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3. Art marks
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3.1 Naturalism
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There are many and
complex explanations of what does really happen to us when
we become truly 'engaged' by a work of art, but most of them seem to suggest that
what takes place is a complex interaction of the mental and the physical. It is almost
as if the artist enabled us to explore our own senses in a detached way, and then
persuaded us to carry the exploration forward from the purely physical level to
something far more all- embracing and therefore more satisfying.
Nature in art first
and foremost encapsulates the natural features which have not
changed much over the centuries and for the most part, they are works of enjoyment
in which the artist singles out the particular pleasures that give them their greatest
joy. In the poems of Milton it was the brightness of a Spring morning; for William
Cowper it was the sight of 'animals running free'; for Coleridge it was the exhilaration
of climbing a mountain. Emily Bronte so loved her wild and windswept Yorkshire
moors that she makes you feel that you are walking with her over them. These
experiences sink deep into the memory, never to be forgotten: as Robert Louis
Stevenson lay dying in Samoa he pined to see again the hills of home in Scotland
and feel the winds 'austere and true'.
The tradition
of pastoral poetry,which started with Edmund Spenser's Shephearde's
Calendar in 1579, celebrated a rustic ideal, where people 'hating the tradeful citys
hum' fled from the insinuating corruption of the courtly life to find peace, harmony and
the pleasure of simple things, and where a contented peasantry went about their
ways w'th a bucolic jollity.
Then, the way of looking
at the countryside changed. In 1770 William Gilpin published
his Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales in which he set
about 'not barely examining the face of a country, but examining it by the rules of
picturesque beauty'. Two years later there followed his guide to the picturesque
scenery of The Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland and in 1777
Paul Sandby published his engravings, A Collection of Landscapes, from which
people south of the border could appreciate the grandeur and isolated beauty of the
Highlands of Scotland. The Romantic movement had been born: henceforth the
appeal of natural beauty was to lie in rugged mountains shrouded in clouds,
windswept moors, shadows, caves, darkness, moonlight, dawn and twilight. With the
publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge established a
new and different way of describing the beauty of nature and the landscape, and the
effect they could have upon the human spirit.
However, it is not
just the grandeur of majestic scenery or the wildest elements that
can stir the spirit. It is often in those Secret and Special Places that a poet will find
the greatest contentment. For Coleridge it was his Lime-tree bower. For Wordsworth
it was when he broke away from his fellow ice-skaters to find 'a silent bay'; for
William Barnes it was his Orchard in Linden Lea; for Yeats it was 'The Lake Isle of
Innisfree'.
Woods, rivers, mountains,
ravines, cliffs and great trees are infused with memories
and associations that have over the centuries assumed a mystical and mythical
quality. There are things that cannot be explained rationally but survive in folklore, in
custom and tradition, in stories handed down from one generation to the next, and a
historic sense that the destiny of man is bound up with the spirits of Nature. William
Cowper's poem 'The Yardley Oak' was popular in the nineteenth century because its
growth from an acorn to its full stature and to its dying from its top downwards was
seen as a parallel to the decay of England - the spirit of the tree was intertwined with
the spirit of Albion. William Blake's vision of the golden pillars built over the fields from
Islington to Marylebone is a victory over the druid past, and Derek Mahon finds in a
forest clearing that:
Nature is often best
enjoyed alone, perhaps on a walk through the countryside, when
one is surrounded with the beauty of nature and immersed in the atmosphere of the
place so that one's enjoyment becomes a source of refreshment and one can be
aware of a presence greater than oneself. For some that presence is God, for others
some pagan deity or some universal spirit, through which one hears. Over the
centuries man has hungered to bring nature under control and to impose some tidy
order over the chaotic confusion and wildness the natural world. Such attempts to
tame nature are usually temporary victories.
