The Collected Prose, page 6
Doric art was linked more profoundly and strongly with religion than later architectural orders of Antiquity. It was visible even in its materials. The marble of the Ionian and Corinthian styles lent chill, stiffness, and pomp: the graceful gods lost their power. It was significant whether the offering to Athena was made in gold and ivory or in rough stone. For the Dorians this goddess was a nomadic princess, a blue-eyed girl with the muscles of an ephebe who could tame wild horses. Dionysus, once the patron of dark forces and orgies, changed into a jovial, bearded drunkard.
To reconstruct a Doric temple fully one should paint it in bright reds, blues, and ochre. The most ruthless restorer would wince at such an ordeal. We wish to see the Greeks washed by the rains, white, devoid of passion and cruelty.
For a complete reconstruction one must also recreate what went on in front of the temple. What is a temple without ritual? The skin torn off a snake, the mere surface of the mystery.
At dawn, when the deities of the heavens were worshipped, or at sunset or nighttime, when subterranean powers were the object of the cult, a procession headed by a priest approached the altar in front of the temple
“…Nestor, the aged lord of chariots9, washed his hands, handed out barley, and praying long to Athene, cut the hair from an animal’s head and threw it in the fire. Then the others at prayer threw the crushed barley grains before them. Suddenly the son of Nestor, the manly Thrasymedes, stepped forward and struck a blow; the axe cut the sinews of the neck and stunned the heifer. At this the daughters and sons sang out…
“Then they raised the animal’s head and held it far from the earth with its wide roads. Prince Peisistratus cut the throat; red blood gushed out, and the breath flew from the bones.”
So it was. Now excursions linger and a guide’s passionless voice gives the temple’s dimensions with an accountant’s accuracy, providing the number of missing columns as if to apologize for the ruin. He points toward the altar, but this forsaken stone stirs no emotions. If the tourists had any imagination, instead of clicking their Kodaks, they would bring an ox and slaughter it in front of the altar.
A brief bus trip gives absolutely no sense of what a Greek temple is. One must spend at least a whole day in the ruins to understand the life of stones in the sun. They change with the time of day and year. In the morning the Paestum limestone is gray, at noon—honey, with the sunset—scarlet. I touch it and feel the warmth of human flesh. Green lizards run across it like shivers.
The day declines. The sky is bronze. The golden chariot of Helios rolls down to the sea. At this hour, Homer says, “all paths darken.” In front of Hera’s temple the roses Virgil sang of—Biferi rosaria Paesti—decant10 their fragrance. The columns drink the sunset’s living fire. Soon they will stand in the darkening air like a charred forest.
ARLES
for Mateusz
THOUSANDS OF COLORFUL lanterns hanging over the streets cast a clownish hue on the faces of the people milling around. The open doors and windows are full of music. The squares spin like carousels. As if you have stepped into the middle of a huge feast. That is how Arles seemed to me on the night I arrived.
I had rented a room at the top of a hotel which faced the Musée Réattu in a street narrow and deep as a well. I could not sleep. It wasn’t the voices, but rather the town’s penetrating vibration.
I walked the boulevards towards the Rhône. “Oh, quick river, issuing from the Alps, rolling the nights and days alongside you, my desires are where nature leads you, where love leads me,” sang Petrarch. The Rhône is in fact powerful, dark and heavy like a buffalo. A bright Provençal night, cool, though with a hidden heat at its apex.
I return to the town center following traces of voices and music. How to describe a town that is not of stone but of flesh? It has a warm, moist skin and the pulse of a snared animal.
I drink Côte du Rhône at the Café de l’Alcazar. Only the color reproduction above the bar reminds me, that this was the subject of Van Gogh’s famous Le café de nuit and that he himself lived here in 1888, having arrived in Provence to capture a blue deeper than the sky and a yellow more dazzling than the sun. Do they remember him here? Is there anyone alive who saw him in the flesh?
The bartender informs me reluctantly that sure, there is one pauvre vieillard who can tell you something about Van Gogh. But he is not here at the moment; he usually comes in the morning and likes American cigarettes.
