Piazza della Signoria (Florence)

Piazza della Signoria is an L-shaped square in front of the Palazzo Vecchio (Florence’s town hall) which is located near Ponte Vecchio and Piazza del Duomo. It is the focal point of the origin of the Florentine Republic. The Signoria was the government of medieval and Renaissance Florence which consisted of nine members, the Priori, who were chosen from the ranks of the guilds of the city. The piazza was already a central square in the original Roman town Florentia, surrounded by a theatre, public baths and a workshop for dyeing textiles. The Piazza has been painted on numerous occasions. Canaletto’s and Bernardo Belotto’s depictions are among the most famous ones.

Art historians have associated cultural splendour with economic prosperity. Athens in its golden age from about 500 BC promoted architecture and art, and witnessed the birth of theatre, politics, and philosophy. What was the catalyst of such an explosion of creative energy? Athens was a cosmopolitan city, open to various outside influences. Military dominance enabled it to exact tributes from its colonies that funded programs of public art. Democracy gave the pride of freedom to its citizens.

By 1460 Antwerp was one of the largest cities in Europe with a total population of some 100,000 citizens. Of all those inhabitants, just twenty were accounted for as professional painters. A century later, as many as 300 master painters in the city were registered as official members of the Guild of St Luke who were running their independent work-shops and instructing apprentices.

What was the driving force behind this cultural eruption? In the course of the fourteenth century Antwerp had grown into Western Europe’s dominant trade and financial centre. In parallel to economic prosperity, an explosive cultural activity developed within the walls of the city. By the sixteenth century art, weaving and printing had reached unparalleled levels of perfection. Enlightened humanism created a mental atmosphere that proved conducive to the pursuit of art and science. Antwerp became the most vibrant cultural city in Europe. If the arts were initially stimulated by commissions from the Church and gentry, increasingly works of art were created on spec, in other words, they were produced for the open market rather than on order or commission. The Guild of St Luke took a pragmatic approach to this commercialization of art, which itself was a direct result of the ever increasing demand for luxury goods.

Artistic innovation has always been propelled by urban energies. Athens promoted intellectual endeavour, Antwerp stimulated printing and tapestry-weaving, Florence revitalized the fine arts, and London flowered from Elizabethan times through drama and theatre. During the seventeenth century freethinking Amsterdam dominated all other cities in banking, industry and science, supporting (and exporting) a density of artists who were painting for wealthy burgher clients.

After 1800, Vienna came to the fore in musical renewal first, and subsequently witnessed an outburst of energy in avant-garde painting. Later, Paris ruled the arts. In the early twentieth century, Weimar Berlin led the way in cinema. What makes a particular city innovative in a specific field? And why does that creativity blaze for a short period and then die down? If such ‘golden’ ages are rare, by what alchemy do they occur? All cities mentioned above flourished economically which led historians like Robert Vaughan in The Age of Great Cities (1843) to conclude that ‘society becomes possessed of the beautiful in art, only as cities become prosperous and great’.

John Maynard Keynes, in A Treatise on Money, boldly remarked that, as a nation, England was in an economic position ‘to afford Shakespeare at the moment when he presented himself’. Great artists flourish in an urban atmosphere of buoyancy and freedom from economic restraints. They tend to work in cities that are cosmopolitan, outward looking, and in the throes of social change. The theory has been repeated time and again. It would be naïve, however, to link artistic innovation exclusively to prosperity. Wealth in our age is everywhere, but creative talent is hard to find. Financial reward has little to do with artistic achievement – ‘Muse and Mammon cannot be worshipped at the same altar’, as Martin Archer Shee observed in his Elements of Art (1808). What makes an innovative milieu is not affluence itself, but the concentration of talent that it may engender. A culture benefits from the presence of ambitious artists scrambling to eke out a living in a competitive environment. It is a principle the Medicis fully understood when they assembled an array of competing talent to embellish the old city.

Florence prospered through its booming textile industry, trade and banking. The Florentine gold florin was the standard coinage throughout Europe and Tuscan bankers established branches in such important cities as London, Geneva en Bruges. Florence was central to the Renaissance thanks to the funding provided by the Medici dynasty who wanted their city-state to be an awe-inspiring urban centre. Art was an expression of civic pride. Around a hundred palaces were built in Florence in the fifteenth century alone. In a city with a population of some 60,000 that is a staggering number. Talented artists and architects, painters and sculptors, were attracted to Florence and rewarded handsomely for their work. These individuals included geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Brunelleschi, making Florence the centre of gravity in the Italian Renaissance. Its military power boosted the image of being heir to the Roman Republic. Its cultural pride attracted intellectuals and artists from all over the peninsula and from abroad. Florence was a cosmopolitan place where foreigners shared in the pride of the city.

One of those immigrants was Bruges-born painter Jan van der Straet, better known as Stradanus, who spent most of his career in Italy. Having joined Antwerp’s Guild of St Luke around 1545, he left for Italy via Lyons. After six months in Venice, Stradanus settled in Florence, designing tapestry-cartoons for Grand Duke Cosimo I de Medici. From 1550 to 1553, he was probably in Rome, first collaborating on the Belvedere gallery in the Vatican and later assisting Francesco Salviati, whose style influenced him greatly. Back in Florence, Stradanus worked under Giorgio Vasari on frescoes and tapestry cartoons for the Palazzo Vecchio, an activity he continued as an independent artist in the 1570s.

Stradanus’s themes and manner of representation became an inherent part of the decorative tradition of the Medici court. In Florence, he developed a descriptive style for the iconography of nobility connected to his Flemish roots in depicting animals, nature, and scenes of every day life. Central to his activity as designer was his fine draughtsmanship. Cosimo I employed Stradanus to design tapestries with hunting scenes which turned out to be popular and inspired him to start producing prints of a similar nature. In collaboration with the renowned Antwerp printmakers, Hieronymus Cock and the Galle family, he produced a vast number of prints using the buyant Antwerp art market as a base for the distribution of his work. He also contributed two paintings to Francesco I de Medici’s famous ‘Studiolo’ in the Palazzo Vecchio (which includes ‘The alchemist’s studio’), a small private room in which the eccentric Duke kept his private museum of paintings and a collection of precious objects. It was also a place where this strange man would find seclusion from his wife, family, and court. Not long after Francesco’s death, the Studiolo was dismantled (only to be partially reconstructed in the twentieth century as a Medici-oddity).

Stradanus created some stunning views of Florence in the 1550s, images of the Via Larga, Ponte a Sante Trinita, Piazza del Mercato, Piazza de Duomo, or Piazza San Giovanni that reflect the tremendous pride Florentines took in the splendour of their city. Highlight is his 1598 fresco of ‘Firework at the Piazza della Signoria’. In their quest to stay close to the public, Renaissance rulers adopted the old trick of entertaining the masses. Impressive displays were part of various festivities. Even though the Chinese had invented fireworks, Europe surpassed them in pyrotechnic development in the fourteenth century, which coincides with the time the gun was invented. Shot and gunpowder for military use was made by skilled tradesmen who also produced fireworks for peace or victory celebrations. During the Renaissance, these became a true art form, when sculptors, craftsmen, and pyrotechnicists worked together to create miniature castles adorned with fountains and wheels that would spray brilliant orange sparks, or spin so quickly that the viewer witnessed a spectacular ‘ring of fire’ during a nighttime display. Italians in particular were known for their elaborate exhibits. The link between the military and pyrotechnics was maintained for some considerable time. By the mid-seventeenth century fireworks were used for entertainment on an unprecedented scale in Europe, being popular at pleasure resorts and public gardens.

In his Pyrotechnia, or a Discourse of Artificiall Fire-Works for Pleasure (1635), the first treatise in English to deal exclusively with the subject of display fireworks, John Babington, Master of his Majesties Ordnance for Charles I, provided directions for making rockets, stars, wheels, and ground-wheels that were more explicit than any offered by previous writers. He was at his best when describing the complex devices and intricate displays in which his age delighted.

When beauty becomes dislodged from functionality, when urban splendour is celebrated for its own sake without consideration of purpose, when wealth and material interests overshadow spritual concerns, then preachers of doom never fail to turn up, pointing out that every metropolis is destined to become a necropolis.

In Florence it was Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola who raised his voice and finger to warn his fellow citizens of imminent ruin. Having ousted the Medicis from the city, he installed a reign of religious tyranny. He packed out Brunelleschi‘s Santa Maria del Fiore, famous for its massive dome, where he delivered rousing sermons against the extravagance of Florentines. He protested against the wealth of the church and preached against the accumulation of worldly possessions. Savonarola declared that the syphilis epidemic sweeping Italy was God’s punishment upon transgressors. He decreed that obesity was a sign of the deadly sin of gluttony. Obese people were set upon by his supporters with sticks and whips. Savonarola called for a ‘bonfire of vanities’ in which people were to burn ‘sinful’ paintings and luxuries (mirrors, cosmetics, musical instruments, manuscripts of secular songs, playing cards, books by Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio and others). A huge pyramid of ‘vanities’ was built in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria. The bonfire was lit on Shrove Tuesday (7 February). As the entire Signoria assembled from the balcony of the Palazzo Veccio, flames reached over sixty feet high with the crowds singing a Te Deum.

