Creative Encounters: That Changed the World

By Rodney Castleden

This e-book is an extract from Encounters that Changed the World and is also available as part of that complete publication.

The great Renaissance artist Michelangelo loved young men. In 1532 he began a courtship with the love of his life. But Tommaso Cavalieri came from a distinguished, conventional Roman family and was shocked by the artist’s passion. Michelangelo’s unrequited love profoundly affected his art, and legend has it that Christ’s face in the Sistine Chapel is Cavalieri’s. Read about their relationship and many other creative encounters that changed the world.

Contents: Martin Behaim and George Holzschuher, Michelangelo and Tommaso Cavalieri, Galileo Galilei and Hans Lippershey’s Telescope, Frederick the Great and Bach, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Beethoven and Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Haydon’s Immortal Dinner, Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre, John Millais and William Holman Hunt, Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, Wagner and Ludwig II, Van Gogh and Gauguin, Klimt and Emilie Flöge, J.M. Barrie and Peter Llewellyn Davies, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Philip Heseltine and Delius, Dali and Gala, Picasso and Dora Maar, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, Bill Gates and Paul Allen

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canary Press eBooks Limited
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781908698438

Book preview

Introduction

We all have encounters that change the way we think, the way we see the world, and ultimately the way we behave. It is one of the characteristics that make us human beings. A lot of these encounters are commonplace, like the encounters we have with our teachers at school, and most of us can remember moments when a teacher somehow, by telling us or showing us something, made us see things differently.

Then there are encounters with friends, colleagues, husbands, wives and lovers, building over the course of months, years and decades to change us piecemeal in all sorts of ways. And there are fleeting encounters with strangers, maybe a brief conversation, maybe no more than a fragment of someone’s conversation overheard as they pass.

All these different encounters, significant and insignificant alike, are woven into the fabric of our lives, changing us sometimes subtly and gradually, sometimes with dramatic suddenness, into different people.

Some encounters are life-changing meetings between generations, an older person handing on knowledge and experience to a younger person, acting as a role model, encouraging and cultivating a nascent talent. Some of these relationships have a positive and creative appearance, and yet when you look at them closely they turn out to have been destructive.

The relationship between the middle-aged composer Frederick Delius and the young Philip Heseltine looks like a classic case of positive mentoring, an experienced older man helping a young man find himself – yet in the end it all went badly wrong. Did Delius give fatally bad advice? I rather think he did.

There are other cross-generational encounters that look as though they were completely sterile and unproductive, and yet on examination they generated a creative result, like the 57-year-old Michelangelo’s long infatuation with a young man who did not return his affection – Tommaso Cavalieri. Michelangelo’s love led to an outpouring of poetry and may have influenced the subject matter of his sculpture too.

So it is that, in many situations, we know a great deal about an encounter from one participant’s point of view and much less from the other’s. We know Michelangelo was in love with Cavalieri, because art historians and biographers have carefully researched the artist’s life, but we know next to nothing about Cavalieri’s thoughts regarding Michelangelo.

This book is inevitably about encounters experienced by people who have made their mark, famous people whose lives are a matter of record. Some encounters look full of promise, as if they should lead on to something momentous, yet they don’t. Others involve people like Tommaso Cavalieri, relative unknowns who happened to be in the right place at the right time. But, as I hope the book shows, the unpredictability of human encounters is what gives them their peculiar interest.

Part I

CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS: FROM ANTIQUITY TO 1900

1

Martin Behaim and George Holzschuher

(1492)

Martin Behaim (1459–1507) was a German geographer and navigator who was in the service of the King of Portugal. At the court of King John II he acquired a reputation as a scientist and he was thought to have been a pupil of the astronomer Johann Muller, who was known by the impressive Latin name of Regiomantanus. He may have been, but whatever Behaim’s real background, he was appointed by John II to a mathematical council for the furtherance of navigation. One of his contributions in this area was the proposal to introduce to Portugal the cross-staff, a navigation instrument already invented and in use. He made improvements to astrolabes, principally in making them smaller out of brass; the old wooden instruments were cumbersome to use. It is thought that he also worked on producing better navigation tables.

Martin Behaim travelled on one of Diogo Cão’s voyages to West Africa in 1484, probably reaching the Bight of Benin. When he returned he was knighted by King John and after that lived mainly at Fayal in the Azores.

While working for the King of Portugal, Behaim had access to all the latest maps. It is thought that he passed on to Magellan a map showing a channel passing through the southern tip of South America. Magellan saw it as a possible route through from the Atlantic into the Pacific. Antonio Pigafetta, who helped Magellan research his circumnavigation voyage, named Behaim as the man who had drawn the original of the map that Magellan took with him. Behaim cannot take credit as the discoverer of this channel, as he almost certainly copied its shape from an existing map.

When Martin Behaim returned to his native city, Nuremberg, in 1492, he was treated like a visiting celebrity, and fêted by the city council. One of the city councillors was a man called George Holzschuher, who was himself a great traveller. Holzschuher formally proposed to the council that Martin Behaim should be invited to build a globe to incorporate everything that was known about the world. The idea was that all the recent discoveries made by the Portuguese and other travellers should be included to give a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the world’s geography.