So I started my sojourn not with the Greeks and Romans, but with the fin de siècle.
The following day I was shown the old man at the Café de l’Alcazar. He was dozing over a glass of wine, propped on a cane, his chin resting on his clasped hands.
“They tell me you knew Van Gogh.”
“I did. Who are you? A student, a journalist?”
“A student.”
I see that I have blundered. The old man closes his eyes and loses interest. So I reach for the American cigarettes. The bait works. The man inhales with relish, empties his glass and looks at me attentively.
“You are interested in Van Gogh?”
“Very much.”
“Why?”
“He was a great painter.”
“So they say. I haven’t seen any of his pictures.”
His bony finger taps the empty glass. I fill it obediently.
“Well then. Van Gogh. He is dead.”
“But you knew him.”
“No one knew him. He lived alone, like a dog. People were afraid of him.”
“Why?”
“He ran around the fields with these huge canvases. Boys used to throw stones at him. I didn’t. I was too small. Three or four.”
“So you didn’t like him?”
“He was very funny. His hair was like a carrot.”
The old man suddenly bursts out laughing. He laughs long, heartily and with satisfaction.
“He was a very funny man. Il était drôle. His hair was like a carrot. I remember it well. You could see it a long way off.”
That is more or less the sum of the little man’s memories of the prophet.
I dined in a small restaurant off the Place de la République. The Provençal kitchen, which I got to know on a limited scale and in third-rate places, is magnificent. First comes a tin tray divided into compartments with hors d’oeuvres: green and black olives, pickled onions, endives, and spicy potatoes. Then a delicious fish soup, cousin of the queen of soups—the bouillabaisse of Marseilles, in simple words, a fish bouillon enhanced with garlic and spices. Sirloin fillet baked in pepper. Rice from the neighboring Carmargue. Wine and cheese.
More reproductions of Van Goghs on the wall: Le Pont-levis, Les oliviers, Le facteur Roulin. “A good fellow,” wrote the painter, “since he refused payment, we ate and drank together, which was more expensive…But that was nothing since he posed very well.”
The owner did not know the master, but he remembers a family story often told by his mother. One afternoon this crazy painter rushed into their vineyard shouting for them to buy a painting. They barely managed to shove him out of the gate. “He wanted only fifty francs,” the patron concludes with a bottomless melancholy.
During his stay in Arles and nearby St Rémy, Van Gogh completed hundreds of paintings and drawings. None remain in the city, whose citizens petitioned the authorities to place him in an asylum. The document was published in the local newspaper and may be seen in the Arlaten Museum, to the eternal disgrace of its authors. The grandsons would easily excuse their grandfathers’ cruelty, but not the fact that they let slip through their fingers the fortune now represented by the slightest sketch signed “Vincent.”
Time to start my more methodical sightseeing.
The fertile Rhône valley has attracted colonizers from time immemorial. The first to come were the Greeks, who founded Marseilles in the sixth century B.C.E. From its strategic and mercantile site in the Rhône delta, Arles began as a small trading post within that powerful Greek colony. Not surprisingly, few remains have survived.
The real growth of Arles and of the whole of Provence came in Roman times. The town was called Arelate and was planned with real Roman panache and urbanist talent. Its rapid development began when Marseilles, allied with Pompey, rebelled against Julius Caesar. The city was stormed in 49 B.C. with the aid of war ships built in the shipyards of Arelate.
New colonists came to Arles: the poor citizens of Latium and Campania, and the veterans of the VI Legion1. Hence the official, rather long name of the city: Colonia Julia Arelatensium Sextanorum. Perfect roads, mighty aqueducts, and bridges bound the conquered land into one administrative and political organism. After the cruelties of the conquest, the bounty of a new civilization descended upon Provence.
The cult of the good emperor Augustus is still alive on the banks of the Rhône, and people speak of him with as much affection as my Galician grandparents used to speak of Franz Joseph. The emperor’s beautiful head in the Arles collection of stone carvings is full of energy and gentleness. This sculpted portrait presents the young ruler with a beard worn like a black mourning band, commemorating his adopted father, the divine Julius.
