Fly Away Home

by Marina Warner

  The revelation was fleeting. Soon, the wooden screen and the stalls near and around the new instrument were put back in place and the painted figures disappeared again. But the eighteen-year-old future ghost-story writer, who was already a keen antiquarian, had travelled back in time, through the stones and plaster, wood and brass, into the Gothic chapel as it was before the Reformation, and he did not forget how, under the surface of the austere whitewashed walls, the past trembled and breathed like the landscape that seethed with ghosts when his story’s protagonist put the magic binoculars to his eyes. He was plunged into a history to which he, as an Englishman, belonged, and he found in it, not the cacophony of battle that rises from the spooky hill, but a lost grace and fantasy. Medieval Europe, lying as if at the bottom of a well, so that he would only be able to see it again if the light slanted right on the surface at a certain angle. He had seen the chapel’s Catholic face, surviving when so much of the architecture, sculpture, stained glass, painting, ware and so forth of England in the medieval and early Renaissance was destroyed.

  MR James was an old man composing his memoirs when he recalled the apparition, and what it meant to him comes through his words, ‘I will only repeat … that in these paintings Eton possesses a treasure which is, honestly, unrivalled in this country and in France. You must go as far as Italy (or almost as far: we must not forget Avignon) before you can find wall-paintings of equal importance and beauty.’

  Gasparo Spirello was seventeen when his master, Messer Gerolamo, stopped alongside his workbench, where he was tooling a binding of the new selection of Madonna Veronica’s Canzoniere, and beckoned him into the inner room where the workshop’s books were stored before delivery to their patrons or their purchasers. Messer Gerolamo sat down at the oak table to face the young engraver, who stood before him. A Legenda Aurea, on which Gasparo had worked a year or so ago, lay open at the feast day of the Invention of the Holy Cross, with the woodcut of St Helena proving the true wood on which the Saviour hung by holding each of the three crosses in turn over the body of a young girl, freshly laid in her grave. Stroking and patting the great volume as if it were a favourite hound, restive and yet biddable, Messer Gerolamo, master printer to the young and clever Duchess of O——, Madonna Veronica del Licorno, looked up at his assistant and smiled.

  – I have a proposal for you, Gasparotto mio, which I hope you will find an inspiration.

  Messer Gerolamo prided himself on the talent he discovered and fostered, and he had known Gasparo since he was a baby – the boy’s mother worked in the Castle for the workshop’s attentive and most gracious patroness. For his part, the young man was relieved: when summoned, he had expected a reprimand (his execution of twining sea serpents on a colophon had been deemed skittish, and he’d been asked to quell his fancies in future).

  – I am going to send you into England. Che ne pensi, Gasparo mio?

  But the master printer did not give the lad time to reply, for he was already writing out a letter of credit, closing the huge book and thrusting it into Gasparo’s arms.

  – Wrap this well, giovinotto, and go home and tell your good mother to start packing. We shall be sending you there with much of our old stock. I’m putting it together – last year’s prints and those from years before – in the north this is all still new to them, and they are hungry for our woodcuts. They want to feast their eyes at home on the lives of the blessed saints and the deaths of the glorious martyrs. Whereas we – and he tapped a knowing index finger below his right eye – now have a finer appreciation, under the aegis of our great lady.

  Off with you, now. London awaits!

