Some Kind Of Wonderful

Once, 30,000 years or so ago, a man — or a woman, or a family, or a group of lost hunters looking for bears — entered a cave in southern France and painted a maze of red dots on a wall. Others (who knows whether before or after the proto-Seurat) added lions and deer, horses' heads, a pair of rhinos fighting, and — perhaps as some mark of justified pride in what they had done — stenciled handprints on the walls as if to say, "We were here."

Men and women have been all over Europe in the years since the Chauvet Caves were first painted, and have left enough marks on a crowded Continent to instill a sense of wonder in those who came after them. There was Sinan, the great architect of the Ottoman Empire's golden age, whose soaring mosque at Edirne seems to defy the laws of physics. There was Duke Federico da Montefeltro, a Renaissance prince whose palace at Urbino mixes up simple geometric lines with impossible, boastful flourishes. And still, to this day, artists are coming up with head-snapping work that seems to signify a victory over — or collaboration with — nature. If you doubt that, you haven't seen Norman Foster's bridge over the Tarn at Millau, a work of graceful strength that seems to float 343 m above the valley below.

With such a feast spread out before us, it wasn't hard to hit on the Wonders of Europe as a theme for this year's Summer Journeys double issue — the third we have produced. Yet we quickly decided that it wasn't just famous artists whose works we would celebrate. There were the nameless people of times long gone and of our own age who made little societies — Neolithic stonemasons in the Orkney Islands, butchers in London's Smithfield Market.

And then, of course, there was the canvas on which these pigments were laid by human hands — the natural wonders of a Continent stuffed with them, from cloudy waterfalls in Iceland to thankfully mosquito-ridden sand dunes in Spain; from fjords above which the Aurora Borealis performs its light show, as if God had dropped a tab of acid, to glaciers against whose progress Swiss peasants and priests once offered prayers but which now are visibly receding. Human ingenuity and natural beauty, crammed into a peninsula of peninsulas, stumbling over each other, surprising and enchanting those who stumble across them. Wonder, and enjoy.

TOP