After a while Florentines began to ridicule his puritanical edicts. His crusade against the abuses of the church would lead to his downfall. Pope Alexander VI restricted Savonarola from preaching and when he refused to do so, he was excommunicated. His reign would not come to an end until 1498 when he was accused of sedition and uttering false prophesies. He was jailed in the Bargello and tortured for several days, but never recanted his words. On 23 May 1498, in front of the fountain of Neptune, he was hanged together with two of his loyal disciples, Silvestro Maruffi and Domenico de Pescia, from a huge cross and burned until nothing but ashes remained. After Savonarola’s execution Florence rapidly recovered from the trauma and continued to thrive. Only a month after his death, on the festival of San Giovanni, the Florentines were entertained by the spectacular sight of a set piece of fireworks representing a giant, a pig, and some dogs. These were allegorical figures of the giant Francesco Valori (Gonfaloniere = leader of the Signoria under Savonarola), the pig Savonarola, and the dogs were the followers of the preacher. It must have been some party.

Rue des Moulins (Paris)

The Rue des Moulins dates back to 1624 and is located in the first arrondissement of the city. Two windmills once stood on the hill – hence Rue des Moulins and nearby Rue Saint-Honoré which is dedicated to the patron saint (Honorius of Amiens) of millers, bakers, pastry chefs, and confectioners. One of the windmills, the Moulin Radet was dismantled and rebuilt at the junction of Rue Lepic and Rue Girardon in Monmartre. The notoriety of the street was established during the last decade of the nineteenth century. That was largely due to the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a post-Impressionist painter and illustrator whose immersion in the theatrical life of Paris yielded a series of provocative images of the extravagant 1890s life-style of the capital. Prostitution is central to his oeuvre.

Prostitutes play a central role in the European novel of the nineteenth-century century. There are Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Dickens’s Nancy, Collins’s Mercy Merrick, Gaskell’s Ruth, Hugo’s Fantine, Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier, De Maupassant’s Elisabeth Rousset, Zola’s Nana, Fontane’s Effi Briest, Wedekind’s Lulu, to mention but a few of the ‘fallen women’ that appear in realistic and naturalistic novels of the age. Prostitutes inspired many negative stereotypes. However, as victims of a culture that marginalized her, the prostitute offered a perfect vehicle for writers to criticize bourgeois hypocrisy. The interest in the world of brothels and courtisanes extends well into the twentieth century and is not limited to literature.

Hungarian photographer and filmmaker George Brassaï (real name: Gyula Halász) published photographs of brothels in his 1935 book Voluptés de Paris. In 1952, Robert Miquet (using the pseudonym Romi) published a voluminous illustrated work on Maisons closes: l’histoire, l’art, la littérature, les moeurs. Released in 2002, the Parisian Musée de l’Érotisme exhibits Polissons et galipettes (Rascals and somersaults), Michel Reilhac’s compilation of film clips from silent pornographic films made between 1905 and 1930 in France that were intended to be shown in brothels.

Ever since the works of Titian and Giorgione, paintings of brothels and prostitutes appear frequently over the centuries. In many cases the bond between artist and sitter was a close one. Margaret Lemans was of Flemish descent and had settled in London some time in 1629. Little is known of her life, even the spelling of her name is in doubt – but her image will last. She was probably still in her teens and working as a prostitute when Anthony van Dyck made Margaret his mistress allowing her to preside over his grand properties in Blackfriars and Eltham where he entertained Charles I and many noble patrons.

Van Dyck has been the most successful immigrant artist ever to arrive on British soil. The English were so overwhelmed by his talent that they were willing to forgive his Catholicism. In fact, most of his clients were Puritans and nobody more so than Philip, Lord Wharton, who bought no less than twenty paintings of the master. While noble women were queuing up to have their portrait painted by Van Dyck, the master himself was completely taken in by an ordinary Flemish girl who had been forced to make a living out of prostitution. He painted her image over and again. Twelve of the paintings for which she posed survive, five of which are portraits. It is not the subject matter that is relevant in this context, but the intimacy between artist and model. It appears that such a caring relationship is in no way exceptional. Artists identify with prostitutes because the creative mind tends to be abused by society in a similarly exploitative and disposable fashion. There is an element of mutual recognition, the artist realizing that Anch’io sono [una] puttana.

Toulouse-Lautrec was born in 1864 into the provincial interbred aristocracy of Albi, in south-western France. At the age of thirteen, he broke his left femur, and a year later, he broke his right, after which his legs stopped growing (possibly a consequence of pyknodysostosis, a genetic disease of the bone, related to his family’s consanguineous marriages). During his long convalescence, he spent much of his time drawing and painting. He persuaded his parents to allow him to go to Paris. In 1882 he entered the atelier of Léon Bonnat, transferring later to Fernand Cormon’s studio where he met his lifelong friends Louis Anquetin, Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh.

His first illustrations were published in 1886 in the Montmartrois journals Le Courrier français and Le Mirliton. His subsequent work is intimately connected to this lively Parisian district where he focused on the life of the dance halls, cafés and concert halls. He created his first lithograph, the famous poster ‘La Goulue’, for the Moulin Rouge in December 1891 and went on to design a further twenty-nine posters as well as hundreds of prints, drawings and paintings.

Catalan-born bookmaker Joseph Oller (inventor of ‘Parimutuel’ betting which spread across most race tracks around the world) lived in Paris for most of his life. From 1876 onwards, he focused his attention on the entertainment industry. He opened various venues such as Fantaisies Oller, La Bombonnière, Théâtre des Nouveautés, Nouveau Cirque, Montagnes Russes, and Olympia (the first music-hall in Paris). In 1889 he inaugurated the famous Moulin Rouge. He also managed Le Jardin de Paris, a café-concert on the Champs Élysées, which was the summer outpost of the Moulin Rouge. Both establishments are associated with Jane Avril and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Lautrec portrayed Jane’s debut at the Jardin. A beautiful and extremely thin girl with pale skin and tresses of red gold hair, Jane Avril soon became infamous for performing the cancan at the Jardin. Lautrec had been employed to produce an advertising illustration. The couple, in spite of their different backgrounds, soon became close friends. Jane (originally named Jeanne) was said to be the daughter of a courtesan, with an absent father rumoured to have been a foreign aristocrat. Her youth was an unhappy and abusive one. She left home when she was thirteen years old, soon afterwards ending up in the care of the Salpêtrière psychiatric hospital in Paris, a desperate place where many ‘bad’ women were imprisoned without trial or sent by their families. Throughout her life she suffered from nervous disorders. These however did not interrupt a glittering career.

Lautrec painted her time and again, and in various moods and poses, glamorous, graceful, melancholic, tired, or nervous. It is doubtful that the two ever became lovers. Lautrec had his own inhibitions and insecurities. In 1899, suffering from the effects of alcoholism and syphilis, he was institutionalized for several months at an asylum near Paris but he returned to drinking soon after his release. On 9 September 1901, he suffered a stroke and died at his mother’s estate, the Château de Malromé, aged thirty-six.

For a period Lautrec resided at no. 24 Rue des Moulins. This was the address of a luxurious brothel, a ‘grande tolérance’ consisting of ornate rooms including a Chinese salon, a Gothic chamber, and a domed Moorish Hall. It was a well-run business, operated to strict rules of conduct, and proper schedules. Despite his aristocratic upbringing, Toulouse-Lautrec found a way to accept and feel accepted by the entertainment industry. Sex workers were his friends, and he treated them as equals.
He produced more than forty paintings and drawings of the inhabitants of Rue des Moulins. It must be the most famous brothel in the world.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there were some 34,000 professional ‘filles à numéro’ (prostitutes) registered in Paris. The brothels were licensed and monitored by the police, while sex workers were subject to routine medical inspections by the ‘dispensaire de salubrité’. The majority of women were forced into prostitution in order to look after themselves and/or family. Job prospects were scarce. Alexandre Parent-Duchatlet noted in his famous 1836 study De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris that few professions were open to women. For many, prostitution was sheer survivalism. Prostitution was a profitable trade by which women improved their circumstances, helped to educate siblings and often saved enough to open a shop or lodging house.

At one time, a job as a seamstress was a respected position. Honour was an important draw as it could help to better marriage prospects. More often than not, seamstresses worked out of their own homes, choosing which assignments to take or leave. The down sides to becoming a seamstress were poor pay and a two year apprenticeship. Many families who needed their daughters to work could not afford two years of lost wages. Hence, the job of a seamstress was reserved to the relatively well-to-do. All that changed after the (belated) industrialization of France. Mechanization and foreign competition led the demise of the skilled artisans who were previously employed in those trades. This change occurred first and most dramatically in the textile industry in centres such as Normandy and Rouen. The skilled and gentle seamstress of former days now became a low class factory worker often with questionable morals. For many decades, the seamstress had been romanticized as a paragon of female virtue. The idealized image would soon be shattered. Hardship took its toll. Prostitution offered a far more profitable trade which took considerable moral strength to resist. The figure of the whore hovered behind the poverty-stricken seamstress, and they ultimately represented two halves of the same whole.

