(MUSIC) Virelai C'est La Fin
I'm in the Gothic world.
The world of chivalry, courtesy and romance.
A world in which serious things 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 all the great unifying convictions of the 12th century,
high Gothic art can look fantastic and luxurious -
what Marxists call "conspicuous waste".
And yet, these centuries produced some of the greatest spirits in the whole history of man,
amongst them St Francis of Assisi and Dante.
Behind all the fantasies of 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.
A charming example is this series of tapestries known as the Lady With The Unicorn,
one of the last and most seductive examples of the Gothic spirit.
It is poetical, fanciful and profane.
Its ostensible subject is the four senses,
but its real subject is the power of love,
which can enlist and subdue all the forces of nature -
including these two emblems of lust and ferocity,
the unicorn and the lion.
They kneel before this embodiment of chastity,
and even hold up the corners of her tent.
These fierce beasts have become in the heraldic sense, her supporter's.
And all round this allegorical scene
is what the scholastic medieval philosophers used to call nature naturing,
natura naturans".
Birds
trees
flowers, leaves galore.
And those rather obvious symbols of nature naturing - rabbits.
There is even nature domesticated sitting on a cushion.
What an image of worldly happiness at its most refined
what the French call the "douceur de vivre"
which is often confused with civilisation.
(MUSIC) Basse Dance: Alta
We've come a long way from the powerful convictions
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,
which is emblematically conveyed by the homage of these fierce beasts,
can be traced back for three centuries
and we may even begin to look for it in the north portal of Chartres.
This portal, the north portal,
was decorated about the year 1220.
It seems to have been commissioned by that formidable lady, Blanche of Castile,
the mother of St Louis.
Perhaps, for that reason, or simply because it was dedicated to the Virgin Mary,
many of the figures are of women.
And several of the stories on the arches concern Old Testament heroines.
And at the corner is one of the first consciously graceful women in Western art.
Only a very few years before,
women were thought of as like this.
And those were the women who accompanied the Norsemen to Iceland.
Now, look at this embodiment of chastity,
lifting her mantle, raising her hand, turning her head,
with rhythms of self-conscious refinement that were to become mannered
but here are genuinely modest.
In fact, she represents a saint called Saint Modeste.
But she might be Dante's Beatrice.
Of the two or three faculties
that have been added to the European mind since the civilisation of Greece and Rome
none seems to me stranger and more inexplicable
than the sentiment of ideal or courtly love.
This was entirely unknown in antiquity.
Passion, yes. Desire, yes, of course.
Steady affection, yes.
But this state of utter subjection to the will of some almost unapproachable woman.
This belief that no sacrifice was too great,
that a whole lifetime might properly be spent in paying court to a disdainful lady,
or suffering on her behalf.
This would have seemed to the Romans or to the Vikings,
not only absurd but unbelievable.
And yet for hundreds of years it passed unquestioned.
It inspired a vast literature, from Chrétien de Troyes to Shelley,
most of which l find completely unreadable.
And even up to 1945, we still retained a number of chivalrous gestures.
We raised our hats to ladies and let them pass first through doors,
and in America, pushed in their seats at table.
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, that's all over now.
But it had a long run, and there was much to be said for it.
How did it begin?
The truth is that nobody knows.
Most people think that, like the pointed arch, it came from the East
that pilgrims and Crusaders found in the Muslim world a tradition of Persian literature
in which women were the subject of extravagant compliment and devotion.
l don't know enough about Persian literature to say if this is true.
But l do think that the Crusades had another, less-direct influence
on the concept of courtly love.
The lady of a castle must always have had a peculiar position.
Cooped up with so many unoccupied young men,
who couldn't spend all their time fighting.
And when the lord was away for a year or two,
the lady was left in charge.
She took on his functions
and received the kind of homage that was accepted in a feudal society.
And the wandering knight who visited her,
did so with the mixture of deference and hope that one gets in the troubadour poems.
