A yellow roughness in the land

Round Soria the land is dry and cold.

Over the hills, the barren ranges,
through green bits of meadow,
up the cindery peaks
the spring advances, leaving its small white daisies
scattered in the fragrant grasses. 

The earth is not reborn: the country dreams...

- from 'The Soria Country' by Antonio Machado, trans. Alan S. Trueblood

In 1909 the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), a leading figure in the Generation of '98, was offered a job teaching French in the old city of Soria in northeastern Spain. There he fell in love with Leonor, the young daughter of the owner of his boarding house (like the unfortunate Lars Hertervig, who I wrote about here earlier this year). They married and spent some time in Paris but she was suffering from tuberculosis and died in 1912. Machado had just published the collection Campos de Castilla featuring poems inspired by the landscape around Soria. He was so devastated by the loss of Leonor that he left Soria and never returned. 

I first encountered Machado via Charles Tomlinson, with Henry Gifford, made a small selection of translations, Castilian Ilexes, in 1963. Their book was named after a poem which compares ilexes to other kinds of tree and describes the regions of Spain in which they grow. A couple of poems in this book particularly appealed to me – ‘To José Maria Palacio’, with its vivid description of springtime, and ‘Novermber 1913’, with its final image of mountains ‘made of stone / of light.’ Castilian Ilexes also introduced me to Machado’s short, aphoristic, haiku-like poems, the ‘Proverbs and Canticles.’

Leonor and Antonio Machado

Henry Gifford's introduction to Castilian Ilexes explains that Machado carried with him to Soria memories of his childhood in Seville, a very different place with its fountains and lemon trees. But 

Soria replaced that vision by the mountains and stony fields, the ilexes and the silent figures in the Castilian solitude. It was Castile that had formed Spain, and here Machado could find a moral dignity born of endurance among the mountains. ... As Yvor Winters has written: 'in an empty place / I met the unmoved landscape face to face.' ... Machado did not go to the landscape like the townsman Rousseau: he sought there 'the countryman's emotion, essentially Georgic, for land that is worked'. ... There is little joy in this landscape, any more than in the Flintcomb-Ash where Tess grubbed swedes, chilled by the rain and buffeted by the wind. Machado like Hardy sees man as 'slighted and enduring': words that apply to the ilexes of Castile and by analogy to the Castilian peasant. 

In Alan S. Trueblood's Selected Poems there are two poems Machado wrote with the same title, 'Along the Duero', both describing walks beside the river that flows past the city. The first recounts the ascent of a hill and moves from a description of the landscape to a meditation on the river of Spanish history. The second begins by describing the humbleness of the river and 'a yellow roughness in the land / like the raw weave of country clothes', then observes the tiny farming plots with shoots of wheat and barley, above them 'rocks and still more rocks' and finally craggy spurs haunted by eagles. This is Castile: a place of woe, a seat of war. The sky begins to darken and Machado hears running water, the Duoro, 'lifestream of Castile, / cutting its way across cold barren plains'. The poem ends with a vision of permanence which is difficult to read now without thinking about the way global heating is affecting the climate of Spain.

Duero, your flowing waters still shall flow
as long as suns of May
melt winter snows and set them loose
through canyons and ravines,
as long as peaks stay capped
in snows and storms
and the sun's bugle flashes
through ashen cloud...

Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape

Joachim Patinir's workshop, Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, c. 1515

The National Gallery's early landscape-related art is now in a Sainsbury Wing room called 'Looking at Nature: European Painting 1430-1540.' One of the works there is Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, attributed to the workshop of Joachim Patinir. I've always loved looking into this - as Erika Langmuir wrote in the 1997 NG Companion Guide 'our eye travels to a hill town (more accurately a monastery complex), valleys, woods, mountains, fortresses, farm houses, fields, the sea, the high horizon, sky...' It is a whole world. And what we see now isn't even the whole picture - it was cut down from a larger original. Patinir and his workshop did several versions of Saint Jerome and the magnificent landscape at the end of this blog post is from one that is now owned by the Prado (this too was cut down). 