The globe was to carry lots of labels. One of these, placed inside the still-unvisited Antarctic Circle, recorded that the making of the globe was undertaken on the say-so of three distinguished Nuremberg citizens, Gabriel Nutzel, Paul Volckamer and Nikolaus Groland. The accounts of George Holzschuher have been preserved, and through these it is possible to trace the development of the globe, and even who was paid how much for their various contributions to it; the cost was borne by the city. The accounts indicate how the sphere was prepared by Kalperger, how a vellum covering was applied to it, how the rings and supports were supplied, and how an artist named Glockenthon transferred the map onto the prepared surface of the sphere; it took him 15 weeks.

Obviously the biggest undertaking was the preparation of a two-dimensional mappa mundi with all the detailed information on it. This was the task allotted to Martin Behaim himself. Later, this base map was mounted on two panels, framed and varnished, and hung up in the clerk’s office in Nuremberg’s town hall. In 1532, Johann Schöner was given the task of renovating this map of Behaim’s and drawing a new one that incorporated the substantial number of geographical discoveries that had been made in the preceding 40 years – including the New World.

It was a great idea, and even though it involved a lot of work and was carried out to the highest specifications, the overall cost to the city was less than 14 pounds. This great civic undertaking was nicknamed ‘the earth-apple’. The layout of the land masses and the oceans shown on the globe was influenced by Ptolemy, but Martin Behaim made every effort to incorporate all the later discoveries, from the Marco Polo journeys onwards. The timing of the project is significant, in that it falls in the year of the famous Columbus voyage, but just precedes it. So the Behaim globe shows how the most advanced European geographers perceived the world – just before the Columbus voyage, just before the discovery of North and South America.

The age of the globe (it is in fact the oldest surviving globe) and its very specific pre-Columbian date make it an historic artefact of the greatest value and importance.

One thing the Behaim globe shows is that a relatively narrow ocean was believed to separate Europe from eastern Asia. A relatively short voyage west from Portugal would take you to Japan or China, which is what Columbus argued. Behaim and Columbus were therefore presumably drawing their knowledge from the same sources. The two men were apparently in Portugal at the same time, though as far as we know they never met.

As a map, the Behaim creation is uneven. The portolan maps, showing capes, harbours and other landmarks round the coasts of Europe were far more accurate and finely detailed. Continental locations on most contemporary maps of Behaim’s time were pretty accurate, accurate to within one degree of latitude: longitude was at that time much harder to pin down. But some of the places Behaim has drawn in are as much as 16 degrees out.

The Behaim globe is the oldest globe that has survived until today, though others were certainly made. A 13th century mathematician, Giovanni Campano, wrote a treatise entitled a Treatise on Solid Spheres, which describes making globes out of metal or wood. In 1474, Toscanelli referred to a globe as being the best way of demonstrating that it was in fact quite a long way from western Europe to eastern Asia, which it was if you stuck to Ptolemy’s longitudes. Columbus had a globe on board the Santa Maria, which was made before Behaim’s globe by Columbus’s brother Bartholomew, who also made charts. So, globes older than Behaim’s did exist, but only the Behaim globe and one other survive; the other, the Laon globe, is preserved in Paris and it is smaller than the Behaim globe.

A major implication of the Behaim globe is that, in its very nature, it made a commitment to a specific width for the western ocean that separated Europe from eastern Asia. Behaim gave Eurasia a longitudinal spread of 234 degrees, whereas the correct figure is 131 degrees. The result was to take the eastern shores of Asia much closer to the coast of western Europe: 126 degrees instead of the correct 229 degrees. The real journey from western Europe to China was more than a quarter of a circumnavigation further than he showed – a quarter of a world further. On top of this, Behaim placed the Cape Verde Islands too far west, and this made the voyage west to China look temptingly short.

Unfortunately, the Behaim globe was allowed to deteriorate over the centuries, and was then over-zealously restored in the early 19th century; at that time a lot of inaccuracies were added in because of the illegibility of the original lettering. The globe still belongs to the Behaim family, though in 1907 it was moved by Baron Behaim to the Germanic Museum.

It has a diameter of 50 centimetres, resulting in a scale of about 1:25,000,000. It is crowded with more than 1,000 place names. A major decorative feature of the globe is the addition of more than 100 miniature paintings by Glockenthon, including 48 national flags and portraits of saints and kings. There are ships on the sea, elephants, leopards, camels and ostriches on the land. There are very few mythical beasts, and there is no ‘Garden of Eden’. It is a genuine attempt at a secular and scientific portrayal of the world as perceived.

The meeting between George Holzschuher and Martin Behaim in Nuremberg had major ramifications. The ‘earth-apple’ that resulted from this encounter was so popular that it created a demand for copies. The Behaim globe was the inspiration for something approaching mass production; globe-making became a new industry in Nuremberg. The Behaim globe was regarded as definitive, too, as cartographers making new globes and maps afterwards evidently respected the information given on it. But Behaim himself did not stay to witness all this. He returned to his home in Azores, where he died in 1507, just two years before Columbus.

2

Michelangelo and Tommaso Cavalieri

(1532)

The great Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti was a lover of young men. The handsome Gherardo Perini went to work for him in about 1520 as a model and from about 1522 until 1525 they were lovers; their sexual relationship continued until the middle of the 1530s. Michelangelo became dependent on Perini. He was depressed and unable to work properly when the young man was absent from his studio. Michelangelo developed a custom of giving special friends gifts of carefully finished