The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (36 page)

Sosus, the creator of Pliny's doves, was also famed for the pleasing and curious motif of 'the unswept floor' (
asaratos oikos
), a type of floor mosaic that appears to portray a floor scattered with the debris of a meal: a device that gives a vivid sense of time suspended, a meal just abandoned, a party newly ended. Scholars have looked for allegorical meanings in the 'unswept floor', suggesting a funerary significance, or a statement of overflowing abundance. Of these, the latter seems more plausible, but it is surely not difficult to explain the attraction of this inspired double use of
trompe l'oeil.
It is witty, it is pretty, it gives delight, and it suggests good company.

I have yet to find a jigsaw of a mosaic, though I am sure I shall soon. (Jigsaws of stained glass are popular; Clara Farmer, editor, and one of the first to approve an early version of this project, once devoted wet holiday time to the windows of Chartres cathedral.) Historian Tom Holland tells me that while pursuing his research in Naples he acquired a jigsaw of the celebrated Alexander mosaic from Pompeii. It proved interesting but difficult to assemble, because of the double set of fault lines. The blank spaces were easier, he says, than the pictorial sections. I looked for it when I was recently in the region, but failed to find it, although I saw the real thing on display in the National Museum in Naples, and a copy of it in its original location in Pompeii. It shows the battle of Issus where Alexander defeated Xerxes III and the Persian army, and the little pink ribbons that tie Alexander's breastplate must have been fun to do. I wonder whether the mosaicists saved them till the end, as I saved the little scarlet square in one of my Ben Nicholson tapestries, or whether they did the interesting bits first, like Arnold Bennett's Constance Baines in Bursley. And I wonder whether it is possible that the design of this great work was, as has been
plausibly suggested, taken from a painting executed by a woman. We know that Helen, daughter of Timon of Egypt, painted the battle of Issus. Maybe she was responsible for those little pink ribbons.

Italy is full of toyshops, much fuller than England, but the Alexander mosaic jigsaw is not a children's toy. I thought my best bet was the museum shop in Naples, where I dared to enquire of the very young and attractive shopkeeper, who, to my surprise, did not snap at me for my folly; she smiled with unfeigned and friendly delight, and said that indeed this jigsaw existed but she didn't, alas, have it in stock. She'd last seen it in Paestum, where there was a 'bella libreria'. But I really couldn't go traipsing off to the majestic ruins of Paestum in search of a cardboard puzzle. That would have been too foolish.

The city of Rome is an immense mosaic. So are all cities, but Rome is more literally a mosaic than most. During the Renaissance, Rome, Florence and Milan all produced notable work of tesserae and
pietra dura,
but the Roman hardstone mosaics contained more archaeological spoils. Florence and Milan drew on the coloured stones and gems of the Alps (which Goethe could not resist pocketing as he journeyed southwards) whereas Rome drew from its past treasury. The reuse of old stones and carvings and the rediscovery of the classical spirit went hand in hand, and it was not until Goethe's day that imitation became suspect.

Goethe, attending a debate on the relative merits of 'Invention and Imitation' at the Academy of the Olympians in Vicenza on 22 September 1786, notes with interest in his
Italian Journey
that those praising 'Imitation' received more applause 'because they voiced what the common herd thinks, so far as it is able to think ... they had not felt the force of the many excellent arguments which had been offered in favour of Invention'.

Goethe tended to favour what he considered a more modern concept of originality. Yet he was also at this time deep in his intensely admiring study of the antique. He may have despised the
collectors of portable snuffboxes and fake antique curios, but he could not resist purchasing large statues and cumbersome casts of ancient models. The desire for souvenirs and mementoes and copies went very deep in him, as in less serious tourists. He writes with interest rather than with contempt of the new fashion for 'encaustic' art, with which ladies on the Grand Tour occupied their spare time. Women who might in a later age have occupied themselves with jigsaws of ancient Rome would apply themselves to works of art in wax relief, a technique from antiquity rediscovered in the eighteenth century and inspired by the excitement of the recent excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum. He described it as one of the 'half-arts (
Halbkünste
), calling for manual dexterity and a taste for handicrafts'. This activity was laid on and supervised by tour manager Hofrat Reiffenstein, who

had long come to realize that people who arrived in Rome with no other idea than to see things and amuse themselves often suffer from the most awful boredom, because they are deprived of the ways in which they usually spend their free time ... He therefore picked on two activities with which to keep them busy: encaustic painting and the imitation of antique jewellery in paste.

