Journeys

Of the four Gospels, St Matthew’s is the only source in the Bible mentioning figures following a star in search of a “King of the Jews” born in Jerusalem. However, at no time does it suggest that these visitors were monarchs, for the original Greek refers to them as magoi, who were originally priests of Zarathustra among the Medes or Persians and were believed to possess the gift of interpreting dreams and predicting the future. The promotion of these scholars to kings is almost certainly due to the passage in Isaiah (60:3) in the Old Testament: “And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” Furthermore, nowhere is it written that there were three, although that figure can be deduced from the number of gifts mentioned in the Gospel, assuming that each bore one gift.

Since ancient times and indeed until relatively recently, journeys were not undertaken for pleasure: the roads were infested with bandits and wild animals, the seas with pirates, nature was an essentially hostile environment. Instead, journeys were undertaken for religious reasons, such as pilgrimages, or for purposes of conquest or commercial gain.

Without doubt the most famous of all the routes was the “Silk Road”, a trading network between Asia and Europe which stretched from Chang’an (now Xi’an) in China via Antioch in Syria and Constantinople to the gates of Europe. Coined by the German geographer Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen in 1877, the term was used to denote the richest merchandise (silk-making being a closely-guarded secret known only to the Chinese) that travelled the route. But many other kinds of goods were also carried along its paths: fabrics, precious metals and stones (like amber), ivory, lacquer, glass, coral, manufactured materials, spices and aromatic substances like incense and myrrh (the gifts made to the Child by the magi).

Many spices (from the Latin species meaning “essential”) and fragrant resins are named in the Bible, as they played an important role in worship. Indeed, they were regarded as objects of great value: kings often exchanged them as gifts or the victors in war demanded them as tribute from the vanquished. However, not only goods were exchanged, but also ideas, artistic knowledge, languages and religions, for alongside the merchants and soldiers travelled scholars and monks representing the world’s great religions and these spread the teachings of Buddha, Confucius, Jesus Christ and Mohammed.

In 1324, some years before this panel was painted, the great traveller Marco Polo died. Marco Polo was the most famous (although not the first) European to travel the Silk Road. His fame is due to his description of an expedition in his book Il Milione (“The Million”), better known as The Travels of Marco Polo or The Book of the Marvels of the World.

In the 15th century, the navigation of new sea routes (ushering in the Age of Discovery) and the rise of the Turkish Empire led to a gradual decline in the importance of both the Silk Road as a main commercial artery between East and West and of some of the most vigorous and magnificent cities along the way. Forgotten by the outside world, these became shadows of their former selves.

One of the oldest Greek legends, the story of the Argonauts has been suggested by some scholars as being previous to the Odyssey, although it did not exist in written form until centuries later. The travels of Ulysses are also assumed to have been based, at least partially, on that story, for in the course of his own travels Jason — like Homer’s hero — had to face not only the forces of nature, but also fabulous creatures (sirens, harpies, monsters...) and sorceresses.

Whatever the case, both epics contain elements commonly found in popular tales: an eventful journey undertaken by a hero, help from unlikely allies to attain an apparently impossible goal, etc. This is, then, a journey of initiation and pursuit of self-knowledge from which, after a series of ordeals, the main character emerges a hero.

Historical echoes have also been detected in the legend. The members of the expedition set sail from Iolcos in Thessalia and, having stopped over on the island of Lemnos, crossed the Hellespont — the strait separating Chersonesos from Asia Minor — to their destination. All this could well be a reflection of the voyages made by the Greeks in ancient times to colonise and open up the Black Sea area to trade.

The panel depicts the Argo as a cog with a rounded hull. This type of small mediaeval vessel (from the Flemish kok, meaning “shell”) first appeared in the 10th century and was used widely from the 12th century on. Normally built of oak, which was extremely abundant in northern Europe, cogs were fitted with a mast with a single square sail and used for maritime trade, especially in the Baltic Sea region, which was controlled by the powerful Hanseatic League.

Atop the mast was the crow’s nest, a wooden platform from which the sea could be scrutinised for enemy vessels and land sighted when nearing the destination, a task sometimes meted as punishment to seamen during voyages.

The short reign of the Doge whose portrait Titian painted was marked by the peaceful settlement of the Republic’s wars but also by a rise in the cost of living that affected the Doge’s popularity considerably. Although the scene in the painting with a sailing ship in front of a burning building, viewed through the window, has never been identified, it has been interpreted as a symbol of the city’s power.

