AND ANOTHER THING
Better the cult of saints than the worship of pop singers and puppets
PAUL JOHNSON
It is an uncovenanted blessing to discover a great painting you did not know existed. It happened to me last week. I am gradually building up a large art library so that, when I am too old to traipse through galleries, I will still be able to enjoy the works of the mas- ters. Browsing in Sheila Ramage's splendid bookshop in Notting Hill, where I pick up many fine volumes, I came across a recent book on Lucas Cranach, the elder. I already have several volumes on him and do not value him much — I find his repetitive nude girls unattractive. But I bought it all the same. Examining it at home, I suddenly came across a superb double-spread colour repro- duction of his 'St Catherine Altarpiece', now in Dresden. It is famous enough and I do not know why I had never taken notice of it before, but the fact is it came as a revelation.
Catherine is one of those historically nebulous martyrs who appealed strongly to imaginative mediaeval minds, and especial- ly to artists. A high-born lady of Alexandria in the fourth century, she declined a mar- riage proposal from the Emperor Maxen- tius, successfully disputed with 50 pagan philosophers on the merits of Christianity, and was condemned to be broken on the wheel. But it was the wheel which was destroyed, by a divine thunderbolt, and many of the pagans were roasted with it. In the end they had to behead the plucky lady. But she was always shown with her wheel, which made her beloved of wheelwrights, carpenters and carters, until in the late 19th century she was turned into a firework, still much relished when I was a boy — you nailed it to a post and it spun riotously.
Cranach treats this fantastic story with a mesmerising mélange of realism and extrav- agance. It is a hymn of joy to the German discovery of Renaissance values, for it dates from 1506, shortly after Diirer brought the good news from Italy. The scene is set under a threatening German sky from which Donner and Blitzen issue. Wittenberg, its intricate roofs shown in brilliant detail, is in the top left-hand corner, and Cranach has painted the portraits of the elite of the city, scholars, professors, theologians and nobility, on the faces of the crowd surround- ing Catherine, who are being converted by her pious eloquence. The great humanist Schwarzenberg falls from his horse. Freder- ick the Wise looks puzzled. Friends and patrons, lovingly depicted, are swept into the catastrophe, their souls saved, their bod- ies about to be destroyed. The colours are light, fresh, dazzling. Flowers, trees, ferns and exotic grasses abound.
In the midst of these convulsions, Catherine, beautiful and undismayed, kneels serene, awaiting her death and sanc- tification with confidence. She is dressed in her best clothes, as a bride of Christ: a superb gown of scarlet velvet with heavy gold trimmings, exquisite Brussels lace on her wrists and shoulders, vast rubies and pearls hanging on her breast, with a gold collar round her shoulders. Her gold-red hair is carefully curled. Her executioner, in the act of drawing his sword, is just as ele- gant. His handsome blond face is that of Pfeffinger, the king's counsellor. He is tall, slim, riotously dressed in the latest fashion, with striped hose in black, red and white, gold silk ribbons tied just below the knee, and a slashed gold silk jacket embroidered with flowers. He is attended by a tall page, just as exquisite, in stripes of white and orange, with an ostrich-feather red velvet hat, carelessly carrying a lance.
The wings of this central panel show us six pretty girls. On the right are St Barbara, St Ursula and St Margaret, in their finest ballgowns, standing beneath Coburg Castle, and attended by a domesticated dragon. On the left are three even more luscious ladies, St Dorothy, St Agnes (nursing her superbly painted lamb) and St Kunigunde. They are being presented with roses and carnations from the basket of a beautiful young prince, John Frederick, the king's son. He wears a scarlet silk gown trimmed with ermine, and has woven a crown of flowers for his tress- es. His hair is blond, his feet are bare, his features angelic, and there are pink corals round his neck. Dorothy has long blonde curls of the kind so fashionable today, Agnes has red ringlets, and Kunigunde modestly keeps her locks under an embroi- dered white and gold bonnet which match- es her sumptuous cloth-of-gold dress.
Impossible not to examine minutely, and relish, every detail of this wonderful trip- tych, from the varieties of finely painted fir trees to the mechanism of the disintegrat- ing wheel, which might have been designed by Leonardo. It is done in oils on smooth limewood and looks as if it were painted yesterday.
I do not pretend to understand this paint- ing, which takes a gruesome subject and turns it into joy and beauty, so that it radi- ates happiness in the power and the glory of Almighty God and His works. We know that all are to be saved in the end, even the horses. Catherine will take a high place in Heaven and will be waiting to greet her assailants, especially the handsome execu- tioner, when they contrive to get there after purgation. Not understanding or knowing, I am at liberty to speculate and to enjoy the colour, grace and fascinating invention.
We lost a lot when the final session of the Council of Trent in 1563 forbade Catholic artists to depict miracles not authorised by the Scriptures (Protestant painters had cen- sored themselves a generation before). Catherine was a poignant loss, especially to young girls and students, who along with wheelmen saw her as a protectress. She was, as it happened, particularly popular in Eng- land. Sixty-two mediaeval churches were dedicated to her here, most of them still standing, and no fewer than 170 mediaeval bells are still engraved with her name. Poems were written in her honour in Anglo- Saxon and Middle English, and a miracle play about her was performed at Dunstable as long ago as the early 12th century. She is the heroine of many mediaeval wall paint- ings, at Winchester Cathedral in the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, at Pickering in York- shire, at Spode in Norfolk, in Eton College Chapel, and 50 other churches. She survives, too, in mediaeval embroideries, ivories and illuminated manuscripts. She was, in short, a great saint, who brought light and love, edifi- cation and pleasure into the lives of many simple people who had not much else to give them comfort.
Catherine's feast day was 25 November. But this was suppressed in 1969 by the killjoy Pope, Paul VI, and Catherine declared a non-person (along with the patron of Eng- land, St George). There are many today who sneer at the saints and martyrs, and deplore their cults as nonsensical and childish. But I say: better by far that people, adults and chil- dren alike, should cultivate the saints, than become zombie-fans of EastEnders and Coro- nation Street, of vile-mannered and dissolute pop singers, Muppets and Daleks and Nin- tendos and all the other grotesque progeny of commercialised mass-entertainment, manip- ulated by cynical opportunists in Hollywood — Time Warner and other behemoths. Give me, instead, the gentle and dazzling lady who inspired Old Cranach to create his master- piece, in the name of goodness and beauty.
Previous page