  Monty was a household name when I was a child, partly because he was a friend of my grandfather’s; he was Provost when my father was sent to Eton, and it’s not impossible that the connection helped to secure him a place. Certainly, the school inspired in him a lifelong, obsessive loyalty at a pitch that cannot be grasped by someone who has not known an Old Etonian, and which upset me terribly as his daughter, trying to shape contrary hopes and ideals. Monty presided – loomed is perhaps the better word – over the whole establishment. His scholarly and genial presence dominated that sacred enclave, when enthroned in the chapel, or when, his dark gown swirling, his canonicals lifting to his stride, he swept across the school yard and stopped to exchange a few words with a boy he knew – my father, perhaps, causing him mortification at his gaucherie in response. In the refectory giving out the formal grace, or at home in the Provost’s elegant and princely quarters, he breathed out essence of Eton. He was a Biblical scholar; a palaeographer and archaeologist and folklorist; an indefatigable cataloguer of manuscripts held by colleges and other foundations; a loving gazetteer of churches, abbeys, cathedrals and monasteries (their ruins). His scholarship was antiquarian, his talents hermeneutics and entertainment. In all the manuscripts he listed and annotated, he read the stories they told, and he correlated characters and plots, proverbs and maxims with church ornaments and furnishings that had survived the Reformers’ hammers and gouges: in misericords, pew-ends, and the odd decorative elements on a grille, or placed too high up for the iconoclasts to reach.

  Yet, when my father recalled him in later life, this learned and celibate figure of authority always provoked a chuckle of amused affection, because MR James’s most beloved works, the writings that earned him a vast audience and are still read – and filmed – today, were his ghost stories. Gory, hair-raising, yet semi-comic, these are winter’s tales in the tradition of the source books for religious frescoes, which later nourished Shakespeare’s imagination, a tradition which has continued to shape current paranoid fantasy cycles about Vatican conspirators and vampire lovers. James liked to perform them on Christmas Eve by the fireside with only a candle or two to dispel total darkness.

  Some of his readers have identified his hauntedness with his repressed sexuality, or his Peter Pan complex, or other Victorian particularities of his personality. His ghosts were not his alone; they are ancestral ghosts, rising from the national imaginary, filled with beliefs in relics, icons, charms, cantrips; the murky, often clammy eeriness rose like will-o’-the-wisps from fens and hills, from parish church furniture and cathedral ornaments, manuscripts and stones, soaked in his disgust with papism. The twisted morbidity mirrored his perfect state of ambivalence, as he was drawn irresistibly into through the dark backward and abysm of time.

  A few years after MR James returned to Eton in 1918 in his supreme role of Provost, he began the work of uncovering the paintings that he knew had adorned the chapel of Our Lady of Eton from the era before the Reformation. The figures he had glimpsed belonged to a parade of saints, some familiar, some almost entirely forgotten in his time (the two who had appeared to him all those years ago were St Sidwell and St Winifred).

  But Messer Gerolamo detained Gasparo to add:

  – Our esteemed English counterpart and correspondent shows sharp interest in our work. He tells me the time has come for the English language – and that he’s confident that our loquacious late Bishop of Genova, our revered Jacopo da Varazze of blessed memory, could become even more popular and influential than he is already with the makers of sermons and designers of church decorations – for those poor dull spirits in the north who are ignorant of Latin!

  Messer Gerolamo nodded at Gasparo, for he had flinched.

  – Yes, you are right. My views are no longer current, as Madonna Veronica likes to remind me. What is more, they have been out of style for a long time. It is the vulgar tongue that makes the sweetest music now!

  – And our London friend does not wish to be left far behind, he writes. In his last letter to me, he declares that translation will boom in his country.

  – I could send others who are older, wiser, more experienced at our trade than you. But I have chosen you from all them (he waved towards the door and the bustling workshops beyond), and Madonna Veronica agrees that you shall go. When you are there, you may k
eep those bright eyes of yours wide open and your clever ears pricked – and bring back news of what those ruffians are up to …

  The artists who worked on the Eton frescoes remain unknown, but they were in England around 1477–87, and they dressed the figures in their frescoes in the latest stylish dress from the continent – they were scandalously fashionable as well as idolaters. Slender, elongated and fashionably dressed, dramatis personae in the miracle stories display some affinities with delicate Flemish and Burgundian journeymen’s art, and a certain compositional closeness to the products of Parisian workshops, as well as similarities with other artisans in England who were making stained glass, church plate, and vestments at the time; but ultimately, they reverberate with Italian narrative verve, as found in such magnificent, complex, and vast cycles as Agnolo Gaddi’s chapel in Santa Croce, Florence, and Piero della Francesca’s chancel in Arezzo. There, in the 1450s, Piero painted his huge complex account of the legend of the true cross, drawing the episodes from several chapters in the Golden Legend, and structuring the scheme to form a total vision of Christian triumph.