The connection is highlighted by Guy de Maupassant in La Maison Tellier (1881). The brothel is located in the small town of Fécamp, Normandy. Madame herself came of a respectable peasant family. The town accepts her business without moral condemnation. Locals simply say: ‘It is a paying profession’. The irony of the story is located in the interplay between the notion of ‘a good job’ and the conventional accusation of immorality. The revealing remark is that Madame had accepted her position as a bordello-keeper without prejudice, as if she might have taken up that of a milliner or a seamstress. The association of the profession with prostitution is also suggested by Jean Béraud in his delightful (undated) Impressionist painting ‘La modiste sur Les Champs Élysées’.

Toulouse Lautrec’s painting‘L’inspection médicale, Rue des Moulins’ dates from 1894. He created this scene from personal observations. In a room richly decorated with autumnal colours and Chinese patterns, two women stand in line. One is blonde and more mature than her smaller red-haired colleague. Both have lifted their chemises above their knee-length stockings to reveal naked buttocks and thighs. With her dress gathered in front to preserve what remains of her dignity, the blonde looks tired and resigned. The younger woman is more assertive. With bright red hair and rouged cheeks she approaches her assignation without inhibition. A third woman in a turquoise kimono walks away from them towards a group of people below a large window through which can be seen a clock tower (perhaps the nearby Bibliothèque Nationale!).

Lautrec paints these women without moralism, sentimentality, or contempt. Despite his personal carnal pursuits as a paying client in the house, there is no erotic exploitation, no sensationalism. He simply records the medical routine to which these women were submitted. Physical examinations served to protect upright citizens from the physical and mental ravages of syphilis, one of the blessings Columbus had brought back to Europe from the New World. The first written records of an outbreak of syphilis in Europe occurred in 1494/5 in Naples during a French invasion. The disease may have been transmitted to the French via Spanish mercenaries serving under King Charles during that siege. During the Renaissance syphilis, generally known as the ‘French disease’, was a major cause of death in Europe. The term was first applied in 1530 by physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro in his epic poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus. There, the shepherd Syphilis is punished by Apollo with the disease for his defiant attitude. From this character the poet derived the medical term which he introduced in his medical study on contagious diseases De contagionibus. Other names in circulation were great pox, lues venereal, or Cupid’s disease. It was not until 1905 that the causative organism was first identified which led to more effective forms of treatment. Until the advent of penicillin in 1943, ‘cures’ for syphilis were based on the use of heavy metals such as mercury or, as the saying goes, ‘a night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury’.

In Europe during the nineteenth century syphilis took on epidemic forms. More than fifteen per cent of the adult population and seventy per cent of sex workers were estimated to have been infected with the disease. In Britain, this led to moral panic during the 1850s and 1860s. The response was a sustained campaign to drive ‘fallen women’ from the streets by representing them as a depraved element in society, doomed to disease and death. Refuges were opened and men like future Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone patrolled at night to persuade girls to leave their life of ‘vice’. The introduction of the Contagious Diseases Acts whereby prostitute women were medically examined and detained if deemed to suffer from venereal disease gave rise to a notable reform campaign. Josephine Butler’s anti-contagious diseases movement argued that enforced medical examinations effectively encouraged prostitution and did not prevent the curse of syphilis. In the nineteenth century syphilis was known as the artist’s disease. A whole alphabet of outstanding creators and thinkers suffered or died from the affliction, Baudelaire, Beau Brummell, Delius, Donizetti, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Heine, Keats, Manet, De Maupassant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Schubert, Smetana, Tolstoy, Vrubel, Wilde, Wolf, and many others. Toulouse-Lautrec painted this world which prompted Edgar Degas to make the crude observation that some of Toulouse-Lautrec’s female portraits ‘stank of syphilis’.

 

High Street (Glasgow)

Glasgow High Street is the city’s oldest and historically most significant street that formed a direct north-south artery between the Cathedral of St Mungo (patron saint of the city – later: Glasgow Cathedral) in the north, to Glasgow Cross (location of the Tolbooth Steeple where the public hangings in the city took place) and the banks of the River Clyde. East of the Cathedral is the Necropolis, one of Britain’s largest Victorian cemeteries – some 3,500 monuments – which one enters by crossing the Bridge of Sighs (named after its Venetian predecessor). Built at the time (1831) that Glasgow was the second city of the Empire, it is a memorial to the merchant patriarchs of the city and contains the remnants of almost every eminent Glaswegian of its day.

Predating the cemetery by a handful of years is the statue of John Knox who, sitting on a column on top of the hill, keeps a Presbyterian eye over the Cathedral and High Street. From 1460 to 1864, the original buildings of the University of Glasgow (established on 4 January 1450 with a Bull granted to Bishop William Turnbull by Pope Nicholas) were located at the junction of High Street and Duke Street, before moving to the West End. The old college buildings and grounds were sold to the City Union Railway Company and the proceedings used for new premises at Gilmorehill. The remains of the old gateway and the gilded arms of Charles II are incorporated into the gatehouse of the new university campus. With industrialization and the massive expansion of the city, the importance of High Street and the medieval heart of Old Glasgow diminished as the administrative functions of the city moved westwards into what is now known as the Merchant City area.

The old town soon fell into neglect. After the city passed an act through Parliament to demolish the run-down districts of central Glasgow in 1866, Fife-born photographer Thomas Annan was asked to record the buildings that were coming down. The area had become one of the worst urban slums in Britain and Annan worked in dark and dank conditions as bad for photography as they were for human beings. Between 1868 and 1871 he produced thirty-five photographs of the closes and wynds (Scots word for a narrow path) of old Glasgow.

The series is the first record of slum housing in the history of photography. Most of the images show dark, narrow passages between damp and dirty buildings in overpopulated streets of extreme deprivation. Annan initially printed his wet-plate collodion negatives onto albumen and carbon paper, but in 1900 issued them as photogravures (a technique to make prints that would not fade, by creating photographic images on plates that could then be etched and printed using a traditional press) in The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow on which his posthumous reputation rests. Through his dispassionate attention to visual detail, Annan initiated what later came to be known as the documentary tradition. He recorded various shots of the old High Street.

Early ballads were narrative songs derived from folk culture that predated printing. Originally perpetuated by word of mouth, many ballads survive because they were recorded on broadsides. Gallows songs, printed for sale at public executions, were a popular form of broadside. There were hundreds of such songs in circulation telling the stories of murderers, pirates, traitors and other felons. Musical notation was rarely printed, as tunes were usually established favourites. The term ‘ballad’ applied broadly to any kind of topical or popular verse. In London, the Seven Dials area was the major centre for broadside production in the nineteenth century.

Glasgow’s equivalent was the Saltmarket which had long been a centre of the cheap print trade, whether for chapbooks, speeches, religious tracts, garlands or broadside ballads. At the end of the eighteenth-century chapbooks seem to have been the most popular production, but by the middle of the nineteenth century broadsides (known as ‘slips’) had taken over in public demand. Broadside printers were in the wholesale market. Many people were involved in the trade: the poet who composed the ballad, the wood-engraver who illustrated it, and the printer. The retail side was handled by the pedlars who bought ballads in the Saltmarket to sing in the Trongate and Gallowgate, or to carry to markets and fairs in the other towns of Scotland. Pedlars, as evidenced by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of a ‘Marskramer’, usually travelled on foot, carrying their wares.

To sell a ballad one had to create an audience. Successful pedlars were adept at street theatre. They were orators and comedians, selling themselves as much as their products. They were often rag-pickers as well. Rags were collected for the making of paper used in the production of cheap print. Of all the nineteenth-century Glasgow pedlars the most famous was William Cameron, better known by his nickname ‘Hawkie’. He was born near Saint Ninians, Stirlingshire, around 1790. Lame through a childhood accident, he was first apprenticed to the tailor’s trade, but he gave this up to become an evangelical field preacher. It was on his return journey from a preaching trip to Newcastle miners in 1815 that Cameron first begged for a living, and thus started his career as a ‘gangrel’ (Scots word for a drifter). Despite his decrepit appearance (as caught on the 1913 tipped-in halftone print of Hawkie), he became a well-known character on the streets of Glasgow and in the High Street in particular.

Cameron began to sell ‘speeches’ and other cheap print after his arrival in Glasgow in 1818. He was inspired by the success of Glaswegian street character ‘Jamie Blue’ McIndoe. Hawkie either bought ready-made stock at Saltmarket printers or wrote his own pieces. It was from one of the latter, a satirical response to the prophecy of the destruction of Glasgow made by a tailor called Ross, that he earned his nickname. It was written in the character of ‘Hawkie, a twa-year-auld quey [cow] frae Aberdour’ who prophesied the destruction of the Briggate area of Glasgow under a tide of whisky. The name ‘Hawkie’ stuck to the author ever after. He travelled to sell his wares in other towns of Scotland such as Paisley and Edinburgh, but his home patch (after an agreement with Jamie Blue, who worked the Saltmarket and Gallowgate) was Glasgow High Street and the Trongate. He clearly made a success of this trade, largely through his talents as a showman. Examples of his wit and street ‘patter’ feature in many memoirs of the city, including Glasgow Characters (1875) by the editor of the Reformer’s Gazette, Peter Mackenzie (known as ‘Loyal Peter’).

