Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914. Colin Platt
of Gil de Siloé. A generation earlier, João I (the Great) of Portugal had made similar provision for his new dynasty. Mindful of the Virgin’s help in granting him a decisive victory over the Castilians at Aljubarrota in 1385, João (after some hesitation) chose a Marian order – Dominicans on this occasion – to tend the family tomb-church at Batalha, north of Lisbon. And there he still lies, in the most enormous state, next to Philippa of Lancaster, his English queen.26
Philippa was the eldest daughter of John of Gaunt, son of one king (Edward III), uncle of another (Richard II), and father of a third (Henry IV). Her half-sister (by the duke’s second marriage to Constance of Castile) was Catherine, queen of Castile; and one of her half-brothers (by Gaunt’s third wife, Catherine Swynford) was the great priest-statesman Henry Beaufort (d.1447), ‘Cardinal of England’, Bishop of Winchester, and international diplomatist. In circles such as these, national frontiers had little meaning in the arts. Thus the architecture of Portuguese Batalha, in its primary phase, shows clear English influence, being an early demonstration of the close bond between the nations first established at the Treaty of Windsor in 1386. And when, in the 1430s, Cardinal Beaufort spent many months in the Low Countries on diplomatic missions to the Burgundians, he took the opportunity to have his portrait painted by Philip the Good’s most favoured artist, Jan van Eyck.27 Beaufort was an old man when the painting was done, and he may already have been pondering his death-plan. Certainly, over the next ten years he took every known precaution to guarantee the comfort of his soul. While plainly confident of his ability to translate the wealth of this world into high-ranking ease in the next, Beaufort nevertheless made provision for an instant barrage of 10,000 soul-masses on his death. He endowed perpetual chantries at three great cathedrals (Lincoln, Canterbury and Winchester); made major contributions, similarly recompensed by prayer, to Henry VI’s mammoth educational charities at Eton and King’s College (Cambridge); and invested heavily in the rebuilding of the ancient hospital of St Cross (Winchester) as an almshouse or refuge ‘of noble poverty’. Even after these and much else, the residue of Beaufort’s estate was still substantial. All was to be spent – the cardinal instructed his executors – in such ways especially ‘as they should believe to be of the greatest possible advantage to the safety of my soul.’28
It was this single-minded concentration on the soul’s repose which, whatever the announced purpose of the work in hand, inspired the great majority of fifteenth-century Grands Projets. Thus it was Archbishop Chichele’s clearly expressed desire in 1438 that the ‘poor and indigent scholars’ of his new Oxford college at All Souls should
not so much ply therein the various sciences and faculties, as with all devotion pray for the souls of glorious memory of Henry V, lately King of England and France … of the lord Thomas, Duke of Clarence [Henry’s brother], and other lords and lieges of the realm of England whom the havoc of that warfare between the two said realms has drenched with the bowl of bitter death.
And it was in this century, in particular, that the funding of universities attracted the attention of propertied but heirless bishops whose concern to improve the quality of diocesan clergy ranked second after the protection of their souls. ‘There never was a prelate so good to us as you have been’, wrote the grateful scholars of Oxford to Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury (1450–81), shortly before his death: ‘You promised us the sun, and you have given us the moon also.’ Yet Bishop Beauchamp, in point of fact, was among the less substantial of their benefactors.29
Fifteenth-century Europe, half-empty and bullion-starved, was both socially and economically disadvantaged. Yet so general was the belief in the cleansing power of prayer that there has never been another time in the entire history of the Church when so much funding has been directed to just one end. Furthermore, if the costly death-styles of the wealthy had established a new climate for exceptionally generous investment in the arts, so also had the life-styles of those ‘great ones’ of the century – usually the same – whose chosen mode of government was to dazzle and overawe by exhibitions of conspicuous waste. Henry Beaufort, the ‘Rich Cardinal’, was dynast as well as priest. And for him as for his siblings (the sons and daughters of John of Gaunt) ‘dispendiousness’ and ‘great giving’ – the distinguishing marks of the generosus – were the inescapable accompaniments of high rank. ‘One morning, on a solemn feast’, relates Vespasiano da Bisticci (Florentine bookseller and gossip), taking his story from Antonio dei Pazzi, a fellow citizen, ‘the cardinal assembled a great company for which two rooms were prepared, hung with the richest cloth and arranged all round to hold silver ornaments, one of them being full of cups of silver, and the other with cups gilded or golden. Afterwards Pazzi was taken into a very sumptuous chamber, and seven strong boxes full of English articles of price were exhibited to him.’30 Almost nothing now remains of a collection so extraordinary that even a Florentine banker was impressed. However, among the many treasures known to have stuck to the old cardinal’s fingers in his last acquisitive decade was the Royal Gold Cup of Charles VI of France, made in Paris for Jean de Berri in the late 1380s and subsequently presented to his nephew, the young king. Now in the British Museum, the cup is decorated on bowl and cover with fine enamel miniatures of the life, miracles and martyrdom of St Agnes. Yet for all its religious imagery, this precious vessel was (and long remained) a secular object, made chiefly for display and probably always intended for ‘great giving’.31
On Charles VI’s death in 1422 when by the terms of the Treaty of Troyes (1420) the infant Henry VI of England assumed his throne, the cup had come into the possession of Beaufort’s nephew, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford and Regent of France. And Bedford himself was a patron in the grand manner, both collector and acknowledged connoisseur. As would-be promoter of the fragile union of France and England brought about by Henry V’s marriage to Catherine of Valois (daughter of Charles VI), Bedford had frequent cause for political giving. However, his collecting instincts were not exclusively pragmatic. And the possession of objects of great value has always found much favour with the rich. One who caught the habit early was Francesco Gonzaga (1444–83), cardinal at the age of seventeen, whose particular private passion was for carved and engraved gemstones, both cameos and intaglios, many of them recovered from ancient sites. The cardinal’s other special interest was in books. While no great scholar himself, Gonzaga was the patron of leading contemporary humanists. And almost a quarter of his large collection was given over to the classical texts to which his friends among the literati had introduced him. As inventoried on Gonzaga’s death in 1483, his books included the poetry of Terence and Virgil, Horace and Ovid; the oratory of Cicero; the ethics of Aristotle; the histories of Sallust, Livy and Plutarch; the comedies of Plautus, the satires of Juvenal, the tragedies of Seneca the Younger, and many more. In his own tongue, Gonzaga read the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, the short stories of Boccaccio, and the marvels of the explorer Marco Polo. In the cardinal’s library, the largest single category – 66 books in total – was made up of works of religion. Nevertheless, the contrast overall with the even greater collections of another clerical bibliophile, Guillaume d’Estouteville, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, was very striking. Cardinal d’Estouteville died the same year. But the Frenchman was no humanist. And while his library was extensive, his reading was chiefly limited to theology and patristics, to contemporary devotional writings, and to the law.32
To be or not a humanist was never a stark choice for European intellectuals of North and South. In France, as early as the 1410s, Jean de Montreuil, Charles VI’s learned chancellor, was a collector of classical texts, a reader of Petrarch, and an admirer of Leonardo Bruni, the humanist scholar, who was later himself Chancellor of Florence (1427–44). And when Poggio Bracciolini, subsequently Chancellor of Florence in his turn, came to England in 1429 to comb monastic libraries for antique texts, he was welcomed there by Cardinal Beaufort among others. Yet what Poggio encountered could hardly have been more remote from his experience. ‘The past is a foreign country’, L.P. Hartley once declared, ‘they do things differently there.’