  The stories that the Eton artists carried with them come from the most popular works of devotion of the times – the Speculum Historiale by Vincent de Beauvais and the Miracles of the Virgin by Gautier de Coinci; but above all, the Legenda Sanctorum (Legenda Aurea) by the Dominican fabulist Jacopus da Voragine, Bishop of Genoa, flow into the plots. They are pictures that present the faith in a manner that was abhorrent to the Reformers who were to come within a matter of decades; the stories they tell promote typical reprehensible Catholic laxity.

  They do not seem especially suited to an institution packed with adolescent boys, but they must have entertained them.

  In one, the Virgin Mary is stepping in to rescue an unmarried woman from death in childbirth. In such miracles, she always intervenes to protect fallen women – and men: when a nun finds herself pregnant, Mary takes her place in the convent so that she can have the baby in peace, give the child away for adoption and then come back.

  In another, an innocent Empress is raped by her brother-in-law, then accused of child murder and exiled – Mary again works to vindicate her in the eyes of all, gives her powers of healing, punishes her slanderers and brings her safely home – to another convent. Her story unfolds in eight exquisitely painted and very busy scenes; they follow the wronged heroine from persecution to triumph.

  In yet another, Amoras, a wicked, dissembling youth, is making a pact with a devil and then carrying off a young innocent to be his wife; she knows nothing of his wickedness and his Bluebeard plans. But he will be foiled – by Mary.

  These pictures resemble many other targets of the whitewashers’ buckets all over the country during the short reign of Henry’s son Edward VI, and then, again, after the accession of his second daughter Elizabeth I, who issued a royal edict in 1559 that all superstitious and idolatrous images be destroyed. The doctrine of intercession, which gives Mary her indulgent role as the ‘mater misericordiae, advocata nostra’ (in the words of the Salve Regina), ever understanding, ever forgiving, consequently stood in the first line of attack from the Reformers, alongside the paraphernalia of efficacious prayer – holy water, rosaries, relics. Small wonder zealous Protestants scratched out the eyes and obliterated the features of this wretched uncanonical crew of dramatis personae on the wall of Eton College chapel.

  A struggle instantly exploded at the very core of Gasparo Spirello’s being, between thrill at the thought of adventure, and horror that he was being taken from everything he knew, from O, where he had lived all his life, from his mother who would, he knew, be stricken at his departure, from his sister, Lucia, who was almost his twin in age and who also worked for Messer Gerolamo, and from his love, his darling, his angel, his robin, his thrushling, his swallow – his Fiammetta – Gasparo Spirello never could decide which of the songbirds he loved she most resembled with her quivering throat and her bright black eyes.

  At the door, hugging the splendid Legenda Aurea to his chest and feeling the leather of its rich binding warm to his blood temperature (as if urging him to remember that even if it were now so very old-fashioned it still had blood in its veins), Gasparo turned to his master and thanked him.

  As he did so, it flashed upon him that before he left he would ask Fiammetta to marry him.

  Some of the faces of the dramatis personae in the Eton chapel frescoes were destroyed before later whitewashing covered them. These pious acts of disfigurement weren’t consistent: a few female saints, a few male saints, and several characters in the stories (men and women) were obliterated like the face of the Prophet in Persian or Indian manuscripts of a similar date, when he and other Islamic saints are screened from our gaze by short veils. They are irrecoverable. The special targets of the Reformers’ outrage were stories about sacred images working miracles, like the charmed mezzotint or the uncanny things – carvings, whistles – in MR James’s stories: in a section of chapel wall, where a Jew is blasted for his blasphemous attack on a statue of the Virgin, her image has become a hole: in an instance of eerie duplication, the act described in the story has been repeated later by the improving iconoclast, who is ferociously rejecting in this way the hold of sacred images.

