Étiquette : printing

 

The Maritime Silk Road, a history of 1001 Cooperations

Identical reconstruction of one of the ships featured on the bas-reliefs of the 8th-century Buddhist temple of Bonobudur in Indonesia.

Today, it’s fashionable to present maritime issues in the context of a moribund British geopolitical ideology that pits countries and peoples against each other. However, as this brief history of the Maritime Silk Road, drawn mainly from a document by the International Tourism Organization, demonstrates, the ocean has above all been a fantastic place for fertile encounters, cultural cross-fertilization and mutually beneficial cooperation.

The ancient Chinese invented many of the things we use today, including paper, matches, wheelbarrows, gunpowder, the noria (water elevator), sluice locks, the sundial, astronomy, porcelain, lacquer paint, the potter’s wheel, fireworks, paper money, the compass, the stern rudder, the tangram, the seismograph, dominoes, skipping rope, kites, the tea ceremony, the folding umbrella, ink, calligraphy, animal harnesses, card games, printing, the abacus, wallpaper, the crossbow, ice cream, and especially silk, which we’ll be talking about here.

Chinese silk.

The Origins of Silk

Before we talk about silk « routes », a few words about the origins of sericulture, i.e. the rearing of silkworms.

As recent archaeological discoveries confirm, silk production is an age-old skill. The presence of the mulberry tree for silkworm rearing was noted in China around the Yellow River by the Yangshao culture during the Middle Neolithic period in China, from 4500 to 3000 BC.

In general, we prefer to retain the legend that silk was discovered around 2500 BC, by the Chinese princess Si Ling-chi, when a cocoon accidentally fell into her tea bowl. When she tried to remove it, she discovered that the cocoon, softened by the hot water, had a delicate, soft and strong thread that could be unwound and assembled. Thus was born the idea of making cloth. The princess then decided to plant a number of white mulberry trees in her garden to raise silkworms.

The silkworm’s reproductive cycle.

The silkworms (or bombyx) and mulberry trees were divinely cared for by the princess (silkworms feed solely on the leaves of white mulberry trees).

Silk production is a time-consuming process that requires careful monitoring. Silk moths lay around 500 eggs during their lives, which last from 4 to 6 days. After the eggs hatch, the baby worms feed on mulberry leaves in a controlled environment. They have a ferocious appetite and their weight can increase considerably. Once they’ve stored up enough energy, the worms secrete a white jelly from their silk glands and use it to build a cocoon around themselves. After eight or nine days, the worms are killed and the cocoons are immersed in boiling water to soften the protective filaments, which are wound onto a spool. These filaments can be 600 to 900 meters long. Several filaments are assembled to form a thread. The silk threads are then woven into a fabric or used for fine embroidery or brocade, a rich silk fabric embellished with brocaded designs in gold and silver thread.

Chinese treatise on agiculture and silk production (1313).

The Early Silk Trade

Under threat of capital punishment, sericulture remained a well-kept secret, and China retained its monopoly on manufacturing for millennia.

It wasn’t until the Zhou dynasty (1112 BC) that a maritime Silk Road was established from China to Japan and Korea, as the government decided to send Chinese from the port in Bohai Bay (on the Shandong Peninsula) to train local inhabitants in sericulture and agriculture. The techniques of silkworm rearing, reeling and weaving were gradually introduced to Korea via the Yellow Sea.

When Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified China (221 BC), many people from the states of Qi, Yan and Zhao fled to Korea, taking with them silkworms and their rearing techniques. This accelerated the development of silk spinning in Korea.

Korea played a central role in China’s international relations, particularly as an intellectual bridge between China and Japan. Its trade with China also enabled the spread of Buddhism and porcelain-making methods. Although initially reserved for the imperial court, silk spread throughout Asian culture, both geographically and socially. Silk quickly became the luxury fabric par excellence that the whole world craved.

During the Han dynasties (206 BC to 220), a dense network of trade routes exploded cultural and commercial exchanges across Central Asia, profoundly impacting civilizational dynamics. The Han dynasty continued to build the Great Wall, notably creating the commandery of Dunhuang (Gansu), a key post on the Silk Road. Over two centuries B.C., its trade extended to Greece and Rome, where silk was reserved for the elite.

In the IIIrd century, India, Japan and Persia (Iran) unlocked the secret of silk manufacture and became major producers.

Silk Reaches Europe

The Nestorian monks sent by Justinian give the silkworms to the emperor.

According to a story by Procopius, it was not until 552 AD that the Byzantine emperor Justinian obtained the first silkworm eggs. He had sent two Nestorian monks to Central Asia, and they were able to smuggle silkworm eggs to him hidden in rods of bamboo. While under the monks’ care, the eggs hatched, though they did not cocoon before arrival.

A church manufacture in the Byzantine Empire was thus able to make fabrics for the emperor. Later emerged the intention of developing a large silk industry in the Eastern Roman Empire, using techniques copied from the Persian Sassanids.

Another version claims that it was the Han emperor Wu (IInd century) who sent ambassadors, bearing gifts such as silk, to the West.

In the VIIth century, sericulture spread to Africa and Sicily, from where, under the impetus of Roger I of Sicily (c. 1034-1101) and his son Roger II (1093-1154), the silkworm and mulberry were introduced to the ancient Peloponnese.

In the Xth century, Andalusia became the epicenter of silk manufacturing with Granada, Toledo and Seville. With the Arab conquest, sericulture spread to the rest of Spain, Italy (Venice, Florence and Milan) and France. The earliest French traces of sericulture date back to the 13th century, notably in the Gard (1234) and Paris (1290).

In the XVth century, faced with the ruinous import of Italian silk (raw or manufactured), Louis XI tried to set up silk factories, first in Tours on the Loire, then in Lyon, a city at the crossroads of north-south routes where Italian emigrants were already trading in silks.

In the XIXth century, silk production was industrialized in Japan, but in the XXth century, China regained its place as the world’s largest producer. Today, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Uzbekistan and Brazil all have large production capacities.

Cultural Melting Pot

Kingdom of Funan

As much as silk itself, the transportation of silk by sea dates back to time immemorial.

For the Chinese, there are two main routes: the East China Silk Road (to Korea and Japan) and the South China Silk Road (via the Strait of Malacca to India, the Persian Gulf, Africa and Europe).

In Vietnam, the Hanoi Museum holds a coin dating back to the year 152, bearing the effigy of the Roman emperor Antoninus the Pious. The coin was discovered in the remains of Oc Eo, a Vietnamese town south of the Mekong Delta, thought to have been the main port of the Funan Kingdom (Ist to IXth centuries).

This kingdom, which covered the territory of present-day Cambodia and the Mekong Delta administrative region of Vietnam, flourished from the 1st to the 9th century. The first mention of the Fou-nan kingdom appears in the report of a Chinese mission that visited the area in the 3rd century.

The Founamians were at the height of their power when Hinduism and Buddhism were introduced to Southeast Asia.

Then, from Egypt, Greek merchants reached the Bay of Bengal. Considerable quantities of pepper then reached Ostia, Rome’s port of entry. All the historical evidence shows that East-West trade was flourishing as early as the first millennium.

Persians and Arabs in India, China and Asia

Island of Failaka (Persian Gulf in front of Kuweit), a meeting place where Greek, Roman and Chinese traders exchanged good.

On the western side, at the entrance to Kuwait Bay, 20 kilometers off the coast of Kuwait City, not far from the mouth of the shared estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Persian Gulf, the island of Failaka was one of the meeting places where Greece, Rome and China exchanged goods.

Sassanid Empire.

Under the Sassanid dynasty (226-651), the Persians developed their trade routes all the way to Southeast Asia, via India and Sri Lanka.

This trading infrastructure was later taken over by the Arabs when, in 762, they moved to Baghdad.

Chinese and Indian presidents, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, exploring the workings of the weaving wheel, the fruit of exchanges between Arabs, Indians and Chinese.
Arab dhow.

From the IXth century onwards, the city of Quilon (Kollam), the capital of Kerala in India, was home to colonies of Arab, Christian, Jewish and Chinese merchants.

On the western side, Persian and then Arab navigators played a central role in the birth of the maritime Silk Road. Following the Sassanid routes, the Arabs pushed their dhows, or traditional Arab sailing ships, from the Red Sea to the Chinese coast and as far as Malaysia and Indonesia.

These sailors brought with them a new religion, Islam, which spread throughout Southeast Asia. While the traditional pilgrimage (the hajj) to Mecca was initially only an aspiration for many Muslims, it became increasingly possible for them to make it.

During the monsoon season, when winds were favorable for sailing to India in the Indian Ocean, the twice-yearly trade missions were transformed into veritable international fairs, offering an opportunity to transport large quantities of goods by sea in conditions (apart from pirates and unpredictable weather) relatively less exposed to the dangers of overland transport.

The Maritime Silk Road under the Sui, Tang and Song Dynasties

Luoyang Bridge, a masterpiece of ancient architecture in Quanzhou.

It was under the Sui dynasty (581-618) that the Maritime Silk Road set out from Quanzhou, a coastal city in Fujian province in south-east China, on its first trade routes.

With its wealth of scenic spots and historic sites, Quanzhou has been proclaimed « the starting point of the Maritime Silk Road » by UNESCO.

It was at this time that the first printing methods appeared in China. Wooden blocks were used to print on textiles. In 593, the Sui emperor Wen-ti ordered the printing of Buddhist images and writings. One of the earliest printed texts is a Buddhist script dating from 868, found in a cave near Dunhuang, a stopover town on the Silk Road.

Under the Tang dynasty (618-907), the Kingdom’s military expansion brought security, trade and new ideas. The fact that the stability of Tang China coincided with that of Sassanid Persia enabled the land and sea Silk Roads to flourish. The great transformation of the maritime Silk Road began in the 7th century, when China opened up to international trade. The first Arab ambassador took up his post in 651.

Mural fresco executed in 706, of the Tang Emperor’s tomb, with diplomatic emissaries to the Imperial Court. The two figures on the right, carefully dressed, represent Korea, while the one in the middle (a monk?), without a headdress and with a « big nose », represents the West.

The Tang Dynasty chose Chang’an (now Xi’an) as its capital. It adopted an open attitude towards different beliefs. Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian temples coexisted peacefully with mosques, synagogues and Nestorian Christian churches. As the terminus of the Silk Road, Chang’an’s western market is becoming the center of world trade. According to the Tang Authority Six register, over 300 nations and regions had trade relations with Chang’an.

