, Assisi (video: upper part only) to his pupil, Cimabue (c. 1280) who, as Dante says, bore the cry, until he was displaced in turn by his own pupil, a63) b63) 63) 63a) Giotto, 1304-6, Adoration of the Magi, Scrovegni Chapel, Padova (detail); + V closer detail Giotto, 1304-6, Flight to Egypt, Padova Giotto, 1304-6, Nativity, Padova (video shows 63a first) Same, upper detail, angels (V after 63a shows 63, center; cf. V63) Giotto (after 1300) in whose style of epic observation the three currents meet. As in Giovanni Pisano, but with more calm, the very fabric of longing smiles: "lassu di sopra in la vita serena" — "up there in the serene life". In Dante, it is the skipping four-stress line which, varying the pentameter, as much as anything suspends joy in mystery: Beatrice's voys of aungel, "Con angelica voce in sua favella" — like dawn in Purgatory, earth brightening through its veil: "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro" — The sweet color of oriental sapphire That gathered in the serene face of the skies Pure from the center even to the first circle, Restored forgotten gladness to my eyes, As soon as I had come from the dead vapor That had afflicted both my sight and heart. The beautiful planet that gives love comfort, Veiling the Fishes that came in her train, Was shimmering all the east with laughter... I looked where dawn was vanquishing the gray Breath of morning, and as it fled before her, I took far off the trembling of the sea... (Though art again hardly parallels that mystic reach of nature: "si che di lontano/ conobbi il tremolar della marina." ) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In music that Italian half century offers (before Giovanni da Cascia) two collections of monodic "Laude Spirituale", songs of the Penitentes. 2nd 61) Music: Coppo di Marcovaldo, Madonna, detail (video: V2nd 61) closer detail from Italian, 13th cent., Laud to San Lorenzo, Tinayre, Lumen 32018 Curious that the earliest recorded, called 13th century, "Saint Laurence, martyr of love," is rendered by Tinayre, 2nd 62) Cimabue, Madonna, detail (video: closer detail) as with Byzantine and early Gothic affinities. 2nd 63) 2nd 63a) Music: (fade Music) Giotto, Nativity, Padova (close detail) Giotto, 1304-6, Head of Christ, from Noli me tangere, Padua Italian, c. 1300, Lauda, Gloria in cielo (close), Meili, AS-l While to the "Gloria in Cielo" called about 1300, Max Meili gives a Troubador richness affined to the clarified passion of Giotto. (end Music) a64) 64) Italian Gothic, 1228-53, View of the Upper Church of S. Francesco, Assisi (CGB '84) Italian Gothic, 1228-53 (frescoes c.1280-1300), Upper Church, interior, Assisi (CGB '84) Assisi was the crucible of the Giotto elixer. This upper church, vaulted by the mid-13th century, witnessed one of the great creative ferments of history. Cimabue was in charge. Artists came from all over Italy. Attributions remain in doubt. 65) Circle of Cimabue, c. 1280-90, Abraham and Isaac, Upper Church, Assisi This Abraham and Isaac has been called Cimabue, Roman, Sienese. But no one could dispute the force with which Gothic penetrates the symbol-world of Byzantine, wrenching it from the timeless to the enormous drama of time. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 30 �C.G. Bell 66) Symbolic History Early Duccio(?), under Cimabue, c. 1280-90, Abraham and Angels, detail, Upper Church, Assisi In that circle of Cimabue, the painters of the rising generation were formed. It is likely that Duccio was there, and this Abraham and the Angels (detail) has been called his earliest work. As in his last, he stresses two elements of the alchemy, refining Gothic line in a solemnity of Byzantine. 67) Cavallini, 1291, Birth of the Virgin Mosaic, S. Maria in Trastevere, Rome The third, Classical revival, Cavallini may have brought from Rome. How consciously his Birth of the Virgin there has absorbed the quiet space of the antique. Unfortunately, his earlier works are lost, and nobody knows how this Trastevere mosaic of 1291 68) Giotto(?) or School of Cavallini(?), 1291-2, Esau and Isaac, Upper Church, Assisi relates to the Assisi Esau and Isaac of the same time. This has been called Cavallini, or school, and taken as a point of departure for Giotto. Others have been as certain that here the youthful Giotto opened the space Cavallini took back to Rome. 2nd 67) Again, Cavallini mosaic (detail) Whatever the dates, such Roman geometry, where a servant-girl as river goddess harmoniously pours into a classical urn, must have helped a Tuscan prodigy to what he required. Though retrospective Cavallini 2nd 68) Again, Easu and Isaac (detail) at once yields, robe, space and gesture, to what is surely here the genius of Giotto. In the melt of Byzantine, French and classical, the magister forms — as much or more than Giovanni Pisano, a cognate for Dante — cognate for the Ars Nova that would peak in Landini. Music: 69) Landini c. 1360(?), Nessun ponga sperança (Cape), ARC 3003 Detail of 68, head of Isaac (so video; slide show uses a black & white photo) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In this face of the blind Isaac, the trans-realities of earth and spirit corruscate like that dawn on the shore of Purgatory for which we had no parallel. In such light Cato had just appeared: Long his beard and streaked with white and his hair The same... And the rays of the four holy stars Glowed on his face, as if the sun were before him. At Cato's direction Dante goes to bathe his face, "where dawn stills the morning breeze", and he knows, "far off, the trembling of the sea." (end Landini after 1st stanza) 70) Giotto, 1303-6, view from chancel, Arena Chapel (degli Scrovegni), Padova; + V details (using V70a, b, & c) Giotto's masterpiece is the Arena Chapel in Padua, from the time of Dante's first banished wanderings. Like the Divine Comedy, it is a numbered Gothic synthesis, three within three: above, an empyrean of stars, with gold-medallion saints and Mary; below in monochrome, Virtues and Vices, allegorical powers of this world; between, three rows of the Coming: Christ's ancestry; his Incarnation and life to the Betrayal; his Passion and Resurrection, to the Descent of the Holy Spirit. On the end wall, opposite the altar, Judgment turns time to eternity. 71) 71a) Giotto, c. 1306, Justice and Injustice, Scrovegni Chapel, Padova Same, detail, scene of injustice Small scenes under Justice and Injustice carve their actuality in the life of man, the bad as always stronger, that raped Italy of Dante's Sordello — "hostel of sorrows" — Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello... 72) From same, Marriage at Cana, and Pieta, with four Correspondences; + V details In such a plan, the life of Christ requires its Old Testament Correspondences. They occupy small windows between the large. Upper left, Moses strikes water from the rock, prototype of Cana, where Christ turns water into wine. While the creation of Adam looks to the next scene (not shown) of Lazarus raised from the dead. Below, Jonah into June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the whale, marks Christ's death; the Lion of Judah breathing life into the cubs, his harrowing of Hell. As in Dante, tragic energies are gripped in the theological frame. a73) 73) Carolingian, c. 880, Second cover of Lindau Gospels, Crucifixion, J. Pierpont Morgan Lib, NY Post-Carolingian, later 9th cent., Crucifixion, Gospel of Francis II, Bibl. Nat., Paris; + V detail Music: Abbot Columban, 814, Planctus Caroli (Deller), Everest 3452 The 9th century stripped field of the blind world and faith in God did not give earth the dignity for tragic pain — even in the lament for Charlemange. When Dante's Fortune, "beyond the intervention of human intelligence... turns her wheel and rejoices in bliss," we do not question; we accept. As Beatrice says: "For our justice to appear injustice to mortal eyes is an argument of faith and not of heresy." But against that Dark Age resignation comes the surge of giant characters, whose pride and pain are no longer to be chanted over with the rest of a universe of fallen vanity. (fade Planctus) 74) Giovanni Pisano, 1301, Slaughter of the Innocents, detail, Pulpit, Cathedral, Pistoia Music: Guillaume de Machault, c.1377, from Ploures Dames, Columbia M. 413(3) This is the vortex in which Western tragedy is born; and it is born in Giovanni Pisano's Pulpits (here from Pistoia), as in Dante, 75) V75a) Giotto, 1304-6, Deposition (Pieta), Scrovegni Chapel, Padova Same, detail of John or in Giotto; it is born in Ars Nova — Guillaume de Machault — though in germ, suspended in the bare fifths of resolving creed. (fade Machault) Yet by that very suspension, the stripped pocket-tragedies of Dante burn with fiercer outrage than Shakespeare, reaching for human containment, could afford. a2nd 74) Giovanni Pisano, c. 1297, Haggai detail of head; Victoria and Albert Museum, London June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 33 �C.G. Bell 2nd 74) Symbolic History Again, G. Pisano, Pistoia Innocents, another detail In the thirty-third canto of Hell, Count Ugolino, gnawing the skull of Ruggiero, who had imprisoned him with his children, speaks: There is a narrow opening in the tower Called since we were there by hunger's name, In which it seems that other men must suffer; Through that crevice I had seen wax and wane More moons than few, before the veil of the future Was rifted for me in a terrible dream ... When I awoke in the dark before the dawn, I heard those of my sons who were with me there Crying out in their sleep, calling for bread. You are hard indeed if you do not shudder Seeing what I foresaw; if you cannot weep At this, how will you ever weep for another? 