by Simon Winder
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hourglasses and bird-eating spiders »
‘Music to Escort the Dead from this Life’ »
In the time of powdered wigs » Damascened yataghans »
‘Burn the Palatinate!’ » Catholicism goes for broke
Hourglasses and bird-eating spiders
The political events of the seventeenth century are preserved as a state of mind in the tremendous sense of gloom that pervades surviving artwork and writing. As usual it is impossible to disentangle waves of fashion from actual events. German art has always loved corpses, guttering candles, emblems of human folly, dances of death, and there is no reason to pin them to specific disasters. But there is an intensity in the seventeenth century that pervades much of Europe in different ways. In England, for example, for all their differences, the morbid yet highly pleasurable mysticism of writers such as Burton, Vaughan and Hobbes is rich with an atmosphere of poorly lit alchemically tinged lives of a kind which must have been in practice rather grim but is an endless pleasure to read about now in a comfy chair, with a drink and some suitably gloomy viol music playing through a good speaker system.
Tangled up in this sense of melancholy is the immense diversity of ‘cabinets of curiosities’ or ‘wonder cabinets’ which still dot the German castlescape, either as collections that have permanently survived since the Renaissance or as painstaking reconstructions, the work of modern enthusiasts in love with the idea of such things. I could really spend all day and every day with these collections. They were once common across much of Europe, but events or fashion dispersed them or folded them into later museum collections. They were particularly sheltered in Germany by the sheer diversity of ossified old courts, still filled with stuff which would have been binned or burned centuries ago in London or Paris.
Rulers have always had an interest in paying for useless yet exotic objects and the origins of these cabinets are obscure. They were an attempt to systematize and display things which were otherwise scattered around odd corners of palaces. Their point was hardly in any sense scientific – the items were purely there to give visitors a vague shiver and to convey the owner’s prestige and humanism. Of course, for objects to come from far off they had to be bony or dried, not smelly or soft. This gave a strange, dusty impression of an outer world – consisting of ostrich eggs, nautilus shells, narwhal tusks, bits of coral, the skeletons or skins of snakes and so on. Coming into Europe through Venice or Antwerp (later Amsterdam), these things were often a very minor aspect of a merchant’s wares and had passed through many hands to reach the European interior. It would be interesting to know, for example, at what point it became decisively clear to everyone concerned that unicorn horns were in fact narwhal’s tusks – a knowledge long available only to a handful of Norwegians and Shetlanders, who may well not have been asked. Was there an awkward silence when these prized objects (very rarely washed up on far northern Atlantic coasts) ceased to be magical, or just a polite agreement to pay no attention to such ideas? They would have been part of the general, encroaching battle to continue enjoying traditional medicine, magic and astrology in the face of ever more plausible scientific scorn.
A spectacular wonder cabinet remains in the schloss at Gotha, assembled in heavy wooden display boxes and packed with skulls, mummified frogs, weird charms, bottled goodies, crocodile eggs. Particularly in the smaller courts there must have been intense competition to get hold of slightly bigger bits of fire coral or an even odder-shaped fruit and at big social occasions a tension as to whether your proud collection would provoke laughter from some ducal heavier-hitter passing through. The acme of these collections was definitely in Prague where Rudolf II in the late sixteenth century almost disappeared under fantastical bits and pieces.
