Drinking with Suetonius

I was delighted recently to learn of the twelve silver chalices, commemorating the first twelve Roman emperors, that art historians now call the Aldobrandini Tazze. Their sixteenth-century designer surmounted each tazza with a figurine of the appropriate ruler, and decorated each saucer with four intricate scenes from that monarch's life, as recounted in Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars. Suetonius, as fans of I, Claudius know, wrote formulaic biographies of the Roman imperators from Julius Caesar to Domitian, describing each man's virtues and vices. His early readers and imitators tended more to appreciate the praises Suetonius sang than the salacious details he dished. The ninth-century German monk Einhard used the more high-minded parts of the "Life of Augustus" as the model for his Life of Charlemagne, and Renaissance readers like Petrarch preferred to read S's biographies as models of noble behavior rather than gossipy celebrity bios. 

The silversmith who designed the tazze also preferred the exalted to the depraved. The four scenes on the Tiberius tazza, for example, included T's mother Livia rescuing him from a forest fire and the older Tiberius paying homage to Augustus after a military triumph. None of Tiberius's notorious dalliances with underage boys make an appearance. Nor do the more famous episodes from its subject's life show up on the Caligula tazza, which focuses on that emperor's generosity rather than his alleged sexual affairs with his sisters, his appointment of his horse to the Senate, or his cross-dressing dance homage to the goddess Dawn. The art historian Julia Siemon argues that the tazze's designer wanted them to exalt the Roman emperors in order to pay homage to their presumptive descendants, the Habsburgs. On a continent wracked with religious warfare, the unity and orderliness of the Roman Empire, and the promise of another universal empire claiming descent from Caesar and Charlemagne, must have had great appeal. In our more democratic and prosperous age, we prefer instead to see the emperors' feet of clay, and compare their personal excesses and foibles with our own bourgeois restraint.

A Bright and Bounded World: Exploring a Rachel Ruysch Still Life

The painting to the left bears the distinctive style of one of Europe’s most accomplished still-life artists, Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750). The daughter of a Dutch naturalist, Ruysch studied with the professional artist Wilhelm van Aelst and became one of the few prominent female painters of the eighteenth century. She specialized in paintings of flowers, which her Dutch patrons valued for their beauty and as a symbol of gentility. Holland had by the sixteenth century developed a market in medicinal and aromatic blooms, and during the Netherlands’ age of maritime ascendancy, florists introduced rare and attractive foreign species (like the tulip) into the nation's market in decorative luxuries.

Flowers are ephemeral, but paintings can endure much longer. Ruysch completed at least 250 still lifes during her sixty-year career, and her canvasses now grace museums and collections throughout Europe. The 1706 painting included here, from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, shows both the artist’s technical virtuosity and her talent for spontaneity - for making her arrangements appear natural. The white carnations draw the viewer’s eye to the painting’s center, whence it can wander to the peripheries; the variegated tulips remind us of her homeland’s passion for that strain of flower; the violet morning glories provide chromatic contrast to the red peonies; and the grapes and pale peaches near the bottom of the painting offer variety of type and texture. The flowers’ stems bend and intertwine, providing dynamism to the composition, while some decline as though starting to wilt.

At the bottom of the picture, atop the table on which the bouquet’s vase sits, an inquisitive snail and a yellow-winged moth approach the fruit and flowers. Another, larger moth with black-speckled wings perches on one of the lower stems. Insects and snails feed on plants, and their presence suggests that the bouquet will not long go unmolested. Death always creeps on the edges of life, and in this painting the snail and moths place a temporal boundary around the beauty of the flowers, which will be eaten if they do not decay first. Ruysch didn’t just include these little predators as symbols of vanitas, however. She developed an interest in entomology early in her career, and included insects in many of her paintings. Her buggy subjects she draws with as much grace and precision as the other parts of the bouquet, indicating that in the little worlds she renders on canvas, Ruysch intends to make mortality just as attractive as beauty.    

(My thanks to Dr. Susan Livingston for her essential advice on this post.)  

(Above painting via the Web Gallery of Art, wga.hu.)