2nd 75) Again, Giotto, from Pieta, central group, Padova 2nd 75a) Giovanni Pisano, 1301, detail of Crucifixion, Pulpit, Pistoia We were all awake now, and the hour drew near At which our food was brought us by the jailor; And by his dream each was inclined to fear. And then I heard them nailing up the issue Of the horrible tower, and without a word I sat and looked into my children's faces. I did not weep; no, I had turned to stone; They wept, and little Anselm said: "Father, Why do you look so, what is it they have done?" 76) 76a) 76b) Again, Giotto, Pieta, close detail of Mary and Christ, Padova Same, another detail, mourning women Same, another detail, grieving angels above And still that day and all the night following I did not weep nor answer them at all, Until the sun brought earth another dawning. Now when the first dull rays entered the gloom Of that lamentable prison, and I beholding Saw four faces the image of my own — I gnawed my hands for grief. And they believing June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From this that I was driven by the wish Of eating, suddenly raised themselves, speaking: "Father, believe our suffering would be less If you fed here; what you have put upon us You may strip off, this miserable flesh." I calmed myself, not to give them more sadness. Through that day and another we sat mute — Earth, hard-hearted, why did you not open? a77) 77) Again, Padua Frescoes, from Kiss of Judas, lower spread (or Va77, whole) Same, detail of Christ and Judas; + V closer detail (V77a) June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History When we had come to the fourth day, Gaddo spoke, And crying: "Father, why do you not help me?" He threw himself face downward at my feet. And there he died; and even as you see me I saw them one by one fall down all three, The fifth day and the sixth; and over them I Already blind, confirming what I knew Groped two days calling the dead. Then finally Fasting did what anguish could not do. He turned his eyes in when this speech was done And fastened his teeth again on the torn skull That were strong as a dog's, ravening at the bone. Giotto's Gaze of Christ, enfolded in the jealous robe, against that of Judas, a peak of concentration in all art: "Would you betray the son of man with a kiss?" (pause) 78) Erwin von Steinbach, d. 1318, West Front, Strasbourg One can no more neglect in Dante the grip of the faith-frame than the vast humanity released there. By that humanity indeed, the frame itself is daringly transformed. Two facades, two late-Gothic containments, both centered about 1300. In the north, Strasbourg, the energized ascent of Erwin von Steinbach. 79) Italian, esp. 1290-1380, Giovanni Pisano and school, upper Façade, with Dome and Tower, Siena (CGB '86; or V variants, CGB ‘48) Here, Siena, where Gothic went down into the sun-wreathed slopes of the South to elaborate, as a conscious work of art, its temporal relations. From those facade-designs, contrasting heads: a80) Vb80) 80) June 1996 Franco-German, end of the 13th cent., Prophet with a scroll, waist up; West Portal, Strasbourg Same, a different view of the Prophet's head From the same Portal, another prophet Dante: Threshold of 1300 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History A Strasbourg prophet, as if the Medieval had gathered its new life for some preLutheran warning — about 1300, the Strawberry Song: "Hie vor dô wir kinder wâren ... Picking berries on that ground We were marred with stains like wounds ... A child walked deep in the grass; In fear we heard his cry of loss: Children, beware, the snake is here; He has bit our own playfere; That wound they say will never heal; He is accursed and will be still ... Did you know five virgins delayed So long in the meadow where they played That the bridegroom closed the hall? For all their plaint and call, The bailiff stripped them of their bright gowns, And left them naked to their wounds. (CGB) 80+1) 80+1a) 80+1b) Again, G. Pisano, Simeon (CGB '86) Variant of 2nd 75a) G. Pisano, Christ's head, Crucifixion, Pistoia G. Pisano, Simeon, closer detail From Siena, the Giovanni Pisano Simeon, where we began. So Dante humanized the way of salvation. It is from the great Image of Man in Crete that the stream of hellsuffering flows, which — Felix Culpa, the snake reared in the desert, the new Adam from the old — becomes the pilgrim's road to the highest good, in the flesh to see God, that ring of light which bears the image of a Man. As Langland follows Dante: "I never saw Christ in truth but as myself in a mirror." There is the incarnate mystery. To be God and Man is not to be half and half but absolutely both, each validated by its opposite. So with the Dante of faith and reason, humility and daring. The venture of indwelling spirit, by which Virgil commands (with Joachim de Floris) "Be your own pope and king!" — is not impaired by the purging discipline at the summit of which it stands: Libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio ... Per ch' io te sovra te corono e mitrio. Your will now is upright, free and whole — June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I crown and miter you lord of your own. June 1996 Dante: Threshold of 1300 38 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 39 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Dante : Threshold of 1300, Symbolic History, Part 11 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 11 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_11_Dante--Threshold_of_1300 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a09f6dd9fdfacf9ad496233a9ca15527.pdf 5d842646c3d76911260042e8adb256f9 PDF Text Text SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 10. The Gothic Wave CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 August 1995 Last Revised January ‘96 �Charles Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, NM 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 10. The Gothic Wave 1) German, 873, Corvey, W. Front (video: details only, below then above) Music: Tuotilo, c. 900, from Kyrie-Trope: Omnipotens, MHS Or 349 To preserve, under an always growing wealth of detail, the great shapes of cultural change... As in a chart of evolution, we have seen the Dark Age fortress of old Romanesque (Corvey — with the solemn tread of later plainsong — c. 900, Tuotilo of St. Gall) (end Tuotilo) 2) French Burgundy, 1120-1140 and ff., Vezelay, interior; + V detail lift itself, over Europe, to the varieties of new Romanesque (and in music to the first horizon of Organum: the close of "Mira Lege", early 12th century — with Vezelay): Music: French, c. 1120, Mira Lege, refrain, from Columbia (78), 5710 (end) 3) French, 1145-60, from Nave into Choir, Cathedral of Sens (CGB '59) V3a) Same, Nave from the aisle, Sens (CGB '59) 3b) Same, north aisle of Choir, two windows: Life of St. Thomas of Canterbury (CGB '59) V3c) Same, close-up of another of these windows (CGB '59) In one of these Romanesque branches — surrounding Paris — occurs the dynamic mutation of Gothic (here Sens mid-12th century, contemporary with Suger's St. Denis) and in music the driving force and mystical tenderness of Leonin. Music: 2/16/96 Leonin, c. 1160-90, Deum Timê (close, from "quie") AS 65 The Gothic Wave 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From that 1160 unfolding 4) French Norman, 13th cent., Coutances, W. Towers (CGB '74) a complex of forms springs to 13th-century Rayonnance. We choose, from many, the delight of Coutances and with it a mid-century motet: "Salve virgo virginum": Music: French mid-13th cent.