Of course in their ‘raw’ form these objects could only get you so far. Once everyone had a piece of coral it became merely a prestige baseline rather than something that could be boasted about. So the next step was to try to decorate it, and the Renaissance became a great era for absurd treatment of these blameless tropical objects, once merrily floating in the vivid sunshine of the Red Sea, but now just desiccated blobs vulnerable to improvement by itinerant, very odd craftsmen in some draughty Thuringian Schloss. Ungainly cups, weird banquet centrepieces, spooky objects to bring out after dinner or contemplate in a religious-mystical way, these mutant combinations of gold and coconut husk or silver and conch-shell left the mere sad world of dried-out frog corpses far behind. The artists who turned out these objects of course fought against the very same problem that the older, simpler assemblies had wrestled with – that once everyone had an ostrich egg with a silver model ship balanced on top of it, they would become merely boring. This fuelled a sort of arms race, with Venetian suppliers pouring in sacks of tropical detritus which could then have bits of precious metal and jewels stuck to it to make ever more demented table settings. In parallel came ridiculous acts of miniature prowess, such as carving a three-dimensional crucifixion scene, jammed with mourners and soldiers, on the inside of a walnut (a Flemish speciality) or the crazy misuse of ivory to make spheres inside other spheres, carved from a single piece in a crescendo of meaningless virtuosity.
I am going on about these things too long – I pretend to despise them, but really I could only be happy with a nautilus-shell drinking cup. As with so many of these objects, the tragedy lies in their museum status. How can an East Prussian backgammon set made from ebonized wood decorated with mythological scenes and with each counter made from amber carved with the faces of Greek heroes sit unplayed with in a museum cabinet? I can only hope corrupt officials or curators every now and then take these things out and actually use them, drink from them or just chuck them around for fun – with the occasional privilege of hearing the spectral crunch of a nautilid shattering on the parquet – for it seems a shame they should just pine away forever behind glass. The decorative arms race finally caved in under the sheer absurdity of Augustus the Strong (1670–1733), the Elector of Saxony who, with money pouring in from his hideous porcelain factory and from defrauding the Poles (whose king through chicanery he had become), decided to go for broke. When many of his contemporaries were sharpening up and reforming their armies, he spent much of his revenue on mistresses, lovely palaces and daft trinkets. He was aided in this last aim by the services of the great Badenese goldsmith Johann Melchior Dinglinger, who blew astounding sums making such monstrosities as a giant cup made from a block of polished chalcedony, dripping with coloured enamels and metals and balanced on stag horns, or creating repulsive little statues of dwarves by decorating mutant pearls, or a mad but magnificent object called The Birthday of the Grand Mogul Aurangzeb in which dozens of tiny figures made from precious stones and metals fill the tiny court of the Mogul, itself made from all kinds of spectacular and rare stuff. This delirious thing (not paid for by Augustus for many years as the money sort of ran out when a Swedish invasion swept through a virtually undefended Saxony) simply ended the tradition. Looking at it today in the head-spinning Green Vault in Dresden, Dinglinger’s fantasy seems a long way from the relative, bluff innocence of a yellowy whale tooth in a little display box – but it was the same tradition endlessly elaborated.
Aside from sheer, sickly excess, what also did for wonder cabinets was Europe’s ever-greater knowledge and global reach. Germany was necessarily a bit player in this, albeit an interesting one, and the process can be traced through the seventeenth century as a remote and uncertain knowledge of much of the world was transformed by voyaging and then publishing. A world in which a group of nobles could stand gawping around a titchy bit of fire coral was replaced by immense amounts of often poorly understood information which slowly solidified into the great scientific universe. Humble wonder cabinets became, as it turned out, the rather dodgy building blocks for systematizing the natural world. Symbolically this could be made to start with one of Adam Elsheimer’s works: a little, charming but highly inaccurate picture of a lynx made for the Rome
-based Academy of the Lynxes in 1603. This amazing organization was the first in the world to have a recognizably scientific basis – a wish to voraciously scoop up and assemble all natural objects (not least through hundreds of paintings and drawings, a ‘paper museum’) as a sort of preliminary to understanding the world. The Lynxes were mostly Italian (most famously Galileo) but there were interesting German elements: Mattheus Greuter from Strasburg, who engraved both Galileo’s newly discovered sunspots and the first image ever taken from the newly invented microscope, a compelling and peculiar one of honey bees; Johannes Schreck from Constanz, who ended up in China having become a Jesuit, taken a Chinese name and advised the last Ming emperor on calendar reform; or Johannes Faber from Bamberg who spent years supervising a huge and wonky compendium of pictures of Mexican animals.
