by Simon Winder
This is particularly noticeable walking up the steep hill into Cassel, which must have been a constant adventure for a horse and cart until the roads were fully paved. This hill has a specific cheeriness as it is reputedly the one featured in the folk song ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’. It was excellent to feel neither up nor down but halfway up and – therefore – neither up nor down. I had expected the lanes to be blocked with laughing young British families engaged in this improving pastime, singing away, the locals in their cars good-naturedly rolling their eyes waiting for the ruck of brightly coloured Wellington boots and anoraks to clear. But perhaps it was too much of an ask on a cold December morning and this sort of middle-class frenzy only happens in the summer months. There are also pedants who point out that there were several useless Dukes of York who could potentially be derided in the old song, and the one who uselessly scrambled around Flanders during the first of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is only one candidate, and one undermined by being neither grand nor old at the time.
It was invigorating marching up a hill fuelled by a nursery rhyme nonetheless, an experience nobody should pass up. It was almost as good as what happened next, lunch in a cafe where almost every customer had next to their chair or on their table a bag filled with chicory, presumably just because it was on sale that day in the local market – but seemingly implying a bizarre local uniformity in celebrating that heroic member of the dandelion family’s role as the quintessential regional foodstuff.
Cassel’s unusual hill has made it the focus of much unwanted military attention. General Foch commanded the French troops in the region from Cassel in the opening phases of the First World War, learning about the unfolding nature of trench warfare and its horrors, receiving the news of the death of both his son and his son-in-law on the Lorraine front on the same day and, understandably, praying in the local church at six o’clock every morning.
I had not really done my homework – I was aware there was a good museum in Cassel but not of what might be showing there. When I saw a huge banner hanging from the museum entrance saying ODYSSEY OF THE ANIMALS: FLEMISH ANIMAL PAINTERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY my initial thrill turned to anxiety. What if this was the like the immortal scene in Disney’s Pinocchio where the bad boys are tricked onto Pleasure Island, thinking it is the most fun place ever, but where they will in fact be turned into donkeys? Admittedly it seemed an eccentric and over-elaborate use of funds to create a giant banner specifically to trick just me into going through the door and then submitting me to some nameless horror. If someone wanted to abduct me or turn me into a donkey they could have done so just as readily while I glanced mockingly at the bags of chicory. Having regained confidence, I trooped into an exhibition which simply featured everything I like the best. As I see I’ve scrawled in my notebook: ‘Oh no! Fleming animal painting exhibition!!’
The Flemish obsession with the brightly coloured and exotic came from Antwerp’s continuing role as one of the great entrepôts for the Spanish Empire. This enthusiasm was matched by the Dutch in the north, based on their own growing trade with the East Indies and generation-long rule over the Brazilian north-east (1630–54). An easy and enjoyable extra source of income for sea captains trading long-distance in sugar or spices was to add a few parrots. A clamorous need for exotica convulsed the courts of Philip II in his new capital at Madrid and of his nephew, the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. These two men were perhaps the greatest of all collectors, with Philip as enthusiastic about Titian or Bosch as he was about elephants and rhinos. It is now impossible to reconstruct the forms of shipboard heroism that safely got these immense creatures across the oceans and safely unloaded. The Fugger banking family had a set of cages at the Antwerp docks and were on a constant lookout, in what must have been an unbelievably exciting time, for previously unimagined exotica.
It is not surprising then that the genre’s great painters came from the region. Joris Hoefnagel was born in Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens (king of the big animal painting, among many other things) moved there in his early teens, Roelant Savery was born in Kortrijk, grew up in Haarlem and settled in Utrecht after a glory period working for Rudolf in Prague. It is Savery who is the star of this exhibition, with a painting, I really believe, that is one of the great justifications for human existence. Called Noah Thanking God for Saving Creation (c. 1625), it is a vision of a staggeringly lush, harmonious world filled with friendly animals, and in the far distance, just visible, are the shattered remains of the grounded Ark. All kinds of unlikely creatures seem happy enough next to each other – lions and cassowaries, pelicans and leopards. Chickens peck obliviously alongside a mixed bag of dogs and foxes who do look as though they may be experiencing some inner turmoil on ethical issues. Noah kneels in thanksgiving next to a charismatic elephant, and the picture has the same sense of dreadful tension comparable to Flemish images of the Garden of Eden (filled with animals and illustrating the final happy and harmonious moments, as Eve hands Adam the apple) where everything seconds later will be in ruins. This too is a peaceful scene that cannot be preserved – as Noah gets up off his knees the farmyard friends will have to scatter, take to the hills and get reproducing before it is too late.