(?), Salve Virgo Virginum, SAWT-(9530-1) 5) 6) 7) Same, Coutances, from rear (CGB '74) Same, Coutances, Central tower (lantern) (CGB '74) Same, Coutances, Nave, Crossing and Choir from entrance (CGB '74); video takes in two sections, below and above V7a) French Gothic, later 13th cent., Lantern over the Crossing, Coutances, France (from CGB '74, Dark Ages 80) (end Salve) From the Ile de France the Gothic wave spreads over Europe... Va8) Roman Christian, 2nd-4th cent., Catacomb of S. Calixtus, detail 8) Same, another view 8a) Christian, c. 470, Mosaic of St. Ambrose, Capello San Vittore, Sant' Ambrogio, Milan (digital: detail only) A total transformation since Christianity went down into the catacombs of troubled late-Rome, putting off temporality, with all assertions of pagan reason and skill, seeking the solemn birth in the cave. Music: Solesmes Gregorian, Absolve, Funeral Mass, opening, VM-87-3 As Augustine said of the old philosopher, Victorinus: he blushed not to become the child of thy Christ and an infant at thy font, submitting his neck to the yoke of humility, and subduing his forehead to the ignominy of the Cross. (fade Gregorian) 9) 2/16/96 French Gothic, c. 1260, Coronation from West Façade, Cathedral, Rheims; (copy of CGB ‘74, Gothic I 5); + V detail, see V9 The Gothic Wave 2 �C.G. Bell 9a) Symbolic History French, c. 1230, Head of an Angel, broken from west Portal of the Coronation of the Virgin, Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris Music: Secular Motet, c. 1250, Dieus! je suis jà près de joir, ARC 14608 Whereas Gothic, from the ascetic grave, wakes to the life of the world. Beside anything earlier, even of the 12th century, what shimmers over Rheims is a smile where the loves of heaven and earth are marvellously mingled. The turning point had been in Paris. But since the 1225 Madonna from the northwest portal of Notre Dame was spoiled in the Revolution, 10) 10a) V10b) 10c) V10d) French Gothic, c. 1250, N. transept portal, Virgin and lintel above, Notre Dame, Paris (CGB '80; cf. Gothic I V64b) French (Amiens), 2nd half of the 13th cent., The Golden Virgin, S. transept portal, Amiens Cathedral A closer view of 10, Virgin of the Column, N. Portal, Notre Dame, Paris French Gothic, 1339, Virgin and Child, gilded silver, Louvre, Paris French Gothic (Rheims), c. 1290, Head from a wooden statue of an Angel, Louvre, Paris we turn to her mid-century successor from the doorway of the north transept. These Marys, with those of Rheims, or La Vierge Dorée of Amiens, gave fresh embodiment to the womanly as a spring garden of grace. (end Dieus!) At about the same time (1230), Guillaume de Lorris crosses a like frontier, from the 12th-century distance of Chrestien, into the dream vitality of The Romance of the Rose — such personality and sparkle as engendered everywhere, and through two centuries, imitations and rehandlings of that rich and fragile joy. En icelui tens deliteus, Que toute rien d'amer s'esfroie, Sonjai une nuit que j'estoie... a11) b11) 2/16/96 English, 14th cent. MS. illumination, King Hunting Boucicault Master, c. 1405-08, Flight to Egypt, landscape detail, Mus. Jaquemart-André, Paris; video then returns to 10, detail: Notre Dame Virgin of the Column The Gothic Wave 3 �C.G. Bell c11) 11) Symbolic History From Cesky Krumlov, Bohemia, c. 1400, "Beautiful Madonna," Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; video: detail only English (or French), c. 1395, Richard II presented to the Madonna and Angels, Wilton Diptych, National Gallery, London In the delicious time of spring, When love enkindles everything, I dreamed I waked, and as it seemed, It was May morning in my dream. (CGB) The dream of waking to foliage, birdsong, the clear river flowing from the hills, would be echoed from Dante and Boccaccio to Machault and Chaucer — as the Notre Dame Lady of the Pillar is followed by a whole school of loving hip-shot virgins, softening by the end of the 14th century to those the Germans called "schöne" — or in England to the Wilton Diptych Mary in a bower of angel wings — among blossoms too; 12) Middle Rhine Master, c. 1420, Garden of Paradise, Städlisches Inst., Frankfurt am Main; with three video details for the painted landscape picks it up, as if the angel smile had renewed on earth the paradise garden: this 1400 Rhenish one, the serpent keeled up on the ground, lower right: such a brightness as Chaucer would describe in his Parlement of Foules: A gardyn saw I ful of blosmy bowes Upon a ryver, in a grene mede, There as swetnesse evermore inow is, With floures white, blewe, yelwe, and rede, And colde welle-stremes, nothyng dede, That swymmen ful of smale fishes lighte, With fynnes rede and skales sylver bryghte. Of instruments of strenges in acord Herde I so pleye a ravyshyng swetnesse, That God, that makere is of al and lord, Ne herde nevere beter, as I gesse. Therwith a wynd, unnethe it myghte be lesse, Made in the leves grene a noyse softe Acordaunt to the foules song alofte. a2nd 11) 2/16/96 French illumination end of the 15th cent., Dance in the Garden, Roman de la Rose, Harley MS 4425 14b, British Museum, London The Gothic Wave 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 2nd 11) English, c. 1370(?), Perpendicular east window of the Choir, Exeter Cathedral (CGB '80) Appropriate that the room where Chaucer wakes in that early poem, The Book of the Duchess, was painted with the Romance of the Rose. Me thoghte thus: that hyt was May, And in the dawenynge I lay... My wyndowes were shette echon, And throgh the glas the sonne shon Upon my bed with bryghte bemes, With many glade gilde stremes... Ne in al the welken was no clowde. a2nd 10) French Gothic (Rheims), c. 1240, Clerestory of Nave, Rheims Cathedral, France b2nd10) Same, 1250-60, Dragons and Foliage, Rheims For 2nd 10) German Gothic, c. 1235 ff, Well House, N. Walk of Gothic Cloister, Kloster Maulbronn So Guillaume de Lorris wakes in the original Romance, "Jolis, gais, et pleins de leesce": So I rose and walked from town, To hear the birds sing their rune, Among the blossoms on the boughs, Where a cold clear river flows; And in that water filled with light, I washed my face; the bed was bright With pebble stones; the meadows green. (CGB) e 1'eau clere et relusant Le fonz de 1'eaue de gravele... 3rd 11) Again, Wilton Diptych, c. 1395, Mary and Angels; video: detail only The Pearl-poet would pick it up a hundred and fifty years later in one of the most luminous of all Gothic visions, that supernatural stream down crystal rocks: 2nd 12) 2/16/96 Fra Angelico, c. 1431 ff., Paradise Garden from Last Judgment, S. Marco, Florence The Gothic Wave 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History V2nd 12a) Jan van Eyck, 1422-24, Baptism from foot of page of Birth of St. John, Mus. Civico, Turin The dubbemente of the derworth depe Wern bonkes bene of beryl bryght. Swangeande swete the water con swepe, With a rownande rourde raykande aryght. In the founce there stonden stones stepe, As glente thurgh glas that glowed and glyght, As stremande sternes, quen strothe-men slepe, Staren in welkyn in wynter nyght. For uche a pobbel in pole there pyght Was emerad, saffer, other gemme gente, That all the loghe lemed of lyght, So dere was hit adubbement. Va13) English Gothic, 1220-60, Salisbury Cathedral from the southwest; whole, with Tower and 1334 spire (copy of CGB '86; see Ars Nova b54) 13) English, c. 1260, Salisbury, Tower, framed by Cloister arch (CGB '66) V13a) Same, Tower over Cloister cedar (copy CGB ‘66, Ars Nova ‘54) Such a wave of lilting Gothic goes out from France, in music, as in the other arts: Salisbury, where the quieter Early English soars to a peak of virginal geometry; with it an isorhythmic "O Maria," sung by the Deller Group. Music: 14) V14a) 15) V15a) 16) 16a) English 13th cent., O Maria Virgo, Deller Group, BGS 70680 Same, Salisbury, across the Cloister to the Chapter House (CGB '66) Across Cloister to Nave; video: detail only of upper windows Same, Salisbury, Tower glimpsed through Cloister tracery (CGB '66) Detail of Va13, Salisbury West Front (CGB '86) Same, Salisbury, Interior, Nave from the Choir (CGB '66); video: details only, above and below (end O Maria Virgo) English Gothic, after 1263, Chapter House of Salisbury Cathedral, detail of vault It was in the 13th century of Salisbury that the first sparkling poems in what would become the language of Chaucer (mingled sometimes with Latin), took up the pulse of pointed arch 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 6 �C.G. Bell 17) 17a) V17b) Symbolic History English, c. 1255, Censing Angel, Westminster Abbey, North Transept triforium English, 1275-80, Angel Playing a Viola da braccia, Angel Choir, Lincoln Cathedral English, 1275-1300, West Front, Exeter Cathedral (CGB '80); video: window tracery only and smiling angel — those of Lincoln Choir or this from Westminster Abbey, fresher and more naive than the French: Of one that is so fair and bright, Velud maris stella, Brighter than the day is light, Parens et puella; I cry to thee, look thou to me, Lady, pray thy son for me, Tam pia, That I may come at last to thee, Maria! 