Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny

by A. S. Byatt

  Credit 5.2

  Once I started looking closely for them in Fortuny’s work I found page after page of different pomegranates, which slot into place in the brain as a complicated pattern once one is alerted to them. There are stylised fat pomegranates like stolid onions in a bracelet of flowers in gold-printed silk velvets, dyed with cochineal. There are Renaissance and other patterns on velvet, with large amphorae between volutes of acanthus, from which spring vine tendrils bearing pomegranates, pears and a large tulip. Others have Islamic decorative features, including the Rumi leaf. There is a delicious fifteenth-century delicate cotton with twining pink linear forms, branchlets ending in pomegranates, sinuous pink branches like snakes ending in thistles grasping the pomegranates, and a central pomegranate, realistic and onion-solid, surrounded by a circle of solid pink florets. Fortuny used a small motif on a faded blue ground, which ‘may be seen in fabrics worn by figures in Renaissance paintings, especially those of Piero della Francesca’ (Doretta Davanzo Poli). Here the stone-coloured pomegranates sprout in threes from a branch curiously and formally knotted with human handmade knots. Fortuny, like his mother, collected fabrics and used old ones as inspiration – he collected fragments of old Cretan printed cloths, and copied the designs.

  Fortuny made rich designs for church garments, for grandes dames and for bishops, for funerals and for dancers and actors onstage. His copes gave prominent place to pomegranates. A bishop’s cope made of gold-printed scarlet velvet, with patterns adapted from fifteenth-century church vestments, is rich with pomegranates of varying sizes – a huge one in the middle of the back, large ones – dissimilar in design – below it, with red flowers sprouting from the round, pointed-leaf-coated base. When you look carefully there are more and more pomegranates – tiny ones in groups of three, amongst curls of acanthus leaves. Fortuny invented ways of adding new metallic colours to his fabrics, effects of silver and gold, without using the metals themselves. There is a particularly splendid cope, made in 1936, in a dark silk velvet, with an encircled outline of a golden pomegranate in the middle of the shoulders at the back, beneath which is a design of ordered chaos, curling seawaves or acanthus leaves, richly golden, with thin curling tendrils inside the curl of the leaf. There is (to a British eye) nothing specifically religious about what is being celebrated – just beauty and growth.

  He spread the pomegranate on a long court mantle, in gold- and silver-printed velvet, trimmed and lined with fur, in a Renaissance style, with woody branches rising solidly up the back of the garment, bearing slimmer branches thick with fat pomegranates, bristling with spines, bursting with fruit, using the long upward space to splendid effect.

  If the pomegranate was used religiously as a symbol of plenty, of life within death, the fruit could also be used to imply and to decorate the female body, rich, promising, fertile. Fortuny used it frequently.

  There is a long coat in the Museo Fortuny of which I have only seen small black-and-white photographs. It is described as having a ‘pomegranate motif of Renaissance inspiration’. It is covered with bold pomegranate images with fanned-out feathery tops – what struck me was that there is a very fat pomegranate sited where the coat-sides meet, and just at the most delicate part of the female anatomy. I’ve seen more than one of these photographs and the pomegranate is solidly there. It would be interesting to see it in motion.

  Maybe the most beautiful pomegranate accompanies Doretta Davanzo Poli’s essay on textiles and clothes, in the book she edited with Anne-Marie Deschodt. It is on the upper part of a Fortuny pleated dress in a colour somewhere between dark pink and pale red – Davanzo Poli calls it ‘ruby’, but what I see in the photograph is a shining rose crossed with rust – and no one reading what I have written will imagine the colour very well, or at all. It is easy to believe that no two Fortuny dresses were the same colour. The pomegranate is in soft gold, and the image covers the whole chest, above a wide, waist-holding belt with gold decorations on a slightly orange ground. At the centre of the image is a substantial floating pomegranate. It took me some time to see that the image is in fact printed on a transparent overdress in a more mulberry gauze. It took me longer to see what a proliferation of pomegranates surrounded the central one. There are ten regular pomegranate shapes arrayed around the central one, as if growing out of it. Then there is an outer circle, growing right and left out of a gold pendant near the wearer’s navel. Then it becomes clear that the outer circle too is composed of triads of upward-pointing pomegranates, somehow sprinkled with quite different and much more realistic burst-open fruits, showing dark seeds. It is pure Fortuny – the image is one whole image, and when one starts to analyse or deconstruct it, it presents many agreeable puzzles and pleasures.

