by Melvyn Bragg
The Fighting Temeraire is at Susan Foister’s workplace, the National Gallery, where, she said, it is in really quite good condition. The Temeraire itself is thinly painted and not in immense detail, with strokes of darker brown against the pale off-white to suggest the form of the ship. There is luminosity and transparency in the reflections in the water, which she thought was something Turner brought from his experience of watercolour painting. Visitors who stand near the painting can still see the marks of Turner, laying his brush on in three dimensions.
SUSAN FOISTER: If you look at it when the light is falling on it at an angle, you can see exactly the texture of the paint and the marks of the brush. In that patch of brilliant red, vermillion red, above the sun, that’s really thickly painted. The moon, although it’s small and rather delicately formed, is very thickly painted, and the reflections of moonlight on the water – again he’s using paint thickly, rather quickly, with a broad brush to give that effect. He knew exactly what he was doing.
The Royal Navy, in 1839, was the largest naval force in the world, James Davey said, larger than its next few rivals added together. There was great nostalgia for the navy of yesteryear with its wooden sailing ships, particularly the navy of Nelson’s time, and there were many signs of this, not least the naming of Trafalgar Square and, soon after, the building of Nelson’s Column. There were great numbers of autobiographies of sailors who were active in the Napoleonic Wars, reminiscing. Warships had already been built with steam power and there was a growing sense of unease about steam, which had the potential to transform the way that navies operated.
Self-portrait by Joseph Mallord William Turner.
JAMES DAVEY: On the one hand, there’s a lot of excitement about this new technology and how the Royal Navy is in exactly the right place to take advantage of it; but, also, a degree of insecurity and unease because of its potential transformational nature. If one of Britain’s rivals, perhaps France or Russia or whoever, gets ahead of the technological game, suddenly the whole Royal Navy could become obsolete.
To James Davey, the painting is saying that Britain had been dominant on the seas in the past, was dominant at sea right then, but the future was not clear.
There were innovations in the pigments available to Turner at that time, and his pictures were increasingly vividly coloured. David Blayney Brown suggested that a visit to the National Gallery or the Clore Gallery at the Tate would reveal that Turner’s early paintings were quite sombre, becoming more and more brilliant over the years. He used new pigments in The Fighting Temeraire.
DAVID BLAYNEY BROWN: In this picture, he uses two vermilions, one of which had been in use for most of his life, but the other, an iodine-based pigment, a particularly vivid scarlet that is sometimes called scarlet lake. That was a new development, recently developed by a friend of Turner, Humphry Davy. And the yellow, an intense lemon yellow (which, of course, is softened out in the painting because it’s working in conjunction with other colours), it’s a new colour, a barium-based chromate yellow, and something that Turner used really more than any other artist at the time, and was criticised for, and joked about, because he said once, ‘I’ve taken all the yellow unto myself this year, there’s none left for you.’
Turner was also using a new cobalt blue that we can see in the picture and, controversially for artists then, he used black, which, according to the standards of the time, was supposed to be created by mixing other colours.
The Fighting Temeraire was not Turner’s first painting related to Trafalgar. George IV commissioned him to create an immense battle painting, Susan Foister told us, which was absolutely full of sailors, and the Temeraire is a ghostly reminiscence of that.
SUSAN FOISTER: In the commission that he painted for, in the first place, St James’s Palace, you see sailors swarming over these boats and you see their suffering thrust in front of you not only with the blood, but there’s one particular sailor who looks almost as though he’s being crucified in front of you. Turner certainly felt great empathy for the suffering of the sailors in these battles.
While The Fighting Temeraire is a work of imagination rather than an accurate depiction, this has not stopped people pointing out the ways in which it departs from reality. David Blayney Brown mentioned some of these, such as the height of the sun in the sky, which was shown as lower than it would have been when the Temeraire arrived at Rotherhithe, and the sun being in the wrong part of the sky altogether, as it appears to be setting in the east, where the ship had come from, rather than in the west, where it was heading. It would be bizarre, he said, to expect a picture like this to be absolutely literal in those sorts of details.
DAVID BLAYNEY BROWN: The other thing that’s really quite spectacularly wrong, and Turner would have known this because he travelled on steamboats all the time – he went up and down the Thames to Margate, he went across the Channel – he knew exactly where a steamboat’s funnel would have been positioned in relation to its boiler, i.e. over it. It would not have been up towards the bows and a long way away from the boiler and the paddles. It would have been centre. But Turner’s moved it so that, of course, the funnel doesn’t conflict with the bow of the Temeraire itself.
This, Melvyn understood, was ‘corrected’ by a printer who made a copy of the painting, and Turner was absolutely furious. It was corrected back to the wrong position in the next edition.
The painting was well received by critics. Thackeray, Susan Foister said, was really inspired by this painting, he really responded to what Turner was trying to do with colour and with the story of the ship. He was particularly taken by the tug, which he called a spiteful tugboat that was dragging the Temeraire to its end. He described the painting as a national ode.
DAVID BLAYNEY BROWN: Thackeray also called the tug the Temeraire’s executioner, which I think is wonderful because, of course, it humanises the tug as well. If the Temeraire is representing Nelson’s entire navy, all the people that had served in it, in the form of one ship, so the tug was this creature that is actually killing all that off.