1st 18) German Gothic, 1248-1322, Apse buttressing, Kölner Dom (copy of CGB '74, wider view; see slide 65 ff.); video: center-spread only The German Gothic road is remote from the hawthorne lanes of English grace. The choir of Cologne took up the Faustian hunger of the heights, to be retraced in time, 1st 19) French Gothic, 1220-60, Amiens, West Front and Towers (Sam Adams' slide); while video previews Amiens Apse, 3rd 19 (CGB '74, wider view) through Amiens, 1st 20) French Gothic, 13th cent., Rheims Cathedral, whole view; while video previews 2nd 20: Rheims Nave buttressing (CGB '74) through Rheims, 1st 21) French Gothic, 12th-13th cent., Notre Dame, Paris, South side, Nave Buttressing, Transept, etc. (CGB '59) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History to Notre Dame in Paris. That there were musical parallels the name of Franco of Cologne attests. Although we read of a three-part work of his performed in Paris, what remains is his treatise Ars Cantus Mensurabilis, from the second half of the century, when Master Gerard, inspired from this France, was building the Kölner Dom. 2nd 20) Rheims, Nave buttressing, 1211 ff. (CGB '74); here video narrows to a detail Music: Tournai Mass, late 13th cent., stratum; Kyrie, Seraphim SIC-6052 It codified the notation of the rhythmic modes so that before 1300 Franconian polyphony had arched its unities of triple conflict over Europe (like Aquinas' God — Questions 28 and 30 — a "transcendental multitude" of "real opposition"). 2nd 19) Amiens, Apse buttressing, 1220-60 (copy of CGB '74, narrow view; from Gothic II 70); video: upper spread only Where, after Perotin, does Ars Antiqua loom like the French cathedral or the Scholastic Summa? Not in most recordings; though such settings of the Mass as this Tournai Kyrie shape the musical future. (close Tournai Kyrie) 2nd 18) Köln Apse buttressing, 1248-1322 (CGB '74, narrow view); video: first, center-spread of 2nd 18; then upper-spread of 1st 18, wider view) Only one 3-voice Ave Gloriosa Mater, which Coussemaker thought by Franco himself, and for which Tinayre lowered the triplum to a choral insistence under his own motetus, catches something of those churches — once more from Cologne to Paris and back by interiors, through Rheins and Amiens again to Cologne. Music: Franconian, mid-13th century, Ave Gloriosa — Ave Virgo, Lumen 32018 3rd 19) Amiens, 1220-60, Apse buttressing (CGB '74, wider view) 3rd 20) Rheims, 1212-41, Apse buttressing (copy of CGB '59, from Gothic II 68) 2nd 21) Notre Dame, Paris, 1163-13th cent., Choir with buttressing, seen from the south (copy of CGB '59, from Gothic II 55) 22) Notre Dame, Paris, interior, c. 1270, South Transept Rose (CGB 59) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 8 �C.G. Bell 23) 24) 25) 25a) 26) Symbolic History Rheims, interior, mid-13th cent., Clerestory windows of the Choir (CGB '59); while video views from the Choir the Nave and West Windows (upperspread only of V23) Amiens, 1220-70, the soaring Nave, looking up to the West Rose (Sam Adams' slide); while video has shown the arching of an Aisle (from CGB '74) [revised ‘94] Again, Köln Cathedral, 1248-1322, interior, Choir (CGB '74); + V lower detail [‘94 video revision] Same, apse, nearer (CGB '74); video shows upper windows only Same, looking from the Aisle into the Nave (CGB '74); from which video takes only the upper spread; + V clerestory detail (from V26a) (end Motet) So from the Ile-de-France transplant of this German Cologne, we might have followed the Gothic wave to Italy, 27) Lombard Romanesque, 1120-38 ff., San Zeno Maggiore, Verona (CGB '66) where from the start of the 12th century (here San Zeno, Verona) the Renaissance foreshadowings of Romanesque had only to receive the flame-shapes of Gothic passion to cross the threshold of a new age: 28) V28a) Italian Gothic, 1228-53, frescoed c. 1320, two vaulted bays of the Upper Church of St. Francis, Assisi (CGB '84); cf. V28, earlier variant Same, interior, looking east (copy of CGB '84, from Dante 64) Dante's Dolce Stil Nouva, the Ars Nova of music, the sculpture and painting of the time of Giotto. Already that sweeping survey has betrayed the living complex. If Gothic fire had awaited its 13th-century height to spread over Europe, we would not have St. Francis' church in Assisi (1228 and after), much less the saint it was reared to. Va29) 29) 29a) 2/16/96 Same as 29, but a wider view [‘94 video revision]; digital uses this for 29 Sicilian Romanesque, end of 12th cent., Cathedral Cloister, Monreale Bonaventura Berlingheri, 1235, St. Francis, with Scenes from his Life, S. Francesco, Pescia; video: detail only The Gothic Wave 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As Norman Sicily and the empire of the Fredericks witness (this 1200 fanciful cloister at Monreale), the Northern and pre-Gothic had been working from the first with Byzantine and Moorish to the boot of Italy and beyond. And St. Francis, a crucial link in the Italian awakening which leads through Dante and the Giottesque toward Renaissance, is a testimony as well to the earlier radiation of mystical love from the fervor of France: Troubador, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux. a30) b30) 30) German, St. Michael's, Hildesheim, 1001-33; and painted ceiling, c. 1220; video: detail only (cf. Vb30, below) Same, whole ceiling (CGB '86); while video draws from Vb30 (CGB ‘86) a closer detail, as of a30: arch plus ceiling panels of Adam and Eve, and Jesse German Romanesque, 12th into 13th cent., Abbey Church of Maria Lach, N. Germany Music: Hildegard von Bingen, c.1150(?), from O presul vere civitatis, (Gothic Voices) Hyperion A66039 The 12th-century awakening, which witnessed in France the rise to Gothic, and in England William of Sens' reshaping of Canterbury, stirred Germany as well. Though construction there (as at Bamberg, Mainz, this Maria Lach) retained past 1200 the round arches of Romanesque. 31) 31a) 31b) German Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1225, Refectory, Maulbronn Cloister, Würtemberg German Romanesque-Gothic, c. 1190-1200, Mary and Child, Leibefrauenkirche, Halberstadt; + V detail Detail of b30, Hildesheim ceiling, Adam and Eve So late as 1220, this columned refectory of the Cistercian Kloster Maulbronn, stands on that transitional threshold. In German music too the new rapture speaks not through the polyphony of Leonin and Perotin, but by the plainsong tradition of solo chant. Thus the melismatic soaring of the Hymns of Hildegard von Bingen, contemporary with the buttressing of Notre Dame, as with early organum there. 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So too with German literature: the Minnesingers carry Troubador devotion into the 13th century; Parzival and Tristan body forth the chivalric romances of Chrestien; while the Nibelungenlied refines the passions of Dark Age German myth: With eyes of covert longing that knight and lady too Looked upon each other as worth made them do. (CGB) mit lieben ougen blicken ein ander sahen an der here und ouch diu fruwe: daz wart vil tougenlich getan. (end Hildegard v. Bingen) 1st 32) Spanish, late 12th cent., Portal of Santa Maria la Real (Cluniac) Sanguesa, Navarra Let this 12th-century portal from Navarre lead us back to that radiation from the France of Cluny and Citeaux (or Cister), of Chartres and Notre Dame, or in music of Leonin and Perotin. 1st 33) Gislebertus, c. 1120-40, Adoration of the Magi, St. Lazare, Autun In the perspective of time, the contenders of an age clasp hands. That Cluny in its wealth was richly adorning its churches stirred the ire of St. Bernard. Though Gislebertus' Magi, carved for Cluniac Saint Lazare in Autun, had epiphanied Bernard's call to Christian love. 1st 34) Spanish, 12th cent., David from Puerta de las Platerias, Santiago de Compostella It was the Romanesque and Cluniac wave which first went out from France, reaching south to Santiago de Compostella in Spain, 1st 35) Anglo-Norman, c. 1145, Carving inside door, Kilpeck, Herefordshire (CGB '65); here slide show has only a detail, while video previews the whole of 3rd 35 and north to Kilpeck on the border of Wales. But Bernard had stripped off that Cluniac ornament in his own purifying reform, 1st 36) Cistercian, 1146 ff., Cloister, Abbey of Le Thoronet, Provence 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History which seized from the first on the clean vaulting of transitional Gothic. By his death in 1153 his Cistercian order comprised 343 monastaries, a number to be doubled by soon after 1200 — here the cloister of Le Thoronet in Provence. 