DEATH AND THE PAINTING

J.M.W. TURNER, THE CAMPO SANTO, VENICE, 1842

(Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio)

Of the many directives given by Joseph Mallord William Turner concerning the posthumous display of his works, two sentences ring out above the rest: "Keep them together. What is the use of them but together?"¹ Turner appreciated better than anyone the essential unity of his oeuvre; he knew that any one of his paintings, even a very great one, could not be properly understood in isolation. Separated from the mass of his works, a single Turner does not function correctly, any more than an arm functions separated from the body. The British government belatedly fulfilled the spirit if not the letter of Turner’s wish with the 1987 opening of the Turner wing at the Tate Britain, where thousands of the artist’s drawings, watercolors and paintings are stored and displayed in rotation. Inevitably, though, some major canvases remain scattered among the art museums of the world. Turner’s two landmark oil paintings of the burning of the Houses of Parliament now hang in Philadelphia and Cleveland. (For historical as well as aesthetic reasons, these two really should be in London; their sale was a major loss to Britain and an incalculable gain for two American cities.) His late, boiling masterpiece of color, The Slave Ship, is now at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And one of his loveliest Italian visions, The Campo Santo, Venice, hangs in the art museum at Toledo, Ohio, where it is dwarfed by a full-length Thomas Lawrence portrait of a standing lord. Seen alone, this Toledo Turner can be especially misleading. Its sheer beauty gives the viewer an incomplete and overly optimistic notion of Turner’s attitudes toward life, death and nature. The Campo Santo needs the context of the artist’s other works from 1842, and it should especially be seen in the light of a painting that is in many ways its polar opposite, the great 1842 Snow Storm.

The full Turnerian title is Snow Storm–Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich. Historians think that Turner muddled the facts of the storm and may have exaggerated his own role, but the final painting speaks for itself. Or rather, it doesn’t speak–it screams, it howls. The boat at the center of the canvas is almost lost in a vortex of wind, water and snow. Turner paints with a fury imitating nature’s fury; his brushstrokes seem to be driven by the awesome, swirling force of the wind. Around the mast, where a curious light shines out of this night scene, the brightest pigments have been applied roughly with a palette knife. The canvas was not so much painted as attacked. Here is literal sturm und drang, storm and stress, the darkest side of Romantic nature. The boat’s mast is bending sharply in the wind, and the smoke from its funnel is swept up into the storm’s swirl, as if the boat produces its own doom. There is no hope, no escape from nature’s rage.

It is hardly credible that Snow Storm and The Campo Santo were painted by the same man; that they were painted by the same man in the same year is almost inconceivable. Two paintings could not be more different. The Campo Santo is a vision of calm loveliness. We are in the Venetian lagoon, on the rarely painted north side of the main island, near the spot Henry James may have been thinking of when he wrote, "The mere use of one’s eyes in Venice is happiness enough..."² The buildings of Venice are on our left, the island just to the right of center is the cemetery of San Michele, and at the extreme right we see what must be the southern tip of Murano. I think Turner came to Venice solely for the reflections, the beautiful mirror effect of the sea that was one of his legacies to the next two generations of painters. The passage at the extreme left, with gondoliers rowing above their own reflections past reflected buildings, is an ancestor of Whistler’s Battersea Bridge nocturne, while the entire island of San Michele is an uncanny premonition of the Venetian paintings Monet would execute late in his own life. For me, though, the Campo Santo’s most interesting reflections are those closest to us, the large patch of multicolored squiggles and chords of paint that seem to float down from the two foreground boats. This is the work’s most nearly abstract passage. The colors appear to be dragged across the surface of the water rather than reflected in it, and some ‘reflections’ seem strangely independent of anything on the boats. What, for example, do those two squiggly green lines descending from the nearest boat actually represent? More than anything else, they are a reflection of the movement of Turner’s brush across canvas. Here color is almost liberated from form, and Turner leaps over the broken brushwork of Impressionism to predict the painterly abstractions of the twentieth century.

But anyone who looks at this painting for even a few seconds will realize that its dominant form is the big double sail of that boat in the middle distance. The sail so overwhelms the boat as to seem independent of it, like an enormous butterfly hovering above the surface of the water. This is the painting’s brightest white and, paradoxically, its most solid object. Although we know the sails are mere pieces of cloth billowed by the wind, they seem as hard as alabaster, more solid than the city buildings (which they dwarf) and even harder than the walls of the cemetery island. At the same time, they are as light as air. The sails are an image of nature’s power harnessed and used by human beings, and they thus present a sharp contrast to the violently buffeted boat in the Snow Storm. But the connection between the two paintings is deeper than this superficial contrast. The double sail is an exquisite image of controlled power. It is as if all the furious, raging, uncontrollable whiteness of the Snow Storm has been compressed into this single image of calm control. Even the V shape of the masts suggests an inverted geometer’s compass, a powerful symbol of measure and order, as in William Blake’s Newton and The Ancient of Days. Some writers have interpreted these sails, appearing in close proximity to the cemetery, as representing angel’s wings. I resist this reading, finding it too sentimental, too heavy-handed and simply too Christian for the context. Turner is a painter of nature, not religion, so a natural comparison is more appropriate: I see in these sails the wings of a dove, a symbol of pure beauty and perfect peace (and, incidentally, the title of Henry James’s late Venetian novel).