In the 1840s Hawkie spent increasing amounts of time in prison or hospital, both occasioned by his chronic alcoholism. He died in Glasgow City Poorhouse in September 1851. A lively insight into Hawkie’s life is supplied by his own autobiography. Although he wrote the story of his life at the request of David Robertson, a Glasgow bookseller, while he was a winter inmate of the Glasgow Town’s Hospital between 1840 and 1850, the text was not to reach the general public till 1888, when John Strathesk (real name: John Tod) edited it. This meant that the manuscript inevitably underwent editorial (linguistic) interventions. Nevertheless, the Autobiography of a Gangrel is both a rich source of information on the production and selling of street literature and a detailed guide of how to survive in a condition of extreme urban poverty.

Plaza Dorrego (Buenos Aires)

Plaza Dorrego is a square in the heart of San Telmo, the oldest barrio (district) of the city. It is named after statesman and soldier Manuel Dorrego who, in the 1820s, twice acted as Governor of Buenos Aires. In the nineteenth century, it was the main residential area of the city and Plaza Dorrego was its focal point. Located at the intersection of Humberto Primero and Defensa streets, its surroundings are full of bars where musicians and dancers perform tango exhibitions. Both the 1997 drama film The Tango Lesson by British director Sally Potter, and the 2002 crime film Assassination Tango produced and directed by Robert Duvall (who also stars in the movie), were shot in the locality.

The sensual plasticity of the tango has inspired numerous contemporary painters. Brazilian-born Juarez Machado settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1966. In a number of paintings he has been able to grasp the grace and embrace of the dance. One of the strongest painted images is Mariano Otero’s ‘Tango de Passion’.

Born in Madrid but living in France, the tango is a recurring theme in his works. Apparently, he is unable to dance the tango himself, but he has captured its essence with an understanding touch. The intimacy of the dance is reflected in an idiomatic expression. It takes two to tango (at times used with negative connotations) suggests that certain activities cannot be performed alone, making love, fighting a duel, playing ping pong, or dance the tango. The 1952 song ‘Takes Two to Tango’ was written by Al Hoffman and Dick Manning. It has the following catching refrain:

Takes two to tango, two to tango
Two to really get the feeling of romance.
Lets do the tango, do the tango
Do the dance of love.

Two different versions, one by Pearl Bailey and the other by Louis Armstrong, made it a hit in that same year. In Australia, during the 1930s, the phrase was used to indicate premarital sex. Tango and eroticism are inextricably linked.

Tango is the manifestation of an immigrant culture. It is impossible to reconstruct its history, because there are no written sources. Its roots are multiple. Both tango music and dance have indirect African, Cuban, and Andalusian influences, added to regional music and popular lyrics. The word itself is of African origin, meaning drums or dance. The Argentine Tango developed between 1860 and 1890 in Buenos Aires. It emerged out of the immigrant culture of Argentina’s dockside slums, on the shores of the Riachuelo River, and in clubs and brothels of southern Buenos Aires. The social class in which it developed was a mixture of regional people and European immigrants made up by sailors, craftsmen and workers. They frequented the establishments to escape the daily pressures of life and loneliness and identified with lyrics that expressed the hardship of life. It was danced by pairs of men, sometimes by prostitutes and their companions. The steps are sexual and aggressive, the music permeated with longing and despair, as the dancers act out the ritualistic relationship of prostitute and pimp. Buenos Aires society considered tango to be a ‘reptile from the brothels’, an indecent entertainment associated with violence and illicit sex. Clubs where the tango was danced were raided and closed by police. But its progress was unstoppable. The first tango bands were trios, which included a flute, violin and guitar players.

Towards the end of 1890 the bandoneon (a German import) was added to the line-up, sometimes replacing the flute. However, it appears to be that bands changed constantly and they were formed by whoever showed up on the day of the performance. The first tangos lacked lyrics and the musicians improvized them on the spot. The words were more often than not vulgar or obscene. The tango was a song of the streets. Some time later it spread to the city and arrived at places like the Café Tarana, known as Café Hansen, and other more upmarket resorts. It was only then that women started to take part in the dance. In 1904, the legendary Casimiro Ain (son of a Basque immigrant) appeared at the Opera Theatre in Buenos Aires as a dancer of tango joined by his wife. The dance had gained some respectability at last – but it would take some time for the tango to lose its familiar associations with brawls and brothels.

French-born immigrant Carlos (Charles) Gardel is a prominent figure in the history of the tango. He was born in December 1890 out of wedlock. Berthe Gardès left Toulouse not long after in order to escape the social stigma of being an unmarried mother. She and baby arrived in Buenos Aires on 11 March 1893. Carlos grew up and spent most of his life in the Abasto area of the city where, outside the Abasto Market, a statue honours his career and legacy (the local underground station carries his name as well). During his lifetime he was known as ‘El Morocho del Abasto’ (the dark-haired guy from Abasto). Together with lyricist and long-time collaborator Alfredo Le Pera, Gardel wrote many classic tangos. His baritone voice and dramatic phrasing of lyrics made an enormous impact on his audience (on women in particular). With more than 800 records to his name he was the soul of tango and a cultural hero who made the dance Argentina’s national treasure. Gardel died in an airplane crash at the height of his career (and so did Le Pera). Millions of his fans went into mourning. The popularity of the tango hit Europe just before World War One. Its introduction into France, England and elsewhere sparked a controversy that had been at the heart of European musical appreciation throughout the ages.

Boethius’s De institutione musica was one of the first musical works to be printed in Venice in 1491/2. It was written toward the beginning of the sixth century and shaped music in Europe for several centuries. Boethius came to be viewed as a primary authority on Greek musical thought. In the first chapter of De musica, the author stresses that music can both establish and destroy morality. The ears are a direct path to the soul for the formation of a moral awareness. When rhythms and modes have penetrated the soul, they affect the psyche with their own character. For that reason, socio-cultural observers have treated music and dance with suspicion. An effective means for disrupting civilized society is through a music that inordinately stimulates the passions. The Christian Church has been a persistent critic of song and dance. Early penance books more often than not contain admonishments against such forms of entertainment. Associating dance with promiscuity, Protestant reformers viewed it with a mixture of fear and resentment. Shoes were made for walking, not dancing. Dance cannot be enjoyed without ‘evil communications’. Hence, music was the work of the devil, and its demoniac power had caught many – especially women – by means of a disturbing sensual power. The nineteenth century novel presents the reader with a procession of women who are seduced into adultery under the influence of music (Wagner’s music in particular). Many cultural critics paid tribute to Plato who had banished music from his commonwealth.

The history of dance is a confrontational one. With its introduction in Europe jazz was regularly identified with the ‘spirit of the times’. Jazz as an expression of the age formed the essence of many articles and essays during the 1920s. Precisely the same had happened in earlier days with the introduction of other styles of music and dance such as the waltz, polka, and tango. Music reflected the acceleration of life, the intensity of urban existence, the sexualization of society. Composers established the link between creative activity and the demands of modernity. In 1869, C. Apitius created a waltz (opus 37) which he called ‘Der Zeitgeist’. The catalogue of copyright entries for the year 1909 of the Library of Congress makes mention of the ‘Zeitgeist Walzer’ for piano solo by G. Marschal-Loepke. The growing passion for music and dance since the nineteenth century was symptomatic of a more general craving for excitement. Critics pointed to the danger of a culture that elevates the hearing of sound over the listening to sense. Linguists argued that the word ‘ball’ is a corruption of brawl: during the Renaissance the French court dance, the ‘branle’, was known in England as the brawl or brawle. Time and again, dance ignited social controversy. Puritans had related dance to the devil, later social observers were shocked by the wickedness of the waltz, the wildness of the polka, or the lustfulness of the Charleston. Dancing, it was feared, would break all sexual taboos. When in the summer of 1816, for the first time, the waltz was included at a ball given by the Price Regent, an editorial in The Times protested that this intoxicating import from the Continent was an ‘obscene display … confined to prostitutes and adulteresses’.

Traditionally there have been various links between music and literature. It is unusual (although not exceptional) that we can identify literary influences that have shaped the history of dance. The first recorded use of the word ‘walzen’ goes back to the second act of a comedy written by the Viennese author Johann Joseph Felix von Kurz entitled Bernardon auf der Gelseninsel (1750). However, the European passion for the waltz was ignited by the immense success of Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). The novel was held responsible for popularizing the waltz and for bringing the fashion to France during the years preceding the Revolution. The hero and narrator of the novel dances a waltz and falls in love with Lotte, a young lady engaged to another man. The ecstasy of the dance and the pain of passionate but unfulfilled love is the cause of Werther’s sufferings. The theme of the novel gave rise to a wide debate on ‘Werther-walzer’ in which sensuality, moral corruption and mental health were the main issues of contention.

