Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

19

The Explosion of Imagination

On the last day of carnival in 1497 in Florence, and again a year later, a curious construction appeared in the Piazza della Signoria, overlooked by the Palazzo Vecchio. The centre of the structure was a great flight of stairs in the form of a pyramid. On the lowest step was displayed a number of false beards, masks and disguises used in the carnival. Above them was a collection of books (both printed and manuscript) – Latin and Italian poets, including the works of Boccaccio and Petrarch. Then came various female ornaments – mirrors, veils, cosmetics, scents – with lutes, harps, playing cards and chess pieces above them. At the very top, on the two highest tiers, were paintings, but paintings of a special kind, showing female beauties, in particular those bearing classical names: Lucretia, Cleopatra, Faustina, Bencina. As this ‘bonfire of the vanities’ was set ablaze, the Signoria, or assembly of politicians, watched from the balconies of their palazzos. Music was played, the people sang, and church bells rang out. Then everyone adjourned to the Piazza di San Marco where they formed into three concentric circles for the dancing. The monks were in the middle, alternating with boys dressed as angels. Outside them came other ecclesiastics and then the citizens.¹

This was all performed for the satisfaction of the Dominican prophet, Fra Girolamo Savonarola of Ferrara. ‘Pungent with charisma’, convinced that he had been sent by God to aid the inward reform of the Italian people, and insistent that the office of preacher was a high one, ‘the next place below the angels’, he sought the regeneration of the Church in, among other things, a series of Jeremiads – terrible warnings of the evils that would arise unless reform was total and immediate. In this, classical literature and learning had little or no place. ‘The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle’, he said, ‘is that they brought forward many arguments we can use against heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in hell. An old woman knows more about the Faith than Plato. It would be good for religion if many books that seem useful were destroyed.’²

This destruction of the representations and trappings of beauty was especially poignant because, as was mentioned in the previous chapter, art, artistic purpose and commitment to beauty were defining characteristics of Renaissance civilisation.³ For Burckhardt at least, ‘even the outward appearance of [Italian] men and women and the habits of daily life were more perfect, more beautiful and more polished than among the other nations of Europe’.⁴ Aesthetics ruled in the Renaissance more than at any other time and the ‘long’ sixteenth century, 1450–1625, has aptly been called the aesthetic moment.

In the realm of art, the fifteenth century was packed with innovations of which the most important were the invention of oil painting, the discovery of linear perspective, advances in the understanding of anatomy, a new concern with nature and, arguably the most pervasive and fundamental influence of all, the Platonic notion of universalism.

The technique of oil painting is traditionally credited to the van Eycks, Hubert and Jan, both active from the 1420s, in and around Ghent, Bruges and the Hague. Though this is no longer tenable, what is clear is that Jan van Eyck did perfect the method of oil painting, and varnishing, which has enabled his colours, and colour-effects, to have survived unchanged over the centuries. The important point about oil painting is that, unlike fresco – the most popular medium to that point – it dries slowly. Fresco dried so quickly that painters had to work very fast and their chances of changing what they had done were minimal. But pigments mixed with oil do not dry for weeks, meaning that alterations could be made, painters could improve weak patches, or change their minds completely if a new idea occurred to them. This made painters more thoughtful, more reflective, and also enabled them to take their time over mixing colours, to achieve more subtle effects. This was in evidence early on with the van Eycks, whose detailed rendering of objects and surfaces (next to impossible in fresco) meant that form and space were now much more developed and realistic. The same applied to the emotional force of paintings. The greater time allowed by oils enabled painters to explore facial expression in more detail, and in so doing to widen the range of emotions represented.

Linear perspective, known originally in Italy as costruzione legittima, was invented in the early fifteenth century, possibly by Brunelleschi, though it was built on and improved by Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca. The idea may have been slowly maturing since the great age of cathedral-building, which drew attention to distances, and spawned a surge in three-dimensional sculpture. Perspective was important not just for the added realism it gave to paintings but also for the fact that it involved an understanding of mathematics, which at that time was included in the liberal arts. If painters could therefore demonstrate that their art depended on, or benefited from, mathematics, it would further their claim that painting was a liberal art, and not a mechanical one. The essential point about linear perspective was that parallel lines never meet but they appear to do so, with all parallel lines converging at a vanishing point on the horizon. This transformed the verisimilitude of painting and accounted in large measure for its increased popularity.⁵

The greater realism allowed by oil painting and perspective was added to by both the close study of anatomy that many artists made in the fifteenth century – allowing a much more accurate rendering of musculature, thanks to advances in medical science (discussed in a later chapter) – and a new affinity for nature, provoked by humanism, and which likewise stimulated the portrayal of landscapes in addition to figures. Allied to this was a new interest in the narrative style – that is to say, paintings which, as well as glorifying God, told a story that would appeal to most people. As was mentioned earlier, Peter Burke found that out of two thousand dated paintings of the period, in 1480–1489 there were 5 per cent that were secular in character; by 1530–1539, this had risen to 22 per cent. This is a four-fold increase over half a century but the change should not be exaggerated: even at the later date the great majority of paintings were still religious in character.

Among the secular paintings, allegories grew in popularity after 1480. Allegorical paintings look rather strange and are generally unpopular these days (except among art historians). Scantily clad women, dancing or dashing about amid classical ruins, small chubby cupids holding bows and arrows, or swords and ribbons, men who are half-beast, or goats with fishes’ tails, do not sit easily with modern taste. But in the Renaissance, with humanism in full flood, allegory was as popular as, say, Impressionism is in our own day. Classical allegory became popular around the time Botticelli finished his Primavera, which is now among the most famous paintings in the world. Rich in complex Christian and mythological allusions, it includes among its nine figures Mercury, Cupid, the Three Graces and the most famous figure of all, Flora, decked in hundreds of flowers. Allegory grew in popularity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but by the end of that period the heavy symbolism which had such an appeal to begin with had become so fragmented that mythology, as a way of presenting a particular message, had been fatally weakened.