The double sail is placed off-center–blocking some of the buildings of Venice–so as not to obscure our view of the painting’s most beautiful passage, the patch of deep blue water visible between the city and San Michele. This is the center of the work, the point toward which our eye is led by Turner’s careful, diagonal placement of the foreground boats. And it is an image of beautiful emptiness. The only object here is another twin-masted boat, like a distant echo or a ghost of the larger one, its tiny size measuring the great, barely credible distance the eye travels in just a few inches. Except for this boat (difficult to see in reproductions), there is nothing here but flat sea and calm, peaceful color. As I stare at this passage I’m reminded of the way Mark Rothko’s rectangles of pure color float upon their darker backgrounds. Just looking at this is a calming experience, diametrically opposed to the Snow Storm, where even looking is a kind of frenzy. The blue water merges imperceptibly into the distant mountains, which in turn sublime into that gorgeous layer of thin pinkish-white clouds. And even these clouds are dissolving, breaking up into small, white scuds that Turner thickly palette knifes on top of the matte blue surface of the sky. The dissolution of forms is one of the major themes of this painting. Everything seems to be dissolving, merging into water and light, a fact that makes the contained, geometric form of that big double sail even more powerful. The water in Venice is a magic mirror that melts reality, elongates lighted forms, stretches them out into patches of pure color. All of the objects in this painting are like symphonic chords sounded by the sunlight and dying away into the silence of the sea.

Dying into the sea. That’s what brought the Romantics to Venice: the spectacle of a once-great imperial city now defeated and decaying, doomed to sink beneath the waves. Byron began the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (published in 1818) with the lines:

I stood in Venice on the bridge of sighs;

A palace and a prison on each hand;

I saw from out the wave her structures rise

As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand:

A thousand years their cloudy wings expand

Around me, and a dying Glory smiles

O’er the far times, when many a subject land

Look’d to the winged lion’s marble piles,

Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!³

This vision of past glory is predictably contrasted with the present state of the city, now under Austrian control:

...Venice, lost and won,

Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done,

Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence she rose!

Better be whelmed beneath the waves, and shun,

Even in destruction’s depth, her foreign foes,

From whom submission wrings an infamous repose.⁴

The same year, in "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills," Shelley strikes a similar note, though with greater concision: "Sun-girt City, thou has been / Ocean’s child, and then his queen; / Now is come a darker day, / And thou soon must be his prey..."⁵ What must be understood about Byron’s and Shelley’s works is that both are, to a great extent, political poems, written in and for a specific historical context: the near-mythical city of Venice, after the defeat of Napoleon, reduced to a provincial outpost of the Austrian empire. Such was the power of the image of a sinking city, however, that the image’s political connotations were soon forgotten, and it migrated into popular culture to become one of the great travel writing cliches. The traveler’s Venice is forever sinking, dying into the water, always disintegrating. It is a vast metaphor for mortality, a trope for transience, a place where all things flow away. Decaying Venice is what the nineteenth century wanted to see and buy, and Turner–among others–filled the need. (In capitalist societies we should never underestimate the influence of the market, even upon geniuses.) While Turner read and was influenced by Byron, he seems to have come to Shelley only late in life, a fact that makes the similarities between their works all the more remarkable. There are canvases by Turner that look like painted Shelley and passages in Shelley that read like Turner versified: "And before that chasm of light, / As within a furnace bright, / Column, tower, and dome, and spire, / Shine like obelisks of fire, / Pointing with inconstant motion / From the altar of dark ocean / To the sapphire-tinted skies..."⁶ All of which suggests that one of the lesser tragedies of Shelley’s early death was its depriving Turner of the only writer in England who might have deeply understood his most nearly abstract works.

So The Campo Santo is very much a Romantic painting, an image of Venice as seen through the lens of Romantic poetry. But there is a marked absence of stereotypical Romantic melancholy in Turner’s vision. True, the buildings and boats appear to melt into the sea, but for a painting that so prominently features a cemetery, this is a remarkably unshadowed work. Here we have reflections instead of shadows, color and light in place of darkness. The intimations of mortality that do appear are extremely subtle and easy to miss. There is motion on this canvas–the big, billowing sails and the heroic diagonal of the leftmost gondolier tell us that these boats are speeding across the water–but it is a motion so calm that it seems like stillness and might even suggest the ultimate stillness. Additionally, the fact that the double-sailed boat is decentered in the composition, shifted to the left, might suggest the final decentering of human life, when nature defeats our egocentricity at death. And now we can perhaps understand why that patch of deep, distant blue sea is at the center of the painting, and why a tiny sailing vessel appears in the middle of the sea: it is a beautiful image of indomitable nature enfolding the minuscule human into the sleep that is death.