1st 37) Cistercian, 1179-1208, Fossanova, interior, S. of Rome, Italy How quietly those late 12th-century churches, spread over Europe (this Fossanova, south of Rome), suit the mystical soaring of Leonin's organum — 1st 38) Cistercian, 2nd half of 12th cent., Refectory of Santa Maria de Poblet, Tarragona, Spain thus the Cistercian refectory of Santa Maria de Poblet in Tarragona, with Tinayre's old performance of the Haec Dies, for two voices, and entirely in the sustained-tone style. For 2nd 37) Fossanova exterior, while video previews, as for 2nd 36, Le Thoronet Apse (see for 3rd 36) The lower note (cello here) protracts itself under the increasing tension of the upper, holding, to a point of incalculable yearning; so rises or falls to concord, from which passing notes in inwrought sequences of rhythm and tone lead to another peak of the spiritual cry — For 2nd 35 and 2nd 34) English Norman, 1154-89, Parish Church, façade, Iffley, near Oxford (CGB '84); video divides, below and above as in Dante from spaceless sphere to sphere by "The Love that moves the sun and the other stars" — "L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle." Not in the ear, but in some deeper recess, the delayed lingering accumulates, the falls of melody are distilled. For 2nd 33) Same, Iffley, detail of main Portal (CGB '84) Music: 2/16/96 Leonin, c. 1175, Haec Dies, Tinayre, Lumen 32011 The Gothic Wave 12 �C.G. Bell 2nd 32) 3rd 33) 3rd 34) 3rd 35) 3rd 36) For 3rd 37) 3rd 37a ) 2nd 38) a39) 39) Symbolic History Again, Portal of Santa Maria la Real, detail Again, Adoration of the Magi, detail Again, David, detail Again, Kilpeck carving; from the slide whole, video takes only a detail Again, Le Thoronet, interior, Apse; while video shows first a detail of the Cloister (from 1st 36), then of the Apse Cistercian, 1147 ff., Nave of Abbey, Church of Silvacane, near Marseilles; to which video adds a detail of 1st 37, interior of Fossanova Cistercian (Portugal), 1158-1223, Church of Monastery of Alcobaca Again, Refectory of Santa Maria de Poblet French Romanesque-Gothic (Chartres) c. 1150, plaster cast of Angel of the Sundial, Mus. des Monuments Français; + V detail (copy of CGB '80, from Gothic I, 79) Chartres, 1150-55, Angel of the Sundial, face (end Haec Dies) In Chartres, Bernard seems answered. As the mild angel smile lights purlieus of grace, Romanesque and Gothic meet in carving and structure. But if we walk from the cathedral's 1150 layer a40) 40) Double: Chartres, [A] 1145, Queen of Judah, head, Royal Portal; and [B] c. 1250, God Meditates Creation, detail, North Porch Chartres, same detail as B of a40, God Meditates Creation to the last sculptures of the Transept Porches nearly a century later, we measure the Gothic assumption of body and person, earth and time — from columnar removal, to this God Meditating Creation, brooding over the world and his involvement in it; so that it is sometimes called (and the doubt is expressive) the human author of the book of Genesis. If one would ask where such implied heresy of personal emergence was most startling, the answer might well be, less in the stylized power of this France than in the precursive outbreaks of the chartered German towns. 1st 41) German, c. 1200, St. Andrew, stucco, screen of Liebfrauenkirche, Halberstadt; first, video detail 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In the Romanesque which we have traced there past this 1200 St. Andrew of Halberstadt, the general awakening looks out with the directness of pre-reformation humanity. So too in the religious and political protest poems of Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 11701230). In that Europe of a hundred years before Dante, perhaps only St. Francis and Frederick II advance so. a2nd 40) Double: [A] Chartres, c. 1250, God Meditates Creation; and [B] Walther v.d. Vogelweide, from the Manessa MS., c. 1320, Heidelburg Library; video shows first B alone Vb2nd 40) Rodin, 1880-1917, from The Gate of Hell, The Thinker, Rodin Museum, Paris For 2nd 40) Again, Walther, from the Manessa MS. (B of a2nd 40); video: detail only I sat down on a stone, Left on the right leg-bone, Elbow piled on the knee, Chin and half my cheek Caught in the palm's grip... (CGB) It is the pose of the Chartres God-author, the same Walther would assume in the Vanessa MS, and centuries after, Rodin's thinker: Ich saz ûf eime steine, und dahte bein mit beine... So I pondered deep, In this world how to live; But found no clue I could give How a man might gain three things, Each of which the other shames: Honor, and worldly goods — Two already at odds — Va2nd 41) Again, St. Andrew, video detail of 1st 41 2nd 41) German, c. 1190, Apostle, detail, Church of Unsere Liebe Frau, Halberstadt A third outweighing both, God's blessing on our faith. Hard as I tried to bind 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The three in one, it would not stand, That wealth and earthly pride, And God's grace beside, In one heart should dwell. That worldly honor and wealth cannot be reconciled with Christ's blessing is the Medieval and doctrinal ground. But the poem does not stop there. It seizes on corruption as the cause of this imperfection: 42) Upper or Middle Rhine, c. 1200, Alexander in single fight, Hanover; + V detail Steps and ways are withheld, Wrong lurks in wait, Violence is loosed on the street, Peace and right thrown down. (CGB) As a Middle Rhine illuminator endows a Romance encounter of Alexander the Great with the violence of the chivalric broils sweeping the Holy Roman Empire. Untriuwe ist in der sâze, gewalt vert ûf der strâze. The poem ends: diu driu enhabent geleites niht, diu zwei enwerden ê gesunt. a43) 43) German (Bamberg), c. 1240, Prophets Jonah and Hosea, Bamberg Cathedral; video: details only From the same group, Head of Jonah, Choir Screen, Cathedral, Bamberg Literally: "The three will never have safe conduct until the two are restored." Whether "the two" are "peace and right" just above, or "honor and earthly good" earlier called "die zwei," does not alter the meaning: that if the kingdom of man could be ordered, God's grace might dwell in it, as in whatever Reform Utopia Joachim's Third Kingdom, Dante's De Monarchia, or this Bamberg Jonah characterfully foresee. Against the dark exile of the opening, we glimpse the dawn of God's self-realization in the world: The three will never be atoned Until the two are sound. (CGB) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 15 �C.G. Bell 44) V44a) Symbolic History German-Italian (Apulia), c. 1240, Bust of Frederick II, Mus. Civico, Barletta; + V detail German (Bamberg), c. 1235, Kaiser Heinrich II, Adamspforte, Dom, Bamberg Ironic that the German (Sicilianized half-Norman Hohenstaufen) who pressed furthest with the ordering of the secular (this bust a battered relic of his Apulian Rome), Frederick II, "stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis" (Mathew Paris: "wonder of the world and miraculous transformer"), should have been hounded by the papacy, for all his genius and worth, down into Dante's Hell — a risk prefigured in the carving. For the question was always ticklish, as with Abelard and even Aquinas (or in Frederick's crusading youth), whether the vitality would be embraced or damned. 1st 45) French MS, late 13th cent., Book of Health, Bathing Scene, British Museum, London It was love most of all, Dante's "seed of every virtue and punishable crime," which had to walk that sword bridge of church denial or sublimated service. How critical the span, from the irrepressible fabliaux vanity which would grow to Chaucer's clowning lust; 1st 46) Limoges, enamel early 13th cent., Violist and Dancing Girl, Copenhagen through troubador idolization, glowingly heretical: Tristan and Isolde, Paola and Francesca; 1st 47) French, c. 1250-60, Angel-guardian of St. Niçaise, West Portal, L, Rheims to the sacred incorporation in which the smiling Gothic angels led the way for Beatrice. 2nd 46) Again, Limoges, Violist and Dancing Girl, detail V2nd 46a) Limoges enamel, c. 1200-10, Fiddler and Dancing Woman, British Museum, London This Limoges enamel, as much as any work of the 1200 time, endows sensuous love with almost religious grace, though its symbolic flower forms, its longing faces float as wistfully in the timeless as Aucassin's preference for Hell: "En paradis qu'ai je a faire?" It is, as he says, the old priests, the crippled and maimed whom creed saves; 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History while the knights and loving ladies — Dante's "Le donne antiche e cavalieri" — proceed into hell: "Let me go with these, if only I have my love, Nicolette." 2nd 45) Again, Book of Health That church norm of ascetics praying in holy cripts can make love almost as thin a levity as the 13th-century foibles of the bath house. For 3rd 46) Again, Fiddler and Dancing Woman (detail of V2nd 46a); video having first returned to a detail of 1st 46, Violist and Dancing Girl Yet the vernal delight declares itself, as in a lai set for minstrel's harp: "En Mai la Rousee": Music: French, c. 1240(?), En Mai la Rousee (realized for harp) EMS-201 2nd 47) Rheims Smiling Angel; video: two details only (end En Mai) In a time of the anagogical, one can hardly tell how far that dream of a May morning serves the sacred smile; 48) V48a) V48b) French Gothic, 1228, Cloister, detail, bushes behind, Mont-Saint-Michel (copy of CGB '74, from Gothic I, 1) Video here previews the whole of 49 to follow: the Ivory Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre French Gothic, 1228, Cloister of Mont-Saint-Michel, another view (CGB '74) or how much of earth's spring is enfolded in Mont-Saint-Michel cloister. Such the mingling of a French motet to the Virgin: "A la clarté qui tout enlumina nostre grand tenebror": To the brightness that lightens the land of our shadow, To the lady whose grace is a medicine for our sorrow... Maiden and mother of healthful savor, Rose of the dawn and of women flower. (CGB) Music: 2/16/96 French, c. 1260, A la Clarté, 2-voice motet, Cape Group, AS-71 The Gothic Wave 17 �C.G. Bell 49) Symbolic History French polychrome Ivory, c. 1265, Coronation of the Virgin, Louvre, Paris; video here shows details