by Simon Winder
The picture is so striking because it is so clearly to be used for private devotion. Everywhere in the region’s museums there are objects such as this which are, of course, Catholic but require no priest to get in the way. Homes would have been littered with small shrines, and just a crucifix and somewhere to kneel would have been available to everybody. The clue in this particular picture is the rose bower, a private symbolic garden a long way from the formal, public ceremonial of mass. The most zany extremity of this intimate form of worship was the brief, early sixteenth-century enthusiasm for Flemish ‘prayer nuts’ – wooden spheres the size of walnuts which opened up to reveal minutely carved crucifixions teeming with expressive figures the size of rice grains. Both virtuoso and disturbing, the perhaps voluntarily anonymous artists who created these as the ultimate in portable altars were – again – aiming at the individual not the community. Indeed, even the individual could barely see them and it is only with twenty-first-century digital technology that they really come into their own.
Without heaping up endless examples, my simple point is that much of the world of prayer was always private and possibly eccentric, certainly personal. Van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin seems originally to have been just for Rolin himself to pray before – so our looking at it in the Louvre is almost a form of spying. This gap between public ceremony and private prayer has always been potentially problematic. It is an issue hid in plain sight in the context of monasteries. Each monastery was a battleground in which the individual monk was to confront evil and overcome it both for his own salvation and on behalf of all mankind. This struggle was expressed through community actions (an unending round of prayers), but as vigorously through personal devotions. This is just in brackets, but there remains in London today a very small convent where the nuns’ task is to pray for the safety of Londoners who are out at night. In a very ancient framework therefore, while the ostensible action around Piccadilly Circus is focused on carousing and throwing up, there is a separate invisible spiritual fight still being waged today in the air above.
The rose bower in Lochner’s painting is important and the imagery of the garden as a private spiritual space pops up everywhere, explicitly in the cloisters and herbaria of monasteries, but in innumerable similar paintings linking the veneration of Mary to a bower or walled garden planted with symbolic flowers. This in turn was related to the murky origins of the Rosary itself, its use in prayer perhaps beginning in Douai or Zwolle in the late fifteenth century. Nothing could be more Catholic – but this whole world of private spiritual wrestling or invocation was not something that could necessarily be controlled by priests. For centuries the Church seemed able to manage this problem, but in practice it was always there. How the individual monk or priest interpreted his private and direct prayers could not be monitored. One of the most striking and lasting communities of north-west Europe, the institution of beguinage, has left beautiful scatterings of buildings across Belgium and the Netherlands. These were places where men or women could withdraw from the world and without taking holy orders devote the rest of their lives to prayer. The surviving buildings in Breda, for example, or Bruges, enshrine the idea of perfect communities – often, indeed, focused around ideal gardens, providing food, healthy work and flowers linked to specific saints in the Lochner manner. The official Catholic Church tried to ensure doctrinal conformity, indeed that conformity was seen as central to accessing the afterlife. But it was always incomplete, not just in the obvious, vast arena of much of human life as a sort of festival parade of the Seven Deadly Sins, but because private thoughts and ideas simply could not be watched. It was in several Netherland towns that a profound challenge to Catholicism would emerge, long before Luther.