Nevertheless, the rot had set in long before, with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Eventually the overland paths monopolised by Genoese and Venetian merchants were cut off, forcing Europeans to seek new trade routes, their main aim being to find an alternative path to Asia to continue the trade in spices from the East and avoid the Ottoman-controlled Mediterranean. The discovery of America soon after, however, was to affect trade routes permanently and change the view of the world forever.

The real subject of this painting, however, is the idyllic Roman countryside. The amber light typical of the Arcadian scenery (so popular with 18th-century British painters and travellers), pervaded by a picturesque quality, inspired a device known as the Claude’s Glass — a tinted convex mirror often used by artists to produce images of landscapes in miniature and study the subtle ranges of tones in compositions. A similar though larger device was apparently often attached to horse-drawn carriages so that travellers could see the reflection of the scenery not as it actually was but as Claude Lorrain would have rendered it.

In areas as frequently visited by artists and travellers as the Lake District in England, special viewpoints were set up where tourists (armed with maps and Claude’s Glasses from opticians’ shops or art material suppliers) could turn their backs on the landscape to admire the view, duly framed and re-configured, in the manner of a 17th century work of art. Thanks to the distorted perspective, chromatic saturation and compressed tones in the reflection, it was possible to unify forms, although at the expense of a certain loss of detail. And as if by magic, Mother Nature suddenly became “picturesque” (i.e. “worthy of being painted”).

The so-called “Grand Tour” was an itinerary (and precursor of modern tourism) whose heyday lasted from the period mentioned above to the 1820s, when rail travel — by then much more affordable — became the alternative.

The Grand Tour, which could last for several months or even years depending on one’s means, was especially popular with young, upper-class Britons. As a prelude to marriage, it rolled relaxation, education and social self-promotion all in one, as it enabled travellers to see the splendours of Classical art and the Renaissance while affording them access to members of the European aristocracies.

Although its original purpose as a formative trip appears to date from the 16th century, when artists and humanist intellectuals travelled around Italy to familiarise themselves with Classical culture, the earliest reference to a journey of this type as a “grand tour” was apparently made by the Jesuit Richard Lassels, a traveller who in 1670 recommended an itinerary which he called “The Voyage Of Italy, Or A Compleat Journey Through Italy”.

Travellers usually visited Turin, Milan and Venice and then headed south for Florence. Rome was a must and drew large numbers of young people with artistic aspirations. The tour ended in Naples, where the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, whose excavation began in the first half of the 18th century, could be admired. In Travels in Italy, published in the late 1780s, Goethe also popularised visiting Sicily.

The experience was often recorded in journals, as in the case of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne, or History of a Six Weeks’ Tour by the Romantic writers Mary and Percy Shelley. Furthermore, vedute or city views, like those by Canaletto on display in this room, became fashionable as souvenirs for travellers to take home.

Whether discussing or depicting his scenes, the traveller uses his imagination to restore the vestiges of the past, with their auras of nostalgia that he has encountered along the way. Ravaged by time and covered in vegetation, the ruins of the imposing Classical buildings symbolise the triumph of the passing of time over civilisation, and spur us to philosophical reflection on the vanity inherent in all human endeavour.

The idea of man as a traveller and life as a pilgrimage, a brief intermediate sojourn or a vale of tears is an existential concept common to many peoples and religions. Knights errant, wandering monks, nomads in pursuit of enlightenment, all in search of themselves on a physical and existential journey… To the hat he wears as protection from the elements, the figure on the left has attached a shell — the symbol of his pilgrimage. Stom’s work is an invitation to reflect on the law of hospitality for hospitality is that essential sense of fellowship uniting all those who make the journey.

For the latter this meant the decline of their societies, while for the colonists such encounters often led to intense debate on the very nature of culture itself.

Corner of a Library depicts a room full of scientific instruments (a terrestrial globe and armillary and celestial spheres), several scrolled maps leaning against a bookshelf, an open atlas on a table with a decorative Chinese cloth, and two Oriental spears; all in allusion to the unprecedented overseas expansion of the young Dutch Republic. On account of the new discoveries, the field of geography also expanded on a major scale and by the 17th century the city of Antwerp had become an important centre of cartography. Exhibited in the same room is Gerard ter Borch’s Portrait of a Man Reading a Document (c. 1675), which features an atlas open at a page with a map of the Netherlands showing what some believe to be the Scheldt estuary and the city of Antwerp. Furthermore, in Room 25, The Naughty Drummer by Nicolaes Maes shows the interior of a middleclass house with a large map on the wall.

