The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (49 page)

The works were made by artisans in guilds,
plain craftsmen, yet there were already famous persons whose styles could be discussed,
whose genius was assumed. Jan van Eyck ‘has been judged the prince of the painters
of our time’, the Naples humanist Bartholomeus Facius wrote; ‘he is
thought … to have discovered many things about the properties of colours
recorded by the ancients.’
²⁴
The legend as Vasari wrote it in
his
Lives of the Artists
is even more striking: Van Eyck invented oil
painting.

‘Realizing the imperfection of tempera
colours,’ Raffaello Borghini said, ‘after many experiments he discovered
that mixing colours with the oil of walnuts or linseed gave a very strong tempera which,
when it dried, not only had no fear of water but also gave life and lustre without
varnish.’
²⁵
Lodovico Guicciardini, who was a
merchant from Florence living in Antwerp, called van Eyck ‘the first inventor of
the art of mixing colours in oil … a glorious and highly important invention,
for it renders the colours eternal, nor is there any reason to suppose that it had ever
been known before’.
²⁶
His eighteenth-century translator,
anonymous but wise, suspected that painting in oils was an old idea from Byzantium, but
still Vasari’s legend lives, alongside the idea that it was only by studying
Italians, the ancient ones and Michelangelo and Raphael, that Northern painters could
hope to ‘escape the prison of their dry, archaic, even barbarous manner and become
modern’.
²⁷
Neither one is quite true.

For a start, there is a twelfth-century text
all about using pressed oil to bind colours: Theophilus Presbyter’s
Schedula
diversarum artium.
Vasari says van Eyck was the one who taught Antonello da
Messina how to paint in oils; Pietro Summonte, writing from Naples, says it was a Naples
master called Colantonio who had wanted to move to
Flanders because he ‘looked to the work of Flemish
painters’ but was kept at home by a king with the skill to ‘show
him … how to mix and use these colours’.
²⁸
The point is that
Italian painters looked at the life and brightness, the brilliance and the shadows, of
the Flemish masters, and they were hugely impressed. They saw faces that could be alive,
which suggested a new kind of portrait, and landscapes of a kind they had never yet
tried, which could be used as details in their own paintings.
Mona Lisa
became
imaginable, a woman whose name we still want to know in front of a landscape we still
try to read. The Italians learned from the North in the way the Flemish went down to
Rome to learn.

They also imitated particular painters, and
recognized painting as something more than a craft which requires simply practice. They
honoured the painter Hugo van der Goes by imitating the great altarpiece he painted for
the Portinaris in Florence, commissioned by the head of the Medici bank in Bruges: the
shepherds pressing in on each other to see the vulnerable baby on the ground, watched by
a still, modest Virgin all in dark blue. Before the Virgin there are flowers: the usual
lilies, but also black aquilegia, the flower of the Holy Ghost and the flower whose
French name,
ancolie
, sounds like melancholy. Van der Goes had finished the
painting just before he went into the monastery at Windesheim as a
conversus
, a
plain craftsman and not a learnèd man. He was acknowledged as a great painter and he was
very nearly mad.

Gaspar Ofhuys was Prior of Windesheim and
also Master of the Sick, and he told the story thirty years later. ‘He kept
repeating that he was damned … and because of this, he even tried to do
himself bodily harm and to kill himself – had he not been forcibly restrained with the
help of bystanders.’ Gaspar thought he was suffering like King David and might
recover to the sound of music, but he did not improve; ‘rather, he declared that
he was a son of perdition, uttering strange things’. He became ‘exceedingly
anxious about how he would carry out the works he was supposed to paint’. He drank
with his guests and got worse. The idea grew that somehow he must have hurt something in
his brain, ‘a very small slender vein that nourishes the power of imagination and
fantasy’; his individual state, his
individual fantasy, had somehow gone wrong.
²⁹
In
other words, he thought he had a talent, that it was personal and that it had been
ruined; and the people around him agreed.