Throughout the Renaissance, however, the fact that allegory flourished is of great significance. The popularity of the classical deities suggests, for instance, that they had never really disappeared but had simply gone underground, often adapted to the Christian tradition in hybrid form. In turn this raises the possibility that, in medieval times, the general public had never been quite so convinced of Christianity as the church liked to maintain. There were of course unavoidable elements of paganism in the Christian world, starting with the names for the days of the week and the very timing of Christmas. But it was more than that. During the great flowering of Christian art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, astrologers in Italy directed the lives of whole cities. By the early fourteenth century, the pagan gods commonly appeared not just in literature but on monuments as well. In Venice they were used on the Gothic capitals of the Doges’ Palace, and appeared at much the same time in Padua, Florence and Siena.⁶ In the early fifteenth century the use of pagan mythology and astrology became even more open. In the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence, just above the altar, there is a cupola containing mythical figures and a constellation of the heavens which coincides with the sky above the city at the time of the Council of Florence. Later equivalent decorations were to invade even the palaces of the popes (the list of St Peter’s successors in the Borgia apartments is surrounded by celestial symbols, including Jupiter and Mars). Marsilio Ficino founded a whole school of exegesis in which it was accepted that wisdom could be sought in classical allegory, and this makes clear that allegory is more than simple allusion to mythology. To be able to decipher an allegory conferred a kind of insider status which appealed very much to the mood of the times and was adroitly developed by one of Ficino’s followers, Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). According to him, and others like him, the ancient myths were a kind of code which concealed a secret wisdom: this wisdom was veiled by allegory which, once deciphered, would reveal the secrets of the universe. Pico cited the teaching of Moses who, after all, had communed with God for forty days on the mountain and yet returned from Sinai with but two tablets: much more must have been revealed to him which he kept secret. Jesus himself confessed as much when he said to his disciples: ‘It has been granted to you to know the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven; but to those others it has not been granted.’ To Mirandola, and many others like him, all religions shared mysteries, and only to a select few – philosophers – could the secrets be revealed through the deciphering of ancient myths. One way of trying to do this was to explore the links and similarities between classical myths and Christianity.⁷

But the most dominant idea among the artists of the Renaissance was the essentially Platonic notion of universalism. Universalism is in fact one of the oldest and most influential ideas in history. It stems in part from ancient Greece, reflecting the theories of Pythagoras and Plato, though it also owes a great deal to the early Christian thinkers who adapted Greek ideas in Alexandria in the first centuries AD. By Renaissance times, the idea of universality had a long genealogy and had become more and more sophisticated.

In his survey of medieval theories about art and beauty, Umberto Eco concluded that medieval aesthetics was filled with repetitions and regurgitations and constituted a world ‘where everything was in its proper place . . . medieval civilisation attempted to capture the eternal essences of things, beauty as well as everything else, in precise definitions.’⁸ The difference was shown most clearly in the status of artists: the medieval artist was someone ‘dedicated to humble service of faith and the community’ (a community that might be a monastery, remote in the countryside).⁹ Underlying universalism in the Renaissance, however, was the idea that though nature was a ‘divinely ordained’ system, as it was held to be in the Middle Ages, it was now given to man – especially artists and geniuses – to apprehend that system. According to this theory, nature is homogeneous and all knowledge can therefore be reduced to a few primary axioms – ‘natural law’. People such as Francis Bacon believed that man was divinely endowed to know nature and that the age was at hand when that knowledge would be perfected. Christians – knowingly or unknowingly – adopted Platonic ideas, in particular the notion that, since man shared some of the qualities of the divine mind, then the proper observation of nature, and of the links between the various arts and sciences, would provide man – and in particular the artist and scientist – with glimpses of the real essence of the universe, the underlying reality. In the Renaissance, this is what wisdom meant. Marsilio Ficino was specific. ‘God has created all only that you may see it. As God creates so man thinks. Human understanding, on a limited scale, parallels the act of creation. Man is united to the gods by what he has of the divine, his intellect.’¹⁰ Pico della Mirandola put it more strongly: ‘In him are all things; so let him become all things, understand all things and in this way become a god.’ Whereas beasts had a fixed nature, it was given to man – artists especially – to alter his nature and ‘become all things’. This is what being an artist meant and why being an artist was so important.

Renaissance thinkers also believed that the entire universe was a model of the divine idea and that man was ‘a creator after the divine creator’. Central to this was the concept of beauty, a form of harmony which reflected divine intentions. What is pleasing to the eye and ear and mind is good, is morally valuable in itself. More important, it discloses part of the divine plan for mankind, because it reveals the relation of the parts to the whole. This Renaissance ideal of beauty supported the notion that it had two functions and applied across all disciplines. At one level, architecture, the visual arts, music, and the formal aspects of the literary and dramatic arts all informed the mind; at a second level, they pleased the mind, by means of decorum, style and symmetry. In this way an association was established between beauty and enlightenment. Again, this is what wisdom meant.

The natural corollary was the desire for personal universality, and for mankind’s achievement of a universal corpus of knowledge. The bringing together of disciplines was, in part, a conscious quest to deepen understanding, by exploring the generic similarities at the core of the different spheres of knowledge. Because of the then-recent rediscoveries of the Greek and Latin classics and the greater availability of such material, the assumed existence of these similarities was more than ever in the air. As a result, Renaissance men were often led naturally from involvement in one field of activity to another. Vitruvius had noted that all the sciences and arts have theory in common despite great differences in practice and technique. He therefore recommended that the architect, for example, become a master of the theoretical background of many different disciplines. ‘He should be a man of letters, a skilful draughtsman, a mathematician familiar with scientific inquiries, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music; not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of juris consults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.’¹¹ This idea of universality was taken up afresh by Renaissance men. It is found in the thought of humanists and in the ideals of the Florentine Academy. Jacob Burckhardt, in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, wrote: ‘The fifteenth century is, above all, that of the many-sided men. There is no biography which does not, besides the chief work of its hero, speak of other pursuits all passing beyond the limits of dilettantism . . . But among these many-sided men, some who may be truly called all-sided tower above the rest.’ He singled out Alberti and Leonardo (who had his own advisor for mathematics, Luca Pacioli).¹²