In his poem 'Going,
Going', which was commissioned in 1972 at the request of
Robert Jackson, later an MP and a member of a government enquiry into the 'Human
Habitat', Philip Larkin saw that all he loved most around him was slipping away under
concrete and tyres. A sense of angry regret prevails. But that was not the view of
poets such as John Dyer and John Dalton, writing in the early eighteenth century;
they welcomed the Industrial Revolution, 'for industry brings all her honey to the hive'.
Blake was certainly opposed to industrialization, but his 'dark Satanic mills' refer, it is
now thought, not to the belching chimneys of the wool and cotton mills in Yorkshire
and Lancashire, but to either the Church of England or the Newtonian system.
Farmers too, the very
custodians of the countryside, now recognize their
responsibility for the devastation of the bird life over the last twenty years. In that time
it has been estimated that the number of skylarks has fallen by fifty percent. Perhaps
only poetry can describe how the beauty of birdsong can crystallize a unique
moment of contact with nature, and evoke a sense of regret when it can be made no
more.
Hopkins expresses his
personal agony when his beloved poplars at Binsey were
felled, and Charlotte Mew, when she saw the great plane trees coming down at the
end of her garden, pleaded 'Hurt not the trees'. Francis Nowell Mundy, who was a
Derbyshire magistrate and country gentleman published a poem in 1776 called
'Needwood Forest' in which he makes a great oak speak out against the axe. But the
love of trees is not simply a matter of protecting the landscape but also the
recognition of a much more elemental pull that they have upon the human
imagination. Great oaks became symbols of stability and national endurance, and the
greenwoods were the sanctuaries for free men standing out against oppressive
tyrannies. Forests and woods are part of a primeval past, impregnated with mystery
and myth, places where solemn rites were performed, where sacrifices were made,
where outlaws lived and where wild animals hid for security. In the eighteenth century
James Hall, the Scottish antiquarian, trained saplings in the shape of arches to prove
his conviction that gothic architecture was derived from the perpendicular alley
formed by trees: to him the tree was a symbol of the resurrection of man. |
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A woodland plant I
prefer is the curiously named, curiously shaped Herb Paris. If we
can talk of "English" plants, then Herb Paris (which I first saw in a wood in
Normandy) has an English individuality. I know it every year in small patches, on
mossy ground under hazels and oak trees, in a Wiltshire wood, ten or eight plants to
a patch. There is no other plant at all like it in England. It is a surprise, and an elegant
oddity, with its flower stem curving up from the centre of its four regular leaves, its
yellow thin petals showing off its big, black ovary, which turns into a blacker and
bigger berry. "One Berry" is the name it was first recorded by in 1548.
Herb Paris embodies
much of what I look for in a wild flower. It has a range from the
Mediterranean to the Arctic, and into Asia. It is not, with us, too pushing, or too rare,
too much talked about, or too remote from an individual appeal to one's own feelings.
So it comes high in
a list of the good plants to look for every year, in which I include
fritillary, wood anemone, sainfoin, restharrow, Cornish moneywort, bugle, woodruff,
bogbean, deadly nightshade, henbane, greater celandine, viper's bugloss, orpine and
rnusk mallow, mistletoe, and an isolated spindle tree, standing free, away from a
hedge, in fruit.
Geoffrey Grigson
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Under the dense foliage
of the glade, or even a single tree, sheltered from the burning
rays of the sun, weary travellers have found cool and refreshing rest. The shade of
trees, gratefully accepted, is recorded by the early Greeks and Romans. Pliny says :
"There is a little hill named Carne within the territorie of Tusculum not far
from Roman Citie
side, clad and beautiful with a goodly grove and tuft of beech trees, so even and round in the
head as if they were curiously kept cut and shorne artificially with garden sheares : ... In it
there was one especiall faire tree above the rest, which Pabienus Crispus ; a man in our daies
of great authoritie . . . cast a fancie and extra ordinarie liking unto ; insomuch as he was wont
not onely to take his repose and lie under it, to sprinkle and cast wine plentifully upon it, but
also to clip, embrace and kisse it other whiles."
