Art – the heart thrills

TUTTO CAMBIA, TUTTO SI TRASFORMA

Los Angeles, 24 March 2024

“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”, everything changes, everything is transformed. My wife intones this popular Italian saying, half jokingly, every time we come across something that has changed since we last passed this way. It seems to be happening more and more frequently now, I suppose a sign that we have clocked up decades of memories and experiences on which to draw on as we move inexorably towards the exit door (cue to my wife rolling her eyes at this latest meditation of mine on the transience of all life).

In any event, I was forcefully reminded of this saying a few weeks ago when an urban walk of ours led us past one of Milan’s earliest churches, the so-called paleochristian basilicas built before the fall of the western Roman Empire. I did what I exhort all my readers to do when a church hoves into view; I popped in to have a look around. Aïe! How much had changed since this church was first built in the 380s CE: “tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”. In a somewhat melancholy mood, I returned home and started researching the fate of Milan’s other paleochristian basilicas.

I need to give a bit of context here. Many people think that Rome was the only capital of the Roman Empire. This, as any Milanese will proudly tell you, is not so. In 286 CE, after the Roman Empire was carved into two, Milan became the capital of the western part and remained so for a little over 100 years, until 402 CE, when the capital was moved again, this time to Ravenna. There aren’t of course any pictures from that period, so I’ll throw in here a reconstruction of Milan (then known as Mediolanum) in about 300 CE.

Readers will make out the white rectangle of the forum, the circus along the edge of the city walls, to which was attached the imperial palace complex (so that the Emperor could step out into the Imperial box without leaving the palace grounds and mix with the hoi polloi), and the amphitheatre down to readers’ left. Just to get down among the hoi polloi, here’s another reconstruction of a typical day in the forum.

And in a rush of enthusiasm, I throw in another reconstruction of the hoi polloi doing their shopping along the cardo, the north-south street that passed through all fora in the Roman Empire.

The ghost of this particular street is still there, by the way. It is now called via Cantù. We see it here, looking in the same direction.

“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma.”

In any event, Mediolanum now being the capital city, it was here, in 313 CE, that the two Emperors, Constantine and Liceus, promulgated what has come to be called the edict of Milan, which allowed the free exercise of religion throughout the Empire. While the edict formally covered all religions, it was actually aimed primarily at Christianity. The result was that Christians could finally come out of the shadows and worship freely (we’ll skip over the fact that a mere seventy years later, in 380 CE, Christians imposed their religion on everyone else in the Empire, with all other religions being forced (back) into the shadows).

Among other things, the edict of Milan meant that Christians could finally stop meeting in secret in people’s houses and build their own places of worship. They were quick to take advantage of this new-found freedom. In Milan alone, and focusing just on the big churches, within a year of the promulgation of the edict the city had its first Christian basilica. In the photo below, we have a reconstruction, in the top right, of that first basilica, while the building at the bottom left, which had been a temple dedicated to the Goddess Minerva, was converted into another basilica, which some 30 years later was knocked down to make space for a much larger church.

By the time St. Ambrose became bishop of Milan in 374 CE, the city had added two more basilicas to the list. During his tenure, St. Ambrose ordered the construction of another four basilicas, I suppose to cater to all the newly-minted Christians now that Christianity had become the State religion. And not to be outdone by St. Ambrose, the imperial household decided to build their own basilica. So by 402 CE, the year that Milan stopped being the capital of the western Roman Empire, the city had another five basilicas on the rolls. The construction of basilicas went on even after Milan’s demotion as capital, with two more basilicas being built before the final collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE.

Of course, churches continued to be built in Milan in the centuries thereafter. But I want to focus on these eleven earliest, paleochristian, churches to show that indeed “all changes, all is transformed”.

Let me first give readers a framework for these tides of change. Any of us with the minutest interest in history will know that over the arc of history we humans have been repeatedly subjected to the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Death, Famine, War, and Conquest. Here is Albrecht Dürer’s take on these four horsemen; I leave it to the readers to work out which horseman is which.

But buildings have also been subject to their own horsemen of the apocalypse. Two they share with us: War and Conquest, whole cities having been wiped out by both – and not just centuries ago. Here is a photo of Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped on it.

While here is a photo of Dresden after it was destroyed by more “traditional” ordnance.

A third has been Fire, a frequent companion of War and Conquest (Dresden is an eloquent memorial to that), but also a horseman that can strike alone. It, too, has wiped out whole cities. The Great Fire of London stands out in my mind, although many other cities have been laid low by fire.

Since my subject is churches, readers should note Old Saint Paul’s burning fiercely (and that is London Bridge that we see, although it is not “falling down, falling down”, as the nursery rhyme has it).

For religious buildings in particular, I would add a fourth horseman of the apocalypse: Fanaticism, religious or otherwise. These buildings are particularly targeted, both by the mobs and by the State, as symbols of the Religious Other or of Religious Obscurantism. Here we have the Dutch Protestants smashing up one of their Catholic churches.

While here we have the French Revolutionaries being even more thorough in their destruction of a church (the church of Saint-Barthélemy), in the name of the Cult of Reason.

But buildings are also victims to the horsemen’s running dogs, to use a Maoist turn of phrase – which gives me an excuse to throw in an example from 1971 of Maoist propaganda posters: compelling art, if nothing else. The phrase at the bottom reads, I am told: “People of the world unite to defeat the American invaders and their running dogs!”

These running dogs are less extreme but no less harmful forces which have disappeared buildings (to borrow a term from the violent rule in Chile and Argentina by right-wing Army putschists back in the 1970s – I wish to show myself being even-handed in my comments of Left and Right).

One is Urban Improvement. Buildings which have had the bad luck to be in the way of some Big Man’s vision of A New City, or just the municipal government’s decision to have a wider avenue for more cars, have been unceremoniously torn down.

Another running dog is Impoverishment; buildings put up when their owners had money then slowly rot and collapse when their descendants have fallen on hard times and can’t maintain them any more. Closely related has been the running dog of Indifference. The descendants have simply preferred to spend their money, inherited or otherwise, in other ways than on maintaining old buildings.

Finally, and often most damagingly for religious buildings, there is Changes in Taste. A building considered beautiful when it was put up is thought, several centuries later, to be ugly, or embarrassingly old-fashioned, or both. It absolutely needs a make-over! Closely related, again mostly for religious buildings, is Showing Off: the desire by the rich and powerful to preen their social feathers by paying for the addition of extra elements such as chapels to existing venerable structures, often to the aesthetic detriment of the whole.

So how have our eleven basilicas fared in the face of their four horsemen of the apocalypse and the five lesser running dogs? Before answering that, I think it is time to give a name to these eleven churches, to make this more personal. We have:

- The basilica vetus (the old basilica), built in 314 CE, later renamed the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore;
- The basilica nova (the new basilica), built in about 350 CE, later renamed the basilica of Santa Tecla;
- The basilica portiana (the Portian basilica), built in the first half of the 4th Century CE, later renamed the basilica of San Vittore al Corpo;
- The basilica trium magorum (basilica of the three Wise Men), built around 344 CE, later renamed the basilica of Sant’Eustorgio;
- The basilica prophetarum (basilica of the Prophets), built in the late 370s CE, later renamed the basilica of San Dionigi;
- The basilica martyrum (basilica of the Martyrs), built in the early 380s CE, later renamed the basilica of Sant’Ambrogio;
- The basilica apostolorum (basilica of the Apostles), also built in the early 380s, later renamed the basilica of San Nazaro in Brolo;
- The basilica virginum (basilica of the Virgins), built in the 380s-390s CE, later renamed the basilica of San Simpliciano;
- The basilica palatina (the Palatine basilica), built in the 390s-410s, later renamed the basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore;
- The basilica evangeliorum (basilica of the Evangelists), built in the first half of the 5th Century CE, later renamed the basilica of San Giovanni in Conca;
- The basilica sancti Calimerii (basilica of Saint Calimerius), also built in the first half of the 5th Century CE, which kept the Italianised name of Santo Calimero.

Well, the first thing to say is that within no more than 150 years of being built, the eleven original buildings were all razed to the ground by the horseman of War, in the form of Attila the Hun. As part of his rampage through northern Italy in 451-452 CE, his army besieged Milan, broke through its defensive walls, and laid the city to waste. Of course, no-one at the time recorded this momentous event pictorially, so I throw in here a re-construction of the Huns looking suitably menacing under the walls of a city.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, prior to arriving beneath the walls of Milan, Attila had completely destroyed the city of Aquileia. He moved on from there and meted out the same fate to the city of Padova. He richly deserved his nickname the Scourge of God. Aquileia never recovered, but Milan (and Padova) did. Among other things, the basilicas were rebuilt.

Alas! A mere 90 years later, in 538 CE, the horseman of War came galloping over the horizon again, this time in the form of an army of Ostrogoths and Burgundians under the command of a certain Uraiah. Once again, the city was besieged, the walls were eventually pierced, and the city was razed. Worse, all the male citizens were killed and all the female citizens handed over as slaves to the Burgundians, as payment for their part in the siege. Again, no-one at the time recorded these hideous events pictorially, but there is a painting in the basilica di Sant’Eustorgio from the 17th Century which formally is about the Massacre of the Innocents but is thought to actually be about the massacre of the Milanese by the Ostrogoths and Burgundians.

Not surprisingly, it took Milan much longer to recover from this devastation, several centuries actually. But it did, and the basilicas were once again rebuilt.

Next on the scene was the horseman of Fire. In 1071 and 1075 CE, Milan suffered two devastating fires which burned down whole swathes of the city, much of whose houses were close-packed and built of wood. We have here a picture from an illuminated manuscript of a town going up in flames.

In the ensuing conflagrations, the basilicas of San Lorenzo Maggiore, in 1071, and, in 1075, San Nazaro in Brolo and Santa Tecla were badly damaged.

If I use these churches’ later names it’s that by now naming habits had changed. Churches were named after a particular saint rather than a group of saints as had been the case when these churches were first built – “tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”.

Once again, the Milanese rose to the challenge and rebuilt the burnt basilicas. But – “tutto cambia”, etc. – building styles had evolved in the intervening centuries. The churches were now being rebuilt in the Romanesque style. Here is a reconstruction of Santa Tecla from around this time. As readers can see, the basilicas all probably looked very much like the basilicas in Ravenna, with beautiful mosaics running along the walls. Given my predilection for early Christian mosaics, I personally grieve that Milan has lost nearly all of these mosaics.

A mere 90 years after these devastating fires, in 1161, the horseman of War came riding again, this time in the form of Frederick Barbarossa (Red Beard), Holy Roman Emperor. As we shall see, he also brought with him the horseman of Fire.

He had already laid siege to the city two years earlier, had starved its populace into submission, and had forced them to accept humiliating terms. Once Frederick was gone, the Milanese had quickly reneged on the terms and taken up arms again. This time, Barbarossa was determined to grind Milan’s face into the dirt. In this, he was actively supported by the nearby cities of Lodi, Novara, Como, Cremona, and Vercelli, whose citizens were both afraid of, and jealous of, Milan’s growing power; they had allied themselves with Barbarossa in the hope that he would cut Milan down to size. Once again, the city was besieged, and once again its citizens were starved into submission. Here, in a 19th century imagining, we have the consuls of Milan coming before Barbarossa begging for mercy.

But this time, not only did Frederick impose even more humiliating terms on the Milanese, he had his allies burn Milan to the ground, with each allied city being responsible for one district (very methodical …). But he decreed one exemption, the places of worship – he was a Christian, after all. So our basilicas more or less got through this one unscathed (more or less because some of them do seem to have got badly singed).

The basilicas now got a break from the horseman of War for 800 years, but the running dogs got to work. Because of them, four basilicas never made it down to us. Two, Santa Tecla and Santa Maria Maggiore (which were very close to each other), fell victim to the running dog of Urban Improvement, in this case in the form of a desire by the City Fathers to build in their place a much bigger and more splendid cathedral, the current Duomo of Milan (the centuries-long story of its construction is the subject of an earlier post). For reasons which will become apparent in a minute, I choose a photo of a painting of the Duomo as it was in 1819.

Sant Maria Maggiore was completely destroyed. A very small part of Santa Tecla survived as part of the shops that crowded in on the Duomo (those shops we see on the left of the painting), but that finally also disappeared after the running dog of Urban Improvement came along again in 1865, when the city fathers decided that there was a need for a grand, and large, piazza in front of the Duomo. The buildings in the painting above were all torn down to make the grand – but rather barren – piazza that we have today.

Two other basilicas fell victim to the double whammy of, first, the horseman of Fanaticism, and then the running dog of Urban Improvement. Fanaticism led to the monasteries which had become attached to the basilicas being closed down and to the monks who had looked after them being kicked out. This was done by Emperor Joseph II of Austria (Milan was in Austrian hands at this time) in the name of bringing the Catholic Church to heel and modernising it. Urban improvement took different forms. In the case of the basilica of San Dionigi, it meant that church and monastery completely disappeared as all its lands were turned into a very pleasant public park which is still with us today, the giardini Indro Montanelli.

In the case of the basilica of San Giovanni in Conca, Urban Improvement meant a widening of streets and a mad plan, dreamed up after World War II, to drive a new avenue right through the old city centre. The church being in the way, it was unceremoniously torn down. The new avenue was never built (luckily for us; by my calculations it would have gone right through where our apartment building is). But by then it was too late for the church. All that’s left of it is this miserable-looking ruin sitting forlornly in the middle of a busy road.

At this point, I’m reminded of the American children’s counting-out rhyme “Ten Little Injuns”, whose first couple of lines go like this:
Ten little Injuns standin’ in a line,
One toddled home and then there were nine;
Nine little Injuns swingin’ on a gate,
One tumbled off and then there were eight.

And it goes on until there are no little injuns left.

To paraphrase the song:
Eleven basilicas built way back when,
Two were eaten up and then there were nine.
Nine basilicas still around,
Two were in the way and then there were seven.

So seven of Milan’s original eleven paleochristian basilicas have managed to stagger on into our modern age. But … “tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”! None of them look anything like the original Roman-era basilicas. Not all of them even look like the Romanesque churches that replaced them after the disasters of Attila, the Ostrogoths, Barbarossa, and various fires. And even if they appear Romanesque, what we see today is someone’s guess as to what the Romanesque versions of the churches looked like. Let’s look at them one by one.

