Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny

by A. S. Byatt

  Morris too was both craftsman and inventor. Under ‘craft skills’ in the index to Fiona MacCarthy’s biography appear ‘brass rubbing; calligraphy; cooking; clay modelling; dyeing; illuminated mss; painting and drawing; paper making; stone carving; tapestry; textiles, woven; wood carving; wood engraving’.

  Like Fortuny, he collected and perfected his own tools for these pursuits. MacCarthy tells one particularly attractive story of him at work in 1870 rediscovering the ancient technique of gilding. It is worth quoting in full.

  The gilding of the letters and the ornament of illuminated manuscripts is a complex, and chancy, craft in itself: a gesso base is laid and the gold-leaf attached and burnished. Traditionally the gesso was prepared from an arcane mixture of slaked plaster of Paris, white lead, bole and such adhesives as sugar, glue and egg. The raised gold was technically very problematic. May remembered sheets of paper strewn about her father’s study for years afterwards covered with experimental squares of grounding and gold as Morris tried out recipes given in Theophilus and other ancient books. He compared the methods of contemporary workers in gold and evolved his own solution. One gets the impression that Morris’s phases of technical experimentation interested him almost more than the arrival. He once showed his young daughters how the gold was laid, amusing them by passing the broad badger gilding brush through his ‘forest of thick curls’ like a hair brush before laying it gently on the leaf of gold. The brush, slightly pre-greased by Morris’s hair, took the gold leaf up evenly, and transferred it to a little cushion for him to cut.

  Credit 2.13

  This passage, as well as being an intricate description of Morris at work, shows also the sympathy with his mind that makes this one of the great biographies.

  The history of the founding of the Kelmscott Press is analogous to Fortuny’s technical and aesthetic inventiveness with lighting. Morris was living in Kelmscott House in Hammersmith – named by him after Kelmscott Manor – and in 1891 he rented a cottage a few doors away to try ‘turning printer’. The press later moved to larger premises nearby. Morris immersed himself in the printing process with his usual enthusiasm, designing new typefaces based on the calligraphy of the Middle Ages. He also needed to invent his own paper, modelled on a Bolognese paper made in 1473. This was shown to a paper manufacturer, Joseph Batchelor, who supplied three handmade papers for the Kelmscott Press – Morris named the watermarks after English country things: Flower, Perch and Apple. MacCarthy tells us that on his first visit to Batchelor Morris ‘could not resist taking his coat off and trying to make a sheet of paper. He succeeded at the second attempt’. A few copies were printed on vellum, and the books were bound in vellum and half holland. At first Morris obtained the vellum from Italy, but the entire production was then reserved by the Vatican. Morris found a British supplier and specified a vellum made from calfskin. He liked it to have a brownish cast and even a few hairs. The press published twenty-three of Morris’s own books, many medieval texts, and books by poets Morris admired – Keats, Shelley, Tennyson and Swinburne – and the monumental Chaucer. As I have noted, it also published the handsome edition of Ruskin’s chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’ from The Stones of Venice.

  The William Morris Museum in Walthamstow has some very interesting exhibits about the press and its workings. Indeed, this museum is both inventive and extremely interesting in its display of Morris’s methods as well as of his finished work. It has excellent displays of Morris’s work in many forms – including the archetypal wooden chairs sold by Morris & Co. It is in the house Morris lived in as a child, roaming the Essex woods, now, like the Red House, engulfed by outer London.

  * * *

  *1 I am much indebted to The Gardens of William Morris, by Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, Penny Hart and John Simmons. This quotation is on page 63.

  *2 Guillermo de Osma, pp. 66 and 70.

  NORTH & SOUTH

  Fortuny and Morris – Fortuny through Wagner – may both be said to have been interested in the myths, sagas and legends of the Nordic peoples. Fortuny went to Bayreuth in 1892 and came back deeply involved in Wagner’s art, in the Gesamtkunstwerk Wagner proposed, combining acting, music, costume, lighting in one whole artwork. As Robert Donington brilliantly showed in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and its Symbols (1963), Wagner made formidably intelligent use both of the Niebelungenlied and of the tales in the Eddas and the Sagas, welding them together into one complex and tragic form. William Morris hated Wagner. In 1873, having returned from his second Icelandic journey, he wrote to the brother of Alfred Forman, who had sent him Forman’s translation of Wagner’s text of Die Walküre.

