The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  Some of the most extraordinary works in encaustic that have come down to us from antiquity are images, not by but of women. These funerary portraits, discovered in the nineteenth century at Fayum in Egypt, date from the second century AD, and have a poignant beauty, a vivid living naturalism, that speak to us across two millennia. Were any of them made by women? We do not know, but maybe one day we will. The zipped and helical codes of DNA may yet reveal wonders to us. The past is in the future.

  Some years ago the British Museum, which holds some of the best of the Fayum mummy portraits, mounted an exhibition titled ‘Ancient Faces’. This made a deep impression on me and on many of those who saw it. I was at that time writing The Peppered Moth, which dealt with mitochondrial DNA and the recovery of genetic information, and the faces in the British Museum seemed to have personal messages for me. They looked at me from their dark and lustrous eyes; there was language in their lips, their necks, their noses. Confidently they insisted on resurrection, with the full polychrome glow of the fully human. They waited for the morning. They had never died. I wove them into my novel, basing the appearance of Faro, the high-spirited representative of the younger generation in my saga, on these women: she had their large brown almond eyes, their delicate pink and smiling lips, their apricot flesh tones, their golden hoop earrings, their charming hairstyles of bandeaux of small corkscrew ringlets, their fondness for brooches and necklaces, their untiring grace and vivacity. Physically, Faro has inherited a little from the Fayum, a little from my daughter, and a little from my sisters-in-law. The womanly traits live on.

  One of the Fayum-related women (a painted woman, not an encaustic portrait) has something of the look of Cherie Blair. She has large eyes made larger with spiked mascara, a wide red mouth, fine bare breasts, corkscrew curls, and hoop earrings threaded with gold beads and pearls. She wears a yellow tunic with a pretty pink-and-green geometric collar, and her sleeves are adorned with the protective green wings of Isis and Nepthys. Her hair is garlanded with rosebuds, through which winds a coiled green stem. She holds a sprig of sage-green leaves in her left hand. She gazes at us so confidently, smiling slightly, with such a pleasantly inviting intimation of immortality. She looks just a touch crazy, as, sometimes, does Cherie Blair.

  What she does not look is dead.

  Maybe the Egyptians were right: maybe we live on in the body.

  These portraits not only preserved the features and personalities of the men and women they commemorated; they also preserved and embodied the great Greek painting tradition. ‘Almost all the work in that tradition has been lost to time and the elements, the Mediterranean not sharing the exceptional preservative conditions of the Egyptian desert,’ writes Euphrosyne C. Doxiadis in the catalogue (1997) to the exhibition.

  The paintings of the Fayum, sheltered in this way, are a dazzling testament to the sophistication of the Alexandrian school from which they are derived and show us the heights that had been reached in the rendering of nature. It is not until some fifteen centuries later, in the faces painted by Titian or Rembrandt’s depiction of his own features, that the same artistry that characterises many of the anonymous artists of the Fayum is witnessed again.

  This may be an overstatement, but it is telling.

  The Egyptians preserved their dead so carefully because they knew we would need the body in the next life. They took food and utensils and cosmetics and weapons with them to the next world. The living had a tradition of dining with the dead, and they sat down to banquets with Anubis, the lord of the dead, in little pavilions near the embalmed bodies of their loved ones. Or so the Greeks and Romans told us, and so a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus excavated by Flinders Petrie seems to confirm. Dining with the dead is a challenging concept.

  The paintings are alive and beautiful, but the beliefs are disquieting. Preservation and perpetuation may be considered dubious aims.

  Not long ago, I had a disquieting dream about Auntie Phyl. It began pleasantly enough, for in my dream she seemed alive and well, and was wearing a familiar and becoming silky rayon dress with a bright blue-and-green geometric pattern that signified festivity – a birthday, or a Christmas gathering. But as the dream unfolded, I realized that she was not really alive at all. She was a robot, a simulacrum, an animated waxwork, summoned up by me for my own dark purposes. At the end of my dream (as at the end of this book) she would depart again into the shades. She had not been able to enjoy the events of the dream or to participate in them. She had not tasted her food, or enjoyed her glass of champagne. She had merely been a helpless dummy, an unwilling and unfeeling participant in a story of my devising. A zombie. She was dead, with no right of redress, and she was not willing to collaborate with me. She had not wanted to walk again.

