A Time of Gifts (21 page)

The hush was broken by a succession of claps from a lagoon. A heron was slowly hoisting itself off the ice; then a spiral of slower wingbeats lifted it to the top of a Lombardy poplar that was dark with a multitude of dishevelled nests. Its mate, looking enormous as it paced a white pool, cumbrously followed it; and a minute later, I could see their beaks projecting side by side. They were the only ones there, wintering it out in the nearly-empty heronry. The other nests would fill up towards the close of the tadpole season.

It was a marvellous place; an unusual place; I couldn't quite make it out—half mere, half frozen jungle. It finished at a bank where a row of poplars was interspersed with aspen and birch and willow among blackberry-thickets and hazel. On the other side of this barrier the sky suddenly widened and a great volume of water was flowing dark and fast. In midstream, cloudy with the hemispherical ghosts of weeping-willows, an island divided the rush of the current. There was an answering line of ice on the other bank, then reeds and woods and a fluctuation of timbered mountain.

This second meeting with the Danube had taken me unawares; I had reached it half a day sooner than I thought! As it streamed
through those wooded and snowbound ranges the river made an overpowering impression of urgency and force.

My map, when I dug it out, said that the mountains opposite were part of the Bohemian Forest. They had followed the north bank ever since the river had entered Austria a mile or two east of Passau, about thirty miles upstream.

* * *

“In cold weather like this,” said the innkeeper of a Gastwirtschaft further down, “I recommend Himbeergeist.” I obeyed and it was a lightning conversion. Spirit of raspberries, or their ghost—this crystalline distillation, twinkling and ice-cold in its misty goblet, looked as though it were homoeopathically in league with the weather. Sipped or swallowed, it went shuddering through its new home and branched out in patterns—or so it seemed after a second glass—like the ice-ferns that covered the window panes, but radiating warmth and happiness instead of cold, and carrying a ghostly message of comfort to the uttermost fimbria. Fierce winters give birth to their antidotes: Kümmel, Vodka, Aquavit, Danziger Goldwasser. Oh for a thimble full of the cold north! Fiery-frosty potions, sequin-flashers, rife with spangles to spark fuses in the bloodstream, revive fainting limbs, and send travellers rocketing on through snow and ice. White fire, red cheek, heat me and speed me. This discovery cast a glow over the approach of Linz. A few miles on, round a loop of river, the city appeared. It was a vision of domes and belfries gathered under a stern fortress and linked by bridges to a smaller town at the foot of a mountain on the other bank.

* * *

When I got to the fine sweeping piazza in the middle of the city I chose a promising-looking coffee house, kicked off the snow, went in and ordered two boiled eggs.
Eier im Glas!
It was my latest passion. The delight of tapping the eggs all over with a bone spoon
before removing the fragmented shell and sliding the fragile contents into a tumbler intact, then a slice of butter...travellers' joys. I had chosen more luckily than I knew; for as well as staying me with eggs, the young proprietor and his wife put me up for two nights in their flat over the shop. Better still, next day being Sunday, they lent me some boots and took me ski-ing. The whole of Linz was picnicking on the Pöstlingsberg—the mountain that rose from the opposite bank—and then swirling down its icy and rutted slopes. Starting without any practice, I was soon battered black and blue, but the sorrows of Salzburg were exorcized.

I hobbled round Linz by twilight. Pargeted façades rose up, painted chocolate, green, purple, cream and blue. They were adorned with medallions in high relief and the stone and plaster scroll-work gave them a feeling of motion and flow. Casemented half-hexagons jutted from the first storeys, and windowed three-quarter-cylinders blunted the corners, both of them soaring to the line of the eaves where they shelved into wasp-waists and re-expanded spherically to the same circumference, forming buoyant cupolas and globes; and domes and pinnacles and obelisks joined these decorative onions along the city's skyline. At ground-level, spiral commemorative columns rose twirling from the flagstones of the piazzas and hoisted radiating, monstrance-like, counter-Reformation bursts of gold spikes in mid-air. Except for the fierce keep on the rock, the entire town was built for pleasure and splendour. Beauty, space and amenity lay all about. In the evening Hans and Frieda, my hosts, took me to a party in an inn and next morning I set off down the Danube.

* * *

But not immediately. On their suggestion, I took a tram a few miles off my track and then a bus, to the Abbey of St. Florian. The great baroque convent of Augustinian Canons stood among low hills, and the branches of the thousands of apple trees all round it were crusted with lichen and bright with rime. The buildings, the
treasures and the marvellous library, all—excepting the pictures—have merged in a universal and coruscating oblivion. Just before leaving, I stood for a moment in front of the twin belfries with a friendly Canon. Following his pointing forefinger, we gazed along a succession of freak gaps in the mountains. As the crow flies, this trough runs south-west for over a hundred and sixty miles, clean across Upper Austria to the northern marches of the Tyrol and Upper Bavaria to a point where the peak of the Zugspitze just discernibly floats, half-ghostly and half-gleaming.