only (end A la Clarté) This Louvre Coronation in painted ivory, an ultimate of courtly love in heaven. a50) c50) 50) Franco-German, c. 1230, Synagogue from South Transept, Strasbourg; + V detail, cf. Vb50 (both from CGB ‘59, Mozart 7) Double: [A] Franco-German 1230, Head of Synagogue, Strasbourg; and [B] Ecclesia, Musée de l'Oeuvre de Notre Dame Same as a50, again Synagogue, head and shoulders; + V closer detail Heavenly, too, the seduction, when that more formal French grace penetrates and lightens the moods of German heart: the 1230 Shulamite Synagogue at Strasbourg — for "negra sum sed formosa," "blind but beautiful." In this work, mythically ascribed to a woman, what Augustine most feared, the pathos and glory of sense, brings into the church itself the passion of Eloise, the mystery of Isolde. At the same time, in the German singers of Minne (love sacred and profane), most in Walter von der Vogelweide, the troubador strain enters the forests of Taunus and Tirol, absorbing a fragrance of woods and meadows — Lindenduft: "Nemmt froue diesen kranz" — Take this wreath from me, lady — the flowers I have; But I know where all colors blow and birds sing; Come, let us gather flowers. Blushing she came. Until dawn took me from my laughing dream. And now all summer long I search the dance for eyes; If I could find her under some garland spray. (CGB) Always the sweetness of love under medieval acceptance of dream. Va51) 51) 51a) 2/16/96 A side view of 51, head and shoulders, with a closer video return after 51 Master of Naumberg, 1250-60, Queen Regelindis, head, Westchor, Dom, Naumburg German (Erminold master), 1280, Angel Head, detail, Choir, Regensburg Cathedral The Gothic Wave 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Walther's most quoted poem is also his most smiling; we are tempted a generation forward, to the Queens of Naumburg, by the winsome wreathing of that smile: Under the lime-tree On the moor, Where we made our bed together, You will find there Grass and flowers Broken, which for love were gathered. Before the forest in a vale Tandaradei Sweetly sang the nightingale. (CGB) Under der linden an der heide, dâ unser zweier bette was, dâ muget ir vinden schône beide gebrochen bluomen unde gras. Vor dem walde in einem tal tandaradei! schône sanc diu nahtegal. In the analogies of Gothic this revived Eden, the phallic bird Boccaccio would also set singing there, and even the pregnant beatitude of the high lady in the next stanza, "daz ich bin saelic iemer mê," hint at another love meeting, of Gabriel and the Jungfrau. 52) V52a) German, c. 1240, Der Reiter (vertical): horse, from right side and front; rider, full-face; Bamberger Dom; + V detail Same, rider and body of the horse, with V return to rider from 52 (full-face) As a Minnesinger, Walther was as much musician as poet. Though he only longed for the Holy Land, his Crusader's hymn puts him there: "Nu alerst lebe ich mir werde" — "Today my better life began… I have come to the very land,/ Where the one God walked as man" — "Ich bin kommen an die stat,/da got mennischlichen trat." With the old Max Meili performance we return in art to Bamberg, to this German Rider. Like Walther himself, like utopian Frederick II before Papal calumny sealed his Satanic compact, this knight of the new faith seeks an Incarnate City, where God walks as man. 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 19 �C.G. Bell Music: 53) V53a) Va54) 54) Symbolic History Walther von der Vogelweide, 1228, Nu alerst lebe ich, AS 18 (Meili) Same, Bamberger Reiter, head and shoulders, as looking three-quarters forward Same, head only, full-face (end Walther with lst stanza) French Gothic, mid 13th cent., Simeon det., Central Portal, W. Front, Rheims Cathedral German, c. 1260, Ekkehard, Head, Founder's Choir, Naumburg In age, with a pension from Frederick II, Walther went home to find his playmates old, the fields burned off, and the woods cut down. In his last elegy contempt of the world becomes the vortex in which Renaissance tragedy was to form: "The years of my life have vanished like a dream:" O wê war sint verswunden Ist mir mîn leben getroumet alliu mîniu jâr? oder ist ez wâr? With such precursive immediacy, the 1260 Kings and Queens of Naumburg prepare for the realistic donors in the paintings of the Van Eycks. 55) 55a) Same, Ekkehard and Uta, Naumburg; video: detail only Double: [A] Franco-German, c. 1230, Synagogue from South Transept, Strasbourg; and [B] German, 1260, Uta, Founder's Choir, Naumburg Surely the pair of Ekkehard and his love-haunted wife, Uta, is the most oracular visualization of romance. If any Western poetry before Dante shares its sensuous intensity, it is the German courtly epics at the start of the 13th century. Gottfried of Strassburg's lines on Isolde's dress have been compared with the Synagogue figure in his own city, but they would as well serve here: The gown was formed as a part of her And held her body like a lover; There was no place where it jutted out, But everywhere clipped her about, Falling smooth from top to floor, With clinging folds behind and before, That gathered close between her feet, As much as you would wish to see it. (CGB) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 20 �C.G. Bell 56) 56a) 56b) Symbolic History German, 1260, Uta, head and upper figure, Founder's Choir, Naumburg; first, video detail of face German (Master of Naumburg), c. 1260, Hermann and Regelindis, statues in West Choir, Naumburg Cathedral; video: upper detail only German, c. 1230, Angel of the Last Judgment, tympanum of North Portal, Bamberger Dom But it is the face and fold of the ermine which match the evocation of Paolo and Francesca as they read of Launcelot and Guenevere: "how the desired smile was kissed by such a lover" —"quando leggemmo il disiato riso/ esser baciato da cotanto amante." To which Wolfram von Eschenbach comes as near, in his crazy way, as any of those Germans: the God-made lady, Jeschûte, asleep naked in her tent, all love's weapons on her: flesh of ivory, a red mouth slightly parted, breathing heat of minne — Diu frowe was entslâfen, si truoc der minne wâfen, einen munt durchliuhtic rôt... der truoc der minne hitze fiur. The forest-grown bumpkin Parzival, who falls on her snow-white body, only to take some symbolic ring — at which Wolfram's Eros flames to the wild and strange: ...Who has dishonored me? It is insupportable, youth: You might have taken a better aim. Va57) 1st 57) Again, Kilpeck (cf. slide 35), Anglo-Norman and Celtic, c. 1145, Corbelcarving: the Maw of Sex French Romanesque, 12th cent., Portal detail, Oloron-Sainte-Marie, Basses-Pyrénées Reminder of the comic odds against which Dante would deify his love; how far human passion hung, with the six other sins of all that is earthly, over a doomsday void, one of the gargoyles grinning down from the fabric of creed — as in the old church of St. Nicholas at Blois, beasts and sinner-mouthing devils stare from the columns of the choir at the very mass where God is eaten and drunk. 2nd 56) Again, Uta, detail, Naumburg 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is this suspension that wraps the richest Gothic love in poignance and paradox: O lasso, Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio Menò costoro al doloroso passo... How many tender thoughts, what hearts' desire Has led them down into this place of sorrow. 2nd 57) French, mid 13th cent., Gargoyles, Rheims; + V details 2nd 57a) English Norman, 12th cent., Sanctuary Knocker, Durham Cathedral That is the vacancy of the bare fifth chord which yawns under the liveliest music of the jongleurs; how the skirtling and warbling and plucking trail out into the wail of noclaim. Music: French, c. 1260, In saeculum viellatoris, instrumental, Cape, AS 71 (cut) 58) French, 1225-50, Villard de Honnecourt (Sketchbook, 143), Bibl. Nat., Paris; + V detail V58a) Same, Unrelated figures and plans (Sketchbook, 123), Bibl. Nat., Paris Attempts at the humanistic and forceful speak the same condition — the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, would-be Leonardo of the thirteenth century, its exploratory studies of the nude far from acclaiming the glory of body. Or the sequence of motets from Perotin's last years and after, in honor of Louis, King and Saint: Music: Attr. to Perotin, 1226, from Gaudia Felix Francia (Bars 45-58), Ducretet-Thomson, 320c10 (fade) It is in rhythmic drive and heterophonic clash that Gothic levity whirls its dance, 59) French, early 13th cent.(?), Adenez, King of Minstrels at the bedside of Blanche of Castile, Arsenal Library, Paris; video: first, three details as in the quaint miniature of the King of Minstrels at the levee of Blanche of Castile. The playing card faces gaze through a diapered mirth of color, spaceless reminders under the brightest play. 