In 1913, a new fashion swept over Europe. It had all started in Buenos Aires, took America by storm, before arriving in Paris. Tangomania grabbed the Continent: 1913 was the Year of the Tango. One of the musicians responsible for the rage for this dance in Paris was Casimiro Ain. That year he had left Buenos Aires with three other musicians on board the steamship ‘Sierra Ventana’ and sailed to France. They travelled from Boulogne sur Mer to Paris and went straight to Monmartre. They entered the first cabaret club they came across and were invited to perform. They were lucky. The club was ‘La Princesse’ which would later become the famous ‘El Garròn’, run by Argentinian musician Manuel Pizarro and his brothers. The young went mad with enthusiasm; the critics red with outrage. The issue of the Mercure de France of 16 February 1914 called the tango ‘la danse des filles publiques’.

The Argentinian ambassador in Paris, Enrique Rodriguez Laretta, was furious: ‘In Buenos Aires tango is found only in whorehouse and filthy taverns. It is never danced in the respectables lounges, nor between civilized men and women for tango is crude to the ear of any Argentinian worthy of his nation’. King Ludwig of Bavaria forbade his officers to dance the tango, while the Duchess of Norfolk pronounced it to be contrary to English character and manners. The Vatican issued a circular warning the faithful that the tango was ‘offensive to the purity of every right-minded person’. Pope Pius X barred what he called ‘this barbarian dance’. He had his moral instincts in a twist. Shortly after the ban, war broke out. Europe was about to witness levels of barbarity it had never seen before.

Spiegelgasse (Zurich)

The Spiegelgasse, a narrow street in the Old Town of Zurich, has been home to a number of fascinating figures – most of them immigrants. Switzerland is the last country one would associate with revolutionary thinking, but this street proves differently.

‘Die Revolution muss aufhören, und die Republik muss anfangen’ (The revolution must cease and the republic must begin), is a famous sentence taken from Georg Büchner’s 1835 political play Dantons Tod (act i, sc. i). Büchner, a young German doctor and dramatist with revolutionary sentiments who had made a spectacular appearance on the literary scene, is often viewed as a sort of proto-Marxist. His writings are filled with premonitions of class struggle. Late 1836, the author was appointed as a lecturer in anatomy at the University of Zurich. He settled at no. 12 Spiegelgasse where he spent his final months writing and teaching until, in 1837, he died of typhus aged just twenty-four. In 1916/17 the house next door (no. 14, second floor) was home to Vladimir Iljitsch Uljanow, better known as Lenin. The authorities were not particularly concerned about the Russian refugee and allowed him to read, write, and speak (in good German) unhindered. They did not consider him a threat.

In London, printers Francis Meynell and Stanley Morison established the Guild of the Pope’s Peace in 1916. Pius X had died in 1914 and was succeeded by Benedict XV. The latter was apalled by the war and condemned the continuation of the slaughter. The Guild was set up to print and distribute Benedict’s political appeals and his attempts to end the bloodshed. The world, including the Catholic world, did not listen. People preferred to lend their ear to the jingoïsm of Lloyd George Kitchener or the Kaiser. The situation was symptomatic for the rest of Europe. Sensitive minds tried to escape from the collective madness. Zurich was a gathering place for European refugees, a place where people came to find peace and stability. It was also a relatively permissive environment that enjoyed a history of allowing the expression of revolutionary ideas by Europe’s disillusioned intellectuals. Artists, activists, intellectuals, and other refugees swarmed to Zurich and met in bars and cafés, discussing the precarious future of Europe, and planning political or artistic revolutions. Romanian Jews escaping ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic tendencies, German and French citizens escaping conscription, they all gathered in neutral Switzerland. Pacifist poets such as Schickele, Leonhard Frank, and Franz Werfel lived in the city. Among the refugees were German poets Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, Romanian poet Tristan Tzara and painter Marcel Janco, the Alsiatian painter Jean Arp.

Repelled by the utter madness with which the young were rushed to trenches of senseless slaughter, these artists had lost their faith in European bourgeois culture. The copying of external reality and the creation of a self-contained work of beauty no longer seemed to make sense to them. They were united by a conviction that the horrors around them were rooted in outdated morals and values. Throwing overboard all conventions and traditional sentimentalities, they sought an alternative unity of art and life. In order to do so, they aimed at establishing – in the words of Hugo Ball – a ‘playground of crazy emotions’. With that ambition in mind, Hugo Ball contacted Jan Ephraim, an elderly Dutch sailor and patron of the Holländische Meierei (Dutch dairy inn) who made a backroom available for a cabaret with singing, theatrics, music, visual art exhibitions, and all sorts of other performances that would disturb bourgeois feelings.

On 15 February 1916 Cabaret Voltaire opened its doors for the first time at no.1 Spiegelgasse. The press release – dated 2 February 1916 – which announced the opening of the nightclub is rather tame. It reads: ‘Cabaret Voltaire. Under this name a group of young artists and writers has formed with the object of becoming a centre for artistic entertainment. In principle, the Cabaret will be run by artists, permanent guests, who, following their daily reunions, will give musical or literary performances. Young Zurich artists, of all tendencies, are invited to join us with suggestions and proposals’. Ball took as his model the cabaret tradition of Paris and Berlin before the war. Voltaire, the philosopher who in his time was at war with the ‘spirit of the age’, was chosen as the godfather for the new movement. Refugee artists from all over Europe quickly besieged the new establishment.

Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball’s partner, sang her own songs as well as many from the repertoires of cabaret legends such as Aristide Bruant, Erich Mühsam, and Frank Wedekind. A spirit of mockery soon took over. Each evening at the Cabaret included a succession of spectacles, dance, song, plays, a balalaika orchestra, etc. The French or Russian evenings were occasions for readings of poems by Max Jacob and Jules Laforgue, of extracts of Ubu Roi, as well as texts by Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov. This was the age of manifestos – at times some twenty people read out declarations of various sorts simultaneously.

All visitors were welcome to take part in the performances which were presented to a noisy, mainly young audience. On 15 June 1916, with a print run of 500 copies, the only edition of the magazine Cabaret Voltaire appeared, edited both in French and German. In thirty-two pages, it included a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire, texts by Kandinsky, ‘Parole in libertà’ by Marinetti, the reproduction of a poster by Marcel Janco and a drawing by Arp (on the cover). Ball and Tzara took the opportunity to announce the future publication of a magazine entitled Dada. Thus the word Dada appeared here for the very first time in print.

The Cabaret closed in June 1916, but Dadaïsm was just beginning. The Dadaists rented a room for one night at a guildhall named Zunfthaus zur Waag where they held their celebrated 14 July Dada Soirée which officially launched the movement with Ball’s now famous manifesto. In French, he explained, dada means hobby horse. What the poet did not mention is the fact that the word dada appears in a bawdy French song performed on various occasions by Eça de Queiroz’s marvellous creation of the shameless concubine Genoveva in his novel A tragédia da rua das Flores (The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers; written between 1877 and 1878, but published many years after the author’s death). All three nouns here are synonyms, although dada in this context would be best translated as stud-horse or stallion:

Chaque femme a sa toquade,
Sa marotte et son dada.

In German dada means good-bye, be seeing you sometime. In Romanian: yes indeed, you are right. With that declaration Hugo Ball launched Dadaïsm. The legend goes that the name was adopted by randomly sticking a knife into a dictionary and finding under the blade the noun dada. That night, Tzara read aloud his own first manifesto, Richard Huelsenbeck performed a phonetic poem, there were absurdist literary readings, works of art on display, and general chaos. Every gesture and every move was calculated to shock the audience with the aim of destroying traditional understanding of art and aesthetics. Dada was anti-art, and these performances were meant to be hideous, like horrors of war.

That same year, Tristan Tzara’s La première aventure céleste de M. Antipyrine, with coloured wood-cuts by Marcel Janco, was published in the ‘Collection Dada’. By 1917 the excitement generated by the Cabaret Voltaire had fizzled out and artists moved on to other places in Zurich such as the Galerie Dada at no. 19 Bahnhofstrasse (an initiative by Tzara), then later to Paris and Berlin. Politically, many of the personalities involved, and Ball in particular, were admirers of Russian radical Mikhail Bakunin who, in 1843, had also spent time in Zurich. Bakunin’s anarchism, to Hugo Ball, was ‘Dada in political disguise’. But it was another Russian political thinker who, in physical terms at least, found himself much nearer to the Cabaret Voltaire.