The Lynxes fired a sort of starting gun for a sustained and increasingly scientific assault on the world, sifting and mulling over everything from humble mushrooms to the astonishing supplies of dried, pickled or sometimes living things brought back in increasing profusion by Spanish and Dutch navigators from the New World. It is in this sense unsurprising that Greuter among many other things worked on designs for globes, following in the footsteps of his distinguished German predecessors Behaim (the world’s first globe), Etzlaub (creator of the great Rome Pilgrimage map), Waldseemüller (inventor of the word America) and Mercator (creator of a plausible flat map). It is surely odd that the world should have been so deeply shaped by the inhabitants of a country with such limited access to the sea.
This ferment of investigation and the profound sense of chaotic decompression – both from having access to a far wider world and from being in turn assaulted by a mass of new data from that world – had a profound effect across the whole of Europe. In Germany it was all somewhat second-hand except through the Dutch networks of northern Germany and the Habsburg networks which entered Germany in both the north and the south-east. As in the example of the Academy of Lynxes, German scientists were not restricted to their home towns. Mercator, for example, was Flemish but, suspected of heresy, had to flee Spanish rule and did most of his remarkable work safely ensconced in the Duchy of Cleves; Johannes Kepler was kicked out of Graz by the future Emperor Ferdinand II for refusing to convert to Catholicism.
Despite the nightmare of the Thirty Years War, there is a sense as the seventeenth century progressed of a Germany which, through travels but mostly through increasingly reliable books and maps and engravings, had a strong sense of the outer world, a world in itself so exotic and diverse, so filled with religions and practices and ideas that challenged European ones, that this must have been (if you were leisured, safe and smart) a highly stimulating period to be alive, both scientifically and practically. Peppers, pineapples and potatoes began to nudge their way into European diets (the last of these more or less redefining Germany). The seashells which had so prominently featured in older wonder cabinets merely as nameless, geography-free oddities were being systematically engraved and named by the Bohemian Wenceslas Hollar in the 1640s and in every area description and labelling were marching relentlessly onward. In a limited way it is regrettable that Europeans found themselves lying in such uncontrollably large piles of data, objects and stories as the century went by. Of course this inpouring of stuff was the basis of the scientific revolution, but it was also an early indication, like a clammy change in atmosphere before a storm, of Europe’s coming role as despoiler and chewer-up of the whole planet. What started with funny bits of coral passed through dozens of hands and taken over the Alps as a minor aspect of a mule’s load ended with wholesale global misappropriation. But even setting that aside, part of me would love to share that very narrow, ignorant but questing and excited seventeenth-century world, with its dense allegories of skulls, mirrors and soap bubbles, its strange blend of obsession with the classical world and a wish to heave its way out of the merely antiquary: where a small group of savants in a dark, barely candle-lit room could handle a mutant lemon and mull over its properties (perhaps accompanied by some sensationally introvert piece of music). Of course the problem with all such reveries remains that the reverer assumes he would be one of those savants, when in practice the chances are that he would be in quite some other part of town dying of glanders or some other grotesque horse-handling-related illness.