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 22 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History In saeculum viellatoris, as above, but 2nd half (end) One can hardly credit the leap to the panoply of Baroque joy: 60) Pietro da Cortona, 1637, Age of Silver, detail, Pitti, Florence (CGB '47); video breaks into smaller details Music: Monteverdi, 1607, Orfeo, from "Lasciate i monti" ARC-3035 Cortona's "Age of Silver", the celebrations of Monteverdi's Orfeo, where every chord asserts temporal validity in the pomp of musical space. Yet even here, the mortal enigma, now a conscious theme, brings out of gaiety an averse of tears, (music) as if the complicity of major and minor were the ineradicable trace of the old timelessness. (fade Orfeo) Since Bacchus too is celebrated in this Cortona fresco, 61) French, late 13th cent. MS, Drinking, from Book of Health, British Museum, London; + V detail let us glance at the Bacchic cult of 1300 — a monkish branch of the sin of Gluttony, conceived in the pleasure-mode Gothic allows, of gargoyle-grotesque. Though from this monastic sprout comic courage would burgeon, through Langland ("There was laughing and louring and 'Let go the cuppe!'") and Skelton ("She drank so of the dregs/ A dropsy was in her legs"), to the almost Rubens affirmation of Brueghel and Rabelais: 62) Peter Brueghel, 1568, Peasant Dance, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien; video: two details only ...the flagons began to go, the hams to trot, the goblets to fly, the big bowls to jingle... "I drink for the thirst to come. I drink everlastingly." "Gulp it down; it's medicine!"... While... Gargantua, as soon as he was born, did not cry "Mie, mie," like other children, but in a loud voice bawled "Give me drink, drink, drink!" 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From the Thomistic synthesis all aspects of man and world would enlarge and ripen separate realms of substantial temporality. a63) 63) English Gothic, c. 1250, W. Front of Lincoln Cathedral from far off Same, from nearer; video breaking it into a lower front and upper towered spread The strength of medieval unity (as in the West Front of Lincoln, combining Romanesque and Gothic from the 11th century through the 13th) is its transrationality — that it can suspend disparities of heaven, earth, and hell in a faith structure where relationships are abstract and allegorical. What Tawney said of the economy applies to politics, theology, the arts: "Medieval religious thought strains every interest and activity, by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea." How could it be otherwise where the life of the age was a continual centrifugal release within creed containment, a continual absorption and canonizing of secular vitalities, bound to rend the mould in which they were formed, or replace it with another 1st 64) Inigo Jones, Christopher Wrenn, et. al, 17th and 18th cents., Queen's House, Greenwich Hospital, etc. (CGB '74) 1st 64a) Gislebertus, 1130-40, Tympanum, from the Last Judgment, Autun Cathedral 1st 64b) Guido Reni, c. 1624-27, St. Michael over Satan, Altar piece, Capuchin Church, Rome; video then returns to a detail of 64, Greenwich Hospital ultimately of rational and volitional ordering? It seems in that sense the historical task of the Western arts to give measured accord to what, in the Gothic synthesis, had been hauntingly juxtaposed. The gaunt contention of angel and fiend, buttressing the sanctum even of Dante's energized acceptance, had in Milton and Leibnitz and Hegel to be reconciled by the arrogations of dialectic, coherently justifying the ways of God to men. In music it is consonance and dissonance which must be nobly harmonized. 1st 65) German Gothic, 1248-1322, Cologne Cathedral, Apse buttressing (CGB '74); cf. 1st 18, earlier 2nd 64) Again, Greenwich Hospital, central perspective (CGB '74) 2nd 64a) Same subject, new angle (CGB '74) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Their keen opposition and formal containment are the flung gage of Gothic; Music: French, c. 1248, from Conductus for St. Louis, (de Van) AS-99 the later history of harmony is their substantial reconciliation in spacious structures of tension and release — Purcell, with this Wrenn. Music: Henry Purcell, 1695, Queen Mary's funeral music, Canzona, close, Seraphim 60001 For 2nd 65) French Gothic, esp. 1240-80, Façade of Bourges Cathedral, France V2nd 65a) Same, Michael, etc., detail of the Last Judgment, great West Portal 2nd 65b) German (Rhine), 1329, (detail of the Damned from West Choir screen), Mainz Cathedral 2nd 65c) Chartres Glass 13th cent., Knights Jousting, Chartres Cathedral V2nd 65d) Chartres Glass, 13th cent., Window of St. Lubin, N. Aisle of Nave, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '74) 2nd 65e) Chartres Glass, 13th cent., detail of St. Mark mounted on the Prophet Daniel, Chartres Cathedral 2nd 65f) French Gothic, c. 1200, Saint's Head, Vitry: Sculpture Française, 12th-16th cent. The principle of medieval polyphony is feudal. In Franco of Cologne's treatise, the loyalty of each part is not to a regulated whole, but to another part, either the tenor or the last part written. Varying melodies, words, languages will be crushed together: over a church Kyrie the triplum may warble in French of the month of May, while the middle voice, in Goliard Latin discusses bigamy. Music: Cod. Bamberg, French, c.1260, 3-voice motet, El moi de mai...bigami -Kyrie [start with words], (Munrow) ARC-2723 045 #14 Everywhere is the battering of stresses into structure; everywhere a nominal oneness lays its sanction on radical contingency — the "nihil est praeter individuum" of scholastic thought, the fortune and accident of medieval romance. Such the Thomistic tercets of Credo-reasoning, by which Aristotle's world fabric is wrenched into Trinitarian transcendence of good and evil, with syllogistic demonstration that just such the Philosopher had in mind. As John of Salisbury said: "they work to reconcile dead men who contradicted each other all their lives." (end motet) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While formulas of humble respect buttress magisterial wilfulness: "reverenter exponere," to explain with respect, "pium dare intellectum," to give a dutiful meaning (De Wulf). a66) 66) 66a) 66b) French, c. 1270, Old Testament King, N. Rose Glass, Notre Dame, Paris French Gothic mid-13th C., Science from N. Portal, Chartres English Gothic (Decorated), 1322-42, Ely, View of the Octagon and Lantern (from CGB '77; see Period Styles V47a) Same, Octagon and Lantern, interior (CGB '77); video: brighter Lantern only, from V66b (CGB '77) Thus Thomas argues Gregory out of the repudiation of reason he shared with the early Church: When Gregory says there is no merit in believing where human reason furnishes proof, he refers to a man who has no will to believe... but where he has the will... his faith is not diminished, though he have apodeictic proof. So Gothic compromise shoulders out a handmaidenly space for earthly science itself, that lady who appears smiling on the North Portal of Chartres. With such clairvoyance Roger Bacon opens the vision of technocracy in the catechistic cloister: It is possible that great ships and sea-going vessels shall be made which can be guided by one man and will move with greater swiftness than if they were full of oarsmen. It is possible that a car shall be made which will move with inestimable speed, and the motion will be without the help of any living creature... It is possible that a device for flying shall be made such that a man sitting in the middle of it and turning a crank shall cause wings to beat the air after the manner of a bird's flight... Va67) b67) 67) 67a) 2/16/96 Same: Octagon and Lantern, cf. slide 66b, but taken from Period Styles 52 (CGB '77) English, 14th cent., Flying Ribs at the Crossing, Gloucester Cathedral `Honnecourt, c. 1240, Perpetual Motion Machine, Sketchbook CIX, Bibl. Nat., Paris Engraved after Peter Brueghel, 1558, The Alchemist; video: details only, right and left The Gothic Wave 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is possible also easily to make an instrument by which a single man may violently pull a thousand men toward him in spite of opposition... It is possible also that devices can be made whereby, without bodily danger, a man may walk on the bottom of the sea or of a river... Infinite other things can be made, as bridges over rivers without columns or supports, and machines and unheard-of engines. While Honnecourt, whose sketchbook we have compared with Leonardo's gives a page to a perpetual-motion machine, using an odd number of mallets and quicksilver. Alchemists pondered the Emerald Tablet attributed to Hermes Trismegistos, seeking talismanic keys "not so much to make Gold and Silver," Ashmole would write centuries after, "as to see the Heavens open, the Angells of God Ascending and Descending." A sacred Hermetic text, a body of chemical operations, stinks and all, a heavenly vision of God — if such is the anagogical synthesis of Ars Antiqua, small wonder the myth of Faust has been called a Western archetype. 