  Many thanks for your letter and the translation of Wagner: I have not had time to read it yet: nor to say the truth am I much interested in anything Wagner does, as his theories on musical matters seem to me as an artist and non-musical man perfectly abhominable [sic]: besides I look upon it as nothing short of desecration to bring such a tremendous and world-wide subject under the gaslights of an opera: the most rococo and degraded of all forms of art – the idea of a sandy-haired German tenor tweedledeeing over the unspeakable woes of Sigurd, which even the simplest words are not typical enough to express! Excuse my heat but I wish to see Wagner uprooted, however clever he may be, and I don’t doubt he is: but he is anti-artistic, don’t doubt it.

  Credit 3.1

  One of the motifs that both connects and separates Morris and Fortuny is the Wagnerian myth of Sigurd, Siegfried, the dragon and the ring. One bizarre contrast between my two heroes that amuses me is Morris’s version of Fafnir the dragon compared to Fortuny’s painting of the doomed incestuous lovers in the Valkyrie. Morris had an image of Fafnir, the terrible dragon or Worm. It was made of topiary – a yew hedge – and Morris had periodic dragon-trimming ceremonies with large shears. It is still at Kelmscott, perennially green. Whereas, on entering the salon in the Palazzo Fortuny (the Palazzo Pesaro Orfei), we see a painting made in 1928, The Valkyrie, Siegmund and Sieglinde. The background is very dark. We see the lovers in a tight embrace from behind; Sieglinde is clothed only in agitated transparent veiling. She is on tiptoe and the centre of the painting is the straining of her lovely buttocks against the shadowy dark male form whose dark arms clasp her naked shoulders. Fortuny invented what is still, I think, the most beautiful dress ever made for the female body – and he made it for many bodies, of many shapes.

  Morris considered himself a man of the north, and during his lifetime translated many of the sagas from Icelandic with his friend Eiríkr Magnússon – amongst these The Story of Grettir the Strong, Gunnlaug the Wormtongue and the Völsunga Saga (the story of the Volsungs and Niblungs). Morris liked the harshness, cruelty and inevitability of stories like that of Gudrun, a beautiful and strong-minded woman who, when she finds out that she was tricked into marrying the friend of the man she loves, calls on her husband to kill her lover – which brings about her husband’s own death. Morris’s poem ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is in the last volume of The Earthly Paradise, and in the mid-1870s he published The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, a poem in four books, in long rhyming couplets. His long and ambitious work, The Earthly Paradise, published in four volumes between 1868 and 1870, is about a band of Norsemen, in the late fourteenth century, fleeing the Black Death and searching for the earthly Paradise ‘where none grow old’. They end up on an island where the Greek gods are still worshipped, and ceremoniously exchange stories, the islanders from the classical mythology and epics, the Wanderers from the Norse, the Icelandic and medieval tales. This work was hugely popular in Morris’s lifetime. It is also told in couplets, this time pentameters. I bought a vellum-bound edition from a bookstall in Cambridge in 1954 but I have never been able to read it for long – and even less Sigurd the Volsung. The rhythms hack and bang – I can read it best by ‘hearing’ Morris reading it aloud as he was in the habit of doing. But this poetry lives still – the contemporary Icelandic writer Sjón uses it in his novel The Whispering Muse, in which the same device of consecutive story
telling is used on board a Norwegian ship in a fjord, collecting wood to make paper. Sjón makes his own versions of the tales from The Earthly Paradise, and from Morris’s The Life and Death of Jason. I said to Sjón that I loved Morris and wanted to read the epics, but that I found the verse forms unmanageable. He replied that they were indeed difficult, and needed to be read a little at a time, but that Morris was a great man and a great writer, and we owed it to him to read him. It is good that he is being kept alive by an Icelander, for Iceland was Morris’s vision of an essential part of his self.