  Credit 5.3

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  In 1877 Morris designed a completely different pomegranate, which was printed onto cotton and tusser silk by Warners of Braintree. It combines several formal motifs, on an unusually pale (white) ground, covered with an allover pattern of curling fronds of leaves, simply outlined in dark blue, with sprouting small eight-petalled red flowers. The motifs themselves are defined and imposing, outlines in dark blue leaf patterns, containing abstract designs of flower forms, or hemispheres. With most of Morris’s work one needs to look closely to see everything and relate all the parts to the whole. Here, if one draws back, and looks at the whole design, all the abstract forms suddenly become solid and very much pomegranates, with sprouting leaves on top, or curved round the fruit, ready to be pulled away. The pomegranate with the high sprout is surrounded by ten smaller fruits on stems, while the fat fruit is surrounded by the small red flowers. All of it – the white ground, the perhaps oriental design, the heavy reds and blues on the light background – are unexpected and disturbing. It is related to the printed cotton Snakeshead of 1876 which has a wonderful combination of small leafy designs in various blues on black, including recognisable (small) snakeshead fritillaries such as we used to find in meadows. There are large imposing motifs in reds and golds standing out from this background, like flames or large leaves, balanced on formalised stems.

  These designs make me think of something else Morris said in his lecture, ‘Some Hints on Pattern Designing’. The following quotation will be long – Morris’s written voice is as exciting as his images. He says that ornamental pattern work must possess three qualities: ‘beauty, imagination and order’. Of order, he says that:

  Without it neither the beauty nor the imagination could be made visible; it is the bond of their life and as good as creates them, if they are to be of any use to people in general. Let us see therefore, with what instruments it works, how it brings together the material and spiritual sides of the craft.

  I have already said something of the way in which it deals with the materials which nature gives it, and how, as it were, it both builds a wall against vagueness and opens a door therein for imagination to come in by. Now this is done by means of treatment which is called, as one may say technically, the conventionalising of nature. That is to say, order invents beautiful and natural forms, which, appealing to a reasonable and imaginative person, will remind him not only of the part of nature which, to his mind at least, they represent, but also of much that lies beyond that part. I have already hinted at some reasons for this treatment of natural objects. You can’t bring a whole countryside, or a whole field, into your room, nor even a whole bush; and, moreover, only a very skilled craftsman can make any approach to what might pass with us in moments of excitement for an imitation of such-like things. These are the limitations which are common to every form of the lesser arts; but besides these, every material in which household goods are fashioned imposes certain limitations within which the craftsman must work. Here again, is a wall of order against vagueness, and a door for the imagination. For you must understand from the first that these limitations are as far as possible from being hindrances to beauty in the several crafts. On the contrary, they are incitements and helps to its attainment; those who find them
irksome are not born craftsmen, and the periods of art that try to get rid of them are declining periods.

  Credit 5.4

  The earlier pomegranates by Morris which I have described learn how to show the pomegranate through the patterns of its depiction. They increase both in accuracy and subtlety. This almost abstract order, imposed by its designer as a needlework designer might impose repetitions and variations, is different – it still relies on the order of the shape of growing pomegranates for its own intrinsic order, but the artist has used that order to make a form for quite different shapes of patterns and colours. Altogether they show the endlessness of what is there to be imagined and shaped.

  BIRD

  In 1916 Proust wrote to his friend Maria Hahn, who was also a close friend of Fortuny, with a string of precise questions about Fortuny’s sources and images.

