Part 25

In a Carpaccio in the same town the cherubs fly, three heads together, like a celestial molecule. In Zacchia da Vezzano’s _Assumption of the Virgin_ at Lucca she rides on cherubs. There is an angelic aeroplane in a painted relief at San Frediano in Lucca, and in Guido Reni’s _Immaculate Conception_ at Forli (where the Virgin stands on a leaf on a cherub’s head), and in Lippo Lippi’s picture at Prato of the Madonna handing down her girdle to St. Thomas. Zuccari Taddeo in the Pitti uses the angelic aeroplane to carry up Mary Magdalen, who is further provided with a number of fussy heralds and _avant-coureurs_. Marco Antonio Franceschini in the Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini of Genoa likewise carries up the Magdalen on the backs of angels, her familiar hair streaming over her familiar breast. Raphael’s _Vision of Ezekiel_ suggests to the profane, God the Father holding up His arms as if to start a flying competition.

But when every generalisation is made, it is the individual genius for blundering that opens up the most spacious vistas of humourless humour. Byzantine art affords, of course, the most naïve illustrations. In the sarcophagi of the Christian emperors at Ravenna you may see sheep eating dates from tall palms. In the mosaics of the vestibule of St. Mark’s you may see humanity unconcernedly drowning in the Deluge. Some, it is true, are whirled helplessly on their backs, but others are quite apathetic among the blue, curly waves. Noah looking out of the little folding doors of the Ark is as quaint as in the mosaics of Monreale Cathedral in Sicily. In the ancient church of S. Zeno at Verona there is an eleventh-century fresco of the _Resurrection of Lazarus_ in which the bystanders hold their noses—a poetic touch that was repeated in later treatments of the theme.

In the Scuola of the Confraternity of St. Antony at Padua, Domenico Campagnola has a fresco, _A Hungry She-Ass adores_ _the Eucharistic Sacrament by a Miracle of the Saint, in order to convert a Heretic_. In vain are heaps of green stuffs and corn spread and baskets tendered her and piles of beans; the ass, on her front knees, adores the Eucharist on a priestly table, so that even the baby lad is wrought up to adoration. One is irresistibly reminded of Goethe’s landlady at Rome calling him to see her cat adore God the Father like a Christian, when it was licking the beard of the bust, probably because of the grease that had sunk into it. In the same Scuola there is a representation of the saint’s preaching which liberates his hearers from an approaching rain-storm. People all around are flying to get out of the rain, not knowing that the saint’s sermon is dry. There are charming figures of mothers and children in the audience which atone for the unconscious humour.

But when one considers the libraries written on Italy, it is strange that that book on her grotesques should be as yet merely an impious aspiration, and that nobody has mocked even at those horrid little waxworks that represent the plague-stricken. Meseems the blessèd word “Renaissance” has hypnotised student and pleasure-pilgrim alike, but some day an irreverent refugee from the Renaissance will gather up the threads I but indicate. In that delectable volume of his there will be a chapter on the camel.

For the advent of the camel marks the faint beginnings of an historic and geographic sense, and stands for all the fantastic wonder-world of the East. Strange that the Crusades or Venice’s Eastern Empire should not have earlier awakened the comparative consciousness. But the East, with its quaintness and its barbaric colour, broke very slowly upon the culture of Europe—Victor Hugo had to rediscover it even for modern France. Despite Altichiero’s pig-tailed Tartars, it was not till the Byzantine Empire was destroyed in 1453 and the Turks were firmly established in Europe that the Christian world became really aware that the East was a world of its own. That conquest of Constantinople, from which the blessèd Renaissance is popularly dated, by sending so many Italians flying home, must have provided Italy with Oriental information as well as Greek manuscripts. And the Renaissance (or re-born) camel represents the quickened sense of local colour. At first, indeed, there is little improvement on the Giotto breed. Apparently none of the fugitives rode off on camels. Such fat creatures as take part in _The Reception of the Venetian Ambassador_ (a picture of the school of Gentile Bellini) were never seen on sand or land. The Magian kings should have come riding on camels with swart servitors, but only a rare artist like the animal-lover Gaudenzio Ferrari is bold enough to attempt this local truth. And the result belongs to comedy. But a people without circuses or zoological gardens, to which the camel was as remote as the centaur, was not keenly aware of the anatomical details of this exotic beast, grotesque enough at its truest. And in the hands of Gentile Bellini himself the creature became quite possible, if still curious, and in that great decorative picture _St. Mark preaching in the Piazza of Alexandria_ there is a real feeling of the turbaned, shrouded and minareted East, even if the head-shawls of the women do appear to cover top-hats and the giraffe strolls about the piazza and the dromedary is led by a string.