 

The historical record on Patinir is scant, although we do know Dürer admired his landscapes and attended his second wedding. The first monograph on him was written by Robert A. Koch and published in 1968. This includes an analysis (pp 17-19) of his 'world landscape' paintings, and from it I have extracted these ten characteristics. 

1. Distance and Scale

'In every Western landscape painting before the nineteenth century,' Koch writes, 'the illusion of distance was created in principle by the diminution of scale and a progressive loss of clarity; but Patinir is inclined to mock this law of aerial perspective until the eye of the spectator is close to the horizon line.' His example of this is the Met's St. Jerome triptych, shown below. Koch says Patinir 'permits us to scan the landscape as though through a telescope.' I remember visiting New York in 2008 and being amazed that you were now allowed to take photos in their museums, so I zoomed in and photographed lots of details visible in Patinir's painting. Sometimes 'the scale changes irrationally and abruptly' but Patinir was seemingly happy to do this 'in order to make his landscape more immediate and more exciting.' 

Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of Saint Jerome, c. 1515

2. Perspective

Patinir lavished attention on individual objects to make them as realistic as possible but the effect as a whole was clearly not 'realistic.' As an artist he sometimes resembled an architect or cartographer. 'In constructing his vast vistas of space, he was either disinterested in or unaware of scientific rules of perspective, which in any event would have availed him little in his conquest of landscape.' 

3. Foregrounds

The highly-detailed, sharply-focused plants, animals, rocks etc. in his foregrounds are designed to make the viewer feel connected to the picture space. He would sometimes put a tree there to help provide scale. Sometimes these were dead (symbolic) and sometimes they were lacking leaves, so as to leave gaps through which the landscape would be visible. 

4. Light and Shadow

'The lighting of the landscape is artificial and rather arbitrary in the nearer distances.' But while overall it 'tends to be flat, for the sake of over-all clarity, tree foliage and rocks are usually accented in light and shadow.' Few things in Patinir's landscapes cast shadows, and if they do they are rather weak ones.

5. Colour

Flemish painting deployed the formula of the 'three distances' - reddish brown in the foreground, green in the middle and then that beautiful blue for the distance, a colour I've talked about on this blog before. Patinir, though, went beyond this simple schema, using different colours to create transitions. 'The far distant blue permits little color play, though Patinir varies its intensity and may shade it to green or gray. Bright red may occur in its traditional role as the local color of the costume of a foreground figure, and touches of it may also spark the sky, or a distant earthly or infernal fire. The sky is usually shaded from a bright, creamy tone on the horizon through white and bluish white to a deep azure blue at the frame.' 

6. Sky

When it comes to weather effects, Patinir's skies usually contain 'white cumulus clouds, evoking the mood of a clear, late summer afternoon, the atmosphere cleared of dust by a recent rain.' The subject of the painting may require a change to this of course - Koch relates St. Jerome's 'dark night of the soul' to the blackness in the sky above him (see above), and the same can be said of other works like the Prado's The Temptations of Saint Anthony. 

7. Ground

Here we see 'overlapping folds of earth' with land either swelling from a darker shade to a bright summit or vice versa. 'In either case a contour line is created when dark and light meet, clarifying the earth mass.' 

8. Water

'From the trickle of a foreground stream to rivers that empty in the foreground or meander in the distance, from ponds and lakes to great bays, water is an important element of the Master's world landscape.' Koch notices that it is always 'smooth or gently rippled, but never angry', even when the religious stories being illustrated might suggest turbulent waters or rough waves. 

9. Trees

Patinir's 'compact, trimly rounded, distant trees' are produced with dots of paint that were referred to by the late sixteenth century artist-writer Karel Van Mander as getippelt. Koch doesn't translate this term but I see it implies light, quick steps (and hence a street prostitute in modern slang!) 

