Amazons

by John Man

  The first thing these troopers did was, that they stabled their horses: thereafter each fell to his appointed task: which task was neither more nor less than ruin and destruction. For though some began to slaughter and to boil and to roast so that it looked as if there should be a merry banquet forward, yet others there were who did but storm through the house above and below stairs … Bedsteads, tables, chairs, and benches they burned, though there lay many cords of dry wood in the yard. Pots and pipkins must all go to pieces, either because they would eat none but roast flesh, or because their purpose was to make there but a single meal. Our maid was so handled in the stable that she could not come out; which is a shame to tell of. Our man they laid bound upon the ground, thrust a gag into his mouth, and poured a pailful of filthy water into his body: and by this, which they called a Swedish draught, they forced him to lead a party of them to another place where they captured men and beasts, and brought them back to our farm, in which company were my dad, my mother, and our Ursula.

  And now they began: first to take the flints out of their pistols and in place of them to jam the peasants’ thumbs in and so to torture the poor rogues as if they had been about the burning of witches: for one of them they had taken they thrust into the baking oven and there lit a fire under him, although he had as yet confessed no crime: as for another, they put a cord round his head and so twisted it tight with a piece of wood that the blood gushed from his mouth and nose and ears. In a word each had his own device to torture the peasant … Yet in the midst of all this miserable ruin I helped to turn the spit, and in the afternoon to give the horses drink, in which employ I encountered our maid in the stable, who seemed to me wondrously tumbled, so that I knew her not, but with a weak voice she called to me, ‘O lad, run away, or the troopers will have thee away with them. Look to it well that thou get hence: thou seest in what plight …’ And more she could not say.

  That was in Germany. For Holland, the Thirty Years’ War was part of something much longer lasting – an Eighty Years’ War of independence from Spain (1568–1648). Holland was divided: Protestants, known as Calvinists, in the northern United Provinces, Catholics in the south (roughly modern Belgium). In the southern capital, Antwerp, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, joint rulers from 1599, built up a court that was the centre of a Catholic renaissance. They continued to try to subdue the Dutch rebels through military force, until the signing of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1609, which effectively recognized the independence of the northern provinces.

  Commercially, Antwerp was giving way to Amsterdam, but Albert and Isabella provided an intellectual and artistic haven in which artists thrived. There were damaged churches to be restored, new ones built, altarpieces made, stained-glass windows put in, mansions to be filled with fine paintings. It was a great time to be an artist in Antwerp. Two of them were among the most famous of their day: Jan Brueghel and Peter Paul Rubens. Brueghel – brilliant son of the brilliant Pieter Bruegel the Elder (who omitted the h in his name, though his children kept it) and younger brother of the equally brilliant Pieter Brueghel the Younger – was the better established, being nine years older than Rubens. Both had their own studios, both their own special talents. Brueghel, known as ‘Velvet’ for his delicate touch, was expert in landscapes and multi-figure scenes; Rubens, though hardly out of his teens, loved historical subjects. They started a collaboration, like many others, artistic collaboration being a well-established practice, not only in Antwerp. A master would often paint the essence, with assistants adding the details. Art historians spend a great deal of time trying to work out who did what. In the case of Brueghel and Rubens, collaboration turned into a close friendship, in a tight-knit community of artists who were in and out of each other’s studios and houses, and often intermarried. In 1598, when Rubens was twenty-one and Brueghel thirty, they produced their first work together, The Battle of the Amazons.

  Why the Amazons? It was not a particularly popular subject with Renaissance artists. Both, though, were drawn to the themes of classical mythology and the turmoil of battle. Brueghel, newly back from Italy, did the landscape, the top half; Rubens, already well educated in the classics and soon to go to Italy, did the figures which fill the bottom half. On a wide plain, with a wooded hill to the left, the Greek army charges in, pushing the Amazons towards a river and towards us. In the foreground Herculesfn1 subdues two Amazons, one of whom is wearing an incongruous plumed cap. Perhaps the Amazon in red with a gold banner, the one holding a head, is Hippolyte. A muscular figure, Theseus perhaps, holds a limp Antiope. All around warriors surge, trampling and being trampled. There are many wild expressions and much violence.

