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.

View of the Garden of the Villa Medici

 Diego Velázquez, View of the Garden of the Villa Medici, c. 1630

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the course of her fascinating book on Velázquez, The Vanishing Man, published last year, Laura Cumming writes about 'a picture without precedent.'  The View of the Garden of the Villa Medici 'seems to have no pretext, no definitive narrative or focus.  A fragmentary glimpse, strikingly modern in its random observations, it is simply itself - the momentary scene.'  Velázquez was in Rome in 1630 and knew Poussin and Claude, who were painting their great classical landscapes at this time.  But 'to depict nature purely for itself, live and unadorned - in its natural state, as it were - was very much the innovation of Velázquez.'  Cumming sees nothing similar in art before Corot, 'whose silvery landscapes with their secretive air have a genetic link back to Velázquez'.  But is it really the case that Velázquez was so ahead of his time?  

Albrecht Altdorfer, Landscape with Footbridge, 1516

Source: Wikimedia Commons

 
In Western art, earlier 'independent' landscape paintings, going back to Albrecht Altdorfer, do not have the air of real places seen at real moments.  There are plein air sketches that have this quality, but they do not resemble the Velázquez either.  Claude made such studies in the Roman Campagna and the example below is by another contemporary, Van Dyck, who was court painter to Charles I while Velázquez worked for Philip IV of Spain (The Vanishing Man is about a portrait of the young Charles that was apparently painted by Velázquez, or possibly by Van Dyck, or maybe neither...)  The View of the Garden of the Villa Medici is different, more reminiscent of certain oil sketches made in the late eighteenth century (the cloth on the balcony is like the washing hung out on Thomas Jones' A Wall in Naples).  It could have been a sketch of this kind, but the Prado's curators (quoting Javier Portús) say that it is currently considered to be a finished, self-sufficient work.

Anthony van Dyck, An English Landscape, c. 1635

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Laura Cumming describes The Vanishing Man as 'a book of praise for Velázquez, greatest of painters.'  She writes effusively about the brilliant and subtle ways he found to apply paint to canvas.  In the View of the Garden of the Villa Medici, which is relatively small (48.5 x 43 cm), she notices something remarkable.

'The weave of the cloth is exactly the right size to imitate the pattern of bricks at that distance.  This is one of Velázquez's unimaginably subtle calculations.  How could he guess in advance, or did it come to him as he painted?  This is a great question with his art: what grows out of what, how it all evolves at leisure, or at speed, by chance or design.  But what one sees here is something akin to precision engineering, in terms of vision and judgement: each brick finds its tiny outline in the grid of threads.'

   Diego Velázquez, View of the Garden of the Villa Medici [detail], c. 1630

Source: Prado

Perhaps surprisingly, Cumming makes no mention of the fact that this painting of the Villa Medici has a companion piece, also in the Prado: a view of the same structure seen from a different angle, but with more prominent foreground figures.  It is a marvellously strange, enigmatic image; in the background a man looks out at the distant view, like a Romantic Rückenfigur, and beside him the statue of sleeping Ariadne foreshadows the sequence of mysterious Ariadne paintings de Chirico painted in 1912-13.  There might originally have been two more of these paintings.  It may be that what we have now 'are two of the four little landscapes that the artist sold to Phillip IV in 1634' (Portús).  The disappearance and reappearance of artworks is central to The Vanishing Man and now, after having read it, I can't help wondering about the possibility of other Velázquez landscapes one day coming to light.

Diego Velázquez, View of the Garden of the Villa Medici, with the statue of Ariadne, c. 1630

Source: Prado

After Nature

We made our way to Suffolk last weekend for the third manifestation of the Re-Enchantment project, dedicated to W.G. Sebald and landscape.  The events at Snape Maltings began on Friday with the premiere of Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald), which retraces the walk taken by the narrator of The Rings of Saturn and examines the book through the responses of artists and writers like Iain Sinclair, Tacita Dean and Adam Phillips.  Saturday's symposium opened with Stephen Watt's poem, 'For My Friend, Max Sebald', and gave a platform to various writers on place: Rachel Lichtenstein, Richard Mabey, Robert Macfarlane, Alexandra Harris and Dan Gretton. Although each discussed their own work rather than Sebald's, their contributions provided a context for thinking about Sebald and landscape, picked up in the round table discussion that ended the afternoon.  The talks were all stimulating and enjoyable but did leave me wanting to get back to Sebald's writing, so it was a pleasure to end the day with a Patti Smith concert in which she performed sections of Sebald's poem After Nature. The more committed Sebaldians stayed on for some guided walks to Orford Ness on Sunday, but we decided to head home - put off by the prospect of the fierce winter wind blowing in off the German Ocean.

