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All Five Senses
IN the palaces and cities of Renaissance Italy, it has been said, the pattern of the modern gentleman-the European gentleman-was defined. From the wreck of the feudal world some legacy of chivalry, some traditions of polished manners, still survived; but a good deal more polishing was needed. A social climber had to be cautioned against using bad language in mixed company, wearing a toothpick around his neck, scratching himself in immodest places and looking in his handkerchief after blowing his nose 'as if thou hadst pearls and rubies fallen from thy brains'. As earnestly as ever, women were enjoined to modest demeanour, to decorum in dress; and as contrarily as ever, they rejected all advice.
It was a chaotic age, in which man wallowed even as he soared; an age of courtesy and cruelty, art and artificiality, mysticism and smut. This was the sensual-cynical world of Boccaccio and Aietino; it was Rabelais's world; equally it was the world of Dante and Petrarch, who carried extra-marital passion to heights undreamed by the troubadours. The end of romantic love was not attainable on earth, said Dante, but in the next world the souls of tormented lovers glowed, commingled, in a divine radiance. By Presbyterian standards, the aspirations of Dante and Petrarch seem more than a little comical. Dante, who hymned the ineffable Beatrice, had his wife and children. Petrarch, who chose to immortalize a matron of Avignon, had two bastards by another woman. Byron said:
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?
(Don Juan)
As men prised themselves from the grip of the Church so their dress grew more frivolous, more colourful, more sexually conscious. The game of revelation and concealment had begun. It was a sport at which both sexes played. For many generations to come the audacities of man's costume, no less than woman's, were to be a stimulus to courtship. Unlike the amorous stickleback, man could not glow with an inner incandescence, but he could and did array himself with feathers and jewels. He took pleasure in displaying his thighs, which were not always worth displaying. Women exposed a generous area of breast and plastered themselves with what seem to have been singularly unlovely cosmetics. Both sexes used stimulating and not always subtle perfume, of a kind (according to one sour critic) to 'obnubilate the spirits and darken the senses'.
A new factor began to contribute to the refinement of wooing: the growth of domestic privacy. In the feudal world privacy had never been missed because the pattern of life was communal. For a long time to come it was to be a luxury rare in royal palaces, where life was as public as in a modern slum; one room opened into another and all the functions, follies and felicities of life were for anyone to see. Now, in slow architectural evolution, came the corridor and the private room; a room, moreover, with its own fireplace, so that it could offer not only the novelty of privacy but of warmth, By the fourteenth century the wealthy had glass in their windows instead of shutters, and some were even effeminate enough to lay carpets on the floors (a Spanish innovation). Slowly the bedroom changed from a whistling cave of Boreas, in which the only refuge was under the blankets, to a reasonably snug chamber in which dalliance could be contemplated (many English bedrooms have still to make this transition). Other refinements followed-curtains, screens, paintings on the walls. From Venice, source of the sensuous, came the glass mirror, soon to be pressed into the service of Venus. Lewis Mumford has told in The Culture of Cities how, eventually, in direct consequence of such discoveries, there sprang up 'a new code of sexual manners, embroidering the preliminaries of sexual intercourse and tending to lengthen the period of amatory youth for both sexes'. Thanks to the heated room 'visual erethism added to the effect of tactile stimuli'.
In other words, man had discovered that courtship, to give the maximum of pleasure to both parties, called for the employment of all five senses. Anyone who has explored the, sixteenth-century Kinseyland of the Abbe de Brantome will remember the stories of noblemen who found themselves under the regretful necessity of making love in total darkness to highborn but anonymous ladies unable to speak for fear of disclosing their identity; two-fifths of the joys of love were thus denied the participants. Apocryphal though these stories may be, it is clear from Brantome that the amoral amorists of the French courts had already glimpsed the grail of voluptuousness. The abbe discourses long and unquotably on the functions of vision and voice in love-making. He acknowledges the suggestiveness of the fashionable fleshy paintings of Venus and Mars, of Leda and her Swan. He tells how fastidious travellers in foreign lands are loth to enter into affaires (other than the briefest lustful interludes) with women whose language they do not know. (At a later date Casanova refused to consider an affaire with a famous English courtesan because he would have been deprived of the stimulus of words-lacking as they did a common language.) It was, however, only the fashionable world which could disport in fire-lit privacy. Lesser mortals, driven into dark alleys and doorways, or into the fields, did not know that they were losing perhaps three-fifths, perhaps even four-fifths, of the fun.
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