(MUSIC) Retrovenge: Pour Mon Coeur
In support of this theory is the subject of the siege of the Castle of Love,
which appears on mirror cases and caskets
and other domestic objects of the 14th century.
l ought perhaps to add that the idea of marriage doesn't come into the question at all.
Medieval marriages were entirely a matter of property.
Well, as everybody knows,
marriage without love means Love without marriage.
And then, l suppose, one must admit that the cult of the Virgin had something to do with it.
In this context, it sounds rather blasphemous.
But the fact remains
that one often hardly knows if a medieval love lyric is addressed to the poet's mistress
or to the Virgin Mary.
The greatest of all writings about ideal love, Dante's Vita Nuova - the New Life -
is a quasi-religious work.
And in the end, it is Beatrice who introduces Dante to paradise.
So, for all these reasons
l think one can associate the cult of ideal love with the ravishing beauty and delicacy
that one finds in the madonnas of the late-13th century.
Courtly love was not only the subject of lyrics,
but of long - very long - stories in prose and verse.
And this reminds me of something else
that the Gothic centuries added to the European consciousness.
That cluster of ideas and sentiments
which surrounds the words "romantic" and "romance".
One can't really say that romance was a Gothic invention.
l suppose that, as the word suggests, it was Romanesque,
and grew up in those southern districts of France
where the memories of Roman civilisation had not been quite obliterated
when they were overlaid by the more fantastic imagery of the Saracens.
But the chivalrous romance of the Gothic time
from Chrétien de Troyes of the 13th century to Mallory in the 15th,
with their allegories and personifications,
their endless journeys and night-long vigils, their spells and mysteries,
had a special appeal to the medieval mind.
For two hundred years,
the Roman De La Rose was probably the most read book in Europe...
..except for Boethius and the Bible.
Well, it's not much read today, except in order to pass examinations.
But, of course, the effect of these romances on 19th-century literature was decisive,
whether as a quarry or as an imaginative escape, especially in England.
The Eve Of St Agnes, the Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Idylls Of The King,
to say nothing of that crucial masterpiece of the late-19th century,
Wagner's Tristan And Isolde.
One can't say that Gothic romance hasn't played a part in our experience,
if only at second-hand.
(MUSIC) Ja Nun Hons Pris
The summit of court civilisation was reached in the late-14th century in France,
under the patronage of the Duc de Berry.
He built a series of fabulous filigree castles,
of which the painter de Limbourg has left us an apparently accurate record.
He filled them with jewels and jewelled contraptions,
paintings and tapestries.
This warlike scene is only a tapestry.
The Duke wasn't fond of war.
The Duke's artists have given us a vivid account of his court.
Here he is giving a grand dinner to celebrate the New Year.
There are no ladies present, which is curious,
because the Duke who was an amiably self-indulgent man,
is reported to have said of women,
"The more the merrier, and never tell the truth."
But we can see some of his famous collection of fifteen hundred dogs.
Which is too many even for me.
They seem to have had the run of the table.
Behind him is his chamberlain saying to some bashful suitor,
"Approache, approche."
And his courtiers, including a cardinal,
are raising their hands in astonishment at such condescension.
The castles, pictures, tapestries have vanished with the dogs.
But a few of the treasures remain.
This gold cup is one, which seems to have been owned by the Duke,
and one of the few objects from which can still catch
the flavour of this fanciful, luxurious world.
And this, nominally a reliquary,
but actually an extravagant, but charming, toy.
It's supposed to have held a thorn from Christ's crown at the Crucifixion.
There were many patrons of art and collectors at that time
but the Duke was peculiar in that the arts were his whole life.
And to pay for his collections, he taxed his subjects mercilessly,
and they wouldn't have agreed with this miniature where St Peter admits him to heaven
without the usual formalities.
It was a colder world for peasants.
The manuscripts illustrate another capacity of the human mind,
which had grown up in the preceding century -
the delighted observation of natural objects, leaves and flowers, animals and birds.
Birds were a medieval obsession.