I start with the basilica di Sant’Ambrogio because it is a mere 10 minutes’ walk from where my wife and I live in Milan, and we often go by it on our various walks. It is also the one that at first glance seems to have changed the least since its rebuilding in the Romanesque style in the 1090s CE. And even in the Romanesque rebuild we see the ghost of the original Roman basilica; the 11th Century builders scrupulously maintained the original building’s floor plan. Here we have some photos of this delightful building. This first shot shows how the church is seen from the road in front of it.

As readers can see, the façade of the church is obscured by some building whose immediate purpose is not clear. The visitor first has to enter this building to enter the church proper. It turns out to be an enclosed courtyard, or – to give it its Latin name – atrium.

It’s interesting that this atrium has come down to us. When the original Roman basilica was built, the atrium had a precise function. At some point during the Liturgy, the catechumens, people who were not “full” Christians yet because they had not yet been baptised, had to file out into the atrium because they were not allowed to be present for the full Liturgy. By the time the church was rebuilt in Romanesque style, this function was meaningless because by then all Christians were baptised at birth. Luckily, it was decided to keep it and use it instead to hold various meetings. So this very early Christian architectural element has managed to make it down to us.

The interior shows the clean, simple lines of the Romanesque style.

In this last photo, readers can glimpse the magnificent mosaic in the apse. Here is a closer look at it – because of the ciborium over the high altar, it’s difficult to get a clean view.

It was originally laid down in the 8th Century, some three centuries after the disaster of the Ostrogoths. From a century later comes the main altar, a magnificent piece of Carolingian goldsmithing.

The ciborium under which the altar sits is equally magnificent, but readers will have to go and visit Sant’Ambrogio to hear about it. I want instead to take readers to a small side chapel, San Vittore in Ciel d’Oro, where some even earlier mosaics, laid down between the sacks of the city by the Huns and the Ostrogoths, by some miracle managed to survive. We see here the cupola of this little chapel, with its mosaic field of gold surrounding a portrait of Saint Victor.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noted that the walls below the cupola carry mosaics of some serious-looking fellows dressed in togas. These are various saints and early martyrs. I show one of these, the mosaic of Saint Ambrose, because contrary to the others it is said to be an actual likeness of the saint, the oldest in existence.

Yes indeed, the basilica of Sant’Ambrogio doesn’t seem to have changed terribly much since its Romanesque incarnation. But alas! It has changed. Because a mere 80 years ago the horseman of War came riding back to Milan in the form of massive bombing raids during World War II. The first of these was on the night of 24/25 October of 1942. There was a second such raid in mid-February of 1943. The climax was four nights in August. These were all raids which, like the infamous bombing raid on Dresden in 1945, a photo of which I give above, deliberately tried to burn the city down by creating a fire storm. Luckily, by the 20th Century there wasn’t that much wood left in Milan’s buildings so a fire storm wasn’t started. Nevertheless, 50% of the city’s buildings were destroyed or damaged. And one of the buildings which was badly damaged was Sant’Ambrogio.

Restorers did a good job after the war in putting the basilica back together again, but you can tell that much of the brickwork is new, as are many of the tesserae in that magnificent mosaic in the apse.

“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”.

Normally, we would next look at the basilica of San Lorenzo. It’s even closer to our apartment in Milan, a mere five minutes’ walk away, and we go by it very often on our way down to Milan’s canals. In fact, we go by it so often that I wrote a whole post about it a few years back, so I will refer readers back to that post.

Logically, the next basilica to consider is the basilica of Sant’Eustorgio. I say logically because there is now a park, il parco delle Basiliche (or, to give it its new name, parco Giovanni Paolo II), which runs between San Lorenzo and Sant’Eustorgio (a park whose creation was much helped by the bombing during World War II; the houses standing on what is now the park were so badly damaged that it was decided to simply tear them all down and create a park in their place). When you enter the park at its northern end, you have this wonderful sight of the venerable pile of San Lorenzo behind you. But very, very little of what we see comes from the original Roman-era basilica, and even from the Romanesque version.

“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”.

Then the walk southwards through the park brings you to Sant’Eustorgio, which stands at the southern end of the park. There’s no striking view of the church from the park itself, so it’s best to make one’s way round to the front, where one is confronted with this view.

The first thing one notices are the accretions on the church’s side. Unfortunately, the church has suffered badly from the running dog of Showing Off: chapels have been added to the side of the original Romanesque church, paid for by rich Milanese families who wanted to add lustre to their family name. They may be quite pretty in and of themselves; indeed, there is a very lovely one at the back of the church which has been the subject of a previous post of mine. But they have destroyed the original harmony of the church.

The second thing to notice is the façade. It looks quite original, but actually it is the result of a restoration carried out in the mid-1860s. The restoration was certainly done in the spirit of what we know Romanesque façades looked like in northern Italy from the few original examples still with us, but it’s unknown what the original façade of Sant’Eustorgio actually looked like. When all is said and done, though, it was probably better to carry out this restoration than not – this is what the façade looked like prior to the restoration.

Apart from its leprous look, the façade had obviously already been manipulated in the intervening centuries.

The interior is nice enough, although there is nothing spectacular on show.

It was the subject of a sensitive restoration in the late 19th Century, where the restorers simply stripped away the Baroque and Neoclassical accretions and tried to bring the structure back as closely as possible to its Romanesque forms. Of course, the Romanesque builders would never have left the church as naked as it is now, they would have covered everything with frescoes. But those are pretty much all gone. As readers can see in the photo above (especially visible on the columns), the restoration brought to light a few shards of the original frescoes. But of the original mosaics which must have graced the Roman-era basilica, nada, all gone.

“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”.

There is one curious artefact in the basilica, and it is this:

“This” is claimed to be the sarcophagus of the Three Wise Men (“We three kings of Orient”, as the well-loved Christmas carol goes). It is fundamental to the basilica’s foundational story. It is said that Eustorgius went to Constantinople when the Milanese chose him to be their bishop, to obtain the approval of the Emperor. Not only did the Emperor approve the choice, but he also gave Eustorgius this enormous sarcophagus which contained the relics of the Three Wise Men, to take back to Milan. Eustorgius’s original idea was to place the relics in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. But the poor oxen which were pulling the cart on which this humongously heavy sarcophagus had been placed “inexplicably” came to a stop where the basilica is now and refused to go any further. Given the weight of the sarcophagus, I think the oxen’s refusal to move another hoof is perfectly explicable, but Eustorgius took this to be a divine sign that a new basilica should be built on this spot to house the relics. Thus was the original Roman-era basilica built.

If I tell this little story, it is because in the succeeding centuries those relics made the basilica famous, attracting flocks of pilgrims (and their money, the cynical me thinks to himself). Which allows me to highlight one of the side-effects of the passage of the horsemen of War and Conquest: looting. In this case, the looting took place during the burning to the ground of Milan by Frederick Barbarossa. One of Barbarossa’s principal advisors during this campaign was Rainald von Dassel, who also happened to be the Archbishop of Cologne. He carried the relics off as war booty to grace his cathedral in Cologne, where they were brought in with much pomp and subsequently housed in this magnificent reliquary (made by Nicolas de Verdun, who also made a magnificent altarpiece housed in the Abbey church of Klosterneuberg near Vienna, which I’ve written about in an earlier post).

For centuries, the religious leaders of Sant’Eustorgio pleaded to have their relics back, but successive archbishops of Cologne turned a deaf ear. It was only in 1903, after a cardinal brokered a deal, that a small portion of the relics were given back.

I shall quickly pass through the fate of the remaining four basilicas.

For the basilica of San Simpliciano, I refer readers to a post I’ve already written about it. Suffice to say that it went through the same treatment as Sant’Eustorgio: accretions of chapels in a completely different style, a restyling of the whole church in baroque and neoclassical style, and then a restoration – this time in the 20th Century – trying to bring it back to its essential Romanesque simplicity. I throw in a photo of the exterior and interior.

The best thing in this church is the painting in the apse; you can just see it in the photo. Any readers who are interested in that painting should go to my post on San Simpliciano, where I tell its story.

It was a visit to the basilica of San Nazaro in Brolo that started me on this post. Its Romanesque version endured the same fate as Sant’Eustorgio and San Simpliciano: remodelling and remodelling and remodelling of the interior with each successive Change in Taste (that running dog really ran wild here), followed by a stripping back during the late 20th Century to the original simple lines. But in addition, the running dog of Showing Off really sunk its teeth into the church’s structure. During the Renaissance, a family from Milan’s elites decided to attach their mausoleum to the church. And they didn’t just attach it to the side of the church, like a chapel. They attached it to the façade! So the poor church has permanently lost its façade, its place being taken by a square building housing the tombs of this elite family. To enter the church, one has to pass through the mausoleum.

It’s all very well to say that the Mausoleum was designed and built by Bramantino, it’s still a terrible desecration of the church!

As for the basilica of Santo Calimero, it is a poster child to bad restoration. Like the others, its Romanesque version went through various remodellings as tastes changed. It was then “restored” in the late 19th Century into someone’s idea of Romanesque, which is more pre-Raphaelite than anything else. In great distress, I throw in a photo of the mosaic that was laid down in the apse.

Which leaves the basilica San Vittore al Corpo. Well, there it wasn’t a question of remodelling. When the church, in a rather pitiful state it has to be said, was handed over to the Olivetans in 1507, they decided to simply tear down the whole building and rebuild it in the “modern” style. They also completely turned it around, with the choir where the entry used to be and the entry where the choir used to be. So it’s difficult to say that anything of the original church has remained. It is therefore with great sadness that I insert a photo of the church’s hideous façade and of its equally hideous interior.

“Tutto cambia, tutto si trasforma”. My wife is indeed right (as always). We cannot freeze things as they used to be, much as I sometimes would like to. We just have to be grateful that some of the wonderful things our ancestors created have come down to us in not too bad a shape and can only fervently hope that they will still be there for our descendants to admire in 2,000 years’ time.

GIN

Vienna, 26 January 2024

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. But for reasons that I cannot explain, I have procrastinated. Nevertheless, I have finally got myself to put pen to paper and get to work.

The germ for the post was planted several years ago during a hike my wife and I were taking along the edges of Lake Como. We dropped into a café to have ourselves a cappuccino. There, on a shelf, the café owner had lovingly placed a long row of bottles of gin, all of them some strange colour: pastel yellow, blue, or even – I think – pink. I say “I think”, because the memory of it all is somewhat fuzzy now. At the time, I took a photo of that row of bottles to show to my readers – as I say, I thought immediately of writing a post about gin – but somewhere along the line I decided to delete it, convincing myself I would never get around to writing the post. This photo, which I created with a bit of photoshopping, will have to stand in for that initial vision of mine.

All those coloured gins startled me. I have since read on the internet that this is the latest fad in gin making – or perhaps, to put it a little more cynically, the latest way for gin makers to differentiate themselves from their competitors. As one internet entry puts it, “coloured gins are having a moment, the latest phase in the great craft gin revival. You can now choose from a whole spectrum, including pink grapefruit gin, Amalfi lemon gin the colour of a pale sunrise, bitter orange gin like alcoholic marmalade and lavender gins that change colour on contact with tonic. But the most popular is violet.”

I dislike to think of myself as a traditionalist, I’ve always been suspicious of tradition, but hello! coloured gin! what is the world coming to?! I am firmly of the opinion that gin should be a colourless liquid to which you add things to enhance its basic taste and possibly – just possibly – add colour.

Talking of gin’s basic taste, I think we all know that this primarily comes from the addition of juniper berries, from juniper trees like this beautiful example.

Juniper is after all in the drink’s name. The ancestor of British gin is Flemish/Dutch jenever. Jenever making was brought to England by traders or by English soldiers returning from fighting in the Low Countries. Linguistic laziness eventually shortened jenever to gin. But my surfing has shown me that today’s gin makers add other “botanicals” to their gin, to distinguish it from everyone else’s. Citrus “notes” seem to be important, imparted by the addition of the peels of lemon, or bitter orange, or lime, or grapefruit. Then small amounts of all manner of spices can be added: anise, fennel, caraway, coriander, licorice, orris, longan, baobab, savory, angelica, cardamom, grains of paradise, cubeb, cinnamon, cassia, nutmeg, almond, saffron … the mind whirls in front of this veritable cornucopia of spices.

And it doesn’t finish there. Even pine needles and cones can be added, or frankincense! Of course, which extra “botanicals” are added are closely guarded secrets.

I wouldn’t want readers to think I am a frequent drinker of gin – unlike the late Queen Elizabeth, who was, I was somewhat astonished to learn, still knocking back two gin-based drinks daily in her nineties: a gin and Dubonnet with lots of ice before lunch, and a dry martini after it.

I will just have a gin and tonic from time to time, when the fancy takes me – and when the ingredients are available. Harking back to my earlier harrumphing, readers will see that a G&T is satisfactorily colourless.

I am glad to see that I am in good company in my fondness for G&T. Philip Larkin, a poet whom I greatly admire, was an aficionado. We have him here nursing a G&T.

He once wrote to his lover: “life is very narrow without glasses OF GIN AND TONIC”. Note the capital letters and the plural “glasses” – he imbibed considerably more gin and tonic than I do. He even devoted several lines of one of his poems, Sympathy in White Major, to the making of a gin and tonic:

When I drop four cubes of ice
Chimingly in a glass, and add
Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,
And let a ten-ounce tonic void
In foaming gulps until it smothers
Everything else up to the edge,
I lift the lot in private pledge:
He devoted his life to others.

But in my mind the G&T is also firmly anchored to the colonial period of India, where it was particularly popular among the British colonialists. I’ve read that their excuse for quaffing large amounts of G&T was to ingest quinine as a prophylactic against malaria – tonic water contains quinine. Malaria was certainly a problem in India – my father contracted it while a colonialist in India – but I’ve also read that actually this can only have been an excuse, because there isn’t enough quinine in tonic water to work as a prophylactic. In any event, I throw in a photo of two British colonialists languidly seated and being fanned by an Indian servant. On the table, one can make out what seems to be a glass of G&T.