Nor is Eusebio di San Giorgio’s camel impossible in his _Adoration of the Magi_ in San Pietro, Perugia, though immeasurably inferior to his oxen and his horses. Carpaccio, too, gets something of Eastern architecture and dress, if more of Venetian, into his _St. Stephen at Jerusalem_.

But after all there is more fascination in the primitive artistry which knew no differences of Space or Time, no colour but universal—_id est_, Italian—no place _un_like home. The whole temper of these early painters seems to me summed up in a picture in the Uffizi by Pietro Lorenzetti, who lived about 1350, _Gli Anacoreti nella Tebaide_. A green water borders a white, curving shore, and land and sea are a chaos of trees, houses, steeples, people, skiffs, sailing-boats, all of the same size and brightness. A like absence of perspective—geometrical, spiritual, or humorous—is seen in Benaglio’s fresco in Verona of _Christ Preaching by the Lake of Galilee_, or Giotto’s fresco in Santa Croce depicting the _Apocalypse of St. John_. In the Lake of Galilee float two gigantic ducks and a gondola, while the audience includes mediæval falconers and pipers. Patmos is a vague turtle-shaped island, and the saint squats in the middle of it, while above hover the celestial figures. Temporal perspective is as confounded as spatial. Hence all those anachronisms which give us pause. Cimabue’s Madonna consorts with the Doctors of the Church, Fra Angelico’s with Dominicans, Alvise Vivarini’s with Franciscans. As Dante explains, the imagination can ignore Time, just as—though his dubious comparison weakens his explanation—it can conceive two obtuse angles in one triangle. A truer simile may perhaps be drawn from the Baptistery of Pisa, where the janitor—humble link in the “nutritive chain”—chants a note to show the wonderful echo, and after its long reverberation has been sufficiently demonstrated he sounds the notes of a simple chord, one after another, so that the earlier notes remain alive and enter into harmony with the new ones, and one hears an enchanting quartet—yea, even a quintet or a sextet. Sometimes he will set an even more complex chord in vibration, and all the air is full of delicious harmony. Even so the mediæval thinkers conceived of the dead and the quick, the pioneers and the successors, all living in unison, vibrating simultaneously though they had started in sequence, all harmoniously at one in the echoing halls of Fame. And so things disparate could be pictured united—anachronism was merely man putting together what blind Time had put asunder. Everything happened in the timeless realm of ideas. And often—as we saw in Sicily—the strictly chronological aspect of things is, indeed, irrelevant. Space and Time are shifting illusions that the spirit disregards. Those who are in harmony are of the same hour and of the same place.

