Charlemagne

Cord
Mecate
Courage
Prov. 3:5
" Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding."

Calangute beach, North Goa
Calangute Beach, North Goa, India

Chess: "cord" "mecate" "courage" "CE" "Civil Engineering" "Charlie"

Excerpts from Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation"

People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater. Quite apart from discomforts and privations, there was no escape from it. Very restricted company, no books, no light after dark, no hope.

When one considers the Icelandic sagas, which are among the great books of the world, one must admit that the Norsemen produced a culture. But was it a civilisation? . . .
Civilisation means something more than energy and will and creative power: something the early Norsemen hadn’t got, but which, even in their time, was beginning to reappear in Western Europe. How can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence.

Civilised man, or so it seems to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back.

But the pages of pure ornament [in the Celtic illustrated gospels] are almost the richest and most complicated pieces of abstract decoration ever produced, more sophisticated and refined that anything in Islamic art. We look at them for ten seconds, then we pass on to something else that we can interpret or read. But imagine if one couldn’t read and had nothing else to look at for weeks at a time.
Charlemagne . . . with the help of an outstanding teacher and librarian named Alcuin of York, he collected books and had them copied. . . . Charlemagne felt strongly the value of education, and in particular he saw the importance of an educated Italy.

CHAPTER 3

ROMANCE AND REALITY

I am in the Gothic world, the world of chivalry, courtesy and romance; a world in which serious thigs were done with a sense of play - where even war and theology could become a sort of game; and when architecture reached a point of extravagance unequalled in history. After allt he great unifying convictions of the twelfth century, High Gothic art can look fantastic and luxurious - what Veblen called conspicuous waste. And yet these centuries produced some of the greatest spirits in the history of man, omongst them St Francis of Assisi and Dante. Behind all the fantasy of the Gothic imagination there remained, on two different planes, a sharp sense of reality. medieval man could see things very clearly, but he believed that these appearances should be considered as nothing more than symbols or tokens of an ideal order, which was the only true reality.

The fantasy strikes us first, and last; and one can see it in the room in the Cluny museaum in paris hung with a series of tapestries known as the lady with the unicorn. poetical fanciful and profane, its ostensible subject is the four senses but its real subject is the power of love. which can subdue all.

We have come a long way from the powerful conviction that induced knights and ladies to draw carts of stone up the hill for the building of Chartres Cathedral. And yet the notion of ideal love, and the irresistible power of gentleness and beauty, whcih is emblematically conveyed in the tapestry can be traced back for three centuries; we may even begin to look for it in the north portal of Chartress dedicated in 1220.

Only a very few years before, women were thought of as the squat, bad tempered viragos that we see on the font of wichester cathedral; These were the women who accompanied the Norsemen to iceland. The figures on chartres are amongst the the first consciously graceful women in western art.

Of the two or three faculties that have been added to the European mind since the civilisation of Greeece and rome, none seems to me stranger and more inexplicable than the sentiment of ideal or courtly lobe. it was entirely unknown in antiquity. Passion, yes. desire, yes of course; steady affection yes. But this state of utter subjection to the will of an unapproachable woman, this would have seemed to the Romans or the Vikings not only absurd, but unbelievable. But it lasted for centuries. Even up to 1945 we retained a number of chivalrous gestures; we raised our hats to ladies, and let them pass through doors first. And we still subscribed to the fantasy that they were chaste and pure beings, in whose presence we couldn't tell certain stories or pronounce certain words.

Well thats all over now. But where did it come from. nobody knows. Most people think, with the pointed arch, it came from the east. that pilgrims and crusaders found in the Moslem world a tradition of Persian literature in which women were the subject of compliment and devotion.

Less directly the lady of a castle must have had a peculiar potition with so many unoccupied young men who couldn't spend all their time hunting, and who of course never did any work, and when the lord was away for a year or two, the lady was left in charge.

One troubador poem known as the siege of the Castle of love, in which the ladies leaning on the battlements put up a weak defence as young gallants climb up on rope ladders is on ivory mirror cases.

I ought to add that the idea of marriage doesn't come into the question anymore than it would today. A 'love match' is almost an invention of the late 18th century. medieval marriages were entirely a matter of property, and , as everybody knows, marriage without love means love without marriage.

Then i suppose the cult of the virgin probably had something to do with troubador poetry. You often don't know if the poetry is to the Virgin or to a mistress. The greatest of all writings about ideal love, Dante's Vita Nuova, is a quasi-religious work, and in the end it is Beatrice who introduces dante to Paradise.