Almost 10,000 foreign families from the west lived in the city, especially in the area around the western market. There were many foreign inns staffed by foreign maids chosen for their beauty. The most famous poet in Chinese history, Li Bai, often strolled among them. Foreign food, costumes and music were the fashion of Chang’an.

After the fall of the Tang dynasty, the Five Dynasties and the Ten Kingdoms (907-960), the arrival of the Song dynasty (960-1279) ushered in a new period of prosperity, characterized by increased centralization and economic and cultural renewal. The maritime silk route regained its momentum. In 1168, a synagogue was built in Kaifeng, capital of the Southern Song dynasty, to serve merchants on the Silk Road.

During the same period, as Islam expanded, trading posts sprang up all around the Indian Ocean and the rest of Southeast Asia.

China encouraged its merchants to seize the opportunities offered by maritime traffic, in particular the sale of camphor, a highly sought-after medicinal plant. A veritable trade network developed in the East Indies under the auspices of the Kingdom of Sriwijaya, a city-state in southern Sumatra, Indonesia (see below), which for nearly six centuries served as a link between Chinese merchants on the one hand, and Indians and Malays on the other. A trade route truly emerged, deserving the name of the maritime « Silk Road ».

Increasing quantities of spices passed through India, the Red Sea and Alexandria in Egypt, before reaching the merchants of Genoa, Venice and other Western ports. From there, they moved on to the northern European markets of Lübeck (Germany), Riga (Lithuania) and Tallinn (Estonia), which from the 12th century onwards became important cities in the Hanseatic League.

After seven years of excavation, over 60,000 porcelain objects dating from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) were discovered on the Nanhai ship (South China Sea), which had been underwater for over 800 years.
A XVth-century junk from the Ming dynasty.

In China, during the reign of the Song emperor Renzong (1022-1063), a great deal of money and energy was spent on bringing together knowledge and know-how. The economy was the first to benefit.

Drawing on the know-how of Arab and Indian sailors, Chinese ships became the most advanced in the world.

The Chinese, who had invented the compass (at least by 1119), quickly surpassed their competitors in cartography and the art of navigation, as the Chinese junk became the bulk carrier par excellence.

In his geographical treatise, Zhou Qufei, in 1178, reports:

« The big ships that cruise the South Sea are like houses. When they unfold their sails, they look like huge clouds. Their rudders are dozens of feet long. A single ship can house several hundred men. On board, there’s enough food to last a year.« 


Archaeological digs confirm this reality, such as the wreck of a XIVth-century junk found off the coast of Korea, in which over 10,000 pieces of ceramic were discovered.

During this period, coastal trade gradually shifted from the hands of Arab traders to those of Chinese merchants. Trade expanded, notably with the inclusion of Korea and the integration of Japan, the Malabar coast of India, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea into existing trade networks.

China exported tea, silk, cotton, porcelain, lacquers, copper, dyes, books and paper. In return, it imported luxury goods and raw materials, including rare woods, precious metals, precious and semi-precious stones, spices and ivory.

Copper coins from the Song period have been discovered in Sri Lanka, and porcelain from this period has been found in East Africa, Egypt, Turkey, some Gulf states and Iran, as well as in India and Southeast Asia.

The Importance of Korea and the Kingdom of Silla


During the first millennium, culture and philosophy flourished on the Korean peninsula. A well-organized and well-protected trading network with China and Japan operated there.

On the Japanese island of Okino-shima, numerous historical traces bear witness to the intense exchanges between the Japanese archipelago, Korea and the Asian continent.

Excavations carried out in ancient tombs in Gyeongju, today a South Korean city of 264,000 inhabitants and capital of the ancient Kingdom of Silla (from 57 BC to 935), which controlled most of the peninsula from the VIIth to the IXth century, demonstrate the intensity of this kingdom’s exchanges with the rest of the world, via the Silk Road.

Indonesia, a Major Maritime Power at the Heart of the Maritime Silk Road



In Indonesia, Malaysia and southern Thailand, the Kingdom of Sriwijaya (VIIth to XIIIth centuries) played a major role as a maritime trading post, storing high-value goods from the region and beyond for later sale by sea. In particular, Sriwijaya controlled the Strait of Malacca, the essential sea passage between India and China.

At the height of its power in the XIth century, Sriwijaya’s network of ports and trading posts traded a vast array of products and commodities: rice, cotton, indigo and silver from Java, aloe (a succulent plant of African origin), vegetable resins, camphor, ivory and rhinoceros horns, tin and gold from Sumatra, rattan, redwoods and other rare woods, gems from Borneo, rare birds and exotic animals, iron, sandalwood and spices from East Indonesia, India and Southeast Asia, and porcelain, lacquer, brocade, textiles and silk from China.

With its capital at Palembang (population 1.7 million) on the Musi River in what is now the southern province of Sumatra, this Hindu-Buddhist-inspired kingdom, which flourished from the VIIIth to the XIIIth century, was the first major Indonesian kingdom and the country’s first maritime power.

By the VIIth century, it ruled a large part of Sumatra, the western part of Java and a significant part of the Malay Peninsula. It extended as far north as Thailand, where archaeological remains of Sriwijaya cities still exist.

Buddhism on the Maritime Silk Road

The museum in Palembang (today Indonesia) – a town where Chinese, Indian, Arab and Yemeni communities, each with their own particular institutions, have co-prospered for generations – tells a wonderful story of how the Maritime Silk Road generated exemplary mutual cultural enrichment.

Buddhism was closely tied to international or cross-boundary trade. Early inscriptions indicate it was common for seafarers to pray to the Buddha for a safe voyage.

The maritime routes were very challenging as they were often beset with cyclones and typhoons, and piracy was an ever-present danger.

As a consequence, merchant support for Buddhism along these travel routes helped to establish monastic life far beyond India. Monks and nuns also took passage on these trading ships, and the merchants sought good karma by helping them travel to spread the teachings of the Buddha.

Madagascar, Sanskrit and the Cinnamon Road


Map of the expansion of Austronesian languages.


Today, Madagascar is inhabited by Blacks and Asians. DNA tests have confirmed what has long been known: many of the island’s inhabitants are descended from Malay and Indonesian sailors who set foot on the island around the year 830, when the Sriwijaya Empire extended its maritime influence towards Africa.

Further evidence of this presence is the fact that the language spoken on the island borrows Sanskrit and Indonesian words.

Bas-relief from the Buddhist temple of Borobudur (8th century, Indonesia)

To demonstrate the feasibility of such sea voyages, in 2003 a team of researchers sailed from Indonesia to Ghana via Madagascar aboard the Borobudur, a reconstruction of one of the sailing ships featured in many of the 1,300 bas-reliefs decorating the 8th-century Buddhist temple of Borobudur on the island of Java in Indonesia.

Many believe that this vessel is a representation of those once used by Indonesian merchants to cross the ocean to Africa. Indonesian navigators usually used relatively small boats. To ensure balance, they fitted them with outriggers, both double (ngalawa) and single.

Their boats, whose hulls were carved from a single tree trunk, were called sanggara. Merchants from the Indonesian archipelago could reach as far east as Hawaii and New Zealand, a distance of over 7,000 km.

On the Cinnamon Route, the ship made its way from Indonesia to Accra, Ghana, via Madagascar.

In any case, the researchers’ boat, equipped with an 18-meter-high mast, managed to cover the Jakarta – Maldives – Cape of Good Hope – Ghana route, a distance of 27,750 kilometers, or more than half the circumference of the Earth!

The expedition aimed to retrace a very specific route: the cinnamon route, which took Indonesian merchants all the way to Africa to sell spices, including cinnamon, a highly sought-after commodity at the time. Cinnamon was already highly prized in the Mediterranean basin long before the Christian era.

On the walls of the Egyptian temple at Deir el-Bahari (Luksor), a painting depicts a major naval expedition.

On the walls of the Egyptian temple at Deir el-Bahari (Luksor), a painting depicts a major naval expedition said to have been ordered by Queen Hatshepsut, who reigned from 1503 to 1482 BC. Around the painting, hieroglyphs explain that these ships carried various species of plants and fragrant essences destined for the cult. One of these was cinnamon. Rich in aroma, it was an important component of ritual ceremonies in the kingdoms of Egypt.

Cinnamon originally grew in Central Asia, the eastern Himalayas and northern Vietnam. The southern Chinese transplanted it from these regions to their own country and cultivated it under the name gui zhi.

Unsurprisingly, the map of Austronesian language expansion is almost identical to that of the « Cinnamon Road. »


From China, gui zhi spread throughout the Indonesian archipelago, finding a very fertile home there, particularly in the Moluccas. In fact, the international cinnamon trade was a monopoly held by Indonesian merchants. Indonesian cinnamon was prized for its excellent quality and highly competitive price.

The Indonesians sailed great distances, up to 8,000 km, across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar and northeast Africa. From Madagascar, products were transported to Rhapta, in a coastal region that later became known as Somalia. From there, Arab merchants shipped them north to the Red Sea.

The Strait of Malacca

For China, the Strait of Malacca has always represented a major strategic interest. When the great Chinese admiral Zheng He led the first of his expeditions to India, the Near East and East Africa between 1405 and 1433, a Chinese pirate by the name of Chen Zuyi took control of Palembang.

Zheng He defeated Chen’s fleet and captured the survivors. As a result, the strait once again became a safe shipping route.

According to tradition, a prince of Sriwijaya, Parameswara, took refuge on the island of Temasek (present-day Singapore), but eventually settled on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula around 1400 and founded the city of Malacca, which would become the largest port in Southeast Asia, both successor to Sriwijaya and precursor to Singapore.

Following the decline of Sriwijaya, the Kingdom of Majapahit (1292-1527), founded at the end of the XIIIth century on the island of Java, came to dominate most of present-day Indonesia.

This was the period when Arab sailors began to settle in the region.

The Majapahit kingdom established relations with the Kingdom of Champa (192-1145; 1147-1190; 1220-1832) (South Vietnam), Cambodia, Siam (Thailand) and southern Myanmar.

The Majapahit kingdom also sent missions to China. As its rulers extended their power to other islands and sacked neighboring kingdoms, they sought above all to increase their share and control of the trade in goods passing through the archipelago.

The island of Singapore and the southernmost part of the Malay Peninsula was a key crossroads on the ancient maritime Silk Road.

