Mysterious Wisdom (15 page)

Great behemoths of cities grew and grew, engorged by an influx of job seekers. The population of Birmingham more than doubled in the first three decades of the century. Manchester and Liverpool, Bristol and Sheffield expanded apace. But infrastructures were not strong enough to cope. Systems creaked and then cracked under the strain. The industries that were breeding so much wealth were also spawning human misery. People needed housing and, as suburbia swallowed up fields and pastures, the poor were increasingly corralled into squalid urban tenements from which there was less and less chance of escape. Huge, stinking slums spread unsanitary ghettos which developers ignored. An entire urban underclass was being created, its members grist to the economic mill.

Small wonder, then, that those who could afford the luxury of such fantasies, began to look back nostalgically along the ways that they felt were being lost: to imagine the life of the peasant as a pastoral idyll, to see the countryside as a haven of Arcadian peace. It was a pleasing dream. Primitive man, Rousseau had postulated in the preceding century, was in some ways superior to the denizens of a modern age for, however raw his existence, however basic his lifestyle, a proper sense of mutual responsibility had at least prevailed. Archaic society, he had argued, had been built on foundations of comradeship and sharing and had not given itself over to the greedy arrogation of wealth. Such visions had done much to nurture the idealists of the French Revolution and their plans for establishing a mutually beneficial republic. By Palmer's day, that particular fantasy, betrayed by Napoleon and his imperial ambitions, had turned horribly sour and so, in the hope of discovering an alternative idyll, people were beginning to look back towards the Middle Ages instead. Medieval society could be more safely admired. Here was a spiritual antidote to contemporary materialism; here was an era in which, it was wistfully imagined, the values which modernity was destroying could be rediscovered again. The towers of England's Gothic churches stood like stone guardians amid its patchwork landscapes, stalwart survivors of a lost age of belief. They rose like reminders of the glories of faith, of the grandeur of God and of man's highest aspirations and the fact that the Gothic style was widely believed to have been British in origin made such ideals feel appropriately patriotic to boot.

 

 

Artists were in a quandary. It was all very well to admire the simple grace of the Gothic, but what about the hard-fought advances of their professional practice? For generations painters had striven for the skills of life-like representation, studying anatomy, poring over perspective, learning to render the light and shadow which could lend three-dimensionality to form, testing out a variety of atmospheric effects, striving to present the figure in motion, to capture the variety of facial expression, to manifest the drama and vibrancy of life. By the nineteenth century, an ability to imitate naturalistically had become a benchmark of talent. Such mimesis could not simply be abandoned without finding some other great achievement to elevate in its place. A group of German artists presented one solution. Coming together in Vienna in 1809 with Johann Friedrich Overbeck, the son of a Protestant pastor, at their centre, they formed a cooperative similar to that of a medieval guild. Members of the Brotherhood of St Luke – named after the patron saint of artists – believed in hard work and holy living. Forswearing the painting techniques of the present, eschewing the antique as pagan, the Renaissance as false, they looked instead to the art of the Middle Ages, aiming for a style which would combine nobility of intention with precision of outline and scholastic composition and to which light, shade and colour could be added, not for sensual allurement, but for further clarification of their sacred message.

In 1810 the group travelled to Italy and, moving into the abandoned monastery of St Isidoro in Rome, formed the core of a loose commune of fellow believers who, wearing biblical robes, rough beards and long uncut locks, would garden or do household chores in the morning before coming together to collaborate on artistic projects, including, most prominently, religious fresco painting, until the end of the day. This group became known as the Nazarenes, a name that had originally been coined as a term of mockery but which, with time, would become adopted as a badge of pride. The Nazarenes, even as they pursued the Christ-like affectations which their critics derided, rejected at the same time all that was easy or familiar. Refusing to fall in line with the academy system of teaching, spurning the naturalistic conventions of their day and hence also, symbolically, the materialism of modernity, their practice slowly accrued what was seen as an innate moral power.

The Nazarenes' paintings look rather less impressive from a historical perspective than they did to their contemporaries. Their compositions are stilted, their subject matter is derivative and their colours lack energy. But, in their day, these images proved eye-catching if only because they were also so odd. Their style had ‘little or nothing to do with reality', declared Charles Eastlake, a painter of historic and biblical subjects who was to go on, in 1843, to become the first Keeper of the National Gallery and the President of the Royal Academy. ‘To censure it for being destitute of colour, light and shade, would be ridiculous,' he wrote in a review, for ‘such merits would, in fact, destroy its character . . . they have dignified their style by depriving the spectator of the power of criticising the execution.'
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By eschewing the parameters by which painting was normally judged, the Nazarenes had ducked under the barriers of critical convention and discovered what for a while felt like an exhilarating new freedom. By the time that Palmer was looking for a fresh way forward, they were already internationally renowned. A major 1816 fresco commission in Rome, devoted to the story of Joseph in Egypt and painted on the walls of the Palazzo Zuccari (it is now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin) had, even before the project was completed, opened up two further important fresco commissions: the Dante, Tasso and Ariosto rooms at the Casino Massimo and the Gallerie Chiarimonti frescoes in the Vatican. These, capturing the attention of the many travellers to Italy who, with the end of the Napoleonic wars, had started flooding back to the continent, brought celebrity to their makers. Grand tourists would return with descriptions of paintings which, even as they showed off modern fresco techniques, wilfully spurned any superficial virtuosity. They would gossip about the odd commune of artists who had created them, about their peculiar monastic habits and their odd priestly robes. Their desire to return to the celestial origins of art, to cleanse painting of its earthly tarnish and revive its spiritual purpose, struck a resounding chord.

