Not only must a theorist be tinctured with philosophy to make an excellent picture, but its viewers, like the painter, must also be “filled with a great variety of learning.” This was the opinion of Arundel’s librarian Junius, who continues, “without this purifying of our wit, enriching of our memory, enabling of our judgment, inlaying of our conceit,” we will never be able to get beyond evaluation of coloring and draftsmanship. An amateur properly prepared can judge a painting as accurately as its creator.110 Wotton had considered the matter. “An excellent Piece of Painting,” he said, becomes “an Artificiall Miracle” when viewed “philosophically.”111 Viewing is hard work. “The Expressions are the Touchstone of the Painters Understanding…But there is much Sense requir’d in the Spectator to perceive, as in the Painter to perform them.”112 Would not a philosophical critic have thought Cleyn’s rendition of tutor and pupil, with its economical evocation of their mood and bond, superior to Jan Lievens’s sumptuous presentation of King Charles’s nephew, Charles Louis, and his tutor (Figure 54)? Submerged under his elaborate drapery and placed before the huge book he is supposed to be studying, Charles Louis looks appropriately despondent, and there is no rapport between him and his tutor, whom we may suppose the chief cause of his discomfort.113 Someone in Rembrandt’s studio handled the same subject more gently in a portrait, perhaps of Charles Louis’s brother Rupert: the tutor is not so overbearing, the book is smaller, and the boy regards it intelligently. In neither case is the book identifiable (Figure 55).114
Figure 54 Jan Lievens, Prince Charles Louis and his Tutor (1631).
Figure 55 Gerrit Dou?, Prince Rupert? and his Tutor (c.1630).
Viewers of Cleyn’s mysterious masterpiece did not need to know much about the sitters, or even recognize them, to philosophize about the painting. The power of a portrait is not in the identity of the sitter, who, if not uncommonly famous or infamous, is soon forgotten. The poet Abraham Cowley, who was in Oxford about the time Cleyn painted our picture, noticed the frenzied portrait painting of cavaliers and the fleeting interest in their identity. “The man who did this picture draw ǀ Will swear next day my face he never saw.”115 Put in a little puzzle like a reference to Galileo, however, and your portrait of an unknown boy might live for hundreds of years.
9
The Image
The society in which the Bankes family lived and worked was constantly exposed to old star lore and new astronomy through almanacs, plays, literature, handbooks, and political and religious discourse. The better instructed must have known enough to recognize the allusion to Galileo in Cleyn’s painting. What did it mean to them? Galileo’s way of exploring answers to difficult questions, by way of dialogue among quasi-fictitious characters, suggests a route to an answer. We shall have a dialogue. As in Galileo’s, the characters will take positions they would have assumed in life: Dr Williams (MW) resembles the omniscient Salviati and John Bankes (JB) the sharp-witted, commonsensical Sagredo. Francis Cleyn (FC), like Simplicio, is a gentle, composite figure, but of master artists, not of slavish philosophers. There is a fourth interlocutor, offstage but never far away, whose ideas direct most of the conversation: Galileo himself in his Dialogue, Sir John Bankes in ours. Also, as in a Galilean dialogue, we must have digressions.
