Brunelleschi's Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy 9780520947474, 9780520261525

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I Great Mother Nature
Chapter One. The Gendering of Nature as Female: From Prehistory through the Middle Ages
Part II. Nature and Art in the Quattrocento: From Pupil to Equal
Chapter Two. Technology and the Mastery of Physical Nature: Brunelleschi and Alberti
Chapter Three. Genesis and the Reproduction of Life: Masaccio and Michelangelo
Chapter Four. The Rebirth of Venus and the Feminization of Beauty: Botticelli
Part III. A Balance of Power: Pictorial Metaphors for Nature in Transition
Chapter Five. Nature’s Special Child: Leonardo da Vinci
Chapter Six. The Goddess in Arcady: Giorgione
Part IV. Art and Nature in the Cinquecento: From Competitor to Master
Chapter Seven. Love and Death in Venice: Titian
Chapter Eight. Art against Nature: Raphael, the Early Mannerists, and Late Michelangelo
Chapter Nine. Natura Bound: The Later Tuscan Mannerists
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

A R T S

I M P R I N T

   has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of       

.

   

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Sonia H. Evers Renaissance Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by American University, College of Arts and Sciences.

brunelleschi’s egg

Brunelleschi’s Egg Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy

Mary D. Garrard

University of California Press Berkeley  Los Angeles  London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Every effort has been made to identify the rightful copyright holders of material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page, on the copyright page, or in an acknowledgment section of the book. Errors or omissions in credit citations or failure to obtain permission if required by copyright law have been either unavoidable or unintentional. The author and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garrard, Mary D. Brunelleschi’s egg : nature, art, and gender in Renaissance Italy / Mary D. Garrard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-26152-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1.  Feminism and art.  2.  Nature (Aesthetics).  3.  Philosophy of nature—History.  4.  Renaissance—Italy.  I.  Title.  II.  Title: Nature, art, and gender in Renaissance Italy. n72.f45g38  2010 709.02'4-dc22   2010008371 Manufactured in China 19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

contents

Preface and Acknowlegments  Introduction  /  1

/ 

vii

part i. great mother nature One. The Gendering of Nature as Female: From Prehistory through the Middle Ages 

/ 

9

part ii. nature and art in the quattrocento: from pupil to equal Two. Technology and the Mastery of Physical Nature: Brunelleschi and Alberti  /  33 Three. Genesis and the Reproduction of Life: Masaccio and Michelangelo  /  54 Four. The Rebirth of Venus and the Feminization of Beauty: Botticelli  /  89

part iii. a balance of power: pictorial metaphors for nature in transition Five. Nature’s Special Child: Leo­nardo da Vinci  /  123 Six. The Goddess in Arcady: Giorgione  /  156

part iv. art and nature in the cinquecento: from competitor to master Seven. Love and Death in Venice: Titian 

/ 

193

Eight. Art against Nature: Raphael, the Early Mannerists, and Late Michelangelo  Nine. Natura Bound: The Later Tuscan Mannerists  /  275

Epilogue  /  313 Notes  /  317 Bibliography  /  377 Illustrations  /  407 Index  /  413

/ 

237

preface and acknowledgments

The idea of nature as female is both an empowering metaphor and a narrow stereotype, at once cosmic and confining. The equation of woman and nature may have originated, as has been suggested, in the prehistoric observation that women’s generating bodies and the generating earth worked in the same way. Because nature was powerful and mysterious, scholars have reasoned, female humans in pre-agricultural societies may have shared in “her” mystique. It is certain, however, that after culture and patriarchy were invented, women and nature were relegated to the lower half of a hierarchy, with men and culture occupying the superior, dominant position. In the modern era, we came to see that the patriarchal mentality that sustained the human oppressions of gender, race, and sexuality also drove the exploitation of nature. As long as the earth was seen as a constantly self-replenishing natural resource, gender stereotypes silently undergirded man’s (largely men’s) utilitarian consumption of nature’s abundance (Mother is always there for you), while his devastation of the natural environment was supported by gender-based metaphors such as “virgin land,” “taming the wild,” and “rape of the earth.” Today, as we recognize with alarm the fragility of this planet and foresee its potential death at our own hands, the coupling of nature and female takes new stereotypical form: we must save the earth from annihilation. The dominator-exploiter is called upon to become a hero who will rescue the powerless heroine. I would not argue against ecological salvation, nor that we need not act, but would note that the contemporary

presumption that nature is powerless and exhaustible is still based on a limiting bias of gender. Missing is the possibility that nature—which includes not only the earth, but the solar system, galaxy, and universe—may be capable of surviving Earthman’s self-destructive energies on terms he has not yet envisioned. If the dominator model hasn’t worked, then the rescuer model may be equally inadequate. The idea of a helpless nature needing our protection is the mirror opposite of a more ancient and longstanding topos: of a dangerous nature indifferent to humans, who are powerless against her destructive force. “Nature” is a changing conceptual construct, a projection of beliefs at a given time about culture’s powers, including its self-doubts and fears. In earlier cultures, the divide between nature and culture was placed between man and his artifacts on one side, and women, animals, and the physical environment on the other. More enlightened ages brought women into the fold of culture (while insisting on their greater proximity to nature, or their borderline status), and now that we are in the era of animal rights, reasoning dolphins, and human-primate hybrids, nature is threatened to be robbed even of its most certain denizens. The realm of nature is steadily appropriated by culture, which consistently values itself as higher. It might make more sense to go in the other direction. In a genuinely enlightened cosmic view, humans would be seen as part of nature, alien from it only by reality-denying choice. Indeed, this is not an extreme perspective, if one enlarges the

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Preface and Acknowledgments

definition of nature to something like the “tao” of Taoism, the way of the universe, the process by which life unfolds and continues, including all that is in it and also how it works. If one thinks of nature in this way, then all of culture is a product of nature, and there is no binary opposition worth discussing. But that is an Oriental vision. Western culture has thrived on binary oppositions, none of them more pervasive or enduring than the opposition of nature and culture. The gender bias that long warped culture’s relationship with nature into an adversarial struggle for dominance has also distorted the history of art. In this book, I examine those distortions in the Renaissance period, but it can be stated more broadly here that an anti-naturalism bias runs through Western art history in general. One sees it in the countless writers who seem to need to insist on the superiority of art, and the lesserness of nature. Perhaps my strongest motivation to write this book was an abiding sense I’ve had of being out of step in understanding this. As a student, I always found faintly oppressive the notion that “naturalism” in art was manifestly inferior to something else, namely, art that was closer to art than to nature. My suffering was nothing, however, compared to the whole lives of artists who endured critical opprobrium in their own time and after for their extreme devotion to nature. Caravaggio tops the list, closely followed by Rembrandt, and the Flemish painters scorned by Michelangelo for their deceptive attention to outward appearances in an art that, he allegedly said, appealed primarily to women. As the last example suggests, nature is entangled with gender in many ways. Yet I had not realized that my personal views had a feminist dimension until, in the late 1980s, I read Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, which brilliantly analyzed the way that gender figured in the replacement of the old worldview of nature by the scientific worldview. Though Merchant did not emphasize it, the irony that the “death of nature” occurred in the period we call the Renaissance made me realize that here was another reason to ask, as had Joan Kelly, “did women have a Renaissance?” Indeed, did anyone? This book is an amplification of Merchant’s thesis about that critical transitional phase of “Renaissance,” and in a sense, it is merely a footnote. However, because Merchant was not primarily interested in art, I have found a great deal to talk about in this footnote, and if I were to sum up my findings simply, it is this: art’s contest with nature in the “Renaissance” was the battleground for the changing understanding of man’s relationship with the physical universe. And in important respects, it was art that pioneered and negotiated the transition from the age of theology to the age of science.