  Savez-vous du moins si jamais Fortuny dans des robes de chambre a pris pour motifs de ces oiseaux accouplés, buvant par exemple dans un vase, qui sont si fréquents à St Marc, dans les chapiteaux byzantins. Et savez-vous aussi s’il y a à Venise des tableaux (je voudrais quelques titres) où il y a des manteaux, des robes, dont Fortuny se serait (ou aurait pu) s’inspirer?

  Do you know, at least, whether Fortuny has ever used as a decoration for his dressing-gowns those pairs of birds, drinking from a vase for example, which appear so frequently in St Mark’s on Byzantine capitals? And do you know if in Venice there are any paintings (I would like some titles) in which any coats or dresses appear that Fortuny may have (or could have) gained inspiration from?

  Maria encouraged him, and Proust in his novel subsequently described Albertine’s Fortuny dress, which the narrator had given her.

  Elle était envahie d’ornementation arabe comme Venise, comme les palais de Venise dissimulés à la façon des sultanes derrière un voile ajouré de pierres comme les reliures de la Bibliothèque Ambrosienne, comme les colonnes desquelles les oiseaux orientaux qui signifient alternativement la mort et la vie, se répétaient dans le miroitement de l’étoffe.

  It swarmed with Arabic ornaments like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like the sultan’s wives behind a screen of pierced stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that symbolised alternately life and death were repeated in the mirror of the fabric.

  Peter Collier has written an amazingly interesting book, Proust and Venice, in which he studies Proust’s idea of Venice, and the images from Venice which partly inform and construct À la recherche du temps perdu. He has two chapters on Fortuny. In the first of these he goes into the birds of Venice. He finds them – particularly phoenixes and peacocks – in the buildings and works of art. And he sees Fortuny as instrumental in the resurrection of the art of the past.

  Birds in Venice are like pomegranates – they are recognisably symbolic, and many of them derive from Byzantium and the East, from North African and Arab cultures. As Proust noted, they come in pairs. Sometimes they are face-to-face, sometimes they look away from each other, sometimes their necks are entwined, sometimes they are one two-headed bird. Peter Collier observes that the phoenix is ‘a well-known Christian and Venetian symbol but it is not actually prevalent in the city. The peacock is.’ He gives a spirited description of symbolic animals and birds in cathedrals, especially in San Marco.

  It is everywhere the peacock…symbol of immortality and resurrection, which triumphs in Venice. On either side of the chancel screen in Torcello cathedral a pair of bas-relief peacocks supping from a chalice guards the approach to the altar, and St Mark’s (despite being a veritable menagerie of gryphons, St John’s eagles, Mark’s lions and doves of the holy spirit) reserves pride of place to two enormous pairs of mosaic peacocks, a pair on either side of the floor of the nave, as well as displaying one bas-relief pair on the parapet of the first-floor gallery and another couple of pairs inset in the outer north-west wall. Outside the north front of the basilica is a peacock surmounting a globe, symbolising the triumph of the spirit over the world of earthly desires, and there is another pair of these carved beside the altar steps.

  Ruskin was amazed by the birds. He describes them in The Stones of Venice, amongst other beasts.

  Underfoot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery, one picture passing into another, as in a dream; forms beautiful and terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents and ravening beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them drink from running fountains and feed from vases of crystal; the passions and pleasures of human life symbolised together and the mystery of its redemption.

  This is quoted from Morris’s edition of The Stones of Venice – a point of contact between Morris and Venice and, at a distance, Fortuny. Ruskin illustrated his text with drawings of the birds inset in the outer wall above the west door. Collier describes this work:

  a brace of drinking peacocks above a pair of similar but intertwined birds, and [Ruskin] copies in the same illustration carvings of another pair of peacocks drinking from a chalice they perch on, and also a pair of birds linked at the waist which are either a double eagle or twin phoenixes (it is difficult to see whether they are on fire or merely have spiky feathers).