Pliny was probably
referring to the woodcraft of pollarding, which was used on
beeches, oaks and willows to produce a plethora of thin branches for various uses
such as basket making and making hurdles and hot-burning faggots. |
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A century ago the bittern
was making what seemed like a last stand in Norfolk, having
previously bred in quite a large area of East Anglia, wherever there were suitable
reed bedded marshes. After 1868 it only bred once during the nineteenth century. It
was given up as lost. Then in 1911, a Miss E.L. Turner discovered a pair in the
Norfolk Broads once more. Since then, as a result of conservation management of
reed beds, the bittern has gradually increased; today it breeds in Suffolk and
Cambridge as well as Norfolk. |
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The giant balsam of
the Himalayas was described in 1839 in royle's Illustrations of
the Botany of theHimalayan Mountains with illustrations by an Indian artist. By 1840 it
had come over to England as a garden plant and was first recorded as establishing
itself outside gardens by 1855. When A.O. Hume saw it growing wild in Cornwall in
1900 he wrote a picture in the Journal of Botany:
"I notice that it has been called 'a cumbersome and weedy thing"; but growing
in the soft, warm
south-west, with the base of its stem in the clear running stream, it is a magnificent plant, 5-7
feet, or more, in height, stalwart, with a stem from one to one and a half inches in diameter just
above the surface of the water, erect, symmetrical in shape, with numerous aggregations of
blossom, the central mass as big as a man's head, and those terminating all the principal
lateral branches, though smaller, still most striking–masses
of bloom varying in difl'erent plants
through a dozen lovely shades of colour from the very palest pink imaginable to the deepest
claret colour, and with a profusion of large, elegant, dark green, lanceolate leaves, some of
them fully 15 inches in length."
From June to autumn,
its pink bank and billows of flower fill the West country valleys
valleys with a wide gentleness of colour ; and the plant has spreads far beyond
Cornwall the length and breadth of southern England and Wales.
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E.
Donavan. Birch Weevils: Natural History of British Insects, 1794
The 18th century took
to insects, both as objects of beauty and interest in their own
right, and also speculatively and to the glory of God. Biological philosophy at that time
was dominated by a conception of "The Chain of Being" in which insects had their
essential and not insignificant place. It is set forth in a noble poem addressed by
Benjamin Stillingfleet to Thomas Pennant, who was also the respondent of Gilbert
White.
After mentioning some
of the more utilitarian aspects of Creation, "Not these alone,"
he says:
Which strike ev'n eyes
incurious, but each moss,
Each shell, each crawling
insect holds a rank
Important in the plan
of Him, who fram'd
This scale of beings;
holds a rank, which lost
Would break the chain,
and leave behind a gap
Which Nature's self
would rue.
The same thesis occurs
in Thomson and Pope. Paley in his Natural Theology gives
considerable space to insects. They had, in fact, become respectable. Gray loved
them to the extent of turning Linnaeus's entomology into Latin verse. Everyone
remembers, "where the beetle wheels his droning flight," and he mentions the
appearance of the White Butterfly, of Gnats, and of the Ladybird, in his letters. But
what deeply touched his enthusiasm was a present of foreign insects :
"Here is Mr. Foljambe,
has got a flying hobgoblin from the East Indies, and a power of
rarities, and then he has given me such a phalaena, with looking glasses in its wings,
and a queen of the white ants, whose belly alone is as big as many hundred of her
subjects, I do not mean their bellies only, but their whole persons; and yet her tetons
and her legs are no bigger than other people's. Oh, she is a jewel of a pismire !"
And elsewhere, less
breathlessly and more scientifically, he describes his jewel in
fuller detail.