When Lenin arrived in Switzerland in 1914, he informed the authorities that he was neither an army deserter nor a coward, but a political exile. He had little difficulty gaining entry to the country. With his wife Nadia Krupskaya, he settled in bourgeois Bern. Politically, he did not win over any friends or comrades. In February 1916 he was granted permission to move to Zurich where he had access to the central library. The couple rented a two-room flat at no. 14 Spiegelgasse. It was here that he finished his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (the study was influenced by John Hobson’s thinking on the subject) – in spite of bad smells. Nadia wrote in her memoirs that the yard was filled with the stink of a nearby sausage factory. Did Lenin visit the Cabaret? Hugo Ball does not mention Lenin amongst the people attending the performances, but Huelsenbeck claims to have encountered Lenin in Zurich (ironically, the local police were more suspicious of the Dadaïsts than of the revolutionary thinker). Marcel Janco circulated stories according to which the shows were attended by Lenin and by another famous inhabitant of the city, Carl Jung. Self-promotion has always been one of the stronger aspects of the movement. In his Lénine Dada (1989) French writer Dominique Noguez imagined Lenin as a member of the Dada group and suggests how the meeting of minds influenced and transformed his vision of society. Leninism is a product of Dada. Noguez based his book on this intriguing question: could Lenin have been Dada incarnate? In 1917, with the help of Swiss representatives of the political left, Lenin received permission to return to St Petersburg. In April of that year he left the Spiegelgasse for good. Six months later, following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks seized control.

This then is the remarkable chain of events. In February 1916 Lenin and his wife settled at no. 14 Spiegelgasse. Cabaret Voltaire opened its doors at no. 1 Spiegelgasse on 15 February of that same year. In Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (1974) Lenin and Tzara stand opposed. The name of Spiegelgasse (the German ‘Spiegel’ means mirror) functions as structural and thematic base for the play which opposes two revolutionary characters, one who transformed the political, the other the artistic status quo. The mirror image postulates sameness and difference. One can look at this mirror image from a different angle. In one street, in the same month of the same year, two contrasting personifications of the idea of ‘avant-garde’, Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Lenin, stand shoulder to shoulder, staying virtually next door to one another, the one representing the artistic, the other the political interpretation of this controversial concept.

Henri de Saint-Simon was a leading social theorist in the post-Revolutionary period. In his vision of society, scientists play a dominant role. It was in this context that Saint-Simon introduced the notion of avant-garde. In a Mémoire sur la science de l’homme (1813), the author encourages contemporary scientists of rendering their services to the elevation of mankind, thus functioning as a ‘scientific avant-garde’. From the outset, Saint-Simon regarded the arts as a crucial part of his social system. Writers had to develop the poetic part of his new social system and influence public opinion. The anonymously published Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles (1825) concludes with a dialogue between an artist and a scientist in which the former pledges that ‘we, artists, will serve you as your avant-garde’. The political use of the military metaphor preceded the artistic one which can be traced back to the 1790s. The word was adopted in left-wing utopian ideology. In the progression from Saint-Simonian to French socialist thinking, avant-garde became solely related to the historic task of ‘working class parties’. A number of newspapers adopted the word in their title. Lenin applied the word avant-garde in his account of What Is to Be Done? (1902).

Napoleon exercised an enormous influence on the arts. Balzac was dazzled by Bonaparte and so was Charles Augustine Sainte-Beuve, the greatest French critic of his age. What makes Sainte-Beuve’s jargon intriguing is his intimate knowledge of military matters. In a letter to Hugo (5 May 1845), he compared the early Romantics to the officers of the ‘Corps of Engineers who are sent ahead to clear the way, to lay a road for the army following behind’. Sainte-Beuve, biographer of Napoleon’s strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini (published in 1869), was well-read into military textbooks. His 1854 Stendhal essay reads like a lecture on military tactics, describing the author as some hussar in the vanguard who gallops up to the enemy’s position, but who also, no sooner has he got back to his own lines, needles the other troops to speed up their advance. When the critic refers to Stendhal as a ‘cheveau-léger d’avant-garde’, he used the metaphor in a well-considered manner. The cultural meaning of the term avant-garde originates in Sainte-Beuve’s critical imagery.

In aesthetics, the military metaphor of avant-garde gradually came to overshadow earlier metaphors of poetic exploration or artistic gamesmanship. The shift from explorer or athlete to soldier underlines the changing conditions under which the artist committed himself to his task. The first metaphors are part of Classicist thinking, as much as the latter constitutes an integral aspect of modernist attitudes. Contemporary critics have interpreted avant-garde in terms of a breach between artist and public, as a ‘tradition’ of heterodoxy and resistance. During the 1970s historians tended to confuse the political with the artistic use of the term. Avant-garde in art was judged to be left-wing, disruptive and anarchic. In the final analysis, the avant-gardist, like the colonist or athlete, metaphorically represents the mobility of the creative mind. The metaphor of avant-garde has been fertile in a sense that both artists and political utopians found a way of integrating the term in their belief-systems. One root, different branches. Two apartments, same street.

Boulevard de Rochechouart (Paris)

 

The Boulevard de Rochechouart is situated at the foot of Monmartre and named after Marguerite de Rochechouart de Montpipeau, Abbess of Montmartre. The street has a rich cultural history. No. 72 was the former site of the Elysée Montmartre which was a popular ballroom originally dating back to 1807.

Twelve doors down the road was the original location of the famous cabaret Le Chat Noir opened by the painter Rodolphe Salis on 18 November 1881. Hungarian painter Francois Gall became an impressionist painter in the French tradition after he moved to Paris in 1936. He admired the first generation of impressionists and adopted their concepts for his own interpretations. Parisian scenes and boulevards – of which his ‘Boulevard de Rochechouart’ is one – were among his preferred subjects.

Pleyel and Company is a French piano manufacturing firm founded by Austrian-born French composer Ignace Joseph Pleyel who had moved to Paris in 1795. In 1797 he set up a business as a music publisher, which among other works produced a complete edition of Haydn’s string quartets in 1801. The publishing business lasted for some forty years and published about 4,000 works. In 1807, Pleyel became a manufacturer of pianos. His firm also ran a concert hall, the Salle Pleyel.

It was there that Chopin performed his first and his final Paris concerts. By 1834 the company had purchased a construction workshop and sale room in the Rue Rue Rochechouart. At that time, it boasted 250 employees and an annual production of 1,000 pianos. Pleyel pianos were the choice of composers such as Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Ravel, Stravinsky, and many other outstanding musicians. The Salle Pleyel opened its doors in December 1839 at no.22 Rue Rochechouart. It became central to nineteenth century concert life in the capital. Chopin, Liszt, Thalberg, Rubinstein, César Franck had all appeared there by the mid-1840s. Over the years it saw the premieres of many important works, including the second (1868) and fifth (1896) piano concertos by Saint-Saëns, and Ravel’s ‘Pavane pour une infant défunte’.

In 1927, a new Salle Pleyel was opened at no. 252 Rue du Faubourg St Honoré. Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel both conducted their own works as part of the inaugural concert on 18 October of that year. For the occasion, André Devambez painted a charming 1928 oil painting of the ‘Salle Pleyel’ for the magazine L’Illustration.

The Boulevard de Rochechouart has a noble reputation in the history of music. In literature however the street was known for its noise levels. To young French romantics of the late 1820s art meant protest. Protest involves noise and agitation. Artistic evolution from the nineteenth into the twentieth century is one of ever increasing noise and loudness. Blast was the perfect title for a literary magazine. The Italian futurists went a step further. Noise is art. This development from public posturing to poetic expression can be shown in a set of contrasting anecdotes involving the intervention of neighbours. Closeness is a dominating feature of city life.

Contemporary historians, in their grand designs, have not been kind to the anecdotal tale. Like Voltaire before them, they have been dismissive about including anecdotes in their narrative. The anecdote comes into play when emphasis is put on ‘couleur locale’ and physiognomy, an approach that focuses on the characters, customs, and habits particular to a country (region), period in time, or movement in art. If one takes a wider overview of historical accounts, the anecdote has often stood in a close relation to more elaborate narratives of history, sometimes in a supportive function, as examples and illustrations, sometimes in a challenging role, as the ‘petite histoire’ that is all too often ignored by authors. Prosper Mérimée was a dramatist and historian, best known for his novella Carmen which inspired Bizet’s opera.

In 1829 he published La chronique du temps de Charles IX, a historical novel set at the French court at the time of the St Bartholomew massacre. In his introduction to the story the author wrote: ‘Je n’aime dans l’histoire que des anecdotes, et parmi les anecdotes je préfère celles où j’imagine trouver une peinture vraie des moeurs et des caractères à une époque donnée.’ [I like nothing in history but its anecdotes; and of all anecdotes, I prefer those, which strike me as presenting a correct picture of the manners and characters of any given period]. The use of anecdote may no longer be considered a scholarly method, but it can nevertheless by an effective way in characterizing the tone of a period. After all, every age speaks its own language, creates its own music, and makes its own noise.