Although I am now firmly in the G&T camp, my gin drinking habit didn’t start there. I began knocking back gin when I was 17, maybe even 16 – yes, it was easier to get served in pubs when I was young – and my gin drink of choice was what I remember being called a gin and lime, although the proper name for this drink seems to be a gimlet. Again, I am pleased to know that I was in good company. Gimlets play a not insignificant role in Raymond Chandler’s book “The Long Goodbye”.

Early on in the story, the hero, or maybe we should call him the anti-hero, the “hard-boiled” detective Philip Marlowe, meets a friend, who happens to be British, in a bar:

We sat in a corner of the bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”

Rose’s Lime Juice cordial … an icon of my youth:

My British grandmother often had a bottle, but not for making gimlets; I don’t remember her ever drinking anything stronger than a dry sherry. She would make lime drinks for us grandchildren, adding water to a generous portion of Rose’s Lime Juice. Yes, I have very fond memories of that cordial. My reading tells me, though, that today’s mixologists (strange word …) pooh-pooh on Rose’s Lime Juice in its modern form, considering it far sweeter than the Lime Cordial made by the original Mr. Rose. As a result, there is a cottage industry in the production of lime cordials considered to be closer to the Real Thing, and the gimlets made with these revisited cordials are claimed to taste much better. If ever I end up in some bar offering one of these alternative lime cordials, I might try a gimlet. Otherwise, I’ll stick with my G&T, thank you.

Chandler’s tales of Marlowe are great, by the way. If any of my readers have never dipped into them, I highly recommend they pick up a copy. And of course, a good number of his books have been turned into films over the decades. Liam Neeson is the latest well-known actor to play Marlowe, but there have been a number of others before him: Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, Robert Montgomery. But to my mind by far the best Marlowe was Humphrey Bogart, who back in 1946 played him in “The Big Sleep”.

It was also Bogart who, in “Casablanca”, after Ingrid Bergman has entered his nightclub, talked to him, and left, utters the anguished phrase: “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

Which brings us back to gin.

Marlowe’s friend in “The Long Goodbye” says gimlets beat martinis hollow. I wouldn’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a martini. But I’m sure James Bond – who must be the best known martini drinker in the world – would have disagreed. Here, turning to films again, we have Sean Connery, the greatest of all the James Bonds (at least that’s what I think), preparing himself a martini.

Mind you, I don’t think Bond’s martini is quite the Real Thing, which I read should be a mix of gin and dry vermouth – the precise ratio is of course a source of heated debate in certain mixological circles but the current consensus seems to be around 5 parts gin to one part vermouth. The two should be poured onto ice cubes, stirred not shaken, strained into a chilled cocktail glass, and served with a green olive or twist of lemon peel as garnish.

In his book “Casino Royale”, however, Ian Fleming has Bond ordering another kind of dry martini at the bar in the casino:

‘A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’
‘Oui, monsieur.’
‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?’

Sounds like a bit of a Frankenstein martini, if you ask me. And Bond’s well known comment “shaken, not stirred” has mixologists shaking their head in disapproval; it should be the other way around. I’m sure that other famous martini drinker, the late Queen, would have pursed her lips in disapproval, even though, as we know since the 2012 London Olympics, she and Bond were BFFs.

This mention of the House of Windsor lets me segue smoothly to another gin-based drink which I have also never tried, a fruit-based punch using Pimm’s No. 1 Cup as the base. To make it, get a bottle of Pimm’s No. 1 Cup.

This is basically gin in which a whole lot of herbs and some citrus have been macerated; quite what herbs and citrus we are talking about is – of course, as usual – a closely guarded secret. Pour a slug of this potion into a jug, add a generous portion of lemonade, and then bung in sliced and diced vegetables and fruit; which vegetables and fruit exactly is up to you, but I’ve seen mention of cucumbers and celery on the vegetable side and orange and strawberries on the fruit side. The end result will look something like this.

This seems to be quite a posh drink. For instance, we see here King Charles, at a time when he was still a young Prince Charles, gulping down a Pimm’s at a polo game – note polo game, not a football game or rugby game or some other game which we normal mortals take part in or watch.

Here he is again, “a little bit older, a little more bent” as the song goes, pensively clutching his glass of Pimm’s.

It’s very popular at Royal Ascot, which – obviously, given its name – the Royals attend.

Following suit from the Royals, the other race goers deck themselves out in their finest, the ladies with those ridiculous hats English women love to wear, the gents in morning suits, which are equally ridiculous.

Everyone has a flutter on the horses.

And the Pimm’s flows freely all day.

These two drinkers of Pimm’s seem to have backed the wrong horse, though.

It’s also very popular at the Henley Royal Regatta, where anyone who is anyone wears a blazer (I think to signal that they belong to a boat club somewhere).

And of course Pimm’s flows freely.

Although not quite in the same posh league these days, Pimm’s is also quaffed in large quantities at Wimbledon. Just because I find him very simpatico, I throw in a photo of Stanley Tucci at Wimbledon clutching his Pimm’s.

I think readers will get the general idea from what I have written above that gin is a very respectable drink these days. Which was certainly not the case a mere three hundred years ago. In the early 1700s, the British government decided – as an anti-French move (so what’s new…) – to greatly increase import duties on French brandy. At the same time, it made it much, much easier for people to get into the business of making gin: it broke the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers on the making of spirits, it reduced taxes on the distillation of spirits, and it revoked the need for a license to make spirits. Add to this the fact that this was a period which saw a drop in the prices of barley – used to make the mash, which was then distilled to obtain the spirits – which very much helped to make the final product cheap. Add also to this the fact that there was a general rise in salaries (from absolutely wretched to slightly less so) and a concomitant general drop in food prices, which meant that the poor had somewhat more disposable income to spend on liquor. Add all of that up and you have the makings of a perfect storm. Thousands of people all over the country got themselves a pot still and started making gin. This is a pretty simple type of pot still.

This pot still is a little more sophisticated.

Many of these new gin makers opened gin-shops to sell their rot-gut. Here, we have a print of a gin shop made towards the end of the 1700s (note that it’s all women and one child; commentators of the time were particularly exercised that this was not just a problem with men).

Many others simply made it at home in their kitchen for their personal consumption.

And rot-gut it was! Pot stills produced a very coarse product, and some pretty awful things were added to make it more palatable. Turpentine was one, to give the stuff “woody notes”. Sulphuric acid was another, although luckily the acid didn’t distill over with the ethanol; it merely reacted with it to form diethyl ether, which added a sweetish taste to the product.

The awful taste didn’t seem to matter very much. People, especially the poor, began drinking huge amounts of gin. What came to be known as the Gin Craze had started. Quite soon, the authorities realised they had a serious social problem on their hands as drunkenness and disorderly behaviour – especially among the poor and involving women as much as men – became endemic. William Hogarth’s print, “Gin Lane”, gives an idea of how the governing classes saw the problem.

By 1736, the Middlesex Magistrates had this to say: “It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has spread within these few Years … it is scarce possible for Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve of this pernicious Liquor.”

Already in 1734, the story of one Judith Defour had shocked the nation – or at least the superior Sort of People. Judith had taken her two year old daughter out of the workhouse, where she had placed her earlier, for a visit of a few hours, and had met up with her friend Sukey. The court records document what followed:

“On Sunday night we took the child into the fields, and stripp’d it, and ty’d a linen handkerchief hard about its neck to keep it from crying, and then laid it in a Ditch. And after that, we went together and sold the coat and stay for a shilling, and the petticoat and stockings for a groat. We parted the money, and join’d for a quartern of gin.”

The little girl died in the ditch. Defour was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, and hanged at Tyburn (note the grandstands; this was spectacle indeed).

The public outrage over this story forced Parliament to act. Over the next fifteen years, various laws were passed which eventually brought gin drinking under control.

It’s hard not to read about the Gin Craze and think about today’s opioid crisis, or the crack epidemic of the 1980s, or the many previous epidemics of heroin, amphetamines, morphine, and on and on. Different chemicals, same problem: the desire – the need – to dull the pain of living, and a ready supply of cheap chemicals to do it.

And on that sombre note, I will finally crack open a bottle of – colourless – craft gin someone gave us, aromatised – so the label informs me – with juniper of course, but also orange peel, cardamom, angelica root, coriander, ginger, cinnamon, and maybe a few other things, and, more or less in Larkin’s words:
I’ll drop four cubes of ice / Chimingly in a glass, and add / Three goes of gin, a lemon slice, / And let a ten-ounce tonic void / In foaming gulps until it smothers / Everything else up to the edge. / And then I’ll lift the lot and ask myself:
“Am I a superior Sort of Person or an inferior Sort of Person?”

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Milan, 25 December 2023

On this day when we celebrate the birth of a child, I send an electronic Christmas card to my readers. It is a bas-relief of a Madonna and Child. My wife and I saw it last year at the exhibition which was held of Donatello’s work in Florence. It looks so modern, yet Donatello sculpted it nearly 600 years ago, in 1425-1430.

Merry Christmas!

THOUGHTS ON VISITING ASSISI

Kyoto, 29 November 2023

At the end of October, my wife and I did a two-day hike from Gubbio to Assisi, along the Via di San Francesco. As the trail’s name suggests, it centres around the life and times of St. Francis of Assisi. As befits any saint from the Middle Ages, he was the protagonist of a great number of stories, many of which became the subject of the late 13th Century frescoes painted in Assisi and elsewhere after his death in 1226. I will choose some of these to illustrate stories which took place in the localities linked by the trail.

to the north of Assisi, the trail starts at La Verna, where Francis received the stigmata.

It passes through Gubbio, where he tamed the Big Bad Wolf which was terrorising the good people of the town.

It then goes on to Assisi.

As for the southern portion of the trail, it starts in Rome, where Francis went a number of times to keep his movement on the right side of the Church authorities – this fresco depicts his critical first meeting with Pope Innocent III, to receive the pope’s blessing for his nascent movement.

It goes on to Rieti, where Francis came many times. His last visit was shortly before his death, to have an operation on his eyes – he had become nearly blind (the operation failed, alas).

Nearby, while resting and preparing for his operation, he worked on his Canticle of the Sun:
“Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.”
He goes on to praise “Sister Moon”, “Brother Wind”, “Sister Water”, “Brother Fire”, “Sister Mother Earth”. He completed the last verse on “Sister Bodily Death” as he lay dying in Assisi soon after.

In nearby Greccio, he created the first living crèche, using locals as the actors in the drama. It was his way of telling the Christmas story to rural folk, who couldn’t understand the Latin in which the story was normally told.

The trail goes on to Spoleto, where Francis had the dream which convinced him to give up his plan of becoming a knight to fight in the Crusades.

And it, too, of course ends in Assisi, where Francis’s spiritual journey began and ended. Of the many stories about him that happen in the town, I choose two:
His renunciation of his father and family, stripping himself naked in the town’s piazza and giving his clothes back to his father;

And the moment when Christ on the cross spoke to him in the little church of San Damiano on the edges of Assisi.

And then there is the tiny church of Porziuncola down in the valley below the town, which Francis had rebuilt and where he loved to spend time. Here is an artist’s rendering of what it looked like in his day. Those two rows of little huts are where the friars stayed.

It was in that church – chapel, really – that Francis heard the priest read out from the Gospel of Matthew the passage where Christ sends his disciples far and wide to proclaim the Good News, with the following instructions: “You received without charge, give without charge. Provide yourselves with no gold or silver, not even with coppers for your purses, with no haversack for the journey or spare tunic or footwear or a staff, for the labourer deserves his keep.” Then and there, he decided that he and his followers would do the same. Thus was born the order of mendicant friars which was to take his name, the Franciscan Order.

Funnily enough, this momentous decision doesn’t feature in any of the frescoes about him – at least, none that I have found. But other stories involving Porziuncola have been the subject of frescoes. I choose three:
His welcoming of Clare when she ran away from her family to join Francis’s movement and eventually established the Order of Poor Clares;

His moment of doubt, when he rolled himself in a rose bush whose thorns, though, miraculously turned into flowers;

His death at the little infirmary next to Porziuncola.

After our two days of hiking, my wife and I spent a day in Assisi. Alas, I can’t say that I liked the town in its modern guise. It’s just a tourist trap, crowded, full of shops selling tourist tat and restaurants selling overpriced food.

Francis would have been horrified at all these shops pushing tourists to consume – and in his name at that. I rather think – I hope – that like Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem he would have gone after all these sellers of tat. Turning once again to Matthew: “Jesus then went into the Temple and drove out all those who were selling and buying there; he upset the tables of the money-changers and the seats of the dove-sellers. He said to them, ‘According to scripture, my house will be called a house of prayer; but you are turning it into a bandits’ den.'” I throw in a painting by El Greco of Jesus wielding the whip in the Temple, one that always comes to my mind when I see these shops in places that are supposed to be havens of religion.

But even the basilica of St. Francis, which one reaches after braving the tourist shops and overpriced restaurants, disappointed me. Yes, it is full of art whose creation supposedly kick-started the Italian Renaissance, and I’ve used many of its frescoes above as illustrations. But I was struck by something I read. In his testament, Francis had specified where he wanted to be buried in Assisi. It was at the far end of the town, its lower end. It was here that convicts were executed and the town’s lepers and other outcasts congregated. Its noisome reputation led to the area being called the “collis Inferni”, the hill of Hell. Francis had often spent time on that hill, ministering to the wretched who eked out a living there. It was of a piece with his beliefs to want to be put to rest in a humble grave among the lowest of the low. Yet, the Church authorities, actively supported by the Franciscan Order’s hierarchy, were having none of that. It was decreed that a splendid basilica would rise on the collis Inferni, turning it into the “collis Paradisi”, the hill of Paradise.

Poor Francis must have been spinning in his coffin when he was finally interred in that basilica, four years after he died. It was a betrayal of everything he stood for.

As for Porziuncola, that humble chapel so beloved by Francis, Pope Pius V in the 16th Century ordered a huge church to be built, Santa Maria degli Angeli.

It literally englobes the little chapel

as well the infirmary where Francis died

and the rose bush he rolled himself in.