Mandatory Fun: Saint Petersburg and Its Despot

In opposing the “Great Man Theory” of historical causation, Leo Tolstoy also challenged one of the most obvious features of his own nation’s history: the prominent role played by autocratic, strong-willed monarchs in shaping Russia’s politics and institutions. One thinks of Catherine II, enlightened despot with countless paramours; Alexander I, statesman-mystic and defier of Napoleon; Alexander II, liberator and reformer; and Nicholas II, outstanding both in weakness and misfortune - not to mention the communist tsars of the twentieth century, Lenin and Stalin. Vladimir Putin, with his show-biz antics, dictatorial governing style and foreign adventures, follows the example of the Romanovs and the Bolshevik autocrats. As yet, though, he has not attempted to secure his fame by building a permanent monument in the form chosen by many of his predecessors: a city bearing his own name. Putin has not, in short, emulated the most outsized of Russian monarchs, Peter I, founder of Saint Petersburg.

Peter (1672-1725) identified more with western Europe than with his homeland. As tsar he sought to remake Russia into a Western state and society. There were limits to how far anyone, even an autocrat, could transform Russia’s vast peasantry, its ancient Church, or its social institutions. Peter could and did impose changes on the nation’s aristocracy (e.g. cutting off their beards) and its capital city. Rather than rebuild Moscow, the Romanov tsar decided to build a new capital, a city-sized model of the Russia he wanted to inhabit. Saint Petersburg, whose construction began in the spring of 1703, quickly grew into a center of power, commerce, and refinement. Peter invited French and Italian architects to design his city’s broad boulevards and cascading fountains. He encouraged foreign ships to call by offering favorable trading terms and bounties. Foreigners the tsar had to cajole and entice, but Russians he could simply command. Peter ordered a thousand noble families to build residences in Saint Petersburg, and directed 2,500 artisans and merchants to join them. In 1710 he moved the royal court there as well. Saint Petersburg remained Russia’s capital until the Revolution, and one of its largest cities thereafter.

Peter’s city combined grandeur with cruelty, incompetence, and farce. The tsar conscripted several hundred thousand peasant laborers to build his capital, but did not make adequate plans to feed or house them. Exposure, illness, and overwork killed workers by the thousands; 30,000 left their bones beside the Neva River. Russian nobles’ need to build new homes in the city, meanwhile, caused them to build in haste. As one historian observed “their new palaces were crumbling before they were completed,” their walls sagging and sinking into the marshy ground (Blanning, 231). Once the aristocrats arrived in Petersburg, Tsar Peter’s determination to turn the city into a center of culture caused him to place additional, absurd burdens on them. He ordered the resident nobles to learn yachting, organized mandatory sailing reviews and regattas, and obliged the high-born to attend a long series of balls and soirees - and, presumably, to pretend they were having a wonderful time. Enforced gaiety, “mandatory fun” as Weird Al calls it, signals quite clearly that one is living under a despot. In his demand that his aristos not only move to Saint Petersburg but publicly pretend they were happy, Peter resembled (to me at least) no-one so much as Ming the Merciless, villain of the film Flash Gordon (1980), who on the occasion of his wedding ordered “All will make merry on pain of death.” However romantic a monarchy seems in retrospect, actually living in one must have resembled life in Pyongyang more than Camelot.* 

Sources: Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory (Penguin, 2007), 231, 238; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, The Age of Federalism (Oxford UP, 1993), 185-186. 


*As Charles Stross has pointed out several times.

(Image above: The Palace Embankment from the Peter and Paul Palace, by Fyodor Alekseev)

Everyone Wants to Be a Wild Man

The April issue of Archaeology Magazine features an artifact, a gold spoon finial from late medieval Europe, crafted into the form of a bearded, club-wielding humanoid of doubtful sanity. The editor identifies his visage as that of the "Wild Man," a common motif in European art and ceremonial from the twelfth century to the fifteenth. Scholar Ronald Hutton notes that the Wild Man evoked earlier pagan deities and at the same time warned Christian Europeans of the chaos that lurked at the edge of their civilization. We might add Robert Berkhofer's observation (in The White Man's Indian [1978]) that the Wild Man heavily influenced Europeans' perception of Native Americans. Early modern Europeans sometimes assumed that Indians, like Wild Men, lived on raw meat or human flesh, and referred to both groups as "woods-dwellers" or "silvani" - in English, "salvages." 

What interested me most about the article was the obvious ambivalence Europeans displayed toward Wild Men. Commoners and elites feared these mythical figures but also emulated them, the latter by including them in military heraldry and by dressing as Wild Men for pageants. The image, like that of Native Americans in later centuries, suggested strength, physical courage, and a carnivalesque suspension of social rules. (We may note that the same elites who dressed as Wild Men in the fourteenth century also dressed as Brazilian Indians in the sixteenth.) The Wild Man thus served as a precursor to the early-modern trope of the "noble savage," and a bridge between that era and the pre-Christian Europeans whom Tacitus and his Classical contemporaries admired.