Here is Burckhardt on Alberti: ‘Assiduous in the science and skill of dealing with arms and horses and musical instruments, as well as in pursuit of letters and the fine arts . . . showing by example that men can do anything with themselves if they will.’ Alberti himself wrote a great deal about universality, as did Leonardo. For example, Alberti said: ‘Man was created for the pleasure of God, to recognise the primary and original source of things amid the variety, dissimilarity, beauty, and multiplicity of animal life, amid all the forms, structure, coverings, and colours that characterise the animals.’¹³ In his book on architecture we are explicitly told that ‘the potential for awareness of harmony and beauty is innate in the mind’ and that recognition of these truths occurs from the ‘quick and direct’ stimulation of the senses. ‘In order to judge truly of beauty it is not opinion which matters but rather a kind of reason which is innate in the mind.’ Man, Alberti says, possesses qualities of mind that are analogous to divine qualities, in particular the ‘capacity to recognise’ and the ‘capacity to make’. All creatures perfect themselves as they fulfil their innate gifts.¹⁴

Nature, Alberti further argued, has been arranged harmoniously by God in accordance with a divinely conceived pattern that is best described in mathematical terms. Others, like Kepler, agreed. Man’s conscious awareness of innate qualities – for example the awareness of beauty – can be increasingly magnified from an accumulation of good examples. This was the aim of art. In his search for truly good forms in nature, the artist continually shops around for beautiful examples – of, say, human bodies. From the range of these examples he gradually refines a clearer conception of what, for example, a beautiful body is. Eventually, over the course of many similar pursuits, the artist perfects his awareness of a general idea of beauty. Men are all gifted to recognise beauty but the artist practises to perfect his gift, and to represent his concept for his fellow men. He becomes our teacher of beauty by the quality of the artistic examples that he places before our eyes. The recognition of beauty centres on the divine gifts to the human intellect. In Alberti’s curriculum, there was no mention of Christian authors or the Bible, only classical sources.¹⁵ Some forty-three treatises on beauty were written during Renaissance times. The idea of the universal man was a common feature of nearly all of them.

Peter Burke has identified fifteen universal men in the Renaissance (‘universal’ defined as talents in three or more areas, at a level beyond that of a dilettante): Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), architect, engineer, sculptor, painter; Antonio Filarete (1400–1465), architect, sculptor, writer; Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), architect, writer, medallist, painter; Lorenzo Vecchietta (1405/1412–1480), architect, painter, sculptor, engineer; Bernard Zenale (1436–1526), architect, painter, writer; Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1506), architect, engineer, sculptor, painter; Donato Bramante (1444–1514), architect, engineer, painter, poet; Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), architect, sculptor, painter, scientist; Giovanni Giocondo (1457–1525), architect, engineer, humanist; Silvestro Aquilano (before 1471–1504), architect, sculptor, painter; Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), architect, painter, writer; Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), architect, sculptor, painter, writer; Guido Mazzoni (before 1477–1518), sculptor, painter, theatrical producer; Piero Ligorio (1500–1583), architect, engineer, sculptor, painter; Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), architect, sculptor, painter, writer.¹⁶

It will be noticed in this list that, out of fifteen universal men, fourteen were architects, thirteen were painters, ten were sculptors and six each were engineers and writers. What was it about architecture that it features so highly among this group? In the Renaissance, it was the aspiration of many artists to progress towards architecture. In the fifteenth century, architecture was one of the liberal arts, whereas painting and sculpture were only mechanical arts. This would change, but it helps explain the order of priorities in quattrocento Italy.

The careers of some of these universal men were extraordinary. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, for example, designed a large number of fortresses and military engines. Other ideas of his may be seen from seventy-two bas reliefs he constructed ‘which consist wholly of instruments for the purposes of war’. He was a councillor in Siena and rather more than that, as it turned out, becoming a spy of sorts, who reported on papal and Florentine troop movements. Trained as a painter, he had a career that matured through sculpture to architecture in the 1480s and the writing of an important architectural thesis. In his treatise he contrasted such things as birds’ nests and spiders’ webs, arguing that their very invariability proved that animals were not touched by the divine quality of invenzione as humans were.¹⁷ Giovanni Giocondo was a Dominican friar, ‘a man of rare parts and a master of all the noble faculties’. Vasari depicts him chiefly as a man of letters, but adds that he was a very good theologian and philosopher, an excellent Greek scholar, when such a thing was rare in Italy, a very fine architect, and an excellent master of perspective. He became famous in Verona, where he lived, for the part he played in redesigning the Ponte della Pietra, a bridge built on such soft ground that it was always collapsing. In his youth he spent many years in Rome and in that way became familiar with the relics of antiquity, collecting many of the most beautiful things into a book. Mugellane called Giocondo ‘a profound master in antiquities’. He wrote commentaries on Caesar, taught Vitruvius to his contemporaries, and discovered the letters of Pliny in a Parisian library. He built two bridges over the Seine for the king of France. On the death of Bramante he was, with Raphael, given the commission to complete Bramante’s work at St Peter’s. He ensured that the foundations were renewed, exposing a number of wells in the process and filling them in. But his greatest accomplishment is probably his solution for the great canals of Venice, diverting water brought down by the river Brenta, and helping La Serenissima survive until today. He was a great friend of Aldus Manutius.¹⁸ Brunelleschi had even more varied talents than those mentioned above. He was a clockmaker, a goldsmith and an archaeologist in addition to designing and directing the construction of the amazing dome of his city’s cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. A friend of Donatello and Massaccio, he was more versatile than either.¹⁹

Has the concept of universal man, Renaissance man, been overdone? In the twelfth century certain scholars – Aquinas, for example – came close to having ‘universal knowledge’, knowing all that could be known (remember R. W. S. Southern’s point, discussed in Chapter 15, that the sum-total of texts in those days was a few hundred, meaning that it was possible for someone to be acquainted with everything, or almost everything). Perhaps the real significance of the Renaissance idea of universal men is their attitude, their self-consciousness, their optimism. This, as much as anything, surely accounts for the explosion of imagination.