Archaeological excavations in the Kallang estuary and along the Singapore River have uncovered thousands of shards of glass, natural and gold beads, ceramics and Chinese coins from the Northern Song period (960-1127).

The rise of the Mongol Empire in the middle of the XIIIth century led to an increase in seaborne trade and contributed to the vitality of the Maritime Silk Road.

Marco Polo, after a 17-year overland journey to China, returned by ship. After witnessing a shipwreck, he sailed from China to Sumatra in Indonesia, before setting foot on land again at Hormuz in Persia (Iran).

Under the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

Under the Song dynasty, large quantities of silk goods were exported to Japan. Under the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), the government set up the Shi Bo Si, a trade office, in a number of ports, including Ningbo, Canton, Shanghai, Ganpu, Wenzhou and Hangzhou, enabling silk exports to Japan.

During the Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties, and at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, each port set up an oceanic trading department to manage all foreign maritime trade.

Maritime travel was dependent on the seasonal winds: the summer monsoons blow from the south-west (May to September) and reverse direction in the winter (October to April). As a result, seafaring merchants developed sailing circuits that allowed them to use the monsoon winds to travel long distances, then return home when the wind patterns shifted.

Trade with southern India and the Persian Gulf flourished. Trade with East Africa also developed with the monsoon season, bringing ivory, gold and slaves. In India, guilds began to control Chinese trade on the Malabar coast and in Sri Lanka.

Trade relations became more formalized, while remaining highly competitive. Cochin and Kozhikode (Calicut), two major cities in the Indian state of Kerala, competed to dominate this trade.

Admiral Zheng He’s Maritime Explorations

Map of Admiral Zheng He’s maritime expeditions.

Chinese maritime exploration reached its apogee in the early XVth century under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), which chose a Muslim court eunuch, Admiral Zheng He, to lead seven diplomatic naval expeditions.

Financed by Emperor Ming Yongle, these peaceful missions to Southeast Asia, East Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea were intended above all to demonstrate the prestige and grandeur of China and its Emperor. The aim was also to recognize some thirty states and establish political and commercial relations with them.

In 1409, prior to one of these expeditions, the Chinese admiral Zheng He asked craftsmen to make a carved stone stele in Nanjing, the present-day capital of Jiangsu province (eastern China). The stele traveled with the flotilla and was left in Sri Lanka as a gift to a local Buddhist temple. Prayers to the deities in three languages – Chinese, Persian and Tamil – were engraved on the stele. It was found in 1911 in the town of Galle, in south-west Sri Lanka, and a replica is now in China.

Zheng’s armada was made up of armed bulk carriers, the most modest being larger than Columbus’ caravels. The largest were 100 meters long and 50 meters wide. According to Ming chronicles of the time, an expedition could comprise 62 ships, each carrying 500 people. Some carried military cavalry, others tanks of drinking water. Chinese shipbuilding was ahead of its time. The technique of hermetic bulkheads, imitating the internal structure of bamboo, offered incomparable safety. It became the standard for the Chinese fleet before being copied by the Europeans 250 years later. Compasses and celestial maps painted on silk were also used.

The synergy that may have existed between Arab, Indian and Chinese sailors, all men of the sea who fraternized in the face of ocean adversity, was impressive. For example, some historians believe that the name « Sindbad the Sailor », which appears in the Persian tale of a sailor’s adventures from the time of the Abbasid dynasty (VIIIth century) and was included in the Tales of the One Thousand and One Nights, derives from the word Sanbao, the honorary nickname given by the Chinese Emperor to Admiral Zheng He, literally meaning « The Three Jewels », i.e. the three indissociable capital virtues: essence, breath, and spirit.

Statue of Admiral Zheng Ho in front of a mosque built in his honor in Indonesia.

Maritime museums in China (Hong Kong, Macau, Fuzhou, Tianjin and Nanjing), Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia showcase Admiral Zheng’s expeditions.

However, at least twelve other admirals carried out similar expeditions to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.

In 1403, Admiral Ma Pi led an expedition to Indonesia and India. Wu Bin, Zhang Koqing and Hou Xian made others. After lightning caused a fire in the Forbidden City, a dispute broke out between the eunuch class, supporters of the expeditions, and the learned mandarins, who obtained the cessation of expeditions deemed too costly. The last voyage took place between 1430 and 1433, 64 years before the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrived in 1497.

Japan, for its part, similarly restricted its contacts with the outside world during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), although its trade with China was never suspended. It was only after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 that a Japan open to the world re-emerged.

Withdrawing into themselves, trade with both China and Japan fell into the hands of maritime trading posts such as Malacca in Malaysia or Hi An in Vietnam, two cities now recognized by Unesco as world heritage sites. H?i An was a major stopover port on the sea route linking Europe and Japan via India and China. In the shipwrecks found at Hi An, researchers have discovered ceramics awaiting their departure for Sinai in Egypt.

History of Chinese Ports

Over the years, the main ports on the Maritime Silk Road have changed. From the 330s onwards, Canton and Hepu were the two most important ports. However, Quanzhou replaced Canton from the end of the Song to the end of the Yuan dynasty. At that time, Quanzhou in Fujian province and Alexandria in Egypt were considered the world’s largest ports. Due to the policy of closure to the outside world imposed from 1435 and the influence of war, Quanzhou was gradually replaced by the ports of Yuegang, Zhangzhou and Fujian.

From the beginning of the IVth century, Canton was an important port on the Silk Road. Gradually, under the Tang and Song dynasties, it became not only the largest, but also the most renowned port of the Orient worldwide. During this period, the sea route linking Canton to the Persian Gulf via the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean was the longest in the world.

Although later supplanted by Quanzhou under the Yuan dynasty, Canton remained China’s second-largest commercial port. Compared with the others, it is considered to have been a consistently prosperous port over the 2,000-year history of the Maritime Silk Road.

The Tributary System of 1368

China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing, reigned from 1644 to 1912.

Since the arrival of the Ming dynasty, maritime trade with China proceded in two different ways:

  • The Chinese « tributary system » ;
  • The Canton system (1757-1842).

Born under the Ming in 1368, the « tributary system » reached its apogee under the Qing. It took the refined form of a mutually beneficial, inclusive hierarchy.

States adhering to it showed respect and gratitude by regularly presenting the Emperor with tribute made up of local products and performing certain ritual ceremonies, notably the « kowtow » (three genuflections and nine prostrations). They also demanded the Emperor’s investiture of their leaders and adopted the Chinese calendar. In addition to China, they included Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, the Ryükyü Islands, Laos, Myanmar and Malaysia.

Paradoxically, while occupying a central cultural status, the tributary system offered its vassals the status of sovereign entities, enabling them to exercise authority over a given geographical area.

The Emperor won their submission by showing virtuous concern for their welfare and promoting a doctrine of non-intervention and non-exploitation. Indeed, according to historians, in financial terms, China was never directly enriched by the tributary system. In general, all travel and subsistence expenses for tributary missions were covered by the Chinese government. In addition to the costs of running the system, the gifts offered by the Emperor were generally far more valuable than the tributes he received. Each tributary mission was entitled to be accompanied by a large number of merchants, and once the tribute had been presented to the Emperor, trade could begin.

It should be noted that when a country lost its status as a tributary state as a result of a disagreement, it would try at all costs, and sometimes violently, to be allowed to pay tribute again.

The Canton System of 1757

Port of Canton in 1850 with American, French and British trade missions.

The second system concerned foreign, mainly European, powers wishing to trade with China. This involved the port of Guangzhou (then called Canton), the only port accessible to Westerners.

This meant that merchants, notably those of the British East India Company, could dock not in the port but off the coast of Canton, from October to March, during the trading season. It was in Macao, then a Portuguese possession, that the Chinese provided them with permission to do so. The Emperor’s representatives would then authorize Chinese merchants (hongs) to go on board to trade with foreign ships, while instructing them to collect customs duties before they left.

This way of trading expanded at the end of the XVIIIth century, particularly with the strong English demand for tea.

In fact, it was Chinese tea from Fujian that American « insurgents » threw into the sea during the famous « Boston Tea Party » in December 1773, one of the first events against the British Empire that sparked off the American Revolution.

Products from India, particularly cotton and opium, were exchanged by the East India Company for tea, porcelain and silk.

The customs duties collected by the Canton system were a major source of revenue for the Qing dynasty, even though it banned the purchase of opium from India. This restriction imposed by the Chinese Emperor in 1796 led to the outbreak of the Opium Wars, the first as early as 1839.

At the same time, rebellions broke out in the 1850-60s against the weakened Qing reign, coupled with further wars against hostile European powers.

Sacking of the Summer Palace by the British and French in 1860.

In 1860, the former Summer Palace (Yuanming Park), with its collection of pavilions, temples, pagodas and libraries – the residence of the Qing dynasty emperors 15 kilometers northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City – was ravaged by British and French troops during the Second Opium War.

This assault goes down in history as one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism of the XIXth century. The Palace was sacked a second time in 1900 by an eight-nation alliance against China.

Today, a statue of Victor Hugo and a text he wrote against Napoleon III and the destruction of French imperialism can be admired there, as a reminder that this was not the work of a nation, but of a government.

By the end of the First World War, China had 48 open ports where foreigners could trade according to their own jurisdictions.

The 20th century was an era of revolution and social change. The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 led to inward-looking attitudes.

It wasn’t until 1978 that Deng Xiaoping announced a policy of opening up to the outside world in order to modernize the country.

China’s New Silk Roads initiative.

In the XXIst century, thanks to the One Belt (economic) One Road (maritime) Initiative launched by President Xi Jingping, China is re-emerging as a major world power offering mutually beneficial cooperation in the service of a better shared future for mankind.

Merci de partager !

The republican struggle of David d’Angers and the statue of Gutenberg in Strasbourg

In the heart of downtown Strasbourg, a stone’s throw from the cathedral and with its back to the 1585 Chamber of Commerce, stands the beautiful bronze statue of the German printer Johannes Gutenberg, holding a barely-printed page from his Bible, which reads: « And there was light » (NOTE 1).

Evoking the emancipation of peoples thanks to the spread of knowledge through the development of printing, the statue, erected in 1840, came at a time when supporters of the Republic were up in arms against the press censorship imposed by Louis-Philippe under the July Monarchy.

Strasbourg, Mainz and China

Plaster model for the statue of Gutenberg, by David d’Angers.

