Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

all religious pictures, and ruled that "God has cursed all those who

make them." `063631 Commissions fell, and in 1532 Holbein returned

to England.

There he painted portraits so plentifully that most of the figures

dominating the English scene in those turbulent years are still

alive by the magic of Holbein's hand. In the Queen's Library at

Windsor are eighty-seven sketches in charcoal or chalk, some for

cartoons, most of them for portraits; apparently the artist required

only one or two sittings from his subjects, and then painted their

likeness from such sketches. The Hanseatic merchants in London

solicited his art, but did not inspire his best. For the Guildhall

of the Hanse he painted two murals preserved only in copies or

drawings: one represented The Triumph of Poverty, the other The

Triumph of Riches; both are marvels of individualized character,

living movement, and coherent design, and illustrate the motto of

the Guild- "Gold is the father of joy and the son of care; he who

lacks it is sad, he who has it is uneasy." `063632

Thomas Cromwell, who was to exemplify this adage, submitted his hard

face and soft frame to Holbein's brush in 1534. Through him the artist

found access to the highest figures at the court. He painted The

French Ambassadors, and one of them, Charles de Saulier, he portrayed

with especial success, revealing the man beneath the vestments and

insignia of office. Four others- Sir Henry Guilford (controller of the

royal household), Sir Nicholas Carew (royal equerry to the King),

Robert Cheseman (royal falconer to the King), and Dr. John Chambers

(physician to the King)- suggest the thick skins that alone could

safely live near the parboiled King. Holbein became one of them

about 1537 as official court painter. He received a workshop of his

own in Whitehall Palace, dwelt in comfort, had mistresses and bastards

like anybody else, and dressed in color and silk. `063633 He was

called upon to decorate rooms, design ceremonial garments,

bookbindings, weapons, tableware, seals, royal buttons and buckles,

and the gems that Henry presented to his wives. In 1538 the King

sent him to Brussels to paint Princess Christine of Denmark; she

proved quite charming, and Henry would gladly have had her, but she

took Duke Francis of Lorraine instead; perhaps she preferred to hang

in a gallery rather than die on the block. Holbein took the

opportunity to visit Basel briefly; he arranged an annuity of forty

guilders ($1,000?) for his wife, and hurried back to London. Soon

thereafter came the commission to paint Anne of Cleves; Holbein almost

foreshadowed the result in the sad eyes of the portrait now in the

Louvre.

For the King himself he painted several large pictures, nearly all

lost. One survives in the Barber Surgeons' Hall in London: Henry VIII

Granting a Charter of Incorporation to the Barber Surgeons'

Company; Henry dominates the scene in his robes of state. The

artist made appealing portraits of Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour,

and the fifth wife, Catherine Howard. When Henry himself sat or

stood for Holbein the painter rose to the challenge, and produced

portraits surpassed in his own work only by the Louvre and Basel

pictures of Erasmus. The portrait of 1536 shows the monarch

Teutonically pompous and stout. Henry liked it despite himself, and

commissioned Holbein to paint the royal family as a fresco in

Whitehall Palace; this mural was destroyed by fire in 1698, but a copy

made in 1667 for Charles II reveals a masterly design: at the upper

left Henry VII, pious and modest; lower, his son, brandishing the

symbols of power and spreading his legs like a colossus; at the

right his mother and his third wife; and in the center a marble

monument retailing in Latin the virtues of the kings. The figure of

Henry VIII was elaborated with such realism that a legend arose

about persons entering the room and mistaking the portrait for the

living King. In 1540 Holbein painted a still more imposing Henry VIII

in Wedding Dress. Finally (1542) he displayed Henry in the

deterioration of mind and body. Nemesis here worked leisurely,

lengthening the revenge of the gods from clean or sudden death to

prolonged and ignominious decay.

Two lovely pictures redeem the royal gallery: one of Prince Edward

at the age of two, all innocence; the other of Edward aged six (in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art). This second portrait is a delight to

behold. We may judge the art of Holbein when we see him, within a year

or two, portray unflinchingly the obese pride of the father, and

then catch with such mysterious skill the guileless kindliness of

the son.