It has been suggested that this interior had some connection with the painter, as an inventory of his belongings recorded a considerable number of documents and books. The candle, almost a stub after many hours of study, could be an allusion to Van der Heyden’s work as an inventor, which he alternated with painting. Indeed, this artist was better known by his contemporaries for his innovations in street lighting and fire-fighting mechanisms, his greatest achievement in this respect being a system for pumping water for which he also wrote a manual.

With the Silk Road hitherto unknown objects began to appear in the West, as for example porcelain, brought to Europe by Italian merchants in the Middle Ages. The first European to describe the manufacturing process was Marco Polo, and it is possible that the word “porcelain” is due to confusion connected with the traveller’s story.

The term comes from porcella (“little pig”), the Italian word for cowrie, a mollusc whose highly appreciated shell was used as currency in some parts of the East. A cowrie is also featured in this room in Willem van Aelst’s Still Life with Fruit (1664). As the process for making exquisite china was a secret, some believed that it might be derived from the motherof- pearl shell of that highly appreciated mollusc.

The eccentric monarch commissioned from Savery a series of topographic illustrations of the Tyrol with mountain views, torrents, forests and other natural phenomena which are indirectly connected with this painting, as he based many of the works he later produced in his studio on the sketches and drawings he made on his travels.

It was precisely in the 17th century when landscape painting became a genre in its own right, as a result of the major transformation in society’s approach to nature, for it ceased to be regarded as inhospitable or menacing or a source of exploitation and instead became an inspiration for aesthetic appreciation. Furthermore, this occurred at a time when trade became the powerhouse of the European economy and obliged an ever greater number of people to do something hitherto unheard of in the West: travel.

One mid-century writer told of the origin of landscape painting through a fable: A gentleman and great art lover from Antwerp returned home from a long journey through the Liege and Ardennes Forest region. On his arrival in Antwerp he called on an old friend and local artist and found him sitting at his easel. To amuse his friend the traveller described the towns he had visited and the beautiful views, full of fanciful rock formations and imposing castles (like those in this picture) he had seen.

The painter (without the traveller realising) put his work aside and, taking up another panel, began to produce images of what his friend had described in such detail, thus immortalising his words. Later, as the loquacious traveller was taking his leave, he happened to glance at the panel and to his astonishment found himself looking at the landscape he had been describing, rendered as faithfully as if the painter had seen it with his own eyes.

Landscape painting is not a reflection or direct transcription of surroundings; it has much more to do with memory, description and, ultimately, travelling. By “reinventing” nature for us and showing us what we feel when we gaze on it, the artist teaches us how to see.

Although the expedition focused mainly on trade and establishing an area in which the Dutch West India Company could operate safely, it was also intended as a scientific project to map territory and study Brazilian flora and fauna.

Although few paintings from Post’s time in the Americas have survived, on his return to Holland, and indeed until the end of his days, he reproduced from memory in his workshop a vast number of nostalgic variations of the places he had seen, filling them with exotic creatures, including the snake and bird seen here in the lower left-hand corner, and recombining elements as the fancy took him.

One being the migrations of peoples (particularly through the slave trade) and another the appearance of new, interconnected markets on which consumer goods, ideas and also diseases circulated.

Merchant fleets grew and international law attempted to shape and control these new interactions. New transcontinental empires sprang up, journeys of exploration began to receive financing, etc. Only against the backdrop of this world of constant exchange can the process of industrialisation which took place years later be understood.

This canvas, which has an extremely well documented history, was commissioned with the painter by Louis XV’s minister Abbot Terray (identified in the picture as the clergyman in black behind the man in the vermilion dress coat). When it was exhibited at the 1775 Salon, it received favourable criticism from Diderot, who added that the central figure in the green dress coat was the painter himself.

There he worked for the powerful British community, consisting of the civil servants, soldiers, merchants and adventurers who had settled on the subcontinent in the hope of starting a new life. Zoffany decided to bring his Oriental venture to an end in 1789 and finally sailed back to England.

The historian William Dalrymple states that on the way back Zoffany’s ship sank off the Andaman Islands. Lots were drawn to determine who was to feed the survivors, the loser being a young seaman who was promptly devoured — by Zoffany among others. The painter is regarded as the only member of the Royal Academy with a cannibalistic past.