Born around 1400 in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg, with money lent to him by the merchant and banker Johann Fust, carried out his first experiments with movable metal type in Strasbourg between 1434 and 1445, before perfecting his process in Mainz, notably by printing his famous 42-line Bible from 1452.

On his death (in Mainz) in 1468, Gutenberg bequeathed his process to humanity, enabling printing to take off in Europe. Chroniclers also mention the work of Laurens Janszoon Coster in Harlem, and the Italian printer Panfilo Castaldi, who is said to have brought Chinese know-how to Europe. It should be noted that the « civilized » world of the time refused to acknowledge that printing had originated in Asia with the famous « movable type » (made of porcelain and metal) developed several centuries earlier in China and Korea (NOTE 2).

In Europe, Mainz and Strasbourg vie for pride of place. On August 14, 1837, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the « invention » of printing, Mainz inaugurated its statue of Gutenberg, erected by sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsenalors, while in Strasbourg, a local committee had already commissioned sculptor David d’Angers to create a similar monument in 1835.

This little-known sculptor was both a great sculptor and close friend of Victor Hugo, and a fervent republican in personal contact with the finest humanist elite of his time in France, Germany and the United States. He was also a tireless campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery.


The sculptor’s life


French sculptor Pierre-Jean David, known as « David d’Angers » (1788-1856) was the son of master sculptor Pierre Louis David. Pierre-Jean was influenced by the republican spirit of his father, who trained him in sculpture from an early age. At the age of twelve, his father enrolled him in the drawing class at the École Centrale de Nantes. In Paris, he was commissioned to create the ornamentation for the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and the south facade of the Louvre Palace. Finally, he entered the Beaux-arts.

Portait of David d’Angers, by François-Joseph Heim, Louvre.

David d’Angers possessed a keen sense of interpretation of the human figure and an ability to penetrate the secrets of his models. He excelled in portraiture, whether in bust or medallion form. He is the author of at least sixty-eight statues and statuettes, some fifty bas-reliefs, a hundred busts and over five hundred medallions. Victor Hugo told his friend David: « This is the bronze coin by which you pay your toll to posterity. »

He traveled all over Europe, painting busts in Berlin, London, Dresden and Munich.

Around 1825, when he was commissioned to paint the funeral monument that the Nation was raising by public subscription in honor of General Foy, a tribune of the parliamentary opposition, he underwent an ideological and artistic transformation. He frequented the progressive intellectual circles of the « 1820 generation » and joined the international republican movement. He then turned his attention to the political and social problems of France and Europe. In later years, he remained faithful to his convictions, refusing, for example, the prestigious commission to design Napoleon’s tomb.

Artistic production

Project for a statue of the physician Françis-Xavier Bichat (1771-1802), David d’Angers.

David’s art was thus influenced by a naturalism whose iconography and expression are in stark contrast to that of his academic colleagues and the dissident sculptors known as « romantics » at the time. For David, no mythological sensualism, obscure allegories or historical picturesqueness. On the contrary, sculpture, according to David, must generalize and transpose what the artist observes, so as to ensure the survival of ideas and destinies in a timeless posterity.

David adhered to this particular, limited conception of sculpture, adopting the Enlightenment view that the art of sculpture is « the lasting repository of the virtues of men », perpetuating the memory of the exploits of exceptional beings.

Medallion featuring Alexander von Humboldt, David d’Angers.

The somewhat austere image of « great men » prevailed, best known thanks to some 600 medallions depicting famous men and women from several countries, most of them contemporaries. Added to this are some one hundred busts, mostly of his friends, poets, writers, musicians, songwriters, scientists and politicians with whom he shared the republican ideal.

Among the most enlightened of his time were: Victor Hugo, Marquis de Lafayette, Wolfgang Goethe, Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse Lamartine, Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Alfred de Musset, François Arago, Alexander von Humboldt, Honoré de Balzac, Lady Morgan, James Fenimore Cooper, Armand Carrel, François Chateaubriand, Ennius Quirinus Visconti and Niccolo Paganini.

To magnify his models and visually render the qualities of each one’s genius, David d’Angers invented a mode of idealization no longer based on antique-style classicism, but on a grammar of forms derived from a new science, the phrenology of Doctor Gall, who believed that the cranial « humps » of an individual reflected his intellectual aptitudes and passions. For the sculptor, it was a matter of transcending the model’s physiognomy, so that the greatness of the soul radiated from his forehead.

In 1826, he was elected member of the Institut de France and, the same year, professor at the Beaux-Arts. In 1828, David d’Angers was the victim of his first unsolved assassination attempt. Wounded in the head, he was confined to bed for three months. However, in 1830, still loyal to republican ideas, he took part in the revolutionary days and fought on the barricades.

Pediment of the Panthéon, David d’Angers.


In 1830, David d’Angers found himself ideally placed to carry out the most significant political sculpture commission of the July monarchy and perhaps of 19th century France: the new decoration of the pediment of the church of Sainte-Geneviève, which had been converted into the Pantheon in July.

As a historiographer, he wanted to depict the civilians and men of war who built Republican France. In 1837, the execution of the figures he had chosen and arranged in a sketch that was first approved, then suspended, was bound to lead to conflict with the high clergy and the government. On the left, we see Bichat, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David, Cuvier, Lafayette, Manuel, Carnot, Berthollet, Laplace, Malesherbes, Mirabeau, Monge and Fénelon. While the government tried to have Lafayette’s effigy removed, which David d’Angers stubbornly refused, with the support of the liberal press, the pediment was unveiled without official ceremony in September 1837, without the presence of the artist, who had not been invited.


Entering politics

During the 1848 Revolution, he was appointed mayor of the 11th arrondissement of Paris, entered the National Constituent Assembly and then the National Legislative Assembly, where he voted with the Montagne (revolutionary left). He defended the existence of the Ecole des Beaux-arts and the Académie de France in Rome. He opposed the destruction of the Chapelle Expiatoire and the removal of two statues from the Arc de Triomphe (Resistance and Peace by sculptor Antoine Etex).

He also voted against the prosecution of Louis Blanc (1811-1882) (another republican statesman and intellectual condemned to exile), against the credits for Napoleon III’s Roman expedition, for the abolition of the death penalty, for the right to work, and for a general amnesty.


Exile

Greek maiden, statue by David d’Angers for the tomb of Greek freedom fighter Markos Botzaris.

He was not re-elected deputy in 1849 and withdrew from political life. In 1851, with the advent of Napoleon III, David d’Angers was arrested and also sentenced to exile. He chose Belgium, then traveled to Greece (his old project). He wanted to revisit his Greek Maiden on the tomb of the Greek republican patriot Markos Botzaris (1788-1823), which he found mutilated and abandoned (he had it repatriated to France and restored).

Disappointed by Greece, he returned to France in 1852. With the help of his friend de Béranger, he was allowed to stay in Paris, where he resumed his work. In September 1855, he suffered a stroke which forced him to cease his activities. He died in January 1856.


Friendships with Lafayette, Abbé Grégoire and Pierre-Jean de Béranger

The Marquis de Lafayette. painted by Adolphe Phalipon after a picture by Ary Scheffer (1795-1858).

David d’Angers was a real link between 18th and 19th century republicans, and a living bridge between those of Europe and America.

Born in 1788, he had the good fortune to associate at an early age with some of the great revolutionary figures of the time, before becoming personally involved in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

Towards the end of the 1820s, David attended the Tuesday salon meetings of Madame de Lafayette, wife of Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette (1757-1834).

While General Lafayette stood upright like « a venerable oak », this salon, notes the sculptor,

« has a clear-cut physiognomy, » he writes. The men talk about serious matters, especially politics, and even the young men look serious: there’s something decided, energetic and courageous in their eyes and in their posture (…) All the ladies and also the demoiselles look calm and thoughtful; they look as if they’ve come to see or attend important deliberations, rather than to be seen. »

Irish republican general Arthur O’Connor.

David met Lafayette’s comrade-in-arms, General Arthur O’Connor (1763-1852), a former Irish republican MP of the United Irishmen who had joined Lafayette’s volunteer General Staff in 1792.

Accused of stirring up trouble against the British Empire and in contact with General Lazare Hoche (1768-1797), O’Connor fled to France in 1796 and took part in the Irish Expedition. In 1807, O’Connor married the daughter of philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794) and became a naturalized French citizen in 1818.

Republican chansonnier Pierre-Jean de Béranger, bust by David d’Angers.

Lafayette and David d’Angers often got together with a small group of friends, a few « brothers » who were members of Masonic lodges: such as the chansonnier Pierre-Jean de Béranger, François Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Alexandre Dumas (who corresponded with Edgar Allan Poe), Alphonse Lamartine, Henri Beyle dit Stendhal and the painters François Gérard and Horace Vernet.

In these same circles, David also became acquainted with Henri (Abbé) Grégoire (1750-1831), and the issue of the abolition of slavery, which Grégoire had pushed through on February 4, 1794, was often raised. In their exchanges, Lafayette liked to recall the words of his youthful friend Nicolas de Condorcet:

« Slavery is a horrible barbarism, if we can only eat sugar at this price, we must know how to renounce a commodity stained with the blood of our brothers. »


For Abbé Gregoire, the problem went much deeper:

« As long as men are thirsty for blood, or rather, as long as most governments have no morals, as long as politics is the art of deceit, as long as people, unaware of their true interests, attach silly importance to the job of spadassin, and will allow themselves to be led blindly to the slaughter with sheep-like resignation, almost always to serve as a pedestal for vanity, almost never to avenge the rights of humanity, and to take a step towards happiness and virtue, the most flourishing nation will be the one that has the greatest facility for slitting the throats of others. »

(Essay on the physical, moral and political regeneration of the Jews)

Napoleon and slavery

The first abolition of slavery was, alas, short-lived. In 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte, short of the money needed to finance his wars, reintroduced slavery, and nine days later excluded colored officers from the French army.

Finally, he outlawed marriages between « fiancés whose skin color is different ». David d’Angers remained very sensitive to this issue, having as a comrade a very young writer, Alexandre Dumas, whose father had been born a slave in Haiti.

As early as 1781, under the pseudonym Schwarz (black in German), Condorcet had published a manifesto advocating the gradual disappearance of slavery over a period of 60 to 70 years, a view quickly shared by Lafayette. A fervent supporter of the abolitionist cause, Condorcet condemned slavery as a crime, but also denounced its economic uselessness: slave labor, with its low productivity, was an obstacle to the establishment of a market economy.