Most pictures sold in Antwerp did not need a
genius as much as a steady hand, and a print or a drawing blacked on the back to trace
out the outlines that the artist would then fill. There were ‘patterns’ for
paintings, drawings that were pricked with tiny holes along the outlines; when they were
put against wood or cloth, and blacked, a delicate outline showed through. Sometimes a
painter took one of the many prints being published, traced it onto wood and invented
colours for it; sometimes there was no painted original at all, just the pattern. The
patterns were assets; Ambrosius Benson, a lacklustre Italian marooned in Flanders, went
to court to get back the patterns in a chest he had left behind.

Copying was the business: to give people
what they wanted, at a price they could pay. Art was no longer something that great
persons commissioned for great churches in order to save their souls. Guicciardini
listed among the excellent artists of Flanders ‘Peter Brugel of Breda, a sedulous
imitator of the fancies of Jerome Bosch whence he is commonly called the second Jerome
Bosch.’ This is Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who also turned out versions of the
originals by his more famous father Pieter, copies for people who could never find or
afford the originals. He was five when his father died, and he may never have seen his
father’s work, but he was taught to paint by his grandmother and he had access to
the ‘patterns’ for his father’s pictures; so he signed his pictures
‘Bruegel/Brueghel/Brueghel’. He did copy Bosch but he did not do what
forgers do: he did not smoke the canvas to make it look old. He was reproducing, not
faking.

When the Valois Duke of Burgundy Charles the
Bold was killed, and the Hapsburgs came riding into Flanders, the court commissioned far
fewer paintings; genius had a hard time. Middle-class commissions were everything, and a
line of product that could be made ready for each year’s trade fair. The middle
classes liked to pray at home and they bought ‘contemplation pieces’, holy
pictures on a domestic scale, and they bought them on the open market from painters they
never met. The
Madonna of Cambrai
, which was supposed to be painted by
St Luke himself although it looks
suspiciously like a late copy of a Byzantine icon, was copied over and over again: three
at a time for some great persons, and in dozens by the Cathedral of Cambrai, which sold
them to pilgrims. Even Jan van Eyck turned out a couple of versions at a time; he did
that for the merchant Anselmus Adornes, two virtually identical pictures of St
Francis.
³⁰

Conspicuous consumption, with an unfamiliar
holy accent, had already reached the middle classes, who in the North would make
possible all the domestic glories of the Dutch golden age. So had the idea of genius,
which they knew very well was something quite different.

Ten in the morning and the men are crowding
into the Bourse: into a great Gothic quadrangle in the middle of Antwerp, arcades all
around and shops upstairs, two great bell towers like a castle, shut in by streets of
other people’s houses but open to the business of the known world. It opened in
the 1530s as a kind of engine for the town.

The men have letters that give the bearer a
claim on money left at some fair in Spain or a warehouse in Cologne, credits or debts:
the kind of money that crosses borders. They’re here to trade them. Each trader
needs to find a broker, maybe Spinola from Genoa or Fontoba from Spain, who knows the
various exchange rates for the day; the big trading firms know them already, having
fixed them. The movement of goods from as far away as Afghanistan or Africa depends on
their deals.

Watch them and you watch the kind of market
that will come to rule our lives: a market you play by handling paper rather than
anything solid like spices, amber, cloth or fish. A man like Gaspar Ducci, who started
with a firm from Lucca, could make money by arranging loans for the broke Emperor in
return for the right to collect taxes. He could also make bets on the difference between
prices and the cost of money in different markets, between Antwerp and Lyons, say, and
take a profit. Theologians had once said that that kind of expertise could justify a
profit when trading goods, a merchant doing real work, but Ducci dispensed with the
goods altogether and took a profit just on the paper differences. He speculated.
³¹

Merchants turned up at the Bourse every day because absence
was taken as proof you were bankrupt. A trader who was still in business would have to
have the day’s information, to see what was changing and what might change next.
Letters were unreliable; merchants always sent a copy of their last letter with a new
letter, and sometimes sent three copies by different routes.
³²
Information was
talk and talk was raucous. In Amsterdam, before there was an Exchange, the traders met
on a narrow street of shops called Warmoesstraat, or on the New Bridge, or in churches
when the weather was foul. Neighbours complained about the racket coming from the
churches.

