The Other Renaissance, page 21
Owing to increasing ill-health, Charles V felt obliged to divest himself of some of the territories over which he ruled. In 1555, the emperor appeared at a public ceremony held at the Palace of Coudenberg in Brussels. With tears streaming down his face, and forced to lean on his adviser William the Silent* for support, Charles V announced what became known as the Abdications of Brussels. This ongoing process gradually divided the Habsburg Empire into the Spanish line and the Austro-German succession. One result of this was that Charles V’s son became King Philip II of Spain and Lord of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands. Philip II was determined to stamp out Protestantism, which had already taken a strong hold in many parts of the Netherlands, especially in the northern provinces. A rumour spread amongst the Protestants that he was planning to introduce the Spanish Inquisition, which in 1566 provoked a revolt led by the Calvinist William the Silent. The revolt led to the Eighty Years’ War, during which the Protestant northern provinces of the Netherlands gradually separated from the southern provinces. This division would eventually result in the establishment of the Dutch Republic (loosely modern Holland) and the Spanish Netherlands (loosely modern Belgium and Luxembourg). Subsequently, the Dutch Republic would enter its ‘Golden Age’, during which Dutch traders established an overseas empire from the Americas to Indonesia, while the sciences flourished in the homeland as never before.
Although the ructions of the Eighty Years’ War did not involve continuous fighting – there was even a Twelve Years’ Truce signed in 1609 – they provided a troubled background to the later years of Bruegel’s life, as well as to the ensuing Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. Once again we see a turning point in human history, similar to that of Ancient Greece or the Italian Renaissance, taking place against a background of squabbling city-states and internecine warfare.
The mature masterpieces which Bruegel would produce during the last years of his life barely hint at the political turmoil unfolding around him. Yet the clues are there if one looks hard enough. His several panoramic winter scenes paint an evocative picture of countryside under snow; these are as spectacular as they are chilling. In one, his well-muffled skaters slither over an ice-bound waterway beneath the watchful eye of dark winter birds perched on the branches of the bare trees. His scenes of the snow-blanketed countryside may be magnificent in their vision of bleakness, but they do not depict a happy or an easy way of life.*
Other paintings by Bruegel during these years depict a wide range of disparate subjects, yet still manage to convey the troubled zeitgeist. Perhaps the most blatant of these is The Blind Leading the Blind, which is a nightmarish scene of medieval misery, yet its peasant faces and the literal helplessness of its subjects are rendered with a Renaissance realism and composition that conveys all too well its proverbial content. Here allegory and actuality are blended with supreme artistry. Even the comparative ease of the recumbent figures in his celebrated The Land of Cockaigne contains ominous Bosch-like images in the background. This is not just a clerk, a peasant and a soldier lying sprawled out in the afternoon countryside, snoozing after a pleasant bibulous lunch. The clerk’s eyes are open, his features frozen in a blank expression. Cockaigne is the mythical land of plenty and these supine figures are gluttons overcome by sloth; it is a vision of spiritual emptiness.
Similarly, Bruegel’s brilliantly realized scene in The Peasant Wedding, for all its witty observation and feasting plenty, is hardly a joyous spectacle. The plethora of superbly characterized individual figures feature mainly dour faces that are all but expressionless. Yes, this is what it was really like…
In the last years of his life Bruegel would paint two versions of The Tower of Babel. These depict vast intricate constructions whose incompleteness enables us to gain an insight into the complex engineering involved, and which were inspired by the ruins of the Colosseum – which Bruegel had seen while in Rome during his twenties. Indeed, he is known to have painted an earlier miniature version of this scene while he was working for the maestro Giulio Clovio, though this is now lost. Even so, the larger versions contain a miniaturist’s eye for detail – from the tiny silhouettes of the builders against the sky at the uppermost level, to the stonemasons bowing in servile reverence at the foot of the tower as they are approached by the visiting king and his entourage. The building of the Tower of Babel is a biblical symbol of humanity’s hubris, even megalomania. It was intended to reach as high as heaven, and this purpose was only frustrated when God inflicted upon its builders the confusion of different languages so that they could not communicate with each other. At the same time, the echoes of the Colosseum in Bruegel’s depictions hint at the persecution of the early Christians. As with all great art, this is a fully realized image of aesthetic wonder as well as being an instructive object of contemplation. How tiny and frail is humanity in comparison with its overweening ambitions.
