Going Dutch

From the dark ages until the advent of steel nibs and fountain pens in the nineteenth century, the quill pen dominated western writing. Although now the domain of the hobbyist, the quill nonetheless retains its romance, artistic flexibility- and the skill needed to handle it as a writing implement. In handbooks for the modern scribe, there are invariably instructions for heat tempering quill pens, a process called ‘dutching’. As with most aspects, the assumption is that this was a historical practice. Yet curing a quill with sand is a relatively modern phenomenon, dating only to the mid-eighteenth century: throughout the great ages of the medieval manuscript, pens were prepared by ageing, selection and cutting.

In common with many professions, manuals and treatises were written throughout the later middle ages: the earliest printed book to appear Sigismondo Fanti’s Theorica et Practica in 1514, dealing with handwriting and lettering. None mention dutching, but agree that age curing is needed to turn feathers into pens. Giovanbattista Palatino in 1540 recommends selecting a quill that had already become hard and clear with age, from which the fatty membrane should be scraped away with the pen knife, and also not to rub it with a cloth. Juan Vives in 1538 suggests this be done by rubbing the quill inside the jacket or on the thighs of the hose. Fanti and Tagliente (1524) both recommend scraping with a knife. Hamon in 1567 talks about selecting a barrel which is clean, dried and not greasy; Scalzi in 1581 specifically warns not to use quills that are too fresh, recommending a year old. This continues right on with Billingslie in 1618, the same method in Shelley in 1714: even Bradbury writes in 1815 that ‘it is age best mellows and meliorates a quill’.

It is notable that air dried quills seem quite durable: in 1630 Philemon Holland poetically claimed that he wrote out the whole of his translation of the Moralia without needing to recut his (pre-loved!) quill: “…This Booke I wrote with one poor Pen, made of grey Goose quill, A Pen I found it, us’d before, a Pen I leave it still.”
The first references to heat curing occur in 1760, referring to quills shipped from Holland in an already clarified condition: the newly-invented process, soon adopted elsewhere, became known as “dutchifying” or “dutching.” These quills were prepared by being placed in a moist cellar for several hours, their points in the damp earth, or wrapped in a wet cloth. A hole about six inches deep was then made into a coal fire; the quill was then inserted into the space. After a few seconds the quill was placed on a metal plate and draw beneath a dutching hook, a flat metal tool that flattened the barrel, removed the outer covering and any oily surface, and shrivelled the inner membrane. The heat and pressure caused the explosive release of heated air form the tip of the quill, accompanied by a sharp sound, known in the trade as ‘snapping’. Any remaining oil or membrane were removed by rubbing with the skin of a dogfish.

By the 1830s, a simpler method had come into use wherein the quill was soaked in water for several hours, before being plunged into hot sand or ashes, and is the basis for the method used by modern calligraphers, Quills were sold in small bundles ‘dutched’ but uncut, or purchased from pencutters ready for use. Mechanical nibbers appeared in France around 1820, with the most popular being patented by Joseph Rodgers in England in 1835, meeting “the decided approbation of the first penmen in this Kingdom.”

Meat

Pieter Aertsen’s The Meat Stall is a full-tilt assault on the senses. To keep your eyes on the painting is to feel, practically to smell the glutinous, raw flesh as much as seeing it. But this jarring impact has a purpose: to shock and disorientate viewers, forcing them to look deeper into the painting to discover clues to its real meaning. This visceral connection is no less felt by modern audiences that the original viewers- but far removed from its place and time, those clues, and therefore that meaning, are lost…a common hazard looking at early modern art.

In recent years, renaissance art works have become once again ‘acceptable’ objects to enjoy and study. But rather than ceding hard-won ground to the odious political imperatives of the canon or subjective connoisseurship, emphasis has been placed on the contextual readings that arise from the work’s creation and reception in its original historical-cultural milieu. This is resonance, the recognition that artworks are social objects, intimately connected to people and histories, and emerging from a specific cultural background that connects- or resists connection- with our own contemporary cultural furniture. This premise allows early modern works to be recast as contemporary art. Accreted meanings and the distances of history are consciously stripped away, rendering a work from the fifteenth century as open to interpretation and ascription as a work created in the twenty-first. A contemporary audience may thus re-experience a now-venerable work as if new, by imaginatively re-entering a time when that work was the cutting edge of what was (then) contemporary. And when reconsidered from within the context of its time, renaissance works can yield startling revelations.

Nowhere is this more marked than The Meat Stall. Art historians usually grant it hallowed status as ‘inventing’ several genres: market scenes, inverted morality pictures, encomia, and still life in general. Yet in 1551, the year it was painted- those concepts simply did not exist, and its original viewers, the respectable citizens of Antwerp, would respond according to its immediate visual language. The discomforting synaesthesia of raw, glutinous chunks of meat, unprecedented in Flemish painting but here depicted with such unsettling realism, is the first thing to induce shock and disorientation in its audience- and once off balance, the jumbled semiotic scheme denies them a unified reading of the image. Viewers are forced to put together a visual puzzle to find the meaning.

The painting itself is also clue. In an era when art was valued for to the subtlety of its dialogue with convention, The Meat Stall’s jarring disruption defies and satirises the predictable, elitist nature of art. The fragmented image reinforces the unsettling sense that something is fractured in staid, bourgeois Flemish society.
Looking past the dismembered carcasses and the bull’s head that fixedly stares back, the stall itself looks out not across the market lane but surreally onto an allegorical country scene- as it turns out, a ‘Biblical’ scene depicting the Holy Family giving alms on the Flight into Egypt. Seated on her donkey, the Virgin offers her bread to a boy and his father on the road- a modest act of Christian charity literally dwarfed by the rich foods for sale, eternal food for the soul in stark contrast to temporal food for the flesh. Aertsen’s unprecedented inversion of scale and importance, giving prominence to a mundanity and relegating the traditionally elevated religious art to the background, clearly signals another inversion between the secular and sacred.

The middle-ground figure to the right of the Holy Family reveals exactly how topical these signs of fractured nature are, and how closely tied to local knowledge. Alone in the arch formed by the stall, the youth dressed in the same red as the flensed head, is unambiguously framed as the key to the composition. That red jacket and knife block at his belt would be instantly recognisable to anyone in the city as the badge the Vleeschouwers Ambacht, Antwerp’s prestigious butcher’s guild…also a prominent property owner and a powerful force in the city’s economy.
But rather than being shown proudly at his trade, he is shown beneath a small, hurriedly written sign above the stall advertising a certain parcel of land for sale. In October of that year the Vleeschouwers forcibly acquired this land from the Sisters of St Elizabeth Gasthuis, the city’s most respected charitable foundation. Bought for a pittance, this land was resold to an urban developer at enormous profit just three weeks later. The shady real estate deal beggared the Gasthuis Sisters, and outraged the people of Antwerp: in this light, the tiny scene of Christian charity dwarfed by the luxurious fleshly display becomes a bitter moral coda.

Aertsen dated his painting very specifically, marking its appearance less than five months after the Gasthuis deed: the scandal would be still fresh in the minds of Antwerp’s citizens. When viewed with this inside knowledge, it is revealed that The Meat Stall would be seen by its original audience as forceful and topical painting, responding quickly to current events with angry comment and protest- exactly as contemporary art might.