viii

Histories of art do not address the role of the visual arts in facilitating this large cultural transition, nor, more surprisingly, do they acknowledge art’s adversarial engagement with nature as one of its most fundamental and abiding concerns, a primal subject that underlies the many story lines that make up the master art-historical narrative, or metanarrative. In this book I present a counternarrative, attempting to show how the metanarrative was shaped by unacknowledged factors, in particular, the gendered status of nature, and what happens when the story is told from nature’s point of view. From the vantage point of the common primal theme that they engage, even much-studied familiar monuments of Renaissance art can yield fresh meaning. And from the perspective of feminized nature’s history, the biases of a masculinist art history can be revealed. For all the new considerations that modern scholarship has brought to the framing of Renaissance art history—patronage, artists’ contracts, audience reception, the factor of women artists, the avoidance of value judgments, to name a few— certain judgmental assumptions remain in place. One of them is embedded in the currently fashionable substitution of the term “Early Modern” for “Renaissance,” a substitution with teleological implications that are not being critically addressed. Though intended to counter the Italo-centrality (and masculinism) of traditional Renaissance studies and to include the Northern European worldview in which classical antiquity played a limited part, “Early Modern” hints at development and progress in a way that Alberti or Vasari would have relished. (From the viewpoint of this book, Early Modern progressivism and the Renaissance’s strategic revival of socially correct antiquity are merely two aspects of the same thing.) From the counternarrative perspective, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were a transitional age, yet not as an “Early Modern” that preceded a more mature (High?) “Modern,” leading in an ascending arc from the old world order to a newer and better one, but an arc that descends downward, marking culture’s progressive loss of a felt organic connection with nature. Nature, like God, is found in the details. The largest issue that came up in the copyediting of this book was whether or when to capitalize the word “Nature.” Renaissance Italian texts are no definitive guide, since writers were quite inconsistent in capitalizing, sometimes in the same sentence. Throughout the book, the name of its chief protagonist is spelled “Nature” when the sense of a living presence or animated personification is strong, and “nature” when something broader or less definite is meant. I cannot claim perfect consistency in the distinction

Preface and Acknowledgments

(as my copyeditor knows all too well), yet I have tried to preserve it because the change of Natura’s identity over time from a divine goddess to a lifeless abstraction, from real to literary, is the subject of the book. I hope this transit is subtextually conveyed by the gradual disappearance of the capital N. I began thinking about the subject of this book nearly twenty years ago, and though the writing of it was interrupted many times by other projects, I never stopped thinking about or developing it in some way. My work has been strengthened and supported over the years by friends, colleagues, and others, who are due my grateful thanks. My debt of gratitude begins with the institutional, collegial, and intellectual support I have received from American University. Funding from my university has bookended the project: my work on the book began with a Research Leave grant, and ended with a Mellon grant to help defray pho­tographic and permission costs, and a generous subvention toward its publication, given to UC Press in 2009. For the latter gesture of support, especially welcome at a time when both universities and university presses are financially stressed, I thank Kay Mussell, then Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of American University. I am grateful to colleagues at American and other univer­ sities who invited me to their campuses to speak on aspects of this subject, providing opportunities for intellectual exchange that helped me hone the arguments. These include the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, the Univer­ sity of Missouri–St. Louis, Notre Dame University, Princeton University, Washington University in St. Louis, and Williams Col­lege. Colleagues are named below, but I also thank three former students, Bryna Campbell, Lori Johnson, and Katie Poole, for initiating invitations as doctoral candidates in their new institutions. My special appreciation goes to the graduate students in my own classes over the years, who often provided the first sounding board and test of my devel­ oping ideas. For invaluable technical support in image production, I am indebted to our art department’s Visual Resources Curator, Kathe Albrecht, and to graduate students under her supervision, most recently, Gretchen Martin and Ellie Pinzarrone. Over time, graduate students in our department have assisted me in bibliographic research for this book, and I especially thank Kelly Gayden, Kevin Kandt, and Allison Levy. Particular appreciation goes to Andrea Paredes-Herrera, Interlibrary Loan specialist in the American University library,

whose energetic retrieval of far-flung and elusive texts made it possible for me to conduct primary research at my home base. I am fortunate to live in Washington, D.C., a city with unparalleled scholarly resources, and my work has been greatly facilitated by the proximity of two world-class libraries, those of the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art. My particular thanks go to Lamia Doumato and her staff in the National Gallery of Art library for their unfailingly gracious and helpful assistance. As always, the gathering of photographs and permissions became a global initiative, one greatly facilitated by the obliging cooperation of many specialists in museums and libraries in Europe and America, and by the magical rapidity of communication and response that e-mail has brought. Special thanks are due to Cari Winterich at Art Resource, New York, whose cheerful assistance went well beyond the call of duty; and also to Ingrid Kastel at the Albertina Museum,Vienna; Agata Rutkowska at the British Museum, London; Grazia Visintainer at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence; and Negin Yazdanpanah, at my branch of Wachovia Bank. For help of various kinds—the spark of an idea, the loan of a photograph, the gift of information or specialized ­knowledge— I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues, including Kim E. Butler, Michael Cole, Phillip Earenfight, Christine M. Havelock, the late George Hersey, Ruth Iskin, Christiane JoostGaugier, Barbara G. Lane, Patrice Marandel, Sara MatthewsGrieco, the late Mary Martin McLaughlin, Patricia Meil­man, Leatrice Mendelsohn, Margaret R. Miles, Katharine Park, Charles Rosenberg, James M. Saslow, Steven Schot, Romeo Segnan, Claire R. Sherman, Stefanie Solum, Regina Stefaniak, Ann Suter, Marvin Trachtenberg, and Rosemary Trippe. I owe very special thanks to colleagues who read the complete manuscript at an early stage: Mieke Bal, Yael Even, and especially Jacqueline M. Musacchio, for her helpful close reading and valuable input. At University of California Press, my appreciation and gratitude are due first to my editor, Stephanie Fay, with whom I have worked on three books now, and whose fine editorial judgment and friendship I value in equal measure. I am also grateful for the expert skills of Sue Heinemann in editorial oversight and those of Eric Schmidt in image acquisition and copyright issues; they have made the pro­ duction process much easier and more agreeable than it often is for authors. My thanks go as well to Charles Dibble, who handled the task of copyediting a long manuscript with attentive care and good cheer, and to Nola Burger, the book designer, for her subtle and innovative design choices.

ix

Preface and Acknowledgments

Inspiration and sustenance have also come from long, ongoing conversations with friends and family. I particularly want to acknowledge Pamela Askew and H. Diane Russell, two dear friends whose untimely deaths ended our conversations about many topics, including this book, from which I benefited tremendously. And I thank my sister Marion Garrard Barnwell for listening, encouraging, and sharing her experience and wisdom as a fellow writer. With Norma Broude, I have shared a longstanding arthistorical, feminist, and personal adventure, a centerpiece of which has been our independent interrogations of the gen-

x

dered relationship of art, nature, and science in our different disciplinary subfields. Her book, Impressionism: A Feminist Reading, was her early, important answer. My book has taken more time and another shape due to its different historical scope, but Broude’s book should be recognized as its conceptual counterpart, and its inspiration in many ways. I thank Norma for her abiding intellectual stimulus, the power of her example, her help at many critical junctures—and for her impatience. No one will be gladder to see this book in print (and out of the house), and I hope that she will finally be able to read it for pleasure.

Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art, we express our conception of what nature is not.  —pablo picasso, 1923

introduction

This is not a book about landscape. If there is a single premise that the reader must begin by understanding, it is that nature and landscape are not the same thing. Landscape developed when nature was demoted from a power to an environment. When we see nature in art, we often leap to the conclusion that it is being “appreciated” or valued by the artist. This may be true, but the matter is more complex. Nature—whose realworld operations include hurricanes, floods, plagues, asteroid collisions, and assaults by wild animals—is often profoundly dangerous to humans. Danger can be mediated by naming (Katrina) and also by representation. Thematized within art, nature ceases to be alien; rendered harmless, nature is admired and loved for its beauty. Yet it is only precariously contained by art. To “capture” nature is a revealing military metaphor, meaning to stop the enemy’s aggression, to disarm and acquire the enemy’s powers. From the ancient past through the Middle Ages, nature was conceived as an abstract being or force that sustained the mysterious, subtle, and often violent processes of natural life on earth. In antiquity, nature’s powers were represented by female deities such as Artemis, Aphrodite, or Demeter; in medieval Europe, they were personified in the goddess Natura. With or before Greco-Roman culture came patriarchy and the ascendancy of a father god; with Christianity came Natura’s subordination to the patriarchal God. Yet, because Natura was a transcendental deity with powers quite similar to God’s, an uneasy tension lingered in medieval thought regarding the

relation between God and Nature. Each was ascribed responsibility for the miraculous variety of life on earth, and both were assigned powers that derived from the mirroring of the natural order in the social order. God’s claim was based on patriarchal authority, father-right, while Nature’s claim was grounded in mother-right, and the unchallengeable priority of the maternal role in birth and nurture. This book is about the gendered discourse of Art and Nature in the Renaissance, a period when their relationship was in dramatic transition. First, a definition. Historians of philosophy and science have examined changing conceptions of “nature” to find it a highly equivocal term, whose connotative range embraces some sixty-six different meanings in literary and philosophical usage.1 Using the most constant and generally accepted definition, I mean by “nature” the physical universe and its operations, including causality and generation, motion and change. In the Western world, the concept of nature changed significantly during the Renaissance. In this period, philosophies of nature moved from a view of the natural world as an organism imbued with mind or “soul,” the earth itself understood as alive and intelligent, to the early modern, “scientific” conception of the world as a machine that lacks both intelligence and the capacity to move itself, created and maintained by a divine outside being.2 In the terms of an influential medieval distinction, the emphasis shifted from natura naturans (nature “naturing,” an active creative agent) to natura naturata (nature “natured,” the inert product of creation).