The ostensible reason for building the church was to better control the flow of pilgrims. The guide books are at pains to point out the bareness of the interior of this mastodontic church, as proof of its respect for Francis’s vows to Lady Poverty. But, standing on the square in front of the church, it is difficult not to see this as one more example of the Church authorities glorifying themselves. I’m certain that Francis would have been horrified.

As I’ve said in an earlier post, I am a great admirer of Francis – not the religious side of him; as I’ve said in another post, I am an atheist and have been since I fell off the straight-and-narrow as a student at University. But his turning away from the material side of life – a core part of the Rule he wrote for his friars being that they should own nothing – makes him truly a man for our times.

I hardly ever allow my professional work to leak into my posts, but today will be different; I suppose it’s because I’m writing this post in Kyoto where I am giving my annual course to university students on precisely this: how we can build a society that has a much smaller footprint. What I tell my students is that after working for 45 years in the environmental field, I have become convinced that our excessive consumption is literally destroying our planet. Look at these photos taken by Peter Menzel. He travelled to different countries and invited households whom he met to put everything they owned out on the street in front of where they lived. This photo is of a family somewhere in North America, a place with one of the highest levels of per capita consumption in the world.

This one is from Japan.

Source
This one is from Kuwait.

This is all worrying enough. But what’s even more worrying is that people who live in less developed countries, whose levels of ownership and consumption of stuff are still modest, like South Africa

or Bhutan

they want to have the same levels of consumption as the richer countries.

That impulse is perfectly understandable. But it cannot be. We cannot all consume at the levels of that North American family, or even of that Japanese family. We must heed Francis’s call to adopt a life shorn of stuff. We must – we must – reduce our levels of consumption, or else we will face an ecological catastrophe. Here, too, Francis is a man for our times because of his views on Nature. Unlike most of his contemporaries, and indeed unlike most of humanity even today, he saw the rest of Nature as equal to us humans. His Canticle to the Sun is an ode to Nature, as relevant today as it was when he wrote it 800 years ago. Of course, his reverence of Nature sprang from his reverence of God – if God created Nature, his argument went, we should revere Nature as God’s work. My position is rather different. Whether we like it or not, we are an intimate part of the world’s biosphere, and if it dies we die. Yet, because of our huge levels of consumption, growing ever huger with every passing year, we are ripping our biosphere apart, one result being that the Earth is losing species at rates which have not been seen in the last 10 million years. Francis, I’m sure, would have been appalled. If we go on like this, we are going towards a general collapse of the world’s ecosystems, which will sweep away our civilisations – for all our cleverness, we will not survive breakdowns in our biological life-support systems.

And finally Francis is a man for our times because he felt closest to the poor, the outcasts, the lowest of the low. Today, we live in a world riven by inequalities. In the photos above, I showed one type of inequality, the inequality between countries. Seemingly, this type of inequality is narrowing, but only to be replaced by a much more insidious inequality, the inequality between the citizens of these countries. Already rich individuals are getting ever richer at the expense of everyone else and don’t care anymore about their fellow citizens. We have to change that. We must – we must – pay more attention to the greater societal good rather than to our own individual desires. Frankly, this is not – as was the case for Francis – a disinterested decision, an “act of love for our fellow men”; it is very self-interested. If we don’t look after those who have been left behind, they will eventually come for us with their pitchforks.

This family from Cuba shows us more or less what our levels of consumption needs to be for them to be sustainable.

And this should not be an average. Every one of us should have this level of consumption, from the Bezoses and Musks of this world to the homeless that haunt our streets.

PETRA

Milan, 29 August 2023

It rained the day we visited Petra. Not a huge amount, just a sprinkle. But it was enough to keep the skies covered and the temperatures moderate. This was the one time in my life that I’ve been pleased to have rain when I visited somewhere. It was the last days of May, and my wife and I had been worried that we would be visiting the site under a burning sun.

We entered the site through the Siq, that long, long gash in the mountains.

We followed its meanderings, hopping out of the way of the electric vehicles ferrying tourists back and forth, all the while craning our necks backwards to look at the walls of rock soaring above us.

And so we came to the end of the Siq and found ourselves in front of the Khazneh, the Treasury, the building that “is” Petra. It was a gradual unfolding, as we exited from the narrowness of the Siq.

It wasn’t actually a treasury. That’s what the local Bedouins believed. They thought there was treasure hidden in that urn on the very top of the rotunda, as witnessed by the pockmarks on it caused by Bedouins firing at it to try to break it open – a waste of time and bullets since the urn is solid sandstone. In reality, it was a mausoleum for the Nabatean king Aretas IV Philopatris (“friend of his people”, which probably means he wasn’t their friend at all). We have – possibly – a likeness of this friend of the people on one of his coins.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the New Testament will be interested to know that Aretas’s daughter married Herod Antipas, and it was the latter’s decision to divorce her and marry his stepbrother’s wife Herodias that eventually led to the beheading of John the Baptist. Here’s Caravaggio’s take on this execution.

I actually first came across the Treasury in the Tintin album “Coke en Stock”. For reasons which are too convoluted to explain, Tintin, with Captain Haddock in tow, is crossing the fictional Middle Eastern country of Khemed on horseback to get to the Red Sea. On the way, they pass through a narrow gorge. The relevant page from the album recounts the rest of the incident.

As I say, the story is highly convoluted, and I invite curious readers to go back to the original album to understand who is who and what is going on. Let’s just focus on the Treasury (although I have to say, I’ve always asked myself what that lady was saying to Captain Haddock).

When I read the album, I had no idea that this was the Treasury in Petra. Neither it nor Petra itself is mentioned by name. Captain Haddock says it is a Roman temple, and that is all we are told. It was only years later, when I happened to see a guidebook on Petra, that I realised where Hergé had got his inspiration. Here is one of the many, many guidebooks on Petra with the Treasury on its cover.

The official photos of the plaza in front of the Treasury normally have few if any people. But as my wife’s photo above shows, when we there it was like a souk, although a very modern one. Large crowds of tourists were milling around, taking photos, taking selfies, reading guide books, listening to guides they had rented, or chattering among themselves, before they moved on to the next ruin. In the middle of all this, and rather getting in the way, camels and donkeys waited patiently, with the local Bedouins hawking a ride on them down to the rest of the ruins. Other Bedouins called out from the cliffs above, inviting tourists to climb up and have a drink. Others still manned the stalls lining the side of the canyon which brought us all to the rest of Petra, selling tourist tat.

I noticed that getting one’s eyes lined with kohl was a popular offering when we were there, with all the Bedouins – men and women – heavily eyelined in kohl to advertise the service.

We ignored the tourist tat and the calls to climb onto a camel, or donkey, or horse, and walked down the Street of Facades, the canyon leading away from the Treasury with buildings cut into the canyon walls.

The facades had once been very ornate, but water and wind have taken their toll.

At some point, we climbed up the wall of the canyon to admire the royal tombs cut into the rock farther up on one side

and the theatre cut into the rock on the other side.

We climbed back down and walked along what had once been Petra’s main drag, the Colonnaded Street.

At some point, we passed through the remains of the Temenos Gate.

It was “guarded” by two Bedouins dressed up as Nabatean soldiers.

No doubt they were offering a photo opportunity for a donation, like all those Roman legionnaires haunting the Colosseum, saying “Ave” to each other.

But we declined the offer and moved on.

We finally made it to the path leading to the Monastery and then slowly made our way up the long, long – 850-steps-long – climb, part of a steady stream of tourists struggling upwards in panting silence (thank God for the cloud cover!).

As we climbed we had to squeeze our way through yet more tourist stalls jammed onto the narrow path, with their Bedouin owners loudly advertising their wares.

We finally emerged onto the plaza abutting the Monastery.

It was of course never a monastery, although quite what it was is not clear. Experts’ best guess is that it was dedicated to the cult of the deified King Obodas I. Once again, we can possibly get an idea of what he looked like through his coinage.

Obodas’s people deified him because he was a Mighty Kicker of Ass. He gave the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus, who ruled over Judea, a severe drubbing near the Sea of Galilee, from which Alexander barely managed to escape alive (I’ve mentioned Alexander before; he was the High Priest who was pelted by the faithful with citrons). Then a few years later, after the Seleucid king, Antiochus XII Dionysus, had invaded the Nabatean kingdom, Obodas attacked his army. Antiochus was killed and the remains of his army perished miserably in the desert.

After a well-deserved rest and drink, we joined the stream of tourists going back down, now skipping along and chattering as they went. Once back down to the Colonnaded Street, we headed up onto the hillside to the north, to have a view down on the site.

Looking at all these dusty ruins, it’s difficult to understand what Petra looked like when it was a living, thriving city, so I have resorted to showing a reconstruction.

At the very top of the photo, in the middle, one can just make out the Treasury. Coming down the canyon from the Treasury, we have the royal tombs to the right and the theatre to the left. We are looking down at the red roofs of the Colonnaded Street, with the colonnades finishing at the Temenos Gate. The path to the Monastery, which is not visible here, is off at the bottom right of the photo.

The water in the stream running along the Colonnaded Street is ridiculously blue, like a swimming pool. I wonder how much water there even was in that stream bed. Water was a precious resource in Petra, and its citizens had created a complex network of dams, reservoirs, cisterns, and basins, the whole connected by some 200 km of channels and pipes, to collect, store, and distribute the little amount of rain which fell in the environs.

It’s all gone now, victim of time and neglect (and of a powerful earthquake in 363 CE), but you can still see remains of the network here and there.

In its heyday, this network was able to support a population of some 20-30,000 people, about the same size as the small town of Wadi Musa situated on the edge of Petra, where we stayed the night. Not large by today’s standards, but populations were much, much smaller back then.

There was also an important transient population – of both man and beast – to supply water to, for Petra’s importance – and wealth – came from it being at the crossroads of important trade routes.

From Yemen in the south came frankincense and myrrh, those precious incenses so desired for religious ceremonies throughout the Middle East and beyond. It’s no coincidence that in his Gospel, Matthew has the Three Wise Men bringing frankincense and myrrh, along with gold, as presents fit for Christ the King.

From the south too came ivory and other goods which had originated in Africa.

From the Persian Gulf to the east came pepper and other fabled spices transported there from India and beyond.

From Damascus to the north came its famous damask textile, but also silk which had been brought from China along the Silk Road.

From various places to the east and north came bitumen, used as a glue, a binder, a water repellent, and – in Egypt – in embalming.

Gold, silver, and precious stones also came to Petra from all points of the compass.

The goods moved west to Gaza, or north to Damascus and then west to the coast of what is now Lebanon, from whence they were shipped across the Mediterranean. The Nabateans welcomed all these traders who crossed their kingdom and offered them protection, shelter, and water – for a price. And that price paid for all the buildings and infrastructure in Petra.

Nearly all gone now. The earthquake of 363 CE did massive damage, changes in trade routes did the rest. Once sailors understood how to sail the monsoons in the Arabian Sea, ships from India could sail up the Red Sea and transit through Alexandria, cutting out the Nabateans, while Palmyra to the north drew away much of the rest of the east-west trade. By the time of the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634 CE, Petra had been forgotten. Sic transit gloria mundi.

We slowly made our way back to the Siq and left the site. Tomorrow, we were on our way to Amman, where I was going to give a training course on green industry policies.

SANKT VEIT

Vienna, 3rd July 2023

Revised 29 July 2023

In our wanderings across the Austrian landscape, my wife and I have from time to time come across villages (or, in the case of Vienna, districts) called Sankt Veit. Here’s one such village in the region of Salzburg.

In the past, there has been no more than a flicker in my subconscious as some neurones somewhere registered the name. But the last time it happened, a neurone or two formulated the question, “who was this Sankt Veit?”, a question which led me to my usual desultory surfing of the web. The conclusion has been this post, which can be added to my various past posts on obscure saints whose names pepper the Austrian landscape and end up being our companions on our hikes across it.

Sankt Veit was originally Saint Vitus, a martyr from the late 3rd Century-early 4th Century. His story – or rather his hagiography – is quickly told. He was born in the far west of Sicily, in the town of Mazara del Vallo (and so, of course, in his italianised form San Vito, he is the town’s patron saint). I’ve never been there, but judging from photos on the web it has a nice central piazza.

In any event, Vitus’s mother died when he was a child. The times being what they were, his father wasn’t going to bring him up. Instead, he delegated this task to a nanny, Crescenzia, and a teacher, Modestus. Unbeknownst to him, the pair were Christians and converted Vitus when he was 12. Even though just a young lad, Vitus was of course very holy and began performing miracles. One such miracle took place in a locality near Catania on the eastern side of the island. Quite what he was doing there when he lived in the far west of the island isn’t explained. In any event, he met some shepherds who were in a frenzy because some dogs had torn a child to pieces. Vitus called the dogs over, had them hand over the remains of the child, and then brought the child back to life. This story explains why it’s common for him to be depicted with dogs. We see him here, for instance, on a capital in the church which was built on the site where Vitus met the shepherds, bringing those wild dogs to heel.

Here, we have a more modern take on the story.

I presume being a Christian was a big no-no at the time, because when Vitus’s father found out, he had the three of them arrested and brought before the local judge, who ordered Vitus to recant. When Vitus refused, the judge invited his father to punish him severely, which he was glad to do, beating him to within an inch of his life. Still Vitus refused to recant. So his father imprisoned all three of them. At this point, an angel intervened and got them out of jail. Whereupon they fled, taking a ship to the ancient Roman province of Lucania, which more or less corresponds to today’s Italian region of Basilicata. There, all three continued their work of proselytism, with Vitus continuing to cure people.

Vitus’s fame as a healer grew to the point where the Emperor Diocletian up in Rome heard about him. We have here a bust of Diocletian. I must say, he looks rather grim, which fits nicely with the rest of the story.

It so happened that Diocletian’s son was possessed by a demon. Diocletian had Vitus and his two companions brought to Rome, where he implored Vitus to cure his son. This Vitus did, but the only reward he got was a demand from Diocletian that the three of them give up their faith (the ingratitude of it! but what could you expect from a pagan?). Vitus of course refused, so then started all those grisly tortures which hagiographers love to pile onto martyrs: see the tortures inflicted on Saint Blaise, Saint Florian, and Saint Pancras. First, Diocletian had Vitus and his two companions thrown into cauldrons of boiling pitch, which gave painters and sculptors of later centuries a very satisfying subject to work on.