  But it’s all rather academic. There are as many naked bodies as figures in diaphanous costumes. A spotlit woman lying in the foreground is obviously dead, except that there is no blood and she has somehow died while preserving her modesty with a well-placed hand. In fact, there’s not really much blood anywhere, given the mayhem. Even the head being held by Hippolyte, if it is she, is rather insignificant. Hercules and his two opponents recall the famous marble statue of Laocoön and his sons wrestling snakes, every muscle tense. The design also refers to a fresco by Raphael in Rome, The Battle of Constantine Against Maxentius, done 100 years earlier, which Brueghel would have seen in Rome and Rubens knew from engravings. Rubens was, it seems, more eager to solve the problems of composing all the bodies than engaging with the brutality of war.

  But the Amazons now had him in their grasp and would not let him go. It was as if his unconscious was telling him: ‘You can do better, Peter. You can give the Amazons real meaning.’ He even explored the subject in a drawing, perhaps gathering material for another version in the future. One image he kept was that of an Amazon, Hippolyte perhaps, waving a severed head. That was in 1602–4, after which the subject went on a backburner, as if he were giving peace a chance.

  In 1621, three years after the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, he was doubling as an undercover diplomat. Holland was still divided, the rebellious Protestant north against the still-Spanish Catholic south. For twelve years, from 1609, the two sides had held back. Rubens, now aged forty-four, was an established master, collector and connoisseur with an international reputation, having trained in Italy and toured Spain. Most of Europe’s top art collectors had pieces by him and his studio of helpers – great hunting scenes, portraits, tapestry designs, altarpieces. As court painter to the Archduke Albert and his wife Isabella, he was the jewel in Antwerp’s crown. Success gave him high-level contacts, which was why Archduchess Isabella, an equal to her husband, employed him as an unofficial envoy. His task, as the Twelve Years’ Truce approached its end, was to try to broker a lasting peace between divided Holland and Spain. He failed. War broke out again. He ran his studio to the occasional sound of cannon fire and when he travelled – as he did to Paris in 1622 to plan twenty-one portraits for France’s Queen Mother, Marie, a Medici from Florence – he did so across a war-ravaged land.

  So he knew from the inside the disaster that faced all Europe when, in some unspecified year about this time, he painted his own The Battle of the Amazons, which he gave to the great collector Cornelis van der Geest. It is very different from the previous picture done with Brueghel. In a chaos of horses and two dozen half-naked bodies, Greeks and Amazons struggle on top of a small, low-arched bridge, with corpses tumbling down on either side into a shallow river. In size, imagine a school blackboard – not exactly palatial, but just right for the wall of a spice merchant and art collector. It is at first glance an appropriate piece of mythology, exactly the sort of thing a seventeenth-century aristocrat would want.

  But a closer look reveals a most unlikely agenda. In ancient times, the battle would have been designed to show the fine qualities of both winners and losers. There were models to be followed in similar works by Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, both glorifying particular victories. Here, though, Rubens has made the subject his own. The figures, fighting against smoke surging from a blazi
ng city, swirl around a Greek seizing the Amazon standard – a traditional theme in military subjects, because the flag, being colourful and visible, was the point round which troops were supposed to rally. Here there is no rallying and no glory. The Amazon standard-bearer, already collapsing and unarmed, is having the flag dragged away from her by a Greek wielding a bloody dagger, while another raises his sword to finish her off. The Amazon queen, Hippolyte, is no leader now, riding off in the background. There is no hint of heart-stopping beauty or any power-giving girdle, only barbarity. She is holding up a Greek head, leaving its owner’s decapitated torso on top of the bridge, dead centre, bleeding into the river below. It is a scene of extreme and shocking brutality. Bodies are distorted in death. A female corpse almost blocks the river. In antiquity Greeks liked to see virtue in their own side for achieving victory over respected adversaries, but here there is no respect for either side. The Greeks are slaughtering defeated women, and being slaughtered in their turn.

