Lucius Cranach's A Golden Age hangs in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. He painted it early in the 16th Century, and in it he hauntingly depicts the lost age of innocence before the fall: naked men and women dance ecstatically through a sylvan landscape, a Garden of Eden. It is one of Cranach's most extraordinary, surreal compositions, and it celebrates a legend that has haunted us for generation after generation, almost since the dawn of our human race: the legend of a lost ideal time, a golden age.

But it has a rare irony: for Cranach himself lived and painted at a time that we now see as a golden age, one of the most glorious in all human history. It was no mythical era of primeval innocence, but - as contemporaries recognized - a time of huge and surging excitement in human affairs: everything - the perception of nature and of reality, the character of experience, the relation of individuals to each other, their feelings about the supernatural - was in a state of turmoil. The city in which Cranach ended his days, of which he became a highly respected citizen and merchant and finally Bürgermeister, Wittenberg on the Elbe, was that same city where in 1517 Luther nailed his famous theses to the cathedral door, to usher in the Reformation; Cranach and Luther were close friends and associates. And in his art, Cranach constantly worked at the borderline between the sacred and profane, testing the limits of the possible. Cranach and Luther lived and worked in what we can now see as a golden age of the here and now.

Like every such golden age of which we know, it was an urban age. True, Wittenberg by modern standards was and is a tiny place, but by the standards of Cranach's time it was one of the most important cities of central Europe. The Renaissance, of which Cranach formed such an important German outlier, was an urban phenomenon; so was every great burst of creativity in human history.

So there is a nagging question: why should great cities have such golden ages, these belles époques? How do these golden ages come about? Why should the creative flame burn so especially, so uniquely, in cities and not in the countryside? What makes a particular city, at a particular time, suddenly become immensely creative, exceptionally innovative? Why should this spirit flower for a few years, generally a decade or two at most, and then disappear as suddenly as it came? Why do so few cities have more than one such golden age? How is it that they fail to recapture the creative spark that once animated them?

For history shows that golden urban ages are rare and special windows of light, that briefly illuminate the world both within them and outside them, and then again are shuttered. The great examples - Athens in the fifth century BC, Florence in the fourteenth century, London in the sixteenth, Vienna in the eighteenth and nineteenth, Paris at the end of the nineteenth -make that clear. Even the greatest of great cities had relatively short periods of creative artistic glory; most never had another. Stefan Zweig, in the marvellous autobiographical fragment he left before his tragic suicide in Brazilian exile, left an unforgettable picture of one such brief golden age, the Vienna of his youth.


Growing slowly through the centuries, organically developing outward from inner circles, it was sufficiently populous, with its two millions, to yield all the luxury and all the diversity of a metropolis, and yet it was not so oversized as to be cut off from nature, like London or New York ... Within, the old palaces of the court and the nobility spoke history in stone. Here Beethoven had played at the Lichnowskys', at the Esterhazys' Haydn had been a guest; there in the old University Haydn's Creation had resounded for the first time, the Hofburg had seen generations of emperors, and Schönbrunn had seen Napoleon. In the Stefansdom the united lords of Christianity had knelt in prayers of thanksgiving for the salvation of Europe from the Turks; countless great lights of science had been within the walls of the University. In the midst of all this, the new architecture reared itself proudly and grandly with glittering avenues and sparkling shops (1).


Zweig unforgettably captures the essence of this lost world, of the people who inhabited it, and of the culture they created and nurtured:


Our Austrian indolence in political matters, and our backwardness in economics as compared with our resolute German neighbor, may actually be ascribed in part to our epicurean excesses. But culturally this exaggeration of artistic events brought something unique to maturity — first of all, an uncommon respect for every artistic presentation, then, through centuries of practice, a connoisseurship without equal, and finally, thanks to that connoisseurship, a predominant high level in all cultural fields. The artist always feels at his best and at the same time most inspired where he is esteemed or even over﷓estimated. Art always reaches its peak where it becomes the life interest of a people (2).


By the time Zweig wrote that, in 1943, the Viennese golden age was over; and, with it, the spirit that animated it. He recalls its quality through a wonderful short poem of Goethe's, which depicts the waves of life as they erode the calm stillness which ushered us into the world. That calmness, that inner security, was a quality that the Viennese bourgeois society of 1900 miraculously preserved throughout the lives of its members, and so gave the freedom to create and to appreciate creativity in others; paradoxically, tranquillity and security were the rock on which originality and creativity were anchored. He recalls it in the sadness of exile: "though it was a delusion our fathers served, it was a wonderful and noble delusion, more humane and more fruitful than our watchwords of today ... That which, in his childhood, a man has drawn into his blood out of the air of time cannot be taken from him" (3). By the time he wrote, of course, it had been exposed as an illusion; yet it represented something of infinite value, cherished from a vanished past:


Today, now that the great storm has long since smashed it, we finally know that that world of security was naught but a castle of dreams; my parents lived in it as if it had been a house of stone. Not once did a storm, or even a sharp wind, break in upon their warm, comfortable existence. True, they had a special protection against the winds of time: they were wealthy people, who had become rich gradually, even very rich, and that filled the crevices of wall and window in those times. Their way of life seems to me to be so typical of the so﷓called "good Jewish bourgeoisie," which gave such marked value to Viennese culture ... ten or twenty thousand families lived like my parents lived in Vienna in that last century of assured values (4).


No more moving, no more perceptive account has ever been given of an golden urban age: not least, of the unique combination of elements that allowed it to happen, or of the forces that all too soon blew it apart. For the Viennese golden age in its ultimate florescence was peculiarly a creation of that Jewish society: a society of outsiders who, for all too brief a time, had become insiders.
That kind of artistic and philosophical creativity is the grandest, of course; most civilized societies place it on the topmost pinnacle, and in that they do right. The Viennese, like the Greeks before them, were curiously indifferent to technology, even when it came to creature comforts: the Vienna of 1900 was a city where the suburbs lacked piped water, where telephones and passenger elevators were few, where bathrooms were unknown (5). But, for good or ill, twentieth-century society has demanded phones as well as philosophy, bathrooms as well as opera; indeed, it gets most of its opera from the domestic CD player rather than the opera house.

But these new technologies arise from the same creative spark: the same rules apply to art and culture as to that more mundane but equally momentous kind of creativity, which results in major technological advance and thus in new objects, new industries, new modes of production. Manchester at the end of the eighteenth century, Berlin in the middle of the nineteenth, Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area during the twentieth century, all are just as valid examples of urban creativity as are Athens, Florence, Vienna, Paris. And, during the twentieth century, first and most obviously in America, artistic and technological innovation have increasingly and creatively fused: in movies, in television, in recorded music, finally and perhaps most excitingly in multimedia. Essentially these two great modes of innovation, long since seen as separate and contraposed, have become one; and the implications are still exploding around us.

From:
Sir Peter Hall
Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order.
London, Weidenfeld & Nocolson, 1998


Notes

1. Zweig S. The World of Yesterday: An autobiography. New York, Viking 1943, p. 13-14.
2. Zweig 1943, p.18.
3. Zweig 1943, p. 5.
4. Zweig 1943, p. 5.
5. Johnston W. M. The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and social History, 1848-1938. Berkley: University of California Press1972, p. 66.