At forty-five (1542) the artist pictured himself again, and with the

same objectivity with which he had depicted the King: a suspicious,

pugnacious fellow with carelessly kept graying hair and beard; and

once more (1543) in a roundel showing him in a gentler mood. In that

year plague came to London, and chose him as one of its victims.

Technically he was one of the supreme painters. He saw meticulously,

and so portrayed; every line, color, or attitude, every incidence or

variation of light, that could reveal significance was caught and

pinned down upon the paper, linen, wood, or wall. What accuracy in the

line, what depth and smoothness and warmth in the color, what skill in

ordering details into a unified composition! But in many of the

portraits, where the object was not the subject but the fee, we miss

the sympathy that could see, and feel with, a man's secret soul; we

find it in the Louvre and Basel Erasmus, and in the picture of his

family. We miss, except in the Meyer Madonna, the idealism that

ennobled the realism in the Van Eycks' Adoration of the Lamb. His

indifference to religion kept him short of the grandeur of

Grunewald, and marked him off from Durer, who always had one foot in

the Middle Ages. Holbein was neither Renaissance like Titian nor

Reformation like Cranach; he was German-Dutch-Flemish-English

matter-of-fact and practical sense. Perhaps his success prevented

the effective entry of Italian pictorial principles and finesse into

England. After him Puritanism triumphed over the Elizabethan

passion, and English painting languished till Hogarth came. At the

same time the glory departed from German painting. A flood of

barbarism would have to pass over Central Europe before the sense of

beauty would find voice there again.

VII. ART IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL: 1515-55

-

Despite El Greco and Velazquez, Cervantes and Calderon, Spain

never had a Renaissance in the rich Italian sense. Her far-won

wealth gave new ornaments to her Christian culture, it offered

productive rewards to native genius in literature and art, but it

did not flow into any exciting recapture- as in Italy and France- of

that pagan civilization which had adorned the Mediterranean world

before and after Christ, and which had begotten Seneca, Lucan,

Martial, Quintilian, Trajan, and Hadrian on the soil of Spain

itself. The remembrance of that classic era had been deeply

overladen by the long struggle of Spanish Christianity with the Moors;

all the glorious memories were of that protracted victory, and the

faith that had won it became inseparable from the proud remembrance.

While everywhere else in Europe the state was humiliating the

Church, in Spain the ecclesiastical organization grew stronger with

the generations; it challenged and ignored the papacy, even when

Spaniards ruled the Vatican; it survived the pious absolutism of

Ferdinand and Charles V and Philip II, and then dominated every aspect

of Spanish life. The Church in Spain was almost the sole patron of the

arts; therefore it called the tune, named the themes, and made art,

like philosophy, the handmaiden of theology. The Spanish Inquisition

appointed inspectors to outlaw nudity, immodesty, paganism, or

heresy in art, to specify the manner of treating sacred subjects in

sculpture and painting, and to direct Spanish art toward the

transmission and confirmation of the faith.

And yet Italian influence was pouring into Spain. The rise of

Spaniards to the papacy, the conquest of Naples and Milan by Spanish

kings, the campaigns of Spanish armies and the missions of Spanish

statesmen and churchmen in Italy, the busy trade between Spanish and

Italian ports, the visits of Spanish artists like Forment and the

Berruguetes to Italy, of Italian artists like Torrigiano and Leone

Leoni to Spain- all these factors affected Spanish art in methods,

ornament, and style, hardly in spirit or theme, more in painting

than in sculpture, and in architecture least.

The cathedrals dominated the landscape and the towns as the faith

dominated life. Traveling in Spain is a pilgrimage from one to another

of these mighty fanes. Their awesome immensity, their wealth of

interior ornament, the dim-lit silence of their naves, the devoted

stonework of their cloisters, accentuate the simplicity and poverty of

the picturesque tiled dwellings that huddle below, looking up to

them as the promise of a better world. The Gothic style still ruled in

the giant cathedrals that rose above Salamanca (1513) and

Segovia

(1522); but at Granada Diego de Siloe, architect son of a Gothic

sculptor, designed the interior of the cathedral with classic

columns and capitals, and crowned the Gothic plan with a classic

dome (1525). The style of the Italian Renaissance completely dislodged

Gothic in the palace of Charles V at Granada. Charles had reproved the

bishop of Cordova for spoiling the great mosque by building within its

850 Pillars a Christian church; `063634 but he sinned almost as

grievously when he tore down some halls and courts of the Alhambra

to make room for a structure whose stern mass and dull symmetry

might have passed without offense amid kindred buildings in Rome,

but proved strikingly out of harmony with the frail elegance and gay

diversity of the Moorish citadel.