The women favoured the painting, the men the jewels. He offered so much tactful help that his students were frequently astonished by the beauty of the products of their unsuspected artistic talent.

These secondary artistic pursuits recall the activities of Mary Delany and her circle in England, although Delany herself, as we have seen, was much more inventive than these tourists. Yet it is an irony that Angelica Kauffmann, with whom Goethe spent much time in Italy, and who was one of the few women artists to be taken seriously by him and by her contemporaries, became better
known through the endless adaptations and reproductions of her work than for the works themselves. Her designs were so popular that they appeared on snuffboxes, vases, teasets, fans and chocolate cups. They did not appear in jigsaw format, for, although the dissected puzzle was in her lifetime being used to portray subjects other than maps, it had not yet been co-opted by the fine-art market.

Particularly curious is the relationship between Kauffmann's mythological oil paintings and portraits and the 'stippled' versions of them, which attracted (and still attract) many admirers. Stippling, a technique that evolved in the late eighteenth century, is a type of engraving using dots or spots to create shading and gradations of colour and tone, and William Wynne Ryland's works after Angelica Kauffmann were one of its earliest successes. Most of Ryland's engravings were shaped as circles or ovals and were destined for use in schemes of interior decoration. Stippled work was softly attractive and richly coloured, making it especially suited for miniatures and reproduction in fashion magazines. It was also easily adapted for needlework designs. In other words, it had a 'feminized' feel to it, a softness that linked it to fashion, crafts and design as well as to art, thus ironically harnessing Kauffmann's reputation to a womanly sphere that she had in so many ways boldly resisted.

Stippling was a novel technique in the eighteenth century, but encaustic art has an antique lineage. Like the mosaics of Hadrian's Villa, it too had been described by Pliny, who tells us that a famous Greek woman artist called Iaia of Cyzicus excelled at miniature portraits in the medium. She worked in Rome in the first century
BC
, producing mainly female portraits, which included a large picture on wood titled
Old Woman at Neapolis,
and a self-portrait done with the help of a mirror. She painted fast, and her work fetched high prices. Did encaustic art have a particular attraction for the woman artist? There was a long tradition of women working in
encaustic, established long before Goethe's grand tourists learned to dabble in it in Rome.

Some of the most extraordinary works in encaustic that have come down to us from antiquity are images, not by but of women. These funerary portraits, discovered in the nineteenth century at Fayum in Egypt, date from the second century ad, and have a poignant beauty, a vivid living naturalism, that speak to us across two millennia. Were any of them made by women? We do not know, but maybe one day we will. The zipped and helical codes of DNA may yet reveal wonders to us. The past is in the future.

Some years ago the British Museum, which holds some of the best of the Fayum mummy portraits, mounted an exhibition titled 'Ancient Faces'. This made a deep impression on me and on many of those who saw it. I was at that time writing
The Peppered Moth,
which dealt with mitochondrial DNA and the recovery of genetic information, and the faces in the British Museum seemed to have personal messages for me. They looked at me from their dark and lustrous eyes; there was language in their lips, their necks, their noses. Confidently they insisted on resurrection, with the full polychrome glow of the fully human. They waited for the morning. They had never died. I wove them into my novel, basing the appearance of Faro, the high-spirited representative of the younger generation in my saga, on these women: she had their large brown almond eyes, their delicate pink and smiling lips, their apricot flesh tones, their golden hoop earrings, their charming hairstyles of bandeaux of small corkscrew ringlets, their fondness for brooches and necklaces, their untiring grace and vivacity. Physically, Faro has inherited a little from the Fayum, a little from my daughter, and a little from my sisters-in-law. The womanly traits live on.