But they remained unharmed! So then Diocletian had them thrown to the lions. But these ferocious beasts suddenly became meek and mild, licking Vitus’s feet!

Mad with rage, Diocletian had the three of them put on the rack.

But even though their bodies were close to breaking they survived! And so angels carried them off back to Lucania, where they died.

The End.

I won’t bother readers with a secondary complicated story of a princess who some four centuries after Vitus’s death was involved in carrying his remains from Lucania to San Polignano a Mare, some 30 km south of Bari, on the other side of Italy. I rather suspect that the story was a complete fabrication which nevertheless allowed the monks of a monastery in San Polignano to claim that they had the saint’s relics. This encouraged a vigorous relics-based tourism from which the monastery no doubt profited. The monastery has gone through many rebuilds in the intervening centuries, but it is still a rather arresting building, at least from a distance.

Whatever the truth is about the historical Vitus, assuming he even existed, the fact is that his veneration spread rapidly in Sicily and southern Italy. And then, once the great craze for relics started in the 3rd Century or so, his relics started circulating in Europe. In the 490s, Pope Gelasius I mentions a reliquary of Saint Vitus in the chapel of a deaconry dedicated to him in Rome. In 756, Fulrad, one of the great Abbots of the Abbey of Saint-Denis in what is now the outskirts of Paris, brought relics of St. Vitus to the Basilica there. This is what the abbey church looks like now, after its gothic makeover in the 12th Century.

About a century later, in 836, these relics were presented to Abbot Warin of Corvey on the river Weser. Founded in 822, this was the first Benedictine monastery in Saxony. It later became a princely Imperial Abbey in the political crazy quilt that was the Holy Roman Empire. The abbey has survived the vicissitudes of time, and is an imposing set of buildings. And Saint Vitus is still the patron saint of the abbey today.

The abbey of Corvey played a very important role in the Christianisation of eastern and northern Germany. Monks fanned out from the mother house, and to help along in their missionary work they took with them parts of the relics of Saint Vitus, thus also spreading the veneration of the saint throughout the German lands.

The same proselytising impetus brought Saint Vitus to the Slav lands, where he became extremely popular. It’s been theorised that this is because the German Sankt Veit was translated as Sveti Vid, which sounded very similar to Svetovid, the name of the Slav god of abundance and war.

Sveti Vid certainly became very popular in Prague after king Henry I of Germany gifted to Wenceslaus, Duke of Bohemia, the bones of one of Saint Vitus’s hands in 925. As a result, he became patron saint of Prague’s cathedral. To this hand was added Vitus’s head in 1355, when Charles, King of Bohemia (the Dukes had traded up to Kings in 1212) became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. He filched it from a church in Pavia – the town “belonged” to the Holy Roman Emperors at that time (in turn, the head had been brought to Pavia in 755 by the Longobard King Astulfus, God knows where from; I’m sure many PhDs have been written about the European trade in relics). This same Charles IV, by the way, was the man behind Prague cathedral’s Gothic makeover, which is more or less the version of the cathedral that we see today.

Relics don’t carry the same weight these days – at least, they don’t with me – but some of the reliquaries that were made to house relics are wonderful works of gold and silversmithing. Here’s one such reliquary holding a relic of Saint Vitus from the Treasury of the Cathedral. The artist even gave the young man a dimple in his chin!

Quite why Saint Vitus was plucked out from among all the martyrs of the early church and became so popular is not clear to me. Nevertheless, something in the stories and legends that accreted to his person got him connected to diseases where convulsive, uncoordinated movements were part of the symptoms. Thus, he became the go-to saint when you had epilepsy, chorea, and ergotism, all illnesses giving rise to uncoordinated movements. Chorea especially gives rise to rapid, jerky movements in the face, hands and feet, and so it was often called Saint Vitus’s dance. He was also your saint when you had been bitten by rabid or venomous animals, a fate which can also lead to convulsions. Somewhat more randomly, it seems to me, his intercession was also invoked in cases of bedwetting.

His connection to cases of uncoordinated, jerky movements also led him to be invoked in the strange European phenomenon of dancing mania. Although the first episodes were recorded in the 8th century and occurred intermittently in the succeeding centuries, there was an enormous increase in incidences between the 14th and 17th centuries, after which it disappeared abruptly. I’m not sure dancing mania is really such a good term. Dancing requires music, while here people were just hopping and writhing around. The phenomenon involved groups of people, sometimes numbering in the thousands, who went on “dancing” sometimes for days on end, until they collapsed from exhaustion or injuries. The condition was often considered a curse sent by Saint Vitus, and was therefore also, somewhat confusingly, called St. Vitus’s Dance. Victims of dancing mania often made their way to places dedicated to the saint, who was prayed to in an effort to end the “dancing”. Here, we have a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of women overtaken by dancing mania being taken to a church.

Not surprisingly, outbreaks often started around the time of the feast of Saint Vitus, on 15th June.

Even today, there is no consensus about what was going on here. It is speculated to have been a mass psychogenic illness, also known as epidemic hysteria, in which physical symptoms with no known physical cause affect a group of people, as a form of social influence. But what started off these bouts of epidemic hysteria? To my mind, the most reasonable suggestion that has been made is that people started “dancing” when their stress levels, induced by chronic poverty and political instability, got too high – although why, then, did the phenomenon abruptly disappear in the 17th Century? People were just as stressed in the succeeding centuries. Mystery …

Of course, people at the time had no idea how to stop an outbreak of dancing mania once it caught hold – other than praying to Saint Vitus. One possible remedy that was tried was music – in the drawing above, one can see a couple of men playing bagpipes. It was theorised that music would get people to channel their chaotic flailing around into a regular rhythm and so bring them down from their hysterical high. The type of music was important; as one writer put it, “lively, shrill tunes, played on trumpets and fifes, excited the dancers; soft, calm harmonies, graduated from fast to slow, high to low, prove efficacious for the cure” (one unintended side-effect of playing music, though, was that sometimes onlookers would now join in, swelling the numbers dancing). It’s not really relevant, but I thought this would be a good place to throw in a wonderful painting (by Pieter Bruegel the Elder again) of peasants dancing.

In the south of Italy, dancing mania was known as tarantism (because it was believed to be caused by the bite of a poisonous spider, the tarantula – confusingly, not a member of the well-known family of tarantulas). The music used there to tame the dancers was thus called the tarantella, which in the intervening centuries has become a well-known musical export from Italy. Many twee paintings of people dancing the tarantella have been produced, normally in a Neapolitan context, like this one.

Personally, though, I prefer this rather strange painting by “the circle of Faustino Bocchi”.

But back to Saint Vitus after this interesting digression into phenomena of mass hysteria!

In the 14th Century, largely because of the shocks caused by the Black Death, Germans in the Rhineland created a collection of fourteen saints called the Nothelfer, or Helpers in times of need; their formal name in English is the Holy Helpers. Basically, these fourteen saints were tasked with helping people with all the ills they suffered from. We’ve already seen what Saint Vitus was meant to help you with. Another of the Holy Helpers which I’ve dealt with in a previous post, Saint Blaise, was to help with any illnesses of the throat. Staying with the head, Saint Catherine of Alexandria was charged with illnesses of the tongue, Saint Ciriac of Rome with illnesses of the eye, Saint Acacius with migraines, Saint Denis with normal headaches, Saint Barbara with fevers, and Saint Giles with mental illnesses (and with nightmares, I suppose by extension of his powers over mental illnesses). Moving to other parts of the body, Saint Elmo was invoked in cases of stomach and intestinal illnesses and Saint George when it came to diseases of the skin. Saint Margaret of Antioch was prayed to when backaches were the problem and when childbirth was looming (this was by extension, I suppose, since many pregnant women suffer from backaches). Meanwhile, Saint Pantaleon was the go-to saint when cancers and consumptive diseases were the problem.

But requests for help from our fourteen Holy Helpers didn’t stop there. They were also invoked to prevent risks to life and limb caused by events in the outside world. You prayed to Saint Barbara to avoid a sudden and violent death at work. When travel was necessary, you prayed to Saint Christopher to avoid the many dangers of travelling. I suppose by extension you also prayed to him to avoid the plague – a sensible thing; we all saw during Covid how plagues spread through travel. For good measure, terror of the plague being great, you also prayed to Saint Giles to avoid the plague. Storms and lightning must have been a common problem because you also prayed to Saint Christopher to avoid the consequences of storms (a good extension of his powers since storms are a common enough danger when travelling), to Saint Vitus to avoid both storms and lightning (a sensible combination) and to Saint Barbara to avoid lightning. Fire, too, must have been an ever-present threat when houses were made primarily of wood, because two of the saints looked after the risk of fire for you: Saint Barbara (by extension, no doubt, of her protective powers against lightning) and Saint Eustace. Interestingly enough, Saint Eustace was also the saint to go to for protection from family discord – this must have been quite a common problem if it warranted a Holy Helper. And of course, since this was a time when the great majority of people were peasants, and since much of their wealth was tied up in livestock and domestic animals, no less than five of the Holy Helpers could be invoked to protect these animals: Saint Blaise, Saint Elmo, Saint George, Saint Pantaleon, as well as our friend Saint Vitus. In fact, in the small Italian town of San Gregorio Magno in the province of Salerno, there is still an annual festival when people come with their animals and go round the local church of St. Vitus three times, followed – given the saint’s connection to dogs – by dog owners with their dogs. We have here goats doing the rounds.

But the help requested from the Holy Helpers didn’t end there. People were profoundly Christian and specifically believed in the afterlife, where depending on how good or bad you had been in this life you would either go to heaven or to hell. Here is a mosaic from the church on the island of Torcello in the Venice Lagoon of the Last Judgement, where parishioners could see just what would happen to them if they were judged to be bad.

And it was for all eternity! So it was incredibly important to end up on the right side of Divine Judgement. The Holy Helpers were duly invoked to help here. You prayed to Saints Barbara and Catherine of Alexandria to avoid a sudden death (i.e, one where you had not confessed your sins and received extreme unction). You prayed to Saint Giles to make a good confession: generally a desirable thing, but especially desirable just before you died. You prayed to Saint Ciriac of Rome to avoid temptation on your death-bed, which would indeed be a very ill-judged moment to give in to temptation since you might not have time to confess (but who on their death-bed would have the energy to be tempted, I ask myself?). You also prayed to Saint Ciriac as well as to Saint Denis to avoid demonic possession. I suspect in Saint Ciriac’s case this was as an extension of his powers to protect you from diseases of the eye (the eye could be an entry point for the devil, the Evil Eye) while in Saint Denis’s case, I see it as an extension of his powers to prevent headaches (I mean, when I’ve had bad headaches it’s often felt as if some small monster was pounding on the insides of my head). Saint Barbara of Antioch, meanwhile, was invoked for escape from the clutches of devils in general. Finally, you prayed to Saint Eustace to prevent you ending up in the eternal fires of Hell, a very natural extension, it seems to me, of his powers to protect people from fires in the terrestrial realm.

So there you have, in a nutshell, the fears that wracked the great majority of Europeans in the 14th and later centuries. The idea of a bevvy of saints who could help you with all the trials and tribulations of life proved to be so popular that it spread rapidly from its point of origin in the Rhineland to the rest of Europe, with local additions and subtractions from the basic list. Here is a collection of statuettes of the fourteen Holy Helpers from a chapel in Baden-Württemberg, where centuries ago you could have gone and asked the relevant saint, or saints, for help with your problems.

However, all I can say is, thank God for modern medicine, and thank God for governments which enact (and hopefully enforce) laws to protect us, and thank God for insurance companies which can cushion us from the risks of everyday life – as long as we read the fine print. As for fears of Hell, all I can say is, thank God Europe is dechristianising – although the fear of death is still there, in a different form, but still there.

Let me end this post with some examples of well-known people who have been named after Saint Vitus.

For Vitus, I tried to find a well-known Roman who was called that but failed to find one. So I choose Vitus Bering.

Bering was a Dane but spent most of his working life in the Russian Imperial Navy. His explorations in the northern Pacific Ocean gave us the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, and Bering Island (on which he died and was buried).

For Vito, I choose the very famous fictional character Vito Corleone, as played by Marlon Brando in the film The Godfather.

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Mario Puzo, who wrote the book on which the film is based, chose the name Vito for his character. As readers can imagine, it is a popular name in Sicily since Saint Vitus hailed from there (assuming, of course, that he ever really existed).

For Veit, I had difficulties finding someone who was really, really famous. So I choose Veit Bach, for the simple reason that he founded the Bach family, one of the most important musical families in history. There is no portrait of him, so I choose instead a portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, who was his great-great grandson.

I also choose Veit Bach because he was a victim of Europe’s religious wars. He was a Protestant who lived in the Kingdom of Hungary, then ruled by the staunchly Catholic Hapsburgs. Religious persecution drove him to relocate his family to the Protestant state of Thuringia. He will contrast neatly with another personage I will mention in a second.

For Vid, I had even more difficulties finding someone who is even modestly famous. For lack of anything better, I choose Petar Vid Gvozdanović, a Croatian who was born at a time when Croatia was part of the Hapsburg Empire.

He joined the army, where his name was Germanified to Peter Vitus Quosdanovich, and he fought in the Seven Years’ War, then the War of the Bavarian Succession, then the Austro-Turkish war, rising steadily through the ranks. By the time the wars with the French revolutionaries started, he was a major-general and had been made a baron. After successfully fighting the French on their northern frontiers, he was made Field Marshall Lieutenant and sent to Italy to fight Napoleon. Alas! Napoleon was his nemesis, beating him repeatedly and leaving his reputation in tatters. After his final defeat at the battle of Rivoli, he was “retired”; he does look a little mournful in his photo.

The name game doesn’t end there! At some point during the invasions of Italy by the Germanic Longobards, the Latin name Vitus got inextricably mixed up with the Longobard name Wito or Wido and was transmuted into the name Guido. The French turned that into Guy, today pronounced very much like the Indian clarified butter ghee. The Normans brought the name with them when they invaded England, but its pronunciation over the centuries changed to the same as “buy” or “hi!” or “lie”. So now we have three more variants!