Something of the Moors' flair for architectural decoration

appeared in the "plateresque" style that marked chiefly the civil

architecture of this reign. It took its name from its resemblance to

the complex and delicate ornament lavished by the silversmith

( platero ) or goldsmith upon plate and other objects of their art. It

topped and flanked portals and windows with winding arabesques of

stone; it grooved or spiraled or flowered columns with Moorish

fantasy; it pierced grilles and balustrades with marble foliage and

embroidery. This plateresco marked the Obispo Chapel at Madrid,

the church of Santo Tomas at Avila, the choir of the cathedral at

Cordova, and it disported itself without restraint on the

Ayuntamiento or Town Hall of Seville (1526 f.). Portugal adopted the

style on a portal suffused with ornament, and columns carved with

decoration, in the magnificent monastery of Santa Maria at Belem (1517

f.). Charles V took the style to the Lowlands and Germany, where it

flourished its signature on the town halls of Antwerp and Leyden and

the castle of Heidelberg. Philip II found plateresque too florid for

his taste, and under his frowns it died an early death.

Spanish sculpture yielded more readily than architecture to the

swelling Italian tide. Pietro Torrigiano, after breaking

Michelangelo's nose in Florence and bearding Henry VIII in London,

settled in Seville (1521), and modeled in terra cotta an ungainly St.

Jerome which Goya mistakenly judged to be the supreme work of

modern sculpture. `063635 Feeling poorly paid for a statue of the

Virgin, Torrigiano smashed it to bits, was arrested by the

Inquisition, and died in its jails. `063636 Damian Forment,

returning to Aragon from Italy, carried the spirit of the

Renaissance on his chisel and in his boasts; he called himself "the

rival of Pheidias and Praxiteles," and was accepted at his own

estimate. The ecclesiastical authorities allowed him to carve

likenesses of himself and his wife on the base of the reredos that

he made for the abbey of Monte Aragon. For the church of Nuestra

Senora del Pilar at Saragossa he cut in alabaster a spacious retable

in bas-relief, combining Gothic with Renaissance elements, painting

with sculpture, color with form. To another retable, in the

cathedral of Huesca, Forment devoted the last thirteen years of his

life (1520-33).

As Pedro Berruguete had dominated Spanish painting in the

half-century before Charles V, so his son became the leading Spanish

sculptor of this age. Alonso learned the art of color from his father,

then went to Italy and worked with Raphael in painting, with

Bramante and Michelangelo in statuary. When he came, back to Spain

(1520) he brought with him Michelangelo's penchant for figures

caught in tense emotion or violent attitudes. Charles appointed him

court sculptor and painter. At Valladolid he worked for six years

carving in wood an altar screen, forty-two by thirty feet, for the

church of San Benito el Real; only fragments remain, chiefly a San

Sebastian vividly colored, with blood pouring from the wounds. In

1535 he joined with his chief rival, Felipe de Borgona, to carve choir

stalls in the Toledo Cathedral; here too the Michelangelesque manner

swayed his hand, and presaged baroque in Spain. When he neared

eighty he was commissioned to erect in the hospital of St. John at

Toledo a monument to its founder, Cardinal Juan de Tavera; he took his

son Alonso as helper, created one of the chefs-d'oeuvre of Spanish

sculpture, and died in the attempt in his seventy-fifth year (1561).