Most fabulously, in the bottom right of the picture, there is a dodo having a drink. The dodo is this period’s quintessential bird. Discovered only a generation before by a Dutch expedition to Mauritius (named after Prince Maurice), there was a flurry of excitement about this bizarre-looking creature. Almost all we know about them comes from a handful of paintings – most in fact by Roelant Savery. Joris Hoefnagel painted one in Prague in 1602, but it is a deeply distressing image as the dodo’s blackened head shows it must have already died – it is probably this bird whose partial skull and leg are in the Prague National Museum. Savery himself featured them frequently in his pictures, but also created the painting that everyone knows, now in the Natural History Museum in London, of a jaunty, fat creature, seemingly posing for a seaside saucy photo. This picture, alas, is thoroughly misleading. The first serious attempt in the nineteenth century to rebuild a dodo skeleton found in a Mauritian swamp used Savery’s bird as a model and it was only many years later that it became clear the bird was not remotely fat, but quite limber. Savery’s painting was copied by Tenniel for his Alice in Wonderland dodo and this image of a simple, loopy creature, an innocent almost pre-basted and Bacofoiled treat for sailors, was born. A lucky generation of Dutch sailors did undoubtedly eat a lot of dodos, but it now seems that its extinction came from the usual depressing business of rats and mice jumping off ships and eating all the eggs. There are a handful of other glimpses of dodos – a murky one can be seen rooting about at the back of one of the best-named paintings ever, Perseus and Andromeda with a Dodo and Seashells, by Gillis d’Hondecoeter (born in Antwerp), but otherwise the trail goes cold. Somehow Savery intersects by accident with the arrival of perhaps two or three dodos in north-west Europe and happens to paint them before they drift into oblivion.
I am in a quandary with these paintings as I would like to write an entire book about them, but have to move on. Aside from Rudolf, the other great promoters of this genre were the Archduke and Archduchess Albert and Isabella in Brussels, who created a beautiful series of gardens next to the Coudenberg Palace which were immortalized by Jan Breughel the Elder, with Albert and Isabella almost blasphemously prelapsarian in the midst of a crowd of docile birds and deer. It was perhaps unsurprising, in the context of warfare that had persisted for generations, that gardens should become associated, whether in the Spanish Netherlands or the independent north, with specific ideas of peace, grace and privacy. Clusius’s Hortus Botanicus in Leiden was part of the same impetus that created Savery’s dodo pictures. Dutch ships coming back from the East Indies, the Near East, Brazil, the West Indies, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope would load up with exotica and then these could be planted and studied in the chilly air of Leiden University. Clusius’s whole career, uneasily weaving between Catholic and Pr
otestant environments, shows that the barriers were far from absolute between the two. But Clusius will for ever be associated with making one of the most important of all interventions in Dutch society. While in Vienna with Maximilian he had experimented with Turkish plants in the gardens there and had since studied them intensively. In 1593, the year he arrived at Leiden he planted the first of these, flowering the following year. The tulip had arrived.
Croissants of crisis
The Anglo-American polemicist Alexander Coburn once wrote an essay deriding the imaginary patterns Pentagon strategists in the Cold War would come up with to link countries in practice separated by mountains, religion, language and history into some unified ‘crescent of crisis’. A variant on the domino theory, this allowed alarming lines on maps to link bits of Latin America or South-east Asia in a way that sounded dynamic and plausible, with the leftist bacteria relentlessly creeping round the crescent. But why did it always have to be a crescent? Cockburn suggested it was in practice no more plausible than if they called it a ‘croissant of crisis’. Indeed, he suggested, you could muck about with marker pens on maps and come up with pretty much any shape and claim it as an alarming one – a ‘bagel of Bolshevism’, or a hair-raising ‘crumpet of catastrophe’ in which ‘holes of subversion’ sat in the solid ‘crumpet base’ of Moscow.