The eighteenth century had looked to classical style because it had wanted to express a universal ideal. When Reynolds in his
Discourses
extolled ‘general beauty' and ‘general truth', he had been encouraging a quest for some perfected template that lay beyond the natural world. This ideal was not so far from that which the Nazarenes sought, it is just that Reynolds's slow, methodical progress, leading step by step backwards towards ancient Greek models, was not nearly as appealing to a new generation as the thrilling illogical leaps that the Romantic imagination could make. ‘Mere enthusiasm will take you but a little way,' Reynolds had admonished; but Blake was speaking for many when he scribbled indignantly: ‘Damn the fool, mere enthusiasm is all.' By 1830, the Nazarenes had disbanded, all but Overbeck returning to Germany, several to become teachers in the very academies which they had once spurned. But for a while, they had set an inspiring precedent. They were ‘one of the chief renovators of Christian art', George Eliot wrote of them some fifty years later, for they had ‘not only revived but expanded that grand conception of supreme events as mysteries at which successive ages were spectators, and in relation to which the great souls of all periods become contemporaries'.
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In 1824, Linnell introduced Palmer to a German collector, Charles Aders. His Euston Square home was to become almost a place of pilgrimage to the eager young painter who sought an art of vision not of mere verisimilitude. Aders was a wealthy merchant and insurance broker. His wife, Eliza, the daughter of the portraitist John Raphael Smith, was a gifted artist in her own right. A friend of the poet August Schlegel (brother to the more famous philosopher) and of the novelist, critic and founding father of the Romantic movement, Ludwig Tieck, Aders was steeped in the spirit of German Romanticism and had come, through this, to develop a discerning admiration for the art of the northern primitives. During the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars, he had managed to purchase many works which, routed from the religious institutions for which they had been painted, came on to the market at very low prices. Scattered throughout the rooms and up the staircases of his London home, were works by such masters as Jan Van Eyck, Hans Memling, Rogier Van der Weyden and Albrecht Dürer.

By the mid-1820s, when an interest in German literature and northern art were at the height of their vogue in Britain, invitations to Aders's various residences were highly sought. The English actor Charles Mayne Young describes a visit to his castle in Godesberg on the Rhine during which he met Coleridge, Wordsworth and Schlegel, and in Euston Square the merchant kept open house to anyone from Charles Lamb through Flaxman to Crabb Robinson. Linnell brought Blake along in the hope that he might find a new patron and Aders obliged, buying, among other works, copies of both the
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience
. The nineteen-year-old Palmer was also invited and it was probably there that he met Jacob Götzenberger, a pupil of Peter Cornelius, a leading figure among the Nazarenes.

Palmer was not completely uncritical of what he saw. He had the outspoken opinions of youth. The faces in many of the paintings, he complained in an 1828 letter to Linnell, though exquisitely drawn, were too much like portraits and the purity of naked form was too frequently ‘thwarted with fringes and belts and trappings' as the artists focused disproportionately on textiles and drapes. But for the most part it was through the work of these ‘primitive' northern masters, through paintings which ‘our modern addlepates grin at for Gothick and barbarous',
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that he encountered a style which to him felt completely authentic. It was not the pictures that were barbarous, the young man decided, but the ignorant onlookers who dismissed them as such.

Linnell was equally enthusiastic. He had spent many patient hours engraving a minutely rendered copy of a panel by Van Eyck. Look for Van Leydenish qualities in the landscape, he instructed his eager pupil. He did not find the stylisations of this artist's primitive aesthetic in the least inimical to naturalistic study; rather, as far as he was concerned, medieval art aimed at a direct, unprejudiced description of the world and a careful rendition of creation's wonders amounted to a proof of the presence of God. This was not an uncommon belief. Among the most popular books of that period (it was to remain one of the most influential texts in Britain right up until the Victorian era and even Darwin would be required to read it as a student at Cambridge) was the
Natural Theology
of the cleric William Paley, best known for his use of the ‘watchmaker analogy': a teleological argument for the existence of God which posited that, just as the complex mechanism of a watch requires an intelligent designer to make it, so the entire world must also have been designed by some omnipresent creator and must still be kept ticking by this potentate. Linnell saw the accurate rendition of nature as an acknowledgement of and homage to this divine presence. By paying meticulous attention to detail, the painter raised his labours to the plane of prayer.