The Romantics were the first to raise the noise level in art and literature. Artists and poets were young, loud and disrespectful. Being young was a critical value in itself. In a society in flux youth seemed to be called upon to play a decisive role. Poet Pétrus Borel was spokesman for an eccentric group of Parisian students and artists, known as Le Petit Cénacle, who were dedicated to the fight against Classicism and artistic stagnation. Among its members were Célestin Nanteuil, Philothée O’Neddy, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, and others. As was the case for so many Bohemians, Borel’s lodgings were poor and small. In 1831, he and his followers moved from the Latin Quarter to the corner of Boulevard de Rochechouart. Since they could not afford the cost of an entire house, they rented a room which opened into a garden and named their base ‘Le Camp des Tartares’. They changed their group name as well and proudly called themselves Les Jeunes France, suggesting that they were the nation’s future. They intended to fight all forms of philistinism that symbolized the regime of Louis Philippe.

Borel and his band of artists made a social nuisance of themselves. They gathered naked in the garden until outraged neighbours called in the police. The practice had to stop under threat of court action for outrageous behaviour. Garden concerts given by the artists were not aimed at evoking a sense of tonal harmony, but were staged for the purpose of making as much noise as possible. To them, music meant creating a cacophony of sound. In the end, their rowdy behaviour led to arrests (even a gentle soul such as De Nerval spent time inside). The landlord decided to terminate the lease. Neighbours had convinced him that the presence of these non-conformist youngsters lowered the prestige of the neighbourhood. Borel then found a tiny house in the Quartier Latin. Appropriately, the street was called La Rue d’Enfer. He celebrated the move with a house-warming party that may still count as one of the wildest orgies ever celebrated in the French capital. Once again, the physical move brought a new name to the group. A term of abuse in the press became a banner of pride (in much the same way as the label Impressionism was introduced some decades later).

The artists adopted the name of Bousingos (‘faiseurs de bousin’ = brawlers). As Charles Asselineau mentions in his Mélanges tirés d’une petite bibliothèque romantique (1866), they even planned to publish a joint collection of short stories under the title Les contes du Bousingo – par une camaraderie. The project never materialized, Gérard de Nerval being the only author who contributed a story. Borel and his circle of bousingo’s formed the link between Bohemia and Romanticism. Hugo naturally turned to him when recruiting his ‘Romantic Army’ on the eve of the performance of Hernani, the play that would prove to be the decisive blow in the battle between Classicists and Romantics (artistic relations at the time were described in military terms, indicating a sharpening of competitive relationships).

Futurist artists were a loud lot. Noise was their trademark. Excessive noise, they argued, is a by-product of modern industrial and technological society to which art has to respond. To them, it served both to shatter older forms of perception based on notions of order and harmony, and to instantiate the violence the Futurists believed was inherent in matter as well as in social life. L’arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises) is a 1913 manifesto written by Luigi Russolo. In it, the author argues that as the human ear has become accustomed to the speed and noise of the urban soundscape, musical instrumentation and composition has to adept itself to new technologies and create an intoxicating orchestra of noise. Futurism, of course, was rooted in poetry. From the outset, the renovation of language was its ultimate aim. In the process the notion of New Typography was developed. The initiative goes back to F.T. Marinetti who, since 1905, advocated in the pages of his magazine Poesia the idea of free verse (verso libero) which gradually evolved into the idea of words-in-freedom (parole in libertà). In 1913 Marinetti published his manifesto ‘Destruction of Syntax / Imagination without Strings / Words-in-Freedom’ where he argued that the futurist experiment was ‘grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility that has generated our pictorial dynamism, our anti-graceful music in its free, irregular rhythms, our noise-art and our words-in-freedom’. By an imagination without strings the poet meant the absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with unhampered words and without connecting strings of syntax or punctuation. Adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions were to be banished from poetry.

 

His theories were given shape and form in his masterpiece Zang Tumb Tumb in 1914. Marinetti’s efforts were central to subsequent typographical experiments in European poetry. Book-making would never be the same.

Marinetti visited London in 1910 as part of a series of lectures aimed at galvanizing support across Europe for the Italian avant-garde. In his presentation at the Lyceum Club, he addressed his British audience as victims of ‘traditionalism and its medieval trappings’. His attack on John Ruskin was devastating. Ruskin – Marinetti thundered – with his morbid dream of rustic life, his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-winders, and his hatred for the machine, is like a man who, after having reached maturity, wants to sleep in his cradle and feed himself at the breast of his decrepit old nurse in order to recover his infancy. Marinetti electrified some of the assembled English avant-garde with his performance. Others were more reserved about, if not shell-shocked by the Italian’s cultural extremism.

One of those was young Richard Aldington. It is an irony of Aldington’s career that he is chiefly remembered for his involvement in a modernist movement he quickly disowned. Aldington was only twenty when Ezra Pound launched him as a leading light of the Imagistes, who fought Victorian poetics with the ideal of clear imagery and flexible rhythms. Hardness as of cut stone, as Aldington phrased the ambition himself. However, Marinetti confused him. He appreciated his artistic radicalism, but abhorred the Italian’s derision of traditional culture and civilization. In his memoirs Life for Life’s Sake (1941) Richard Aldington has left an amusing description of an evening that a party of poets consisting of Ezra Pound, Thomas Sturge Moore, Yeats, and himself, spent with Marinetti. Communication was difficult as Marinetti spoke no English and Yeats would not talk a language of which he was not a master. Yeats read some poems which Marinetti would have thought disgustingly passéistes if he had understood them. Marinetti was requested to recite something of his. He sprang up and in a stentorian Milanese voice began bawling:

Automobile,
Ivre d’espace,
Qui piétine d’angoise, etc.

Yeats had to ask him to stop his performance because neighbours were knocking in protest on the floor, ceiling and walls. In art and literature, England was slow to adopt modernist trends that were manifest on the Continent. Fear of neighbours maybe?

Linnaeusstraat (Amsterdam)

The Oosterpark is the first large park laid (in 1891) out by the municipality of Amsterdam. It was designed on the principles of an English garden by Leonard Springer. The ‘Oosterparkbuurt’ in its current shape was constructed at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1926, a corner of the park was used to house a newly built museum. The Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (Royal Tropical Institute) was established in Haarlem in 1864. It was then known as the Colonial Museum, founded to house the collection of artefacts brought back from the Dutch colonies in the East. Its mission included the scientific study of plants and products derived from the colonies. Today, the collection is housed in the Tropenmuseum with its entrance on the Linnaeusstraat, one of the main streets in the district.

‘De Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam, gezien vanaf de Middenweg’ produced by Heertje van Doornik, a painter who had settled in the capital in 1891, supplies a fine image of the street.

Impressionist painter and photographer Willem Witsen lived in the area. His house at no. 82 Oosterpark is now a museum (Witsenhuis) – it was here that Paul Verlaine stayed during his brief visit to the Netherlands.

There is one Dutch author whose work is closely associated with the East of Amsterdam. Nescio (Latin for ‘I don’t know’) is a pseudonym for Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh who made a professional career for himself at the Holland-Bombay Trade Company in Amsterdam and was a talented author at the same time. He hated his job, but felt unable to fully commit himself to his creative endeavours. The Nescio corpus includes stories, unfinished compositions, a nature diary and correspondence, but the works for which he is remembered consist essentially of three extensive prose-poems: De uitvreter (The Freeloader, 1911), Titaantjes (Young Titans, 1915) and Dichtertje (Little Poet, 1918). The translation of a collection of stories by Damion Searles was published in the New York Review Books Classics series under the appropriate title of Amsterdam Stories. Aptness of title, and quality of the first sentence, are crucial aspects of any novel.

In his 2011 study How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One, Stanley Fish devoted an entire chapter to memorable English opening sentences. If his approach had been multi-lingual, he would certainly have included the start of De uitvreter which announces the author’s unique style and idiosyncratic manner of storytelling. As a story this is an evocative mix in which dreams and youthful rebelliousness are beaten down by an indifferent world. Although set in the city, there are lyrical descriptions of the Dutch landscape, often triggered by author’s fascination with water (a Dutch theme if ever there was one). Nescio stresses the Dutch dichotomy of money-mindedness with the visionary wealth of Jeroen Bosch, Multatuli, or Vincent van Gogh. The dominating tone is one of an aching melancholy. Grönloh himself was careful to keep his business and creative identities separate. He only revealed true name in 1933, over twenty years after the publication of De uitvreter.

Samuel Sarphati was a physician and city planner. He descended from Portuguese Sephardi Jews who had settled in Amsterdam during the seventeenth century. Having qualified in medicine at the University of Leiden, he became a practitioner in the capital where he initiated projects to improve the quality of hygiene in the poorer parts of the city. The Sarphatistraat is named after him and runs between Frederiksplein and Oostenburgergracht. To many locals the name Sarphati means little nowadays. It is just an ordinary Amsterdam street. However, to those familiar with Dutch literature, the Sarphatistraat has made an indelible impression. Why? Because of Nescio first sentence in De uitvreter: ‘Behalve den man die de Sarphatistraat de mooiste plek van Europa vond, heb ik nooit een wonderlijker kerel gekend dan den uitvreter’ (Except for the man who thought Sarphatistraat was the most beautiful place in Europe, I’ve never met anyone more peculiar than the freeloader). To me, as an utterly biased reader, this remains a classic opening.