1

Introduction

Historians of natural philosophy distinguish scientific consciousness, which perceives humans as detached from nature, from the perspective that preceded the scientific revolution, in which humans felt at home and participated affectively in the “enchanted world” of nature.3 Feminist scholarship significantly augmented this model. First came the problematizing of the western European gendering of nature and culture, the former identified archetypally with the female and the latter with the male, by anthropol­ ogist Sherry Ortner and other feminist scholars, who found the model to be social-structural and not innate, as well as masculine-biased.4 As Carolyn Merchant showed, the critical transition that occurred in the Renaissance, from an organic to scientific worldview, was accompanied and assisted by the gender metaphor that equated nature with the female. Merchant situated this idea in the histories of both philosophy and science, and explained its dynamic operation. She described the replacement of an ancient cosmology that viewed the earth as a living organism, personified in thought as a nurturing mother, by the mechanistic view of the female earth as passive matter, to be acted upon and controlled by man.5 The gender metaphor, as well as men’s supposedly natural dominance of women, lent rational support to the objectification and exploitation of nature and was used to justify a variety of entrepreneurial measures, from mining to the clearing of forests, that were prompted by the growth of capitalism. Evelyn Fox Keller examined the role of “gender ideology” in the birth of modern science. Pointing especially to the writings of Francis Bacon, she demonstrated the dependence of the very definition of science and its objectives upon sexual imagery: the mastery of nature, the teasing out of her secrets, a Nature described as the bride who is to be tamed, subdued, and put in the service of the (masculine) scientific mind.6 In the views of both Keller and Merchant, the parallel emergence of modern capitalism, science, and technology in the early modern period was critically assisted by “natural” gender concepts that mediated and eased the passage into a new worldview. Over the years, feminist perspectives on aspects of the gendered nature rubric have been sustained by a number of writers, who are cited throughout this book. In recent decades, however, scholars have largely abandoned the project of examining the interplay of nature and culture, or nature and science, or nature and art, as binary cultural constructs with changing and interdependent histories.7 Instead, as if to echo the course of nature’s own transition from a cosmic power to a collection of things, scholars have set aside the agency of natura naturans to make natura

2

naturata their subject for analysis. Most current studies of the nexus of nature, art, and science focus on the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the scientific mentality emerged and art had indeed “defeated” nature, preserving and displaying its marvels and monstrosities in Kunstkammers and Wunderkammers. 8 Another vital area of interest to contemporary historians of nature is the “occult,” which embraces alchemy and ­astrology—​specific strategies for coping with or enjoining Nature practiced in the Renaissance. These topics are usually examined “contextually,” that is to say, respectful of the practices as authentic to their culture, but not necessarily interrogating purposes or consequences from an external analytic perspective.9 This approach might be described as “scientific” in Morris Berman’s definition, in that scholars are today more inclined to ask “how” than “why.”10 And gender has in many instances dropped out as an analytic category. I propose to resume the original feminist project, the analysis of the role of gender in the constructions and discourses that surround the binary of nature and art, building on the work of Merchant in particular. I bring to this project, first of all, access to the growing scholarship on gender that has emerged in all disciplines during the last quarter-century. I bring as well the specialized perspective of the art historian, which should be joined to the study of nature as agent in history, just as gender analysis must shape art history more comprehensively. Although historians of science and culture have identified a basic change in the conceptualizing of nature in the Renaissance, this major paradigm shift is not acknowledged in modern histories of the visual arts. Art’s relationship with nature is discussed sporadically in Italian Renaissance art-historical texts, and gender has been of considerable recent interest to early modern art historians, yet without reference to a body of theory that would connect these rubrics. In this book, I attempt to construct a larger historical framework for the changing relationship of art and nature and to show through selected case studies how nature, personified or otherwise conceptualized, was a real and active presence in Italian Renaissance art and theory, interdependent with the concept of art. As quasifictive entities, nature and art were conceived as antagonists in a power struggle, whose victor was said to be art. The theme of the competition of nature and art in the Renaissance was sounded first and primarily in Italy. Male artists, particularly in Quattrocento Florence, launched a campaign to promote the visual arts and champion their inclusion among the liberal arts by drawing on the rhetoric of “defeating nature.” The elevation of the male-dominated visual arts and the idea

Introduction

of art and culture as masculine spheres were directly fostered by—indeed, depended upon—the figuring of nature as a female Other. This discourse of competition, coupled with the escalating claim by artists to have rivaled or defeated nature, was sustained in both theoretical texts and images. I have limited this study to Western art and to Italy, first, because of my own specialization and knowledge. But there are other good reasons for doing so. It is not possible to be comprehensive about a subject so vast; one can only hope to be incisive. Western and Oriental conceptions of nature differ radically, and to a lesser extent, so do those found in northern and southern Europe.11 Though I occasionally draw crosscultural and trans-Alpine comparisons, I follow only the Italian story. Today, when both the Italo-centricity of Renaissance studies and the continuing glorification of artist-heroes have rightly been challenged, it may seem perverse that I focus on the “major” artists in the traditionally privileged centers of Florence, Rome, and Venice. One reason is simply that these were the production centers and producers of the dominant discourse, whose hegemony I do not mean to reify but to deconstruct. Another is that Masaccio and Botticelli, Leo­nardo and Michelangelo, Pontormo and Titian, were in fact major artists, whose intricate creative histories deserve our ongoing attention from changing critical perspectives. Histories of art often unthinkingly replicate the Renaissance heroizing of the artist and his agonistic effort to create art and wrest it from the realm of nature. In that masculinist hero narrative, “nature” is an impediment, negative and essentialized. What is needed is a history that represents nature as a changing historical construction, from a viewpoint that does not repeat the biases of the period under study. In this book, I interrogate the art-nature topos from the viewpoint of the Other and offer a counternarrative in which the suppressed feminine is allowed a voice—one that was sometimes granted within Renaissance discourse by writers and artists whose masculinist faces have been exaggerated in the modern literature and is augmented here by modern writers schooled in the critical methodologies of feminism. My purpose is to challenge and destabilize a pervasive way of thinking about the Renaissance that not only perpetuates the art vs. nature binary, but also uncritically privileges male-identified factors over those associated with the feminine and/or with nature: rational over intuitive, mathematical over organic, or design over color. Behind the figure of Nature as the imaginary adversary of Renaissance artists stood her real-life representatives and incarnations, women. Because Nature was gendered, it was never simply an abstraction: the constructed relationships of nature

and art both drew upon and supported the socially defined relationship of the sexes. That is to say, the inferior status of women in society was theoretically justified by concepts about nature, which in turn claimed validation from the social example. Natura lived in women, or more precisely, in the sexspecific roles constructed for women by men, who gave themselves a space of creative freedom that could exist only in opposition to a feminine Other saddled with all the negatives: mortality, mutability, decay. There is an authentic reality behind this gendered fiction, of course, for if not for time and death, the idea of art’s immortality could have no meaning. Yet behind the seemingly constant idea of a female Nature is always the particular reality of gender relations at a certain time. I will bring this social perspective into play, frequently though not systematically, and argue in certain instances that the intersection of concepts of nature and gender politics may have impinged upon the shaping of particular works of art. A subtheme of the book is that art and visual imagery anticipated larger cultural changes in the conceptualization of nature. Whereas scholars generally locate the transition to the scientific worldview in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, significant changes can be traced in visual imagery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, a period when Italians pioneered artistic developments in Europe. The philosophical perspective in Italy throughout the sixteenth century remained “Renaissance” (both for its revival of classical antiquity and the Neoplatonic and hermetic perspectives that prevailed), yet Italian art can be seen to model in advance, progressively, some of the larger transitions and developments the scholars describe. I am not the first to argue on behalf of art’s priority in modeling cultural change—perspective and naturalism have been credited with bringing about what effectively were paradigm shifts in conceptualizing the world, and certain scholars have recently emphasized the importance of the visual arts for the natural disciplines.12 The model I describe is different, however, one that involves not a particular influential form of visualizing the world, but the creation of structural dyads within the painter’s formal language, their alteration and morphing across time, and the way that changing structures in the history of painting anticipated those of science. The visual arts have had an especially close relationship with visible nature, most obviously because the natural world constitutes the representata of the artist’s work. Yet on a deeper level, the basic elements of the world of painting correspond to those of philosophy: the painter, too, deals with form and matter. This is true in a literal sense, inasmuch as the illusion of form is created by lines, shapes, and colors, and physical