10. Rocks

Finally, rock formations are particularly memorable elements in all his landscapes and dominate the National Gallery's Saint Jerome. I've always thought of these as 'fantastical' but Koch believes Patinir was 'deeply affected by the noted landmarks along the Meuse River around Namur and Dinant: the Marche-les-Dames, a bright gray wall which rises precipitously from the river; the bluish limestone Rochers de Frènes; and the dramatic chimney-like Bayard Rock at Dinant. What appear to be melodramatic rock fantasies in Patinir's paintings are really constructions based upon his personal observation of nature.' 

Joachim Patinir, Landscape with Saint Jerome (detail), 1516-17

The distant island of Eimeo

Conrad Martens, HMS Beagle being hailed by native Fuegians, 1832

Following a visit to Charles Darwin's home Down House earlier this year, I read the The Voyage of the Beagle (1845 - the second edition which incorporated extensive revisions and looked forward to his theory of evolution). It really is a fascinating account, in which Darwin experiences an earthquake in Chile, climbs the Andes, meets gauchos, encounters political turmoil in Peru and witnesses the return of Fuegian natives who had been taken to Britain after the captain’s previous voyage. The Galapagos Islands are an obvious highlight but the whole book is interesting. Darwin is admirably critical of slavery, sympathetic to exploited miners and saddened by the impact of diseases brought by Europeans. He is also sympathetic to the efforts of missionaries, who were evidently doing some good, even if the extent of their negative impact was not yet apparent. Overall he comes over as thoroughly admirable and his enthusiasm for the natural world extends well beyond animals and plants to encompass insects, coral reefs, fossils, geological formations and meteorology.

At the end of the book he concludes that 'the pleasure derived from beholding the scenery and the general aspect of the various countries we have visited, has decidedly been the most constant and highest source of enjoyment.' There are descriptions of landscape throughout the journey and I will just quote one example here, from his time in Tahiti, where he reaches for the analogy of a work of art.

From the highest point which I attained, there was a good view of the distant island of Eimeo, dependent on the same sovereign with Tahiti. On the lofty and broken pinnacles, white massive clouds were piled up, which formed an island in the blue sky, as Eimeo itself did in the blue ocean. The island, with the exception of one small gateway, is completely encircled by a reef. At this distance, a narrow but well-defined brilliantly white line was alone visible, where the waves first encountered the wall of coral. The mountains rose abruptly out of the glassy expanse of the lagoon, included within this narrow white line, outside which the heaving waters of the ocean were dark-coloured. The view was striking: it may aptly be compared to a framed engraving, where the frame represents the breakers, the marginal paper the smooth lagoon, and the drawing the island itself. When in the evening I descended from the mountain, a man, whom I had pleased with a trifling gift, met me, bringing with him hot roasted bananas, a pine-apple, and cocoa-nuts. After walking under a burning sun, I do not know anything more delicious than the milk of a young cocoa-nut.

The Voyage of the Beagle mentions a few of his companions but in general Darwin is too busy studying the natural world to focus on them as characters. Of the two artists who accompanied the voyage, there is no mention of Augustus Earle, who shared a cottage with Darwin in Rio, and only one of Conrad Martens: on the occasion he shot an ostrich. 'It was cooked and eaten [but] fortunately the head, neck, legs, wings, many of the larger feathers, and a large part of the skin, had been preserved; and from these a very nearly perfect specimen has been put together, and is now exhibited in the museum of the Zoological Society.' The sketchbooks of Martens were digitised a few years ago by Cambridge University (The Guardian published on article on this at the time). The example below was drawn in Tahiti.