Indeed the Augustan
period was certainly insect-conscious, from Addison with his
rather second-hand Ants to William Smyth, Professor of Modern History at
Cambridge, who, in his English Lyrics of 1797, has a charming poem to a Bee, and
Erasmus Darwin, who, two years later, wrote this beautiful invocation :
Stay thy soft murmuring
waters, gentle Rill;
Hush, whispering Winds;
ye rustling Leaves, be still;
Rest, silver Butterflies,
your quivering wings;
Alight, ye Beetles,
from your airy rings;
Ye painted Moths, your
gold-eyed plumage furl,
Bow your wide horns,
your spiral trunks uncurl;
Glitter, ye Glow-worms,
on your mossy beds;
Descend, ye Spiders,
on your lengthened threads;
Slide here, ye horned
Snails, with varnished shells;
Ye Bee-nymphs, listen
in your waxen cells !
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For a broad view of
shore life we need to go, not to specialised volumes produced by
professional scientists on different groups of animals, but to the writings of the shore
naturalists who became increasingly active during the last century. The most
important of these was Philip Henry Gosse, 1810-1888. To the-present generation he
is best known as the austere parent of Father and Son but to the Mid-Victorians his
name was a household word as the author of a unique series of books on shore life,
A Naturalist's Ramble on the Devonshire Coast, The Aquarium and Tenby, with a
host of others from accounts of early experiences in Canada and Jamaica to a
history of the creation in which this devout Plymouth Brother attempted to rally
opinion against the doctrines of The Origin of Species.
Gosse was a fine observer,
a faithful and exact recorder and gifted with high artistic
powers ; his paintings of shore life have rarely been equalled. He combined his
popular work, on which he depended for his livelihood, with scientific studies which
secured his election to the Royal Society. He lacked only imagination and its
attendant humour. Indirectly he affected English literature first through Sir Edmund
Gosse's study of their contrasted characters, second by his friendship with Charles
Kingsley in whom he awoke the interest which found literary expression in Glaucus :
or, The Wonders of the Shore, illustrated by G. B. Sowerby, and in the more enduring
Water Babies.
Another literary figure
who turned aside to write on the beauties of the shore was
George Henry Lewes, husband in all save name of George Eliot, whose Seaside
Studies was widely read. The Seaside Book of W. H. Harvey, Professor of Botany at
Dublin, was another popular work although the author has more enduring claims to
fame through his book on British seaweeds.
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Egyption: circa 1350 BC
The domesticated horse
had arrived in the countries of the eastern Mediterranean at
some time in the second millennium, brought there from Asia during one of the
warlike migrations, and had been largely responsible for the overthrow of the
Egyptian Empire by the Hyksos in about 1500 bc. We may suppose that these
horses, 'the tanks of the ancient world', were more formidable than beautiful. But
quite early they were evolved from instruments of aggression into objects of pride.
On reliefs of the Ramassid period we can see that the Egyptians, having taken them
over from their conquerors, had cultivated their beauty as well as their strength, and
we can find the same feelings in the Assyrian reliefs from 1000 bc. A pride in the
beauty of horses, which appears repeatedly in the Homeric poems, was to continue
through the ancient world, and survive till it became the root of the word 'chivalry'.
The Dauphin's speech about his horse in Shakespeare's Henry V, although partly
intended as satire, expresses the feelings of most young men of spirit (and means)
up to 1914.
When I bestride him,
I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he
touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes ... It
is a beast for Perseus: he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and
water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him: he
is indeed a horse; and all other jades you may call beasts.
The point is that the
artists treatment of horses down the ages says more about the
human response to animals than about the horse itself.
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Parthenon frieze
The Greeks, although
much less interested in animals than the Egyptians, had one
superb vehicle for their sense of beauty, the horse. In Greece beauty became the
artist's main objective, and was applied to the human face and body with such a
mania for perfection, that for centuries the words 'beauty' and 'Greek' were practically
interchangeable.