Nor do I know where to look for a better map of the world as it figured itself in the mediæval mind—for your atlas with its assumption that man inhabits mere mounds of earth fantastically patterned is as absurd as your school chronology—than that naïve _Mappamondo_ which Pietro di Puccio frescoed on the walls of the Campo Santo of this same white Pisa. The universe is held in the literal hands of God, whose haloed head appears dominatingly above, not without a suggestion of a clerical band. In the centre of the cosmos—note the geocentric glorification—stands the earth, mapped out into continents by a couple of single straight lines. (If Asia lies north of Europe that is a mere turn to express its hyperborean barbarism; in Fra Mauro’s map in the Doge’s Palace the south has got to the top, perhaps because Venice was there.) America, of course, is not. And yet there are compensations even for the absence of America. For this old world is circumscribed by circle on circle. On the rim of the third are perched the mere figures of the zodiac, but the spaces between the remoter extra-terrestrial circles are a-swarm with cherubs, all heads and wings, and floating robed saints and endless haloed heads of the beatified. The dim spaces below the cosmos are solidly garrisoned by bishop with crozier and monk with breviary, and the predella is full of suggestions of beauty and sanctity. Thus the whole world lies serenely in the palms of God, and saints and angels girdle it with circles of holiness.

This is, indeed, the true way to make a map—for the actual shape of the world is only one of the factors of our habitation, just as the actual features of a beloved face do not constitute its total reality for us. ’Tis not eyes or nose one sees so much as those mental circles due to loving habit in which the face swims for us—the dear haloing circles of tender experience. Rivers and mountains have, indeed, an influence on life, just as the real eyes and nose, but the world we live in is always more mental than geographical, and the same rivers and mountains serve the life of successive races. The Red Man’s America is not different from the White Man’s on the atlas—save by the black dots which mark the ephemeral tumuli called cities—yet the America of the Trust and the America of the Tomahawk are two different continents. The same thin curve marks the Thames up which the pirate Vikings sailed and the Thames of Sunday picnics. More veraciously did the Arab geographers conceive of a country by its autochthones and not by its configuration. For our country lives in us much more than we live in our country.

And so, to-day, too, a true map would circumscribe our globe—not with the equally non-existent circles of the spatial latitude and longitude, but with those of the spiritual latitude and longitude in which we float—only, I fear, our modern _Mappamondo_ would be girdled with dark rings marked “Survival of the Fittest,” “Necessity for Navies,” “The Need of Expansion,” “The Divinity of the Dollar”; soldiers and syndicates would float around in lieu of cherubs, nor would any divine hands appear upbearing us amid the infinite spaces.

That old Pisan map leads me to suspect that Swift saw only half a fact when he complained that

“Geographers in Afric maps With savage pictures fill their gaps.”

True, many an old map might seem to attest the truth of the accusation. There is a map of the Dark Continent in the Museum of Venice, dated 1651, with a camel, a unicorn, a dromedary, and a lion’s tail—all put in by hand. But in another map of “Apphrica” in the Arsenal of Venice there are not only lions and tigers, but tents and veiled figures, and the turrets and spires of strange buildings, and a gay sprinkling of flags. Surely the old cartographer was less concerned to fill his gaps than to express the poetry of geography. Maps were, in truth, of mediocre use in ancient times when the old Roman roads took one from town to town. What profited an aeronaut’s panorama? Maps were only indispensable on the roadless seas. The first maps in the modern sense were thus pragmatic, not scientific, for it was from the mariner’s map, or _Portolano_, that rigid cartography arose. But even these coast charts refused to be prosaic. There is one in the Venice Museum—a view of Italy lying sideways, as if its famous foot were asleep. Never have I seen a more joyous chart. It is all glorious with the gold and vermilion of compasses and crests and flying banners, while mountains stand out in red and gold. It must have belonged to a jolly mariner. In a complete _Portolano_ of Europe each country flies its national flag, amid a whirl of crests and compasses. And the “Portolano del 1561 di Giacomo Maggiolo,” which may be seen in the Palazzo Bianco of Genoa, is illuminated in gold and blue and vermilion and green, sprinkled with compasses, sown with towered cities crowned by golden flags, and a-flutter with flying angels and banners and the bellying sails of carracks, with kings seated on their thrones in the middle of the sea, under glorious canopies crowned with angels, while over the whole presides the Madonna in her golden chair. Most taking of the monarchs is the King of Tartary, wearing a large moustache and surrounded by golden scimitars.