In the early seventeenth century the key strategic baked goods were scattered around the area of the north-west where the Rhine split in two – the chunkier (the Waal) heading west to Nijmegen and the lesser (the Nether Rhine) north to Arnhem. All over Europe hungry eyes with rival maps stared at the area, waiting and waiting for Johann Wilhelm, its mad, childless duke, to die, which he finally did in 1609. He owned the Duchies of Kleve, Jülich and Berg, the County of Ravensberg and the tiny enclave within the Dutch Republic of Ravenstein, to which we will not refer again. Kleve was an important place – it controlled the split in the Rhine and was made up in part of former floodplain which had been converted to particularly lush, dense agricultural land. Hiking west of Kleve today it is still an astonishing sight – deliriously packed and fecund, with every ledge generating peas and carrots without end. It briefly bobs into English history as the home of the unhappy Anne of Cleves (aunt of the last duke), and the duchy used to be known in English, enjoyably, as Cleveland.
Strategically it was important – but only in the way that everywhere is strategically important if you feel that way. The problem was the timing of the duke’s death, as Europe’s political and religious situation rotted around him. The Dutch needed a friendly Kleve on their eastern borders; the Spanish equally saw the pleasure to be had in placing an ally there to damage their enemy’s strategic position. As a half-dozen or so dynastically concerned aristocrats paid rare visits to their bandy-legged court librarians to give instructions to dust off various old forged pedigrees, the key figure became the wife of the Elector of distant Brandenburg. In a development of tremendous significance for the future of European history, the clever and forceful Anna of Prussia stood at the intersection of two great dynastic claims. Her father was the mad Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia, who had outlived both his sons, making Anna’s husband his heir. Anna’s mother was the sister of the earlier-mentioned other mad duke, the childless ruler of Kleve-Jülich, and through her Anna became the route to her husband’s claim there as well.
For the first and last time everybody was interested in Kleve. The Elector of Brandenburg was absurdly far away in his tiny and impoverished capital of Berlin. His ancestors had bought the land and title of Elector two centuries before from the flailing, low-rent Emperor Sigismund, which made them automatically important, but without the resources for much glamour or many troops. The Kleve-Jülich inheritance was a rich one and it would give the Elector a western base, but he needed allies. Normally the issue would have been resolved through the Emperor – but these were the last days of the chaotic necromancer and melancholic Rudolf II, alone with his dodo sketches. At the highest levels Rudolf’s court was wrecked by in-fighting and a fervid Catholic resurgence which was very bad news for Protestant states such as Brandenburg.
This incapacity at the centre encouraged local military solutions. In a fateful move, a Protestant Union had been set up – a military alliance between Berlin, the Palatinate and the Dutch Republic to impose Anna and the Elector on the disputed territories against the five or six other claimants. The Emperor then shook himself awake and responded by allying with Bavaria in a Catholic League. Spanish troops marched towards Jülich and a general war seemed to be threatened. King Henry IV of France (genial, informal, not mad: perhaps the only French monarch it would have been fun to have had dinner with) also decided that the dispute provided an opportunity to take on the Spanish and prepared to march towards the duchies. The entire operation ground to a halt when a Catholic fanatic, Ravaillac, assassinated Henry, creating a trauma that knocked France out of the international arena for many years (Ravaillac was pulled in four bits by horses and his very surname abolished).