The conversation takes place in Gray’s Inn, in the rooms of John’s brother Ralph, who is studying law. Cleyn’s painting has probably hung there since its completion a decade earlier. The Bankes family had chambers even after Sir John’s death; he had enrolled his eldest sons in Gray’s Inn during their childhood to encourage them to study law after terms at Oxford or Cambridge.1 At the time of our dialogue, John is a confident, wealthy young man, transformed by travel from the feckless youth we knew. He had gone to France in 1645, improved his knowledge of French in Paris, and soon set off for Italy. On his way he fell in with a Dutch jurist who stretched his mind with the grotesque claim that the university of Leyden, with its Scaliger, Grotius, and infamous Arminius, was more distinguished than the much older Oxford of Bainbridge and Greaves.2
Threading his way between the two Italys of the guidebooks, between “the Nurse of Policy, Learning, Musique, Architecture, and Limning” and the gymnasium of vice, epicurizing, whoring, poisoning, sodomizing, and atheism, further broadened him. If he acted on his guidebook’s report that a traveler is “accounted little lesse than a foole, who is not melancholy once a day,” he might have passed for an intellectual.3 In any case, he took on enough of the continental to practice the bad habit, censured by the guidebooks, of acting the foreigner on his return. Or so we infer from a note that “Giovanni Bankes” addressed to his acquaintance from Oxford days, Justinian Isham, “tra i boschi ameni a campo Elisée di Richemont.”4
Cleyn had substituted graphic for tapestry design as his main work after completing our painting. He moved to London, to the parish of Covent Garden, where he remains, buried in Inigo Jones’s oddly oriented church. He stayed busy making hundreds of drawings for coffee-table books for Ogilby, the limping dancing master who translated Aesop and Virgil into limp verse. A few of the drawings from which the engravers worked survive. An exemplary one shows poor doomed infatuated Dido leading Aeneas to their cave to escape the downpour that interrupts their hunt, while in the background the monster Rumor, covered in mouths and ears, her head in the clouds, wings open, stands ready to spread the lovers’ doings far and wide (Figure 56).
Figure 56 Francis Cleyn, Dido, Aeneas, and Rumor (c.1654).
The Mortlake works had scraped by with a few commissions for old sets until Cromwell took an interest in tapestries and Cleyn could return to making cartoons. The themes appointed, the Story of Abraham and the Triumphs of Caesar, suited the Protector’s mix of religion and militarism.5 By a rare agreement between king and parliament, Cleyn kept tools and designs from Mortlake in his London studio, where they joined paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and Van Dyck. There were excellent copies of other masterworks, including the Raphael cartoons, all done by Cleyn’s two sons.6 To his great sorrow and the world’s loss, both died young, leaving, as his last artistic offspring, his daughter Penelope, who gained some reputation as a miniaturist.7 Cleyn gave some of his select collection, regrettably identified only as “draughts and pieces of paintings of sundry excellent masters,” to John Tradescant for preservation, along with gifts from King Charles, the Duke of Buckingham, Laud, Wotton, Digby, and the Countess of Arundel, in his famous Ark.8
The third of our interlocutors, Maurice Williams, had risen in the medical world since leaving Oxford. In 1651, he became an “elect,” or senior member, of the College of Physicians. He had made his peace with parliament, which sent him and two other physicians to Ireland in 1652 on urgent unspecified business. He had property there to dispose of, evidently not extensive, for which he compounded with parliament for £20. If he paid this ransom at the same rate as the Bankeses, the property would have been worth £400 to £500. So far the historical record extends.
At John Bankes’s request, Williams arrived at Gray’s Inn before Cleyn for a consultation about some medical advice John had received when taking the waters at Bath.9 Their exchanges showed something of the doctor’s erudition, discernment, and humor. The advice in question had to do with the difficult question, still with us, of what and how much to drink in England. Could one domesticate the behavior described in the adage Bankes had recorded in his travel diary, perhaps enviously, Qui bue si garde sobre se rend italien, “if you can drink and stay sober you make yourself an Italian”? His doctor in Bath, Tobias Venner, had reassured him: do not drink water unless your stomach is preternaturally hot and dry. Drink beer or, better, wine, as it strengthens natural heat, helps digestion, combats flatulence, and “taketh away the sadnesse, and other hurts of melancholy.” Of course, Dr Venner advised, no one should drink immoderately except kings and great officers of state. Children under 14, youths under 25, and men under 35 should be abstemious, temperate, and careful, respectively; but over 35 you can drink wine as you pl
ease, for “it mightily strengtheneth all the powers and faculties of the body,” especially in people in the later period of old age—that is, over 60.10 A wise physician! There remained the question whether wine should be consumed hot, cold, or tepid.