A word of advice from Mehmet the Conqueror
Much of the glamour and style of the Burgundians has been erased by bad luck, vengeance and changing fashion. For example, we know that Philip the Good patronized fifteen different goldsmiths just in Bruges and yet not one example of their work survives. By contrast, many of Philip’s manuscripts do survive, presumably because paper can’t be melted down for cash. We also know that in 1425 Philip employed one hundred and eighty artists, many of them embroiderers, to create suitably dramatic decorations for his horses and glamorous pavilions in preparation for a planned and then cancelled single combat with Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester – but nothing of this immense and, as it proved, pointless work now exists. None of the automata the dukes delighted in survive and their functioning cannot even be guessed at. More deliberately fleeting were the gigantic snowmen built in the two squares of Arras during the brutal winter of 1434–5 which featured the Seven Sleepers, a Danse Macabre, Joan of Arc and others. Most of the Dukes’ northern palaces have been destroyed, except for a fragment at Lille which is a tourist office. The palace at Ghent is still there but so ferociously renovated it looks like a toybox castle – but the empty shell of Philip’s audience hall is still inside, now a notably charismatic gift shop. A very elaborate and expensive votive offering from Charles the Bold to St Lambert’s Cathedral in Liège still exists, but this is a rare accident as in most of the rest of the Netherlands these things were destroyed by iconoclasts in the sixteenth century. This shows a gold figure of Charles holding a glass vial containing a finger of St Lambert and supported by the gold figure of St George, doffing his hat. With a time-machine one might want to go back to the fifteenth century with Charles’s reliquary and see if one could trade it in for something else a bit better as it has a Jeff Koons quality which makes it hard to warm to.
The Dukes loved their palace at Hesdin in Artois. It had wonderful machines to entertain visitors: they could create hidden voices, spray water, sprinkle snow. There was a trapdoor through which visitors would drop onto great piles of feathers; conduits were placed to squirt ‘women from below’. There were the mysterious but no doubt beguiling automata. There was a magical room celebrating the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece (to commemorate the chivalric order initiated by Philip the Good), which William Caxton saw while he was working as a printer in Bruges and which he thought ‘craftily and curiously depeynted’. The entire palace and its fortifications were razed by the Emperor Charles V and no trace remains. The Burgundian court was once famous for a special dance called the ‘moresca’, but we have no idea how it was danced, and in any event the music has not survived.
What have survived in quantity are tapestries. These reach a peak of beauty and complexity in this period, becoming – it could be argued – more static and banal thereafter. Tapestries became the quintessential Flemish and Brabantine art. Now often terribly faded, they are massively heavy and therefore rarely worth looting – particularly as the market for individuals wanting to publicly compare themselves to Hercules or Alexander was always a small and clearly defined one. Some beautiful and bizarre pieces fill the Tournai tapestry museum, associated with Philip the Good’s tapestry merchant, Pasquier Grenier. In the strange way that they tell an entire story in a single tapestry with no regard for sequence or scale they have an atmosphere lost until twentieth-century modernism. The Famine and Fall of Jerusalem shows men bigger than horses, walls which could be easily stepped over; a town is just a tower, an army a handful of men, one starving woman eating a child stands in for many more. This tapestry was obviously meant to remind visitors or supplicants of the fate of disobedient towns. It is particularly appropriate that it should be in Tournai, as the semi-independent enclave politely but nervously shelled out ten thousand francs a year to Charles the Bold to be left alone. There is also a superb Battle of Roncevalles, with Roland (his name thoughtfully sewn onto his armour, like on a school PE kit) hideously wounded, his oliphant strapped on his back and a dastardly Muslim in a gold helmet studded with jewels grinning as he stabs a Frank in the neck. Here was Philip associating himself with expiatory chivalry (despite backing out of his single combat with Duke Humphrey), and with the power and glamour of Charlemagne.
It is hard not to wonder wheth
er the Dukes (and indeed other rulers of the period) and their guests got a bit bored with being compared to the same people over and over – there is always a tapestry of Godefroy of Bouillon or Charlemagne. But perhaps the static nature of the iconography was the point: that greatness and legitimacy created a permanent present, where both dynastic heroes and ancient classical examples remained vivid. In 1453 the catastrophic news arrived of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. An elaborate event called the Feast of the Pheasant was held by Philip the Good in Lille, featuring heaps of food and drink, musicians in a giant pie, an elephant, a special lament by Dufay and allegorical figures representing a ravished Constantinople. The Burgundian hierarchy swore to go on crusade but little serious planning was done and Constantinople was quietly forgotten about. With any luck surrounded by his tapestries of classical heroes, Philip the Good received a letter from Mehmet the Conqueror saying to let him know that, by the way, if he was thinking about going on crusade Mehmet’d do to him what his grandfather Bajazet had done to Philip’s dad. He signed himself ‘the true heir of King Alexander and Hector of Troy, sultan of Babylon, King of Troy’.