For Guido, I choose Guido Reni, a baroque painter from Italy. Here is a self portrait.

I generally don’t like his paintings much, but this one of Salome with the head of John the Baptist is fun.

For the French Guy, I choose Guy de Maupassant.

He is a Famous Author, and as a result I have never read any of his stuff. If any of my readers are curious to read him, Wikipedia informs me that his first published story, “Boule de Suif”, or “The Dumpling”, is often considered his most famous work. I welcome anyone who has read it to tell me what it’s like. Who knows, one day, at the next pandemic-induced lockdown, I might get around to read it.

For the English Guy, I choose Guy Fawkes. He, like Veit Bach, was a victim of Europe’s religious wars, although his situation was the mirror image of Veit Bach’s: he was a Catholic in a Protestant kingdom. He was also definitely more militant than Bach was in his response. He was one of the main conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, where the plan was to blow up King James I and the House of Lords. His role was to light the fuse which would set off the barrels of gunpowder which the conspirators had stashed away under the House of Lords. He was caught red-handed at the last minute, tortured, and hanged, drawn, and quartered. He is the third to the right in this contemporary engraving of eight of the thirteen conspirators (he was also known as Guido, because he had fought many years on the continent in Spanish armies).

Ever since, on 5th November, the day Guy Fawkes was caught, big bonfires are burned all over the UK on which are perched effigies, originally of the Pope but later of Guy Fawkes, and nowadays of just about any public figure whom the bonfire-makers dislike (in case readers don’t recognise her, it’s Margaret Thatcher in the photo).

That big bonfire, and the fireworks which accompany it (reminding us of the gunpowder) is one of my enduring memories of my youth in the UK.

And now Guy Fawkes has taken on a new life as the mask which anti-establishment protesters of various stripes wear at their protests!

So there we have it. I’ve taken my readers through quite a wander of things related to Vitus – sometimes rather remotely. And now my wife and I can wander over the Austrian landscape in our hikes, knowing that the next time we come across a village called Sankt Veit or a church dedicated to Sankt Veit we’ll be able to say “Ah yes! Remember that post?”

POSTSCRIPT

A week or so after writing this post, my wife and I went down to the Dorotheum auction house for tea and a nose around to see what was new. In a small section they have devoted to religious art, I came across this painting on glass.

It was a painting of the fourteen Holy Helpers plus God the Father with the Holy Ghost, Mary with the Baby Jesus, and Jesus with his cross. I can’t figure out who is who except in a few cases. The young man at the very bottom holding a palm must be St. Vitus; he’s always depicted as a boy. The bishop holding a candle must be St. Blaise (see my post about him to understand the meaning of the candle). The fellow with a baby on his shoulder must be St. Christopher. After that, I’m a bit lost. I leave it to my readers to figure out the rest.

The painting was being sold with a companion piece depicting the Last Judgement.

Somewhat more succinct than the mosaic in Torcello, it nevertheless passes on the vital message: “if you’re bad, you burn”.

I had to have them! So I forked out the €166 being requested, and they now hang proudly on our wall, on either side of another painting on glass I bought several years ago of God the Father blessing all and sundry.

MY FAVOURITE AQUARELLE

Milan, 5 June 2023

I’ve mentioned elsewhere my little collection of art – nothing hugely expensive, I hasten to add; the most I have ever paid for a painting is €2,000, and I went back and forth in an agony of indecision for several days before made the final plunge. I love all my paintings, but there is one that I am particularly proud of because of the sleuthing which I carried out to properly identify its subject.

A little bit of background is in order. I bought the painting at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna – although not during an actual auction, but rather in the part of the Dorotheum where paintings and other objects are sold at fixed prices. I throw in a photo of it.

It’s an aquarelle, not very big – 46 by 63 cm. I loved its naïve style, I found the colour scheme cheerful, and I was intrigued by the scene it depicted. The description the Dorotheum gave it was:
“Belgien, 19. Jhdt.
Panoramablick von einer Brücke an einem Fluss, links and rechts Häuserzeilen, im Vordergrund Spaziergänger”

Or:
“Belgium, 19^th C.
Panoramic view from a bridge on a river, left and right rows of houses, in the foreground strollers.”

The first thing I did was to take it to a framer who has a shop down the road from our apartment, for him to take off the frame and check the painting over. And here came a big surprise. On the back of the painting, someone had written “Vor Stadt im Paris”, which can be translated “In front of the City in Paris”. So the painting probably wasn’t of somewhere in Belgium as the Dorotheum’s description had suggested, but of Paris!

But where in Paris was this scene painted? Answering this question meant first understanding what waterways existed in Paris in the early 1800s – from the clothes the people in the painting are wearing it’s clear that the scene was painted some time in that period. A bit of sleuthing led me to the conclusion that the only waterway of any substance which existed in Paris in this period was the River Seine. The three canals which currently exist in and around Paris – Canal Saint-Martin, Canal Saint-Denis, Canal de l’Ourq – only got the go-ahead to be built in 1802 (from the-then First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte), and were only completed in the early 1820s, which is a bit late for the painting. So not only Paris but the River Seine! More and more exciting!

I won’t bore my readers with a summary of the hours I spent trying to find out where on the River Seine my painting was executed. Suffice to say that, given that the painting depicted a bridge, I became a real expert on all the bridges crossing the Seine in Paris in the early 1800s. But actually the breakthrough came from digging around for information on the shop to the far right of the painting – I throw in a close-up of it.

As readers can see, the shop’s name was “DUHAMEL M^D [MARCHAND] FAYENCIER” while underneath it says “Magazin de Porcelan …” (the rest to me is unreadable; however, if any of my sharper-eyed readers can make out what’s written please do tell me). So it seems that the shop was owned by a certain Duhamel and he sold porcelain and possibly earthenware. And here I had a real stroke of luck. Searching away on the internet, I discovered that the Bibliothèque de France had scanned a series of “Almanach du Commerce de Paris”. Here is the front page of the Almanac for 1798-1799, or Year VII in the Revolutionary Calendar, the first of these Almanacs that the Library had scanned.

These Almanacs were the period’s equivalent to the old Yellow Pages that we used to have before the internet came along (minus the phone numbers, of course). They listed all the businesses and shops in Paris, with – very important for me – their addresses. And here, in the Almanac for the Year VII, in the category of “Fayanciers” (the spelling wasn’t yet settled, it seems), I found an entry for a Duhamel. This was extremely encouraging! The name and trade fitted the name of the shop in the painting. The shop was listed as being in rue de la Lanterne. This street no longer exists. It is now the northern section of the rue de la Cité, which runs across the Île de la Cité, linking two bridges, the Pont Notre-Dame to the north and the Pont Cardinal-Lustiger to the south. I held my breath. Could the bridge in the painting be the Pont Notre-Dame? To make sure, I started working my way through successive Almanacs, and I soon got confirmation that the shop had been located at the foot of Pont Notre-Dame. Already in the Almanacs for the years 1806 to 1808 (the Revolutionary Calendar had been dropped by then), the address of the shop was given as “rue du Pont-Notre-Dame, 1” rather than rue de la Lanterne (although they went back to this address in later years), which strongly suggested that the shop was right next to the bridge itself. But the clincher came in the Almanac of 1812, where the address was given as “rue de la Lanterne 1 (Cité) et pont Notre-Dame”, while the Almanac of 1813 gave the address as “rue de la Lanterne, 1, au coin du quai Napoléon”, which at that time was the name of the quay that ran alongside the Seine from Pont Notre-Dame to Pont Saint-Louis at the far end of the island.

So I could finally identify the bridge! It is Pont Notre-Dame. This identification was strengthened by another feature of the painting. Readers will notice that a number of people crossing the bridge are holding plants. I throw in a close-up of two of them.

It just so happens that behind viewers’ right shoulders as they look at the painting, a flower market was located! (and is still located.) Here is a drawing of that market done in 1829.

So now we can understand that the people in the painting holding plants have just bought something at the flower market and are presumably taking them home. The vicinity of the flower market to the shop is emphasised in the entry in the Almanac of 1817, where the address of the shop is given as “au bas du pont Notre-Dame, en face le marché aux Fleurs” (the emphasis is in the original), or “at the foot of Notre-Dame bridge, facing the flower market”. This connection, by the way, tells us that the aquarelle must have been executed after 1809, which is when the market was created.

Identifying the bridge in the painting as the Pont Notre-Dame also clarifies the rather odd wording of the phrase written on the back of the painting, “In front of the City in Paris”. Clearly, the “city” in this case is the Île de la Cité, which takes up most of the right-hand side of the painting.

A few years ago, during a visit my wife and I made to Paris, we visited the Pont Notre-Dame. I was curious to see how much the view had changed. Unfortunately, there were roadworks going on on the bridge and the traffic was horrendous, so I wasn’t able to get a clear view from the point where our artist must have been more or less standing. So I’ve turned to Google Maps Street View for today’s view from the bridge. It’s not brilliant, but it will have to do.

As readers can see, the view has changed quite considerably in the intervening 200 years. At the back of the painting, readers will note a somewhat humpbacked bridge – I throw in a close-up of it.

That bridge is the Pont Marie, which connects the right bank of the Seine to the Île Saint-Louis. Here is a rather more professional painting of it from 1757.

The bridge in this painting has five arches and a slight hump. The painter of the aquarelle faithfully gave the bridge five arches but made the hump much more pronounced. This particular version of the bridge still exists, although the houses on the bridge, some of which you can still see in the 1757 painting, were all torn down by the time the aquarelle was painted, and more recently the hump has been flattened.

Since the aquarelle was painted, two more bridges have been built between Pont Notre-Dame and Pont Marie. One of them, Pont d’Arcole, is visible in the Google Street View photo.

The banks of the river have also been built up in the intervening 200 years. The most obvious change is on the left of the painting, where viewers can see a sort of beach (which is also visible in the 1757 painting of Pont Marie).

This used to be the Place de Grève, a place where boats could be pulled up onto the beach and cargo loaded or unloaded. I presume that those white cocoon-looking things on the beach are some sort of cargo, Lord knows what. Here’s a more sophisticated view of the beach, by the same painter who painted the Pont Marie.

This whole area was “tidied up” in the 1830s, when today’s quays were built up.

The dome one can see above the Place de Grève is the dome of the church of St. Paul St. Louis.

As the Google Street View indicates, you can’t see it any more from the Pont Notre-Dame because the intervening buildings have all increased in height, so here is a photo of it from nearby.

More or less opposite that dome on the other side of the painting, readers will see a spire peeking over the roofs. I think that is the spire of the cathedral of Notre-Dame – looking at maps of the period, I can’t see what else it could be.

Alas, this spire no longer exists, having come crashing down when the cathedral’s roof burned down four years ago. This photo shows the spire enveloped in flames.

As for the building in which Duhamel’s shop was located, it has disappeared. The whole block was torn down to make space for a hospital, which was built in 1878. But it looks like Duhamel had already sold up in 1823 or ’24. Certainly, by 1824 the building housed a new shop, called À la Belle Jardinière, which sold ready-made clothes. I suppose this was a revolutionary idea at the time. In any event, it did roaring business, bought up the surrounding houses and turned them into one big shop. When the hospital was built, the shop moved elsewhere and continued to do business until 1972.

The Duhamel involvement in the sale of earthenware and porcelain didn’t stop with the closure of the shop at the foot of Pont Notre-Dame. The Almanacs show an interesting story. A younger brother got involved in the business in 1804. Then one of the two moved out in 1809 or ’10 and set up another shop in what is now the first Arrondissement near the Halles. Then in 1820, a son of one of the two Duhamels set up a third shop on Boulevard des Italiens. The disappearance of the first shop in 1824 was followed by the disappearance of the shop on Boulevard des Italiens in 1827. The shop near the Halles kept going until 1837, after which it, too, disappeared from the record. Who knows what happened to the Duhamels after that?

There is one thing which the painter must have got wrong. You can’t see it in the modern photo from the bridge because the Pont d’Arcole blocks the view, but there is a small channel to the back right. This is the arm of the Seine which runs between Île St Louis and Île de la Cité – you see it very well in the painting of the Place de Grève. I can’t believe the painter didn’t see it; I have to assume that he first sketched the scene “en plein air” and then later painted the aquarelle proper, at which point he either forgot about the channel or decided it was making the painting too complicated.

Which brings us back – sort of – to the cast of colourful characters our painter has peopled the bridge with. I’ve already mentioned the persons carrying plants. We also have what seems to me to be a Gendarme on horseback.

Gendarmes were (and are still) a type of policeman with military connections. Here is a modern picture of what the Gendarmes looked like in the early 1800s.

I have no idea what the other military-looking fellow behind our Gendarme could be, the one going for a walk with his Missus. I welcome inputs from any of my readers who are experts in military uniforms.

There is also what looks like a vitrier, or glazier.

Here is a photo of a vitrier from a later period. You can see better the contraption on his back with which he carried his spare window panes.

I was rather pleased to see him. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, my mother often used to sing old French songs, and there was one song in her repertoire about vitriers. It was only one verse, which was repeated ad infinitum, and which went like so.

Encore un carreau d’cassé, v’là l’vitrier qui passe
Encore un carreau d’cassé, v’là l’vitrier d’passé
V’la l’vitrier, v’la l’vitrier, v’la vitrier qui passe
V’la l’vitrier, v’la l’vitrier, v’la l’vitrier d’passé!

which can be loosely translated as:

Another broken pane, here’s the glazier passing
Another broken pane, here’s the glazier’s gone past
Here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier passing
Here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier, here’s the glazier gone past!

Then we have an itinerant shoe-shiner.

This is another trade which survived into the era of photography. I have chosen a photo of Neapolitan boys offering the service. Readers will see the word Sciuscià written on their box. It’s a term which came into use in Naples during the Second World War; it’s an adaptation into the local vernacular of the English word “shoeshine”, which shoeshine boys picked up from American troops. Vittorio De Sica made a powerful film in 1946 about these Neapolitan shoe-shine boys; I highly recommend it to my readers.

