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I keep his picture by my desk. His dark eyes stare at me. His hair is long and he needs a shave. His lips are set in a determined downward curve. He is trying a bit too hard to look like he doesn’t care about me and yet he is carrying a placard which he is defying me to read and consider. Upon it are written the words,
Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silence
The man in the picture is Salvator Rosa (1615 -1673), artist, actor, philosopher, and possible bandit. I first encountered him at The Wallace Collection which owns his painting of Apollo and the Cumaean Sybil. The self portrait is usually in the National Gallery but can now be seen in a wonderful exhibition of his paintings at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silence
His advice seems to run counter to all the pressure on me to twitter, buzz, hum and fritter my words and myself in order to get myself ‘out there’. Should I deck myself out in the literary equivalent of a meat dress and get noticed?
Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silence
John Le Carre recently said in a recent interview that he likes to be the quiet guest at the dinner table. If we are expected to ‘make a noise’ all the time are we sacrificing a bit of our creative self? After his death Salvator Rosa became the darling of the Romantics because he refused to paint to order. He painted scathing pictures showing Fortuna scattered her riches on those that least deserve them. I would love Fortuna to scatter some random riches and recognition in my direction.
Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silence
His words challenge me as I write. Silent images flicker on the screen of my imagination over and over again and I dance with them until they are reformed into words. Then I can only hope that these words can successfully transmit those images and emotions into another’s imagination so that a story or a poem comes into existence. A story that is better than silence.
This year I have been spending time at the Wallace Collection in London with fellow author, Bridget Crowley, devising and running creative writing workshops using the collection as inspiration. Bridget was looking for artefacts for a Myths and Legends workshop when she found this object….a trousse.
Beneath the ornate sheath lies a set of knives that a hunter would use to eviscerate prey. The stag being overwhelmed by a pack of hounds is the handle of the largest knife. This trousse belonged to a legendary figure in British history- Bonnie Prince Charlie otherwise known as The Young Pretender or Prince Charles Edward Stuart.
Charlie had contacted Frederick the Great of Prussia asking for support with his plans to invade England and reclaim the British throne. He was probably hoping for some troops and a large bag of money.
No troops or bag of money arrived. Instead Frederick sent him this trousse.
I imagine there was no accompanying letter. That would be too incriminating if it fell in the wrong hands.
What was Frederick showing rather than telling him?
Was he warning him to keep his plans under wraps?
Was he suggesting that a soldier like a huntsman needs to be prepared?
Was Frederick using the stag imagery to remind him of the fate of Actaeon the hunter who accidentally stumbled across Artemis bathing with her nymphs? His punishment for this was to be turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds.
For me the message of Frederick’s gift shouts out, ‘Beware of your own ambition.’ Misplaced ambition can tear you apart like a pack of baying hounds.
I don’t know what it said to the Bonnie Prince. In 1745 he began his doomed invasion attempt turning back at Derby. He was pursued by the Duke of Cumberland who took his revenge by eviscerating many of the Prince’s supporters along the way to Culloden.
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Thanks so much for introducing me to this fascinating character and I do hope the workshops went well.