The Age of Foundlings

On a recent trip to England, Your Humble Narrator managed a visit to the Foundling Museum, recommended to him several years ago by veteran travelers Theda Perdue and Michael Green. The museum stands on the site of London's first home for orphaned and fostered children, which philanthropist Thomas Coram founded in 1739, and which over the next two centuries housed over 25,000 boys and girls. Its exhibits include a history of the Foundling Hospital, with displays of inmates' clothing and beds and photos of foundlings who “graduated” in the twentieth century. One case contained a unique selection of artifacts: “tokens” left by children's parents to identify them if they wanted to redeem their offspring. These consisted of commemorative medals, passes to locales like Vauxhall Gardens, coins (sometimes clipped or punched), padlocks, penknife handles, and scraps of cloth. All silently testified to the ragged circumstances that had obliged mothers and fathers to abandon their children.

Other galleries tend toward opulence, rather than pathos. A sitting room, decorated in rococo style, pays tribute to the institution's wealthier patrons. A display room celebrates the life and work of composer George Handel, who helped finance the Foundling Hospital. A selection of paintings and prints by William Hogarth (another patron), including the original version of “March of the Guards to Finchley,” adorns another hall. Taken as a whole, the museum offers a cross-sectional view of London society in the eighteenth century: the refinement available to the wealthy, the satirical worldliness of a professional middle-class artist like Hogarth, and the wretchedness of the impoverished majority, for whom even a spartan life in a charity hospital seemed an improvement.

1592 and All That

By 1592, a century after Columbus’s first voyage and nine decades after his death, Spain had created an empire as vast and ruthless as the Mongols.’ Spanish officials and soldiers ruled much of the Western Hemisphere, from Florida to Peru, and Spain’s banners flew over much of western Europe as well. By then, too, Spain’s imperium had begun to suffer from imperial overstretch: King Felipe II’s finances were deteriorating, his New World subjects dying en masse from smallpox and enslavement, and Dutch rebels and English heretics preyed on his European provinces and American treasure ships. It was in this context that the engraver Theodore de Bry published one of the more influential visual representations of Columbus’ “discovery.”

De Bry (1528-1598) made the picture for a series of illustrated volumes on the European voyages of discovery. It shows a well-dressed Columbus, accompanied by soldiers, encountering a party of Indians, who present him with gifts of jewelry. To one side several men erect a cross, legitimizing the Spanish conquest, while in the background other Indians flee from other disembarking explorers.

I learned of this engraving from a recent article by Michiel van Groesen, who notes that De Bry’s engraving established an iconic image of Columbus’s landing that recurred in European illustrations throughout the eighteenth century. Van Groesen suggests that De Bry wanted an illustration that appealed to Europeans’ superiority complex, emphasizing their material culture (clothes, weapons, ships) as well as their more confident bearing and Christian faith. At the same time, De Bry had a less-than-favorable view of the Spanish, having been driven from his native Liege for practicing a faith (Calvinism) that Spain considered heretical. Hence, the picture contains a few subversive elements: some of the Indians are clearly frightened by the intruders, and their offering of gold reminds viewers of Spain’s greed. Since De Bry was publishing his books for Europeans of all confessions and nations (as long as they could read Latin), he didn’t want to alienate Spanish or Catholic readers, but there is at least a whiff of the “Black Legend”* in this ostensibly celebratory engraving. 

* Introduced by the reformed encomendero and slave-owner Bartolome de Las Casas, whose accounts of Spanish cruelty in the Caribbean De Bry covered and illustrated in his series.