Which brings us to the person whose shoes – or rather boots – are being shone.

This character intrigued me. I thought perhaps he could help me date the painting. As I said, I’m not an expert on military uniforms, and even if I were we don’t know if the painter painted the uniform at all accurately. All that being said, I rather think we are dealing with a lancier rouge (although in the painting the man has a red feather in his shako while it should have been white or white and red). Here is a more sophisticated rendition of this uniform.

The regiment, properly known as the 2^e régiment de chevaux-légers des Lanciers de la Garde Impériale (2nd regiment of Light Horse Lancers of the Imperial Guard), was known colloquially – and for obvious reasons – as the Red Lancers, or somewhat more irreverently as the écrevisses, or crayfish. The regiment has a grim but romantic history. It was originally formed in 1810 from hussars of the Dutch Royal Guard, after Napoleon merged Holland with France, and at the beginning it was primarily made up of Dutch recruits. The regiment served in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, where it was decimated, the depleted ranks being filled by Frenchmen (particularly from Paris and its environs). The regiment was dissolved a first time in 1814 at the Restoration, reformed during the Cent Jours, fought at the battle of Waterloo where it was again decimated, and finally dissolved at the end of 1815. If I’m right about the regiment, this means that the painting can’t have been painted that long after 1815 (soldiers from the disbanded regiment might have continued wearing their uniforms for a few years, either out of defiance or simply because they had nothing else to wear).

Which brings me finally to the anonymous painter. Who was he? (or maybe she, although I rather doubt it). Given the the phrase written on the back of the painting, I’m guessing that he was a German speaker, and given where I picked the painting up that he was a citizen of the Austrian Empire. Looking at the window of 1809 (when the flower market opened) to a few years after 1815 (when the Red Lancers regiment was disbanded) as the time period when the aquarelle was probably painted, I wonder if my anonymous painter was not an officer in one of the Austrian regiments that occupied Paris after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. In which case, the painting – or at least the initial sketch – would have been executed between 1815 and 1818, when the Allies maintained troops on French soil. But I have no name to give to my painter, who has given me so much pleasure since I purchased his aquarelle, and he will probably remain anonymous forever.

LA MARINIÈRE

Milan, 14 May 2023

It is the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso‘s death this year and the art world is overflowing with Picasso exhibitions. My wife and I recently visited one at the Albertina in Vienna (just before the minor operation which has kept me “indisposed” for a while). Meanwhile, one of my sisters announced the other day in our WhatsApp group that she and her husband had just visited the newly refurbished Musée Picasso in Paris, to which another of my sisters replied that she and her husband had just visited the Picasso museum in Malaga, Picasso’s birthplace. No doubt there will be more announcements along these lines throughout the year. However, in this post I do not propose to follow the tide and celebrate Picasso’s artistry. Rather, I want to celebrate his dress sense, and in particular his fondness for wearing, in his later years, a long-sleeved cotton shirt with blue and white horizontal stripes, what the French call la marinière.

If I give it its French name, it’s because it was the French who turned this originally humble shirt into something that cultural movers and shakers like Picasso wore and eventually into an item of high fashion.

I will skip the history of stripes in clothes – or rather the lack of them – in Europe’s earlier history, fascinating though that is, and will cut straight to the chase, in this case an Ordinance emitted in 1858 by the French Ministry of the Navy. This Ordinance decreed that from now on not just Navy officers but also the more humble petty officers and ordinary seamen would wear a uniform, and described in good bureaucratese what this uniform should look like. Here we have a French sailor from a few decades after the Ordinance’s publication.

As the reader can see, the marinière is the shirt beneath the jacket.

It hasn’t changed much since then. Here, we have a couple of modern sailors in the French navy.

The 1858 Ordinance of course also dictated the precise design of this uniform. As far as the marinière was concerned, it was to be made of a fabric knitted in the “jersey” style, and have, front and back, 21 white stripes, each 20 mm wide, interspersed with 21 indigo-blue stripes half as wide, while 14 white and blue stripes of the same widths should run on the sleeves. Why this number of stripes? Lord knows. In the case of the 21 stripes, it has been suggested that they stand for the 21 battles which Napoleon won, although I don’t see how that can be since by my count he won more like 30 battles (and anyway, this is the Navy; why should they memorialise land battles?). In the old days, the blue of the stripes (and probably the blue of the jacket and trousers) came from using my old friend indigo as the dye, but I suppose modern dyes are used today.

It seems that pretty much every Navy has adopted this type of uniform for its seamen. As a result, for the last one hundred and seventy years or so it has become typical in towns near Navy bases to see off-duty seamen in their dashing uniforms lounging about ogling the girls and being ogled back.

But now to the marinière’s upgrade into a fashion item. It seems that Coco Chanel was the first fashionista to take this humble piece of clothing and turn it into a fashion statement. The story goes that during the First World War Chanel would often leave Paris to go and spend time on the Normandy coast; she had a second shop in Deauville, a seaside resort which was the hang-out of the rich and famous. This is a poster for Deauville from the 1920s, when it was once again the place for the rich to go and have fun.

It being wartime when Chanel was going, Deauville must have looked much more sober than in this poster, and I suppose that since the locals were sea folk many of the men would have been called up to the Navy and would have been seen walking around the town in their uniform. Chanel was much struck by the marinière and added her version of it to her collections for women from 1916 onwards. This was quite audacious of her, since she was taking an article of clothing for men, and working men at that, and using it as a fashion item for respectable bourgeois ladies. Initially, she also made her marinières out of jersey fabric; this scandalised people because at the time this was a fabric strictly associated with underwear. She argued that the war made it difficult to source more upscale fabrics – and perhaps it was unpatriotic to use such fabrics at a time when many people were suffering great privation. After the war, she quietly moved to using posher fabrics, especially silk. Here, we have her wearing one of her marinières, along with a pair of trousers, no doubt another cause of scandal (when I was young it was still thought that proper young women did not wear trousers, and certainly not in the workplace).

Of course, Picasso and Chanel knew each other; the artsy world is a small one, everywhere. Jean Cocteau was a firm friend of Picasso’s; he was one of the witnesses to Picasso’s marriage with his first wife, Olga Khokhlova. He was also a firm friend of Chanel’s, so naturally he introduced the two to each other … It so happened that Olga was a devoted client of Chanel’s, and Chanel regularly visited the couple after they were married … Some of Chanel’s creations were inspired by Picasso’s cubism … Chanel and Picasso collaborated with Cocteau in his 1922 adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone: Chanel designed the costumes, Picasso designed the sets and masks; here we have the costume for Antigone …

Readers get the picture. I don’t think, though, Picasso ever painted Chanel; at least, I haven’t found any trace of such a painting.

But Picasso did paint another woman who was also instrumental, along with her husband, in promoting the marinière among the more arty folk.

She was Sara Murphy, he Gerald Murphy, both from wealthy American families, who in the 1920s decided to escape from their disapproving parents and live on the French Riviera for a while. They hosted a fashionable bohemian set at their home there: Picasso, of course, was a guest, but so was the painter Fernand Léger, despite his communist sympathies; as readers can guess, Cocteau also turned up (he happened to own a villa in the same general area); Cole Porter – an intimate friend of Gerald’s – was a frequent visitor; a bevvy of American poets and writers travelling through Europe dropped by: F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley; and on and on. Chanel could well have also been a guest – she, too, owned a villa on the French Riviera – but I’ve found no trace of her being on the guest list.

The story goes that on a shopping trip to Marseilles – a port city, let’s remember – Gerald was charmed by the marinières that he saw all around him. So he bought a bunch of them and distributed them to his guests, thereby transforming the humble marinière into chic leisurewear. We have here a photo of Gerald wearing a marinière, with his wife on the beach.

And here we have F. Scott Fitzgerald, with his wife Zelda, wearing his marinière together with plus-fours – an interesting combination, shall we say.

I should say in passing that the Murphys are credited with getting the smart set to visit the French Riviera during the summer and not just the winter, as had been the case until then. Prior to their arrival, lying on a beach to enjoy the sun was not done. Occasionally, someone went swimming, but the joys of hanging out on a beach just to soak up the sun were still unknown. It was the Murphys who introduced this as a fashionable activity. We have here Gerald and Picasso on the beach at Antibes.

And here, to complement the photo above of the poster advertising the charms of Deauville, we have a photo of a UK poster from the late 1920s advertising the – warm – charms of the French Riviera.

Even though Gerald may have given Picasso a marinière to wear back in the 1920s, we don’t have a photo of him wearing one then – or at least I haven’t found such a photo. The photos with him in a marinière, like the one I started this post with, are from the 1950s and later. Perhaps it was only when Picasso moved down to the Riviera after World War II that he started wearing one regularly.

In fact, the marinière only seems to have become a common fashion statement in France in the 1950s, and from what I can gather we mainly have Brigitte Bardot to thank for this. She turned up at a Cannes Film Festival – and was photographed – in a marinière. Here, we have a few of these photos.

Here’s another, with BB showing her sex kitten side.

High fashion once more picked up on the marinière. Here, we have Yves Saint Laurent’s 1966 take on this item of clothing.

But it was Jean-Paul Gaultier who really put the marinière on the high fashion map from the late 1970s onwards. He went crazy for it after seeing Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film “Querelle de Brest”, a film which plays to another side, the homoerotic side, of the Navy uniform.

Here is a selection of Gaultier’s take on the marinière.

There are lots more of Gaultier’s takes on this once humble piece of clothing. Any reader who is interested in dreaming about what flash piece of Gaultier marinière-themed wear they could look for in their local vintage clothes shop can do no worse than surf this site. And there are lots of other high fashion dudes who’ve had a go at the marinière: Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel (unsurprisingly), Kenzo Takada, Sonia Rykiel, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, and on and on. I shall let readers explore.

Meanwhile, although I said at the beginning that I didn’t want to celebrate Picasso’s artistry in this post, it seems to me appropriate to finish up with a couple of his works in which he celebrated the marinière.

Here, we have a man in a marinière smoking a cigarette.

This is a self-portrait from 1943.

And here we have Picasso’s daughter Claude in a marinière-themed dress.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY’S COSMATESQUE PAVEMENT

Vienna, 8 April 2023

I don’t understand it, my wife and I have not yet received our invitation to attend King Charles III’s coronation in Westminster Abbey! It’s taking place very soon, on 6 May!

This is a huge problem, because I won’t get a chance to surreptitiously inspect the Cosmatesque pavement laid in front of the Abbey’s High Altar while the assembled Archbishops drone their way through the coronation liturgy.

The fact is, the pavement is covered up almost all the time, to protect it. It’s only during a coronation or other exceptional events that it is uncovered. In fact, the last time it was uncovered was when William and Kate were married in the Abbey back in 2011 (another event to which my wife and I were not invited; have they mislaid our address, I wonder?)

Why my anxiety to inspect the pavement? Well, the Abbey’s Cosmatesque pavement is quite remarkable, simply because it really shouldn’t be there. One finds this style of pavement primarily in and around Rome, where it was developed from the end of the 11th Century to the 13th Century by a number of families of artisans, the most well-known of which were the Cosmati, who have given their name to the style. As a rule, Cosmatesque pavements have white or light-coloured marbles for background, into which have been inlaid triangles, squares, parallelograms, and circles of darker stones. These are surrounded by ribbons of mosaic composed of coloured and gold-glass tesseræ. The result are lovely geometrical designs of swirling colours over the floor. Here are some of the best examples that have come down to us.

Basilica di San Clemente:

Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin

Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme

Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura

Basilica di San Saba

The artisans laying down these pavements recycled much of the stones they used from the copious ancient Roman ruins that still littered Rome and its environs; the circles in particular were sliced off columns that couldn’t be used as columns any more. The artisans would dig through old ruins, looking for marble to salvage (with one of their side businesses being selling off the statues which they came across during their digs). This painting by Canaletto is from many centuries later, and it just shows people visiting the ruins in Rome rather than digging into them, but it gives a nice impression of what it must have been like to live with all those ruins around one.

The sources I’ve read talk airily about examples of Cosmatesque work also existing north of the Alps, although the only example they ever cite is Westminster Abbey. I haven’t been able to find a single other example of Cosmatesque pavement outside of the Roman heartlands, not even in the north of Italy (if any readers know of examples outside Italy, please let me know). So the presence of a Cosmatesque pavement in Westminster Abbey is indeed pretty remarkable. How come there is this one isolated example north of the Alps?

The answer to that question lies in the history of Westminster Abbey. The Abbey has always had a special relationship with the English (and later, British) crown, ever since King Edward the Confessor in the 1040s established his royal palace by the banks of the river Thames west of the city of London and decided to re-endow and greatly enlarge a small Benedictine monastery already located there. This included building the first cathedral, the “west minster” (as opposed to the “east minster”, St. Paul’s cathedral, in the city of London). Here, we have a scene from the Bayeux tapestry, showing the funeral procession of Edward the Confessor, bringing him to his cathedral where he was buried.

Thereafter, the English kings patronised the abbey and its cathedral, with all the coronations of English (and then British) monarchs from 1066 onwards (bar two) taking place in the cathedral.

Presumably as a reflection of its special royal status, in the period we’re interested in, namely the second half of the 13th Century, the Abbot reported directly to the papacy and not to any local bishop as would normally have been the case. This meant that it was the Pope who approved the choice of abbot made by Westminster’s monks. Which explains why, in 1258, a certain Richard de Ware, whom the monks of Westminster had chosen as their new abbot, travelled down to Rome to obtain the necessary papal approval. It just so happened that the pope and his court were residing in the town of Agnani, some 60 km south-east of Rome, when Richard arrived (for a while, it was a popular place for Popes to spend their summers). So Richard made his way there. He of course visited the cathedral in Agnani, where he was captivated by its Cosmatesque pavement. I deliberately left this pavement out from the examples I gave above so that I could show it here in all its splendour and imagine Richard de Ware’s feelings when he set eyes on it. The first photo shows the pavement in the main church, the second the pavement in the crypt.

It seems that Richard lusted after this pavement: “I must have it in my abbey church!”, I can hear him cry (in Latin) to the assistants who travelled with him (ever since the beginning of time, Important People have had what the Italians call portaborse, or bag carriers, to accompany them wherever they go).