Pieter and Mayken Bruegel would have two sons, who both became artists. Pieter Bruegel the Younger would grow up to build a successful artistic career copying his father’s style (and in doing so increase his father’s reputation). His other son, Jan Bruegel the Elder, would become an important artist in the Flemish Baroque style which flourished during the Dutch Golden Age.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder himself became old before his time. A self-portrait from 1565 when he was in his early forties depicts a somewhat scruffy bearded figure with an old man’s features. He would die just four years later, leaving his mother-in-law Mayken Coecke to instruct his sons in the art of painting. Mayken Coecke, who painted under the name of Mayken Verhulst, is known to have been a highly skilled artist in her own right, though her works have yet to be reliably identified.
And what of Bruegel the Elder’s lasting reputation? The great sixteenth-century Italian historian of the Renaissance, Giorgio Vasari – whose Lives of the Artists bring so much of this period to life – barely acknowledges the northern Renaissance. Though he does find time to denigrate Bruegel as ‘essentially a comic successor to Hieronymus Bosch’. During Bruegel’s lifetime he achieved renown largely as a genre painter of peasant scenes – for the most part more popular with the emergent merchant class than with connoisseurs and art critics. During the century after his death he influenced a number of less-talented artists who attempted to imitate him; yet at the same time his true talent was recognized by the Austrian Habsburg emperor Rudolf II and the great Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens (who collected a dozen of his paintings). Many of Bruegel’s most successful works may have featured typical medieval rural scenes, but his painterly skills incorporated a vivid realism against a backdrop of imaginary landscapes (there were no mountain vistas in the Netherlands). Such accomplishments ensured that he is now regarded as one of the most significant northern Renaissance artists – a master whose skills on occasion aspire to the likes of van Eyck and Dürer.
* Highly popular in the nineteenth century, this society followed a religion whose secret masters lived in remote locations throughout the world, but mainly in Tibet. These superhuman figures possessed great wisdom and occult powers derived from western Neoplatonism and eastern mysticism, as well as a melange of the ancient religions of India.
* The inclusion of such apparently superfluous posthumous metaphysics is intended to illustrate that the strain of irrationality is not confined to the remnants of medieval thought which lasted on into the Renaissance. The human mind throughout history has thrived on metaphysical beliefs – from the pyramids where the mummified pharaohs would rise to enter their ‘after life’, to the enjoyment of modern movies featuring exorcism, zombies, body-changing and the like. Humanism and the Renaissance may have inspired the human mind on its path to the modern world view, but even this latter also contains its seemingly necessary undercurrent of esoteric thought. From Faust to Frankenstein to Count Dracula, this never-ending cast of figures rises from our subconscious mind to march on beside us, at the edges of our vision. As with Paracelsus, such thought can, and still does, inform all manner of genuine scientific discovery. Today, research into AI (artificial intelligence) has brought huge technical advances, despite its quixotic striving to create ‘consciousness’. Likewise the many advances effected by Elon Musk, fuelled by his belief that humanity will escape this polluted earth to thrive on barren planets.
† He would not take on his self-aggrandizing classical name until he was thirty-six and had so blotted his aristocratic moniker that he was no longer able to get away with practising as a physician under the name Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. I have used the name Paracelsus for the opposite reason – in order to avoid any misidentification such as he sought to perpetrate.