  Credit 3.2

  Credit 3.3

  He went there twice, once in 1871 and once in 1873. In 1871 he had just settled his family in Kelmscott, where Janey was with Rossetti and the daughters. His life was at a crisis point and he felt he needed the distance and harshness of the imagined wild. He travelled with Eiríkr Magnússon, his friend Charles Faulkner and a stranger, W. H. Evans, ‘an officer and gentleman’. They made excursions on ponyback, and saw the volcanoes, the lava, the shores, the geysers. It was, as MacCarthy remarks, the kind of male adventure Morris liked – companionship and humour. Morris learned Icelandic from Magnússon, and became fluent. He wrote a splendid poem, ‘Iceland First Seen’.

  Lo from our loitering ship

  a new land at last to be seen;

  Toothed rocks down the side of the firth

  on the east guard a weary wide lea,

  And black slope the hillsides above,

  striped adown with their desolate green:

  And a peak rises up on the west

  from the meeting of cloud and of sea,

  Foursquare from base unto point

  like the building of Gods that have been,

  The last of that waste of the mountains

  all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey,

  And bright with the dawn that began

  just now at the ending of day.

  Ah! what came we forth for to see

  that our hearts are so hot with desire?

  Is it enough for our rest,

  the sight of this desolate strand,

  And the mountain-waste voiceless as death

  but for winds that may sleep not nor tire?

  Why do we long to wend forth

  through the length and breadth of a land,

  Dreadful with grinding of ice

  and record of scarce hidden fire,

  But that there ’mid the grey grassy dales

  sore scarred by the ruining streams

  Lives the tale of the Northland of old

  and the undying glory of dreams?

  Morris wrote a journal of this journey, which Geoffrey Grigson described as ‘the best book of travel by an English poet…which is also one of the least known’. Morris did not publish it in his lifetime. The English poet Lavinia Greenlaw published an edition, with the title Questions of Travel, in 2011. She discerns in the journal Morris’s attempt to connect with his own imagination through the harshness and pared-down simplicity of the landscape and the people’s plain lives. He described the lava, the rare plants, the birds and fish. Here is an early description of the place, seen from the ship:

  on our left was a dark brown ragged island, Papey, and many small skerries about it, and beyond that we saw the mainland, a terrible shore indeed: a great mass of dark grey mountains worked into pyramids and shelves, looking as if they had been built and half ruined; they were striped with snow high up, and wreaths of cloud dragged across them here and there, and above them were two peaks and a jagged ridge of pure white snow…

  And here is Morris riding over the plain where the adventures of the sagas took place:

  As we ride along (over the lava now) we come opposite to a flat-topped hill some way down the lava stream, and just below it opens a huge black chasm, that runs straight away south towards the lake, a great double-walled dyke, but with its walls tumbled and ruined a good deal in places: the hill is Hrafnabjörg (Raven Burg) and the chasm Hrafnagjá (Raven Rift). But as we turn west we can see, a long way off across the grey plain, a straight black line running from the foot of Armannsfell right into the lake, which we can see again hence and some way up from the lake a white line cuts the black one across. The black and white lines are the Almannagná (Great Rift) and the Öxará (Axe Water) tumbling over it. Once again that thin thread of insight and imagination which comes so seldom to us, and is such a joy when it comes, did not fail me at this first sight of the greatest marvel and most storied place of Iceland.

  Morris was very fat and unfit when he set out. He was dismayed by having to ride a pony but found he enjoyed it, and he coped well with the hard moments of the journey. Burne-Jones made a particularly cruel cartoon of Morris on a pony in Iceland. But Morris took the pony back to Kelmscott, where it became happily at home.

  Credit 3.4

  In 1878 Jane Morris and her daughters spent the winter with friends on the Italian Riviera, at Oneglia. Jenny Morris – who was affected by increasingly severe epilepsy – was seventeen. Their hostess, Rosalind Howard, reported that ‘The M’s are not quite so happy as I hoped they might be. Garden a perfect paradise but somehow the girls do not take so kindly to Italy as I hoped.’ Fiona MacCarthy observes: ‘May, evidently going through an awkward phase, announced one day that she would rather be in Iceland.’ Morris’s daughter was as fiercely northern as he was.