JB. As you know, Sir Maurice, I suffer from a melancholy stomach and learned from Venner that cold was bad for it. He says that the omniscient Lord Chancellor Bacon recommended that we should warm our stomachs with a hot drink before dining even in midsummer. Bacon proved the danger of excessive cold very dramatically if it is true that he died at Lord Arundel’s house after trying to stuff a chicken with snow.11
MW. Bacon did not die from stuffing snow into a chicken but from swallowing medicines he prescribed for himself.12 Incidentally, the custom of drinking wine before the meal is at least as old as Tiberius. As for cold drinks, unnaturally cooled by snow or ice, they are a damaging luxury. But I’ve seen Florentines put ice in wine and the Sienese keep wine jars in cold water, on the advice of no less a man than Girolamo Mercurio, who doctored Galileo.13 Mixing wine with cold water, however, can produce excellent results. When the Nymphs washed Bacchus they used cold water. Symbolic, no doubt. Plutarch advises watering wine by harmonic proportions: 3 parts water to 2 of wine (a fifth, musically speaking) for the merriest; the octave (2:1) for the staid; and the product of the two (3:1) for the abstemious. Here is another curiosity from Plutarch for you. After the ancients forbade women to drink wine they invented kissing to discover infractions.14
JB. Venner says that a ratio of 2 or even 3 parts of water to 1 of wine is suitable for southerners, but 1 to 1 is the recipe for England, and 0 to 1 for men of your age. He says nothing about kissing but urges frequent cleaning of the teeth and avoidance of radishes, which might be intended as a preparation for it.15
MW. Excellent advice, all of it, but enough of it. Let’s prepare for our talk by looking over Cleyn’s illustrations for Sandys’s Ovid. They are very clever, attractive in themselves and a great temptation to play at sortes virgilianae. We need only open the book at random. Well, well, here is an augury, Cleyn’s depiction of bugonia, that queer old practice of growing bees from the carcasses of slaughtered cattle (Figure 57). Bees! No doubt we shall have sweet conversation as we buzz about our portrait. There is Aristaeus, who invented or perfected the practice; Cleyn has him appear a little perplexed by his success.16 It reminds me of the conclave that elected Urban VIII when I was in Italy. Barberini and his bees emerged from it over the bodies of several cardinals who died of heat or old age during their long burial in the Vatican. Ah, here is Mr Cleyn.
Figure 57 Francis Cleyn, Bugonia, from Virgil’s Georgics, book IV, in John Olgilby, Virgil (1654).
FC. I apologize, gentlemen, for my tardiness. The fields are wet and though I picked my way carefully I got moist in the nth degree, as old John Dee might have said. He made algibberish out of everything.17 It is a beautiful place, Gray’s Inn, but a little isolated. Yes, thank you, a cup of sherris-sack, just the thing for a cold stomach.
JB. Well, here is the painting. What do you think of it?
FC. It needs cleaning. The London smoke ruins everything even in these outskirts. But I’m glad to see that the Galileo emblem still stands out clearly.
JB. That comes to the heart of the question quickly enough. How did you think to put it there?
Gaps
FC. It wasn’t my idea. Dr Greaves brought it to me. He said that I should take care to put it in the painting, but not paint in it, which I suppose was a mathematician’s joke. I knew the book. I had looked at a copy here in London quite carefully, to study the design of its frontispiece, an art in which I can claim a professional interest. It is one of the most brilliant frontispieces I know, maybe the most brilliant. Just the spacing of the figures is stupendous! It is so singular, it is instantly recognizable—only by people who know the book, of course. The brilliance is, I say, in the spacing: the figures evidently are engaged in friendly conversation, but one of them just as clearly opposes the other two and is somehow the strongest. And that is shown just by the spacing and the attitudes. Brilliant! And to think that della Bella was only 20 when he conceived it.