A dense forest of pines

This is 'Barbara Codonia', a depiction of the 'landscape' of northern Germany drawn by Dürer or his school, incorporating the names of places and longitude and latitude around the borders. In the northern sea there are islands - Thule (Tyle), probably one of the Shetland Islands, Iceland (Islandi), Scandia, Gottia and somewhere that might be Svalbard. It is an illustration from the Quatuor libri amorum secundum quatuor latera germanie by German humanist Conrad Celtes (Latin: Conradus Celtis), published in Nuremberg in 1502.  These erotic poems were written in praise of Germany and each book had its own heroine. Barbara resides in Lübeck, while in the East there was Hasilina of Cracow, to the South, Elsula of Regensburg and in the West, Ursula of Mainz. The only one of these women that historians have identified with a real person is Hasilina, about whom Simon Schama writes amusingly in Landscape and Memory.

Celtis was altogether an extraordinary figure. ... He studied in Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Rostock before reaching Kraków in 1489, where he had a sensually ecstatic affair with Hasilina Ryztonic, the wife of a Polish nobleman. "How happy I was in that hour amid kisses and embraces holding Hasa's soft breasts in my hands and burying myself in her sweet thighs." Celtis strayed far enough into the Polish countryside to hunt bison, but his view of Poland as a place hopelessly sunk in drunken squalor may have been colored by his rejection at the hands of the passionate but unpredictable Hasa. In his later Liber Amorum she was decisively annexed as one of the four corners of Germany. 

In a 1992 article called 'Desiring the Barbarian' in The German Quarterly David Price describes Celtis's attitude to his four geographically separated lovers. He praises some poems in German from Ursula, albeit tentatively, and then complains that nobody teaches girls Latin. This leads him to imagine instructing her - 'my tongue will pour words into your lips'. He says he will indicate long and short syllables through the length of his kisses. Barbara gets short shrift, criticised for slurred speak when she gets drunk, and Elsula, ignorant of Latin, is castigated for being unreceptive to his songs. 'Haselina, the subject of much of Celtis's best erotic poetry, comes off even worse. Like all "non-classical" women, according to Celtis, Hasilina scorns books. ... Celtis's women resemble the faithless or unreceptive women of Roman love lyric, but they are repugnant to an even greater degree because of their illiteracy in Latin.'

Christopher S. Wood's rich study Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (a source for Simon Schama's book), views Celtis as a pivotal figure in the identification of Germany with the idea of the forest. 

The key intellectual manoeuvre was the conversion of the forest from the blight into the pride of the land. The forest became at once a hazardous wilderness and a stage for chivalric heroism; it sheltered the satyr, the wild man, even - in Celtis's profound imagination - the Druid priest. The forest became an open-air temple; it became the seat of the Muses. These ideas were so fresh that they could only be put forward tentatively, experimentally, often with tangible excitement. The glamour of the forest lay in its precarious double nature: awe could easily collapse back into fear, mystery into obfuscation, heroism into barbarism.

Wood illustrates the forest's dangers with a pen drawing by Altdorfer showing robbers in action, and notes a similar scene in the Amores of Celtis, who described an encounter on the road between Nuremberg and Regensburg. This is how Celtis sets the scene:

It is a place where hills are lifted from the bending valley,
And a dense forest of pines covers all sides;
In the middle of the space is a well-trodden road in a narrow track;
Watered by a lake, it leads through putrid fields.

Here the thieves spring forth but, 'moved by the poet's supplications (delivered in Latin, if we are to trust the poem),' they spare his life.

The Enchanted Forest

Marc Chagall, sketch of a curtain for The Firebird Act 1, 'The Enchanted Forest', 1945

We were in Nice last week and visited the Chagall Museum. It has an exhibition on at the moment that includes sixty-four sketches for the stage curtains and costumes used for the New York Ballet's revival of The Firebird in 1945.  I was drawn to the image above, a landscape as seen through the distinctive imagination of Chagall, with his vivid colours, floating creatures and magical realism. The view seems to be trees on either side of a river, although this river is also the sky, and what looks like a sun and moon with their usual colours reversed. Interestingly he repeated this composition for one of the Museum's twelve large painting of scenes from Genesis and Exodus (below). At first glance those wonderful blues and greens evoke the idea of a natural paradise, but the upside-down trees and fleeing birds also suggest a landscape being uprooted and changed for ever as Adam and Eve are expelled (assisted by a red cockerel, looking a lot like the Firebird).  