They're the subject of one of the earliest medieval sketch books
and they fill the borders of manuscripts.
If you'd asked a 14th-century cleric to account for all these birds
he would probably have said that they represented souls,
because they can fly up to God.
But this doesn't really explain why artists drew them with such obsessive accuracy.
And l think the reason is that they had become symbols of freedom.
Under feudalism men and animals were tied to the land.
Very few people could move about.
Only artists...
and birds.
They were cheerful, hopeful, impudent and mobile.
And, in addition, had the kind of markings that fitted in with medieval heraldry.
The Duke's earliest manuscripts had shown an isolating and symbolising approach to nature.
But in the middle of his career he discovered an artist
or a group of artists called de Limbourg,
who by some stroke of original genius saw nature as we see it -
as part of a complete visual experience.
No doubt much of their work's been lost.
But one book remains
The Very Rich Hours,
which is one of the miracles of art history.
Here are men and women cultivating the fields,
harrowing, sowing - there's a scarecrow in the background -
haymaking and harvesting.
And suddenly we realise that all this had been going on
in the same places, more or less unchanged,
all through the Dark Ages.
And went on in the same way right up to the last war.
In the foreground,
a party of nobles out hawking indulge in a little mild courtship.
So called because it was only in courts that one had time for these agreeable preliminaries,
instead of getting down to business immediately.
Then, in May, everyone puts on crowns of leaves and goes out riding.
What a dream.
No society has ever been more elegant, more debonair, more dainty.
Those French and Burgundian courts were the model of fashion and good manners
all over Europe.
Many people, when you mention to them the word civilisation
think of something like this.
Well, it isn't to be sneezed at.
But it isn't enough to keep a civilisation alive.
Because it depends on a small static society
that never looks outside or beyond.
And we know from many examples
that such societies become petrified,
anxious only to hold on to their own social order.
The great, indeed the unique, merit of European civilisation
has been that it has never ceased to develop.
Even the idea of courtesy could take on an unexpected form.
In the years when the north portal of Chartres was being decorated,
a rich young dandy named Francesco Bernadone suffered a change of heart.
He was, and always remained, the most courteous of men.
He was deeply influenced by French ideals of chivalry.
And one day, when he had fitted himself up in his best clothes
in preparation for some chivalrous campaign,
he met a poor gentleman whose needs seemed to be greater than his own,
and gave him his cloak.
That night he dreamed that he should rebuild the Celestial City.
Later, he gave away his possessions so liberally
that his father, who was a rich businessman in the Italian town of Assisi
decided to disown him.
Whereupon Francesco took off his remaining clothes
and said that he would possess nothing, absolutely nothing.
The Bishop of Assisi hid his nakedness,
and afterwards gave him a cloak,
and Francesco went off into the woods singing a French song.
The next three years he spent in abject poverty,
looking after lepers, who were very much in evidence in the Middle Ages
and rebuilding with his own hands abandoned churches.
In all his actions he took the words of the Gospels literally.
And he translated them into the language of chivalric poetry.
He said that he had taken poverty for his lady.
And when he achieved some still more drastic act of self-denial
he said that it was to do her a courtesy.
It was partly because he saw that wealth corrupts and is the cause of war,
but partly because he felt that it was discourteous
to be in the company of anyone poorer than oneself.
I've so far illustrated the story of St Francis by the work of the Sienese painter Sassetta,
because although he painted so much later,
the chivalric Gothic tradition lingered on in Siena as nowhere else in Italy,
and gave to Sassetta's sprightly images a lyric, even a visionary quality
more Franciscan than the ponderous images of Giotto.
But l must now change to Giotto.
Not only because he lived 150 years earlier than Sassetta
that's to say much nearer the time of St Francis
but because he was chosen to decorate the great church where I'm now standing,
the Church of St Francis
built very shortly after his death.
How many of these frescoes are really by Giotto's own hand is an open question.
Modern English scholars have taken it into their heads to say
that Giotto practically never went to Assisi at all.