The Bourse, the Exchange, was born in
Bruges, in a town with merchants from everywhere, who needed a place to meet and do
business, to deal information, paper, goods. They often met outside the hostel that
belonged to the Van der Buerse family, and when the big trading powers, Venice, Florence
and Genoa, built their headquarters around the Buerse square the talk began in earnest
and the name Buerse and Bourse stuck to every exchange. The city added a bailiff to
stand watch and keep order. The pattern was set: an open space with at least one portico
for shelter against the weather, a narrow entrance with security, a semi-public square
in the middle of the city.
³³
There had to be room for goods to
be shown. There had to be dry zones for all the paper.

The first exchange in Antwerp was a fine
private house, a courtyard with arcades on three sides all sculptured and trefoiled like
some Victorian railway station. More merchants came to town, there were more deals and
more paper to be dealt, so the city planned a new and showy Bourse in 1531. They found
an unbuilt parcel of land, and put the Bourse in the middle of it all, enclosed by
streets and houses: ‘an ornament for God and city’ with a couple of towers
to show where it was, but not a palace. It was a beautiful, shut-in courtyard, galleries
all around, an upper floor with shops for art and luxuries. It was a public square,
which the Florentine merchant Ludovico Guicciardini reckoned the ‘most
decorous’ square in Antwerp. It would be the model for the Royal Exchange in
London, and for the Beurs in Amsterdam, not to mention the exchanges in towns like
Lille: the kind of space that every city wanted.
³⁴

In Antwerp if you wanted to trade goods – we’d say
‘commodities’ – you went to the English Bourse, which was the place on
Wolstraat and Hofstraat where the English met customers to organize the sale of their
wool. Their market was a futures market; they sold wool that had not yet been delivered
for prices they had to predict. Anything even less solid was traded in the palatial new
Bourse.

Climb the stairs there and you could buy a
picture; Barbara Alleyns would sell you one of the paintings stacked around while her
husband ran his workshop to paint more. There were already art dealers, and there are a
good number of women among them, sometimes selling the work of women artists.
³⁵
You
could lend money, lots of money, to the Hapsburgs if you were so minded. You could
insure your life, or someone else’s; if you got paid, the insurer had seven years
to try to prove the person wasn’t dead after all. You could insure a ship to
voyage as far as the Indies, East or West, almost anywhere, which had more to do with
the flexibility of the Bourse than the traffic coming through the Antwerp docks. Antwerp
brokers used insurance mostly as a speculation, a way to profit from trade without
actually buying, selling or shipping. They liked the profit so well they blocked schemes
to send fleets out with official naval protection, which would have spoiled the
game.

To get prices right, traders had to know
about the supply of solid, physical money, how much silver was flowing up from Spain, if
the land route was open across France for couriers to pass with safe conducts, or if the
metal would have to come by the rarer and riskier sea route. Money was a commodity, too,
like grain or spices: the amount available changed its price. The good coins, solid
silver, inevitably went abroad to do business, bad coins that were clipped or worn out
stayed at home. Bad money was always driving out good.
³⁶

Besides what you knew, how you were known
was all important. Even when the law allowed bad behaviour, like slow payment, a man
lost all his standing if he made a fuss about paying a letter of credit. It
‘looked bad’.
³⁷
Everyone had to trust people he
didn’t know, from outside his family or even his nation; people of all
nationalities were working together because trade required so many languages. Smaller
firms were always going bust, so it was alarming if a bankrupt started to hide what he
owned; the de la Peña brothers were notorious
because Gaspar got his workers to pile the contents of his
warehouse on a ship bound for Spain, so the Antwerp courts could not touch them, and his
brother Diego sat down South to handle everything that was left to the firm.