3

Introduction

materials are used to create this illusion. But it is also true figuratively for, as I will demonstrate in the chapters below, the dialectical relationship of form and space in Renaissance art paralleled the dialectical relationship of form and matter in philosophy. In his tangible and physically manipulable medium, the Renaissance painter could present visually clear constructions of these dyadic relationships, and could develop sequenced changes in their interaction. I do not suggest that the artist imagined he13 was thinking philosophically, only that he followed progressions inherent in the materials and practices of his craft. But because the artist’s moves are physical and quick while scientists and philosophers develop their constructs over time, it is unsurprising that art might prefigure science, demonstrating a precocious working out of models that apply to, and evolve sui generis within, the two parallel universes. Thus, to forecast arguments developed below, the relationship of solid and void in the art of Leo­nardo, Giorgione, and Titian became an increasingly dynamic and interactive one, leading to a pictorial field, especially in the late work of Titian, in which matter was in constant motion and the form-matter binary was finally dissolved—before the work of Kepler and Galileo confirmed this scientifically.14 Dürer and Giorgione imaged the waning of the geocentric order and the rise of the sun to replace it decades before the radical theory of Copernicus was widely known or accepted. And artists have sometimes tapped into archetypal forms not previously imaged to construct visual models that anticipate scientific models by many centuries—for example, Leo­nardo da Vinci’s prefiguring of the basic structure of DNA in the double helix he frequently depicted. Another subtheme gives the book its somewhat metanarrative framework. As I followed the changing construction of the figure of Nature from the early fifteenth through late sixteenth centuries, I saw analogies with a modern model of masculine psychological development, which posits that the male’s ego formation depends upon successful separation from his mother, expressed in sequential representations of the female that psychologists have defined as mother, bride, wife, and whore.15 Susan Bordo described the “flight from the feminine” as a broad cultural development away from the medieval and Renaissance universe that was in many ways organic and maternal, toward the new masculinization of thought seen in seventeenth-century Cartesian philosophy. In her study of masculine identity in Shakespeare’s plays, Coppélia Kahn similarly employed the analogy of the stages of masculine separation from woman.16 I will show that this model can also account for a progression

4

visible in Renaissance art, which involved the male artist’s separation from the original mother (nature) to attain masculine cultural independence and dominance. Thus, for Brunelleschi and Alberti, nature was mother; for Botticelli, she was a permanently youthful bride. In the early Cinquecento, artists and theorists such as Leo­nardo da Vinci and Leone Ebreo claimed a more equal partnership with nature, like that of husband and wife. Later in the Cinquecento, in the art of Bronzino and Cellini, came a new modeling of nature in erotic terms, as a “whore” who begged to be dominated. I follow this cultural transition in the conceptualizing of nature through a series of critical moments in the history of the art-nature struggle in Renaissance Italy. The book opens with a chapter that traces the evolving relationship of art and nature in philosophy and art from prehistory through the Middle Ages. This chapter differs from the others, as a backstory for the main body of the book. Yet it may hold interdisciplinary value as a thumbnail synthesis of relevant aspects of myth, philosophy, theology, and art on the subject of art and nature. In the eight “case-study” chapters that follow, the gendered competition of art and nature is seen to form an ideological subtext in numerous visual images. Many of these are familiar monuments, such as Brunelleschi’s Florentine dome, Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Giorgione’s Tempesta, Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, and Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas. Examined from a fresh and continuous perspective, these monuments can be understood in a new way. The transition within the Renaissance from organic to scientific consciousness is the subject of this study, but it is not the end of the story. Feminism made possible a new perspective on (masculinist) scientific consciousness, one that could lay claim to objectivity by virtue of its alienated detachment from the project. The second-wave feminist intellectual models that were born in the 1970s did not die out with bell-bottoms and long sideburns, however, but have survived, however fragilely, both in scholarship and the world. Today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the idealistic ecofeminism of the 1970s has become ecological pragmatism, as both men and women look for solutions to the increasingly urgent problem of a threatened nature, hoping that they will not be found in another dominator model, of which “rescuer” is only a variant. As one whose personal intellectual journey began in that era and has continued into this one, I conclude this introduction with a few personal perspectives that guided my study. First, I do not accept the premise that art and culture are separate from nature. “Nature” is feminine only because culture has defined itself as masculine, and we live within a

Introduction

discourse shaped by their opposition. A position outside the discourse would recognize, I believe, that what we call culture is part of nature, produced by some of its inhabitants. Effectively, we humans are nature’s nous—i.e., its form of highest intelligence—organically connected to it as the head is to the body. The brain may command the body’s movements, yet the body has ways of protecting the conscious mind from its harmful overreaches. In this book, I examine the use of art as an instrument to support man’s (illusory) self-distancing from nature, but I am equally interested in his subconscious use of art to seek reconnection. It is an implied premise of the book that Nature is a mute and stable adversary who never concedes defeat, but elicits from her opponent, culturati of every era, the ongoing construction of her changing identities. This personification is, of course, a fiction. What is relatively stable and unchanging,

however, is not constructed nature, but the real thing, whether we define it as the geosphere, the cosmos, the force that sustains life in the universe, or a bit of divinity embedded in us. Despite enormous technological change, we have lived since pre-paleolithic times in a world of daily sunrises and seasonal cycles, of oceans and rivers, mountains and trees. Our place in the natural order is dual: we humans share reproduction and much behavior with animals, yet we alone walk upright and build cities, spaceships, and bombs. Like everything else in nature, humans are born and we die. We despair at this, yet there is a consolation every generation comes to know: that it is only through art, science, and culture that humans can escape the unchanging cycle of birth and death. When I began writing this book, I was an unabashed partisan of Nature, but now that I am older, I find myself also rooting for Art.

5

part i

Great Mother Nature

All this—what makes it grow? Where did it come from?  —empedocles, Nature, c. 500 bc

Chapter One 

The Gendering of Nature as Female

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

Was the universe born or made? Did a guiding conscious intelligence fabricate the world out of nothing, fashioning a whirling operation from which he stood apart and preexisted, and whose operations he delegated to a lesser deity called nature? Or did she birth herself and the cosmos all at once, out of primal chaos, exploding into existence that ceaseless cycle of birth and death which is an infinite replication of the original state of becoming and whose originator is at one with her creation? At the heart of most philosophical speculations about the origin and nature of life on earth lies the presumption of a gendered creator, whose femaleness or maleness prompts the metaphors by which creation is explained. The earliest cosmologies describe the original act of creation as female-engendered. In the ancient Mediterranean version, the female creator emerges out of Chaos, or primordial waters, to give birth to the World Egg.1 She is born of, but also delivers, the primal egg, according to a transcultural myth that is a metaphor for the identity between creator and creation. In later creation myths, however, the goddess’s partition of the cosmos into primal elements is accomplished through her interaction with a male creator god or demiourgos, who separates himself from their creation. This shift is manifest in the mythology of the ancient Near East. A Sumerian narrative explains the world as resulting from the union of An, the male Sky, with Ki, the female Earth (both were produced by parthenogenesis from an original

Mother identified with the primordial waters); their offspring are gods of the atmosphere and other elements. In a later Babylonian account, the first couple, now named Apsu and Tiamat, gave birth to Marduk, an aggressive upstart god. Turning upon his mother, Marduk challenges Tiamat to combat, kills her, and splits her skull to create the sky and the earth, and then creates mankind. In this account, Tiamat is transformed from a universal creator goddess into a demonic, negative figure who brings forth monsters; Marduk is a victorious young god, who fabricates the cosmos out of the dead matter of his scorned mother’s body.2 The creator-gods who follow Marduk—the Egyptian sun god Re, the Vedic sky god Dyaus (“Dyauspitar,” ancestor of Zeus pater, Jupiter), and the Israelite Yahweh—challenge the primacy of the mother goddess in similar if less bloodthirsty ways. They create by sexual fertilization of a female counter­ part (Uranus), by sexual self-stimulation (Re), by the physical separation of heaven and earth (Yahweh, Indra), or simply by speaking; Elohim, the Israelite god, organizes chaos through the power of language: “let there be light.” 3 The creator-gods shape the vault of heaven, command and release the waters and the lightning, and give order to inchoate matter. Unlike the prehistoric female birthgivers, they stand apart from the natural world that is both their creation and dominion. The tense and oppositional relationship between male sky gods and female birthgivers survived in the myths of historic civilizations. The protagonists in Hesiod’s Theogony are Gaia

9

The Gendering of Nature as Female

1.  Mother deity flanked by two leopards. Neolithic, c. 6000 bce. Clay figure from Çatal Hüyük. Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey. Photo courtesy Museum of Anatolian Civilizations.