* Despite this typical claim, Paracelsus had almost certainly heard of the cure while travelling in Italy. The cure is known to have been discovered by Fracastoro of the University of Padua, who was the man who named the disease syphilis – after a mythical shepherd, Syphilus, who was said to have been stricken with the disease after insulting the god Apollo. The mercury cure was a painful treatment, frequently causing almost as much pain as the disease itself. And it was certainly toxic. The skill lay in assessing the correct dosage, depending upon the stage reached by the disease and the general health of the patient. Those who did not die of this treatment usually experienced a remission of the symptoms, often for long periods. In fact, the mercury cure (of one kind or another) would remain the standard medical prescription until the Salvarsan treatment of 1909 which was substituted for arsenic compounds.
* This may have operated much like a stock exchange, but was in reality a commodity exchange. Financial instruments such as stocks and shares as we know them had not yet come into common usage.
* Technically known as mandibular prognathism, this deformity projected the lower jaw so that its teeth overlapped the teeth of the upper jaw, which hindered chewing, affected speech and gave an odd facial appearance. The Habsburg habit of intermarriage between cousins and other close relatives may have extended their European territories, but it also resulted in additional defects, including a tendency to gout, epilepsy and the reinforcing of other genetic flaws.
* Also known as William of Orange. The House of Orange was named after the principality of Orange in southern France, which his family had inherited through marriage in 1530. A later William of Orange, together with his wife Mary, would be invited to take over the throne of Britain in 1689. The present Dutch and British royal families are both directly descended from the House of Orange.
* The Little Ice Age, which affected Europe to a more or less degree between 1300 and 1800, was approaching its most severe stage. The depiction of winter scenes became a genre at this time, but the paintings of Bruegel outshone all others in their atmospheric intensity.
CHAPTER 13
VERSIONS OF THE TRUE: MERCATOR AND VIÈTE
WE NOW COME TO two figures who used ingenious mathematical techniques to unravel their own versions of the truth. These were Gerardus Mercator and François Viète, both of whom lived exciting lives (though not always pleasantly so), and whose works would play a part in transforming the world in which we live. Both of them were contemporaries of Bruegel the Elder, and Mercator was even a fellow citizen of the Habsburg Netherlands who grew up in a village just outside Antwerp. However, Mercator would outlive Bruegel and witness the birth of the Dutch Golden Age – in which his work would play a formative role.
Gerardus Mercator was born Gerard de Kremer* in the village of Rupelmonde, some seven miles south-west of Antwerp, on the left bank of the River Scheldt. At the time of his birth in March 1512, Gerard’s German father, Hubert de Kremer, and his wife Emerance already had six children, and were on an extended visit to Hubert’s uncle Gisbert, a locally influential priest. Hubert’s home town was Gangelt, almost 100 miles east, in Germany, where he plied his trade as a not very successful cobbler. Hubert and his family may have taken refuge with their prestigious relative to escape an outbreak of the plague, or possibly to avoid their debtors in Gangelt. At any rate, after six months Hubert was able to return to his home in Germany, and young Mercator spent his first years in the rural backwater of Gangelt.
During Mercator’s youth, two historic events took place which would change Europe forever. Mercator was just five when Luther instigated what would become the Reformation, and he was ten years old when the survivors of Magellan’s three-year expedition to circumnavigate the globe arrived back in Seville. By this time young Mercator’s father had died, and his uncle had taken on the role of his guardian. Discerning an element of promise in young Mercator, Gisbert used his influence to gain his protégé a place as a pupil at the school of the Brethren of the Common Life in the Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch. Despite its name, this was the finest school in the region. As we have seen, forty years previously Erasmus had been educated there, and several of the brethren were known to have been favourably impressed by his humanist texts. Even so, the main curriculum was still based on the traditional scholastic trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, all of which were of course taught in Latin. However, in a gesture towards the renaissance of classical knowledge, the curriculum had been extended to include Ptolemy and his Geography. The Ancient Greek polymath had written this work in Alexandria around ad 150. The fact that it was written in Ancient Greek meant that it had remained unknown to Europe during the medieval era, as scholars only knew Latin. It was not translated until 1406, when its appearance created a great stir. Meanwhile Ptolemy’s geocentric cosmology, which Aristotle had passed on, would not be refuted by Copernicus until 1543, when Mercator was in his thirties. But much of Ptolemy’s Geography, especially his map of the world – consisting of a chart which stretched from the Atlantic coast in the west to Sinae (China) in the east – had come as a revelation to the young Mercator.