And even before the signing of the peace treaty between France and the United States, Lafayette wrote to his friend George Washington on February 3, 1783, proposing to join him in setting in motion a process of gradual emancipation of the slaves. He suggested a plan that would « frankly become beneficial to the black portion of mankind ».

The idea was to buy a small state in which to experiment with freeing slaves and putting them to work as farmers. Such an example, he explained, « could become a school and thus a general practice ». (NOTE 3)

Washington replied that he personally would have liked to support such a step, but that the American Congress (already) was totally hostile.

From the Society of Black Friends to the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery

Abbé Henri Grégoire, bust by David d’Angers.

In Paris, on February 19, 1788, Abbé Grégoire and Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754-1793) founded « La Société des amis des Noirs », whose rules were drawn up by Condorcet, and of which the Lafayette couple were also members.

The society’s aim was the equality of free whites and blacks in the colonies, the immediate prohibition of the black slave trade and the gradual abolition of slavery; on the one hand, to maintain the economy of the French colonies, and on the other, in the belief that before blacks could achieve freedom, they had to be prepared for it, and therefore educated.

After the virtual disappearance of the « Amis des Noirs », the offensive was renewed, with the founding in 1821 of the « Société de la Morale chrétienne », which in 1822 set up a « Comité pour l’abolition de la traite des Noirs », some of whose members went on to found the « Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage (SFAE) » in 1834.

Initially in favor of gradual abolition, the SFAE later favored immediate abolition. Prohibited from holding meetings, the SFAE decided to create abolitionist committees throughout the country to relay the desire to put an end to slavery, both locally and nationally.

Goethe and Schiller

Victor Pavie.

In the summer of 1829, David d’Angers made his first trip to Germany and met Goethe (1749-1832), the poet and philosopher who had retired to Weimar. Several posing sessions enabled the sculptor to complete his portrait.

Writer and poet Victor Pavie (1808-1886), a friend of Victor Hugo and one of the founders of the « Cercles catholiques ouvriers » (Catholic Workers Circle), accompagnied him on the trip and recounts some of the pictoresques anecdotes of their travel in his « Goethe and David, memories of a voyage to Weimar » (1874).

In 1827, the French newspaper Globe published two letters recounting two visits to Goethe, in 1817 and 1825, by an anonymous « friend » (Victor Cousin), as well as a letter from Ampère on his return from the « Athens of Germany ». In these letters, the young scientist expressed his admiration, and gave numerous details that whetted the interest of his compatriots. During his stay in Weimar, Ampère added to his host’s knowledge of Romantic authors, particularly Mérimée, Vigny, Deschamps and Delphine Gay. Goethe already had a (positive) opinion of Victor Hugo, Lamartine and Casimir Delavigne, and of all they owed to Chateaubriand.

A subscriber to the Globe since its foundation in 1824, Goethe had at his disposal a marvellous instrument of French information. In any case, he had little left to learn about France when David and Pavie visited him in August 1829. On the strength of his unhappy experience with Walter Scott in London, David d’Angers had taken precautions this time, and had a number of letters of recommendation for the people of Weimar, as well as two letters of introduction to Goethe, signed by Abbé Grégoire and Victor Cousin. To show the illustrious writer what he could do, he had placed some of his finest medallions in a crate.

Once in Weimar, David d’Angers and Victor Pavie encountered great difficulties in their quest, especially as the recipients of the letters of recommendation were all absent. Stricken with despair and fearing failure, David blamed his young friend Victor Pavie:

Friedrich Schiller, David d’Angers medallion.

« Yes, you jumped in with the optimism of a young man, without giving me time to think and get out of the way. It wasn’t as a coward or under the patronage of an adventurer, it was head-on and resolutely that we had to tackle the character. (…) You’re only as good as what you are, it’s a yes or no question. You know me, on my knees before genius, and imployable before power. Ah! court poets, great or small, everywhere the same!

(…) And with a leap from the chair where he had insensitively let himself fall: Where’s Schiller? I’d like to kiss him! His grave, where I will strike, will not remain sealed for me; I will take him there, and bring him back glorious. What does it matter? Have I seen Corneille, have I seen Racine? The bust I’m planning for him will look all the better for it; the flash of his genius will gleam on his forehead. I’ll make him as I love and admire him, not with the pinched nose that Dannecker (image below) gave him, but with nostrils swollen with patriotism and freedom.

Victor Pavie’s account reveals the republican fervor animating the sculptor who, faithful to the ideals of Abbé Grégoire, was already thinking about the great anti-slavery sculpture he planned to create:

« At that moment, the half-open window of our bedroom, yielding to the evening breeze, opened wide. The sky was superb; the Milky Way unfurled with such brilliance that one could have counted the stars. He (David) remained silent for some time, dazzled; then, with that suddenness of impression that incessantly renewed the realm of feelings and ideas around him:
‘What a work, what a masterpiece! How poor we are compared to this!Would all your geniuses in one, writers, artists, poets, ever reach this incomparable poem whose tasks are splendors? Yet God knows your insatiable pretensions; we flay you in praise… And light! Remember this (and his presentiments in this regard were nothing less than a chimera), that such a one as received a marble bust from me as a token of my admiration, will one day literally lose the memory of it. – No, there is nothing more noble and great in humanity than that which suffers. I still have in my head, or rather in my heart, this protest of the human conscience against the most execrable iniquity of our times, the slave trade: after ten years of silence and suffering, it must burst forth with the voice of brass. You can see the group from here: the garroted slave, his eye on the sky, protector and avenger of the weak; next to him, lying broken, his wife, in whose bosom a frail creature is sucking blood instead of milk; at their feet, detached from the negro’s broken collar, the crucifix, the Man-God who died for his brothers, black or white. Yes, the monument will be made of bronze, and when the wind blows, you will hear the chain beating, and the rings ringing' ».

Finally, Goethe met the two Frenchmen, and David d’Angers succeeded in making his bust of the German poet. Victor Pavie:

« Goethe bowed politely to us, spoke the French language with ease from the start, and made us sit down with that calm, resigned air that astonished me, as if it were a simple thing to find oneself standing at eighty, face to face with a third generation, to which he had passed on through the second, like a living tradition.

(…) David carried with him, as the saying goes, a sample of his skills.He presented the old man with a few of his lively profiles, so morally expressive, so nervously and intimately executed, part of a great whole that is becoming more complete with our age, and which reserves for the centuries to come the monumental physiognomy of the 19th century. Goethe took them in his hand, considered them mute, with scrupulous attention, as if to extract some hidden harmony, and let out a muffled, equivocal exclamation that I later recognized as a mark of genuine satisfaction.Then, by a more intelligible and flattering transition, of which he was perhaps unaware, walking to his library, he charmingly showed us a rich collection of medals from the Middle Ages, rare and precious relics of an art that could be said to have been lost, and of which our great sculptor David has nowadays been able to recover and re-immerse the secret.

(…) The bust project did not have to languish for long: the very next day, one of the apartments in the poet’s immense house was transformed into a workshop, and a shapeless mound lay on the parquet floor, awaiting the first breath of existence. As soon as it slowly shifted into a human form, Goethe’s hitherto calm and impassive figure moved with it. Gradually, as if a secret, sympathetic alliance had developed between portrait and model, as the one moved towards life, the other blossomed into confidence and abandonment: we soon came to those artist’s confidences, that confluence of poetry, where the ideas of the poet and the sculptor come together in a common mold. He would come and go, prowling around this growing mass, (to use a trivial comparison) with the anxious solicitude of a landowner building a house. He asked us many questions about France, whose progress he was following with a youthful and active curiosity; and frolicking at leisure about modern literature, he reviewed Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nodier, Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo, whose manner he had seriously pondered in Cromwell.

(…) David’s bust, writes Pavie, was as beautiful as Chateaubriand’s, Lamartine’s, Cooper’s, as any application of genius to genius, as the work of a chisel fit and powerful to reproduce one of those types created expressly by nature for the habitation of a great thought. Of all the likenesses attempted, with greater or lesser success, in all the ages of this long glory, from his youth of twenty to Rauch’s bust, the last and best understood of all, it is no prevention to say that David’s is the best, or, to put it even more bluntly, the only realization of that ideal likeness which is not the thing, but is more than the thing, nature taken within and turned inside out, the outward manifestation of a divine intelligence passed into human bark. And there are few occasions like this one, when colossal execution seems no more than a powerless indication of real effect. An immense forehead, on which rises, like clouds, a thick tuft of silver hair; a downward gaze, hollow and motionless, a look of Olympian Jupiter; a nose of broad proportion and antique style, in the line of the forehead ; then that singular mouth we were talking about earlier, with the lower lip a little forward, that mouth, all examination, questioning and finesse, completing the top with the bottom, genius with reason; with no other pedestal than its muscular neck, this head leans as if veiled, towards the earth:it’s the hour when the setting genius lowers his gaze to this world, which he still lights with a farewell ray. Such is David’s crude description of Goethe’s statue.- What a pity that in his bust of Schiller, so famous and so praised, the sculptor Dannecker prepared such a miserable counterpart!

When Goethe received his bust, he warmly thanked David for the exchange of letters, books and medallions… but made no mention of the bust ! For one simple reason: he didn’t recognize himself at all in the work, which he didn’t even keep at home… The German poet was depicted with an oversized forehead, to reflect his great intelligence. And his tousled hair symbolized the torments of his soul…

David d’Angers and Hippolyte Carnot

Hippolyte Carnot, son of Lazare Carnot, painted by Jules Laure, 1837.

Among the founders of the SFAE (see earlier chapter on Abbé Grégoire) was Hippolyte Carnot (1801-1888), younger brother of Nicolas Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), pioneer of thermodynamics and son of « the organizer of victory », the military and scientific genius Lazare Carnot (1753-1823), whose work and struggle he recounted in his 1869 biography Mémoires sur Lazare Carnot 1753-1823 by his son Hippolyte.

In 1888, with the title Henri Grégoire, évêque (bishop) républicain, Hippolyte published the Mémoires of Grégoire the defender of all the oppressed of the time (negroes and Jews alike), a great friend of his father’s who had retained this friendship.