The temptation to walk in Sebald's footsteps is strong (as I have mentioned in an earlier post about Sebald), but several contributors to Grant Gee's film remark on the futility of this endeavour.  In an interview with The Guardian Gee describes Robert Macfarlane's attempt to retrace Sebald's walk. '"He arrived in Lowestoft," laughs Gee, "and saw everybody was happy, that the weather was lovely, and then he went and had a swim in the sea. He realised he was having too much fun – that what he was doing was unSebaldian – so he packed it in after two days."'  Gee filmed the locations in grainy black and white, like Sebald's embedded images, giving us the sense of a landscape refracted through the memory of the narrator (voiced by Jonathan Pryce).  The film is unobtrusively soundtracked by The Caretaker (James Kirby), whose music has often dwelt on memory and amnesia.  It is an essay film rather than a conventional documentary, so we do not get to hear about Sebald from people who were close to him, or hear the views of a succession of literary critics - the emphasis is on Sebald's artistic legacy and influence.  His humorous side comes through too - fans of the Lowestoft fish-eating incident will be pleased to see this 'sorry wreck' of a meal makes a brief appearance.  Gee also managed to persuade two actors to lie on the beach at Covehithe and recreate the sight that so disturbed the narrator, looking down from the cliff at a couple resembling 'some great mollusc washed ashore', her legs spreadeagled, his feet twitching 'like those of one just hanged'.

 Robert Macfarlane introduces The Wild Places of Essex

After the screening Grant Gee was interviewed by Robert Macfarlane whose own recent film The Wild Places of Essex was shown as part of Saturday's programme.  This was made for the BBC's Natural World series and in complete contrast to Patience (After Sebald) it was shot in high definition colour.  The camera lingers on bluebells and badgers in the woods near Billericay, deer leaping somewhere in Epping Forest and seals stained rusty orange by the iron in the Thames estuary.  However, Macfarlane, like Sebald, was also making a literary journey, and we see him reflecting on the nature of wildness and the way industry and nature conflict and interact.  It made me want to visit Rainham Marshes, and even Jaywick, where crumbling streets are named after coastal plants that have long since disappeared (I thought of the poems in H.D.'s Sea Garden).  Essex also featured in Rachel Lichtenstein's talk, which drew on her books Rodinsky's Room (1999) and On Brick Lane (2007) and illustrated the way history has shaped the inhabitants of these places.  Like Sebald, she has listened to the accounts of people marooned by time or who hold memories of worlds that have disappeared forever.  Another Sebaldian character, Fred Zentner, emigrant and bookshop owner, is the subject of a Grant Gee short film, seen packing up to leave after forty years selling specialist cinema books.  Among the other short Gee films shown in Snape I was particularly struck by The Western Lands and have included an extract below because of its landscape subject.

Looking back, I think the day's main talking point was provided by Richard Mabey, who criticised Sebald's lack of respect for the Suffolk landscape in The Rings of Saturn. His particular concern was with Dunwich Heath, which the narrator found to be a 'melancholy region', forlorn above the sea.  Sebald writes of the prehistoric settlers who burned off the forests, saying the scene must have resembled those palls of smoke now visible above the jungles of Brazil and Borneo.  Mabey explained that it could not have happened - Suffolk's deciduous woods would not have burned in this way.  The criticism had added force as part of an ecocritical plea to see the natural world more clearly and resist the pathetic fallacy (Mabey's concerns reminded me that the Climategate controversy had centred on Sebald's University of East Anglia).  Does it matter?  Sebald ends his book with an explicitly unreliable anecdote, based on a passage in Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica 'that I can no longer find'.  He says that  in Holland 'it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the fields, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost forever.' Sebald's melancholy world view may have obscured the details of the landscape and people he encountered, but perhaps this helps us see the journey we are on more clearly.