  Fortuny’s garments are intimately involved in the relationship between the narrator of À la recherche and his mistress Albertine, who eventually leaves him, wearing a Fortuny cloak and taking nothing else. A quarrel between the lovers takes place whilst Albertine is wearing a Fortuny dress, which Collier describes as symbolising an ‘intricate conjugation of death and desire, art and resurrection’. There has been some discussion as to whether Fortuny made dresses with the phoenixes, eagles and peacocks which are used as symbols elsewhere in the novel. Even if there is no record of a Fortuny dress with images of phoenixes Proust may well have invented one. There is a scene in which the narrator is trying to make love to Albertine, who is wearing a Fortuny dress embellished with birds – phoenixes or peacocks precisely. The narrator tries to make Albertine take off the dress.

  Since you’re being kind enough to stay here a moment to console me, you ought to take off your gown, it’s too hot, too stiff, I dare not approach you for fear of crumpling that fine stuff, and there are those fateful birds between us. Undress, my darling.

  The phoenixes or peacocks, oiseaux fatidiques, symbolise death and resurrection. The embrace crushes the separate birds together into an embrace of their own, which Albertine experiences as baleful. Marcel kisses her again, and Venice with her.

  I kissed her then a second time, pressing to my heart the shimmering golden azure of the Grand Canal and the mating birds, symbols of death and resurrection. But for the second time, instead of returning my kiss, she drew away with the sort of instinctive and baleful obstinacy of animals that feel the hand of death.

  Collier argues: ‘It would be in the spirit of Proust’s creativity to suppose that the phoenix/peacock motifs are separate on the material, and that we are invited to imagine the embrace itself crushing together in the folds of the cloth birds which are separately drawn.’

  The movement of birds on the cloth of dresses and curtains is exciting in itself. Morris too made plans for this. But before leaving the work of Peter Collier I’d like to mention his elegant and convincing contribution to the discussion of the importance of Fortuny’s work, and whether he is original or derivative. Fortuny, he says, was part of the constant movement of death and resurrection of art, which the birds also signify. Fortuny finds ancient images of creatures, or clothing such as Carpaccio’s dresses and jackets, and restores them to new life. Proust presents this in terms of the drinking birds.

  Credit 6.1

  These Fortuny gowns, one of which I had seen Madame de Guermantes wearing, were those which Elstir, when he told us about the magnificent garments of the women of Carpaccio’s and Titian’s day, had promised would imminently return from their ashes, as magnificent as of old, for everything must return in time, as it is written beneath the vaults of St Mark’s, and p
roclaimed, as they drink from the urns of marble and jasper of the Byzantine capitals, by the birds which symbolise at once death and resurrection.

  Fortuny the artist, Proust affirms, is the agent of resurrection – as Collier says, Proust ‘sets his derivative dress-designer, Fortuny, at the apex of creativity’.

  And Collier illustrates this with two pieces of cloth from the Museo Fortuny – one ‘designed after a twelfth-century Byzantine original’ depicting ‘a series of two-headed eagles’ with ‘strikingly peacock-like plumage’, and one with two dancing fighting birds, facing each other, wings outstretched.

  De Osma also reproduces images of Fortuny fabrics where naturalistic birds appear as part of the general impression of a design. There is a cotton with a sixteenth-century Italian-style motif which shows a trellis with climbing vines in a mixture of dull reds and greens, with leaves and bunches of fruits. It takes a moment to see that there is a bird there at all. It is hidden behind stems and leaves and is the same colour as they are. Its sharp-beaked naturalistic head can be seen pecking at the stem. Its tail merges into the foliage and the shadows. It is hard to see, and would be even more difficult if the cloth were moving. On a cotton fabric with images inspired by Persian textiles is a row of tiny birds melding into the background, again almost invisible because they are so small. I have wondered who was meant to make these images out and how. What is the beholder meant to see on a sweeping gown or a folded coat? I had never asked myself that. I will come back to it.