(the earth), and her son Uranus (the sky or heaven), whose sexual union produced many children, thrust by Uranus into the underworld, inside Gaia. In revenge, Gaia gave their son Cronus a sickle to castrate his father. Some scholars have interpreted this story and its contradictory features (Uranus impregnates Gaia after his castration by Cronus) as reflecting a historical struggle between Mediterranean peoples who preserved ancient matrifocal culture and the northern (or Aryan) invaders who brought patriarchal culture.4 In ancient pre-agrarian cultures, the earth was regarded as mother, with its power of spontaneous fruitfulness. In the Neolithic period, this concept took visual form in a figure that has been called the Great Goddess, controller of life and death (Fig. 1). This female deity was seen at Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia and Minoan Crete, where her worship coincided with matrilocality (though not necessarily matriarchy), and in numerous sculptures or statuettes that emphasize her procreative fertil-

10

ity, sometimes with animals who were her attributes: lion, dove, fish, owl, vulture, egg, and snake.5 The pre-patriarchal female deity’s power is recognizable in the inversion of her attributes in Bronze Age mythology and Hellenic art, where ambivalence and negativity about the female are expressed in the struggles of male heroes against serpents, dragons, and monsters. 6 The Anatolian birthing figure may represent the Mother Goddess herself or the processes of birth, death, and natural regeneration—all of which constitutes what would later be called Nature. Yet the very existence of such an object as the product of human art already indicates an ontological separation between its maker and the natural order symbolized. These artistic configurations produced by the human brain, an effort to comprehend life itself, constituted a first step out of nature, the initial act of naming that would separate us forever from it in our minds. The impulse that would eventually lead humans to represent “nature” as singular, abstract, and personified7 was already present at the earliest identifiable moment, when art showed nature to ourselves, in a restated form, so that we might know it as Other. By the time that myths entered written history and patriarchy was instituted, nature was already separated out philosophically. 8 Sumerian kings (c. 2000 bc) had defeated the fertility goddess Ishtar and had instituted, within agricultural cycles, the ritual death and resurrection of Tammuz. In Egypt, by the Middle Kingdom (c. 2040–1730 bc), the sky was still imagined as a Mother Goddess, but Osiris had taken over the powers of Isis, controlling vegetable fertility, human reproduction and, through his own death and rebirth, the spiritual realm as well.9 In the biblical account of Genesis (the patriarchal version dates from c. 2100–1550), God created the earth, sky, trees, plants, and animals separately from his creation of humans, their subordination to man indicated in God’s promise of dominion over the animals to Adam. Gods die by drowning, dismemberment, crucifixion—the more violent the death, the more triumphant the resurrection. Goddesses die by denial, or defamation of character. Yet they too keep coming back—or simply never go away. Sinister survival has its own history, with ups and downs caused by sudden bursts of strength, shows of power, that must be put down. Like the protean hero with a thousand faces, OsirisTammuz-Adonis-Dionysos-Christ, the ur-goddess returns in new guises: Inanna, Isis, Hecate, Demeter, Artemis, Aphrodite, Mary. The dynamic is complex: at any historical point we put our finger, the patriarchal takeover has already occurred, yet its leaders and mythmakers struggle with unacknowledged

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

ghosts, female deities who are still there, all the more present for being denied, and kept alive by efforts to suppress them. “Already over” and “still here” overlap and coexist—it is a pattern we can follow from prehistory through the so-called Renaissance and beyond. plato and aristotle: psyche and physis The Ionian philosophers of the seventh and sixth centuries bc—​Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes—investigated natural things, understood as part of a natural world consisting of a common substance and internal motivation.10 The Ionians used the word physis to describe this continuum, a word that is gendered feminine in the Greek language, though they may not have conceived nature as feminine in philosophical terms. In later Greek philosophy, however, nature was both named and conceptually gendered. A key feature of the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus was the cosmon psyche, usually translated as the “world soul” (though in fact “cosmic psyche” might be a better modern equivalent). Psyche (“breath,” Latin spiritus) was understood by Plato to be the animating principle of all living beings, as distinguished from physis, soma, or hyle, words pertaining to the realm of material nature. It is a distinction preserved in Genesis 2:7, where God breathes life into “the dust of the ground,” transforming Adam into a living soul. Plato’s “god” was a divine craftsman, the Demiurge or demiourgos, grammatically masculine and described as “he,” who did not create the universe ex nihilo as did Yahweh, but imposed order on preexisting Chaos.11 Plato’s world soul was feminine in gender, a “mistress and ruler” of the material world, who presides over the movement of the heavens and the generation of life.12 The world soul connected the transcendent world of forms with the material world of becoming and change, inferior by virtue of its mutability and seen by Plato as something to be overcome. The world soul is invisible, but spherical in shape, without need of hands and feet, joined with the corporeal world within it, “center to center.” At the center of Plato’s corporeal world is the earth, “our nurse, which is globed around the pole that stretches through all . . . the first and eldest of all the gods which have come into existence within the Heaven.”13 Plato’s feminine figurations of both world soul and earth probably reflect pre-Hellenic creation myths, known in fragmentary form in Greek literature.14 Sharing in the misogynous perspective of his day, Plato himself considered the male sex to be superior and postulated that, before sexual intercourse was invented, the very existence of females could be explained as the punitive rebirth of wrong-doing males.15 Indeed, modern

2.  “The Earth Is Its Nurse.” Emblem II, from Michael Maier, Atlanta fugiens (Oppenheim: Hiernymus Galler for Johann Theodor de Bry, 1618). Photo from de Rola, 1988, 72; courtesy Thames and Hudson, London.

feminist writers have characterized Plato’s gendered privileging of Ideas and Forms over the material world as an effort to transcend feminine “nature” through reason.16 Despite this, Plato’s influential identification of both the world soul and the earth as female kept culturally alive the ancient belief that the physical universe and all forms of life must have been generated and sustained by a cosmic female principle or being. These linked concepts, of the earth as our nurse and our mother, are deeply embedded in Western thought, and they are figured persistently in art (Fig. 2). Plato’s description of the world soul and the earth as two separate entities, psyche and physis, the former a guiding intelligence that mediates between the eternal and material spheres, and the latter a finite physical body that nurtures the human species, is an early instance of the philosophical tendency to compartmentalize and limit the realm of female nature, and to subordinate it to the higher and ultimately masculine realm of mind and idea—though, as we will see, with considerable tension between the “higher” part of nature and God himself. In his positing of a transcendent “magician-god,” the demiourgos, Plato followed Thales. Thales was, however, virtually alone among the Ionians in his idea of a transcendent god; he was challenged especially by Anaximander, who located the cre-