There were no gaps to fill up in these _Portolani_. No, the cynical Swift has missed the inwardness of these old maps, in which Art was called in to give the touch of life and reality and to eke out, not the barrenness of knowledge in particular, but of science in general. There is in the Uffizi an old map of Italy which fills the Mediterranean with boats and compasses, draws the mountains, sketches the towered cities, and illumines the names with gold-leaf. There is an old map of Venice which perches Father Neptune dominatingly in the middle, and symbolises the winds by the curly locks of children blowing every way, and fills the canals with sailing-boats and galleys and gondolas. This is something like a map of Venice. On another, which is more of a plan of the city with its buildings named, Venice is alive with heraldic figures, and over the roofs and domes fly winged lions and Neptune and Venus and angels and warriors, while a stout-lunged angel blows two trumpets at once. And the spaces of the sea are full of brave beflagged vessels with swelling sails, and galleys with many oars. Surely all this is less false than the dead reticulation which expresses Venice in your modern map. The map of Genoa, too, shows the arms of the city floating over a sea crowded with red galleys and black merchant ships and white sailing-boats.

In these old maps the dull spaces of the world are lit up by fiery stars, trumpeting angels, and allegorical figures, while another symbolic group, upholding a titulary tablet, serves, as it were, to introduce the territory to the spectator. A wreathed lady and a male student thus combine to present Arabia. Greece is introduced and presided over by angels. “Terra nova detecta et Floridae promontorium” are presented by a man holding a tablet, which records how Henry VII of England sent out John Cabot and his son Sebastian, while the dry details are further vivified by a superdominant figure of a gallant signor in a feathered cap, hand on globe and learnèd tome at feet. Asia, as a nymph with a camel, presides over a map of her continent, while a prodigious Latin title—“Quae Asiae Regna et Provinciae Hac Tabula Continentur a Propontide usque ad Indos,” &c. &c.—records how its three makers were sent to Russia in the fifteenth-century and how they ripped up (_dissuerunt_) much in the published itineraries. One of the trio, Ambrosius Contaremus, remained long in Russia to study the less-known portions; another, Josaphat Barbarus, devoted himself for sixteen years to the provinces round the Euxine and the Mæotian marsh. “Perlustrata commentariolo exponunt.”

That old map of Frau Mauro which I have already mentioned belongs to this same century, being dated 1459; a circular map this, in a gilded frame, with little ships floating around and America away from home, perhaps enjoying itself in Paris. Here our familiar world shows upside down, which is, of course, as scientific as being downside up. It is notable how Anglia and Caledonia (or Anglia Barbara, as she is styled in Church Latin) are disguised by this simple shifting of the point of view, and how much like herself Hibernia looks, even topsy-turvy. Another pre-American map in the University of Ferrara pictures the winds personified, blowing from every quarter.

The Stones of Venice also assume the forms of maps, as in those stone reliefs on the rococo façade of S. Maria Zobenigo opposite the Traghetto of the Lily. These are town-maps—Candia, its name upborne by a flying boy angel; Roma with its twin brethren at the wolf’s breast; Corfu, characterised by its castle and its beflagged galleys. The symbolic shorthand, which I have already noted in pictures, spread also to map-decoration as in a map at the Arsenal, wherein Ægyptus is figured by an elephant, Libia by giraffes, Judea by the crescent and minarets, Germany by a winged sage, and “Holy Russia” by churches.

If these old maps erred in the courses of rivers and the lines of mountains and in ratios of space, they are not so misleading as your modern atlas with its all too accurate earth-measurements. For even your most primitive map, your mediæval figment, with Paradise on the East, a gigantic Jerusalem in the centre, great spaces for Gryphons and Cynocephali, Sciapodes and Anthropophagi, and St. Brendan’s Isles of the Blest marked clearly west of the Canaries, gave in its way a less distortive impression than that which we obtain from the most scientific chart on Mercator’s projection. Your modern cartographer would persuade you that Canada is fifty times as large as Italy, and Canada, contemplating herself on a school globe, already pouts her breast with the illusion. In a true map, as distinguished from a geographical, dead Space would shrink to its spiritual nullity, and for its contribution to the human spirit, for its amplitude of history and poesy, Sicily—Italy’s mere foot-note—would loom larger than all the provinces of the Canadian Confederation.