For the former bishop of Blois, « we must enlighten the ignorance that does not know and the poverty that does not have the means to know. »

Grégoire had been one of the Convention’s great « educators », and it was on his report that the Conservatoire des Arts-et-Métiers was founded on September 29, 1794, notably for the instruction of craftsmen. Grégoire also contributed to the creation of the Bureau des Longitudes on June 25, 1795 and the Institut de France on October 25, 1795.

Bust of Rouget de Lisle, David d’Angers.

Hippolyte Carnot and David d’Angers, who were friends, co-authored the Memoirs of Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (1755-1841), who acted as a sort of Minister of Information on the Comité de Salut Public, responsible for announcing the victories of the Republican armies to the Convention as soon as they arrived.

It was also Abbé Grégoire who, in 1826, commissioned David d’Angers, with the help of his friend Béranger, to bring some material and financial comfort to Rouget de Lisle (1860-1836), the legendary author of La Marseillaise, composed in Strasbourg when, in his old age, the composer was languishing in prison for debt.

Overcoming the sectarianism of their time, here are three fervent republicans full of compassion and gratitude for a musical genius who never wanted to renounce his royalist convictions, but whose patriotic creation would become the national anthem of the young French Republic.


Provisional Government
of the Second Republic

Hippolyte Carnot.

All these battles, initiatives and mobilizations culminated in 1848, when, for two months and 15 days (from February 24 to May 9), a handful of genuine republicans became part of the « provisional government » of the Second Republic.

In such a short space of time, so many good measures were taken or launched! Hippolyte Carnot was the Minister of Public Instruction, determined to create a high level of education for all, including women, following the models set by his father for Polytechnique and Grégoire for Arts et Métiers.

Article 13 of the 1848 Constitution « guarantees citizens (…) free primary education ».

On June 30, 1848, the Minister of Public Instruction, Lazare Hippolyte Carnot, submitted a bill to the Assembly that fully anticipated the Ferry laws, by providing for compulsory elementary education for both sexes, free and secular, while guaranteeing freedom of teaching. It also provided for three years’ free training at a teacher training college, in return for an obligation to teach for at least ten years, a system that was to remain in force for a long time. He proposed a clear improvement in their salaries. He also urged teachers « to teach a republican catechism ».

A member of the provisional government, the great astronomer and scientist François Arago (1886-1853) was Minister for the Colonies, having been appointed by Gaspard Monge to succeed him at the Ecole Polytechnique, where he taught projective geometry. His closest friend was none other than Alexander von Humboldt, friend of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.

Bust by David d’Angers signed « To his honorable friend François Arago ».


He was another abolitionist activist who spent much of his adult life in Paris. Humboldt was a member of the Société d’Arcueil, formed around the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, where he also met, besides François Arago, Jean-Baptiste Biot and Louis-Joseph Gay-Lussac, with whom Humboldt became friends. They published several scientific articles together.

Humboldt and Gay-Lussac conducted joint experiments on the composition of the atmosphere, terrestrial magnetism and light diffraction, research that would later bear fruit for the great Louis Pasteur.

Napoleon, who initially wanted to expel Humboldt, eventually tolerated his presence. The Paris Geographical Society, founded in 1821, chose him as its president.


Humboldt, Arago, Schoelcher, David d’Angers and Hugo

Victor Schoelcher and the 1848 decree abolishing slavery in the French colonies.


Humboldt made no secret of his republican ideals. His Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (1825) was a bombshell. Too hostile to slavery practices, the work was banned from publication in Spain. London went so far as to refuse him access to its Empire.

Even more deplorably, John S. Trasher, who published an English-language version in 1856, removed the chapter devoted to slaves and the slave trade altogether! Humboldt protested vigorously against this politically motivated mutilation. Trasher was a slaveholder, and his redacted translation was intended to counter the arguments of North American abolitionists, who subsequently published the retracted chapter in the New York Herald and the US Courrier. Victor Schoelcher and the decree abolishing slavery in the French colonies.

In France, under Arago, the Under-Secretary of State for the Navy and the Colonies was Victor Schoelcher. He didn’t need much convincing to convince the astronomer that all the planets were aligned for him to act.

A Freemason, Schoelcher was a brother of David d’Angers’s lodge, « Les amis de la Vérité » (The Friends of Truth), also known as the Cercle social, in reality « a mixture of revolutionary political club, Masonic lodge and literary salon ».

On March 4, a commission was set up to resolve the problem of slavery in the French colonies. It was chaired by Victor de Broglie, president of the SFAE, to which five of the commission’s twelve members belonged. Thanks to the efforts of François Arago, Henri Wallon and above all Victor Schoelcher, its work led to the abolition of slavery on April 27.


Victor Hugo the abolitionist

Victor Hugo, bust by David d’Angers.



Victor Hugo was one of the advocates of the abolition of slavery in France, but also of equality between what were still referred to as « the races » in the 19th century. « The white republic and the black republic are sisters, just as the black man and the white man are brothers », Hugo asserted as early as 1859. For him, as all men were creations of God, brotherhood was the order of the day.

When Maria Chapman, an anti-slavery campaigner, wrote to Hugo on April 27, 1851, asking him to support the abolitionist cause, Hugo replied: « Slavery in the United States! » he exclaimed on May 12, « is there any more monstrous misinterpretation? » How could a republic with such a fine constitution preserve such a barbaric practice?

Eight years later, on December 2, 1859, he wrote an open letter to the United States of America, published by the free newspapers of Europe, in defense of the abolitionist John Brown, condemned to death.

Starting from the fact that « there are slaves in the Southern states, which indignifies, like the most monstrous counter-sense, the logical and pure conscience of the Northern states », he recounts Brown’s struggle, his trial and his announced execution, and concludes: « there is something more frightening than Cain killing Abel, it is Washington killing Spartacus ».

A journalist from Port-au-Prince, Exilien Heurtelou, thanked him on February 4, 1860. Hugo replied on March 31:

« Hauteville-House, March 31, 1860.

You are, sir, a noble sample of this black humanity so long oppressed and misunderstood.

From one end of the earth to the other, the same flame is in man; and blacks like you prove it. Was there more than one Adam? Naturalists can debate the question, but what is certain is that there is only one God.

Since there is only one Father, we are brothers.
It is for this truth that John Brown died; it is for this truth that I fight. You thank me for this, and I can’t tell you how much your beautiful words touch me.

There are neither whites nor blacks on earth, there are spirits; you are one of them. Before God, all souls are white.

I love your country, your race, your freedom, your revolution, your republic. Your magnificent, gentle island pleases free souls at this hour; it has just set a great example; it has broken despotism. It will help us break slavery. »



Also in 1860, the American Abolitionist Society, mobilized behind Lincoln, published a collection of speeches. The booklet opens with three texts by Hugo, followed by those by Carnot, Humboldt and Lafayette.

On May 18, 1879, Hugo agreed to preside over a commemoration of the abolition of slavery in the presence of Victor Schoelcher, principal author of the 1848 emancipation decree, who hailed Hugo as « the powerful defender of all the underprivileged, all the weak, all the oppressed of this world » and declared:

« The cause of the Negroes whom we support, and towards whom the Christian nations have so much to reproach, must have had your sympathy; we are grateful to you for attesting to it by your presence in our midst. »


A start for the better

Another measure taken by the provisional government of this short-lived Second Republic was the abolition of the death penalty in the political sphere, and the abolition of corporal punishment on March 12, as well as imprisonment for debt on March 19.

In the political sphere, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly were proclaimed on March 4. On March 5, the government instituted universal male suffrage, replacing the censal suffrage in force since 1815. At a stroke, the electorate grew from 250,000 to 9 million. This democratic measure placed the rural world, home to three quarters of the population, at the heart of political life for many decades to come. This mass of new voters, lacking any real civic training, saw in him a protector, and voted en masse for Napoleon III in 1851, 1860 and 1870.


Victor Hugo

Second bust of Victor Hugo, by David d’Angers.

To return to David d’Angers, a lasting friendship united him with Victor Hugo (1802-1885). Recently married, Hugo and David would meet to draw. The poet and the sculptor enjoyed drawing together, making caricatures, painting landscapes or « architectures » that inspired them.

A shared ideal united them, and with the arrival of Napoleon III, both men went into political exile.

Out of friendship, David d’Angers made several busts of his friend. Hugo is shown wearing an elegant contemporary suit.

His broad forehead and slightly frowning eyebrows express the poet’s greatness, yet to come. Refraining from detailing the pupils, David lends this gaze an inward, pensive dimension that prompted Hugo to write: « my friend, you are sending me immortality. »

In 1842, David d’Angers produced another bust of Victor Hugo, crowned with laurel, where this time it was not Hugo the close friend who was evoked, but rather the genius and great man.

Finally, for Hugo’s funeral in 1885, the Republic of Haiti wished to show its gratitude to the poet by sending a delegation to represent it. Emmanuel-Edouard, a Haitian writer, presided over the delegation, and made the following statement at the Pantheon:

The Republic of Haiti has the right to speak on behalf of the black race; the black race, through me, thanks Victor Hugo for having loved and honored it so much, for having strengthened and comforted it.


The four bas-reliefs
of the Gutenberg statue

Tour of the Gutenberg statue in Strasbourg by the author, July 8, 2023.


Once the reader has identified this « great arch » that runs through history, and the ideas and convictions that inspired David d’Angers, he will grasp the beautiful unity underlying the four bas-reliefs on the base of the statue commemorating Gutenberg in Strasbourg.


What stands out is the very optimistic idea that the human race, in all its great and magnificent diversity, is one and fraternal. Once freed from all forms of oppression (ignorance, slavery, etc.), they can live together in peace and harmony.

These bronze bas-reliefs were added in 1844. After bitter debate and contestation, they replaced the original 1840 painted plaster models affixed at the inauguration. They represent the benefits of printing in America, Africa, Asia and Europe. At the center of each relief is a printing press surrounded by characters identified by inscriptions, as well as schoolteachers, teachers and children.

To conclude, here’s an extract from the inauguration report describing the bas-reliefs. Without falling into wokism (for whom any idea of a « great man » is necessarily to be fought), let’s point out that it is written in the terms of the time and therefore open to discussion:

Dissemination of ideas in Europe thanks to the printing press.
Plaster model for the base of the statue of Gutenberg, David d’Angers.