11

The Gendering of Nature as Female

ative, life-generating force within the physical world.17 It remained for Plato’s younger contemporary, Aristotle, to turn Anaximander’s principle of immanence into a philosophical worldview that differed sharply from Plato’s description of the highest divine forces as transcendent. Aristotle replaced Plato’s world soul with two entities: another generating figure he called the unmoved Prime Mover, and the primum mobile the Prime Mover sets in motion. Aristotle’s sublunary world of nature—which included generation, becoming, mutability, and death—was governed by a quasipersonified female nature, physis, who is a direct agent of the Prime Mover. Although the realm of physis is inferior to that of the heavens, it is informed with a striving that is teleological, seeking to attain the perfection of the primum mobile.18 Like Plato and the Ionians, Aristotle understood nature as a living organism, yet his cosmology is distinguished from Plato’s by his location of the Prime Mover within physical nature, stated as the inseparability of form (morphe¯) and matter (hyle). Aristotle’s Prime Mover, like Plato’s demiourgos, is implicitly masculine, yet physis, his all-embracing word for “nature,” is a feminine noun. Although Aristotle did not yet conceive of “nature” as a full-fledged female personification,19 his setting of these quasi-gendered agents in dialectic opposition to each other, aligned with their counterparts, form and matter, provided a conceptual foundation for their later personification as masculine Art and feminine Nature. Aristotle distinguished seven meanings of the word physis, beginning with its associations with “origin or birth” and “that out of which things grow, their seed.”20 The seventh meaning, considered deepest by Aristotle, is “the essence of things which have a source of movement in themselves.” This final formulation is said to epitomize Aristotle’s view of nature as a dynamic force, an intrinsic property that directs development. Things grow and change—a kitten becomes a cat—because they are striving to realize their proper or final form or purpose. Yet although Aristotle proclaimed the immanence of form in matter, in the Metaphysics he described matter itself only negatively, as “that which in itself has neither quality nor quantity . . . the element which is always in the process of acquiring form, and which disappears when form is realized.”21 Aristotle’s hierarchic distinction between form and matter, and the explanation of procreation that it supported, were profoundly influential in later centuries. Describing human and animal generation, Aristotle stated that the male is the motive cause, possessing the principle of movement and generation, while the female is the material cause, the matter out of which life is produced by the contribution of the male

12

agent.22 The male’s discharge of semen is the creative generative act; its counterpart is the female’s discharge of menstrual blood (a biological error not to be corrected for centuries). The active male partner supplies both the form and the principle of the movement while the passive female provides the body and the material. Aristotle states openly that form is better and more divine than matter, as the male is superior to the female.23 Here as elsewhere, Aristotle’s reasoning is influenced by his need to preserve the principle of male superiority intact and unexamined. Taking the male as normative, he finds the female, in any instance of difference, to be a deformed male,24 arguing that the female plays a noncreative role in procreation because she does not produce semen. To maintain the hierarchy, Aristotle must devalue the nutritive role. He even invents a doctrine to explain why the female cannot generate offspring by herself. If she could, observes Aristotle, “the existence of the male would have no purpose.”25 Circular thought abounds. Because the male element is superior, it must be associated with other superior things, which are then used to justify male superiority. The greater heat of the male body, which causes semen to become fertile, is caused by the pneuma (hot air) enclosed within semen. Pneuma is a substance, says Aristotle, analogous to the “fifth element” that exists beyond the world of the four elements, up in the stars.26 The female element, by contrast, is lodged firmly in the geocosm. Against all physical evidence, Aristotle insists that no active part is played by the mother’s body.27 The teleological striving toward perfection may be located in physical nature yet remains conceptually as separate from it as does male semen, which—for all its functional proximity to the matter it inspires—is on an entirely different philosophical plane, whirling around with the stars. Aristotle profoundly influenced the Western tradition that followed, in his freighting of biological description with gender ideology and his linking of the male with form, spirit, and goodness, and the female with matter, passivity, and evil. His views on biological reproduction were especially influential on art theory, offering a template for the gendered distinction between the artist and his materials. This idea is set, as Maryanne Cline Horowitz pointed out, in Aristotle’s characterization of the female body as “a workplace containing raw material” for the work of the male, who is both “procreator par excellence” and “homo faber, the maker, who works upon inert matter according to a design, bringing forth a lasting work of art.”28 Like earlier Greek philosophers, Aristotle contrasted physis with techne, distinguishing between what nature does on her

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

own and the products of human skill.29 Yet art imitates nature, says Aristotle, in that the guiding intelligence within physis provides a model for the structures and operations of techne. Aristotle accords the leading role and greater wisdom to nature; art is nature’s humble follower. But through the examples given, a significant turn is introduced. The physician, for instance, imitates the processes of nature that keep us well, and in making sick people well improves nature’s products on her own terms. “Art is thus a kind of perfecting of nature, or a remedying of its defects.”30 In this sense, Aristotle maintains that the arts fulfill cosmic nature’s purposes, completing her, as the Stoics would later argue.31 Indeed, Aristotle frequently described the operations of nature in terms of art. The child that results from the union of male and female is formed from them as “a bedstead is formed from the carpenter and the wood, or a ball from the wax and the form.”32 Elsewhere, he compares the contribution to generation of male semen to the carpenter’s use of a tool: “his hands move his tools and his tools move the material.”33 Or, he explains, the embryo is formed first in outline and later filled in with colors, softnesses, and hardnesses, “for all the world as if a painter were at work on them, the painter being Nature.”34 Inasmuch as artists in fourth-century Greece were normatively male, Aristotle’s metaphors have the effect of underlining the deep association between male/form and female/matter and of stressing the analogy between the artist and the generative, creative (masculine) aspect of nature. Aristotle’s explanation of generation in the terms of art was not his habit alone. The creation of the cosmos was frequently described on the model of artistic creation. Plato’s word for God, demiourgos (“architect and maker of the cosmos”), was perpetuated by Latin writers as artifex, fabricator, or aedificator.35 The Old Testament Yahweh molded the world like a potter, “separated” the light from the darkness (the terminology of leather-cutting); and the “expanse” or “firmament” that he placed above the earth is a Hebrew term from metalsmithing.36 The image of God as architect of the cosmos was perpetuated in the Middle Ages through Hebrew commentaries on Genesis, through writings of the School of Chartres that were influenced by Plato’s Timaeus, and through miniatures in Creation manuscripts. Representative is a miniature from a Bible (Fig. 3), in which God inscribes with a compass the newly created circle of the world (Proverbs 8:27). At the center of the circle is hyle, the original chaos or matter out of which God produced architectural order.37 Philosophical and religious conceptions of divinity, man, and nature were thus influenced and shaped by a metaphor

3.  God inscribing the world with a compass, end of the thirteenth century. Miniature from Bible moralisée, Reims, France. National Library of Austria, Vienna, Cod. 2554, fol. 1v. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

derived from art: the imposition of designed form upon lifeless matter by a knowing creator. As the metaphors developed, historical priority became reversed: God the architect now precedes Nature the engenderer. It was not always thus. The earliest products of techne visibly imitated the forms of nature. Sumerian ziggurats echoed the forms of mountains, even as they perfected their contours and claimed their powers. Early functional vessels such as pots were figured as female humans, sustaining an equation between two content-bearing forms, as if the female body were a right model for a pot.38 In Neolithic and preclassical antiquity, as long as there was more of physis than of techne, nature was everywhere and nearly everything, not an entity that could be framed or limited. Her

13

The Gendering of Nature as Female

absence in imagery denotes the impossibility of circumscribing her. In art objects that predate philosophical texts, nature’s engendering power is expressed in rhythmic patterns, vital shapes, and archetypal symbolic forms such as circles and spirals. In vases of Minoan Crete, natural animal and plant forms abound (Fig. 4). At first, they cover the vase all over, reflecting the ubiquitous elements of the natural world. Gradually, however, plant and animal forms were restricted to eversmaller decorative zones, as nature became subordinated to human action. By the end of the sixth century, the major zone of the vase is reserved for figures, which have no environmental setting (Fig. 5). Vegetative ornament is limited to the base or neck of the vase, where it continues to function aesthetically, but now standing for nature in a capacity expressly secondary to man. The ancient Greeks’ attitude toward nature was ambivalent. Much Greek art shows a respect for the subtlest aspects of natural harmony: early temples were sited in careful relation to surrounding hills, sky, and the deities who personified natural forces.39 The twin philosophical positions presented by Aristotle, art as both the follower and the perfector of nature,

4.  Minoan vase decorated with an octopus, c. 1500 bce. Terracotta. Archaeological Museum, Heraklion, Crete. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

14

were surely deeply allied with the twin drives in Greek art toward both naturalism and idealism. On the other hand, nature is often presented in Greek myth and art in antagonistic terms, as dark forces to be conquered or a disturbing past to be transcended. As natural elements disappeared in art, aggregate nature remained, symbolized in figures and forms that stood for barbarism, otherness, the bestial or monstrous— always set in opposition to that which was Greek, rational, and human (and needless to say, masculine). Nature was personified negatively as the snake-haired Gorgon who destroys men with her gaze or as the man-rejecting Amazons, who appear on the Parthenon metopes among the four great enemies of man, with the Giants, centaurs, and Persians.40 The more affirmative descendants of the ancient Mother Goddess were Astarte, Isis, Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, and Persephone, who had come to symbolize, metonymically, different aspects of greater Nature. Isis and Aphrodite represented the generative principle; Demeter and Persephone stood for life and death as expressed in nature’s cycles of death and rebirth; Artemis ruled the moon, the forests, and wild animals. Preserved in their Roman counterparts as Venus, Diana, Ceres