Italian scholars think that he painted nearly all of them.
I'm inclined to think that Giotto was one of those artists, like Raphael,
who attached much more importance to invention than to execution.
He was quite prepared to let his pupils -
there must have been a small army of pupils -
carry out his ideas.
The ones here above my head l am pretty sure he painted himself,
because they have all his weight and dramatic power.
Where he seems to me to fall short
is in his actual image of the saint.
It's too grave and commanding.
It has none of that sprightliness, almost -
that sense of joy which St Francis valued almost as much as courtesy itself.
Incidentally, we don't know what St Francis looked like.
The best known early painting is attributed to Cimabue.
It looks quite convincing,
but I'm afraid that it's entirely repainted
and only shows us what the 19th century thought St Francis ought to have looked like.
From the first, everyone recognised that St Francis was a religious genius,
the greatest, l believe, that Europe has ever produced.
Although he was only a layman,
the Pope gave him permission to found an order, here at Assisi.
St Francis died in 1226 at the age of 43,
worn out by his austerities.
On his deathbed, he had asked forgiveness of "poor brother donkey, my body"
for the hardships he had made it suffer.
He had seen his order go from a group of humble companions
and become a great institution,
a power in church politics.
And at a certain point, he had quite naturally and simply relinquished control.
He knew that he was no administrator.
Within two years, only two years of his death,
he was canonised
and his companions began to build this great church to his memory.
A masterpiece of Gothic architecture, also an incredible piece of engineering.
Two churches, one on top of the other,
a huge monastery, all built on arcades,
and of such hard stone that it's almost impossible to believe
that it's original 13th-century work.
l think it must have been built by a castle architect.
It was decorated by all the chief Italian,painters of the 13th and 14th centuries
from Cimabue onwards
so that it has become the richest and most evocative church in Italy.
(Plainsong)
A strange memorial to the little poor man whose favourite saying was,
"Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests
but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."
Of course, St Francis's cult of poverty couldn't survive him.
It didn't even last his lifetime.
It was officially rejected by the Church
because the Church had already become part of the international banking system
that originated in the 13th century.
Those of St Francis's disciples who clung to his doctrine of poverty, called fraticelli,
were denounced as heretics and burnt at the stake.
And for 700 years, capitalism has continued to grow to its present monstrous proportions.
It may seem that St Francis has had no influence at all.
Even those humane reformers of the 19th century who sometimes invoked him,
didn't wish to exalt or sanctify poverty but to abolish it.
And yet, his belief that in order to free the spirit we must shed our earthly possessions
is the belief that all great religions have in common - East and West.
Almost without exception.
And by enacting that truth, with such simplicity and grace,
he made it a part of European consciousness.
An ideal to which, however impossible it may be in practice,
the finest spirits will always return.
And, by freeing himself from the pull of possessions,
St Francis achieved a state of mind which has been of great value to us'.
l mean his belief in the unity of creation
and the possibility of universal love.
It was only because he possessed nothing
that St Francis could feel sincerely a brotherhood with all created things.
Not only living creatures, like Brother Pig,
but Brother Fire and Sister Wind.
This philosophy inspired his hymn to the unity of creation,
known as the Canticle Of The Sun.
It's expressed with irresistible naivety
in a collection of legends known as the Fioretti - the little flowers.
Not many people can make their way through the polemics of Abelard
or the definitions of St Thomas Aquinas,
but everyone can enjoy these holy folk tales,
which, after all, may not be completely untrue.
They are, in contemporary jargon, amongst the first examples of popular communication.
At any rate, since the Sermon on the Mount.
And they tell us, for instance, how St Francis persuaded a fierce wolf
that terrified the people of Gubbio, to make a pact
by which, in return for regular meals, he will leave the citizens alone.
"Give me your paw, " said St Francis.
And the wolf gave his paw.
Most famous of all, of course is the sermon to the birds.
Those creatures which, as I've said seemed to the Gothic mind singularly privileged.