« Europe
is represented by a bas-relief featuring René Descartes in a meditative attitude, beneath Francis Bacon and Herman Boerhaave. On the left are William Shakespeare, Pierre Corneille, Molière and Racine. One row below, Voltaire, Buffon, Albrecht Dürer, John Milton and Cimarosa, Poussin, Calderone, Camoëns and Puget. On the right, Martin Luther, Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Copernicus, Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Hegel, Richter, Klopstock. Rejected on the side are Linné and Ambroise Parée. Near the press, above the figure of Martin Luther, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Rousseau and Lessing. Below the tier, Volta, Galileo, Isaac Newton, James Watt, Denis Papin and Raphaël. A small group of children study, including one African and one Asian.« 

Ideas spread to Asia thanks to the printing press.
Plaster model for the base of the statue of Gutenberg, David d’Angers.

« Asia.
A printing press is shown again, with William Jones and Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron offering books to Brahmins, who give them manuscripts in return. Near Jones, Sultan Mahmoud II is reading the Monitor in modern clothes, his old turban lies at his feet, and nearby a Turk is reading a book. One step below, a Chinese emperor surrounded by a Persian and a Chinese man is reading the Book of Confucius. A European instructs children, while a group of Indian women stand by an idol and the Indian philosopher Rammonhun-Roy.« 

Ideas spread to Africa thanks to the printing press. Plaster model for the base of the statue of Gutenberg, David d’Angers.

« Africa.
Leaning on a press, William Wilberforce hugs an African holding a book, while Europeans distribute books to other Africans and are busy teaching children. On the right, Thomas Clarkson can be seen breaking the shackles of a slave. Behind him, Abbé Grégoire helps a black man to his feet and holds his hand over his heart. A group of women raise their recovered children to the sky, which will now see only free men, while on the ground lie broken whips and irons. This is the end of slavery.« 

Ideas spread in America thanks to the printing press. Plaster model for the base of the statue of Gutenberg, David d’Angers.

« America.
The Act of Independence of the United States, fresh from the press, is in the hands of Benjamin Franklin. Next to him stand Washington and Lafayette, who holds the sword given to him by his adopted homeland to his chest. Jefferson and all the signatories of the Act of Independence are assembled. On the right, Bolivar shakes hands with an Indian. »


America

1884, Statue of Liberty construction site, rue de Chazelles, Paris 17th arrondissement.

We can better understand the words spoken by Victor Hugo on November 29, 1884, shortly before his death, during his visit to the workshop of sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, where the poet was invited to admire the giant statue bearing the symbolic name « Liberty Enlightening the World », built with the help of Gustave Eiffel and ready to leave for the United States by ship. A gift from France to America, it will commemorate the active part played by Lafayette’s country in the Revolutionary War.

Initially, Hugo was most interested in American heroes and statesmen: William Penn, Benjamin Franklin, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Role models, according to Hugo, who enabled the people to progress. For the French politician who became a Republican in 1847, America was the example to follow. Even if he was very disappointed by the American position on the death penalty and slavery.

After 1830, the writer abandoned this somewhat idyllic vision of the New World and attacked the white « civilizers » who hunted down Indians:

« You think you civilize a world, when you inflame it with some foul fever [4], when you disturb its lakes, mirrors of a secret god, when you rape its virgin, the forest. When you drive out of the wood, out of the den, out of the shore, your naive and dark brother, the savage… And when throwing out this useless Adam, you populate the desert with a man more reptilian… Idolater of the dollar god, madman who palpitates, no longer for a sun, but for a nugget, who calls himself free and shows the appalled world the astonished slavery serving freedom!« 

(NOTE 5)


Overcoming his fatigue, in front of the Statue of Liberty, Hugo improvised what he knew would be his last speech:

« This beautiful work tends towards what I have always loved, called: peace between America and France – France which is Europe – This pledge of peace will remain permanent. It was good that it was done!« 

NOTES:


1. If the phrase appears in the Book of Genesis, it could also refer to Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) a novel by Victor Hugo, a great friend of the statue’s sculptor, David d’Angers. We know from a letter Hugo wrote in August 1832 that the poet brought David d’Angers the eighth edition of the book. The scene most directly embodied in the statue is the one in which the character of Frollo converses with two scholars (one being Louis XI in disguise) while pointing with one finger to a book and with the other to the cathedral, remarking: « Ceci tuera cela » (This will kill that), i.e. that one power (the printed press), democracy, will supplant the other (the Church), theocracy, a historical evolution Hugo thought ineluctable.
2. It was the encounter with Asia that brought countless technical know-how and scientific discoveries from the East to Europe, the best-known being the compass and gunpowder. Just as essential to printing as movable type was paper, the manufacture of which was perfected in China at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty (around the year 185). As for printing, the oldest printed book we have to date is the Diamond Sutra, a Chinese Buddhist scripture dating from 868. Finally, it was in the mid-11th century, under the Song dynasty, that Bi Sheng (990-1051) invented movable type. Engraved in porcelain, a viscous clay ceramic, hardened in fire and assembled in resin, they revolutionized printing. As documented by the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, it was the Korean Choe Yun-ui (1102-1162) who improved this technique in the 12th century by using metal (less fragile), a process later adopted by Gutenberg and his associates. The Anthology of Zen Teachings of Buddhist High Priests (1377), also known as the Jikji, was printed in Korea 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible, and is recognized as the world’s oldest book with movable metal type.
3. Etienne Taillemite, Lafayette and the abolition of slavery.
4. Victor Hugo undoubtedly wanted to rebound on the news that reached him from America. The Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic of 1862, which was brought from San Francisco to Victoria, devastated the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, with a mortality rate of over 50% along the entire coast from Puget Sound to southeast Alaska. Some historians have described the epidemic as a deliberate genocide, as the colony of Vancouver Island and the colony of British Columbia could have prevented it, but chose not to, and in a way facilitated it.
5. Victor Hugo, La civilisation from Toute la lyre (1888 and 1893).

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Bruegel, Petrarca and the « Triumph of Death »

The Triumph of Death, Peter Bruegel the Elder, oil on panel, 1562, Prado, Madrid.

By Karel Vereycken, april 2020.

The Triumph of Death? The simple fact that the heir to the throne of England, Prince Charles, and even the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have tested positive to the terrifying coronavirus currently sweeping the planet, tells something to the public.

As some commentators pointed out (no irony) it “gave a face to the virus”. Until then, when an elderly person or a dedicated nurse died of the same, it “wasn’t real”.

Realizing that these “higher-ups” are not part of the immortal Gods of Olympus but are mortals as all of us, brings to my mind “The Triumph of Death”, a large oil painting on panel (117 x 162 cm, Prado, Madrid), generally misunderstood, painted by the Flemish painter Peter Bruegel’s the elder (1525-1569), and thought to be executed between 1562 and his premature demise.

In order to discover, beyond the painting, the intention of the painter’s mind, it is always useful, before rushing into hazardous conclusions, to briefly describe what one sees.

« Below, some people are crawling on their knees, hoping to remain unnoticed ».

What do we see in Bruegel’s « Triumph of Death« ? On the left, a skeleton, symbolizing death itself, holding a sand-glass in its hand, carries away a dead King. Next to him, another skeleton grabs the vast amounts of money no one can take with him into the grave. Death is driving a chariot. Below the charriot some people are crawling on their knees, hoping to remain unnoticed.

People are gambling and amusing themselves…

On the right, at the forefront, people are gambling and amusing themselves. A skeleton playing a musical instruments joins a prosperous young couple engaged in a musical dialogue and clearly unaware that Death is taking over the planet.

The message is simple and clear. No one can escape death, poor or rich, young or old, king or peasant, sick or healthy. When the hour comes, or at the end of all times, all mortals return to the creator since “physical” death triumphs over all of them.

Immortality

Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019)

American thinker Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019), in his speeches and writings, used to remind us, with his typical loving impatience: all human wisdom starts by a personal decision to acknowledge a fact proven without contest: we are all born and each of us, sooner or later, will die. So far, our bodies have all been proven mortal.

The duration of our mortal existence on the clock of the universe, he reminded, is less than a nanosecond.

Therefore, knowing this boundary condition of our mortal existence, we, each of us, have to make a personal sovereign decision: how will I spend the talent of my life ? Will I spend that talent chasing the earthly pleasures of the flesh, or dedicate my life to defending the truth, the beautiful and the good, to the great benefit of humanity as a whole, living in past, present and future ?

In 2011, in a discussion, LaRouche explained what he meant by saying that humanity has the potential to become an “immortal” species:

I live; as long as I live, I may generate ideas.
These conceptions give mankind a chance to move forward.
But then the time will come when I will die.
Now, two things happen: First of all, if these creative principles,
which have been developed by earlier generations,
are realized in the future, that means that mankind is an immortal species. We are not personally immortal;
but to the extent that we’re creative, we’re an immortal species.
And the ideas that we contribute to society
are permanent contributions to the human society.
We are therefore an immortal species,
based on mortal beings. And the key thing in life is to grasp that connection.
To say that we’re creative and die,
doesn’t tell us the story. If we, in our own lives, who are about to die,
can contribute something that is permanent, which will outlive our death, and be a benefit to mankind in future times, we have achieved the purpose of immortality.
And that is the crucial thing.
If people can actually face, with open minds, the fact that we’re each going to die—but look at it in the right way,
then we are impassioned to make the contributions,
to discover the principles, to do the work that is immortal.
Those discoveries of principle which are immortal, which pass on from one generation to the other. And thus, the dead live in the living;
because what the dead do, if they have done that in their lifetime, they are alive, not as in the flesh, but they’re alive in principle.
They’re part, an active part, of human society.

Christian humanism

LaRouche’s outlook, the “moral” obligation to live a “creative” existence on Earth in the image of the Creator, was deeply rooted in the philosophical outlook of both the Platonic and the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose happy marriage gave us the beautiful Christian humanism which, in the early XVth Century, ignited an unprecedented explosion, on a mass-scale and of unseen density of economic, scientific, artistic and cultural achievements, later qualified as a “Renaissance”.

In Plato’s Phaedon, Socrates develops the idea that our mortal body is a constant impediment to philosophers in their search for truth: “It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body” (66c).  To have pure knowledge, therefore, philosophers must escape from the influence of the body as much as is possible in this life. Philosophy (Literally “The love of wisdom”) itself is, in fact, a kind of “preparation for dying” (67e), a purification of the philosopher’s soul from its bodily attachment.

Also the Vulgate’s Latin rendering of Ecclesiastics 7:40 stresses: « in all thy works be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin”. This passage finds expression in the christian ritual of Ash Wednesday, when ashes are placed upon the worshippers’ heads with the words: “Remember Man that You are Dust and unto Dust You Shall Return.”