Snape Maltings: landscape framed by
a hole in the Family of Man
(Barbara Hepworth) 

In defence of The Rings of Saturn, Robert Macfarlane asserted that there are many different ways of writing about a landscape.  Sebald's publishers found it hard to categorise Sebald's work, a unique mix of memoir, fiction, history, travel; similar confusions had surrounded Bruce Chatwin, whose books had nevertheless opened up new space for writers like Sebald.  Richard Mabey continued to question the need for 're-enchantment' and argued that we are still too conditioned to see landscapes as prospects, viewed through the eyes of a surveyor or landowner.  He would like more artists to follow John Clare, immersing themselves in the natural world and able to see the landscape from a non-human perspective.  Alexandra Harris (whose Romantic Moderns I'm currently enjoying) put in a word for the continuing importance of the framed view, which slows us down and directs our attention.  The neo-Romantics in her book depicted places that had been closely observed, but worked on by the imagination - like Suffolk in The Rings of Saturn.  Sebald sees things through the eyes of an artist rather than a naturalist and his books concern visions of landscapes, like Grünewald's in the Basel Crucifixion: 'behind a group of mourners / a landscape reaches so far into the depths / that our eyes cannot see its limits.'  The strange dark sky may seem unreal but may still have been painted 'after nature', inspired by memories of the eclipse of 1502, a 'catastrophic incursion / of darkness, the last trace of light / flickering from beyond.'

These lines were read by Patti Smith at the concert that evening, accompanied by her daughter Jesse on piano and Michael Campbell on xylophone, guitar and percussion.  Among the songs they performed were 'My Blakean Year', 'Ghost Dance', and 'Birdland', which she said had been composed in an associative way reminiscent of After Nature.  They encored with 'Because the Night', introduced as Sebald's "favourite Patti Smith song", the least reliable assertion of the day.  She read an unfinished poem written in tribute to Sebald, but it was her emotionally charged performance of texts from After Nature that made the greatest impression, filling the hall with Sebald's own verse.  Think of the way Patti Smith songs like 'Land', written as prose poetry, begin with gentle accompaniment, then take off, soaring faster and louder until finally getting resolved on a new note of calm. Sebald's poetry lent itself to this treatment, especially the closing lines of After Nature, which she read with gathering momentum until the last sentence, where the sun sets on a distant landscape. The poem describes a dream in which Sebald sees far below him his own house and 'the shadows falling / on the East Anglian landscape'.  He flies over the North Sea and the Rhine's alluvial plain, 'cities phosphorescent / on the river bank, / industry's glowing piles waiting / beneath the smoke trails...'  Time seems to stretch out and speed up and he finds himself looking into Altdorfer's great painting: Alexander's army, Darius 'in flight / towards the sickle moon' and finally, beyond them, 'the evening glow / and a city on the shore ... The Nile Delta can be made out, / the Sinai Peninsula, the Red Sea / and, still farther in the distance, / towering up in dwindling light, / the mountain ranges, / snow-covered and ice-bound, / of the strange, unexplored, / African continent.'

Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle of Alexander at Issus (detail) 1529

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Landscape with Satyr Family

The catalogue to the current Adam Elsheimer exhibition is published by Paul Holberton. Holberton himself knows a lot about early landscape painting and it would be good if he could publish a book based on his own PhD researches in this subject. One of the many interesting things in his thesis is a classification of images according to the characteristics of the figures in the landscape, arguing that a typology based on format or place would be less practicable. So for example Albrecht Altdorfer's Landscape with Satyr Family (1509) would come under the heading of landscapes featuring satyrs and centaurs. Other possibilities are landscapes featuring: hermits and anchorites; lovers at odds with society; vagrants or the homeless (including Biblical examples like Adam and Eve after the expulsion); woodsmen or woodhouses; 'natives' on the borders of the known world (e.g. Scythians or New World Indians); and primitives before the rise of civilisation. These varoius characters might all be termed 'landscape beings.'

Albrecht Altdorfer, Landscape with Satyr Family, 1509

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Promisingly, it says on his website, 'Paul Holberton is currrently writing a book on the history of Arcadia in art and literature (working title: Sex in the Bushes).'