Intimately related to universality was the matter of paragone – whether painting was superior to sculpture, or vice versa. This was a major intellectual issue of the day in the fifteenth century and a central topic in the writings of, for example, Alberti, Antonio Filarete and Leonardo. Alberti argued for the superiority of painting. It had colour, could depict many things that sculpture couldn’t (clouds, rain, mountains) and made use of the liberal arts (mathematics, in perspective). Leonardo thought that bas relief was a kind of cross between painting and sculpture and might be superior to both. The advocates of sculpture, on the other hand, argued that the three dimensions of statues were more real and that painters drew their inspiration from carved figures. Filarete argued that sculpture could never escape the fact that it was made out of stone or wood, say, whereas painting could show the colour of skin, of blonde hair, it could depict a city in flames, the light of a beautiful dawn, the shimmer of the sea. All this was beyond sculpture. To overcome the objections of those who argued for the superiority of sculpture, brushmen like Mantegna and Titian painted stone figures in trompe l’oeil ‘relief’. Painting could imitate sculpture, but not the other way round.²⁰

Just as painting and sculpture were endlessly compared at the time of universal men, so too were painting and poetry. For a while a great similarity was seen between the two activities. Lorenzo Valla, writing in 1442 and perhaps following the line taken by Alberti in his treatise On Painting, suggested that painting, sculpture and architecture are among the activities that ‘most closely approximate to the liberal arts’. In the introduction to the section on painting and painters in his De viris illustribus (On Famous Men) of 1456, Bartolomeo Fazio gave more detailed but comparable arguments: ‘. . . there is . . . a certain great affinity between painters and poets; a painting is indeed nothing else than a wordless poem. For truly almost equal attention is given by both to the invention and the arrangement of their work . . . It is as much the painter’s task as the poet’s to represent those properties of their subjects, and it is in that very thing that the talent and capability of each is most recognised.’²¹ It was Alberti who, in On Painting, written twenty years before Fazio’s biographies of painters, first articulated at length the need for artists to learn from poets and to seek parity between painting and poetry. He wanted the painter ‘as far as he is able to be learned in all the liberal arts’, and so ‘it will be of advantage if [he takes] pleasure in poets and orators, for these have many ornaments in common with the painter’.²² Moreover, Alberti advised ‘the studious painter to make himself familiar with poets and orators and other men of letters, for he will not only obtain excellent ornaments from such learned minds, but he will also be assisted in those very inventions which in painting may gain him the greatest praise. The eminent painter Phidias used to say that he had learned from Homer how best to represent the majesty of Jupiter. I believe that we too may be richer and better painters from reading our poets . . .’ For Alberti painting, like poetry, uses parts of the quadrivium – geometry and arithmetic – in its theoretical basis; therefore, like poetry, painting should rank as a liberal art.²³

In a large number of notes written in preparation for his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci makes plain that in his view (which was based on classical arguments) painting is the superior, nobler art. It is with Leonardo, in fact, that many of these ideas about painting and poetry crystallise. ‘If you assert that painting is dumb poetry,’ Leonardo wrote, ‘then the painter may call poetry blind painting . . . but painting remains the worthier in as much as it serves the nobler sense’ – in other words, the sense of sight. He insisted that the power of a painting that imitates nature to deceive the viewer is greater than that of a poem. ‘We may justly claim that the difference between the science of painting and poetry is equivalent to that between a body and its cast shadow.’²⁴

Some Renaissance painters sought to exercise their inventive abilities by writing poetry themselves. They wanted recognition as poets because, in spite of Alberti’s defence of painting and Leonardo’s arguments for the painter’s superiority, throughout the early Renaissance poets were more highly regarded than painters in intellectual circles. Brunelleschi wrote a group of sonnets in self-defence in his argument with Donatello about the decoration of the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence and a number still survive. Bramante, too, tried his hand at writing verse: thirty-three accomplished sonnets by him survive. It was of course the young Michelangelo who of all Renaissance artists wrote poetry of the truest literary merit.²⁵

The very idea of universality implied that universal men were something special, set apart, examples of the ideal. Thus it was only natural that these universal men should be at the forefront of the movement by means of which the status of the artist improved in the fifteenth century. One way this showed itself was in the art of self-portraiture. Antonio Filarete was unmatched in the middle of the century in his consciousness of the value of self-portraiture and associated imagery for publicising his intellectual and social position. He incorporated not one but two self-portraits into the decoration of the bronze doors of St Peter’s, cast for Pope Eugenius IV between 1435 and 1445. The first is a profile portrait closely based on Roman coins and medals. It is a small medal, let into the centre of the bottom border of the left leaf of the doors; its reverse is in the same position on the right leaf, and both have inscribed signatures.²⁶ Filarete’s second acknowledgement of his own work is a relief attached to the inside of the door at floor level and which shows him and his assistants performing a dance. This is more than it seems because in his imaginary ideal city, Sforzinda, to which he devoted an entire treatise, he wrote: ‘If all are to work together at the same time, the first as well as the last, it will have to be like a dance. The first dances like the last if they have a good leader and good music.’²⁷

In line with the increased standing of the artist, the conceits of paragone and self-portraiture, were the twin concepts of invenzione and fantasia, invention and imagination, which together might be called artistic licence. During the fifteenth century, and especially with universal men, it came to be accepted that artists could not always be expected to do exactly what their patrons said. This was a major change. Here, for instance, is Isabella d’Este writing to Fra Pietro della Novellara in March 1501: ‘If you think [Leonardo, the Florentine painter] will be staying there for some time, Your Reverence might then sound him out as to whether he will take on a picture for our studiolo. And if he is pleased to do this, we will leave both the subject and the time of doing it to him . . .’ In other words, there was no attempt even to specify a subject.²⁸

The huge changes taking place in the visual arts are perhaps most neatly summed up by the appearance, in 1573, of Veronese before the Inquisition. The Inquisition will be explored more thoroughly a little later on but, after the Reformation, and the Catholic Church’s response – the Council of Trent, which met on and off from 1544 to 1563, with the aim of deciding Roman policy – one effect was that works of art were liable to censorship. Veronese had painted a vast, sumptuous feast canvas for the learned Dominican fathers of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, who needed to replace a painting of the Last Supper by Titian which had been lost in a fire. Veronese’s picture was, in effect, a triptych, three Palladian arches with Christ in the central one and staircases leading off the canvas. Despite its religious theme, the picture is lively and shows a sophisticated Venetian celebration, with the partygoers in fine clothes, surrounded by jugs of wine, rich food, exotically garbed black people, dogs and monkeys and is painted in striking perspective. The Inquisition took him to task for this.

Inquisitor. What is the significance of the man whose nose is bleeding? And those armed men dressed as Germans?

Veronese. I intended to represent a servant whose nose is bleeding because of some accident. We painters take the same licence as poets and I have represented two soldiers, one drinking and the other eating on the stairs, because I have been told that the owner of the house was rich and would have such servants.