The Fighting Temeraire was, said Susan Foister, the culmination of a certain type of experimentation with paint, and Turner went on to paint even more extraordinary pictures.
Afterwards, there was talk of Turner’s love for The Fighting Temeraire, his ‘darling’, which he loaned out once and vowed not to do so again, or ever to sell it. He was apparently offered £5,000 for it, which he refused, and that was, coincidentally, the sum the breakers had paid for the ship itself.
SUSAN FOISTER: After his death in 1851, there was this terrific fight about his will, but eventually his paintings came to the National Gallery. And one thing that perhaps people don’t appreciate is that, when the National Gallery was first built, the Royal Academy, where Turner showed the Temeraire in 1839, was in the National Gallery, the right-hand side of the building that we know today. That painting was shown in Trafalgar Square, moved to his gallery, then came back to Trafalgar Square and was put on display in 1857.
Which is where it is today, in Room 34.
RELIGION
It’s the hot subject. Just as there was matter and anti-matter in confrontation soon after the Big Bang, so the forces of religion and anti-religion stand toe to toe slugging it out. The antis – the atheists – would most likely say that there is nothing there. Religions are fairy tales, controlling mechanisms, comfort blankets, the survivalist magic of other ages, and we really must stop giving them the credit they have demanded – and often received – through millennia. Religion is dead. There were two famous slogans daubed on walls in the 1968 Paris students’ revolution. The top one said, ‘God is dead. Nietzsche.’ The lower one read, ‘Nietzsche is dead. God.’
Because God, in many parts of the world, in various guises, is still alive – in the Islamic states, in evangelical North America, in Hinduism, among followers of the Buddha, in Israel, in Catholic South America, in extreme Protestant conclaves all over the English-speaking world. But not much in the UK,
where the Church of England decays in influence by the year and intellectuals don’t even want to waste their energy discussing it. And anti-religion has its champions, most influential of whom is Richard Dawkins, whose brilliant scientific scholarship and inflexible belief in non-belief has become a world force in arguments on this subject.
What cannot be denied is the massive importance of religion to so many of our formative civilisations and their development. To stick with Christianity, for example: since, say, the fifth century ad, Christianity has been intertwined with European and then world history, mythology, art, music, architecture, ceremony, war, conquest, education, tyranny, like no other force. None is comparable. It has, of course, been assumed by many for their own non-religious purposes: by conquerors to sanction and glorify their slaughters; by an organisation such as the Vatican to justify its astonishingly effective and long-lived control system. Its weapons include the Inquisitions and inventions like purgatory, confessions, penitence and pilgrimages, as well as the glamour and allure of sacred festivals and pageants, music and spectacular art and architecture. It’s been argued that the Roman Catholic Church has been the most effective control system in human history.
And so, to understand why we are what we are, it is often indispensable to be at least aware of the shaping force of religion.
I was brought up in the north-west of England in a town called Wigton. It had a population of about 5,000 people and ten active churches in my childhood. Let’s say the late 1940s, early ’50s. These churches ran the town.
I went to the Anglican church and accepted all of it – the resurrection, the miracles, eternal life … all that can be forgiven.
Yet it is hard for me to forgive the Church for the ‘gift’ of sin. It’s a blight. It’s entirely destructive; at best, it was supposed to be a brake, but it is rarely at its best. And, in its history, the Anglican Church, like so many other institutions, has done terrible things to people.
Most civilisations took in forms of religion from the start. In a sense, it is as much history as faith. And it is often impossible to gauge whether it is purely a fig leaf, a convenient cloak for the powerful to sweeten their colonisations, or whether it truly is an essential drive in itself.
From the ways it is entangled with politics, often cruelly, we are left puzzled. What of the crusades against the Cathars? The Cathars were a devout sect in the south of France whose Christianity was thoroughly at odds with the prevailing Catholicism. This led to their mass extermination. And, again and again, religion has been on the side of the ‘bad’. Brutal force, sanctified by prayers, themselves propagated as essential to the ‘good’ life, but also essential to the obedience demanded by an imperial Church.
Yet, again and again, religion has spurred on the arts, examples of self-sacrifice and magnificent philanthropy. The most curious thing of all, I think, is that, despite the fury of logic and unbearable examples of iniquity being brought against it, religion refuses to go away. For billions of people, in the age of artificial intelligence, there are still gods and goddesses, saints and martyrs, and a better life to come. In the variety of the subject we choose, there are always those underlying tensions. Is it plausible? Is it more of an instrument of authoritarianism – the ‘opium of the people’? Or is it an essential mystery that we cannot yet explain through reason?
I realise that, in this foreword, I have been much more personal than previously. That is perhaps because it is such a contentious issue and, although I can no longer be categorised as ‘a believer’, we on the programme are keen to keep religion in our sweep around the globe of 5,000 years. All the subjects chosen by Simon here contain one of the aspects of faith at work. At the Big Bang, there was matter and anti-matter. The latter seems to have gone away, but physicists still puzzle about it. For many, religion is anti-matter, but it won’t go away.