68) 68a) 68b) 68c) English Gothic, c. 1180-1360, Cathedral of Wells from the southeast; + V detail Same, Wells, 13th-14th cent., Nave looking towards Crossing (CGB '84) French Gothic, 1195-1260, Bourges Cathedral, Chevet from SE Again, Wells, esp. c. 1325, Cathedral from Bishop's Garden (SE); while video draws from Dante 35 (CGB '66) the Cathedral and Chapter House from the east and north What Renaissance requires, as much as anything else, is the filling in, between disjunct poles, of the daily fabric of mundane good. Here English Gothic, by the modesty with which it clings to Romanesque proportion, quietly prepares for Renaissance. In the articulation of Wells there is none of that high-Gothic extravagance which, in France and Cologne, made the apse a displayed scaffold of support. Some social and pastoral wellbeing is reflected here, as in the early developments of English law. At the same time English polyphony humanizes the gentler "peripheral style" of note-against-note Romanesque by a decisive filling in of triadic chords. The sharp brilliance of passing tones in the French Salve Virgo, already heard, shifts in an English motet, also of the 13th century, on the same words, and sung by the same Munich group, to a firm reliance on major chords. Here are the two openings: Music: 2/16/96 Repeat opening of French 13th-cent. Salve Virgo Virginum, SAWT-9530/31-B (side 3) The Gothic Wave 27 �C.G. Bell Music: 69) Symbolic History Opening of English 13th-cent., Salve Virgo Virginum, 9530/31-B (side 4) SAWT- English Wall Painting, 13th cent., E.W. Tristram copy, Virgin and Child from Bishop's Palace, Chichester; first, video detail Music: English, 13th cent. (Worcester), 2-voice: O Maria Virgo Pia (lst, last and lst), sung by Michael and Pamela Sloper, 1978 The purest gem of Worcester 13th-century harmony, "O Maria Virgo Pia," seems unrecorded; Michael and Pamela Sloper sing it for me. While the Madonna Tristram copied from the wall of the Bishop's Palace in Chichester suggests the human sweetening in English manuscripts (or in the paintings that survive) from late Romanesque and early Gothic. (end O Maria) 70) English, early 14th cent., Ivory Diptych, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; + V details (digital: one detail) By 1300 English ivories have the line and smile of the French, but with more directness of love. In music the Worcester "Alleluia psallat," about the same time, gives natural intimacy to Gothic joy — a joy especially in the old Cape performance. Music: 71) English, c. 1300 (Worcester), Alleluya psallat, AS-71 (end) English, early 14th cent., Queen Mary Psalter, f. 151 r, British Museum, London; + V details moving to the falconing below English manuscripts also take the quickening lead. With the new century, sacred pages open to a springtime of love and the chase. A first harvest of poems voices the mood: Bytuenè Mersh ant Averil, When spray beginneth to springe, The lutel foul hath hirè wyl On hyrè lud to synge. Ich libbe in love-longinge For semlokest of allè thinge; He may me blissè bringe; Icham in hire bandoun. 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History An hendy hap ichabbe yhent; Ichot from hevene it is me sent; From allè wymmen mi love is lent Ant lyht on Alysoun. 72) V72a) 72b) Same, detail of hawking; first, video: Christ in the Temple, above Luttrell Psalter, 1335-40, detail of sowing, British Library, London Same, f 181v, Ladies' Travelling Coach, old British Museum print Most famous is the Reading Rota, "Sumer is Icumen in," with alternate words in pious Latin — the first piece of six-part writing, the first developed canon, the first clear example of the major mode. If only the London Madrigalists had known how to pronounce the words. Music: English, c. 1310 (once called 13th cent.), Sumer is icumen in, Col. 5715 (78) (end) English genius was already operating in a context of temporal correlatives, which would produce in Austen the familial weaving and balancing Nietzsche had in mind when he said (with some incomprehension of the phenomenon) that the British were a nation of shopkeepers. 73) English, c. 1280, Expulsion, from Triforium of Angel Choir, Lincoln; + V detail Though the visionary wildness which would complement Austen with Blake was always there (Lincoln Choir). So the first Middle English poem on the coming of winter sounds the Biblical Expulsion: Mirie it is while sumer ilast With fughelès song; Oc nu necheth windès blast And weder strong. Ei, ei, what this nicht is long! And ich with wel michel wrong Soregh and murne and fast. Against such precursive reach within the severities of faith, can we bear the shock of what has claimed Gothic affinities — 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 29 �C.G. Bell 74) V74a) V74b) Symbolic History Gustave Courbet, 1844, Happy Lovers, Museum of Fine Arts, Lyons; + V detail Courbet, 1842, Self with a black dog, Petit Palais, Paris; video: detail only Courbet, 1856, Girls by the Seine, Petit Palais, Paris; V: detail only the sensuous flagrance of 19th century, where every modern soul has fledged its lifedreams? Music: Meyerbeer, 1836, from "Tu l'as dit", VLM 6153 Les Hueguenots, RCA Courbet with his love, the Opera of Paris, Meyerbeer's "Tu l'as dit... l'amour..." (skip in music and then fade) Yet it is no accident that the word for all that — Romantic — 75) S. German, c. 1240, Head of the Statue of Synagogue, profile detail, Main Portal, Bamberg Cathedral V75a, cf. 2nd 75) Same head, full-face; with video return to details of 75 and V75a springs from Medieval romance — the cult of nature and heart felt through the veilings of this other Synagogue at Bamberg, as through the forest childhood of Parzival, after his father's battle-death: Day's sun to the Queen became a mist; She fled the world and all its bliss, Wandered deep in her forest land (Not to pick flowers from its ground). There she reared Gahmuret's child Far from the knighthood of the world. Deprived of his heritage of prowess, He carved himself a bow and arrows; Shot at the birds he came upon; But when he saw them stop their song And flutter downward, he would weep And tear his hair in childish grief. Then mornings, when he bathed at the river, And the birds sang, such a sweetness Pierced his heart, he ran to his mother In tears, and could not tell his sorrow. (CGB) 2/16/96 The Gothic Wave 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We have followed the cropping out of Gothic energies in the formal frame. To close the 13th century, let us line up, from the Continent, four moments in which Ars Antiqua approaches the riper fruition the age of Dante would bring in. This Synagogue may stand for the German characterizations of Bamberg and Naumburg, including the Uta we have already seen. 76) French Gothic 1260-80, Head of Christ, Rheims Cathedral; video then previews, as named in the text, 77 (Princess Violante) and 78 (Queen Emma) A Rheims Christ after 1260 goes as far the other way, toward outward drama. From the late century then: Princess Violante from Burgos, and from Regensburg a mythic queen. While the music is a love motet from the end of the century, "Dieu, comment peut," with haunting tritones and a climax moment when the voice soars — though not in a romantic soaring. Music: French, late 13th cent., style of Jehannot de l'Escurel, Dieu comment peut, OL 232, Rokseth Memorial Album 2nd 75) Bamberg, c. 1240, Head of Synagogue; before which video has interposed Uta of Naumburg, head and shoulders, from slide 56 2nd 76) 1260-80, Head of Christ from Rheims; video: close detail 77) Spanish Gothic later 13th cent., Princess Violante, Burgos, Cloister; first, video detail 78) Bavarian, c. 1290, Queen Emma, St. Emmeramskirche, Regensburg (CGB '59); + V detail (see V78a, CGB '59) (close Dieu comment peu) Bavaria, 1290, Queen Emma: and the mysticism of chivalric love refines to a threshold of consciousness: "Dicendo a 1'anima, sospira." — "Speaking to the soul, sigh!" It is the threshold of Beatrice and of Petrarch's Laura. Va79) 79) a80) 80) 2/16/96 Giovanni Pisano, 1301, Double: Annunciation details from the Cathedral Pulpit, Pistoia Same, detail of the Annunciation Angel Giotto, 1304-06, Angel of the Annunciation, detail, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua Simone Martini, c. 1333, Angel of the Annunciation, National Gallery, Washington D.C. The Gothic Wave 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And we have only to cross the Alps, at that charged turn of the century, to find another world. In this Giovanni Pisano, in Dante, Giotto, Simone Martini, as in the music of da Cascia, the mystery of Gothic kindles to an aesthetic passion which the sensuous soul can see and hear and touch. Music: 2/16/96 Giovanni da Cascia, c. 1325, Nascoso el viso, close, (Cape) ARC3003 (end da Cascia) The Gothic Wave 32 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 33 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Gothic Wave, Symbolic History, Part 10 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 10 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_10_The_Gothic_Wave Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.