5.  Exekias, Ajax and Achilles Playing Draughts, c. 550– 540 bce. Black-figure amphora. Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, Vatican, Rome. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

and Proserpina, and Cybele, these figures reappeared in the Renaissance as Venus Genetrix, Ceres, Cleopatra, and Ops.41 An ancient figure who survived into Roman art more intact was Diana of Ephesus. Two majestic examples, larger than life, are preserved in the museum at Ephesus (Fig. 6) and probably reflect earlier prototypes on the site.42 Artemis Ephesia, who embodied and sustained the cult of the Anatolian Mother Goddess, is shown as a standing woman wearing an architectural crown, whose adornments include zodiacal signs and ranks of animals—lions, griffins, does, steers—reflecting the dominion of the mythological Artemis, as well as that of her prehistoric ancestor, the so-called Mistress of the Animals. On her chest are four rows of bulls’ testicles, symbols of fertility in Neolithic Anatolia and in the specific rituals of Artemis at Ephesus.43 When this figure reemerged in the Renaissance, the emblems of fertility were depicted as udders or breasts, changing the iconography of the Ephesian Artemis, who was both mother and virgin but not a nurturer. Diana of Ephesus, nevertheless, acquired new life as a symbol of Nature, as she was frequently depicted in Renaissance art.44 natura creatrix, the cosmic female power Another form of personifying nature is found in the Orphic poems, which reflect a pervasive mode of thought about nature in the ancient world. Although the eighty-seven Orphic hymns were not codified in writing until the first centuries of the Christian era, their theogony is far older.45 Like earlier cosmologies, Orphic theology gendered God and Nature, but it differed significantly from Plato and Aristotle in assigning the male and female elements equal status. In the Orphic account of creation, the great goddess in the form of a snake coupled with the sacred serpent Orphion, whose union produced the world-egg. Phanes, born from the egg, is both male and female, carrying within both procreative seed and the ability to generate him/herself (thus distinctly different from Yahweh and Zeus).46 Male and female elements interact in a sequence of Orphic hymns addressed to various gods and goddesses: Dionysos, Zeus, Hermes, Pluto, Per­ sephone, Demeter, Aphrodite, Eros, Earth the Mother of the Gods, Selene the moon goddess, and many others. Each of these deities has the power both to cause growth and to represent the generating power itself; many of them—Protogonos (Priapus), Selene, Adonis, Mise—are both male and female.47 In these repeated characteristics, the Orphic deities collectively embody a cosmic, bisexual generative power. The tenth Orphic hymn, O physi, gives birth to a marvel-

6.  Artemis Ephesia (The Great Artemis). Roman copy of a Hellenistic type, 100–125 ce. Ephesus Archaeological Museum, Selcuk, Turkey. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

15

The Gendering of Nature as Female

ous figure who was to cast a long influential shadow over the Middle Ages and Renaissance. She encompassed not only the generative realm but the highest divine and creative powers: O, Nature [physi], Goddess, Mother of all, resourceful Mother, Celestial, ancient, skilful in many things, ruling Deity, All-subduer, unsubdued, radiant (all-bright) leader, Almighty, worshipped, exalted over all, Imperishable, firstborn, of ancient fame, glorified by men,  . . . Self-engendered, without father, bright, gladsome and grand, Rich in flowers, wreath, gracious, composed of many ingredients, knowing; Leader and ruler, life-bearing and all-nurturing bride,  . . . Promoting growth, delivering the rich mature fruit, Thou art father and mother of all, feeder and nurser. Thou givest a quick birth, blest art thou and fruitful, bringing forth the ripened crops. Helpful in all arts, creator, much-building, revered Goddess,  . . . Sceptre-bearing, loud-thundering from above, mightiest of all, Fearless, All-subduer, fate, Goddess of Destiny, fire-breathing, Everlasting life and immortal foresight thou art. Thine is all. For thou alone createst all. But now, Goddess, I pray thee that in prosperous season Thou bringest peace and health and growth to all things. 48

The deity here addressed—though female in her primary characteristic of promoting growth, delivering fruit, and giving birth—has many “masculine” characteristics: she is active, infinite, sceptre-bearing, and loud-thundering. Many pairings suggest a conscious combination of male-female qualities: associated with Night, but light-bringing; “father and mother . . . feeder and nurser”; “leader and ruler [but] “lifebearing and all-nurturing bride.” Incorporating in one figure the separate powers of each gender, the Physis of the Orphic hymns is a cosmic deity of giant proportions. Her descendants include the medieval goddess Natura figured by Boethius, Bernard Silvestris, and other writers. The legacy of the Orphic Physis, an androgynous deity, is also to be found in the hermeticism and alchemy that flourished in the Renaissance, with their concern for a balance of male and female elements. Roman writers sustained the image of nature as a cosmic female power. In the opening lines of the Metamorphoses, Ovid asserts that “the primal chaos was brought to order by God— or kindlier Nature.”49 Lucretius speaks of natura creatrix as the maker of all things, commencing De rerum natura with an invocation to Venus, who “governs the nature of things” and is

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the creator of all life.50 As an Epicurean, Lucretius believed in the authority of the senses, distrusting religious and philosophical tradition. He asserted, contra Aristotle, that women contributed semen to generation, and more presciently, he envisioned a universe filled with atoms and not deities.51 Nevertheless, Lucretius preserved the personifications. Like other classical writers, he figured Nature as Cybele (or Rhea), the “great Mother (magna mater) of the gods and Mother of the wild beasts,” who rides on a chariot driving a pair of lions, wearing a mural crown, as the sustainer of cities (Fig. 7).52 For Pliny the Elder, “the power of nature is that which we call god,” and man partakes of the divine because he is part of nature.53 Similarly, the Stoics considered the world to be ruled by an intelligent and divine nature, identical with god yet immanent in the material sphere. In Cicero’s words, “the world is god, and all the forces of the world are held together by the divine nature.”54 In the Thebaid of Statius (ad 45–96), Natura is a female figure of cosmic primacy, called “princeps Natura,” creatrix, and dux, who is identified as larger and more significant than other personifications in the poem and who represents the ultimate Power of the universe.55 It was because of the Stoics’ emphasis upon the living nature of the world organism that John of Salisbury later described them as originators of the blasphemous heresy that nature is God.56 In the Silvae, Statius personifies nature in another form, the natura plasmatrix terrae et locorum who contributes a beauty “beyond human art” to places inhabited or created by man.57 The locus amoenus—a natural setting of shade tree, brook, or grotto, frequented by humans and valued for the pleasure it gives—had been eulogized in pastoral poetry from preclassical writings to the Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil.58 Virgil translated the setting of the locus amoenus from Theocritus’s Sicily to an imaginary Arcadia he had never seen. It was a revealing revision, for the locus amoenus represented to Theocritus, a third-century bc Greek, a friendly place in a hostile world, civilized by repeated human presence, a home within wild nature. The Roman Virgil, by contrast, valued it as a natural escape from overdeveloped civility, a home of wild nature, albeit a constructed one. Leo Marx plausibly argued that pastoral expressions must have eased the pressures of the very earliest structures of technological civilization.59 Renato Poggioli pointed out that the pastoral convention in literature was born as the modern city emerged, to voice a “double longing after innocence and happiness.”60 Modern pastoral theory has emphasized the civilized artist’s alienation from nature in the poetic conventions set up to praise her, “wherein man looks to nature for some-

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

7.  Cybele and Attis, third century ce. Roman funerary altar. Villa Albani, Rome. Photo: Felbermeyer, German Archaeological Institute, Rome, Neg. D-DAI-Rom 1935.0100.