One of the Fayum-related women (a painted woman, not an encaustic portrait) has something of the look of Cherie Blair. She has large eyes made larger with spiked mascara, a wide red mouth,
fine bare breasts, corkscrew curls, and hoop earrings threaded with gold beads and pearls. She wears a yellow tunic with a pretty pink-and-green geometric collar, and her sleeves are adorned with the protective green wings of Isis and Nepthys. Her hair is garlanded with rosebuds, through which winds a coiled green stem. She holds a sprig of sage-green leaves in her left hand. She gazes at us so confidently, smiling slightly, with such a pleasantly inviting intimation of immortality. She looks just a touch crazy, as, sometimes, does Cherie Blair.

What she does not look is dead.

Maybe the Egyptians were right: maybe we live on in the body.

These portraits not only preserved the features and personalities of the men and women they commemorated; they also preserved and embodied the great Greek painting tradition. 'Almost all the work in that tradition has been lost to time and the elements, the Mediterranean not sharing the exceptional preservative conditions of the Egyptian desert,' writes Euphrosyne C. Doxiadis in the catalogue (1997) to the exhibition.

The paintings of the Fayum, sheltered in this way, are a dazzling testament to the sophistication of the Alexandrian school from which they are derived and show us the heights that had been reached in the rendering of nature. It is not until some fifteen centuries later, in the faces painted by Titian or Rembrandt's depiction of his own features, that the same artistry that characterises many of the anonymous artists of the Fayum is witnessed again.

This may be an overstatement, but it is telling.

The Egyptians preserved their dead so carefully because they knew we would need the body in the next life. They took food and utensils and cosmetics and weapons with them to the next world.
The living had a tradition of dining with the dead, and they sat down to banquets with Anubis, the lord of the dead, in little pavilions near the embalmed bodies of their loved ones. Or so the Greeks and Romans told us, and so a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus excavated by Flinders Petrie seems to confirm. Dining with the dead is a challenging concept.

The paintings are alive and beautiful, but the beliefs are disquieting. Preservation and perpetuation may be considered dubious aims.

Not long ago, I had a disquieting dream about Auntie Phyl. It began pleasantly enough, for in my dream she seemed alive and well, and was wearing a familiar and becoming silky rayon dress with a bright blue-and-green geometric pattern that signified festivity – a birthday, or a Christmas gathering. But as the dream unfolded, I realized that she was not really alive at all. She was a robot, a simulacrum, an animated waxwork, summoned up by me for my own dark purposes. At the end of my dream (as at the end of this book) she would depart again into the shades. She had not been able to enjoy the events of the dream or to participate in them. She had not tasted her food, or enjoyed her glass of champagne. She had merely been a helpless dummy, an unwilling and unfeeling participant in a story of my devising. A zombie. She was dead, with no right of redress, and she was not willing to collaborate with me. She had not wanted to walk again.

This dream does not need much interpretation. It is about the way in which writers abuse their subjects. I am trying not to abuse her, but of course I am doing so. As I have abused all the sources of all my work, always. As all writers do, always. The dead may not want to come back to life. It may not be proper to try to resurrect them.

The dream was also about the conditions of life in a care home for the elderly. That is a larger question.

The dry sands of Egypt preserved the mummies and the corpses. I have always been interested in the bog men, accidentally preserved in the peat, and have introduced them into several of my novels. I like amber too, which is a great preservative. Amber necklaces are associated with women novelists, and when somebody pointed this out to me I stopped wearing mine.

The sand, the peat, and the refining fire.

T. S. Eliot invoked the sprouting corpse in the garden. He deplored the practice of childhood reminiscence.

I was much taken with Stevie Davies's detailed descriptions of the process of the reconstruction of the living flesh of a dead face from a seventeenth-century skull in her novel
Impassioned Clay.
(She credits a book titled
Making Faces: Using Forensic and Archaeological Evidence
by John Prag and Richard Neave.) We have all watched these reconstructions on television history programmes – dead pharaohs, Ice Age travellers, Aztec victims, being restored to a semblance of life by twentieth-century expertise.