Archaic Greek art produced
small bronzes of horses, stylized to the point of
abstraction. Charming as they are, they do not show any feeling for beauty in the
naturalistic sense. This first appears on the frieze of the Siphnian Treasury in Delphi
of about 525 bc. They display all the elements which, a century later, were to be
developed and given livelier movement in what are arguably the most beautiful
horses in art, those which cavort round the frieze of the Parthenon. Although they tug
at their vanished reins, and long to break into a gallop, they seem conscious of the
fact that they are taking part in some great ceremonial; they are proudly vigorous,
and beauty still predominates. The splendid curves of energy — the neck and the
rump, united by the passive curve of the belly, and capable of infinite variation, from
calm to furious strength — are without question the most satisfying piece of formal
relationship in nature: so much so that good photographs of horses have the same
effect on some people as works of art. In this respect a well- bred horse is to some
extent the result of the art of selective breeding.
How much the Greeks
valued the beauty of horses is shown by their coinage: a
chariot drawn by four horses of unequalled elegance is the reverse of the most
beautiful coin in the world, the dechadrem of Syracuse commemorates the prowess
of the Macedonian cavalry on the reverse of a coin of Philip II; and the horse's head,
that was to influence Leonardo da Vinci, is the reverse of a dechadrem of Alexander
the Great.
There is on the Acropolis
the fragment of a marble horse of the fifth century, which
must originally have been one of the most beautiful pieces of animal sculpture in the
world, and was probably the inspiration of a small bronze horse in the Metropolitan
Museum of questionable date, but unquestionable charm. The most famous life-size
horses of Antiquity still exist undamaged, thanks to the predatory instincts of the
Venetians, who were prepared to commit any crime to decorate their Basilica. The
horses of St Mark's are so familiar, and so much a part of the marvellous show-case
of the facade, that we forget what extraordinary survivals of antique sculpture they
are. Whether or not they are copies made to fob off the Emperor Nero, they certainly
go back, to fifth-century originals, and have never been surpassed.
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Domenichino
Horses play relatively
little part in early medieval art. Their curves could not be
assimilated into the angularity of Gothic. However, the later Middle Ages invented one
of the most beautiful of all animals, which in fact never existed, that exquisite white
pony with a goat's beard, a flowing tail and a long horn growing straight out of the
middle of its forehead, known as the unicorn. Everything about the unicorn is
mysterious, and leads to a string of unanswerable questions. What does it really
signify? Students of allegory and iconography give contradictory answers. What were
its origins? It is said to have originated in India, and it appears in Pliny, who says that
it is a fierce and dangerous animal, but when it sees a virgin it lays its head
submissively in her lap. In consequence the Physiologus makes the unicorn one of
the supporters of the Virgin Mary. It plays a minor role in the early Middle Ages; then,
in the fifteenth century, it comes to fill some imaginative need, and inspires two of the
greatest masterpieces of late Gothic art. These are the tapestries of the Hunt of the
Unicorn in the Metropolitan Museum (thand the slightly later tapestries in the Musce
dc Cluny, known as the Lady and the Unicorn. Looking at these marvellous works of
art we cannot help asking more questions. Where were they made? For whom were
they made? Above all, what is their subject? Nobody knows. The catalogue of the
Cloisters states with bland confidence 'The subject of the tapestries is an allegory of
the Incarnation in which the Unicorn, a symbol of purity representing Christ, is hunted
and captured.'
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Leonardo da Vinci
After the sixteenth
century the Medieval poetical allegory of beauty, with all its baffling
associations, disappears from art. Leonardo da Vinci was studying its beauty from
an almost exactly opposite point of view. At almost every point in his career as an
artist, until his last years, he was at work on some commission that involved a horse;
first the Adoration of the Magi for San Scopeto; then, for fifteen years, the giant horse
of the Sforza monument; then the Battle of Anghiari; and finally the monument to
Marshal Trivulzio.
