Abbeville and Ruskin

Abbeville is the saddest sight in the world. You come to visit the church of St Wulfram, so admired by Ruskin, and what you notice first of all is that everything else in the centre of town around the church has been rebuilt, in a rather drab 1950s non-imposing, nondescript style. It makes the contrast with the church all the more stark. The church remains, but the rest of the town was flattened by bombs. Amazingly, St Wulfram's survived.

Not that it had ever been finished. The church itself has a very strange shape. There are a few bays of the nave, and a magnificent facade, but the choir seems to be almost an apology, and the church is truncated with a vengeance. Inside, you read that bombing in 1940 took the roof off and much else. So it's amazing that there is anything standing from the church at all.


Is anything left of the church that Ruskin admired? What exactly did Ruskin admire about Abbeville? As often happens, it isn't so easy to work out just what it is that Ruskin got excited by. It is clear that Ruskin loved Abbeville. In Praeterita, for example, he talks about his visit there in 1835, with his parents:

In this journey of 1835 I first saw Rouen and Venice [...] nor could I understand the full power of any of  those great scenes till much later. But for Abbeville, which is the preface and interpretation of Rouen, I was ready on that 5th of June, and felt that here was entrance for me into immediately healthy labour and joy.

181. For here I saw that art (of its local kind), religion, and present human life, were yet in perfect harmony. [...] Outside, the faithful old town gathered itself, and nestled under their buttresses like a brood beneath the mother’s wings; the quiet, uninjurious aristocracy of the newer town opened into silent streets, between self-possessed and hidden dignities of dwelling,
[...] I never, to my knowledge, wasted an hour in Abbeville or Rouen, and the Seven Lamps and Stones of Venice, which were the direct outcome of my work in them, are
securely right and useful.”

The commercial square, with the main street of traverse, consisted of uncompetitive shops, such as were needful, of the native wares: cloth and hosiery spun, woven, and knitted within the walls;

My most intense happinesses have of course been among mountains. But for cheerful, unalloyed, unwearying pleasure, the getting in sight of Abbeville on a fine summer afternoon, jumping out in the courtyard of the Hotel de I’Europe, and rushing down the street to see St. Wulfran again before the sun was off the towers, are things to cherish the past for,—to the end.

Here it seems that Ruskin enjoyed the sincere simplicity (as he saw it) of a a provincial town - nothing to do with art history. Exactly what it is that Ruskin admired in the church of St Wulfram is barely mentioned, although a letter is quoted by Cook and Wedderburn in the Library edition. In the letter Ruskin compares the dullness of the carving at Salisbury with the flamboyance of St Wulfram:

“It is most fortunate that I have come here,” he writes home from Abbeville (Aug. 8, 1848), “straight from Salisbury—not even blunting at Winchester the severe memory of that Gothic; for much as I admired Abbeville porch before, it comes upon me now in such luscious richness,—so full, so fantastic,—so exquisitely picturesque that I seem never to have seen it before.”

What can be seen at Abbeville today is mainly the exquisite wooden carved main door, in glorious Renaissance perspective, as well as two Renaissance sculptures inserted with a different stone onto the Gothic facade. What is clear is that neither of these things is at all Gothic:

Nor is either of these works of art mentioned by Ruskin. He's probably too busy looking at the "uncompetitive shops, such as were needful", indulging in his irrelevant and misguided views of peasant life, and at the same time concentrating on the Gothic he wanted to see and ignoring the Renaissance.

What was so special about the Dutch 17th century?

It all started when Jane asked why the Dutch painted such amazing pictures in the 17th century. The pictures referred to are the "genre" paintings (italicised, because there is no better word to describe them, although no definition I know that is not slightly disparaging). I haven't yet answered the question, but, as often happens, I've come up with a few potential answers to different questions. Jonathan Israel has published extensively in this area and he should know a thing or two. So I noticed a recent review by him with interest. What claims did he make for the 17th-century United Provinces?

Going Dutch: the book

I'm sorry, Lisa, but if you are going to write a book that attempts to engage my sympathies, in a word, if you are going to try to persuade me with your writing, then I reserve the right to notice how my sympathies are being manipulated. In my last post I pointed out how the effect of the writing, which was often powerful and engaging, was severely diminished by the appalling copy editing of the book. But today let's look at the content itself. Here too I am uncomfortable with the basic premise of the book, I'm afraid to say.


Now, I'm no expert in 17th-century Dutch history, or English history, for that matter, but given that Ms Jardine's chosen subject is the relation between the United Provinces and England, would it not be an idea to consider the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism, between supporters of monarchy and supporters of republicanism, during this period? The Netherlands appears amazingly to have jumped from republic to monarchy with surprising ease during this period, while England was switching (perhaps more painfully) back and forth at the same time. Yet in this book we seem to be locked in a study of royalism, even unthinking royalism. We examine the royalist exile courts in The Hague. Our guide is Sir Constantin Huygens, who describes the future Charles II in 1654 as "the King of Great Britain", to the displeasure of at least one of his correspondents. That sounds pretty royalist to me. Yet Sir CH managed to have a senior role to both the Statholder of the Dutch Republic and immediately afterwards to William II - sounds a bit like Talleyrand to me, quite an achievement, to serve both masters with fundamentally different principles. How did he manage it? Does Ms Jardine examine this flexibility of attitude on the part of Huygens? Apparently not.