This canvas features portraits of Sir Elijah and Lady Impey and their three children. The magistrate’s wife, who was a great lover of birds and exotic creatures (which she kept in a small zoo at her mansion), was also a keen patron of the arts. The illustrations she commissioned with Indian artists for her collection include the earliest known depictions of certain species of birds found on the subcontinent and are regarded by ornithologists as extremely valuable documentation. Indeed, the scientific community named a type of pheasant, the Himalayan or Impeyan monal (Lophophorus impejanus), now one of the national symbols of Nepal, in her honour.

During those years Holland succeeded in expanding across the Indian and Atlantic oceans, superseding the Portuguese and Spanish. Luxury goods of all kinds reached its ports: spices such as cinnamon, saffron, peppercorns and cloves, Chinese porcelain, silk and Oriental carpets, to name but a few.

By 1650, around half of the merchant ships in the world were flying the Dutch flag. Established in 1602, the Dutch East India Company monopolised trade from the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Magellan. It was also empowered to declare war and sign peace treaties, build forts, seize foreign vessels and mint coins. In the words of one contemporary poet: “We explore the farthest reaches of the earth for love of profit.”

Willem van de Velde the Younger was one of the most outstanding 17th-century Dutch marine painters. For their oil paintings, the Van de Veldes (father and son) made sketches directly from nature and later reproduced the ships they had seen in full detail. They even sailed with the fleet to gain first-hand experience of navigation and naval warfare. It seems that the artist based this picture on a series of drawings executed in situ by his father which reproduced the ships so faithfully that it was later possible to identify them.

It was created by a number of artists who painted scenes of the Mississippi on long scrolls and then travelled from town to town across America in wagons and boats, charging members of the public a modest fee to see a machine slowly unroll the scrolls and reveal the majestic panorama painted on them, while a narrator described the beauty of the scenes to musical accompaniment. The idea was to give the spectator the sensation of sailing down the river on a steamboat.

Of all these artists, the most talented and the one who made the longest panoramic view was Henry Lewis, who with his assistants painted a scene 365 cm high and approximately 404 meters long (the exact figures are unknown as none of the panoramas have survived). As Lewis’s panorama consisted of two parts — the Lower and Upper Mississippi — anyone who wished to see the complete view of the river had to attend two performances. After various preliminary studies, in the summer of 1848 (one year after this picture was painted) Lewis had taken a steamboat to Minneapolis, where he supervised the construction of a raft fixed to two canoes which he christened the Minnehaha.

In July and August of that year he and his companions had slowly descended the river, from the Falls of Saint Anthony to the town of Saint Louis, sketching riverside views as they went. Meanwhile, one of his assistants was capturing the river’s lower reaches. The panoramas were painted in Cincinnati and Lewis set out with his travelling show in the spring of 1849, working his way across the United States and Canada until 1851, when he sailed to Europe, to settle for the rest of his days in Dusseldorf. There he published Das Illustrierte Mississippithal, the story of his travels (with his own sketches), which is regarded as a jewel of American exploration literature.

The somewhat naive meticulousness with which the topography is depicted is reminiscent of the work of Lewis’s contemporary George Catlin. The close attention to detail can be seen in the Indian in front of the falls, for, despite the extremely small scale, the figure’s painted face, feathers and trinkets are clearly visible.

Such works of art became a source of inspiration for many painters associated with Impressionism and interested in the Oriental perspective, flat areas of vibrant colours and freedom of composition that contrasted so sharply with Western norms and academic conventions.

The American painter William Merritt Chase travelled to Europe, where he came paintinto contact with the current taste for all things Eastern, and decided to become a collector of exotic objects — like the magnificent screen in this painting. When back in New York, Chase (who was well-known for his eccentric dress sense) moved into the old studio of Albert Bierstadt.

There, surrounded by stuffed birds, musical instruments and Eastern carpets, he would receive members of high society. An example of the Japanese influence mentioned above, A Girl in Japanese Gown is one of a series of portraits for which the subject was dressed in that traditional Japanese garment. Chase could not have been especially familiar with the strict Japanese dress code, however, since the right side of the girl’s kimono is folded over the left, in the manner customarily used for the dead.