As usual, an individual must stand in for a more complex, slow and ambiguous process, but a fine finale to the intellectual enrichment of things in these times is shown in the career of Maria Sibylla Merian. This great naturalist and painter, having spent many years in Frankfurt and Nuremberg studying caterpillars and butterflies, moved first to a pietist community in the northern Netherlands, then to Amsterdam and then in 1699, in her early fifties, in a boggling change of scene, to the new Dutch colony of Surinam on the northern coast of South America. This conjunction between a remarkable, highly experienced researcher and artist and New World jungle resulted in one of the greatest, most blindingly coloured of all works of natural history: The Transformation of the Insects of Surinam. To be honest, this marriage of exotica and the somewhat decadent, lurid pallet of traditional flower painting of the same period is a bit hard to deal with. But, looking at these pictures, even through streaming eyes, we have clearly entered the modern world, even down to Merian’s enthusiasm for making creatures fight it out for our enjoyment, as in her immortal image of a giant waterbug eating a frog or a spectacled caiman battling with a false coral snake – the latter a riotous decorative pattern of coloured/armoured scale varieties. There is one, very odd picture of a pink-toed tarantula eating a hummingbird which, as far as can be known, seems to be the origin of the term ‘bird-eating spiders’ to describe the more completely ghastly, teddybears-on-mescaline giant South American spiders as, aside from Merian’s painting, there is no evidence of their ever eating birds. It is a short walk from these images to modern television documentaries. Her meticulous paintings of fruit, flowers and – above all – insects seen as living creatures rather than pinned specimens are themselves a sort of new world. In two centuries the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ had been swamped by a revolution in how Europeans were allowed to see and use the world. How could the poor old Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg impress his smart guests as he pottered down the darkened corridors to open the creaking door to his mouldering selection of half-mummified rubbish, when one of his more scientific-minded friends could unveil a full-colour copy of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Roots of the Cassava with Rustic Sphinx Moth, Caterpillar and Chrysalis of Tetrio Sphinx and Garden Tree Boa, a picture so alien, bracing and garish as to induce a sort of excitable nausea in all those who come face to face with it?
‘Music to Escort the Dead from this Life’
Some small courtly towns are simply unimprovable and Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony is one of them. As you get off the train you immediately see, laid out for your pleasure, a lot of rooks mucking about in the trees, fish plopping in a pretty stream and an ivy-covered restaurant called the Crown Prince. Wolfenbüttel by this point can already do no wrong and its sensational Schloss, pink-painted arsenal, library – the Herzog August Bibliothek – and city church are almost extras – certainly less significant than the ideally named DVD rental store, the Herzog August Videothek. The town’s perfection comes from its having been abandoned by the Dukes of Brunswick in 1742 and since then left substantially just to pickle. Leibniz and Lessing both lived here (with Lessing running the great library), as did Michael Praetorius, composer and compiler of the Dances from Terpsichore, a huge sequence of beautiful, graceful and pawky tunes assembled in 1612. Praetorius is probably unique among major composers in having made his fortune not from his music but from having helped thwart an assassination attempt against his boss, Heinrich Julius, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a brilliant, profligate, witch-burning drunk who died – much hated – of alcoholism shortly after Terpsichore came out.
I mention Heinrich Julius because he and his successors show perfectly the dazzling variety of op
tions available to Germany’s rulers. There were simply so many of these rulers and with such wide interests that anything could happen. Even within each major Schloss there is often this same air of fevered diversity, of stylistic chaos, inadequate funds, cheap and shoddy artists, fire damage and quixotic bequests that mirror the infinitely varied soap opera of princely rule. The sheer size of many a Schloss is one area of puzzlement: even if you have filled an entire tower with mad relatives and their keepers, and filled another with an unstable coalition of illegitimate babies, housemaids in trouble and sullen, blackmail-minded stable lads, there were still acres of rooms to give purpose to. Mutinous younger brothers would move out, entire decorative schemes would fall out of fashion, one regime wants harpsichords and wig-powder, the next wants the whole place looking like a barracks. The staff must have been nothing if not flexible. Sometimes the place would fill up with children, sometimes all the men would clear off to fight (this was a particular issue for the Dukes of Brunswick, who had an amazing propensity for being murdered or dying in battle). Entire reigns could be spent in the shadow of the long-lived widow of two dukes ago, her powerful personality and old-fashioned mourning clothes dominating the court for decades. Families would pour in and pour out, the latter sometimes assisted by plague – with one reign spent in a banqueting hall filled with entire cooked deer, elaborate jellies and a court orchestra, the next shrinking down to just a sallow, wigless old man with his cutlets and a single candle.