  This dream does not need much interpretation. It is about the way in which writers abuse their subjects. I am trying not to abuse her, but of course I am doing so. As I have abused all the sources of all my work, always. As all writers do, always. The dead may not want to come back to life. It may not be proper to try to resurrect them.

  The dream was also about the conditions of life in a care home for the elderly. That is a larger question.

  The dry sands of Egypt preserved the mummies and the corpses. I have always been interested in the bog men, accidentally preserved in the peat, and have introduced them into several of my novels. I like amber too, which is a great preservative. Amber necklaces are associated with women novelists, and when somebody pointed this out to me I stopped wearing mine.

  The sand, the peat, and the refining fire.

  T. S. Eliot invoked the sprouting corpse in the garden. He deplored the practice of childhood reminiscence.

  I was much taken with Stevie Davies’s detailed descriptions of the process of the reconstruction of the living flesh of a dead face from a seventeenth-century skull in her novel Impassioned Clay. (She credits a book titled Making Faces: Using Forensic and Archaeological Evidence by John Prag and Richard Neave.) We have all watched these reconstructions on television history programmes – dead pharaohs, Ice Age travellers, Aztec victims, being restored to a semblance of life by twentieth-century expertise.

  My father was cremated, as I hope to be. His ashes were scattered beneath one of the trees he planted in his Suffolk garden. I dug them in with a little green tin seaside spade that my mother found in the garage. The tree is felled now, for when the house was sold after my mother’s death the garden was built upon. He used to spend a lot of time in that garden.

  I dreamed of my father last night. We were walking together along a street (I think near Regent’s Park), and he wanted to recite to me a poem about an emerald. ‘It’s gone out of fashion now,’ he said, ‘but it’s a beautiful poem.’ In my dream, I heard the first line of the poem, although I have now forgotten it. But then his recitation faded on me, although the words still came stumbling through, and his voice choked, and I knew, even in my dream, that my sleeping brain did not have the quickness, the ability, to create or record or overhear this poem. So where is this dream poem now? I heard it. I half heard it. It was somewhere. It existed. It flickered through my neurons, leaving some trace in them. But now it has gone.

  XLV

  Goethe may have championed Invention against Imitation, but he was also, on his travels, in search of the authentically antique. He was profoundly moved by the buildings of Palladio, that great imitator of classical architecture. Out of respect for Palladio he bought a copy of the works of Vitruvius. But Galliani’s edition of Vitruvius weighed heavy in his luggage and heavy on his brain. ‘I skim through the pages or, to be more exact, I read it like a breviary, more from devotion than from instruction,’ he noted.

  The use of the word ‘antique’ can be puzzling in its imprecision. Does it just mean ‘old’, or does it have a more specific meaning? (Baudrillard, in his discussions of ‘bygone’ objects, has much to say about the real antique, the fake antique, the replica, and the yearning for authenticity. And we have coined new market meanings f
or the words antique, heritage and vintage – ‘vintage’, I gather, now applies to the objects I played with as a child in the 1940s and 50s. You can find a wonderful compendium of these in Adam Mars-Jones’s 2008 novel, Pilcrow.)

  Master craftsman Giuseppe Antonio Torricelli (1662–1719), writing of work in the Milanese workshops of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, pleasantly confesses that: ‘We use four different sorts of mixed stones and we call them antique because no-one remembers where they were mined. There is a yellow one, called oriental, then red antique, green antique and white and black antique.’ Rome, according to Torricelli, is a great heap of old stones, imported and refashioned.