And this misleading potency of the map scientific engenders political as well as spiritual dangers. Tariff Reform in Britain rests on the notion of exchanging products preferentially with these great British colonies which bulk on the map like continents, but which, as yet in their infancy, only represent in all some poor ten million souls against the homeland’s forty millions. Australia, beholding her unified contours from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Bass Strait, persists in the heroic delusion that, despite the torridity and drought of her Northern Territory, she is a single country, and that country a white man’s—nay, a Briton’s exclusively. For it is from the surplus population of the little island in the Northern Sea that all these continents into which Britain has blundered are to be filled up: a notion which lives in the same brains that fever with alarm over the exodus from her shores. And all save the spherical maps foster an infinity of fallacies of dimension: drawn to fill the like-sized page in the atlas, South America seems a twin of India; Ireland and Madagascar (which contains seven Erins) look much of a muchness; and Brazil, which is almost another Europe, bulges in the imagination less than the Balkan Peninsula. What wonder if statesmen have misguided the destinies of nations and misdirected wars by false impressions derived from atlases, with their deceptive distances and their obscurations of the real character of territories, rivers, or harbours. Seoul, the capital of Corea, Lord Curzon tells us, seems on the river, yet it is three or four miles away, and approachable only by a canal at times shallow. “Get large maps,” advised the late Lord Salisbury; but I would say, beware of maps altogether. For your school map would foist upon you the delusion that Morocco is not the East at all, but actually ten degrees more westerly than London! Whereas every schoolboy knows that it is in the middle of the “Arabian Nights.” With the Orient thus thrown south-west of Europe, we are as befogged by the atlas of to-day as by the old maps which put the Orient on the top. In truth, the Orient, like heaven, is not a place, but a state of mind.

To the deuce with your parallels of longitude! Fez in the West, forsooth!

AN EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL: WITH A DEPRECIATION OF DANTE

In that volume on the grotesque a chapter—nay, a section—would deal with the attempts of Art to give form and colour to that after-world “from whence no traveller returns.” The grotesquerie belongs more to the thought than to the picture, for in eschatological æsthetics the horrible can be reconciled to the decorative, as it is in Giotto’s _Last Judgment_ at Padua, which I suppose is the earliest treatment of the theme that counts, and which, as Giotto and Dante were in Padua together, was probably painted under the personal influence of that great authority and explorer. There is no justification in Dante’s own work, however, for the Father’s supersession by the Son, who—while _Il Padre Eterno_ is relegated to the choir-arch—occupies, as so often, the judicial bench, and looms dominant in a large polychromatic oval like an incomplete spectrum, with saints at either hand on golden chairs, and golden companies of hovering angels, the Cross beneath his feet making a decorative division of Heaven from Hell, and its arms providing clinging-points for floating angels. Among the beatific company on the celestial side of the Cross are monks presenting their monastery to lady saints, and fussy nude corpses of all ages and both sexes bobbing up out of their coffins, some looking round in surprise, some instinctively begging for grace, and one looking back into his coffin, as into a cab for something forgotten. The Hell is a chaos of tortures, overdusked by the Personal Hell, the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre (with whom I came to grow very familiar) who gulps down sinners like oysters. You see their legs protruding, and others ready for his maw clutched in his greedy hands. Still other sinners stand on their heads or hang by their hair or quiver under the tortures of gorilla-like devils and strange serpentine beasts, or whirl like Paolo and Francesca. And over all the agony, with beautiful serene face, floats the angel, clinging to the Cross, and the saints sit placid on their golden chairs, perhaps, as in that ecstatic prevision of Tertullian, finding their bliss enhanced by these wails of woe, as one’s enjoyment of one’s warm hearth is spiced by the howling of the winds about.