There is another intriguing story that I think this book misses. I started reading this book because I had been reading about 17th-century Dutch art. It doesn't take long when looking at Dutch art of this period to notice an interesting opposition, or at least contrast, between two concepts of art in the Dutch Golden Age. These two concepts seem to have co-existed. One of them was the classical, Italianate tradition represented by Rubens in Antwerp (significantly in the Spanish Netherlands). The other, less dramatic, but no less powerful, is what is feebly referred to as Dutch "genre" painting of the United Provinces. If you want to over-simplify it, the first school has the bodies big and buxom, while the second has the bodies much, much less imposing (or even non-existent), and seen within an interior or a landscape where the "background" is as important as the actors. This second school had no real equivalent in Italy; perhaps no equivalent elsewhere in Europe. Yet these paintings were popular, and the artists well-known. Jardine does not seem to be concerned about the possible political implications of the two schools. Were the Italianate paintings monarchist while the genre paintings were republican? It seems a theory worth investigating, at least. But in this book, it seems a matter of no concern. Commissions for big pictures, both in England and in Holland, are always Italianate  - not suprising that the English court taste appeared to be for classical (Van Dyke, Rubens), but suprising that the republican United Provinces looked for the same kind of thing when decorating big town halls in Amsterdam and The Hague. There are some mentions of the genre paintings; but overall I feel it is a topic that has been missed in a general haze of royalism that envelops this book. This is not a serious examination of forms of government in early modern Europe; this is the 17th-century equivalent of the Financial Times weekend edition, an uncritical and unquestioning close-up of the rich nobility at play.

In fact the book appears to be written in an apologetic tone for the court party of both countries. It is a strange perspective, a bit like that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, since we readers understand so little of what is really going on. I know this is not a straight account of political history, but there are those (e.g. Jonathan Israel) who make the grand claim that the United Provinces was the seedbed of the Enlightenment, the most advanced liberal state in Europe in the 17th century. If it was, I don't get the feeling from this book.

Going literally Dutch: the editing

Lisa Jardine's well-produced book Going Dutch (HarperCollins) looked appealing the moment I saw it in the bookshop. It has an elegant cover. It is printed in full colour throughout, and to prove the point, it has a different coloured rule for each page per chapter. Not that such a feature would influence me, of course.

The book opens tremendously well, with the 1688 invasion of England that is never referred to by the British as an invasion. I knew little about the details, and Jardine captures the reader's attention by jumping in at the most dramatic point in the story. I have no problems with the author's jumping around chronologically if it helps the drama of the telling. But now I am around half way through the book, I am starting to notice a few places where the manner of the delivery and presentation are starting to become annoying.

The paradox of Latin in the Middle Ages

The Latin of the medieval Church was thus born with a double character. It bound the universal Church intimately together ... but simultaneously preserved writings potentially corrosive of Christian belief. ... The more assiduously a young cleric read Cicero to polish his language for Christian ministry, the more exposed he was to pre-Christian thought. 

Alexander Murray, review in the TLS of Ronald Witt The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Italy (Cambridge, 2013)

Ancient rhetoric

The Greeks got there first. We think we know how to write a piece of propaganda, or how to plan a speech. But the Ancient Greeks had a clearly set-out sequence for how to arrange such a piece. A speech comprises six stages:

1. exordium
2. narratio
3. divisio
4. confirmatio
5. confutatio
6. peroratio

What do these stages mean? Any educated Hellenic Greek could have told you. I have no idea. 

A literary composition would have five sections:

1. inventio
2. disposition
3. elocutio
4. memoria
5. pronuntiatio or actio

All this is according to Brian Vickers, in the TLS of 5 October 2007. But he doesn't tell us where he got these terms from. 

Burghley House - Elizabethan or medieval?

Burghley House is a paradox. Here is one of the great Elizabethan houses of England - from the outside. There are windows, towers, strange shapes, galore.

But inside you could be forgiven for the most part in thinking you are in an eighteenth-century stately home. Even the attendants in each room behave in a stately home way. They will tell you the family still lives here, which is why you can't enter one of the most exquisite courtyards of any Elizabethan house. You have to peek at it through a window, and most people will not even notice it is there.

One of the house's great features, a classically decorated staircase, is almost unnoticed because it looks relatively undecorated compared to the profusion of decoration everywhere else - frescoes, woodcarving, objects, you name it. It's enough to give you a headache just walking round; you feel refreshed to be out of it.

All this becomes more difficult to explain because there is a rule of no photography in the house. So visitors have to use their imagination (to guess what it must have been like originally) and their memory (to try and remember what they have seen).

Yet what is astonishing is when you reach the Great Hall. It's surprising that a brand new Elizabethan house would have a Great Hall, but Burghley does, and it looks just like a medieval hall, complete with hammerbeam roof. Classical it is not.

Somehow William Cecil could have built not only a house in the forefront of modern architecture (the outside view and the courtyard), but in a wilfully archaic style (the Great Hall) at the same time. Inside the Great Hall, the two styles are right on top of each other. There is a fine classical fireplace, singled out by Pevsner as the state of the art in Elizabethan Renaissance architecture, but the fireplace has been wedged in on top of existing windows, and looks very uncomfortably in its non-classical home.

To be honest, the result is a hotch-potch, so perhaps the many additions throughout of the 17th and 18th centuries are perhaps not so foreign to the original patron's idea. He didn't mind a bit of eclecticism.