Spanish painting, still in tutelage to Italy and Flanders,

produced no outstanding master under Charles V. The Emperor favored

foreign painters, imported Anthonis Mor to make portraits of Spanish

notables, and for himself declared that he would allow none but the

great Titian to paint him. The only Spanish painter of this age

whose fame crossed the Pyrenees was Luis de Morales. The first fifty

years of his life were spent in the poverty and obscurity of

Badajoz, painting for churches and chapels in the province of

Estremadura. He was fifty-four when Philip II bade him come and

paint in the Escorial (1564). He presented himself in magnificent

array, which the King thought unbecoming in an artist, but Philip

softened when he learned that Luis had spent his life's savings to

attire himself fitly for an audience with his Majesty. Morales'

Christ Carrying the Cross did not strike the royal fancy, and he

returned to Badajoz and penury. Several of his pictures can be seen at

the Hispanic Society in New York, all of them beautiful; but the

best example of his work is a Virgin and Child in the Prado- a bit

too redolent of Raphael. Philip, passing through Badajoz in 1581,

allotted the artist a tardy pension, which enabled him- now disabled

by palsy and failing eyes- to eat regularly during the five years left

to him of life.

The artisans of Spain were often artists in all but name. Spanish

lace and leather continued supreme in Europe. The woodworkers too were

unsurpassed; Theophile Gautier thought that Gothic art had never

come closer to perfection than in the choir staffs of Toledo

Cathedral. Metalworkers made works of art out of sanctuary screens,

window grilles, balcony railings, door hinges, even nails.

Goldsmiths and silversmiths transformed some of the precious metal

flowing in from America into ornaments for princes and vessels for the

Church; famous were the custodias they made in filigree silver or

gold to hold the consecrated Host. Gil Vicente, not satisfied to be

the leading dramatist of Portugal and Spain in this period, executed a

monstrance- for displaying the Host to the congregation- which has

been rated "the masterpiece of the goldsmith's work in

Portugal." `063637 And Francisco de Hollanda, Portuguese despite his

name, carried on with distinction the dying art of illumination.

-

All in all, this less than half a century came off with credit in

the field of art despite the absorption and disruption of energies

in the religious revolution. The masters in architecture, sculpture,

and painting were hardly comparable to the giants who shook all Europe

with theology; religion was the tune of the time, and art could only

provide an accompaniment. But Il Rosso, Primaticcio, Lescot,

Delorme, Goujon, and the Clouets in France, the Berruguetes in

Spain, Brueghel in Flanders, Cranach in Germany, Holbein everywhere,

made an honorable roster of artists for an age so agitated and so

brief. Art is order, yet everything was in chaos- not religion only,

but morals, social order, art itself. Gothic was fighting its losing

battle with classic forms, and the artist, uprooted from his own past,

had to experiment with tentatives that could not give him the grandeur

of a stability mortised in confident time. In the universal turbulence

faith too was hesitant, and ceased to give clear imperatives to art;

religious images were attacked and shattered; sacred themes that had

inspired the creator and the beholder of beauty were losing their

power to stir either genius or admiration or piety. And in science the

greatest revolution of all was deposing the earth from its theological

throne, and losing in the endless void the little globe whose divine

visitation had formed the medieval mind and generated medieval art.

When would stability come again?

CHAPTER XXXVII: Science in the Age of Copernicus: 1517-65 *06068

I. THE CULT OF THE OCCULT

-

IT is remarkable that this age, so absorbed in theology and

scholarship, should have produced two men of the highest standing in

the history of science- Copernicus and Vesalius; and curious that

the books that contained their lifeblood should have appeared in one

annus mirabilis, 1543. Some conditions favored science. The

discovery of America and the exploration of Asia, the demands of

industry and the extension of commerce, turned up knowledge that often

contradicted traditional beliefs and encouraged fresh thought.

Translations from Greek and Arabic, the printing of Apollonius's

Conics (1537) and the Greek text of Archimedes (1544) stimulated

mathematics and physics. But many travelers were liars or careless;

printing spread nonsense more widely than knowledge; and scientific

instruments, though numerous, were almost primitive. The microscope,

the telescope, the thermometer, the barometer, the micrometer, the

microchronometer, were still in the future. The Renaissance was

enamored of literature and style, politely interested in philosophy,

almost indifferent to science. The Renaissance popes were not

hostile to science; Leo X and Clement VII listened with open minds

to Copernican ideas, and Paul III received without trembling the

dedication of Copernicus's world-shaking Book of Revolutions. But

the reaction under Paul IV, the development of the Inquisition in

Italy, and the dogmatic decrees of the Council of Trent made

scientific studies increasingly difficult and dangerous after 1555.