Several inventions make the dukes unfairly much more vivid than their predecessors. At last, for example, there are good-quality oil-painting portraits and we know what the Dukes and many of their entourage looked like. The same pictures were painted repeatedly and are dotted around the Netherlands, sometimes (as at the Hospice of the Countess in Lille) getting all four dukes in a row, like football cards. Their loyal, long-time Chancellor Nicolas Rolin is one of the best-known faces of the fifteenth century because he was captured both by Jan van Eyck and by Rogier van der Weyden, in two of the greatest pictures ever painted, perhaps both paid for by the enormous bribes we now know he was secretly receiving from the King of France. There are also a mass of accurate drawings from the period. A particularly striking example is Van Eyck’s St Barbara where in the background a wonderfully elaborate sketch is made of what seems to be Cologne Cathedral under construction, teeming with workmen and featuring the famous giant crane on the belfry which, when work seized up in 1475, would remain one of the Rhineland’s most distinctive landmarks for four hundred years.
But most vivid of all is a new form of writing – most notably the astonishing memoirs of Philippe de Commynes. The only comparison that can be made really is between black-and-white film and the arrival of Technicolor. Suddenly, figures who were stiff, hieratic, remote, their motives often mysterious, reported upon only by monastic chroniclers of little percipience, are replaced by living, complex, dithering people. There is not enough room here to do anything other than urge everyone to read Commynes. He served both Louis XI and Charles the Bold for many years, knew them extremely well and wrote candidly about events which were to him contemporary gossip but to us world-historical. He is fascinating on England and the Wars of the Roses and the constant shuttlings back and forth at Calais, with ships full of terrified losers and vengeful victors, depending. Indeed, it becomes clear that the Wars could never have happened without oscillating and patchy Burgundian friendliness nearby. Like Technicolor, Commynes’ impact is unfair. His style of writing is perhaps as important as a portal between the ‘medieval’ and the ‘early modern’ as any other technical or intellectual change. We can in the end only guess at much of Philip the Bold and his predecessors’ personalities, but now here is Commynes giving a brilliantly rounded, complex portrait of Charles the Bold. There is an extraordinary, novelistic moment after the Battle of Montlhéry, where Charles’s forces have just defeated Louis, and Commynes describes seeing the thirty-one-year-old Charles on his horse, ‘very joyfully on the field, thinking the glory his’ – and then Commynes attributes this moment to all Charles’s life’s disasters: someone who had not thought much about war until Montlhéry now did nothing but fight: ‘By it his life was ended and his house destroyed’. The description of that battle itself is something new, catching in all its awfulness the sheer chaos of such occasions and the degree to which nobody had any idea who really was winning or why, as isolated groups panicked here and squads of horsemen galloped away there. Sensibly, Commynes sees all military action as in the hands of God. For a battle to happen both sides must believe they can win, or one would simply surrender beforehand in the hope of mercy. Therefore, the winner is not more skilled but simply divinely favoured: ‘This mystery is so great that realms and great lordships sometimes come to an end and desolation whilst others grow or come into existence.’
Poor local decision-making
For any substantial Flemish community in the later Middle Ages it proved over and over again tricky to work out when your aggressive behaviour towards your neighbouring communities might be viewed as appealingly truculent by your overlord or just a bit too sassy. For the leading merchants of a specific town – Dinant is a good example – years might go by without serious interference by their ruler, who could be a minor, or fighting many miles away or simply incompetent or decrepit.
Dinant remains today a geographically very strange place. It is crowded into the tiny area between a huge limestone cliff and the River Meuse. On top of the cliff is a fortress which has for centuries allowed things to be fired at or thrown down at anyone threatening the town. Dinant, in the domains owned by the Bishops of Liège, had a wholly dysfunctional attitude towards the town of Bouvignes, on the other side of the river and owned by the Counts of Namur. At one point a gigantic tower was built just to intimidate Bouvignes and people from both towns – both engaged in making metal drinking vessels and church decorations – seem to have spent much too much time at guild suppers in a lather of scarlet-faced rage at mutual insults going back many generations.