  There are three types of granite and Rome is full of great columns and pyramids made from them. One is white and black, finely mixed. Another is red and white with a tiny bit of black, and another white, black and reddish with larger flecks like the other red one. Only the white and the black is so much finer. They are all antique and known as Egyptian granite. Porphyry and serpentine are also antique granites, also thought to be from Egypt.

  These quotations from Torricelli confirm that in his lifetime the use of the word ‘antique’ was already highly flexible, as were the artistic aims of the cutters and commissioners of the products.

  I found Torricelli’s description in an appendix on ‘techniques’ in Anna Maria Massinelli’s volume describing the hardstones of the Gilbert Collection. This collection displays an extraordinary variety of precious and expensive objects, but the hardstones and micromosaics are perhaps the most curious of all. They are slightly shocking, some in their beauty, some in their opulence, some because they are so kitsch. The Gilberts were fascinated by richly composite artefacts and densely patterned works of art. Many of the Florentine caskets and table tops are of a ravishing beauty, displaying extraordinary botanical detail; the table top of ‘The flora of the two Sicilies’, commissioned by Tsar Nicholas I, is to my eye one of the most desirable and decorative objects ever made – not that I would want to own it, but I can see how one might long to do so. The waters of the Bay of Naples and Paestum are rendered in exquisitely delicate shades and flecks of iridescent, pearly beauty, and the trees, fruits and flowers rise upwards and inwards with supreme elegance, in green and brown and purple and copper and gold. There must have been joy as well as pride in this fashioning. But other specimens in the collection are of a jigsaw-art crudity, admirable largely in that they have been made at all, and from such expensive, intractable materials. Some of the cabinets look very like children’s wooden jigsaws, although they are made of jasper, black marble, green antique marble and lapis lazuli, and are set in gilt bronze, mahogany and ebony.

  I went to the Museo dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, in pursuit of the origins and history of the hardstone mosaics that so captivated the Gilberts. This small museum, where the craft is still practised, provides a pleasant refuge from the crowds and queues and chaos that attend the Uffizi, the Pitti, the Accademia, the Palazzo Vecchio. When I visited the studiolo of Francesco de Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio, on a ‘special guided tour’, we were shown around by a man pretending to be some sidekick of Vasari, dressed up like an animated waxwork in Florentine costume, who peppered us with fake-antique parlance, irritating questions and coyly unreliable information. (I should have gone with Martin Randall.) The Opificio is not like that at all. It is calm, scientific and instructive, and the objects are captivating. They range from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century coats of arms and floral panels, through ‘stone paintings’ of Biblical and classical scenes, to table tops from the late seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries showing shell-and-coral motifs, fruits, doves and flowers. One circular table board of black Belgian marble displays in its centre an illusionistic silver tray, on which an absent-minded lady returning from a party appears to have dropped a white camellia, a necklace and a ring. The casual permanence of the frozen moment, like that of the ‘swept floors’ of Sosus, is charming.

  The museum also houses large wall cabinets with examples of the many forms of precious and semi-precious stones used by the workshop’s craftsmen: jaspers, chalcedony, fire-marble with fossil shells, mother-of-pearl, lapis lazuli, travertine, cipollino…The very names are poetry. Near Florence, we are told, a river-stone known as ‘pietra paesina’ may be found on the bed of the Arno; it is especially useful in landscapes (such as one showing Dante and Virgil in the Inferno) for its ‘capacity in evocating tortuous ravines and rocky walls sights [visione di anfratte e pareti rocciose]’.

  The translation of the guidebook has its own poetry, and I was delighted to find that it draws a direct parallel with the art of the puzzle.

  The kind of processing which was mainly perfectioned in Florence, and to which the fame of the Granducal manufacturing was entrusted, was the one of mosaics or ‘commessi’, as they were defined in order to indicate they were semi-precious stones mosaic works, which were cutting those stones in different shape sections that, later, were so precisely assembled together that the contact zones between each section practically resulted as invisible. That sort of creations, which could be utilized as wall pictures, table, chess-boards, cabinets, caskets of jewel boxes as well as the various pieces of furniture, were poetically defined as ‘stone paintings’, while nowadays we could call them puzzles, using a quicker but immediately understandable term [noi oggi, con termino più sbrigativo ma immediatamente comprehensibile, le chiameremmo ‘puzzles’].

