Mysterious Wisdom (31 page)

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Honeymoon in Italy

 

You are going to tread a holy ground, where

St Peter and St Paul have walked

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

On Saturday 30 September 1837, after a courtship that had lasted for more than four years, Palmer finally married Hannah Linnell. She was nineteen and he was thirty-two when they signed their names in the register. And though Palmer would have liked to have professed his vows in church, in taking the hand of Hannah he was also taking her father ever more nearly into his life and Linnell, who, when he had married twenty years earlier had been prepared to travel as far as Scotland to avoid the priest, had insisted on a civil ceremony. The young couple, under a law which had only two months earlier come into effect, were conjoined in a ceremony solemnised by a registrar. ‘S. P. was married at the Courthouse, Marylebone', noted Palmer several years later in his commonplace book: and ‘he, a churchman!'
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For their honeymoon, the young couple planned to join the throngs of British travellers who, with the end of the Napoleonic wars, had returned to traipsing the Grand Tour trail. They would visit Italy. For Palmer it would be the fulfilment of a long-held desire. ‘You are going to tread a holy ground, where St Peter and St Paul have walked before you,'
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he had written to Richmond almost a decade earlier when his friend had first visited this land of artistic wonders. He had long dreamt of the luminous vistas of Claudean pastorals, of Donatello's divinities and Michelangelo's giants; he had imagined the heavenly music that would be played in churches, the medieval reverence of the peasants who prayed. Now he and Hannah were to join Richmond, his heavily pregnant wife Julia and their four-year-old son Thomas Knyvett (the sole survivor of the four children to whom she had so far given birth) on a voyage for which they all held great expectations, but none higher than Palmer's. Reputations could be made overseas. ‘I hope to produce much saleable matter – and to make the “pot boil” with fuel “kindled at the muses' flame”,'
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he declared. Richmond, quick to reciprocate the favour that Palmer had done him upon his own marriage, lent his friend £139 for the journey. A contract was drawn up, setting the interest at 3.5 per cent, though specifically stating that the money should never be demanded back at a time when its borrower would be inconvenienced.

Money, however, was not the couple's main problem. Hannah's mother presented a far less easily surmountable obstacle to their plans. A woman who could discover multifarious dangers in even the most ordinary course of London life, regarded the Italian venture as a dice with death in a land of perilous fevers and volcanic catastrophes, ferocious bandits and predatory priests and, perhaps worst of all, indigestible foodstuffs. For a while it had seemed as if Palmer would be travelling alone. It took all the persuasive tact of a conciliating Julia and all the logical pressure of a reasonable Linnell, to coax the neurotic matriarch into changing her mind. To prevent any last-minute backpedalling she was made to put her name to a written declaration of assent. Meanwhile Linnell, although initially he too had had his reservations, commissioned his daughter to paint a series of small-scale copies of the Raphael frescoes in the Vatican, as well as to colour a set of prints he had made after Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling. These tasks would provide her, he thought, with a project to occupy her as well as a source of much-needed income for he had given his daughter no dowry and she would be embarking for Italy with barely £10 in her purse.

In the weeks before leaving, Palmer set busily about his preparations: painting materials were gathered, packing attended to with militaristic rigour, a pistol complete with ammunition purchased (it was confiscated by the French authorities even before they got to Paris) and some ‘curious modifications'
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introduced to his bachelor wardrobe. Though these were not specifically described, they would no doubt have involved increased pocket capacity for, several months into his journey, remembering that he had not returned a borrowed book, Palmer wrote and asked his father to do so only to discover the said volume several weeks later bumping around at the bottom of his coat.

Palmer intended to make money by letting out his Grove Street house and, until such time as a tenant could be found, he left his brother to live there and take care of it with the help of his wife. It had seemed a convenient arrangement at the time. The feckless William had at last secured a job and was working as an assistant keeper at the British Museum.

 

 

Four days after the wedding, the Linnells and their children – Lizzy, Johnny, Jemmy, Willy, Mary, Sarah, Polly and Sally – gathered in their front garden to wave Palmer and their eldest sister Anny off.

Having enjoyed a smooth crossing by paddle steamer from Dover, the travellers arrived in Calais, the foreign cries of the French sailors echoing all about them as they dragged the boat shorewards, earrings winking in the light. It was here that Palmer paid his first visit to a Roman Catholic church (though, unsurprisingly, he did not tell Linnell); its richly furnished chapels and ‘picturesque poor people . . . kneeling about the doors',
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delighted his visitor's eye quite as much as the old-fashioned markets with their gay rustic costumes and profusions of bright fruit. From Calais, the Richmonds and Palmers shared a bumpy diligence
to Paris, only getting out twice on the way for a quick stretch of the legs. Despite a few passages of ‘pretty tolerable' scenery, the villages were mostly ‘desolate and deserted . . . with not a gleam of cottage comfort . . . and instead of ruddy ploughmen, ragged, sallow, blue-coated monsieurs', the firmly anti-Republican Palmer recorded. The whole country, he observed, looked as if it had been ‘purged, not purified' by its violent history.
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In the past, Palmer had referred to Paris as ‘that metropolis of Apes'.
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But now, passing a few days there, he spent every hour he could spare from wrangling with French officials over problems with their papers, admiring the antique statuary in the Louvre where, though three-quarters of the paintings he dismissed as ‘of little interest',
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Veronese's massive canvas
The Wedding at Cana
seized his eye. It would be worth travelling to Paris to see this one extraordinary picture alone, he concluded, though it was but the first of many pictures which he would complain could hardly be seen because they were hung in such gloom.

