The European Contract of the drawer

In Prague, in the Kinsky Palace on Old Town Square, a large exhibition of engravings and drawings of Ventseeslav Hollar (1607-1677) opened. He was born in a wealthy family of a servant nobleman at the Prague Court of Rudolf the Second, and died in poverty (legend claims to be in poverty) in London during the reign of Charles II. Hollar was known during his lifetime, had fans, friends, students, traveled a lot, created hundreds of works. He lived the long labor life of the artist and fugitive, capturing Europe and over and over again eluding the European wars and revolutions. In the Kinsky Palace, you can now see this very Europe in many of its smallest details - except, perhaps, the most widely known, those that we know from the books and works of Collar's colleagues. In this circumstance, it seems to me, there is a secret. Let's try to solve it.

First about life; About creativity - a little later. So, he was born in the famous Prague of the time of a half -crazy collector and philanthropist Rudolf the Second; The city was clogged with artists, alchemists, astrologers, adventurers: they spun around the courtyard, counting on a handout or even a pension, and the emperor, like a stroke, spent over his treasures, which (alternating with various kinds of exotic garbage) filled the room behind the room in his residence in the city. In that strange era in Prague, as in all Bohemia, the Catholics lived quite peacefully mixed with Protestants - the fact is remarkable and renounced, given the catastrophe, which was destined to begin 11 years after the birth of Venzeslav Hollar. The evidence of the confessional affiliation of his family has not been preserved, but the vectors of the movement of the artist in Europe, already covered by religious massaces, give the right to suggest that the Halllars were Protestants. The local, Bohemian catastrophe began to break out in the second half of the tenths: the picturesque collector was first slowly deprived of the crown, then he died and a completely different Habsburg came in his place, preferring the Catholic of bread into the body of the Lord the alchemical transformation of iron into gold, and ariding above the Archimboldo. The Czech Protestants did not like this Habsburg, and they found another ruler who reigned only one winter, which is why he was nicknamed the “Winter King”. The entire Czech national drama fit between the two events: the “second Prague defenses” of 1618, when the Czechs who rebelled against the emperor threw two crown officials and one unfortunate clerk from the windows of the city hall, and the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, in which the imperial army defeated the Protestant army of the “Winter King” and occupied the Prague. The postscript for these events was the public execution of 27 leaders of Czech Protestants in June 1621 at the same Old Town Square in Prague, where the works of Vennlav Hollar are exhibited today. Was there a 14-year-old boy in the crowd of onlookers who watched how the best Czech heads of that time are cut off? It's hard to say.

What began in Bohemia after 1621, otherwise, as a “genocide,” it is difficult to call it - if, of course, use the modern political dictionary. Something similar in the 17th century was arranged only in the British in Ireland. The winners threw hundreds of local Protestants in prison. A quarter of the free population left the country - citizens, merchants, scientists - to avoid a violent transition to Catholicism. Bohemia was flooded with Catholic colonists-Germans, Italians, Irish and even Portuguese. The Czech language was gradually replaced by German - first from worship, then from official documentation, then from the "high culture", finally, from cities in the village; By the beginning of the 19th century, he almost lost writing, and the figures of the “Czech Renaissance” (many of them were Germans) had to compose a new grammar of the old and new language. Under the fluttering banners of counter -reformation, the Jesuits came to bohemia; It is curious, it was they who built up the Prague of the very same baroque churches and conventions that are now coming to admire (under almost gratuitous beer with a bite) tens of millions of onlookers from around the world.

Among the quarter left was Vincent Hollar. He preferred the blood of the “thirty -year war” by Germany pressed against the Jesuit nail of Prague. Hollar was twenty years old, and by that time he became a good engraver and a drawer. Nine years of wandering in German cities, his talent was honed and made one of the best engravers in Europe. He studied and worked in engraving workshops of Stuttgart, Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Cologne. He made the views and panoramas of cities, brought landscapes on paper, the types of citizens, and once went to the Netherlands, where he first saw the sea and the delightful graphic perfection of the sailing of ships - he will never forget this and will engage in rivers, ports, shipyards and sea battles until his death. The work of Hollar and his colleagues diverged briskly; In that era, when there were no cameras and documentary newsreels, engravings were the only way to see the world without leaving home. Since the 16th century, gigantic projects of the visual description of the continent arose in Europe. These projects combined the functions of atlases, guidebooks, injuries, military maps and were intended for a wide variety of categories of people - from travelers to commanders, from pilgrims to scientists. I’ll name only a few of these colossal works: the six -volume Civitates orbis Terrarum , published from 1572 to 1617 by George Brown with the engravings of Franz Hohenberg, and a hundred years later Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Abram Ortelius. It is curious that the military use of such publications was quite implied by authors and printers - but the use of only the most Christian armies. In the foreground, any largest panorama of any European city was always depicted a group of people: ladies, cavaliers, military, peasants, artisans, depending on the type of landscape and the mood of the artist. This was done from the deepest belief that the Magometan Turks, who were then considered (and partly really) the main threat to the Christian world, would be discontinued with disgust these venerable volumes, discovering in them the images of people prohibited by Islam. It would be interesting to read any study of the current historian about whether this trick worked ... After all, if you think about it, Turkish Pasha could simply tear off pieces of strategically valuable cards and panoramas populated by incorrect people (or pour God-dimensional images of ink), and then calmly check with Vienna (we say, Franz Hohenberg), where it is necessary. And ordering to dig trenches for the Janissaries here and here.

