Memories

July 28th 1941 with my mother celebrating
our joint birthdays when we were 1,5 and 7.
Esme, as always, in winsome pose!

 To age is to forget! Not necessarily entirely as in Alzheimer’s, but to some degree, and to some extent. While ageing is, in any case, a story of gradual, often imperceptible, loss, as in swiftness of thought and movement, if we are reasonably lucky, the forgetting of some events and peoples in our past lives, is relatively pain-free and indeed, relatively unrecognised by the person concerned. Many of the details and people in my life in my twenties and thirties have disappeared from view while at the same time, many incidents and people during the same period, remain strongly and clearly in sight. Those remembered, both people and situations, seem to be associated with strong emotions like love or fear; many are SO strong that images appear unbidden to the mind’s eye of an occurrence or part of an occurrence, or of a person much loved, not as they are now but as they were at the time of the memory. There are limitless vivid mind pictures of my children over the years; many happy reels of my mother and my sisters when we were young; only frightening ones of my father [who died in 1969 when I was 35]; snatches of children in my classes over the years, mainly of those is some distress who needed help and many images, some fleeting, others more intensely, of friends at different times of my life. I have been composing a narrative of Childhood Memories, mainly during Lockdown when the time was so accommodating, and surprised myself at how intense some of those times and people recalled, were and are.

The trigger for this blog was an essay in The New Statesman of 27 August to 4 September 2021.

Livia Drusilla 

In an article entitled, Dining al fresco, Michael Prodger has written an informative and delightful article on Livia Drusilla, eventual wife of Gaius Octavius, the future Emperor Augustus. I have had an intermittent memory of a museum, definitely not in Firenze and probably in Rome, which I had visited with my husband, in the 1990s, when I had been utterly enchanted by murals depicting a garden Paradise. That was a memory about which I wished I could identify more. I just knew I had had strong feelings of aesthetic pleasure from this museum exhibit but that was that!

So, imagine my delight on simply seeing the illustration below in the New Statesman article, when I instantly knew that here was depicted this long-lost memory. I felt ridiculously excited before reading the narrative of Livia to discover some of her life story after her marriage to Gaius Octavius. Possibly a part of her dowry, they had a much-loved retreat at Prima Porta, eight miles outside Rome, from which estate they could look down on Rome, the Tiber and the Apennines. Livia expanded this comparatively modest oasis into an idyllic haven with extensive gardens and courtyards covering half of the area, including one terrace surrounded by 150 columns.

"Luscious with fruit and birds."

Although Livia did not die till AD 29, the villa and its gorgeous gardens were abandoned in AD 5 and, astonishingly, lost for over a millennium, discovered but not identified in the 16^th century but not truly unearthed until the extensive excavations organised by Count Francesco Senni in 1863-64. A celebrated marble statue of Augustus and other statuary including a purported head of Livia were discovered [and eventually lost] but the chief delight was a semi-underground room with a collapsed roof but intact walls decorated with extraordinary frescoes showing a garden in full, imagined, impossible bloom with the seasons blended, luscious with fruit and birds.

Prodger quotes the Augustinian architectural writer, Vitruvius, describing walls for frescoes, prepared with seven layers of plaster, with sheets of lead inserted when necessary to block moisture and a top coat of marble dust to give a smooth painting surface. The paints merged with the plaster as it dried, with touching up a secco as needed. Not a quick or simple process then. The room had measured 40 x 20 feet, and had been a dining room or triclinium partly underground to protect against the fierce heat and affording the diners lounging on couches in groups of three, a continuation and embellishment of the fertile landscape outside. The flora depicted represents “a botanical catalogue” with 24 species identified including laurel, myrtle, quince and pine, all of which had symbolic connections to the Golden Age of Augustus. The range of painted birds covers 69 types from pheasants to finches and an empty painted bird cage suggests that perhaps the diners were beguiled by birds singing and flying around them and in cages suspended nearby. So a feast for the eyes and the intellect too.

These so-called Garden Room murals covered all four walls and are the most complete works of nature painting to have survived from antiquity. They are, as I have delightedly discovered, on display in the Palazzo Massimo in Rome which is where Eric and I had originally stumbled over them. Rome was his ultra favourite Italian city where he had done consultancy work over the years and loved to re-visit. Always an effort for me, Firenze being my supreme Italian city in all its Renaissance glory! But the Garden Room is one of life’s total surprises and pleasures.

More of the Painted Garden of Livia.

Livia's orange tree.

Augustus Prima Porta discovered
in the Senni 1863/4 excavation.

De Tuin van Heden.***

 

Sint Godelievesabdij, Bouveriestraat, Brugge.

Last Friday, a visit with a friend to Sint Godelievesabdij in Bouveriestraat, open to the public for a month until September 12. I had read that it is ‘a hidden gem’ and this phrase rather under-sold it! It is truly magnificent both in its immense structure; its atmosphere which provides an almost mediaeval ambience, and the beauty of the various rooms and spaces which suggest the Benedictine nuns have recently departed. [They left in December 2013.] The magazine [produced by ToerismeVlaanderen] provided with the free entry is in itself a splendid catalogue of the history of the place and contains many nudges to the reader to consider the various features such as the silence, and the beauty, and to imagine what might be the future of this place. This opening up to the community is part of Open Monumentsdag but it is more than that. It is a huge exercise in consultation in which ideas from as wide a community as possible are sought so that local opinion in particular can be considered as long-term decisions are made on the future purposes of this august space.