Protestantism could not favor science, for it based itself on an

infallible Bible. Luther rejected the Copnernican astronomy because

the Bible told of Joshua commanding the sun- not the earth- to stand

still. Melanchthon was inclined to science; he studied mathematics,

physics, astronomy, and medicine, and lectured on the history of

mathematics in antiquity; but his broad spirit was overwhelmed by

the forceful nature of his master, and by the predominance of a

narrowed Lutheranism after Luther's death. Calvin had little use for

science; Knox, none.

A discouraging milieu of occultism continued to surround, confuse,

and sometimes- as in Cardan and Paracelsus- threaten the sanity of the

would-be scientist. Hermetic lore from Egypt, mystical

Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism from Greece, the Cabala from

Judaism, bemused a thousand groping minds. Legends and miracles

infested historiography, and travelers told of fire-breathing

dragons and rope-climbing fakirs. Almost any unusual event in public

or private life was interpreted as contrived by God or Satan for the

warning or edification, the temptation or ruination, of man. Many

believed that comets, and meteors were fireballs hurled by an angry

deity. `06371 Cheap literature entered every literate home with

assurances that baser metals could be turned into gold; and (says a

contemporary report) "all the tailors, shoemakers, servants, and maids

who hear and read about these things give all the coins they can spare

to... perambulating and fraudulent" practitioners of such arts. `06372

At a trial in England in 1549 William Wycherley, a conjurer, said

there were 500 like him in the island. `06373 Itinerant students in

Germany sold magical protections against witches and devils. Charms

and talismans guaranteed to divert musket balls were popular with

soldiers. `06374 The Mass itself was often used as a charm to bring

rain or sunshine, or victory in war. Prayers for rain were common, and

sometimes seemed too successful; in which cases the church bells

were rung to warn the heavens to stop. `06375 In 1526-31 the monks

of Troyes formally excommunicated the caterpillars that were

plaguing the crops, but added that the interdict would be effective

only for lands whose peasants had paid their Church tithes. `06376

Perhaps more events were ascribed to Satan than to God. "Scarcely

a year goes by," lamented a Protestant writer in 1563, "without the

most appalling news from numbers of principalities, towns, and

villages, of the shameless and horrible ways in which the prince of

hell, by bodily apparition and in all sorts of forms, is trying to

extinguish the new and shining light of holy evangel." `06377 Luther

joined the commonalty in attributing most diseases to demons

entering the body- which, after all, is not altogether unlike our

current theory. Many believed that diseases were caused by the evil

eye or other magical means, and that they could be cured by magic

potions- which again is not too far removed from our present practice.

Most remedies were administered according to the position of the

planets; hence medical students studied astrology.

Astrology verged on science by assuming a rule of law in the

universe, and operating largely through experiment. The belief that

the movements and positions of the stars determined human events was

not quite as general as before; yet there were 30,000 astrologers in

Paris in the sixteenth century, `06378 all ready to cast a horoscope

for a coin. Almanacs of astrological predictions were best sellers;

Rabelais parodied them in the Pantagruelian Prognostications of

Master Alcofribas. Luther and the Sorbonne here agreed with him, and

condemned astrology in all its forms. The Church officially frowned

upon astrological predictions, as implying determinism and the

subjection of the Church to the stars; yet Paul III, one of the

greatest minds of the age, "would call no important meeting of the

Consistory," said an ambassador to the papal court, "and would take no

trip, without choosing his days and observing the

constellations." `06379 Francis I, Catherine de Medicis, Charles IX,

Julius II, Leo X, and Adrian VI consulted astrologers. `063710

Melanchthon changed the date of Luther's birth to give him a more

propitious horoscope, `063711 and begged him not to travel under a new

moon. `063712

One astrologer of this period is still popular. Nostradamus was,

in French, Michel de Notredame. He professed to be a physician and

an astronomer, and was accepted as semi-official astrologer by

Catherine de Medicis; she built an observatory for him in Les

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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