  ‘Termino più sbrigativo ma immediatamente comprehensibile’ is good. The word ‘puzzle’ does good service here.

  Arthur Gilbert’s eye was drawn to mosaics and micromosaics by a less orthodox route than a visit to the Opificio in Florence. It is an odd story. The first two micromosaics that he purchased were of a particularly dubious aesthetic quality. When he bought them at an auction house in Los Angeles in 1965, he thought they were cracked paintings, and presumably it was as cracked paintings that he first admired them. They were made in Rome c.1875, at a period when nearly a hundred commercial mosaicists were working in the city, selling to connoisseurs and gullible amateurs. Each painting shows a cavalier and a lady, but the costumes, hairstyles and furnishings are incongruous and from incompatible historical periods, and the artistic effect would have been dismissed by Mary Russell Mitford and Arnold Bennett as unacceptable. They are calendar art, jigsaw art, but they have been assembled with enormous labour.

  Nevertheless, there is something fascinating about the spectacle of so much labour devoted to such secondary products, and most of the objects in the Gilbert Collection are aesthetically more satisfactory. Gilbert, a dedicated collector, trained his own eye, and he trained it well. Reproductive effort reaches a dignified apotheosis in Antonio Testa’s Panorama of Rome, a huge view from the Janiculum on which the artist worked for twenty years. It was taken and adapted from a 1765 etching by Giuseppe Vasi, and it is of great delicacy. This was a labour of love and a way of life: La Vie: Mode d’Emploi. The thought of the patient fitting together of so many tesserae over so many years into so useless but so beautiful an imitative object is curiously moving.

  Imitation, appropriation, copyright, authenticity: the doves of Sosus, perhaps themselves a copy, have been copied endlessly, and the mosaic tigress in the Gilbert Collection’s ‘Tigress Lying Below Rocks’ was taken from an engraving of the Stubbs oil painting of 1769, which hangs in Blenheim Palace. (This is also available, as noted, in a charming small jigsaw, which cannot, however, do justice to the extraordinarily tactile rendering of the feathery fur of this mosaic beast’s striped chest; the little hard grains of mosaic uncannily mimic a velvety softness that the hand longs to reach out to stroke.) Mosaicists copied works by Caravaggio, Salvator Rosa, Reni and Raphael, and the workshops of the Vatican produced mosaic copies of sacred masterpieces that took several years to produce. Some artists were attracted by the idea of their work being made more durable in stone painting. Others would perhaps have been appalled by it.

  Arthur Gilbert, l
ike the dukes of Tuscany before him, had an eye for riches and colour, although he had not been brought up in luxurious surroundings. He was born in Dalston in 1913, the son of a Polish Jewish immigrant who became a furrier in Aldersgate. Gilbert’s wife Rosalinde, whom he married in 1934, was a designer with whom he set up a successful wholesale dressmaking business, selling ball gowns and wedding dresses. They prospered, in ball gowns and in property. His life as a collector took off when they moved to Beverly Hills and began to furnish their ‘Italian-Greco-Jewish Villa’ with a theatrical and eclectic assortment of antiques. He made himself into a scholar and the world expert on ‘micro-mosaic’ art, coining the word to describe the objects of his passion, and until recently we could all see them for a small entrance fee in Somerset House. We were even able to dine amongst them, if we had the corporate money to do so. And the less well-off amongst us can continue to buy the jigsaws.

  XLVI

  I too have a liking for opulence, despite my Quaker schooling. I like the look of opulence. I like red and gold. I was taught to suspect any form of opulence as vulgar bad taste, but when I first went to Italy, at the age of seventeen, I realized I had been falsely indoctrinated. Plainness is not the only virtue.