Marc Chagall, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, 1961

I have mentioned descriptions and depictions of Eden before on this blog, e.g. by John Milton and Athanasius Kircher, but here is a bit more on The Firebird. Chagall's forest might more accurately be described as a garden, because the ballet is set in the enchanted grounds of a castle owned by the evil Kostcheï. Ivan, the hero, is lost there and sees the Firebird, who escapes but gives him one of her feathers. Later he uses this to summon her back and she tells him how to kill Kostcheï, by hurling an egg containing his soul to the ground. Aleksandr Golovin designed the scenery for the original 1910 Ballets Russes production at the Palais Garnier on 25 June 1910 - it was just one month earlier that Chagall arrived from Russia to study and paint in Paris. Natalia Goncharova took a different approach for Diaghilev's new production in 1926 - her stylised Russian cityscape for the final act was exhibited a few years ago in the Tate's Goncharova exhibition, but I'm not sure how she depicted the garden. More recent productions seem to have prioritised dancing over scenery, although the Dance Theatre of Harlem's 1982 Firebird had sets with botanical forms designed by the multi-talented Geoffrey Holder. There is no indication of how this garden (or forest) should look in the original production's brief scene descriptions, so artists will always be free to design their own imaginary landscapes. 

Aleksandr Golovin, sketch for The Firebird scenery, 1910

Soracte white with deep snow

Mountains in the Classical Tradition was a research project based at St. Andrews University from 2017 to 2023. It incorporated a blog which considered, among other cultural topics, 'William Golding at Thermopylae' and 'Edward Dodwell on Mt. Hymettos' (the subject of a post here back in 2013). In 'Augustus Hare on Mt. Soracte' Jason Konig discusses the travel writer and watercolourist who published two books about his walks near Rome. These volumes not only described Hare's own impressions of Mount Soracte (now called Monte Soratte) but also referred to twelve other nineteenth century writers who wrote about it. These included Byron, whose Childe Harold lists this rather modest peak alongside the most famous mountains of classical Greece. Soracte's unlikely fame was entirely down to just a few words of Latin verse: the first stanza of Horace's Ode 1.9, in which it stands covered in snow. 

As Jason Konig points out, 

It seems extraordinary that such a brief glimpse could have haunted the imagination of centuries of later readers. It was the opening line of this poem that Patrick Leigh Fermor’s German captive, General Kreipe, quoted to him in looking at the sunrise on Mt Ida in Crete in 1944; Leigh Fermor claims to have quoted the rest of the poem to him from memory in response, an incident which united the two men temporarily in their shared mastery of the classical heritage.

After describing the winter landscape Horace turns to his young companion, Thaliarchus, and urges him not to waste his youth - a similar theme to the famous carpe diem lines in Ode 1.11. There are numerous translations of the full poem online - at the Pantheon Poets site, for example, where you can hear it in Latin. I'll just quote here the start and end of a modern version by David Ferry. 

See Mount Soracte shining in the snow.
See how the laboring overladen trees
Can scarcely bear their burdens any longer.

See how the streams are frozen in the cold.
Bring in the wood and light the fire and open
The fourth-year vintage wine in the Sabine jars.

O Thaliarchus, as for everything else,
Forget tomorrow. Leave it up to the gods. [...] 

[...] While you’re still young,
And while morose old age is far away,

There’s love, there are parties, there’s dancing and there’s music,
There are young people out in the city squares together
As evening comes on, there are whispers of lovers, there’s laughter.

The American literary scholar H. T. Kirby-Smith, a witty historian of poetry, discusses the Soracte Ode in his book The Celestial Twins.   