Seven centuries haven't impaired the naive beauty of that episode.
(Bell tolls)
St Francis is a figure of the pure Gothic time.
The age of Crusades and castles and the great cathedrals.
Although he put it to strange and barbarous uses
he belonged to the age of chivalry.
Well, however much one loves that world
l think it remains for us infinitely strange and remote.
It's as enchanting, as luminous, as transcendental
as the stained glass that is its glory.
And in the ordinary meaning of the word, as unreal.
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, of banking, of cities.
Full of hard-headed men whose aim in life was to grow rich
without ceasing to be respectable.
Cities, citizens, civilians, civic, civic life.
l suppose all this ought to have a direct bearing on what we mean by civilisation.
Behind me is the town hall of Siena looking very much as it did in the 14th century.
In fact, the city architect told me
that the population is two less than it was in the 13th century.
Historians sometimes maintain
that civilisation began in these Italian republics of the 14th century.
Civilisation, as l understand it can be created in a monastery or a' court
just as well as in a city - perhaps rather better.
All the same, the social and economic system that grew up in the 13th century had a point.
It was a manageable human unit.
As opposed to the system - if you can call it a system - of chivalry,
it was realistic.
And the proof is that it has survived.
Of course, Siena remained to some extent medieval, compared with Florence.
There industrial and banking conditions in the time of Dante
were surprising similar to those that exist in Lombard Street today.
Except that double entry wasn't invented till the 14th century, in Genoa, l believe.
Of course, the Italian republics weren't in the least democratic.
As those pre-Marxist innocents, the liberal historians, used to think they were.
Exploitation was in the hands of a few powerful families,
who managed to operate within the framework of a guild system
in which the workers had no say at all.
The Italian merchant of the 14th century isn't a sympathetic figure.
Less so, really, than that old reprobate Jean de Berry.
The stories of Florentine thrift are like the stories that Jews used to tell about each other.
But - and here the parallel with Lombard Street is not so close -
the new merchant classes as patrons of the art of their own time,
were at least as intelligent as the aristocracy.
And just as their economic system was capable of expansion, it has lasted till today,
so the painting they commissioned had a kind of solid reality
that was to be the dominant aim of art up to the time of Cézanne.
The first, and in some ways the greatest, painter of this new reality was Giotto.
This is one of Giotto's frescos in the Arena Chapel in Padua.
As l look at it l realise that to anyone whose eye has been conditioned by realism
as it has existed in European art from the Renaissance to the Cubists
this will not look very realistic.
Perhaps no more so than Gothic tapestry.
But this much is clear.
Instead of a decorative jumble, it concentrates on a few simple, solid-looking forms
arranged in space.
Giotto had, more than any artist before him, the ability to make his figures look solid.
He manages to simplify them into large, comprehensible, apprehensible shapes,
and it gives one a profound satisfaction
to feel that one can grasp his figures so completely.
He needs to make his figures more vividly credible
because he wishes us to feel more intensely the human drama in which they are involved.
Once we have learnt Giotto's language
we can recognise him as one of the greatest masters of painted drama that has ever lived.
How did Giotto evolve this very personal and original style?
When he was a young man - he was born in Tuscany in about 1265 -
Florentine painting was really only a less polished form of Byzantine painting.
It was flat, flowing, linear,
based on traditional concepts, which had changed very little for 500 years.
For Giotto to break away from it and evolve this solid space-conscious style
was one of those feats of original creation
that have occurred only two or three times in the history of art.
When such drastic changes do take place one can usually find certain points of departure -
models, predecessors...
But not with Giotto.
We know absolutely nothing about him till the year 1305
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.
It was commissioned by a moneylender named Enrico Scrovegni,
whose father had actually been in prison for usury,
that is to say, for charging an extortionate rate of interest
because moderate rates of interest were unofficially countenanced.
It's one of the first instances of the new rich
commissioning works of art as a kind of atonement.
A practice that has benefited the world almost as much as vanity and self-indulgence.