THE SIEGE OF MÜNSTER
In the early sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation revolutionised Christian belief. One radical group of believers was the Anabaptists, who rejected infant baptism and formal clergy and believed that all goods should be held in common. They were also convinced, as were others, that the Second Coming was imminent. In 1534, in the German city of Münster, a group of Anabaptists attempted to establish a new Jerusalem, ready for the last days before the apocalypse. But the city was besieged and descended into tyranny. Books were burnt and women were forced to marry. As starvation spread, the city’s ruler lived in insane luxury. The horrors of the Anabaptists of Münster have resonated through European memory ever since.
With Melvyn to discuss the siege of Münster and its impact were: Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the Church at the University of Oxford; Charlotte Methuen, professor of Church history at the University of Glasgow; and Lucy Wooding, Langford fellow and tutor in history at Lincoln College, Oxford.
Diarmaid MacCulloch began by explaining that the Anabaptists emerged out of the early years of the Protestant Reformation in which Luther and his supporters wanted to make Christianity truly biblical again and to look at the New Testament and try to line up the Church to make it look like the New Testament. All the Anabaptists were doing was trying to take the Bible seriously.
DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: The word Anabaptist is a term of abuse, it means re-baptiser, because what they did was to make people baptise themselves again or be baptised again as adults, having been baptised as infants by the Old Church. And the reason they did that was a biblical one. They looked at the New Testament and said, ‘You can’t find infant baptism in the New Testament therefore, if we’re going to be serious about the Bible, we’ve got to make baptism for believers, for adults.’
They were discovering lots of other things in the Bible because it was a very remote, alien book that the Church had domesticated in various ways and, Diarmaid MacCulloch continued, ‘Even Martin Luther was horrified by the sheer logic of what they were doing.’ He and reformers like him thought they were going to overturn the world and they had a very powerful vision of themselves as prophets of the world. It could be said that the first Anabaptists were simply developing that idea, announcing that the world was going to come to an end soon.
DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: There are lots of reasons you should think that, in the early sixteenth century. The Turks are pressing in on Christendom, they appear to be about to destroy it, surely that’s part of God’s plan? It’s taking the logic of what Luther and other great reformers thought and just applying it and being very excited by it. The trouble was that Luther, by now, was beginning to see that things were a little more complicated than that.
There were plagues and famines, there was the fall of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, there was a sense that society was in a crisis that had to be God’s purpose, not simply a series of political accidents.
The Anabaptists were drawing from Zwingli in Zurich and Luther in Wittenberg, Charlotte Methuen added. According to them, sacraments only worked if you believed, and they could not say that a child believed, in which case, you cannot baptise people until they are adults, when they can show that they believe.
CHARLOTTE METHUEN: The reason baptism becomes such an issue is precisely because plagues, infant mortality, were enormous, and so, for parents of children who had been taught for generations that, if their children weren’t baptised, they wouldn’t be saved, to say that you couldn’t baptise children was actually saying something really terrible about the fate of their children if they died unbaptised. And it becomes such an issue that, in the [Holy Roman] Empire, adult baptism is actually made illegal.
The Anabaptists thought the Church was just for the elect, whereas Zwingli, Luther and Calvin went on to say that the Church, the visible Church, was for everybody and all should be drawn in, living their lives according to the laws of the land. Anabaptists had a totally different understanding of the way that Church and state related to one another, and were challenging the Catholic and Lutheran sense of a united Christendom.
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nbsp; For the Anabaptists, the apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ were one and the same thing. One of great differences between their way of interpreting the Reformation message and the one that Luther had in mind, Lucy Wooding explained, related to their inexperience in theology.
LUCY WOODING: Luther was a radical, no doubt, but he’s a theological radical. Now a lot of the people we’re looking at in this story today are very ordinary people. Hoffman is a travelling fur trader, one’s a baker, one’s an apprentice tailor – they don’t have the kind of intellectual framework to fit their reading of scripture into. They are taking it at face value, they’re tremendously excited, they take it very, very literally.
They also expected change much more immediately than perhaps some of the more educated reformers did. Luther was proving more conservative than they might have expected, not supporting the popular revolt of the German Peasants’ War in the 1520s, in which 100,000 people died. Persecution, violence and disaster followed that conflict, which might have been expected to discourage unrest.
LUCY WOODING: For the Anabaptists, it was entirely the opposite, because, if you look into the Bible, the true prophets of God, the early Church, the early apostles, they’re all persecuted. For the Anabaptists, the more people persecuted them, the harsher the treatment that was meted out to them, the more they were convinced that they were the chosen people and that they were pursuing the right path.
The Anabaptists were a disparate selection of different communities found in Switzerland, in the central southern German regions and in northern Germany and the Netherlands, with different people following different prophets. Melchior Hoffman started as a Lutheran lay preacher and then became more and more radical, preaching in marketplaces, whipping up excitement in cities in particular with parallels, Lucy Wooding suggested, to the way Christianity was spread in the first place, with the letters of St Paul to different cities, to Corinth, to Thessalonica, to small groups of beleaguered Christians in different city communities, and the Anabaptists identified with that.