Is this a morbid ritual? No, it is a philosophy lesson. Christianity itself, as a religion, cherishes God’s own son made man, Jesus, for having renounced to his mortal life for the sake of mankind. It put Jesus’ death at the center. And in the XIVth century, Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471), one of the leading intellectuals and founders of the Brothers of the Common Life, wrote that every Christian should shape his life in the “Imitation of Christ”. Both Nicolaus of Cusa (1401-1464) and Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) were powerfully influenced and trained by this intellectual current.

Concedo Nulli

Medal with Erasmus portrait, casted by Quinten Matsijs in 1519.

Erasmus’ personal armory was the juxtaposition of a skull and a sand-glass, referring to death and time as the boundary conditions of human existence.

In 1519, his friend, the Flemish painter and goldsmith Quentin Matsys (1466-1530) forged a bronze medal to the honor of the great humanist.

On one side of the medal there is an efigee of Erasmus and a Latin inscription informs us that this is “an image taken from life”. At the same time we are told in Greek, « his writings will make him better. known »

The reverse side of the medal shows solemn inscriptions surrounding an unusual image. At the top of a pillar that stands in rough, uneven ground, emerges the head of a young man with a stubbly chin and wild, flowing hair. Like Erasmus on the other side of the medal, he seems to have a faint smile upon his face. On either side of the head are the words “Concedo Nulli”– “I yield to no one.” On the pillar is inscribed Terminus, the name of a Roman god who presided over boundaries. Again bilingual quotations surround a profile. On the left, in Greek, is the instruction, « Keep in mind the end of a long life. » On the right, in Latin, is the stark reminder, « Death is the ultimate boundary of things. »

Verso of the medal

Adapting as his own motto “I yield to no one”, Erasmus took the great risk of using such a daring metaphor. Accused of intolerable arrogance by his sycophants, he underlined that “Concedo Nulli” had to be understood as death’s own statement, not his own. And who could argue with the assertion that death is the terminus that yields to no one?

Mozart, Brahms and Gandhi

Centuries later, the great humanist composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was the exact opposite of a morbid cynic. Revealing his inner mindset, Mozart once said that the secret of all genius, was love for humanity: “neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius”.

But on April 4, 1787, Mozart wrote to his father, Leopold, as he lay dying :

I need hardly tell you how greatly I am longing
to receive some reassuring news from yourself.
And I still expect it ; although I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst.
As death, when we come to consider it closely,
is the true goal of our existence,
I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind,
that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me,
but is indeed very soothing and consoling !
And I thank God for graciously granting me
the opportunity (you know what I mean)
of learning that death is the key
which unlocks the door to our true happiness.
I never lie down at night
without reflecting that –young as I am– I may not live to see another day.

Johannes Brahms 1865 German Requiem, quotes Peter 1:24-25 reminding us that


“For all flesh is as grass,
and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.
The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.
But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.”

Also Mahatma Gandhi, expressed, in his own way, somthing similar, about how one has to live simultaneously with mortality and immortality:

« Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Learn as if you were to live forever. »

Memento Mori and Vanitas

Hieronymus Bosch, detail of « The Garden of Earthly Delights ».

Just as Hieronymus Bosch’s (1450-1516) painting of the “Garden of Earthly Delights” (Prado, Madrid), where the great Dutch master uses the metaphor of naked humans incessantly chasing delicious fruits, calls on the viewer to become aware of his close-to-ridiculous, animal-like attachment to earthly pleasures and calls on his free will and his sens of humor to free himself, Bruegel’s “Triumph of Death” painting, on a first level, is fundamentally nothing else than a complex Memento Mori (Latin “remember that you must die”).

With this painting, Bruegel pays tribute to his intellectual godfather’s motto Concedo Nulli, that is, as Erasmus did in his writings, Bruegel paints the ineluctability of death, not by praising its horror, but with the aim of inspiring his fellow citizens to walk into immortality. In the same way Erasmus’ « In praise of folly » was in fact an inversion of his praise of reason, Brueghel’s « Triumph of Death » was conceived as a triumph of (immortal) life.

For the Catholic faith, the aim of a Memento Mori was to remind (and eventually terrorize) the believer that after death, he or she might end up in Purgatory or worse in Hell if they did not respect the Church and her rites. With the invention of oil painting in the early XVth century, panel paintings of this genre for private homes and small chapels were considered aesthetic objects crafted for the sake of religious and philosophical contemplation.

Hence, starting with the Renaissance, the Memento Mori painting became a much demanded artifact, re-branded in the following centuries as “Vanitas”, Latin for « emptiness » or « vanity ». Especially popular in Holland and then spreading to other European nations, Vanitas paintings typically represented assemblages of numerous symbolic objects such as human skulls, guttering candles, wilting flowers, soap bubbles, butterflies and hourglasses.

Iconography

The aristocrat, Holbein the Younger, Dance of Death.

A first source is of course, the famous designs and woodcuts executed by Erasmus intimate friend and illustrator of his “In Praise of Folly”, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), for his satirical “Dance of Death” (1523), which –breaking with the way the “Dance macabre” was used before by the Flagellants and other madmen to desensitize the population in order to push them into a fatalistic retreat of the outer world– introduces the new philosophical dimension that Bruegel will develop.

vanitas
Vanitas, Philippe de Champaigne, 1671.

The close-to-embarassing anamorphosic representation of a giant skull in Holbein’s work « The Ambassadors » (1533), demonstrates his profound understanding of the Memento Mori metaphor.

Erasmus’ friend Albrecht Dürer‘s engraving « Knight, Death and the Devil » (1513), or his « Saint Jerome in his study » (1514) (with skull and hourglass) are two other examples.

The Ambassadors (1533), Hans Holbein the Younger. On the right, the « anamorphosic » skull on the floor, when seen from a tangent viewpoint.

Bruegel and Italy

Ironically, Peter Bruegel the elder has always been presented as a painter of the Northern School who was completely closed to the “Italian” Renaissance.

The reality is that while rejected the transformation of the Renaissance into a form of mannerism in the XVIth century, he took most of his inspiration directly from two Italian Renaissance sources.

Triumph of Death, fresco (1446) from the Palazzo Sclafini in Palermo, Sicily.

First, of course, the image of Death riding a horse, and even a group of persons such as the young couple engaged in their musical embrace, appear incontestably as taken from the Triumph of Deat”, a vast fresco from 1446 which decorated the walls of the Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo, Sicily. Bruegel’s trip to Southern Italy is a well documented fact.

The second source, which undoubtedly also inspired the painter of the fresco, is a series of allegorical poems known as “I Trionfi” (“The Triumphs”: Triomph of Love, of Chastity, of Death, of Fame, of Time and of Eternity), composed by the great Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, most likely following the “Black Death”, a pandemic outbreak which, starting with the 1345 banking crash, decimated a vast portion of the population of Europe.

Petrarca’s genius was precisely to offer to those terrified with the very idea of having to face their physical mortality, a philosophical answer to their anxiety.

As a result, his Trionfi became rapidly popular, not only in Italy but all over Europe. And for most painters, working on Petrarca’s themes became part of their common repertoire.

BNF
The Master of Petrarca’s Triumphs. Manuscript of the BnF. On the left, The Triumph of Love shows Laura on top of a charriot. On the right (The Triumph of Death) Death stands on Laura’s mortal remains.

To conclude, here is an excerpt (English) of the poem, where Petrarca blasts the mad lust of Kings and Popes for wealth, pleasure and earthly power. In the face of death, he stresses, they are worthless. Petrarca’s wording fits to the detail the images used by Bruegel in his painting The Triumph of Death :

(…) afar we might perceive
    Millions of dead heap’d on th’ adjacent plain;
    No verse nor prose may comprehend the slain
    Did on Death’s triumph wait, from India,
    From Spain, and from Morocco, from Cathay,
    And all the skirts of th’ earth they gather’d were;
    Who had most happy lived, attended there:
    Popes, Emperors, nor Kings, no ensigns wore
    Of their past height, but naked show’d and poor.
    Where be their riches, where their precious gems,
    Their mitres, sceptres, robes, and diadems?
    O miserable men, whose hopes arise
    From worldly joys, yet be there few so wise
    As in those trifling follies not to trust;
    And if they be deceived, in end ’tis just:
    Ah! more than blind, what gain you by your toil?
    You must return once to your mother’s soil,
    And after-times your names shall hardly know,
    Nor any profit from your labour grow;
    All those strange countries by your warlike stroke
    Submitted to a tributary yoke;
    The fuel erst of your ambitious fire,
    What help they now? The vast and bad desire
    Of wealth and power at a bloody rate
    Is wicked,–better bread and water eat
    With peace; a wooden dish doth seldom hold
    A poison’d draught; glass is more safe than gold;

Whether Bruegel, who saw undoubtedly the fresco in Palermo during his trip in the 1550s, had read Petrarca’s poem remains an open question. It can be said that many of his direct friends were familiar with the Italian poet.

In Antwerp, the painter was a frequent guest of the Scola Caritatis, a humanist circle animated by one Hendrick Nicolaes, where Brueghel met poets, translaters, painters, engravers (Cock, Golzius) mapmakers (Mercator), cosmographers (Ortelius) and bookmakers such as the Antwerp printer Christophe Plantijn, who’se renowned printing shop would print Petrarca’s poetry.

Also in Antwerp, indicating how popular Petrarca’s poetry had become in the Low Countries and France, the franco-flemish Orlandus Lassus (1532-1594) published his first musical compositions, including his madrigals on each of the six Trionfi of Petrarca, among which the « Triumph of Death ».

Conclusion

All evil, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) hoped, can give birth to something good, far bigger and superior to the evil that provoked it. Therefore, we can hope that the current pandemic breakdown crisis will lead some of the leading decision-makers, with our help, to reflect on the sens and purpose of their lives. The worst would be to return to yesterday’s “normalcy” since that kind of “normal” is exactly what drove the planet currently to the verge of extinction.

At last, it should be stressed that in the same way Lyndon LaRouche, by his ruthless (Concedi Nulli) commitment to defend the sacred creative nature of every human individual, contributed to the enduring immortality of Plato, Petrarca, Erasmus and Bruegel, it is up to each of us to carry even further that battle.

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Saint-Jerome (1521), Lucas Van Leyden (1494-1533)
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