'This Greedy Appetite for New and Unknown Things'

Montaigne’s Travel Journal recounts his wanderings through Germany, Switzerland and Italy between June 1580 and November 1581. He sought relief from the pain of kidney stones and visited numerous spas with mineral baths. As always, Montaigne is curious about everything – not just the art and architecture of the ancient world but such seemingly mundane things as food, lodgings, local customs and manners, the cost of everything. Culture in the broadest sense interested him. He was a man of the world, not a "sensitive plant" in the later Romantic sense, and served as mayor of Bordeaux. Here is his account of the execution he witnessed in Rome on January 14, 1581: 

“On this same day I saw two brothers executed, former servants of the Castellano’s secretary, who had killed him a few days before in the city by night, in the very palace of the said Signor Giacomo Buoncompagno, the Pope’s son. They tore them with red-hot pincers, then cut off their fist in front of the said palace, and having cut it off they put on the wound capons that they had killed and immediately opened up. They were executed on a scaffold: first they were clubbed with a big wooden mace, and then their throats were cut immediately. This is a punishment they say is sometimes used in Rome, though others maintained that it had been adapted to the misdeed, since they had killed their master in that way.”

 

The reader is struck by the cool thoroughness of Montaigne’s account. He writes more like a modern journalist than a self-conscious artiste. In his 1965 essay titled “Mr. Montaigne’s Journey to Italy,” the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert writes:

 

“How to explain the fact that the only remarks on art in Montaigne’s travel journal are so meager and uninteresting? It seems unjust and simplistic to explain it by a lack of aesthetic sensibility. We should rather draw the conclusion that for people of the Renaissance, a work of art was a much more natural thing than it is for us; there was no need to set it apart from the surrounding reality and bury it in a museum.”

 

Herbert visited Western Europe for the first time in 1958-59: France, then England, Italy, France again and back to Poland. His budget was tight but Herbert was no hedonistic tourist. Nor was he a stuffy academic or critic. The resulting essays in Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985) chronicle a self-guided tour of Western culture by a man temporarily liberated from the bleak, vulgar constraints of Soviet-era Poland. Unlike Montaigne, Herbert revels in the inherited art and architecture of Europe. In the Barbarian essay “Orvieto’s Duomo,” the poet recounts his visit to the fourteenth-century cathedral in that Umbrian city:

 

“The muses were not silent though the times were by no means peaceful. The town was a hotbed of heresy; and through historical irony and thanks to thick walls, the frequent refuge of popes. The Guelph clan of the Monaldeschi fought against its Ghibbelline faction, who were expelled from the town while the sculptors were illustrating Genesis. According to the reliable witness, the author of The Divine Comedy, both families suffer in purgatory along with the kin of Romeo and Juliet. They were prolonged contests for power within the town – in Dante’s words the fate of dolore ostello, ‘the inn of suffering.’”

Barbarian in the Garden may be my favorite collection of essays written by anyone, second only to Montaigne’s. It’s a poet’s book but never descends into the merely “poetic.” Herbert’s excitement and gratitude for finally being able to visit the primal sites of his culture – Western culture – are palpable. He echoes a passage in  Montaigne’s essay “Of Vanity”: “This greedy appetite for new and unknown things indeed helps to foster in me the desire to travel, but enough other circumstances contribute to it. I gladly turn aside from governing my house.”

 

The only essay in Barbarian in the Garden Herbert devotes to a single artist is “Piero della Francesca.” If you savor symbolism, consider that Piero died on the first Columbus Day – October 12, 1492. Herbert judges him virtually a saint of humanism. Here’s the conclusion of his essay: “Tradition holds that he went blind towards the end of his life. Marco di Longara told Berto degli Alberti that as a young boy he walked the streets of Borgo San Sepolcro with an old, blind painter called Piero della Francesca.

 

“Little Marco could not have known that his hand was leading light.”

 

Herbert begins “Lascaux” with a spirited, unexpected digression: “Breakfast in a small restaurant, but what a breakfast! An omelette with truffles. Truffles belong to the world history of human folly, hence to the history of art. So a word about truffles.” This is a man temporarily freed from the grim, gray strictures of the Soviet Bloc. He devotes the next two paragraphs to an entertaining account of truffle history and gastronomy. On to the caves at Lascaux, with Herbert’s wit as our guide:

 

“The cold, electric light is hideous, so we can only imagine the Lascaux cave when the living light of torches and crests set into motion the herds of bulls, bison and deer on the walls and vault. In addition, the guide’s voice stammering explanations. A sergeant reading the Holy Scriptures.”

 

Herbert revels in the continuity of human accomplishment, the living tradition of our cave-dwelling forbears, Montaigne and a twentieth-century Polish poet. Let’s all give thanks with him. Herbert died on this date, July 28, in 1998, at age seventy-three.

 

[All passages from Montaigne are taken from The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters (trans. Donald Frame, Everyman’s Library, 2003). The first passage from Herbert is drawn from The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 (trans. Alissa Valles, Ecco, 2010).]