  In the bottom left corner is a woman on her back, lying dead on the steep riverbank. A Greek is hauling her cloak from under her, his foot on the inside of her naked thigh, an act that combines the implication of necrophilia – the rape of a corpse – with the theft of an item that is entirely useless in military terms. Plundering the dead was never described in Greek and Roman texts. Seventeenth-century viewers would not have expected to see it in a mythological scene, which this seems to be. But the picture is not really mythological. It is a reflection of current warfare, in which plundering corpses was punishable by death if done without orders, but commonplace.

  In all this, there is no dignity or heroism, no right or wrong. Both Greeks and Amazons are victims and perpetrators. The subject is the war and its horrors, and to show them Rubens has stripped away every positive element he might have inherited from the past.

  Rubens was eager to spread his universal message as widely as possible. The way to achieve this was by making an engraving of the picture and having it published. This was another monumental achievement, another display of virtuosity. He had it made two-thirds the size of the original (85 x 120 centimetres), which meant dividing the plates into six sheets – the largest engraving made in Holland up to that time. Moreover, Rubens made his message even more explicit by dedicating the print to a woman – Alethea Howard, Countess of Arundel (her name is pronounced Al-ee-thea, from the Greek for ‘truth’). Her husband, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, was Earl Marshal of England, a famous art collector and Rubens’s future patron, but it was she who was of special interest to Rubens because he had painted her (along with her jester, dwarf and dog) when she came through Antwerp and she was now part of his message – as a force in her own right, in effect an Amazon. She (he implied) was politically engaged, and could, perhaps, exert influence that would end the dire consequences of violence shown in the engraving done for her and the picture from which it was taken.

  The PR worked, for art and perhaps a little in politics. The picture was given pride of place in a composite of portraits and well-known paintings in The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, done by the gallery’s curator, Willem van Haecht. And the print, when reduced to normal size, became extremely popular. It still is.

  And peace came at last. The Treaty of Westphalia that brought to a close the Thirty Years’ War marked the end of the wars of religion in Europe, the end of Spanish military control, the start of France’s rise. It settled peoples and dynasties within national frontiers. Wars were now between nations, and not continent-wide, peace ensured by a balance of powers, until Napoleon unbalanced them 150 years later, recalling some of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War and Rubens’s dystopian view.

  Move forward now to a quieter time, the mid-eighteenth century. We are in the age of the Enlightenment, a label used by self-satisfied intellectuals who liked to think that the scientific method and reasoned thought was setting aside the authority of the Church, whatever that was in a Christianity divided between Catholics and Protestants and their countless rival sects.

  Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:

  God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.

  Alexander Pope’s epitaph on the man who more than any other led the scientific revolution overstated a little, because Newton himself was half-hid in night, believing that his work on the Bible was as flawless as his laws of motion. Newton died in 1727. Soon, John Locke would argue that the only true foundations for knowledge were the impressions made by the real world on the senses. The only authority, the only truth, the only way to unlock nature’s secrets was to make sense of sense-impressions with mathematics and experiment and reason. Emerging from the dark and pessimistic depths of what seemed universal and enduring war, mankind was at last climbing towards sunny and optimistic uplands. If all was not yet light, it soon would be.

  Moreover, it was possible for almost anyone to know almost everything if they put their mind to it. In France, Voltaire was a playwright and a poet, but he also wrote history and explained Newton’s physics to the French. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations founded modern economics, but he was also a moral philosopher.

  There was little room in the scientific, rationalist view for God, certainly for the God of the established churches. Of course, the revolution would take time. God and his churches remained part of thought and society, and out-and-out atheism was unusual. But religious influence would surely wane as knowledge grew. If there were still mysteries – natural catastrophes, for instance, like the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1756 – they should be addressed by Science. That was the way to fulfil humanity’s destiny: to seek happiness, avoid misery, make Progress.