Depiction of the strangulation of Godelieve.

Sint Godelieve was born in 1050, an aristocrat married at a young age to Bertolf van Gistel who treated her very badly and eventually had her strangled with her own scarf by his servants who dumped her body in a nearby pool. The Bishop of Tournai canonised her on 30 July 1084. She was buried in the church at Gistel and the daughter of the murderer, Bertolf, born blind but who had gained her sight through a miracle attributed to Godelieve, built Ten Putte Abbey on the spot where she had been murdered. It is now one of the oldest Flemish women’s abbeys. Godelieve’s scarf which ended her life, became her virtual trademark, then called her attribute and it always appeared on any representation of her in paintings and sculpture. There are numerous examples of women saints adorned with scarves in the Bouveriestraat abbey and Sint Godelieve would have been instantly recognisable to the illiterate peasants in the Middle Ages.

The sisters of Sint Godelieve are Benedictine nuns and they live chiefly in silence, devoting their lives to prayer and meditation. They follow the rules of Saint Benedict [480-547 A.D.] praying seven times a day and eating no meat. Their motto is Ora et labora/ pray and work and their days were spent working in the garden, producing all the food needed for the inhabitants of the abbey, and also in contemplation and in religious celebrations. But as the attraction of the monastic lifestyle has waned, so

 the number of sisters has declined until the last five sisters finally closed down this venerable institution on December 23rd 

Abdij Ten Putte, Gistel.

2013. At its height there would have been at least a hundred sisters living there. The original Abbey in Bouveriestraat was begun in 1626 when the first six sisters moved into the modest two room building known as Het Fountainken given by Henricus vanden Zype, Abbot of the Capuchin monks in the same street. The sisters fled from Ten Putte Abbey after Protestants had attacked it and wandered hopefully in search of a home for nearly 50 years before finally settling in Brugge, though over the ensuing centuries they had to leave several times fleeing violence, from the effects of the French Revolution when the Abbey and its contents were sold at public auction and again during the two twentieth century World Wars. Frankly the history of these sisters and their Abbey needs a book to retell in its entirety!

Choir stalls in the Church.

The Abbey now, empty but redolent of its holy past, has most of the furniture and accoutrements from the past four hundred years [excepting those lost at the State-initiated public auction] The main rooms currently on view are St Godelieve’s Baroque church; the Abbess’s Room [the Mother Superior’s office]; the seventeenth century kitchen; the Sewing Atelier [established in 1663]; the Recreation Room and the Chapter House. In addition to the hard work cultivating mainly vegetables and herbs for the vegan community, the nuns also earned income by repairing, washing and ironing liturgical textiles from the numerous churches and convents in Brugge and this continued into the twentieth century. The Recreation Room was used for guests’ dining, [near the Refectory but separate from it]; singing classes for the sisters and Bible classes; a silent space for reading and contemplation while gazing at the garden beyond. The Recreation Room was also used for the training of novices.

Order of service board showing particular
responsibilities for nuns when seven only
remained in the Abbey.

The Chapter House with its democratic seating around the walls to enable all to contribute, was a place for discussion on order and discipline in daily life; the entry of new sisters; special celebrations and commemorations and news from the bishop. The principle of silence was suspended here. The wooden interior of this room was destroyed in WW1 and eventually restored by the carpentry shop of the Zevenkerken’s Abdij in Sint Andries.

There is a wealth of furniture, utensils, books and cupboards, part both of the old and recent every day monastic life and, essentially, all made for the place where they remain. The kitchen has recipe books lying open to be read but its essentially enchanting feature is the Delft tiling. ALL the walls are covered, floor to ceiling in hand-painted Delft blue and white tiles depicting 46 different scenes of children’s games like flying kites, blowing bubbles, bows and arrows plus older games long since forgotten. It is a delight to see and suggests both the temporal innocence of the nuns and their inevitable childlessness.

Well in the Garden of Remembrance.

The exceptional
garden, a square in the centre of the Abbey buildings, is named here as de Tuin van Heden, a Dutch play on words to describe The Garden of Eden but also to suggest The Garden of the Present. It is a place of beauty and reflection and was also a garden of remembrance as sisters who died were buried here until the French Revolution. This earlier conjunction of the dead and the living was more comfortably accepted in the past than perhaps today. In addition to this splendid central garden are other green spaces; the orchard and the vegetable garden; the herb garden with culinary and medicinal plants; the bee hives among flowers; the modest farm with chickens and a cow, the main home farm being in Gistel. There was also an outside oven where bread was baked and a brewery for the beer supply, safer than water often. The whole enterprise was aimed at self-sufficiency within silent and graceful surroundings pervaded by a deeply

religious ambience.

More Delft  tiles decorating a fireplace in the earliest
part of the Abbey.

Archway approach to part of the extensive gardens.

Whip and top

Bowling hoops

Catapults?

*** De Tuin van Heden.

A play on the Dutch to mean both

The Garden of Eden               and            The Garden of the Present.

Sint  Godelievesabdij is a must to see now and a place to keep in focus as decisions are made for its future use as it is transformed from a monastery, a sacred space, to ................ whatever is decided. 

An indication of the former size of the Abbey community.