When I turned my back on these ranges, the pictures indoors still crowded my mind. They unloosed vague broodings on how large a part geography and hazard play in one's knowledge and one's ignorance of painting.

* * *

It had struck me in Holland that an average non-expert, gallery-sauntering inhabitant of the British Isles would know the names, and a little of the work, of scores of Dutch, Flemish and Italian painters and of twenty Frenchmen at the very least. Equally certainly, of half a dozen Spaniards: all thanks to geography, religion, the Grand Tour and the vagaries of fashion. But his total—mine, that is—for the entire German-speaking world is three: Holbein; Dürer; and, palely loitering, Cranach. Holbein, because he seems almost English, and Dürer because he is the sort of genius one can't help knowing about, an original and universal phenomenon, well up on the slope leading to the Da Vinci class. Recent visits to a few German galleries, especially in Munich, had now given more substance to Cranach and added Altdorfer and Grünewald to this list.

Though these painters are unlike each other, they do have some important things in common. They all come from southern Germany. They were all born in the last forty years of the fifteenth century. All of them were active in the early decades of the sixteenth, first under the Emperor Maximilian—‘the Last of the Knights,' a belated survivor of the Middle Ages—and then under
his half-Spanish, High Renaissance grandson and successor, Charles V. The whole of German painting seems to crowd into this sixty years' span: a sudden abundance, with nothing but mediaeval workshops to herald it and no real follow-up. It was Germany's moment, brought about by the Renaissance in Italy and by the spread of humanist studies at home and stimulated and tormented by the rise of Protestantism. Luther's active life fits the time-span almost to a second; and all five painters finished on the Protestant side. (Grünewald, the oldest, was deeply troubled and finally reduced to inaction. Holbein, the youngest, took things in his stride. It is hard to think of them as contemporaries but their lives overlapped for forty years.) Two main channels of approach and flight linked south Germany with the outside world. The more natural one followed the Rhine to Flanders and led straight to the studios of Brussels and Bruges and Ghent and Antwerp. The other crossed the Alps through the Brenner Pass and followed the Adige to Verona, where an easy path unwound to Mantua, Padua and Venice. Fewer took the second way but it was the more decisive in the end. It was a fruitful polarity and German painting was spinning, as it were, on a Van der Weyden-Mantegna axis.

As I walked along the Danube, I was traversing, without knowing it, an important minor sub-division of art-history. ‘The Danube School,' an arbitrary term which is often enclosed in inverted commas, covers exactly the period we have been talking about and it embraces the Danube basin from Regensburg to Vienna, taking in Bohemia to the north as far as Prague, and to the south the slopes of the Alps from the Tyrol to Lower Austria. Dürer and Holbein, although they are from the near-Danubian towns of Nuremberg and Augsburg, are not included: the one is too universal, the other, perhaps, too sophisticated or a decade or so too late. Grünewald, geographically, is a fraction too far west and they probably need him for an equally arbitrary Rhenish School. Otherwise, he would fit in admirably. This leaves Cranach and Altdorfer: Danubian stars of the first magnitude among a swarm of lesser-known regional masters.

On the evidence I encountered then, I hated Cranach more with each new picture. Those pale-haired, equivocal minxes, posturing in muslin against the dark, were eerie and uncongenial enough; but, in juxtaposition with the schadenfreude of his martyrdoms, they become deeply sinister; and this thought flowed on directly to the stark detail of the minor masters of the Danube School and perhaps, if one followed it through, to the whole disturbing theme of realism in Germany.

