Читать книгу The Story of Looking - Mark Cousins - Страница 15

CHAPTER 6

EXPANDING HORIZONS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES ONWARDS: TRADE, CRUSADE, EMPIRE AND CONQUEST

IN our story so far we have progressed through ranks of looking. We saw colour, space, other people, emotions, movement, design, abstraction, light, buildings and cities. Around us, as our consciousness and inner eyes developed, human living became more complex. People used tools, began to farm, lived together in more constructed settings, worshipped a wider range of gods and developed larger and more hierarchical societies. When we imagined walking through the Ishtar Gate in 570 BCE we found ourselves in a kind of biosphere, an entanglement, an ancient-world looking system. We have established how we looked out into our immediate environment and the people, objects and buildings within that environment. Next in our story we should look further outwards, beyond our bailiwick, to a larger cocoon. We should extend our sense of who we are beyond our individual experiences. Nations looked. Traders looked. Empires, sailors, warriors and kingdoms looked. From the Middle Ages onwards, and from the 1400s in particular, Europeans attempted to navigate the world and see it in new ways. This chapter is rooted in those eras and explores the centrifugal looking they involved.

The age of exploration has a prehistory, of course. On 23 August 55 BCE, Julius Caesar invaded the northwest of his world, Britain. He sailed after midnight, in boats from Gaul. When the sun came up behind him, the white cliffs of Dover were a glowing curtain, so close to the water that the awaiting Britons could throw spears down onto his boats. A man of the Mediterranean, he found the English Channel grey and tempestuous. The swell and the defence were too much for him. The water’s surface was scattered with floating parts of the boats that had been wrecked; his men fished them out of the sea to repair the remaining ships, and returned to Gaul. Caesar had barely set eyes on this terra incognita, this unknown land. His gaze was privileged, presumptuous and acquisitive – a forerunner of the male gaze. He was looking at something entirely new, and will have seen it through the myths he carried to the place, his visual expectations. As well as this, his eyes encountered flora, fauna and geology that he had never seen before. It was exciting to see such new things, and troubling too, if you wanted the whole world to be like your world, or if you felt superior to new.

On his second attempt at an invasion the following year, Caesar noticed, as we have already seen, that Britons dyed their bodies with woad. He wrote that this gave them a ‘terrible appearance in war’. As they, in his words, ‘wear their hair long, and have every part of their body shaved except their head and upper lip’, we have a sense of him being visually disturbed by the natives. But he, too, had a surprise up his sleeve. Confronted with lines of sharpened sticks, embedded in the ground and in rivers, he sent in an elephant in fighting armour, on which rode archers, to trample the defences. Thus began Rome’s annexation of much of Britain. The Roman Empire’s edges were adaptive, and so the conquerors absorbed some of the new land’s visual language into the iconography of the imperium. New, hybrid image systems – buildings, clothes, utensils, jewellery and so forth – were the result. This was one of the relatively benign driving forces behind conquest: the desire for visual novelty and renewal.

Caesar headed for Britain to extend the Roman Empire, of course, but in many cultures the land beyond what can be seen haunts or taunts. In J.M. Synge’s Irish play In the Shadow of the Glen, the image of ‘the back hill with the sheep upon it’ blocks the view of the characters. They hardly know what is beyond it and, living in the valley, are mentally and visually imprisoned. They cannot see more, and are frustrated. Similarly, imprisoned people cherish the chink of sky or landscape that they can glimpse through the window of their cell. It is a lifeline. In the Hungarian film-maker Béla Tarr’s film The Turin Horse, the characters are equally visually confined. The hills around them make the horizon unseeable, and the outside world unknowable. At one point people do climb the hill, and disappear for a time, but return to report that there is nothing there.

Such visual captivity applied to countries too. If you lived in China in ancient times, the world to your northwest was screened off by a vast mountain range that arced from Eastern Mongolia to Afghanistan. To see beyond it, or trade with the lands on its other side, you had to skirt the Gobi Desert, trekking between oases. But one break in the vast natural barrier afforded vistas to Central Asia and the west: the Dzungarian Gate. In this photograph, it is the hundred-kilometre corridor that runs from the lake at the bottom, between two snow-topped ridges, to the smaller lake in the top left.