Here he is. Perhaps the earliest painted portrait that is obviously a genuine likeness,
presenting a model of his chapel to three angels,
and for that reason placed among the blessed in the Last Judgement.
Giotto is the supreme dramatist of human life in all its diversity.
He can depict a scene like this, the marriage at Cana,
which is almost Chaucerian.
(MUSIC) Medieval music
Behind the pots stands the pot-bellied host
who tastes with astonishment the wine that has been created out of water.
But Giotto is greatest when the human drama is greatest.
As in this scene of the betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane.
What a marvellous invention - that Judas should put his cloak round our Lord.
Everything - heads, gestures, the explosive pattern of the spears
is a crescendo of feeling, tension and violence.
But he can also achieve the lyrical beauty of the Virgin's wedding procession.
(MUSIC) Early Medieval music
The tenderness of the noli me tangere
with its marvellously subtle relationship between the figures.
And finally, the lamentation over Christ's dead body.
It's a masterpiece of pictorial construction,
a sort of model for high academic painting for 500 years.
But this technical aspect is soon forgotten.
Look at the gestures and the heads of the mourning women.
They need no words from me.
Although l think that Giotto was one of the supreme painters of the world,
he has equals.
But in the year of his birth and in the same district
was born a man who is unequalled.
The greatest philosophical poet that has ever lived: Dante.
Since they were contemporaries and compatriots,
one feels that it should be possible to illustrate Dante by Giotto.
They seem to have known each other and Giotto may have painted Dante's portrait.
In fact, their imaginations moved on very different planes.
Giotto was, above all, interested in humanity.
He sympathised with human beings,
and his figures, by their very solidity, remain on Earth.
Of course, there is humanity in Dante.
He lived in the thick of Florentine politics.
All the characters he had pitied or hated or admired appear in his poem,
not only as representatives of good and evil, but with the vividness of real people.
But Giotto lacked Dante's philosophic power and moral indignation.
That heroic contempt for baseness,
that was to come again in Michelangelo.
Above all, that vision of a heavenly order
and the intellectual power to make it comprehensible.
In a way, the poet and the painter stand at the junction of two worlds.
Giotto belonged to the new world of solid realities.
The world created by the bankers and merchants for whom he worked.
Dante - as has often been observed - belonged to the earlier Gothic world,
to the world of St Thomas Aquinas and the great cathedrals.
One isn't as close to Dante in the Arena Chapel
as one is here in the Romanesque Baptistry at Pisa.
The pulpit by Nicola Pisano was executed five years before Dante was born,
yet it has all his sense of horror,
even some of the elements of the grotesque that come into The Inferno.
Combined with much that is derived from antiquity.
It has the same keen eye for truthful details.
Although, of course, we can no longer believe in these rather ridiculous monsters.
Nicola's son Giovanni about fifteen years older than Dante and Giotto,
and deeply influenced by the Gothic art of the North
seems to me perfectly to reflect the Dantesque spirit.
Giovanni Pisano was one of the great tragic dramatists of sculpture.
The pulpits he carved at Pisa and nearby Pistoia
depict a terrible world.
Here is the grief-filled suffering of the Massacre of the Innocents.
(MUSIC) Worldes Blis
But Giovanni Pisano's feeling of tragic indignation
was only one side of Dante.
In the second half of his great poem,
from the middle of the Purgatorio onwards,
there are moments of disembodied bliss to which no artist of the time did justice.
Nor were the painters of the 14th century ready to reflect Dante's feeling for light.
Like all the heroes of this series
Dante thought of light as the symbol of civilised life.
And in his poem he describes accurately and economically
light in all its varying effects.
The light of dawn, light on the sea,
light on leaves in spring...
But all these beautiful descriptions, which are the part of Dante that we like best,
are only similes.
They're introduced by the words "as when".
They're intended to illustrate and make comprehensible to our Earthbound senses
the vision of divine order and heavenly beauty.
(MUSIC) Early Medieval music