The pagan sculpture collection is modest. It holds no masterpieces, nor even outstanding works like the Venus of Arles, a copy of Praxiteles’ statue found among the ruins of a theater in the middle of the seventeenth century and offered to Louis XIV. Some heads, sarcophagi, fragments of bas-reliefs, two charming dancers in flowing robes in which the wind has petrified. The best sculptures still harbor the Hellenic tradition, but many bear the stamp of a somewhat provincial, lumpish Gallo-Roman craft. Here one has the opportunity—not available in collections of masterpieces—of observing mediocre art, that semi-artistic handicraft, which, though void of genius, is solid and centuries later will flower as Romanesque sculpture.
The clock strikes noon. The keeper closes the lapidarium, comes up to me, and in a conspirational whisper offers to show me something that is not yet available to the public, but should impress me more than all the sculptures on display. I expect a newly-discovered Venus. We descend the winding stairs to the cellars. The torch lights up a wide vaulted stone corridor split by a low portico. It looks like a casemate or an entrance to an underground temple.
In fact it is a Roman food-store: Arles was both a mercantile and a military settlement. The underground storage-room is impressive. To dazzle me further, the keeper throws in some information about the disposition of particular products. “Here, where it was dry, they kept grain. In the middle, where the temperature was stable, casks of wine. Cheese ripened down there.” I don’t know how accurate this information is, but this simple man’s enthusiasm for Roman housekeeping is so great that I agree without protest. Now I know what excites the imagination of the descendants of the Gallic tribes. Not triumphal arches or emperors’ heads but aqueducts and granaries.
“And don’t forget to visit Barbegal2,” says the keeper in parting. “It’s a few steps from the town. Within walking distance.”
On a slope—what appear to be the remains of huge steps leading toward a non-existent temple of giants. Yet there is nothing sacred in the ruins, just an ingenius watermill with eight levels with water forming an artificial waterfall which moved the paddle wheels. In spite of its ordinary function, the structure is considered one of the most interesting artifacts of Roman stone architecture.
The most monumental memento left by the Romans is the amphitheater.
It was built on a hill. Two floors of mighty arches with Doric pilasters at the bottom and Corinthian columns at the top. A bare construction of Cyclopean boulders. No trace of “lightness and charm,” as a naive admirer of the Romans wrote. A place just right for gladiators and amateurs of strong emotions.
I am shown around by an invalid who lost a leg in the First World War. It is late autumn and tourists are scarce. He has just closed his ticket office and wants to chat with someone.
“The old days were better. I lost my leg on the fields of Champagne, and what’s my compensation? A miserable job. Under the Romans I would have had a house of my own, and a vineyard, a piece of land, and free tickets to the circus.”
“But in that circus people were torn apart by wild animals.” I try to spoil his pastoral image.
“Maybe somewhere else, but not in Arles. All sorts of professors came here and didn’t find a single human bone. Not one.”
All right, all right then. Sleep quietly, old veteran, who would so lightheartedly trade Foch3 for Julius Caesar and de Gaulle for Augustus. I did not expect that the Romans, who for me are “flat like a flower in a book,” could still command such vivid human emotions.
The amphitheater’s walls were so thick that during the barbarian raids the construction was turned into a fortress. Inside, streets were laid, with a church and some two hundred houses. This strange hybrid remained till the seventeenth century. Now the houses have vanished without a trace; the immense oval of the arena is covered with yellow sand. On this sand, in dazzling sunlight, I saw a bullfight. The famous Antonio Ordofiez “worked” with the bull in a cowardly and graceless manner. Thirty thousand spectators, that incorruptible judge of caesars and games, howled long, loudly, and with contempt.
The site of the muses, the nearby ancient theater is smaller, more private and “Greek.” The theater is really a pitiful ruin, with two protruding Corinthian columns, described by poets as embodying an ineffable purity and beauty.