The Chinese could not see it from the air, of course, but our photograph shows what they imagined. As the country’s window on the Western world, the Dzungarian Gate became a key part of their visual imagination. They sent silk westwards along it, ensuring income and prestige for a millennium. The country whose yingbi walls blocked visual access to palaces and grand homes enjoyed having a visual corridor to see outside itself. Emperor Wu sent his diplomat Zhang Qian through the Dzungarian in the first century BCE – a pair of proxy eyes, to see what lay beyond. Thus it opened China to other civilisations – Persia, Arabia, the Horn of Africa and Europe – and vice versa. Ideas and religions, as well as goods, travelled through the gate. And in case we think that the Dzungarian is an old-world story, the computer company Hewlett-Packard recently relocated from western China to the mouth of the gate, to make the thirty-five million computers and printers that it manufactures annually easier to send west.

Such expansions were driven by commerce and, as we have seen, the desire to expand the country’s visual world. Merchants were the primary beneficiaries of the new routes, and they were the first to see the new countries. The people back home eventually heard about the new lands and trading partners, and their imaginations expanded as a result. But it was not only merchants who did the travelling. Things did too. The material that gave the Silk Road its name was not aromatic like spice, it was not an intoxicant, and it was not timeless, like gold. Silk’s appeal was its look. On this semi-formal emperor’s tunic, silk threads embroidered on more silk depict a band of boiling seas in green and grey; rainbow abstractions seem to fall from the sea, whilst a buttercup-gold sunrise and twisting, soaring dragons are above.

Silk was great at such detail. It held dyes brilliantly, and caught the light of the sun or candles. It was spun by worms then again by people, then sewn into stories, garments or decorative furnishings – statements of power and taste. There is nothing it could do that other things could not, except dazzle the eye. In its raw form it was used as currency. Its thinness was daring, erotic even. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, uncle of the Pliny who wrote about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, said that silk allowed women to ‘shimmer’. Others noted its visual ambiguity: it covers and does not, conceals and reveals. The emperor’s tunic is an elaborate predecessor of a holiday picture postcard or a Facebook post of Times Square in New York. It says, Look what this place looks like. Look how different it is to us. Look how glamorous it is, how visually striking. Don’t you want to come here?

If the mountains to the north and west stopped the Chinese seeing beyond, the sea to the east and south hypnotised them. As we saw earlier, the sea is the sublime z-axis: it takes our eyes effortlessly to infinity. It is a window, but a forbidding one, which gives unto that which we do not know. China had long sailed the seas, but in 1405, nearly a hundred years before the Portuguese rounded the south of Africa to head for the Indian Ocean, a Muslim eunuch set out on the first of seven voyages into that ocean.

Zheng He was a diplomat and admiral, born in around 1371. A skilled courtier, he caught the eye of the emperor, who set him on his journeys. On his first voyage alone he had about 28,000 men and 62 ships. Two years later he returned, having seen Vietnam, Thailand, Java and Ceylon. Thereafter he got as far as Mecca, Egypt and Kenya. What is strange about his trips is their apparent purposelessness. They did not establish major trading posts, and nor were they land grabs. Instead, Zheng went to see and report back. His were envoy eyes. His trips strip travel of its apparent purpose in these days – to make money – and reveals, instead, one of its subsidiary purposes: visual and cultural curiosity. Horizons expanded for material gain, but also other reasons. Zheng He’s trips were driven, in part, by looking for looking’s sake.

Conquest and exploration spread across Asia in waves, each affording vistas – looking that was curious, fascinated or rapacious. Zoom in on Agra, India, in the late 1500s, for example, and you find another dimension to the story of Asian looking.

We are standing on the ramparts of the vast Agra Fort, staring southeast. In the distance, in this modern photograph, we can see the Taj Mahal. It was built by the grandson of the man whose looking we are here to see. The grandfather, Akbar, was the third emperor of the Indian Mughal dynasty. Born in 1542, he acceded to power aged thirteen, and became interested in architecture, hunting – he trained thousands of cheetahs to hunt with him – interfaith understanding and military tactics.