On dreamily accurate urban panoramas and types of Hollar, people are also present. On the famous panorama of Prague of 1649, which he did, having hung his hometown (as it later turned out, for the last time). On his even more famous panorama of London 1647, perhaps the most amazing image of the city ever made. In London, Hollar found himself after in the late 30s he entered the service of the English diplomat Sir Thomas Hauerdu, the Lord of Arundela and Surrey, who came to Germany to save the remnants of the “Winter King” who died 12 years after the disaster near the White Mountain (the widow of the Winter King, the “winter koro”, “Zimny ​​Koroleva”. Stewart, was the sister of the then English king Charles the Great). Lord Arundel was famous in Europe as a philanthropist and a collector of art is not in vain - Hollar showed him his panorama Cologne and was immediately accepted to the service. He was instructed to make an inventory of the visual treasures of the diplomat and, most importantly, copy his collection of paintings for engravings. Ventseeslav Hollar traveled with Lord Arundel along the Rhine, making, it seems, his best landscape work, and then (at the end of the unsuccessful diplomatic mission), he recovered with him to London. Here he became, if not the most famous, then one of the most famous English engravers; And certainly, the best. Extraordinary for a thorough bohemian ease reigns in his “Type of Englishmen” and “costume series”; These brilliantly tilted women (hands in fur couplings, on faces - half masks) are losing their minds now. Then, in England, the revolution began and, in the end, Lord Arundel, one of the main ministers of Karl the First, fled to Antwerp with his retinue. Here the philanthropist and the artist part are parting - Hauer goes to Italy, Hollar remains in Antwerp, trying to gain food for engravings and book illustrations. Apparently, his deeds went unimportant, and in the early fifties he will return to Cromwew England, where he will again begin to draw, engrave, print, and publish. The ladies in fur couplings were not very relevant in the country of the victims of Puritan, but soon Fortune again changed to Hollar and to the country where he lived, Cromwell died, and his generals restored the Stuarts. The era of Charles Second and his cheerful yard more favored the elegant arts, and some incidents of that reign simply asked for a sheet of paper or cardboard - say, the “great fire” of London in 1666, the sea battles with the Dutch and even the sudden acquisition of the crown of the African port of Tangier. Hollar portrayed all this with great care and art; Its “London before and after the Great Fire”, a paired panorama, is especially noteworthy, on which almost everything that burned out then with a magnifier can be restored in detail - and what was miraculously preserved. Or his joint with the antiques by William Dagdeil "History of St. Paul Cathedral", completed several years before the fire, which destroyed this cathedral. Before going to see St. Paul, erected by Sir Christophore Ren, it is worth it to look through the work of Dagdale-Hall; An amazing sensation: to look at one miracle embodied in stone, having no longer existing in memory, but no less real another - engraved. Hollar’s ​​affairs were going well, he still worked a lot, published engravings, illustrated books, sailed with an expedition to Tangier, and even somehow received from the king the position of “Royal Scenographer) plus a considerable, at that time, an amount of fifty pounds. But, as you know, from the works of the righteous ... (see the beginning of this text).

But back to people, their affairs and how to portray the first and the second. In, it seems, the best film Greenaway “The Contractor of the Drawer” is a colleague of Hollara (and, like the one, a stranger in England, the Irishman) about twenty years after the death of our Bohemice, is hired into one aristocratic family to make a series of drawings depicting a family estate with a park and other English rural charms. In English, both the contract and its conditions are eccentric; The ladies and her daughter herself provide a various services (including sexual ones); He draws, shouts to the masters and servants around him, who (with one degree of obedience) fulfill his orders. Behind all this, some terrible secret seems-and, indeed, the owner of the estate disappeared: someone suspects that he was running away, someone that he was killed. In addition, it is not clear why this drawing epic is started at all. However, if you think at once detectively and Bartovski-Fukoian, the essence of what is happening is clear-to “draw” (as well as “describe”), which means “assign”, to appropriate. If the lady who hired the artist killed her husband, then she tries to take possession of his estate with the help of drawings (so to speak metaphysically). She temporarily gives her body to the power of the impudent Irishman, forever receiving, through his craft, the estate of the deceased spouse . And here the most mysterious begins. Someone secretly tries to leave a mark on impeccable and classically serene drawings, changing, so to speak, nature: it outweighs drying linen, puts the stairs to the window and so on. Someone (and who - isn’t the murdered spouse?) Trives - through a pencil of the artist - to apply a sign of trouble, a sign of a crime committed on paper. Images become evidence, an artist - a witness; Therefore, the drawings at the end of the film are burned, and the drawer, blinding, kill.

