From a narrow perspective, David's work was focused on how one should go about preparing pizza dough or fry calamari. Its deeper theme, however, was a celebration of the values of the south, intended for an audience in the north that appeared to have forgotten them, to its psychological as well as dietetic impoverishment. From the seventeenth century to the modern day, the colder, northern parts of the globe have been at the centre of events, and their spirit has shaped our civilization. It is during the dark, long winters and unreliable summers of Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh, London, Tokyo and Seattle, that many of the key moves in the realms of ideas, science and industry have been made. The values of the north have dominated the modern imagination: among these are rationality, science, the mind rather than the body, delayed gratification rather than the pleasures of the moment and the needs of the individual rather than the call of the collective.
The
Importance of the South
For many people, artists and thinkers foremost among them, this northern dominance has brought with it a powerful yearning for theconverse. Nostalgic and lyrical advocates of the south have been alert to the dangers and frustrations of over-intellectualization and the denial of the claims of the body; they have lamented puritanism and social isolation, they have worshipped instinct over science. They have made a case for south as a state of mind rather than merely as a geographical location. For example, in the 1780s Goethe was so moved when he went to Italy for the first time that he regretted everything that had occurred in his life up to that point (76). This was where he truly belonged, he declared, the previous thirty-eight years having been like ka whaling expedition to Greenland'. He was 'experiencing this happiness as an exception which by rights we ought to be able to enjoy as a rule of our nature'. It was not just antiquities and Renaissance art that drew Goethe to Rome. He liked the person he could be there. He ate a lot of fruit (he was especially fond of figs and peaches, which were hard to get at home in Weimar), he found a lover, a local woman he called Faustina, and spent warm afternoons in bed with her. He exchanged his formal ministerial life for a more liberal existence amongst the artists of Rome.
Goethe was only the most notable of many distinguished Germans who have taken a trip to the south and been transformed, recognizing that their characters hitherto had been unbalanced by an excess of northern darkness. Following in Goethe's footsteps, Nietzsche headed to Sorrento on the Bay of Naples in 1876. He went swimming, visited Pompeii and the Greek temples at Paestum, and, at mealtimes, discovered lemons, olives, mozzarella and avocados. The trip changed the direction of his thought: he moved away from his previous neo-Christian pessimism and embraced a more life-affirming Hellenism. Many years later, with his Italian sojourn very much in mind, he wrote. These little things - nutriment, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness - are beyond all conception of greater importance than anything that has been considered of importance hitherto/
Cyril Connolly would have agreed. In the London winter of 1942, the English literary critic and essayist, a keen reader of Goethe and Nietzsche, playfully declared a wish to start a new religion whose most sacred items would be the olive and the lemon - in other words, the two totemic culinary items of the Mediterranean. Connolly remembered a happier version of himself, driving through France towards the Mediterranean, 'peeling off the kilometres to the tune of "Blue Skies" sizzling down the long black liquid reaches of the Nationale Sept, the plane trees going sha-sha-sha through the open window, the windscreen yellowing with crushed midges, she with the Michelin beside me, a handkerchief binding her hair...'
For people like Goethe, Nietzsche and Connolly, the south was happiness, but rhey could not stay for any extended period. The question for them, and for us, is how to keep hold of some of the fulfilment we have found in southern lands. How might one lay claim on an ongoing basis to the virtues of the south when one is back in the north? The answer, here as so often, lies with that supreme preserver and transmitter of experience: art.
Elizabeth David preserved the south in casserole dishes. In early nineteenth-century Prussia, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel sought to preserve it in bricks and mortar (77). He designed a number of Italianate villas in the suburbs of Berlin, whose open loggias and pergolas were architectural memorials of the warm evenings he had experienced around Rome and Naples. Although the traditional northern house sees nature as the enemy, Schinkel was determined to recast the argument and create a building that would speak to the parts of ourselves that are at home with the elements.
The same spirit was active a century later in the work of Le Corbusier (78). In 1911, having finished his studies, the Swiss architect travelled around the Mediterranean, stopping off for extended periods in Greece and Turkey. The temples aside, what fascinated him was the architecture of the whitewashed seaside villages and the spirit their simple, uncluttered, unornamented designs exuded. What we now know as Modernism is in large measure an attempt to recreate white vernacular Hellenic architecture in a northern climate, with the help of steel, glass and concrete. On the upper floor of his Villa Savoye outside Paris, Le Corbusier designed what he called a 'solarium4 and informed his initially reluctant clients that a good life involved regular sunbathing among its concrete ramps. Like a pergola in Prussia, a sun terrace might not seem the most essential or practical amenity in the tle-de-France. Such structures, however, were making an argument for a paganism of the spirit, whatever the weather might be doing outside.
I}art of what Goethe
appreciated was the culture of shirt sleeves and casual shoes (a cross between flip-flops and espadrilles).
76. Johjnn Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein.
Cortlv 41 tbc Window of bii Roman Apartment, 1787
We shouldn't expect artistic representations of the south made by northerners to be accurate about what it's like to live in sunny climates. When considering much of the architecture, art and writing on Greece and Rome that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, we shouldn't be offended by incomplete representations of conditions in the ancient world. What we learn is more interesting - what people wanted these places to be like. In other words, correctives of their overly intellectual, not body focussed, hampered, awkward, asexual selves. When the Anglo-Dutch artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Taking the south home with you.
77. Karl Fried rich Schinkel, Court Gardeners Mouse, 1829-33
A house thai wants you to live in it with the south in your heart.
78. Le Corbusier. Solarium at Villa Savoyc. 1931
It doesn't matter that Rome wasn't actually like this.
79. Sir Lawrence Alma-T.idcrru, A Favourite Custom, 1909
painted supra-realistic scenes of daily Life in the Roman Empire, his goal wasn't historical truth (79). Real Roman baths were far dirtier, more practical and less lyrical than he ever cared to show them. The point of his work wasn't the recreation of reality; instead he sought to influence his Victorian and Edwardian audiences, used to wearing crinolines and corsets, into accepting their physical natures and finding their way to a more expansive, playful and natural eroticism.