During his time at the school of the Brethren, a leading member of the staff was Georgius Macropedius, regarded by many as the greatest Latin dramatist of the sixteenth century. Indeed, his plays were so widely known that they would later influence the young William Shakespeare. Some of Macropedius’s works were adaptations of Ancient Roman comedies by Terence and Plautus, and he staged performances of these works with his pupils as actors. According to Mercator’s biographer Nicholas Crane: ‘In one of the more raucous works, Aluta, the audience was warned against halitosis and flatulence, and then subjected to heavy drinking, vomiting, undressing and a comedic exorcism.’
Not surprisingly, the local audiences were both shocked and entertained by these performances. Macropedius disingenuously explained that such ‘images of debauchery were sound educational material, as long as purity and truth prevailed by the end of the play’. The school’s plays were frequently sold out, and Macropedius made sure that the takings were distributed amongst the more impecunious members of the cast, which included Mercator. Such drama opened his eyes to another aspect of the Renaissance, introducing him to a more humanistic approach to life.
In 1530, at the age of eighteen, Mercator travelled to the similarly prestigious University of Leuven. Here he passed the entry matriculation, where his name appears in the Latin form he had adopted at school followed by the classification pauperes ex castro (poor students of the castle). This indicated that he was given lodgings in one of the communal dormitories set aside for unprivileged students in the castle by the fish market. Rich students lived separately in their own rooms in a more salubrious quarter of the city. Despite such domestic segregation, all students mingled freely, attending the same lectures, and it was here that Mercator formed a friendship with one of his more privileged contemporaries, named Andreas Vesalius, of whom we will hear more later. Suffice to say that Vesalius would become one of the great luminaries of the northern Renaissance, on a par with Mercator himself, with whom he retained a lifelong friendship.
Mercator graduated as a Magister (Master) in 1532. Normally he would now have enrolled for further study in theology or canon law, with the ultimate aim of entering the priesthood and achieving a senior appointment. This was the career plan which his uncle Gisbert doubtless had in mind for him. But by now Mercator had become increasingly troubled by discrepancies between the Bible, allied to the teachings of Aristotle, and observations of the real world which were beginning to circulate, especially in the rapidly expanding realm of geography. The recent discovery of the New World by Spain, followed by Magellan’s first circumnavigation, had transformed this field, inspiring the young Mercator. As he would later write: ‘Since my youth geography has been for me the primary subject of study… I liked… not only the description of the earth, but also the structure of the whole machinery of the world’.
Mercator’s disputations on this subject with his fellow students, in which he frequently put forward his anti-Aristotelian ideas, had come to the notice of the university authorities, and it may have been this which persuaded Mercator to remove himself to Antwerp. Here he made contact with the controversial Franciscan friar Franciscus Monachus, who broadened Mercator’s knowledge concerning the latest geographical discoveries and the effects they were having upon the world.
As we have seen, in 1494 Pope Alexander VI had brokered the Treaty of Tordesillas, which aimed to avert a dangerous clash between the two Catholic countries most involved in exploration – namely, Portugal and Spain. The pope had drawn a line north–south through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean: all land discovered to the west of this line (i.e. the New World) would belong to Spain, while all land discovered to the east of it (Africa and Asia) would belong to Portugal. Illustrating this ruling, as well as making allowances for consequent discoveries, Monachus drew two circular maps. One depicted the western hemisphere of the Americas, and the other outlined the eastern hemisphere: Africa, India and the lands to the east, which he named Alta India (in effect ‘Beyond India’). In the light of Magellan’s circumnavigation, the next obvious step was to create a model of the world in the form of a globe.