I. What is St Peter doing?

V. Carving the lamb to pass it to the other end of the table.

I. And the one next to him?

V. He has a toothpick and cleans his teeth.

I. Did anyone commission you to paint Germans [i.e., Protestants], buffoons and similar things in your picture?

V. No, my lords, but to decorate the space.

I. Are not the added decorations to be suitable?

V. I paint pictures as I see fit and as well as my talent permits.

I. Do you not know that in Germany and other places infected with heresy, pictures mock and scorn the things of the Holy Catholic Church in order to teach bad doctrine to the ignorant?

V. Yes, that is wrong, but I repeat that I am bound to follow what my superiors in art have done.

I. What have they done?

V. Michelangelo in Rome painted the Lord, His Mother, the Saints, and the Heavenly Host in the nude – even the Virgin Mary.

The inquisitors exacted an apology from Veronese and made him promise to amend the painting within three months. He did so, but not in the way the Inquisition anticipated. All that was changed was the picture’s title, to The Feast in the House of Levi. That was much safer, since, in the Bible, the event was attended by ‘publicans and sinners’.²⁹

Such an exchange would have been unthinkable a century before and shows how the status of artists had changed. If it achieved nothing else, humanism brought about the emancipation of the artist, a development that is still very much with us.

In 1470, at a public festival in Breslau, in honour of the marriage of Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary, the newlyweds were treated to the sound of many trumpets and ‘all kinds of string instruments’. This is regarded as the earliest account of a large number of strings, the essential ingredient of what would later come to be called an orchestra. A hundred years afterwards, roughly, between 1580 and 1589, a number of gentlemen started to meet regularly at the home of Count Giovanni dei Bardi in Florence. This group, known as the camerata, sounds like proto-mafiosi but in fact they consisted of a celebrated flautist, Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer Galileo Galilei), Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, also musicians, and Ottavio Rinuccini, a poet. In the course of their discussions, mainly about classical drama, the idea was conceived that such drama could be sung ‘in a declamatory manner’.³⁰ In this way was opera born. Roughly speaking, in the century between these two dates, 1470 and 1590, we may say that the main elements of modern music came into being. It paralleled the explosion in painting.

The musical developments may be divided into three. There was first a number of technical advances, in instrumentalisation and vocalisation, which evolved the types of sound we hear today. There was, second, the development of a number of musical forms, which led to the shape of music as we know it today. And, third, in line with all this there emerged the first composers of modern music, the first famous names that we still remember.

Among the technical developments, we may identify first the principle of ‘imitation’. This was an innovation of the Flemish school of music, of whom the most celebrated practitioners were Jean Ockeghem (c. 1430–1495) and Jacob Obrecht (c. 1430–1505). During the fifteenth century, however, and throughout a good part of the sixteenth, Flemish music was in the ascendancy, not just in the north of Europe but across Italy. At the papal court in Rome, at the cathedral of St Mark in Venice, in Florence and in Milan, Flemish musicians were those in demand. ‘Imitation’ in this context refers to the practice of having individual voices in a polyphonic work begin singing not together, but one after another, each individual voice repeating the words. The device developed a great expressive power and has remained popular to this day in all forms of music. At the same time there was the introduction of massed voices in choirs and choruses. In particular, the papal choir became very important, though in Venice the Fleming Adrian Willaert (c. 1480–1562) introduced the double chorus, in which two vocal bodies were continually juxtaposed against each other. This had even greater dramatic force.³¹

It was in Venice too that a beginning was made in orchestration, the idea of designating specific instruments for every part.³² This had to do with the fact that the printing of music also began in Venice around 1501, meaning that people could take away musical ideas, ‘not in their heads, but in their luggage’.³³ Venice produced two remarkable musicians, Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew Giovanni. It was they who perfected the balance of choruses, with groups of strings, wind and brass, in opposing choir lofts, throwing the music back and forth, with two great organs as base. Yehudi Menuhin regarded this as ‘the moment in Western music which marks the real beginning of independent instrumental music’, and in particular a feature that was to be of vital importance throughout the modern age: the suspended dissonance. This deliberately planned dissonance, calling attention to itself and demanding to be resolved (at least until Schönberg, in 1907) heightened the emotionality of music and brought forth the technique of modulation, the free movement from one key to another and without which the romantic movement in music would have been impossible (Wagner, for instance).³⁴

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also saw a growth in the number of instruments available and, in a rudimentary sense, the beginning of the orchestra. Most significant was, first, the spread of the bow from central Asia, via Islam and Byzantium, where the rabab and lura were played with a one- or two-stringed bow by the tenth century. The bow first appeared in Europe in Spain and Sicily but quickly spread north. The playing bow is a direct descendant of the hunting bow – the sound of plucked strings died away quickly but it was found that, with a bow, the notes of vibrating strings could be sustained for much longer, as it was drawn across the string. The second decisive event for the evolution of Western music was the crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. New instruments encountered in the Middle East spread quickly, in particular the fiddle. This is first seen in Byzantine illustrations in the eleventh century, when it had many shapes – oval, elliptical, rectangular – and was already often waisted for flexibility in bowing. Other instruments were the rebec and the gittern, the forerunner of the guitar, a massive instrument hollowed out of a solid block of wood.³⁵

Stringed keyboard instruments appeared initially in the first half of the fifteenth century, perhaps developing out of a mysterious instrument, the checker, which is known only from drawings – no actual examples have survived. There was also an early form of clavichord, known as a monacordys (perhaps invented by Pythagoras), and an early harpsichord, a largeish instrument, out of which the smaller spinet and virginals developed. By the sixteenth century, the lute, the guitar, the viol and the violin had all grown greatly in popularity, as the taste for chromaticism in music expanded. Charles IX, who ruled as king of France between 1560 and 1574, ordered thirty-eight violins from Andrea Amati, the famous violin-maker of Cremona. He specified twelve large and twelve small violins, six violas and eight basses.

Among the wind instruments the organ had been in use since Roman times though from the tenth century on it had been exclusively a church instrument. The most important import from the East was the shawm, derived from the Persian surna, a double-reed instrument with finger-holes and a flared bell. The modern oboe was probably invented in the middle of the seventeenth century by a member of the Hotteterre family, where it was used at the French court.³⁶ The oboe was seen as complementary to the violins and helped in the continuo.