Early in the fifteenth century the County of Namur (and therefore of Bouvignes) was sold to the Burgundians and Dinant found itself with a potentially very tough and aggressive neighbour on the far side of the river. During the complex manoeuvrings in 1465 between the Burgundians and the revived and crafty French monarchy under Louis XI, Dinant made several fatal mistakes, including launching further violent attacks on Bouvignes. Under the overhasty impression that Duke Philip the Good’s son, Charles, had been defeated at the Battle of Montlhéry, someone in Dinant who should have stuck to making goblets thought it would be a bit of fun to make a hanged dummy of Charles and dangle it in full view of Bouvignes. Dinant also laughingly announced that Charles was a bastard, his father a cuckold and his mother a whore.
In Charles’s successful negotiations to end the war with Louis XI, it was eventually decided by both sides to put Dinant in a special category. Charles marched to Dinant with his state-of-the-art cannon and in a few days forced the town’s surrender. Dinant’s master armourer was thrown from the fortress into the town, hundreds of male inhabitants were tied together and drowned in the Meuse, the women fled to Liège and the town was looted and burned to the ground. Charles, in one of his many self-consciously Ancient Roman gestures, scattered salt on the remains. One of Europe’s wealthiest smaller towns had ceased to exist.
The destruction of Dinant marked the full maturity of Charles the Bold, who spent the remaining twelve years of his life in a frenzy of violence, eventually destroying his patrimony and inadvertently reshaping Western Europe. The rebuilt town of Dinant prefers to dwell on being the birthplace of the inventor of the saxophone rather promote its connection with Charles the Bold. One curious survival is the local industry that makes and sells the couque, a kind of very hard biscuit made from flour and honey, apparently invented during Charles’s siege from the only ingredients left to the inhabitants. Or in another version the flour and honey were found burned together after the conflagration, accidentally making the delicious couques on which the few surviving inhabitants gratefully survived. Or in another, medieval besiegers were repelled by having couques thrown at them. As with so much food history, there is a strong smell of Victorian tourist-industry humbug about these grim comestibles. They seem useless except perhaps as body armour. The local way is to
snap a bit off and then dump it in your coffee for an hour or so, or leave one in your mouth until at last it starts to buckle. Mistakenly deciding to buy one, I stood in the queue behind a local couple who were themselves joking about how couques were carved from wood. The couque-seller’s blank expression implied a martyred resignation to hearing such facetiousness at regular intervals. The biscuits are baked in moulds so you have pictures of Dinant on them, baby deer, sheaves of wheat – I settled on one of a sailor-suited boy hugging a dog which, when I got it home, turned out to look more frightening than funny.
Dinant is a curious, pretty town with a grim history – in both world wars it became a momentary focus for attention in ways familiar to Charles the Bold. The Meuse is a river large enough to look like an impressive obstacle on French military maps, but narrow enough to look entirely doable on German military maps. This gloomy fact kept coming back to me as I walked along the river bank from Dinant. A freakish limestone outcrop almost blocks off Dinant from the south, with cars squeezing through a narrow gap. This landscape seemed oddly familiar. This is probably well known to art historians, but I realized quite by accident that this is the biblical landscape visible in the Dinant-born Joachim Patinir’s extraordinary painting from about 1520 of Sodom and Gomorrah. Angels usher Lot and his daughters through the limestone cleft, en route to their peculiar drunken sex party. Behind them, a tiny dash of white indicates Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt, one of the Bible’s most cruel and strange moments. The rest of the picture is just flames – a horrible orange reflected in the river, rows of silhouetted burning windmills and even the hills in the far background glowing with heat. Almost all Patinir’s surviving paintings have something uncanny about them, but this picture, which reflects the burning Dinant in 1466 and anticipates the burning Dinant in 1914, just seems worse and worse.