Critical commentary on this poem usually neglects the metrics and settles on the issue of whether it consistently develops its subject. One reads indignant objections to the idea of sending some young man out into the streets in the dead of winter in hopes of picking up a girl, or suggestions that Horace simply meandered away from his original intention of evoking a winter landscape and contrasting it with the consolations of a roaring fire and a drink. Others, more sensibly, suggest that as Horace turns from himself to his young friend he imagines a more hospitable season — of life as well as the year — when the perils of senescent hypothermia are less threatening. 

It is easy to find online images of snow on Mt. Ida (height 2,456 m) but I failed to locate any of Mt. Soracte (height 691 m). I guess we live in warmer times, but perhaps it was a rare event even in Horace's day. Kirby-Smith thinks the poem's familiar landscape transformed by snow sets the poem going with 'Alpine excitement and novelty.' Neither August Hare nor his literary sources mention seeing the kind of scene described by Horace - they describe Soracte as a distant blue peak. This is how it appears in Edward Lear's panoramic vision (below). Corot painted it several times and you can see pale areas of rock on its slopes, but no sign of snow anywhere. Perhaps Horace was only ever using it as a metaphor - in Kirby-Smith's phrase, 'age as the season of snow.'

Edward Lear, Monte Soratte near Rome, 1880s(?)

The Channel of Gravelines

Detail from The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening

The Courtauld exhibition Seurat and the Sea is well worth getting to - not cheap, but of course it gets you access to the splendours of the permanent collection and there are many pictures you would normally have to travel a long way to see. The painting below was borrowed from MOMA, the study for it is usually in the Pompidou Centre and the conte crayon sketch is part of a collection of drawings owned by Jack Shear, the American curator and head of the Elsworth Kelly Foundation. These views were all executed in the last summer before Seurat's untimely death and it is sad to think that if he had lived as long as Matisse or Picasso he would have been around for abstract art and surrealism. One of my favourite paintings in London dates from the same summer, the Courtauld's The Beach at Gravelines, an astonishingly abstract composition, apparently painted for his own pleasure as it serves no purpose as a preparatory study.

Georges Seurat, The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening, 1890

While the other post-impressionists headed for the light and strong colours of the south, Seurat painted Gravelines, near Dunkirk, almost as far north as you can go in France (it is actually slightly further north than Brighton, where I grew up.) The exhibition curators explain that contemporary viewers 'were struck by Seurat's ability to convey atmosphere and by his subtle rendering of the pearly grey light of the Channel coast.'  The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening 'epitomises the contemplative and serene qualities of Seurat's seascapes that were so admired by early reviewers.' Paul Signac said 'this type of painting does not need bright light since it creates its own.' Adrian Searle, in his Guardian review, observes that 'the North Sea light is milky, turned down a notch from his summers farther south. A boat moves down the Channel at evening. There’s no one about in this violet hour, the sun gone, only the man on the boat and, I suppose, the painter following its progress.' 

Georges Seurat, study for The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening, 1890

The stillness in some of these seascapes has a strange, unsettling quality that made me think of artists like Léon Spillaert and Paul Nash. Joe Lloyd in Studio International writes that 'the emptiness and static quality of his scenes renders them stage-like. The grainy gauze of his technique makes them seem antithetical to the clarity with which our eyes perceive the world. The marines are thus simultaneously studied depictions of reality and oddly unreal simulacrums.' Reviewers prefer these paintings unpeopled - as Laura Cumming says 'the pictures go awry when stick figures appear in the foreground'. I agree, although (as in some of the landscapes painted by Claude and Turner) I quite like it when small, stiff and unrealistic figures create a strangeness that would otherwise be much less apparent. I'll leave the last word here to Laura Cumming (sadly, nowadays, often inaccessible behind The Observer paywall), talking about The Channel of Gravelines: An Evening. 'The most beautiful painting in this exhibition, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, shows Gravelines at twilight, where the waters have quietened to a silvery brightness and the sky above is pink-tinged with dying light.' 

Georges Seurat, Gravelines: An Evening, 1890