Several new forms of music emerged from the eleventh century on, of which we may single out the madrigal, the sonata, the chorale, the concerto, the oratorio and (as previously mentioned) the opera. Coming to prominence around 1530, the madrigal was the main secular form of music among the cultured classes of Italy. It originated in the frottole, which were usually love songs and designed as amusements rather than as serious comments on the affections of the heart, accompanied by a single instrument. Under the influence of Adrian Willaert the madrigal became more ambitious – five voices were the norm with him, enabling the choral work to grow richer and more sensuous. As the madrigal matured, the musical leadership of Europe passed from the Flemings to the Italians, Rome and Venice in particular, though we should not overlook the contribution of the French in creating the chanson, known elsewhere as the canzon francese. The chanson was very airy, sprightly, often comprising sentimental ‘love-ditties’, in Alfred Einstein’s words, in which the voice would seek to imitate birds, battle scenes and so on, and it was out of this habit that the sonata eventually emerged. The great exponents of the madrigal and the chanson/sonata were Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594) and Orlando Lassus (1532–1594). Palestrina was maestro di cappella at St Peter’s in Rome from 1571 on. He composed ninety-four masses and 140 madrigals, but he was essentially a religious composer, creating an unearthly purity in his music, whereas Lassus was the master of the madrigal and the motet, celebrating love in this life, on this earth. The pursuit of instrumental style and excellence led eventually to the emergence of the virtuoso musician, in particular on keyboard instruments and woodwind. Here we see another parallel with painting – the evolution of the musician as a respected artist in his own right.³⁷

Towards the end of the century, the canzon francese divided into two types – the sonata for wind instruments, and the canzona for strings. The former developed into the concerto (and then, later, the symphony), while the latter evolved into the chamber sonata. The earliest meaning of concerto was a ‘solo ensemble’, and no distinction was made between voices and instruments. In fact, to begin with, ‘concerto’, ‘sinfonia’ and ‘sonata’ were used interchangeably. But then the meaning of sonata was modified to denote a composition for one instrument and, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, concerto came to mean an exclusively instrumental group as a whole, with the exclusion of voices. For a time, therefore, concerto meant, essentially, what we mean by orchestra, until that term came into use in the middle of the eighteenth century. After that ‘concerto’ coalesced to mean more or less what it means today, the standard term for solo instrument and orchestra.

The humanists in Florence who gave birth to opera were convinced that the prime function of music was to intensify the emotional impact of the spoken word. To begin with the new musical speech was called recitativo (recitative), in which the text was recited or declaimed against a musical background, which consisted mainly of a series of chords, with the occasional dissonance for dramatic effect. From the start, however, there was an harmonic structure – what is called ‘vertical’ as opposed to merely ‘horizontal’ music. The chord, a musical unit composed of simultaneously sounding tones (written vertically), became an important element in opera.³⁸ This was very different from polyphony. The opera also encouraged the development of the orchestra, that particular name deriving from the fact that the ensemble of instruments was near the stage (in ancient Greece the orchestra was where the chorus stood, in front of the main acting area of the theatre).

The first great operatic composer was Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). His Orfeo, written for viols and violins and produced in Mantua in 1607, was a significant advance over the earlier operas produced in Florence. Monteverdi had an original harmonic gift which also allowed him to introduce some bold dissonances, but the chief characteristic of his music is its great expressive colour, much advanced on earlier works. Orfeo was so popular that the full score was published immediately, the first time this had happened, and comprised a major breakthrough in the printer’s art. A year later, also in Mantua, he produced Arianna, arguably even more dramatic, and even more harmonic. During the writing of the opera, Monteverdi’s wife died and he was plunged into despair. The result was the famous Lament of Arianna, which was probably the first operatic aria to become a popular song, ‘and was hummed or whistled all over Italy’. Thanks to the successes of Monteverdi, opera houses began to be built across Europe, although up to 1637 they were private, the exclusive preserve of the nobility. Only after that date, again in Venice, was a paying audience admitted. Sixteen opera houses existed in Venice in the seventeenth century, four of which would be open on any given night.³⁹

The oratorio is a sacred analogue of opera and it developed at much the same time. It embodied a sacred drama set to music throughout. This had been tried before but it was only when Emilio Cavalieri (c. 1550–1602), one of Count Bardi’s circle, set to music The Representation of the Soul and the Body, in 1600, that the modern form of oratorio may be said to have begun. Its first performance was in the oratory of the church of St Philip Neri in Rome, and this is how the form got its name. In an oratorio, the full panoply of singers, musicians and chorus is used, but there is no ‘action’, no costumes or scenic effects.⁴⁰

Story-telling came a little later to music than it did to painting, but once it had arrived, it soon found full expression. The secularisation of music, which is essentially what happened in the sixteenth century, freed it from religious constraints and the new forms became ways to tell different stories, of different length, and at differing levels of seriousness. It is probably the biggest change to have overtaken the history of music at any point.

At more or less the time that Veronese was appearing before the Inquisition in Venice, and the camerata were meeting in Florence, something equally noteworthy was happening in London. ‘Contemporaries recognised it; foreign visitors marvelled at it, and in his Itinerary of 1617 Fynes Moryson identified it: “there be, in my opinion, more Playes in London than in all the partes of the worlde I have seene, so doe these players or Comedians excel all other in the worlde.” What they were seeing was an explosion on the stages of London, an explosion that reflected a sudden creative flowering in all forms of literature: the drama of Shakespeare and Marlowe, the poetry of Donne and Spenser, and the translation of the Authorised Version of the Bible.’⁴¹ But it was drama in England that stood out most.

The defining point, Peter Hall says, was spring 1576, when James Burbage, a member of one of the great theatre companies, went outside the city limits, to Shoreditch, to build the first fixed home for drama and, in the process, ‘turned a recreation into a profession’. In only a quarter-century after that, the new idea had reached its culmination: Shakespeare and Marlowe had come and gone, their dramas making new and huge demands on actors, and the main traditions of the stage had evolved and coalesced. In a dozen new theatres something like eight hundred plays had been performed, though how many more have been lost simply isn’t known. What is known is that, in addition to Shakespeare and Marlowe, twenty other writers were responsible for twelve or more plays each: Thomas Heywood, John Fletcher, Thomas Dekker, Philip Massinger, Henry Chettle, James Shirley, Ben Jonson, William Hathaway, Anthony Munday, Wentworth Smith, Francis Beaumont.⁴² Heywood wrote that he ‘had a maine finger’ in 220 plays.