Our forefathers were far less inclined than we to set up museums. They did not change old objects into exhibits enclosed in glass cases. They used them for new constructions, literally re-embodying the past in the present. That’s why a visit to a city like Arles, where epochs and stones intermingle, is more instructive than the cold didacticism of a systematized collection. Nothing can tell us more about the duration of human artifacts and the dialogue of civilizations than the sudden encounter with a Renaissance house, unacknowledged by guide-books, built on Roman foundations with a Romanesque sculpture over its portal.
For centuries the ancient theater was treated nonchalantly and turned into a quarry of ready-made sculptural fragments. It was even a battlefield for the old and new creeds; a fanatical deacon brought a crowd of believers to destroy this testimony of ancient beauty.
In Arles, the period of Roman glory barely lasted three centuries. In A.D. 308 Constantine the Great arrived with his court. What an ennoblement of the ancient Greek trading-post! A vast palace was built for the emperor, of which only the baths have survived. They were supplied with water from mountain springs seventy kilometers from the town.
A century later Emperor Honorius4 describes Arles as follows:
“This place is so conveniently situated, its trade is so animated, and the travelers who stop here so numerous, that it is easier to exchange products from all parts of the world here than anywhere else. Whatever the opulent East has to offer, or fragrant Arabia, Assyria or Africa, inviting Spain or fertile Gaul, you can find here in abundance, as if they were local products.”
Less than a century later, the Visigoths had conquered Arles and Marseilles.
Yet it was not a sudden descent into night, at least not for Arles, which remained a stronghold of the non-existent empire. The Roman walls and columns withstood the pressure of time. There were games held in the circus and performances in the theater up to Merovingian times. Unstopped by rubble, the fountain still trickled in the Forum. The apogee of barbarism came in the seventh and eighth centuries.
The power of the Roman provincial governors was taken over by the bishops and archbishops (a natural rather than a legal succession) called defensores civitatis by grateful citizens. One should not be surprised that in these times of turmoil, art ceased to be of first importance. Roman temples simply became the sanctuaries of a new creed. The Mother of Christ moved into Diana’s house.
Nevertheless, objects of considerable aesthetic value have survived from the period of invasions. They possess a certain symbolic character: they are the tombs.
They occupy a huge necropolis called Alyscamps (a corruption of elissi campi—Elysian Fields) reaching back to ancient times, an immense salon of death where the deceased held their rendez-vous. The world renown of this legendary place—it was claimed that Roland and the twelve peers of Roncevaux were buried there—gave rise to a rather macabre custom. The coffins of those who declared a wish to be buried in Alyscamps were entrusted to the waves of the Rhône. A special undertakers’ guild fished them out when they reached Arles, charging the so-called droit de mortellage for their services.
From the time of the Renaissance, Alyscamps was a real mine for lovers of bas-reliefs which were frequently stolen in order to decorate palaces and temple portals. Charles IX, the rapacious ruler, ordered a barge to be loaded with such a quantity of these priceless treasures that it sank to the bottom of the Rhône near Pont Saint-Esprit.
What remained forms part of the collection of Christian art displayed in an old church. The simplicity and beauty of the old sculptures contrasts unpleasantly with the bombastic Jesuit baroque of the interior.
Were it not for the subjects taken from the Old and New Testament and the Christian symbols, one could think that they were bas-reliefs from the late Roman era. The Crossing of the Red Sea (now in the cathedral) could easily be placed on a triumphal arch praising the heroism of Roman legions. The ancient tradition is vital until the end of the fifth century. It is then replaced by geometric ornaments, stylized leaves. Art begins anew with an alphabet of forms.
Only a small part of the immense field of the dead that was once Alyscamps has survived. Twelve funeral shrines have turned into rubble. The remains of the stone sepulchres seem to float along an avenue lined with old poplars toward the church of Saint-Honorat, built in Provençal style with a dome and octagonal spire and openwork windows in which fire once blazed. The dead steered toward its radiance like sailors toward a lighthouse.