  —

  Fortuny’s imagery and his mythology, in keeping with the photograph of him with beard and turban, are as southern as Morris’s are northern. True, they share an interest in the matter of the Niebelungenlied, but Fortuny’s passion for the tetralogy is part of a passion for art and artifice, for the Gesamtkunstwerk, for the intricacies of the theatre. Between December 2012 and April 2013 the Museo Fortuny had a rich exhibition: Fortuny e Wagner: Il Wagnerismo nelle arte visive in Italia. This showed Fortuny’s work – both his paintings and his work on theatrical sets and lighting – in the context of a complex and varied Wagnerian interest in southern culture at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. There were paintings by many other artists as well as Fortuny – Lionello Balestrieri, Leo Putz, Alois Delug, Teodoro Wolf Ferrari amongst them. Fortuny’s own Wagner paintings are very interesting but gentler than Wagner himself. More exciting are some of the engravings, darker and tougher – Fafnir going off with the gold, Wotan striking the rock from which jet the flames that surround the Valkyrie, Mime the Nibelung seeking out soporific plants.

  I have read that Fortuny always considered himself primarily a painter, and it was illuminating to see him in the context of his family of Spanish painters at an exhibition in New York, in 2012, at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute. This exhibition showed some of the works of the Madrazo artistic dynasty, as well as Fortuny’s own. There were paintings and drawings by his great-grandfather José de Madrazo, his grandfather Federico de Madrazo, and his uncle Raimundo de Madrazo, who was a close friend and sometime collaborator of Fortuny’s father, Fortuny y Marsal. After Fortuny y Marsal’s early death, Raimundo became influential in his nephew’s education. The New York exhibition showed paintings by these men, comprising both sun-drenched southern landscapes and gardens, and Arab clothing and objets d’art. There were wonderful paintings by Fortuny y Marsal and Raimundo de Madrazo of the garden of the Fortuny residence, c.1872 and 1877, showing tall, still yews or cedars, a still path and an elegant white-gowned woman with a scarlet parasol and a fan, strolling peacefully. There was a painting by Raimundo de Madrazo of The Pavilion of Carlos V in the Gardens of the Alcazar of Seville (1868), with the same mixture of bright sun and sharp shade, stillness and quiet – a red-robed figure is seated talking to a gardener, in front of a carved wall and a terrace, and in the fore-ground is a group of animated small pecking birds, a watering can and a rake. There were also paintings by Fortuny y Marsal of beautifully observed Moroccans, and an animated almost grotesque etching of a snake charmer, lying on a carpet and watched by a tall stork-like bird. Federico studied
dress in Egypt and elsewhere, and made elaborate records of costumes and clothes. The great-grandfather José de Madrazo painted classical dramas, travelled to Rome to study ancient ruins and art, and held the view, the art historian José Luis Diez noted, that ‘ancient Greece was the real classical civilisation, Rome being no more than a pale copy’. Fortuny y Marsal collected objects, according to Guillermo de Osma, ‘tapestries, Japanese armour, Hispano-Moresque weapons and ceramics, and ceramics, fabrics, paintings’. Fortuny was continuing a tradition, or several connected traditions, although he was also, as a designer, striking out on his own. In his turn he travelled to Africa and to Greece, making paintings and taking photographs of Morocco and Egypt, Greece and Crete, the Parthenon and street Moroccans. In 2004 the Museo Fortuny and the Civic Museums of Venice put on an exhibition of Fortuny’s photographs from a journey he made with Henriette, in 1938, to Egypt.* He was an excellent photographer, particularly of simple scenes of ordinary people, lives and buildings.

  Credit 3.5

  If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history. Fortuny’s work is intimately involved in this modernist rethinking, most particularly of the Cretan civilisation in Knossos, and the imagination of a ‘Minoan’ dynasty, as opposed to the Achaeans of mainland Greece. Heinrich Schliemann made various attempts in the 1870s to discover and dig up the remains of Troy. There is an excellent account of Schliemann’s discoveries, ‘theories’, fantasies and myths in Cathy Gere’s fascinating book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, to which I am much indebted. Schliemann invented Germanic theories about Troy and the buried treasure of Priam and the body of Agamemnon. He played with ideas of an Aryan civilisation, and used the symbolism of the swastika, a faked image of which appeared on the vulva of a lead figurine of a goddess, Ilios. Schliemann’s work was taken up by German Nationalist movements, as they elaborated the idea of racial purity, Aryan civilisation and particularly the symbolism of the swastika.