In the end the crisis fizzled out, not least because of France’s implosion. At the Treaty of Xanten in 1614, the Brandenburgers split the territories with another claimant, the Count Palatine of Neuburg. This was meant to be temporary, but later, overwhelming events froze the arrangement. And so distant Berlin came to rule Kleve and became a Western European power, of a constrained kind. Kleve was never a great asset. It was a classic mini-state of the type that made its money off extortion from ships unfortunate enough to want to trade up the river it controlled. Each riparian entity charged a toll and straightforward goods which were worth a sensible sum up-river in Basle became worth a king’s ransom by the time they got to Rotterdam. Understandably most Rhine trade therefore remained local. Kleve never bought into Brandenburg’s (later Prussia’s) ‘Spartan’ military aesthetic either. A typically batty, parochial gang of local worthies sabotaged Berlin’s rule at every turn and when troops were demanded to be sent east, they deliberately sent ‘limp and soft’ young men who blubbed with homesickness. But it nonetheless established remote Prussia as a country with western interests and these would play out over the coming centuries in ways undreamed of in the early seventeenth century.
This was a good example of a croissant of crisis, and it was very unfortunate that the Rhine was scattered with similarly flaky and tempting items. There were rival claims, rival families, religious differences which could lead individuals to see continued accommodation with a rival brand as blasphemous. You could join up any number of lines and create sinister linkages, through the Spanish Road which took troops up from Italy to the Netherlands, through marriage arrangements, specific patches of wealth, the Calvinist International. The Kleve Crisis was resolved in part through mediation by France and England. But there was, despite the truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic, an increasing sense in the 1610s that Europe was running out of such mediators and that the grown-ups had left.
Whitewash and clear glass
In the interests of full disclosure I have to admit that my own religious views have never really recovered from watching Federico Fellini’s film Roma (1972) at a vulnerable age. I never tire of watching Fellini – even his objectively fairly terrible later films you know will sooner or later include some lovely piece of Catholic travesty. There are many scenes in Roma which occupy key places in my personal mythology, but the place of honour belongs to the ecclesiastical fashion-show sequence: serving boys roller-skate down the catwalk swinging censers, bishops parade in glowing, flashing neon vestments and the relic skeletons of saints hang at jaunty angles from the sides of jeeps in the manner of the Andrews Sisters.
I mention this partly from missionary zeal to spread the word about Fellini’s greatness, but more importantly because I can never hear the words ‘modernization’ or ‘renewal’ in a Catholic context without an immediate flashback to Roma ’s nuns in giant wimples. This issue preoccupied me when spending some time in various southern Dutch towns where the scars left by layers of �
��renewal’ can still be seen. With every brand of Catholic and non-Catholic Christianity proclaiming renewal, in an atmosphere of poisonous, frenzied violence, there would, at last, be ushered in, after much agony, a revolutionary new world of genuine indifference.
In around 1630 the tangled, spotty map of Dutch religious belief at last froze and has been little changed since, but this was a result that would have then appalled everybody. By definition a religion can only be so tolerant before it makes its own message entirely unconvincing. The many decades of fighting before 1630 forced onto all inhabitants of the Low Countries, outside the impregnable fortresses of Amsterdam and the north, an acute series of choices about their beliefs and how far they would go to protect them. A city like Breda is one of many examples: occupied with a general massacre by Spanish troops in 1581, retaken by Dutch troops in 1590, taken after an epic siege by the Spanish again in 1625 and taken again by the Dutch in 1637, its surviving inhabitants were subjected to a nightmare which engulfed several generations. The nature of the fighting meant that religious identity was a killer – ownership of a specific book, of some beads, of a statue, or where and how you buried your dead were issues which could result in execution, imprisonment, forced enrolment in work gangs, confiscation of property. Each successful siege created a miserable outflux of those whose only safety lay in entangling their wagons with those of the defeated army. Dutch towns became used to dealing with traumatized Protestants from the south heading north. The Troy-like epic of the Siege of Ostend (1601–4) resulted in the town and its population having to be rebuilt from scratch, its few surviving Protestant civilians fleeing to Sluis and Flushing. The relentlessly Catholic nature of Belgium is the result of any number of treks northwards by defeated people who had never imagined they would be leaving their homes for ever (or, in some cases, until the next successful counter-siege).