Leaving Paris, the two couples headed south-eastwards for the Swiss frontier; rattling along from five in the morning until six at night with only a brief stop for lunch they made their way upwards into the mountains, through steepening valleys and past plunging waterfalls, by cream-coloured oxen and tumbrels of purple grapes, before winding down into Lausanne and on round its lake. They were delighted by the precipitous drama of the Alpine landscape, which, as Hannah informed her parents with somewhat unwise relish, was scattered with crosses to mark the places where previous travellers had been killed. They crossed into Italy by darkness over the perilous Simplon Pass. From the balcony of a flower-trellised inn above Lake Maggiore, the honeymooners watched their first dawn breaking over Italy. Beyond them stretched the landscapes of the Romantic imagination. They were setting out together into their new life.

While the horses were rested for three days in Milan, the travellers went sightseeing. They were entranced by the cathedral's poetic gloom: ‘a wonder of holy, Gothic', declared Palmer: ‘its dim religious light gilds the very recesses of the soul'.
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He admired a few drawings in the city library but was appalled by Leonardo's
Last Supper
which, hanging in ‘the most dismal hall I ever saw', looked like ‘a complete wreck'.
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Then, leaving Milan, they headed south on an ever-more-glorious route which took them via Bologna, where they wandered through moonlit arcades, across Apennine landscapes and on down to Florence. ‘Quaint, antique, stately, and gorgeous, and full of the gems of those divine and divinely inspired arts,'
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this city with its dusky semi-barbarous cathedral, its sumptuous baptistery, its turreted palace and colossal statues seemed to Palmer like some old-fashioned yet richly wrought cabinet, containing in its caskets and curious recesses specimens of all that is sublime. But Rome, that ‘wilderness of wonders',
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was their ultimate destination. It was mid-November 1837 when the companion couples arrived and started sorting out lodgings for the duration of the winter.

Palmer at first was entranced. ‘What shall I say of Rome?' he cried. ‘Rome is a thing by itself which, once seen, leaves the memory no more – a city of Art which one . . . can scarce believe one has seen with these ocular jellies – to which London seems a warehouse and Paris a trinket shop.'
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They watched the sun as it sank beyond the dome of St Peter's, visited the Colosseum by flickering candlelight, witnessed Pope Gregory blessing prostrate multitudes and joined their fellow English tourists for opera trips. For Palmer, the magic of unfamiliarity infused everything at the beginning, although the Richmonds, in their neighbouring lodgings, found the atmosphere rather less charming and three months later moved on.

It was not until May 1838 that the Palmers, disentangling themselves from the happy society of the many artists they had met, got going again, travelling to Naples to escape the rising summer heat. Their carriage, hopping with the fleas that had disembarked from an accompanying greyhound, was protected by a guard with two pistols for there had been several robberies on the marshes which they had to cross. Naples they found ‘filthy and uninteresting';
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their rooms were pestiferous dens with the foul stink of drains, and for all that Vesuvius bubbled fitfully away – they described dreadful rumblings and drifting ash and a sun that glowed red as if shining through a fog – they did not hang around waiting for the promised eruption, for the volcano, locals told them, could go on grumbling for weeks.

By early June, the Palmers were in Pompeii where they found lodgings in a rustic cottage at the edge of the ancient ruins. ‘You can go into their kitchens and cellars and see their jugs and utensils,'
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Hannah told her parents. She was spooked by the eerie silence that hung over the site and the skeletons of trapped prisoners still fastened by their chains. Palmer was astounded by the quality of the paintings: ‘If these are the works of antique house decorators what must Apelles have been!!'
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he exclaimed.

The sun was baking: by nine o'clock each morning the young couple were forced to stop working because of the heat. They spent August and September sketching in the cooler climates of the mountainous Torre Annunziata, Salerno and Corpo di Cava, before returning to Rome at the end of October in preparation for a second winter, throughout which Hannah worked on her father's commission.

Arriving back in the capital, they felt like old hands. They were welcomed as friends by their earlier acquaintances and met up with the Richmonds whose baby, born at the beginning of that year, had already cut six teeth. By the time Julia left the immortal city she was pregnant again.

From Rome, the Palmers took a diversion to nearby Tivoli – ‘the most charming place we have seen in Italy'
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declared Hannah with the effusive delight that marked arrival at any new spot – where they settled down for a month or so in rural lodgings. Palmer, taking advantage of the balmy late autumn weather, produced some of his best paintings before retiring to the hearthside to spend hours reading Shakespeare while his wife worked at resuscitating her tattered wardrobe. By New Year 1839 they were again in Rome where they remained before heading northwards for the summer, reaching Subiaco on donkey-back by June. The heat here was intense and, tortured by fleas, they moved a month later to the fresher climate of Civitella until the temperature there also mounted and an outbreak of plague sent them fleeing, travelling by mule under the light of a moon which picked out the speckled green corpses of abandoned plague victims, to Papignia, a picturesque little village in the Umbrian hills. From there they travelled via Terni back to Florence, where, passing the entirety of September and October ‘wholly absorbed in art', Palmer became ‘so imbued with love for the landscape of Titian and Giorgione' that he vowed never to ‘paint in my old style again'.
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