Hollar in his life saw a lot of evil, even, perhaps, too much for an ordinary person. He was a witness to the uprising and catastrophe of his people. For almost twenty years, he took refuge in German cities from the armies, which robbed and killed all living things in the territory between the Oder and the Rhine. He saw the revolution on the island, where he left the continental massacre. He fled from this revolution to the same continent. Returning to the island later, he witnessed the restoration of the dynasty, overthrown fifteen years before, the great fire that destroyed the city where he lived, the plague epidemic that took the life of his only child, the war with the country where he had found refuge, and much more. The story, like the mysterious owner from the “Contractor’s Contract”, all the time tried to get into his work, but Ventseeslav Hollar, as a real master, for the most part, left only signs of the European trouble of the 17th century on paper. Only a few times he allowed himself a direct speech - and that, having done this, as his time required, symbolically, even allegorically. In 1659, he created an engraving entitled "Comparison of the English and Bohemian Civil Wars." A sheet of paper is divided by diagonally - in accordance with the geographical position of both countries. Above and left is an island along which microscopic detachments of pikiners, musketeers and cavalrymen spread. This is the war of the "gentlemen" and "round -headed". From below and right is the hilly area decorated with a monastery on the mountain. On the slopes are the same pikiners, musketeers and cavalrymen, built in neat battlefield boxes. This is a white mountain. Large images are framed by small pictures in squares; There is a historical and allegorical context of the troubles: on one, for example, three people fly out of the window of a tall building, and on the other a brutal soldier is doing what a brutal soldier in the captured city usually does. Below - neat columns with a "legend" to the pictures. Finally, in the center below, in the oval there is another image: the cow overturns a bucket with just bold milk. This is understandable to every educated person of that time of the allegory of the meaninglessness of what was happening.

Nevertheless, it is not a “comparison of the English and Bohemian civil wars” and not “the view of London before and after the“ great fire ”” show us the strongest image of wars and death, the most piercing sign of the misfortune of Europe of the 17th century. In the mid -thirties, Hollar creates the appearance of the German city of Mainz. This is one of the most (if I can talk about city panoramas) lyrical, warm and serene graphic works. The peaceful city is depicted somewhere in the background, behind the river; In the foreground is a deserted river bank, there and there are overgrown with bushes. On the left - fortification, bastion with earthen escarpes, counter -experts, flanks and other fortification sorts of the era when artillery made the thick and high stone walls of medieval castles unnecessary. At the lower cut of the drawing, on the hill there are three figures: two women and one man. On the right are two powerful wood: one is broken, but still holds in the ground, the other is uprooted and powerless lies nearby. Let's look at the History of the Thirty Years War. The German city of Mainz was taken by the Swedish army and turned into one of its fortified points in the early thirties. In 1633, the Swedes erected a fort here, Gustavsburg named after their king Gustava-Adolf. A man in a military cloak, a camisole and a hat-for sure, an officer of the art. What are two, judging by his clothes, are the wealthy townspeople, the German women from the Mainz Swedes do in his company? The very view of them, at first glance, is serene, but the whole composition is somewhat tense: an officer and one townspeople look at us, the other woman-somewhere left, past the Swede, towards Gustavsburg. What is the symbol, what kind of allegory is hidden in this group? What kind of drama is playing before us, against the background of a peaceful landscape? What happened here in 1633 and what happens at this very moment when the artist captures the appearance of Minz and his inhabitants? How does this city live side by side with someone else's fortress and alien soldiers of someone else's king? Are these citizens of their companion afraid of these citizens? Why is there not a single Minz burgher in the figure? We will never receive answers to these questions. But, as in the works of the Grinuevsky drawer, the Hollar has been left a sign - for those who will understand, who will read the artistic code of the 17th century. The broken and uprooted trees in the foreground are the emblem of vanity, the doom of death and destruction, and the doom that the German city of Mainz (together with dozens of other European cities) in the monstrous XVII century experienced. The draftsman, the engraver, refugee Ventseeslav Hollar honestly fulfilled his contract - he does not insult the viewer with the cheapness of picturesque horrors, he only hints: evil - here it is, here, among these elegant people and beautiful species, it pretends that nothing happens, that everything is fine. And we, for a moment, seek something very important in its nature.