Some of these Danube School paintings are wonderful. Others are either moving or touching or likeable and, to a stranger like me, they had an immediate appeal which had no connection with their technical Renaissance advances, about which I knew nothing. Indeed, the aspect that took my fancy was precisely the mediaeval and the Teutonic spirit that completely changed the Renaissance atmosphere of these pictures: the emerald green of the sward, that is, the sap green of the woods, the dark conifer forests and bosky spurs of Jurassic limestone; the backgrounds full of snowy spikes—distant glimpses, without a doubt, of the Grossglockner, the Reifhorn, the Zugspitze and the Wildspitze. This is the scenery through which the flight into Egypt, the journey of the Magi and the footpaths to Cana and Bethany uncoil! A barn with leaky thatch shelters the Nativity in an Alpine glade. It is among fir-cones and edelweiss and gentians that the Transfigurations, Temptations, Crucifixions and Resurrections take place. The actors in a picture by Wolf Huber are Swabian peasant girls, bewildered gaffers with tangled beards, goodies with dumpling cheeks, crab-apple crones, marvelling ploughboys and puzzled woodmen—a cast of Danube rustics in fact, reinforced, in the wings, by a whole bumpkin throng. The scenes they present have enormous charm. They are not naïve pictures, very far from it; but the balance between rusticity and sophistication is such that to contemplate one of them is to sit on a log under a northern welkin while the incidents of scripture are wonderingly and urgently whispered in one's ear. They affect one like folk-tales in thick Swabian or in Tyrolese or Bavarian or Upper Austrian dialect.
Everything rustic and simple in these pictures is wonderfully real; a convincing earthiness reigns side by side with a most melting piety. But, unless the woods and the undergrowth are goblin country, there is little hint of a spiritual or supernatural feeling in these happenings—except in a different and an adverse sense. For example, in some of these canvasses and panels the laws of gravity seem to exert an unnaturally powerful pull. The angels, unlike their soaring congeners in Italy or Flanders, are poor flyers and ill-equipped for staying up long. The severe Bürgermeister's features of the Holy Child have the ferocity, sometimes, of a snake-strangling infant Hercules. He looks heavier than most mortal babies. Once these symptoms have been observed, everything else begins to go wrong, and in a way that is rather hard to define. Complexions become pasty and suet-like, eyes narrow to knowing and spiteful slits and sparks of madness kindle. The middles of faces are simultaneously flaccid and clenched, as though a bad diet had prematurely rotted away every tooth in their heads, and often, for no clear reason, features start sliding out of shape. Noses fall askew, eyes grow bleary and mouths hang open like those of snowmen or village idiots. There is something enigmatic and unexplained about this spreading collapse. It has no bearing on the holiness or the villainy of the character affected and, clearly, nothing to do with technical capacity. It is as though a toxin of instability and dissolution had crept into the painter's brain.

But, when the theme shifts from pastoral scenes to martyrdoms, their intentions become baffling beyond all conjecture. These pictures are the opposite of their equivalent Byzantine scenes. There the executioner and his victim wear an identical expression of benign aloofness, and the headsman, as an artisan of beatitude flourishing a sword-shaped key to salvation, has an equal claim on our approval. Italians may not attempt this detachment in their martyrdoms, but feelings for sacredness and dignity in the painter's mood engage both the striker and the struck in a ceremonial choreography of grandeur that keeps horror at a distance.

Not here. Meaty, unshaven louts with breastplates crooked,
hanging shirt-tails and codpieces half-undone have just reeled out of the Hofbräuhaus, as it were, reeking of beer and sauerkraut and bent on beating someone insensible. A victim is found and they fall on him. Leering and winking with bared teeth and lolling tongues, they are soon sweating with exertion. These ostlers, butchers, barrel-makers, and apprentices, and Landsknechts in moulting frippery are expert limb-twisters, lamers, stoners, floggers, unsocketers and beheaders to a man, deft with their bright tools and rejoicing at their task. The painters' windows must have looked out on scaffolds where the wheel, the block and the gallows drew frequent crowds. Certain details, which are more rare in other painters, recur with great regularity here. Four burly tormentors, with their crossed staves bending under their weight, force an enormous crown of thorns on their victim's head and a fifth batters it home with a three-legged stool. When another prepares him for scourging, he places a boot for purchase in the small of the victim's back and hauls on the bound wrists till his veins project. The heavy birch-rods need both hands to wield them and broken twigs and smashed scourges soon litter the floor. At first the victim's body looks flea-bitten. It is spotted later on, like an ocelot's, with hundreds of embedded thorns. At last, after a score of indignities, the moribund carcass is nailed in place and hoisted aloft between two pot-bellied felons whose legs are snapped askew like bleeding sticks. The last touch of squalor is the cross itself. Ragged-ended and roughly barked lengths of fir and silver-birch have been so clumsily botched together that they bend under the weight of the victim as though about to collapse, and the special law of gravity, tearing the nail-holes wider, dislocates the fingers and expands them like a spider's legs. Wounds fester, bones break through the flesh and the grey lips, wrinkling concentrically round a tooth-set hole, gape in a cringing spasm of pain. The body, mangled, dishonoured and lynched, twists in
rigor mortis
. It hangs, as Huysmans says in his description of Grünewald's altarpiece in Colmar, ‘comme un bandit, comme un chien.' The wounds turn blue; there is a hint of gangrene and putrefaction in the air.