  In some way, the iconoclasts of the second intense wave of the Reformation, which began when Elizabeth issued her decree, were cultural patriots; like Caxton, who successfully presented Chaucer as a new Ovid or a new Virgil in order to stake a claim that English literature could hold its own, the defacers of Catholic stories and images were asking for history to start again; they were radicals reshaping the landscape of imagination. In former hallowed ground they were hollowing a new space in which to plant another form of life.

  … and Fiammetta said yes. But then, with a sidelong look, the one she gave him when he knew she was going to try to get her way, she added,

  – I’m coming with you. How can I let my young and beautiful husband travel alone to a country full of sad pale girls who dream of someone like you from the warm South?

  Lucia was only ten months or so older than Gasparo, but she had since their father’s death asserted the elder sister’s authority, and she had worked long hours by day and by night, with a candle beside her (she loved the way the flame’s softness brought out the gleam of the illuminations in Madonna Veronica’s gorgeous coloured manuscripts) as she worked, pricking out the design of the illuminations to turn them into simple line drawings for Gasparino and others on Messer Gerolamo’s benches to copy on wooden blocks, and when she heard that her brother was leaving for London to take a copy of the new book, she ran to find Fiammetta to share her anger and her horror, and found her future sister-in-law already trying out an assortment of her brother’s clothes.

  – How do I look? she asked, smoothing the hose over her thighs and laughing as she tightened the laces to flatten her chest.

  Lucia flared up at the thought.

  – Do you think I can let you two travel alone? she cried. What would our dear dead father think of me abandoning my responsibilities like that?

  That was how three Italian youths, slender, beribboned in silk, with varicoloured hose and velvet caps on their heads (the fashions in O were bright and witty compared to English apparel) arrived in London during the last quarter of the fifteenth century; they delivered prints from Messer Gerolamo’s workshop, showed his London correspondent the several printed volumes with woodcuts they had been despatched to sell (including the magnificent folio edition of the Legenda Aurea with more than a hundred woodcuts, hand-coloured), and began thriving, as they reported in letters they punctually sent back home.

  In the substantial glass-walled Gothic Guild chapel of the Holy Cross, Caxton’s illustrated edition of the Golden Legend provided some other journeymen artists with patterns for the frescoes on the chancel walls, painted a few years after the book first appeared in 1483. Empress Helena was shown unearthing the Cross on which J
esus was crucified from its hiding place in Jerusalem on the Mount of Calvary. In full colour, the ­intrepid mission of her old age unfolded: the long journey to the Holy Land, the interrogation of the possible witnesses, the proving of the True Cross by miraculously curing a leper (in another source a young woman, recently dead), and the scattering of splinters throughout the Roman empire in order to found churches.

  This fresco cycle was made for another English heartland – Stratford-upon-Avon – where the walls were also swabbed with whitewash to cover them up. The authority to go ahead and do this, agreeing to two shillings for lime pails and brushes, is signed John Shakespeare. This is William’s father, who was alderman of the town in that period.

  The Shakespeares’ relationship to the old religion has excited much scholarly discussion. William was born around the time his father began the work of painting over the chapel’s papist pictures, and the destruction continued during William’s childhood, with his father presiding over the dismantling of the rood loft and the removal of the stained glass.

  Catholic memories haunt the plays – sometimes literally, when Hamlet’s father’s ghost rises in agony out of purgatory. The family entanglement with the old religion leaves its mark on William’s dramatic imagination: it surfaces in his many spectres and sinners, goddesses and virgins, and the several subjects of hallucinations and prophetic dreams. He makes a statue of a virtuous queen (Hermione in The Winter’s Tale), and she comes to life, silently but warm to the touch at the happy end, as in a miracle story depicted at Eton. On the south side of the Chapel, the upper frieze includes one frame showing the young bridegroom who, smitten by the beauty of a statue, had promised eternal love to the Virgin; on his wedding night, she comes for him and reproaches him bitterly for forgetting his vow; she then takes him for her own, leaving his bride ­neglected in the nuptial bed.