MW. It is a very clever design. He did something similar for a book in my field by the chief physician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Giovanni Nardi. Della Bella needed tact as well as talent to do both jobs at the same time. Nardi rated his fellow courtier Galileo an arrogant thieving novelty hunter for pinching the idea of the telescope from della Porta and the idiocy of a moving earth from Pythagoras. Della Bella’s frontispiece to Nardi’s book, which is about milk, plays with three figures separated two to one as in the Dialogue (Figure 58): two sick rustics offer Aesculapius what seems to be wine and burnt offerings to effect a cure; he points to a statue of a woman from whose breasts milk is pouring into a pool. Milk not wine is nature’s food.18
Figure 58 Stefano della Bella, frontispiece to Giovanni Nardi, Lacta physica analysis (1634).
FC. Both drawings use the convention of a stage or portal where allegorical figures advertise the nature of the entertainment or instruction discoverable within.19 For the Dialogue, della Bella turned the stage into a strand on which his three figures talk under a curtain carrying the title and raised to reveal a harbor (see Figure 3).
MW. And on the strand, for the cognoscenti, are strewn some arrows and cannon balls from Galileo’s experiments.
FC. I should correct myself: the figures do not talk. Their stance conveys their meaning. Compare Marshall’s frontispiece to Wilkins’ book, where each person says something about his position (see Figure 25); in my opinion, a picture should tell its own story without reliance on written clues. In Marshall’s frontispiece to our late king’s ghostly testament, Eikon basilike (1649) (Figure 59), the suffering sovereign talks to himself. “Caeli specto beatam et aeternam,” “Mundi calco splendidam et gravem,” “Christi tracto asperam et levem.” Even a rock speaks (“immota triumphans”) and also a tree (“crescit sub pondere virtus”)!20 And the frontispiece he did for Mr Quarles’s Fons lachrymarum! Five people talking! I remember a badly drawn King Charles bending over a woman and saying something like, “look at the face, behold mine.”21 Really!
Figure 59 William Marshall, frontispiece to Eikon basilike (1649).
JB. But perhaps you carried your principle too far, Mr Cleyn, in omitting the author and title of Galileo’s book from the impression of it in our painting.
FC. But does that not make the question why that particular book, once identified, is there, all the more worthy of investigation? Only people who had seen it before and knew the circumstances of your family, Mr Bankes, could interpret it.
MW. We shall go there in just a minute Mr Cleyn. First I want to say a good word for Marshall’s art. He can be quite witty. I’ll give you two examples. One is his adaptation of the title page of a favorite book of mine, Bacon’s Novum organum, to suit a recent edition of the Advancement of Learning. The original presents the Pillars of Hercules as the gateway to discovery, or the proscenium to the theater of the new world, under a slogan taken from the prophet Daniel, Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia, “many will pass through and knowledge will be increased.”22 In Marshall’s version, the pillars consist of columns of books surmounted by obelisks, one reading “Oxonium,” the other, “Cantabridgia” (Figure 60). Oxford’s obelisk stands on Bacon’s most important works and a pedestal marked “Science” advertising tough subjects such as history, philosophy, and poetry, all acquired by reason; Cambridge’s obelisk stands on Bacon’s slighter works and its pedestal, marked Philosophy, advertises its humanizing, natural, and divine divisions, acquired with the help of God. A terrestrial globe (the visible world) and the sun shine over practical Oxford, an empty sphere (the intellectual world) and a moon dominate lunatic Cambridge; and two owls holding torches illuminate the name of the printer and his employer, the University of Oxford.23
Figure 60 William Marshall, frontispiece to Francis Bacon, Advancement of Science (16
40).
FC. I admit, there is something clever in that.
MW. The second piece I have in mind is the befuddling frontispiece to George Wither’s Collection of Emblems. Although he had no idea what most of them meant, that did not stop him, or anyone else, “Who many times, before this Taske is ended ǀ Must pick out Moralls, where none was intended.”24 Let us keep this salutary warning in mind!
JB. I suppose that Galileo must have had a hand in della Bella’s drawing for the Dialogue.
FC. He had some training at the famous art school in Florence, the Accademia del Disegno. And you can see in the extraordinary drawings of the surface of the moon in Sidereus nuncius that he knew about foreshortening and other tricks of the trade.
The Ghost of Galileo Page 34