The explosion of drama reflects the fact that London was now following Florence as one of the most successful bourgeois cities of the time. Central to this, in London’s case, were the great sixteenth-century voyages of exploration, covered in the next chapter. The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas greatly increased the money supply in Europe, price inflation cheapened labour, and capitalists enjoyed super-profits. There was too a comparable increase in the professional classes. Enrolments to Oxford and Cambridge rose from 450 a year in 1500 to nearly a thousand a year by 1642, the cost increasing from £20 a year in 1600 to £30 in 1660. Admissions to the Inns of Court, where lawyers were trained, likewise quadrupled between 1500 and 1600. ‘What happened between 1540 and 1640,’ says Richard Stone, ‘was a massive shift of relative wealth away from the Church and Crown . . . toward the upper middle and middle classes’.⁴³ It was a similar change to that which happened in Florence. ‘The realm aboundeth in riches,’ said another account, ‘as may be seen by the general excess of the people in purchasing, in building, in meat, drink and feastings, and most notably in apparel.’⁴⁴ This is a statement that recalls van Eyck’s portrait of the Arnolfinis.

The change in London was fundamental. Religious figures disappeared, as the monasteries, chantries and hospitals were sold off. So too did the nobles, to be replaced by commerce and craftsmen. The Law Courts proliferated, ‘as legislation became a favoured alternative to violence’. St Paul’s Cathedral was now the chief place for gossip and it had the air of a club. ‘The Elizabethan-about-Town would habitually look in of a morning to see who was there, and if there were any major news, any minor scandal, any interesting comment on the latest book or play, or anything in the way of a new epigram or anecdote suitable for retailing at home.’⁴⁵ But the rendezvous par excellence was the Mermaid Tavern, the best of the pubs and Elizabethan London’s literary and dramatic centre, the meeting place of its poets, dramatists and wits, who gathered there on the first Friday of every month. The most famous of Elizabethans would attend: Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, John Donne, Michael Drayton, Thomas Campion, Richard Carew, Francis Beaumont, Walter Raleigh. Beaumont once wrote to Ben Jonson, summarising the Mermaid’s appeal:

. . . What things we have seen

Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been

So nimble and so full of subtle flame

Several economists, Maynard Keynes not least among them, have argued that England’s commercial prosperity was directly responsible for the emergence of its theatre.⁴⁶ The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 had engendered a sense of exuberance and irreverence among the population: nothing was sacred, even the Queen swore excessively, and ‘spat at her favourites’.⁴⁷

Although Burbage’s move to Shoreditch was the catalyst for the renaissance (or naissance) of English theatre, it grew out of several medieval traditions – the mystery, miracle, and morality plays of the midlands and north, the royal revels during the twelve days of Christmas, which grew into the masque, and the guilds and livery companies which produced pageants. Even so, when Shakespeare was growing up there were no plays outside London and no professional theatres even there. A ‘game-house’ had existed in Yarmouth in 1538 and a theatrum in Exeter since the fourteenth century, where farces were performed. But there was no professional acting as such and, since the Reformation, even Passion plays had been discontinued. Classical theatre was studied in the universities and, from the 1520s, boys in the schools performed the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the tragedies of Seneca.⁴⁸ In due course, schoolmasters and university dons were writing their own plays in the style of the classics and, around 1550, Ralph Roister Doister, in rhyming doggerel, was produced by a master at Eton. A decade later, a much better-known play, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, was performed at Christ’s College, Cambridge. But this was three years before Shakespeare was born and, since there is no evidence that he ever went to university, the connection cannot have been very strong. The archives of Westminster Abbey show that, throughout the 1560s, plays were performed there privately, acted in by the scholars and played before the Privy Council. In parallel, the monarch maintained two troupes of eight men each, who would produce entertainments – sometimes ‘of a circus nature’, sometimes more serious plays – as the theatre began to tell human stories and individual characters began to emerge.⁴⁹

In terms of structures, the theatres that existed in London at that time were two circular outfits, the Bull-Ring and the Bear-Pit, situated on the south bank of the Thames and in existence for hundreds of years. But the baiting rings never housed plays – instead it was the inn-yards that made natural playhouses to begin with (‘a wooden O’, as Shakespeare called them), with a scaffold for a stage. Convenient as these were, there were problems. The authorities feared plague and riot – drink was never far away. The livery companies – companies of actors tied to a powerful patron, Leicester, Oxford, Warwick, for example – were designed to stop vagabondage and they gradually introduced interludes into their morality plays and these interludes grew in topicality and dramatic content. When, therefore, Burbage built his theatre, the energy and appetite reflected in all these developments was at once harnessed. ‘What had been an almost feudal structure – the livery companies – was turned overnight into a capitalist one.’⁵⁰ The theatre was from the start a commercial venture, with more or less professional actors.

We should remember that these early plays were written to be heard, rather than read. The reading public was, however, growing in London by leaps and bounds. In the early seventeenth century, only 25 per cent of London’s tradesmen and artisans couldn’t sign their names. Around 90 per cent of women were illiterate but they still comprised a good part of theatre audiences, which is why spectacle was more important then even than it is now and why there was no real distinction, as there is today, between ‘high’ culture and ‘popular’ culture.⁵¹

By the early seventeenth century, the term ‘acting’ had come to be applied to London’s theatrical performers, reflecting the fact that there had been a significant advance on ‘orators’, that ‘personation’ and characterisation were being developed and deepened. Actors were not yet respectable, not in the full sense, but the practice of repertory (no play was given two days in succession) did draw attention to the successful actor’s ability to portray very different roles in rapid succession, a versatility which could be easily appreciated. Nonetheless, when John Donne wrote his Catalogus Librorum Aulicorum in 1604–1605 he included no plays – he did not think of them as literature.

The plays that were produced in this atmosphere contained two essential ingredients – realism, as close as the techniques of the day permitted, and emotional immediacy (there was an incipient journalistic element in London theatre along with everything else). But probably the most important element was that the theatre reflected the changing world in which the audience of the time found itself. The social situation was changing, the old rules were breaking down, private reading was growing, many people could afford more goods than ever before.