But before we read this as Turner’s definitive vision of death, we should remind ourselves of his words: "What is the use of them but together?" Turner fancied himself a poet and would often append to his works a few lines from a purported book-length poem titled The Fallacies of Hope. While his verse ranges from derivative to inept, Turner was indeed a masterful visual poet, and his insistence that his works be kept together tells us that he saw them as a unity. Every painting and watercolor by Turner is a single stanza in a vast poem of nature, a work more varied than Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and as great as Wordsworth’s Prelude. The entirety of Turner’s painted work is the real Fallacies of Hope, and we can no more understand his worldview from a single painting than we could understand that of Milton on the basis of a few lines lifted at random from Paradise Lost. Only when we make the effort to see Turner whole do we realize that he is our most eloquent painter-poet of Janus-faced Nature, the goddess who creates and destroys. No artist reflects nature’s extremities like Turner; in his work we see the beauty and the terror portrayed with equal intensity. His late Norham Castle, Sunrise, with its light, watercolor-like washes of paint creating a vision of almost indescribable serenity, should be seen beside The Slave Ship, painted just a few years earlier and showing a scene from a different, more Darwinian world: the water is almost as bloody as the sky, and men are being devoured by grotesque, Boschian sea creatures. Likewise, when we look at the Campo Santo we should consider Turner’s snowstorm paintings or the early The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons or his views of the burning Houses of Parliament, their overwhelming flames reflected in the waters of the Thames. Turner’s nature is a force that both attacks us and soothes us, gives us life and brings us death, enthralls us with beauty and terrifies us with rage. Far from the one-sided, moralizing Nature of some Romantic poetry, Turner’s nature is the very definition of complexity.

Does nature’s beauty compensate for its terror? I don’t think so. Turner is no humanist, a fact I see reflected in the poorness of his figures, most of them simply formulaic repetitions of a caricatured human shape. Nature, not man, is the measure of all things in Turner’s world. And Turner’s nature is not a humanized, essentially benevolent power that, like an abusive spouse, gives us beautiful moments as compensation for its violent rages. Nature is a lawless, amoral force, and the best we can do is gaze upon it clear-eyed. Man in Turner’s works is dominated by nature, a fact that is as evident in beautiful paintings like the Campo Santo as in horrifying ones like The Slave Ship. The domination of man by environment is almost a constant in Turner, maybe the only constant in his varied work. The final, fatal paradox for human beings is that our only means of escape from this domination lies in surrendering to it. We must allow nature to engulf us. We must die. And that is why death in The Campo Santo is so utterly peaceful, so beautiful. Death is that tiny boat, almost impossibly distant from us, sailing in the blue, both vanishing into nature and freeing itself from human submission. Death here is peace, a release from nature’s grasp, an annihilation in the blue. It is akin to Nirvana, the Buddhistic release from the round of reincarnation, a force as implacable as any of Turner’s vortices. Death is the opposite of terror.

But in Turner’s world, as we have seen, death can also be terror. Turnerian nature gives us many ways to die. The Campo Santo is one, the Snow Storm is another, The Slave Ship a terrible third. We must understand that none of these visions is definitive; all are natural and all are death. The Campo Santo is an especially lovely and peaceful vision of mortality, but it is only one among many.

In this painting executed two years after his last visit to Venice ("emotion recollected in tranquility," indeed) Turner attempts to recreate his perception of a specific time and place in order to evoke in his viewer the same emotions he felt on the spot. Speaking of the Snow Storm, Turner once said, "I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like."⁷ Turner wants us to feel what he felt, not merely to understand it. Showing us what he saw is not enough; he must communicate his emotions. This is the essence of Romantic painting. The contrast with an artist such as Canaletto, who painted his views of Venice a century earlier, could not be more dramatic. Canaletto (the subject of a Turner tribute painting) paints like a man of the Enlightenment. In his views of the Grand Canal we have a sense that every building has been measured and fitted into his perspective scheme, that every curve of every arch in the Doge’s Palace has been carefully calculated and delineated. The same rational techniques that unlocked the secrets of the planets are turned to the representation of reality. If the measurements are correct, the lines exact, then through the painting we can see the place. Such was the confidence of the eighteenth century. By Turner’s time, however, the scepticism that appeared in philosophy with Hume and crystallized in Kant finds a parallel in the world of art. If we cannot know the thing-in-itself but are limited to what our senses can perceive, then our personal perceptions and emotions, our (say it!) impressions, are the most that we can communicate. There is more than a hint of the solipsistic prison about this line of thought, but if our selves are like prison cells, we are ingenious prisoners who have developed many means of communication. Turner’s paintings come to us as a powerful defiance of solipsism, showing us that the Romantic artist is not necessarily trapped in himself. These paintings that seem so personal, so singular, so hermetic are in fact sending out messages. And we need only open our eyes to receive this information, these signals from the blue, this spectacular communication.

NOTES

1. Graham-Dixon, British Art, 159.

2. James, Italian Hours, 52.

3. Byron, Works, 221.

4. Ibid., 222.

5. Shelley, Major Works, 201.

6. Ibid., 201.

7. Bailey, Standing in the Sun, 277.

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