Richard was probably encouraged to have these lustful thoughts because Westminster Abbey was in the middle of a total makeover. In 1245, England’s king, Henry III, had launched a rebuilding programme of the cathedral, adopting the-then ultramodern Gothic style. I presume that when Richard got back from Agnani, he persuaded Henry that a Cosmatesque pavement in front of the high altar was de rigeur if the cathedral was to be fully at the architectural cutting edge. But it took another ten years for the pavement to be laid. Work on the cathedral’s makeover proceeded fitfully; Henry was always chronically short of funds, and he was constantly at war with his Barons (at one point, he was even their prisoner). But finally, in 1268, after Richard got a team of artisans headed by a certain Odoricus to come from Rome to do the work, the pavement in front of the high altar was finished.

If I’ve repeated the photo of Westminster Abbey’s pavement, it’s to allow readers to compare it better to the pavement in the cathedral of Agnani and the other Roman and Lazian examples which I gave earlier. One fundamental difference jumps out: in Westminster, the background stone – the stone in which the rest of the stones are inlaid – is dark while in the Roman and Lazian examples it is white. I have to say, personally I feel that the Abbey’s pavement suffers from this change in background colour. A white background allows the geometric patterns and swirls to stand out much more effectively. The only reason I’ve found in my readings for this change of colour is that the white Carrara marble used in Italy suffers in damp climates – and heaven knows the UK is damp! But maybe English tastes were anyway for dark stone. Certainly the stone used – Purbeck marble, which comes from a quarry near Bournemouth in Dorset – was popular in English church architecture; it’s to be found in virtually all of the cathedrals in the south of England. Here, we have quarriers of Purbeck marble from 150 or so years ago.

Considering now the design of the pavement, I can assure readers that there is a meaning to the way it was laid out. Cutting through all the symbolic froth, it evokes a sacred centre of the world, what the Ancient Greeks called the omphalion, the navel of the world, which in turn is at the centre of the universe. And it is on that omphalion in the centre of Westminster Abbey’s pavement that the clergy will place coronation chair on which Charles will sit to be crowned, as they have for all the English and British monarchs (bar two, as I said earlier) who have come before him. I show here a photo of the previous coronation, of Queen Elizabeth II – as readers will note, the pavement was covered up that time.

There’s more heavy symbolism to the pavement’s design, alluded to by the Latin inscription which ran around it but of which very little is left today. Luckily, several hundred years ago, someone transcribed it while it was still legible. It said (translated from the original Latin):

In the year of Christ one thousand two hundred and twelve plus sixty minus four, the third King Henry, the city [of London, presumably], Odoricus [the head of the crew which laid the pavement] and the abbot [Richard de Ware] put these porphyry stones together. If the reader wisely considers all that is laid down, he will find here the end of the primum mobile; a hedge [lives for] three years, add dogs and horses and men, stags and ravens, eagles, enormous whales, the world: each one following triples the years of the one before.

According to scholars who have spent many hours parsing this gobbledygook, it shows that the pavement was meant to symbolise not only the world and the universe, but also to predict the number of years to its end. Very reminiscent of Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code”!

The stones set into the dark Purbeck marble tell us another story, a story of trade, one of the many which I have recounted in these posts. Looking at the Westminster pavement, we can trace a story of a trade in stones across the Roman Empire, the breakdown of that trade as the Roman Empire collapsed, and – as Europe developed economically – its replacement by a European trade in stones. To appreciate these trade flows, readers have to know that the pavement we see today in the Abbey is not exactly the original. Three limited restorations have been carried out over the ages – one in the mid-17th Century, one at the turn of the 18th Century, and a final one in the mid-19th Century – where some of the original stones, worn or lost, were replaced by other stones.

In the original parts of the pavement, purple and green porphyry are the most abundant inlaid stones. Purple porphyry was the “imperial” stone in the Roman and Byzantine Empires (purple being the imperial colour), and it could only be used in connection with the Emperors and their closest family.

That’s why, for instance, the sculpture of the four Tetrarchs (who between them reigned over the Roman Empire in the late 290s, early 300s AD), which today is set into the corner of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, is made with porphyry.

This stone is found in only one set of quarries, located in Egypt’s harsh Eastern Desert. The Romans, and the Byzantines after them, mined it there and transported it all over the Empire. This is a photo of the mountain that the Romans called Mons Porphyris, with remains of the Roman mining town in the foreground.

When the Byzantines lost control of Egypt to the Arabs in the 7th Century, they lost access to porphyry. Thereafter, they were forced to recycle the porphyry already scattered around the Empire.

The green porphyry, on the other hand, originally came from quarries in the Greek Peloponnese.

The quarries were located near the small town of Krokees, not too far from Sparta.

This stone too was traded all over the Empire, a trade that sputtered to a halt after the 5th Century AD as the Empire began to fall apart. The location of the quarries was forgotten and they were only recently rediscovered.

Surprisingly, given the highly symbolic nature of the pavement, porphyry was not used in the central roundel, where the monarchs are crowned. Instead, an alabaster stone was used.

The precise provenance of this alabaster (also used in several other places in the pavement) is not known, but in all probability it was mined somewhere in what is now Turkey but what was in Roman times called Asia Minor.

Odoricus and his crew used a few other stones in minor quantities: africano, a red and black marble breccia, which was also quarried in Asia Minor near what is today Izmir; breccia corallina, a breccia of white marble in a coral-pink matrix, also quarried in Asia Minor, but in what used to be the ancient kingdom of Bythinia; and gabbro, another stone that was quarried in Egypt’s Eastern Desert.

By the time the Westminster pavement was laid down, the trade in these stones had been dead for some 800 years. So contemporary trade was not their source. Just as the stones in the Cosmatesque pavements in Rome were extracted from the Roman ruins scattered around the city, they could have come as spolia from England’s sparse Roman ruins. But Richard de Ware left us a message which suggests that Rome was the source. His grave (which lies on the north side of the pavement) once carried an inscription, which read (in Latin): “Abbot Richard de Ware, who rests here, now bears those stones which he himself bore hither from the City”, in this case the Eternal City, Rome. I can’t believe that Richard’s entourage personally carried the stones back from Rome, like bags of swag slung over their shoulders. I take the inscription to mean that when he got Odoricus and his crew to come from Rome, they brought with them the necessary stones, excavated from the Roman ruins in and around the city.

Interestingly enough, one stone which is common in Rome’s Cosmatesque pavements, but which for some reason Odoricus brought very little of, is giallo antico, a yellow limestone. Here is a nice example of a Cosmatesque use of this stone, in a roundel in the church of San Benedetto in Piscinula.

It was used extensively by the Romans and was mined by them in quarries near Carthage in what is now Tunisia.

The few pieces of this stone in the Westminster pavement have been supplemented by an English stone, Tadcaster limestone from North Yorkshire.

Fast-forward 3½-4 Centuries, to when repairs needed to be carried out to the pavement, and the picture had changed. Stones were being traded once again across Europe. And so, to fill in pieces of missing purple porphyry, ammonitico rosso from the Alps near Verona was used, as was rouge royale, a red limestone from the area around Dinant in Belgium. Any missing green porphyry was substituted either by verde genova, which comes from the mountains lying between Piedmont and Liguria, or verde di Prato, which is mined on the Tuscan side of the Appenines. Where dark-coloured stones needed replacing, a couple of black/grey-black limestones from Belgium were used.

So many interesting things to ponder on! Medieval symbolism, international trade through the ages, political ties between England and Rome in the Middle Ages, and who knows what else! But I can’t do any of this pondering if my wife and I don’t get invited to Charles’s coronation! What can I do to unhook an invite? What favours owed to me can I call in? Let me check my list of contacts for Important Persons whom I can importune to help me get invites. Two measly invites is all I’m looking for!

STOP THE PRESSES! I have just learned that for a limited period just after the coronation, tours are being offered of Westminster Abbey which will include visiting the pavement (shoeless, of course). Unfortunately, all the tickets are already sold out. Who can I buy tickets from, no doubt at highly inflated prices?

THE ONE THAT NEARLY GOT AWAY

Vienna, 20 February 2023

I’m normally quite good at writing posts about the wonderful experiences which my wife and I have enjoyed as we pass through this Autumn of our lives. Sometimes, though, they escape me. We get carried along by the River of Life as it rolls remorselessly on and soon something else has happened which becomes the topic of my next post. That experience disappears from the rear-view mirror and is gone for ever.

This post is about one such experience, which I am determined will not wriggle free of my electronic pen, because it was simply too wonderful not to document. It’s been eight years since it occurred but it has never quite disappeared from my mind’s eye. Every time the memories resurface, I castigate myself for my laziness and vow to write That Post. I am finally making good on that vow.

As I said, I have to take my readers back eight years, when we went to spend the Christmas break in Mexico with our son and daughter – he was working there, and she flew down from New York where she was working. As a last trip before we went back to Bangkok, where I was stationed at the time, the two of us along with our son (our daughter had had to go back) flew down to the state of Chiapas, which borders with Guatemala. We had arranged for a car and driver to pick us up in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, from which we were to take a one-week tour. The itinerary was put together by an agency, with limited input from our side; we were happy to go along with their recommendations. And so we found ourselves going to the Sumidero Canyon, San Cristobal de las Casas, Palenque, a couple of Mayan ruins in the Reserva de la Biósfera Monte Azules down by the Guatemalan border, and finishing off in Villahermosa in the neighbouring state of Tabasco (I had to check our photos floating around in the i-cloud to remember where we’d been).

Ever since my wife and I, together with my mother-in-law, had toured central and southern Mexico back in the early 1980s, I have had an enduring fascination for the ruins of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican civilisations. On that earlier trip, we had visited Palenque, so I looked forward to revisiting the site. Alas, the intervening years have not been kind. The site was in good shape, I hasten to say; that wasn’t the problem. Actually, the site was in too good a shape, very much tamed, with the surrounding semi-tropical vegetation cut back and kept under control, a far cry from my memory of Palenque as a place where the ruins poked out of the jungle. And it was terribly crowded! The curse of having been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I’m sure. So I’m afraid to say I felt slightly deflated after the visit.

The next day, the driver announced that we would be visiting two other Mayan sites today. They were quite remote, requiring us to drive a good long way down to the Guatemalan border. It all sounded very intriguing, but after Palenque I, for one, was game for a little adventure. So off we went, down this rather minor road, with our driver doing some alarming overtaking along the way. After a while, we reached the first site, Bonampak, which lay just off the road.

Its main claim to fame are its murals, which are indeed quite remarkable. I thought of inserting here some of our photos of these murals which are adrift in my i-cloud, but I find that other photos available on the internet are much better, so as is my habit I have instead shamelessly lifted these two photos, showing some of the murals.

On we drove, until finally we reached a river (I later learned that Guatemala started on the other side). Our driver parked the car and we got out. Where was the site, we asked, looking around. Oh no, he said, you could only get to the site by boat. We would be taking one of the boats (rather frail-looking, I found) pulled up on the bank, and it would take us about 40 minutes to get there.

And with that, he handed us over to the skipper of one of the boats and brightly informed us that he’d be waiting for us. Right, we said, and took our seats somewhat gingerly in the boat. As the skipper roared off upstream, I was feeling quite like Indiana Jones setting off into the jungle to discover a long-lost temple stuffed with gold.

A sudden squall of rain dampened the thrill, especially as our trousers and shoes began to get seriously wet. But the rain left mist trailing romantically through the increasingly thick jungle on the Mexican side of the river.

Finally, our skipper pulled up to a jetty and motioned us to take a path which disappeared off into the jungle. And so we climbed up through thick vegetation until we finally entered some moss-covered ruins jutting out of the jungle.

The path led us to a dark, creepy corridor, which we felt our way along

until we finally exited back into the light.

We walked into a clearing, where we could see other ruins peaking out of the surrounding jungle.

We had entered the ancient Mayan city of Yaxchilán.

I find any ancient ruin fascinating – the pull of a place once the centre of a vibrant life but now just a tumbled pile of mouldering stones. Others before me have captured this melancholy fascination of ruins in words much better than mine. Sultan Mehmet II, the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople, is said to have murmured a distich by the Persian poet Ferdowsi as he surveyed the ruins of what had been the Sacred Palace of the emperors of Byzantium:

The Spider has wove her web in the imperial palace,
The Owl has sung her watch song upon the towers of Samarkand.

While an anonymous Anglo-Saxon penned these lines about Roman ruins he encountered somewhere in Britain:

Wondrous is this wall-stead, wasted by fate.
Battlements broken, giant’s work shattered.
Roofs are in ruin, towers destroyed,
Broken the barred gate, rime on the plaster,

Walls gape, torn up, destroyed, consumed by age.
A hundred generations have passed.
Earth-grip holds the proud builders, departed, long lost,
In the hard grasp of the grave. How often has this wall,

Hoary with lichen, red-stained, outlasted the passing reigns,
Withstanding the storms; the high arch now has fallen …

(At this point, there is a gap, for the parchment on which the poem was written has itself suffered badly from the passage of time).

But there is something very special about ruins like Yaxchilàn immersed in jungle. It has to do, I think, with Nature much more obviously reclaiming what is hers, a powerful reminder of the warning uttered endlessly by the catholic priests of my boyhood on Ash Wednesday as they crossed your forehead with ash, “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” That sense of Nature slowly growing back and smothering men’s foolish dreams in stone is overpowering in Angkor Wat, of which this one photo, endlessly reproduced, is a potent example.

But it was also there in Yaxchilàn, all the more so since the overcast weather gave the site a brooding feel.

And so, with the site more or less to ourselves, we wandered from ruin to ruin.

Finally, we climbed a long flight of stairs that disappeared up into the surrounding vegetation.

At the top of which there was this structure.

And beyond which rolled away to the horizon the thick jungle of the Reserva de la Biósfera Monte Azules.

As we walked around we came across carved stone steles showing the proud rulers of this once thriving city state.

Looking at them, it was hard not to murmur Shelley’s Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

And so we travellers walked back down to the river, got into our boat, and skimmed along the river to our waiting driver.