For all these reasons, i think it is permissible to associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy that one finds in the madonnas of the thirteenth century. Its certainly what their husbands and admirers wanted ladies to look like. So it is all the more suprising to learn that these exquisite creatures got terribly knocked about. it must be true, because there is a manual on how to treat a woman, actually to raise daughters that was widely used from 1370 to the 16th that says disobedient women must be beaten and starved and dragged around by the hair. But the confident look of Gothic women makes one thing they cuold look after themselves.

One can't say romance was a gothic invention: i suppose that, as the word suggests, it was really Romanesque, and grew up in those southern districts of France where the memories of Roman civilisation had not been quite obliterated. But the chivalrous romances of the Gothic time were a specialty of the gothic mind.

Civ in the late 14th century shows us that the delicacy and refinement of the thirteenth century lasted over one hundred years. It survived the Black death and th eHundred years war and the economic revolution of the first enclosures and became completeley international. There is a spring and tension in the early fourteenth century which is lost after 1380; in compensation there is an increase in subtlety.

The greatest patron of art and learning of the gothic world were four brothers: Charles 5 of France. The Duke of Burgundy, the slyest and most ambitious and ultimately the most powerful of the brothers; Loius d'anjou and the Duke of Berry. All were frilly.

That the Duke of Berry was brutally murdered shows us how civilisation seems to fly in at one window and out another in the middle ages.

The duke of Berry's manuscripts illustrate another capacity of the human mind which had grown up in th epreceeding century: The delighted observation of natural objects. leaves and flowers, animals and birds. The odd thin about the medieval response to nature was that it saw all of those things in isolation. Birds were a medieval obsession.

He found one group of artists that saw life as we see it (without the isolation) and painted realistic scenes of peasants peasanting that are one of the miracles of art history. They show an aspect of life that went on unchanged until the first ww. Another illustration from his book "the very rich hours" shows him having a grand dinner. During it they indulge in a little mild sourtship, so called because it was only in courts that one had time for those agreeable preliminaries.

Those French and Burgundian courts were the model of fashion and good manners all over Europe. "courtesy"

The most courteous of men wasFrancesco BErnadone "st francis d assisi. One day he gave a poor man his coat and he started giving stuff away his father diowned him and he lived in poverty there after partly because he felt that it was discourteous to be in the company of anyone poorer than oneself. From the first everyone recognised that St Francis was a religious genius. His favorite saying was "Foxes have holes and the birds of the air nests ; but the son of man hath not where to lay his head."

Francis's cult of poverty could not survive him - it did not even last his lifetime. It was officially rejected by the Church; for the Church had already become part of the international banking system that originated in thirteenth century italy. His disciples were called heretics and burnt at the stake.

Yet his belief that to free the spirit one must be poor is the belief that all great religious teachers have in common. Rousseau and Wordsworth brought it back. The folk tales "the canticle of the sun" about him are good reading.

But already during the lifetime of St Francis another world was growing up, which for better or worse, is the ancestor of our own, the world of trade and of banking. The banker types were realistic and the proof is that they survived. Florentine banking is similar to today , except that double entry wasn't invented till the fourteenth century.

And just as their economic system was capable of an expansion that has lasted till today, so the painting they commissioned had a kind of solid reality that was to become the dominant aim of western art up to the time of cezanne. It continued to grow because it involved a third dimension. Two dimensional art- is enchanting. But instead of decorative jumble Giotto concentrates on a few simple solid looking forms. When Dr Johnson wished to refute he kicked. Giotto made em look solid.

Giotto was born near florence in about 1265 when italian painting was really only a less posished form of Byzantine painting. Giotto has no predecessors. We know absolutely nothing about him till the year 1304, when he decorated a small, plain building in Padua known as the Arena Chapel, and made it, to anyone who cares for painting, one of the holy places of the world. Its one of the first instances of the new rich commissioning works f art as a kind of atonement, a practice that has benefitted the world almost as much as vanity and self-indulgence.

Almost in the same year that he was born Dante was born. In a way Giotto and Dante stand at the junction of two worlds. Biotto belonged tot he new world of solid realities, the world created by the bankers and wool merchants for whom he worked. Dante belonged t the earlier Gothic world, the world of St thomas aquinas and the great cathedrals. He's more like gothic sculpture.