There was in last week’s paper an interesting piece about Henry Tudor and Catalina Aragona, alias Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, the sixteenth-century royals. These two formed a typical New York Times power couple, except for the fact that they both have been dead for nearly five hundred years. Catherine was Wife Number One, who got cancelled when Harry’s wandering eye landed on Anne Boleyn. An enterprising Harvard graduate student, Vanessa Braganza, thinks she has found a previously unremarked message from Catherine concerning this matter hidden in clear sight in a cypher, or allegorical emblem, in some seldom consulted old archival papers. According to the researcher’s interpretation, Catherine wanted to make a coded statement of her enduring claim to be Henry’s unique wife, or at least his unique queen. This was not at all his plan. And as Henry VIII did not like to be crossed, if you were going to cross him, it probably would be best to do so in a fashion he could not easily grasp. So the cypher and its possible interpretation are themselves very interesting topics, but not the ones I shall pursue in this essay.
What claims my attention is the more general proclivity of the old artists—whether in visual media, literature, or even musical composition—to embed cryptic meaning in their artistic creations. One of our great Renaissance poets, Edmund Spenser, wrote an epic allegorical poem for, and about, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I. It is called in its ye-olde printed form The Faerie Queene, and it is a very long narrative dealing with ethical, political, and theological issues beneath the veil of what Spenser calls a “dark conceit”—meaning a complex and obscure metaphorical covering that the reader must strive to penetrate and illuminate. We rightly worry about the bad effects that divorce might have on the children. Is it a stretch to suppose that growing up knowing your daddy had your mommy’s head chopped off might cast some shadow across the emotional life of a daughter? One does notice that Elizabeth I chose not to marry. Might studying the Fairy Queen, which has proved to be a full life’s work for several prominent scholars and a life sentence for some of their students, have been suggested in part to occupy its dedicatee’s mind and perhaps help purge it of unpleasant family memories?
The allegorical dimensions of our earlier art present vast fields of interest and of study, to which I applied myself for many years. The allegorical mentality long antedated the Christian era, but it was greatly enriched by the traditions of Jewish and Christian biblical exegesis in Late Antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages. The justification for scriptural obscurity offered by Augustine and many others was a familiar one to all teachers. You get out of a learning experience what you put into a learning experience. Truths learned through assiduous application are more secure than those with which you are spoon fed.
But what about the naked truth? Common expressions like “the simple truth…”, “the truth is…” or “the fact of the matter…” seem to suggest that truth is eventually a rather simple business, and that we too often distort, dilute, or complicate it in our daily life. In an earlier essay I mentioned my pleasure at discovering a novel called The Relic (1887) by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós. Eça is rightly considered an important realist writer who was much influenced by earlier and contemporary French writers like Balzac, Flaubert, and even Zola. In politics he was a liberal, indeed a socialist, and part of a group of writers who were trying to bring new social and political ideas into their native land. Their revolution had a literary agenda as well. They explicitly challenged the conventionality and sentimentality of decadent Romanticism for its lack of “truth” and “sincerity”. But The Relic is a wild and nearly indescribable combination of social realism, extravagant satire, travelog, and what amounts to theological science fiction. In an early edition of the book the author tried to alert his readers by adding the following epigraph: “Over the stark nakedness of truth, the diaphanous cloak of fantasy.” Eça is claiming that beneath a plot that is at times fantastic the adept reader will find a good deal of social and political truth.
For a very particular reason, the nakedness of truth rang a bell in my mind. Around 1970 we launched a private printing operation from our living room. We did publish a few small books, but our main productions at that time were elegant posters advertising public lectures on campus. Among our friends was the historian Carl Schorske, who for years was Joan’s fellow violinist in a string quartet. During the decade of the ‘70s he was completing his celebrated book about the rich cultural life of Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.* Carl, who died a centenarian in 2015, presented some of the chapters of his book as they were finished as public lectures and/or discreet journal essays. He was prevailed upon to offer a public lecture on one dealing with the visual arts (“Gustav Klimt: Painting and the Crisis of the Liberal Ego”) on the Princeton campus. We got the commission for a poster. I hope a copy survives somewhere. It was one of our better efforts.
Most people know the work of the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt (1864-1918), if only for his sensational painting “The Kiss,” a hot contender (along with Che Guevara in a beret) for the artwork most likely to be hanging on an undergraduate’s dormitory wall around 1975. But we lacked the facilities for polychrome elaboration, and the image we chose, stunning in its black and white, was Klimt’s own poster-like version of “Nuda Veritas” (the Naked Truth) in line etching.
It featured a German motto to the effect that “Truth is fire and to speak the truth is both a shining and a burning”—the constructive and destructive aspects of artistic revolution, perhaps. For artistic revolutionaries, “in with the new” definitely implied “out with the old.” Klimt’s “Nuda Veritas” is an image that particularly engaged me because it is of an iconographic type—interesting females with mirrors in hand—with a very long tradition in medieval and Renaissance art. These ladies include the cardinal virtue of Prudence and the vice of Lust. In Dante, biblical Rachel, a type of the contemplative life, never ceases from staring into her mirror. In the Romance of the Rose a dubious lady porter named Idleness greets the Lover at the gate, a mirror in her hand.
But back to Gustav Klimt. He was a founding member of a revolutionary group of artists called the “Vienna Secession” or simply the “Secessionists,” who like most other groups of revolutionary artists claimed to discover or to reclaim the elemental truth of art. What I am now trying to figure out is whether it is even conceivable that hyper-cosmopolitan Vienna could reflect the influence of the benighted and parochial Lisbon of 1871, when Eça and other young Portuguese intellectuals formed a group with similar artistic and political aims. It did not name itself, but is now known as the “Generation of ‘70”. As Schorske pointed out, the first thing one notices about Klimt’s “Nuda Veritas” is its vera nuditas. On this occasion he omitted any diaphanous cloak (manto diáfono) in favor of the “stark nakedness” part. But the good Lord knows that when it comes to diaphanous women’s cloaks nobody did them much better than Klimt.
And it is quite possible to be a little too diaphanous. You may think that the Portuguese sculptor António Teixeira Lopes (d. 1942) succumbed to this temptation in his monument to Eça’s unflinching search for the naked truth. The author is not flinching, but he may in the circumstances be somewhat overdressed.
*Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (NY: Knopf, 1980).