Tramline no. 7 connects the short distance between Sarphatistraat and Linnaeusstraat. From 1735 to 1739, young Carl Linnaeus lived in the Netherlands. This was an important period in his life. He defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Harderwijk in 1735 and met with many Dutch scientists during his visits to the Amsterdam botanical gardens. Among them was one figure who took a central place in the development of the young Swedish botanist. George Clifford III was a wealthy Amsterdam banker and one of the directors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). He was known for his interest in plants and gardens.

His estate the Hartekamp had a rich variety of plants and he engaged Linnaeus to write the Hortus Cliffortianus, a masterpiece of early botanical literature. Many specimens from Clifford’s garden were also studied by Linnaeus for his two-volume study Species plantarum (1753), a work that laid the foundation for plant nomenclature as we know it today. The Clifford dynasty originated from East Anglia. The first recorded member of the family was Richard Clifford who studied at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, which at the time was an important training-institution for Anglican clergy. In 1569 he was appointed rector of Landbeach, a fen-edge village near Ely, just north of Cambridge (beach most likely means ‘shore’ here: both Landbeach and nearby Waterbeach were at one time situated at the edge of the estuary named The Wash).

Henry Clifford was born in Landbeach. Like his father, he studied at Corpus Christi. He named his son George. Somewhere between 1634 and 1640 George Clifford I moved to Amsterdam and lived the rest of his life on the Zeedijk. Six of his children were baptized in Amsterdam’s historical Presbyterian Church at the Begijnhof, and two in the Oude Kerk. He established the family business in the city and, in 1664, is recorded as owning a sugar plantation in Barbados.

George Clifford II was born in 1657. He continued in the trade his father had started. Business prospered and, in 1709, he was able to buy the Hartekamp (for the substantial amount of 22,000 guilders), an estate with a formal garden and conservatory in Heemstede, just outside Bennebroek, near to the coastal dunes and close the famous Dutch bulb fields. The original house had been built by Johan Hinlopen in 1693. The latter had been in charge of running the lucrative postal route between Amsterdam and Antwerp. Hinlopen designed the basic garden and built the orangery. His grandfather had been of Flemish origin, one of the countless cosmopolitan merchants who left Antwerp after the Spanish suppression of the city. A trader in cloth and Indian ware he was a co-founder of the Dutch East India Company in 1602. His son Jan Jacobszoon expanded the business and became an important art collector and supporter of Rembrandt, Gabriel Metsu, and others.

George Clifford III was born in 1685 into by what at that time had become an extremely wealthy Anglo-Dutch merchant dynasty. The family business entered banking at the start of the eighteenth century and established an international reputation lending money to royalty, the Vatican, and to the English and Danish governments. George III also was a Governor of the Dutch East India Company (but not, as is often stated, at any time Burgomaster of Amsterdam) and a keen botanist. On the Hartekamp he accumulated a famous living- and dried plant collection. He gave the garden its international reputation, acquiring specimens of new species from all over the world. He acted as patron of the young Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus whom he employed in the double capacity of ‘hortulanus’ (supervisor) of his collection and of physician (the master of the house was somewhat of a hypochondriac).

Linnaeus had been introduced to Clifford by Johannes Burman, Director of the Amsterdam Botanic Garden and Professor of Botany, who was a supplier of tropical plants to the Clifford collection through his close connections with the East India Company. Linnaeus named after him the Burmannia, a family of chiefly tropical herbs with basal leaves and small flowers. The meeting between the two men turned out well for both of them. Linnaeus was overwhelmed by the botanical riches of the gardens and in particular by the ‘houses of Adonis’ (hothouses) where he encountered a bewildering variety of plants from Southern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Clifford on the other hand was impressed by Linnaeus’s effortless ability to classify plants that were new to him. Clifford offered Linnaeus free board and lodging, and a financial allowance of one ducat a day, or 1,000 florins per annum. The young scientist was overjoyed. By the time he took up his employment in 1735 the estate contained in addition to the garden, a large collection of animals, an orangery and four heated greenhouses. Through the activities of eminent botanists such as Herman Boerhaave, Adriaan van Royen and others, many exotic plants were added to Clifford’s collection and dried plants were exchanged as herbarium sheets. International cooperation between collectors and scientists contributed to the rapid development of plant systematic, both in terms of taxonomy and of practical knowledge of the world’s botanical wealth and variety.

The herbarium played an important role in the development of scientific botany. The preparation of herbarium specimens goes far back to the Egyptians, but the systematic technique for keeping plants as dried reference specimens began in Tuscany during the sixteenth century. Luca Ghini, founder of the first botanical garden in the world at Pisa, introduced this method to his students at the University of Bologna. Initially herbaria were bound together to form books, such as that of the apothecary Petrus Cadé, the oldest herbarium known in the Low Countries.

In the eighteenth century botanists started to keep the individual herbarium sheets separate which allowed systematic ordering rearrangement according to developing systematic ideas. Thus it became possible to lend individual herbarium sheets and exchange duplicates. Because of such exchanges it was no longer immediately clear who the owner of a particular specimen actually was. This is perhaps the reason – apart from mere aesthetics – why ornamentations such as pots, medallions, pennants, or cartouches were printed onto the sheets and thus acted as a kind of ex libris for the owner. The tradition of using ornamentations in herbaria is of Dutch origin. It dates back to the 1720s and had gone out of fashion by the end of the century. Clifford’s herbarium consists of 3,461 sheets. Many of the specimens are mounted in such a manner that they appear to be growing out of engraved paper urns, and are held down by ribbons and their names inscribed on ornate labels. In 1791, Clifford’s herbarium was acquired by botanist Joseph Banks, Director of Kew’s Royal Botanic Gardens, and President of the Royal Society of London, at the sale of the collections. It is now part of the collections of the Natural History Museum.

At the time of Linnaeus’s inventory, the garden at Hartekamp had 1,251 living plant species in the greenhouses, gardens and woods. Linnaeus catalogued the family’s complete collection of plants, herbarium and library. The result was his book Hortus Cliffortianus, whose publication was paid for by George Clifford III. Linnaeus compiled his study with astonishing speed. It took him nine months to prepare the manuscript. Until this time the individual herbarium sheets owned by Clifford were arranged according to the system applied by Boerhaave in his Index alter plantarum. Linnaeus ranked the plant species according to a sexual system which he himself had designed. The system is based on the number and shape of both male and female reproductive parts which determine the class into which the plant species is placed. Within this system every species is placed in a genus and given its own unique Latin adjective. The Hortus Cliffortianus formed the basis for all of Linnaeus’s subsequent work. Many of his plant descriptions are repeated in the Species plantarum which appeared some fifteen year later. In this book Linnaeus introduced the consistent use of the binomial nomenclatural system with a genus name and a species epithet. The many samples taken from the Clifford collection were type specimens for Linnaeus’s new systematic ordering.

The Hortus Cliffortianus came into existence through the collaboration of a brilliant scientist and an outstanding botanical artist. In 1735 German painter and draughtsman George Ehret had travelled to England with glowing letters of introduction to patrons including Hans Sloane and Philip Miller, curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden. In the spring of 1736 Ehret spent three months in the Netherlands and stayed for several weeks at the Hartekamp where he made the majority of the illustrations. He then returned to England to settle in Chelsea from where he sent the remainder of the illustrations. His efforts proved indispensable for the rapid dissemination of the underlying concepts of Linnaeus’s new systematic ordering. Through his famous illustrations, Ehret made Linnaeus’s new system more intelligible. Ehretia, a genus of flowering plants in the borage family (Boraginaceae – containing some fifty species) was named in his honour. Ehret’s plates served as the basis for the etchings of Jan Wandelaar who made the final prints for the book. The latter also produced the outstanding baroque cover, the symbolism of which includes a young Apollo with Linnaeus’s features who brings light into the darkness (of ignorance). Jan Wandelaar – literally: Johnny Walker – is perhaps best remembered for his cooperation with the surgeon and anatomist Bernard Siegfried Albinus. Teaching anatomy at Leiden University, Albinus was famous for his studies of bones and muscles, and for his attempts at improving the accuracy of anatomical illustration. He used Wandelaar’s considerable artistic talent to achieve that aim. The artist’s earlier involvement with Clifford and Ehret had established his reputation. Clifford used the Hortus as a splendid gift for his contacts within the plant-exchange network. Boerhaave and Van Royen were the first to receive a copy.

In 1760 Pieter Clifford, the oldest son of George, inherited the Hartekamp, but he lacked his father’s passion for plants and the importance of the garden declined. After his death the estate was auctioned on 2 June 1788, probably due to financial problems relating to the bankruptcy of the Clifford Bank in 1772. It was the final chapter in what had been a grand Anglo-Dutch-Swedish undertaking in which natural beauty, science and art had been harmoniously merged. Linnaeus in the meantime became a legendary figure in the Netherlands. In 1853, Hendrik Hollander painted the scientist in Laponian costume. The painting is part of the Hartekamp Estate, but a replica is in possession of the University of Amsterdam.