I must have been born somewhere else — I’ve always had memories or intuitions of fragrant shores and blue seas. I was born to be the emperor of Cochin-China, to smoke never-ending pipes, to have six thousand wives and fourteen hundred catamites, scimitars to cut off heads I don’t like the look of, Numidian horses, marble pools... My homeland is the country I love, that is the country that makes me dream, that makes me feel good. I’m just as Chinese as I am French.”

Travelling as a metaphor lies at the heart of Romanticism, a movement represented in the museum’s collection by Caspar David Friedrich, one of its greatest exponents. With its highly personal iconography his Easter Morning, also in this room, places us before a winding road whose symbolism appears to suggest life as a pilgrimage, while the figures on the shore in Fishing Boat by the Baltic Sea (c. 1830-35), from the Carmen Thyssen- Bornemisza Collection, fix their gaze on the dark immensity that stretches away before them.

This belief in the transformational power of art, in its capacity to hone our perceptual abilities and teach us to see more and better, recalls a remark by the British politician and writer Joseph Addison: “… we find the works of nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of art.” (1712).

In the powerful light of the south, Van Gogh adopted a palette of louder colours and a stylistic change with thick, elongated brushstrokes, sharp colour contrasts and silhouetting clearly indicative of the influence of Japanese art. “I saw a magnificent and strange effect this evening,” Vincent wrote to Theo at the beginning of August 1888. “A very big boat loaded with coal on the Rhone, moored to the quay. Seen from above it was all shining and wet from a shower; the water was yellowish-white and clouded pearl grey; the sky, lilac, with an orange streak in the west; the town, violet. On the boat small workmen in blue and white went back and forth, carrying the cargo ashore. It was pure Hokusai.”

In his youth Edward Hopper spent some time in Paris. There he discovered Baudelaire, a writer whose poetry would accompany him for the rest of his life. Travelling is a recurrent theme in the painter’s oeuvre. Hopper once said: “To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you’re travelling.”

In 1925 Hopper bought his first car (a Dodge) and drove down from New York to New Mexico. From then on he never stopped roaming America with his wife Jo and capturing those desolate landscapes of his, making no concessions to picturesqueness or exoticism: service stations, empty parking lots, waiting rooms, neon-lit highway diners, hotel rooms with solitary, introspective, waiting figures, Thanks to the cinematographic quality of his paintings, we can imagine, as if in a road movie, stories of wanderers and the dispossessed setting out on adventures, fleeing boredom, bad luck or abandonment.

As the artist himself explained: “It is to do with getting rid of the ideas we have of ourselves. Of what we call the ego.”

The series covers a journey in a balloon which the artist used as a symbol of the “skin-encapsulated ego”, an expression inspired by the writings of the psychologist R.D. Laing. Andrews painted the solitary progression of that balloon over empty landscapes, urban vistas and coastal spas as a symbol of the soul’s odyssey in search of liberation, finally reaching the calm waters of a beach (the chosen landing site) after overcoming obsessive attachment to the ego.

A great voice in 20th-century poetry, Cavafy wrote one of the most famous poems about journeys, Ithaca, which draws a parallel between Odysseus’ travels and life, viewed as an adventure, in which the destination is not as important as our experiences along the way.

These had gained international fame through their tests at Versailles in the presence of Louis XVI in which they sent a basket aloft hooked to the balloon and containing three docile passengers — a sheep dubbed Montauciel (which may be translated as “ascends to the sky”), a duck and a cockerel — to study the effects of the air at high altitude. With help from a friend, De Maistre — inspired perhaps by Leonardo da Vinci — made himself some wings with wire and paper while dreaming of an impossible journey to the Americas.

Two years later he managed to secure a place in a hot-air balloon and for a brief period flew over Chambéry before crashlanding in a nearby forest. There are various ways of travelling, and one — highly recommended for those without the financial wherewithal or who are afraid of heights or abhor mass tourism — is without luggage. Or else, as De Maistre suggested, sporting comfortable cotton pyjamas. The satisfaction we derive from the journey may depend more on our attitude than our destination or our sensitivity towards the beauty of the small things that surround us.

Let us bring this thematic tour to an end with a quote from Gnoli, the creator of this Armchair, painted in Majorca in summer 1967: “I always use elements which are given and simple; I never want to add anything or to eliminate. I have never any desire to deform; I isolate and I represent. My themes come from the present, from familiar situations, from daily life. Because I never intervene actively against the object, I feel the magic of its presence.”