Into this world stepped Shakespeare. As Harold Bloom pertinently asks, was Shakespeare an accident? He was not, after all, the immediately towering talent that he became. As Bloom also points out, had Shakespeare been killed at twenty-nine, as Marlowe was, his oeuvre would not have been anywhere near as impressive. ‘The Jew of Malta, the two parts of Tamburlaine, and Edward II, even the fragmentary Doctor Faustus, are a far more considerable achievement than Shakespeare’s was before Love’s Labour’s Lost. Five years after Marlowe’s death, Shakespeare had gone beyond his precursor and rival with the great sequence of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and the two parts of Henry IV. Bottom, Shylock, and Falstaff add to Faulconbridge of King John and in Mercutio of Romeo and Juliet we discover a new kind of stage character, light years beyond Marlowe’s talents or his interests . . . In the thirteen or fourteen years after the creation of Falstaff, we are given the succession worthy of him: Rosalind, Hamlet, Othello, Iago, Lear, Edmund, Macbeth, Cleopatra, Anthony, Coriolanus, Timon, Imogen, Prospero, Caliban . . . By 1598 Shakespeare is confirmed and Falstaff is the angel of the confirmation. No other writer has ever had anything like Shakespeare’s resources of language, which are so florabundant in Love’s Labour’s Lost that we feel many of the limits of language have been reached, once and for all.’⁵²

Shakespeare arrived in London with no career plan worked out at that stage, nor any ambitions to be more than a popular, even a hack, writer, and he became known as an actor before he earned fame as an author. He turned out serious plays, light plays, plays tailored to his actors. He paid little attention to spelling or grammar and was constantly coining new words where he needed them. And yet, in the history of ideas Shakespeare stands in no one’s shadow, a man responsible for two groundbreaking innovations. One, mutability. Shakespeare’s characters – the important ones at least – overhear themselves and show a capacity to change, to change in a psychological and moral sense, that was totally new. This shows itself in Hamlet and Lear but is best in Falstaff, arguably Shakespeare’s greatest creation. Second, and all too easily overlooked, and which was also related to urbanisation, Shakespeare’s work ‘resists Christianisation’: his plays exist in their own world, worlds complete unto themselves, which we accept almost without thinking. They are not avowedly humanist, in the obvious sense of drawing their inspiration from the classical past, nor do they make the most of learning (Milan is connected to the sea by a waterway). ‘Shakespeare appears not to have been a passionate man (not in his marriage anyway), he has no theology, no metaphysics, no ethics and very little in the way of political theory.’ Instead, in a very real sense, he invented the psyche in the way that we use the term today. Perhaps the defining Shakespearean play is King Lear where, at the end, there is what Bloom calls ‘a cosmological emptiness’, into which the survivors in the play, and the audience, are thrown. ‘There is no transcendence at the end of King Lear . . . The death of Lear is a release for him, but not for the survivors . . . And it is no release for us either . . . Nature as well as the state is wounded almost unto death . . . What matters most is the mutilation of nature, and our sense of what is or is not natural in our own lives.’⁵³ This is an achievement quite unlike anything that had gone before.

Tradition has Shakespeare and Cervantes dying on the same day. A more important coincidence is that the novel, so common a form of literature in our own times, was born in Spain, with Don Quixote, and at more or less the same time as modern drama was launched in London. In Spanish literature, priority in terms of date is rightly given to Celestina, or The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea (sixteen acts in the 1499 version, twenty-two in the 1526 version).⁵⁴ The plot, so far as there is one, centres around Celestina, a professional go-between, who brings together two lovers, Calisto and Melibea, whose death Celestina eventually causes, along with her own. There is a good deal of the low life in Celestina and this helped set up the tradition of the picaresque novel in Spanish literature of which Lazarillo de Tormes was the first important example (the story of a criminal family and their adventures), and Don Quijote, or Don Quixote, by far the most overwhelming.⁵⁵

Unlike Shakespeare, Cervantes was an heroic man. Almost certainly a disciple of Erasmus, from a family who had been forced by the Inquisition to abandon their Judaism, he fought and shone at the battle of Lepanto, even though he was sick, survived long years of Moorish captivity and then in Spanish jails, where Don Quixote may have been begun. The book appeared at more or less the same time as King Lear and can claim to be as utterly original and as unprecedented. The centre of the book, and its greatness, lies in the ‘loving, frequently irascible’ relationship between the Don and his valet, Sancho Panza. Their individuality, their small-time and big-time heroism are a revelation and a celebration that fill the reader with as much warmth as the end of Lear leaves us bereft and cold. Much of the hinterland of the book is unexplained. Cervantes tell us the Don is mad, but we are not told why or given any clinical details. He may have driven himself crazy by reading chivalric romances of a different age, which caused him to set off on his impossible task of realising his dream, to live life in the course of his travels. As the friendship progresses – a relationship which has been compared to that between Peter and Jesus – throughout their travels ‘no thought on either side goes unchecked or uncritiqued. By mainly courteous disagreement, most courteous when most sharply in conflict, they establish an area of free play, where thoughts are set free for the reader to ponder.’⁵⁶ Despite the differences in rank, there is an ‘equality of intimacy’ between the Don and his valet that is both comic and serious all at the same time (some of the comic interludes are pure slapstick). The Don’s eagerness for battle at every turn, his fantastic ability to mistake windmills for giants, and puppets for real persons, Sancho Panza’s wish to gain fame rather than wealth (how strange that sounds today), their meeting with Ginés de Pasamonte, the famously dangerous criminal and trickster, all this is wholly original but the central point is that the Don and his valet change during the book, they change each other by listening to what each other has to say. As with Shakespeare’s invention, mutability is the central psychological innovation of Don Quixote. Like Shakespeare, Cervantes created huge characters and like Shakespeare he moved well beyond learned humanism, well beyond antiquity, well beyond the Church, to something new. ‘It is not a philosophy,’ said Eric Auerbach, describing the book. ‘It [has] no didactic purpose; . . . It is an attitude toward the world . . . in which bravery and equanimity play a major part.’ In a sense Don Quixote was not just the first novel but also the first ‘road movie’, a genre that is very much still with us.⁵⁷

There was no one reason for the explosion of imagination (and of story-telling, and story-telling techniques). But the extent to which many of these great works began to move beyond Christianity ought not to go unrecognised. Without making heavy weather of it, works of the imagination offered a very varied alternative, a refuge, to the traditional drama of the liturgy and the narratives of the Bible.