No one has ever observed
horses more sympathetically, and also more scientifically,
for he wrote a treatise on the anatomy of the horse, now lost, and did measured
drawings in which he tried to apply to the proportions of a horse the same kind of
complex mathematical progressions that he and Diirer were applying to the human
body. Apparently this horse was the 'Gianecto Grosso' of Messer Mariolo, and I am
inclined to think that this is the same animal who appears in the most beautiful of all
Leonardo's drawings of horses. This drawing was done in about 1490. Both before
and after Leonardo did studies of horses with an intention different from this living
naturalism. The earlier ones, grouped round the Adoration of the Magi for S. Donate
a Scopeto, are reflections of that dream which haunted the imagination of
Renaissance antiquity. Leonardo has used reliefs and coins to nourish his ideal: in
fact the closest parallel is a series of carvings that he can never have seen, the
frieze of the Mausoleum. These dream horses continued into the first period in Milan,
and appear drawings evidently intended as a project for an equestrian monument,
although technically it could not have been carried out as sculpture. This Leonardo
recognized, and for thirty years he worked on a series of drawings of horses that are
directly concerned with his sculptural projects. They are admirable drawings, but
they lack the magic of the lunar apparitions in the Adoration. In the years between his
two monuments he did the studies for his great battle of horses, the Battle of
Anghiari, which I shall return to when I consider how beauty gives way to energy.
From the beginning the beauty of animals has been linked with -— admiration for
their energy. 'Energy,' said Blake, 'is eternal delight.' And it was this, presumably, that
induced Leonardo, to whom war " was 'a most beastly madness', to choose as the
subject of the greatest painting of his Florentine years a battle of horses. |
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Whistlejacket: Stubbs
Stubbs was an observer;
in some of his pictures of mares and foals he is so touched
by the sheer beauty of the subject that his detached observations are transformed;
and in one painting he leaves his deliberate naturalism behind, and sets out to create
an ideal horse.
This is Whistlejacket, surely
one of the greatest pictures of an animal ever painted.
Mares and foals: Stubbs
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Delacroix
'The tigers of wrath
are wiser than the horses of instruction': said Blake, and he was,
as usual, forestalling that new direction in human feeling which we call Romanticism.
Man in his relationship with animals began to sympathize with the ferocity, the cruelty
even, that he had previously dreaded and opposed. The greatest exponent of this
new religion of violence was Delacroix. He felt a personal sympathy with the pride
and aloofness of the tiger, and realized it in the magnificent early painting in the
Louvre of a tiger playing with its mother. But this quiet dignity did not satisfy him as
much as did the glory of carnage. The pictures in which he celebrates it are usually
described as 'lion-hunts', but there is no evidence that the men have had the insolent
courage to go out hunting lions. These are simply episodes in a war between men
and animals in which, for the first time in art, the outcome is uncertain.
The horse plays a large
part in Delacroix animal battle pieces, but it is far from being
the horse of instruction. Usually it is the wretched victim. But occasionally it too is
made to participate in the general frenzy, as in the famous watercolour in the Louvre
of a horse frightened by lightning. Delacroix noted in his Journal, 'Art does not
consist in copying nature, but in recreating it, and this applies particularly to the
representation of animals'; and he adds a comment on horses 'One mustn't aim at
the perfection of the naturalists'. The words come to our mind in front of his picture of
horses fighting in a stable, which is certainly not painted from nature, but is a superb
arabesque of animal ferocity.
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Degas had almost
Leonardo's technical skill as a draughtsman, and his drawings of
horses are sometimes so like Leonardo's that one might, in memory, confuse them.
Two things in the world gave him pure aesthetic pleasure, the ballet and the
racecourse, and, although he could sometimes be cruel to dancers, he always
looked with admiration at les purs sang. He never painted a horse in isolation, or
insisted on its plastic qualities, as Stubbs and Gericault had done. In the age of the
camera, his horses are part of the general scene, at the beginning or the end of a
race, often confused with other horses but observed with an unequalled sense of
their grace and energy.
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