What I Learned at the Leiden AIW

Since the 1980s a consortium of European scholars has been running an annual conference on American Indian Studies, and your Humble Narrator was fortunate enough to attend the thirty-fifth meeting thereof, held last month in Leiden, Netherlands. Many Europeans are fascinated with Native Americans, or at least with stereotyped pop-culture versions of them, and Germany has a thriving “Indian hobbyist” culture, whose adherents dress up in Indian costumes and learn “real” Indian crafts and dances. The American Indian Workshop took pains to avoid or to critique this kind of play-acting and stereotyping. The organizers invited numerous Native scholars, like keynote speaker Henrietta Mann (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College), to attend, and made this year's conference themes language and communication. Linguistics is a specialty of the University of Leiden, and language is a key determinant of how people really think and live. Language is also much harder to master than quasi-authentic craft skills, a point made by Avelino Esteban (Universidad Autonomica de Madrid). Esteban gave a presentation on behalf of the Honoxease Project, a group of European scholars trying to help preserve the Cheyenne language, which demonstrated to your narrator that Cheyenne, with its complicated verbs, multiple pitches, and other complexities, is not a language for the faint of heart.

Approximately one hundred people gave presentations at the workshop, and your narrator was only able to attend about 15-20 papers and addresses. From these I learned what I should probably already have known, which is that Native North Americans approach inter-cultural communication with different priorities than whites. Ukjese Van Kampen (Athabascan/Tutchone), whom I first had the pleasure to meet two years ago in Helsinki, noted that one of the most well-known forms of Indian communication, story-telling, can be hard for outsiders to follow because story-tellers use characters that they assume are already familiar to their audience. Judith Burch, curator of a visiting exhibit on Inuit cloth-making, noted that these stories could take the symbolic form of woven patterns and images, also potentially difficult for outsiders to understand. Anne Grob (Univ. of Leipzig), who has studied indigenous peoples in both New Zealand and Montana, observed that while Crows and Maoris are glad to discuss their cultures with outside scholars, those scholars must take the time to build a reciprocal relationship with their informants, and remember that to Native Americans the process of building and maintaining that relationship is more important than publishable results. Nadia Clerici (University of Genoa), in an extensive survey of American tribal websites, argued that modern Indians can and do make an effort to reach out to non-Indians, and that as part of that effort they challenge stereotypes of Indians as militaristic or hyper-spiritual, focusing instead on peace-making, democracy (an important issue for the Iroquois), women's rights, and sovereignty.*

Apropos of challenging stereotypes, several presenters proved that, contrary to what many Europeans and white Americans believe, Native Americans have a well-developed sense of humor. Sonja John (Humboldt University), in a paper on Lakota cartoonist Marty Two Bulls, argued that Indians used humor to critique their own society in a non-confrontational way. Bobby Wilson (Dakota), a member of the comedy group The 1491s, showed in video clips how he and his colleagues use humor to undermine white stereotypes, such as the ultra-spiritual Indians of kitsch artwork and the hyper-masculine Indian men (and uber-feminine Indian women) of romance novels like Lakota Surrender. Susan Livingston (Univ. of Illinois) analyzed the work of the Cree artist Kent Monkman, showing how he used humorous and shocking imagery to “re-appropriate” Indian images from popular artists like George Catlin and Frederic Remington, and to challenge both racial and sexual power dynamics. Audience members at John's, Livington's, and Tria Andrews's panel saw connections between humor and

Two-Spirited-ness - the assumption of a cross-gender identity by

some Native American men and women – insofar as comedians and Two-Spirited people both go “against the grain” of their societies and challenge apparently fixed rules and identities. One of those commenters, Henrietta Mann, pointed out that the Cheyennes regarded humor, like language itself, as sacred, and that clowning and joke-making were culturally similar to the practices of the Cheyenne Contraries, whose elaborate subversion of social norms gave them great prestige.

I should note that the audiences at the panels I attended were much livelier than their counterparts at American conferences; rare was the paper that did not generate at least several questions or comments from the audience. I am not sure of the reason for this, but perhaps it lay in the multi-disciplinary nature of the conference itself, and attendees' assumption that they would necessarily have to reach out to scholars from other nations and disciplines. Perhaps western Europeans are more intellectually assertive than Americans. Or perhaps historians, who dominated the stateside academic conferences I've attended, are just more naturally reticent and passive than cultural-studies scholars, linguists, and anthropologists. I suspect answer #3 is closest to the truth: we historians can be a pretty dreary lot, even when we're liquored up.      

* On the matter of sovereignty, Julie Reed (U. of Tennessee) argued that the post-Removal Cherokees used institutions like prisons, schools, orphanages, insane asylums, and disability pensions to maintain their national sovereignty. If the nineteenth-century Cherokees could punish their own criminals or declare them criminally insane, they wouldn't have to turn them over to white authorities; if they could take care of their own orphans and disabled persons, they could turn away white reformers who wanted to do that job themselves.