  In France, intellectuals believed the way forward was to acquire knowledge step by step, not just about science but about the world and other societies. Their big idea, spearheaded by Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert, was a vast compilation of information, an encyclopaedia, thirty-five volumes of which were published between 1751 and 1772. This was the ‘war machine’ (as one of its 150 authors, known as the Encyclopédistes, put it) that would inform and change minds, spreading ideas that were believed to be universal. Thus ignorance and intolerance would vanish, the laws of nature and society would stand revealed, and mankind would advance in the interests of all. So the new priesthood of intellectuals, the philosophes, believed, along with their co-‘philosophers’ in England, Scotland, Italy and Germany.

  Why France? The main answer is Louis XIV. When he died in 1715, he had ruled for seventy-two years and pursued the nation’s interest and his own ruthlessly and brilliantly. The rays of the Sun King glowed over all Europe, as well as burning a lot of it. Power and prestige meant that all Europe spoke French. But he was a despot, as his heirs Louis XV and XVI also wished to be, rather less successfully. Power also constrained. If the king ruled by divine right, if God was on his side, how could he permit the toleration for which the philosophes wished? He couldn’t. Intellectuals and artists faced many barriers. Their ideas would have to await another sort of revolution, the violent one of 1789, before they could be taken further.

  For sceptics like Voltaire and the Encyclopédistes, Amazons were not considered a serious subject, at least not by many. A cleric, Claude Guyon, in his two-volume history of the Amazons,fn2 insisted that ‘there is no nation more celebrated, more remarkable or better attested’; the scientist and explorer Charles Marie de la Condamine was sure they were to be found in South America; Joseph Lafitau, the one who had actually worked with Iroquois Indians, insisted that all native Americans were descended from ancient races, including the Amazons. Voltaire said it was all rubbish: ‘The Kingdom of the Amazons, on the banks of the Thermodon, is nothing more than a poetic fiction.’ Across the Channel, Edmund Gibbon was more discreet in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Commenting on the AD 274 victory parade of the Roman emperor Aurelian with its long train of captives, he writes that ‘the title of Amazons was bestowed on ten martial heroines of the Gothic nation’, to w
hich he adds a careful footnote: ‘It is almost impossible that a society of Amazons should ever have existed.’

  But still they were there, lodged in the European consciousness, appealing to the poetic imagination, and finding an outlet through the pen of a woman, one of those remarkable eighteenth-century women who were widely responsible for the spread of Enlightenment ideas.

  Just as important as books, letters and lectures were the Parisian drawing rooms of the rich and influential. In these salons, the dominant personalities were the women. The salons had a century of tradition behind them, looking back to Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, in the early seventeenth century. She set up a sort of counter-court, free of courtly constraints, emphasizing the arts of conversation – politeness, tact, culture, intimacy. She and later hostesses – salonnières – invited guests who, above all, had to be interesting. Neither wealth nor social standing was enough. The idea was to discuss and spread what was new in literature, science, art, politics, thought and society, exploring themes like friendship, marriage, love and independence. They chaired, encouraged, entertained, facilitated and educated themselves, becoming people of influence on behalf of culture. They taught the ‘womanly virtues’ by example, aiming to ‘purge men of the boorish Academy legacy which weighed on them, in which the purpose was to crush others with the weight of one’s learning.’fn3 Thanks to these intelligent, ambitious women, clever members of both sexes intermingled, and all found they were the better for doing so.

  The name of the salonnière in question is Madame du Boccage. Born Anne-Marie le Page in Rouen, she moved to Paris at twenty-three with her tax-collector husband, who liked books and ideas. She was obviously and notoriously brilliant, intellectually and socially. She knew Latin, Greek and several modern languages. She set up a salon, achieving no great fame until in 1746, at the age of thirty-six, she wrote a poem that won her first prize from the Academy – the good-and-great of the local intellectuals – in her home town of Rouen. She sent the poem to Voltaire, who liked it so much he wrote back addressing her as the ‘Sappho of Normandy’, referring to her poetic abilities, but perhaps implying more, for reasons we will get to later. A fellow Norman recommended her to the philosopher Fontenelle, still feisty at the age of ninety, who introduced her to the playwright Pierre de Marivaux. The boost to her salon seems to have injected ambition and released talent.