thing which he has not within himself.”61 Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, all representations of nature in art are expressions less of “appreciation” than of loss, a long succession of laments from within culture to help compensate for the self-imposed yet inevitably painful separation of humans from the natural world, their first home. The Romans significantly advanced the separation of civilization from the natural world, through their technology, urbanization, and widespread domination of both nature and Otherness (symbolized in the rectilinear Roman military camp). Now physically under the thumb of art, nature was invited back on nostalgic terms, to help relieve the woes of urban life. Hence the widespread rejection of civilized artifice in favor of rustic simplicity, as seen in Virgil’s Georgics or Senecan Stoicism; or the revival of the old nature cults, such as that of Isis; or the phenomenon of the Roman villa. The Romans, perhaps the first people to develop a name for urban sprawl (“buildings with no space in between”),62 created in the villa a domestic environment that embraced nature as a pleasure-giving part. Located at a distance from the urbs, villas were designed to preserve a balance between architecture and nature and to express their peaceful harmony or gentle competition. Describing one villa, Statius acknowledges that “the charms of nature have outdone human skill.” Conversely,

another owner is said to have “truly tamed nature” in his estate.63 The famous Tuscan villa of Pliny the Younger has been said to typify the balance between natural and artificial. Here, among clipped topiaries, constructed vistas, and open-air dining rooms, Pliny said that one could “recline as in a wood, but not as in a wood feel the rain.”64 Hadrian’s villa boasted artful human improvements of wild nature, such as moving water from fountains to the floating circulation of food in garden triclinia.65 In the landscape paintings on Roman villa walls (Fig. 8), architecture and nature are juxtaposed as friendly competitors that take turns controlling one another—architecture may judiciously articulate natural space, or buildings may fall into decay and ruin—establishing what Bettina Bergmann has called a “dialogue between linear, historical time and the cycles of nature.”66 Bergmann points to the depiction of the sacred grove, an intermediate zone between nature and city, in which a tree and a column are juxtaposed to express the connection of the man-made and divine worlds by means of a “vertical rotational axis” that links the earth and sky.67 In this vision, art is perceived as complementary rather than antithetical to nature, a respectful imitator of its wisest principles. Such a vision could have only existed in the context of nature-oriented philosophies. Both the Orphic hymns and the Stoic writings

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The Gendering of Nature as Female

8.  A Roman sacral-idyllic landscape from the Villa of Agrippa Postumus, near Pompeii, late first century bce. Wall painting transferred to panel. Museo Archaeologico nazionale, Naples. Photo: Soprintendenza speciale per i beni archeologici di Napoli e Pompei.

celebrate a deity who is immanent in matter, and their exaltations of this divinity as female were not unusual in the last centuries before the Christian era officially began. Closely comparable were the Gnostic texts, produced in Hellenistic Alexandria during the first three centuries after Christ, which aimed to synthesize Christianity with Eastern and Greco-Roman religious teaching. Gnosticism shares with Orphism the idea of an original unity of male and female elements in God (though unified as opposites rather than merged). However, the Gnostics viewed God as transcendent, not immanent in the material world, and, accordingly, separated spirit from matter.68 Even so, there remained an active female generative element, produced by God through emanation, which created the visible world. And some early Christian Gnostics worshipped God as androgynous, a mother and father, follow-

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ing the first account of creation in Genesis, the so-called Elohist or priestly version, which could be interpreted to mean that an androgynous god created both men and women in its image.69 In Gnostic texts, the female element in the divinity is named Sophia, Wisdom, defined as an independent and powerful creative figure, who conceived all life apart from masculine input and enlightens and guides humanity. She is a deity superior to the jealous Israelite God, who is chastised by her for his arrogance.70 Sophia is related to nous, or noys, the intellectual aspect of generative nature, prominent in the philosophy and poetry of the School of Chartres. Both Sophia and Natura were to some degree absorbed into the identity of the Virgin Mary in the later Middle Ages.71 The idea of a nature comprising both male and female principles, embodied in the sun and moon, is found in

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

a Gnostic treatise that, as we will see, was one of the most influential ancient texts upon the Renaissance, the Corpus Hermeticum, ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, the mythic founder of alchemy.72 natura procreatrix: corruptive nature and the inferior female sex The emergence of Christianity as the official religion in Roman Europe marked a sharp division between two ways of viewing nature, the ancient world seeing it as divine, the Christian world seeing it as corrupt.73 A Christian reaction against the goddess Physis or Natura appears in fourth-century writings. In Against Symmachus, Prudentius subjected Nature and other pagan deities to the greater power of God, her master. Praising the emperor Theodosius I for outlawing the pagan worship of nature, Prudentius defined nature as a figure with no capacity for moral judgment, who is able only to provide services—for God in the procreation of men, and for men by providing them with sustenance.74 Lactantius was similarly emphatic about nature’s limited powers: “For they . . . said that nature was the mother of all things . . . by which word they clearly reveal their ignorance. For nature, removed from divine providence and power, is absolutely nothing.”75 Battling the still-vital “pagan” religions that surrounded them, early Christian writers found it necessary to redefine nature completely, usually negatively yet sometimes inventively. In his Hexaemeron, St. Ambrose (337–397) employs a personification of nature as female that goes beyond grammatical construction. Making one of her earliest textual appearances, a speaking Natura explains that the sun, “beautiful and glorious” though it is, is merely a part of nature with no creative powers of its own.76 In this attack on sun-worshipping pagan religions, Ambrose enlists Nature to circumscribe dangerous enemies of the Christian God, portentously empowering her with speech. The personified Natura would resurface in the poetic allegorical goddess of the twelfth-century School of Chartres. St. Augustine rejected the Manichaean doctrines of his upbringing to replace the idea of divine immanence within humans with the “absolute transcendence of divinity.”77 The inherited concept of nature as essentially good was transformed by Augustine into the Doctrine of Original Sin: that human nature was corrupted by Adam and Eve’s disobedience, and that humans are able to transcend their fallen, now evil, natures only through the grace of the Church. The manifestation of corruption in the first parents and their descendants

was “a new motion of the flesh”—that is, sexuality as the body’s disobedience of the spirit.78 In setting flesh against spirit, Augustine followed St. Paul,79 forging another link in the chain of Christian theology. Yet it is also significant, from the viewpoint of nature’s history, that this orthodox Christian viewpoint reiterated and helped to keep alive the PlatonicAristotelian hierarchic distinction between psyche and physis, and between form and matter. The period of transition between Greco-Roman paganism and Christianity saw numerous accommodations of the older worldview within the new, particularly by the Neoplatonists. Plotinus (204–270) adopted Plato’s idea of the world soul as a bridge between the ideal and material realms, but now posited two world souls, one to contemplate the divine mind or intellectual principle (called nous), the other to pass on the ideas into matter. The second of these souls is called “Nature.”80 Nature has now sunk lower than ever, beneath the individual human soul who is in closer contact with Mind. For Plotinus, Nature lacks the power of imagination: “She does not know, she only produces, blindly she transmits to matter the form she possesses . . . . Nature does not even phantasy.”81 Plotinus’s hierarchic layering was furthered by Macrobius (354–430), who produced the idea of the Great Chain of Being. In his commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Macrobius describes the emanation of Mind (Plotinus’s nous) from God, and Soul from Mind: the one splendor lighting up everything and visible in all, like a countenance reflected in many mirrors arranged in a row, and since all follow on in continuous succession, degenerating step by step in their downward course . . . [so that] . . . from the Supreme God even to the bottommost dregs of the universe there is one tie, binding at every link and never broken. This is the golden chain of Homer which, he tells us, God ordered to hang down from the sky to earth. 82

As Arthur Lovejoy demonstrated, this complex of ideas served as the central organizing metaphor for theological, social, and scientific thought during the rest of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. 83 In this ordering of the universe, all things are bound together by continuous links, yet there is always a top and a bottom: things nearest God and the Supreme Good are of the upper regions, the sky, while the phenomena of nature, “the bottommost dregs,” are of the earth. Macrobius contributed two additional poetic images to the evolving mythology of nature. Explaining the biology of human reproduction, he personified nature as artifex natura, an artist or craftsman who, “Once the seed has been deposited in

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The Gendering of Nature as Female

the mint where man is coined, . . . immediately begins to work her skill upon it . . . [causing] a sack to form around the embryo, as thin in texture as the membrane that lies under the shell of an egg, enclosing the white.”84 Philosophically, Macrobius echoes Aristotle, yet he offers a significant aesthetic shift, for the emphasis is not upon the male who deposits the seed, but instead upon natura, whose work in developing the embryo is no longer passive incubation, but a subtle and skillful creative act. Despite its scientific near-accuracy, Macrobius’s comparison of human gestation with the physiology of eggs did not capture the imagination of his medieval successors as did the figure of the mint where humans are coined, which would be borrowed by Alan of Lille and recur in manuscript illustrations (see Fig. 15). Macrobius also contributed an important formulation of the idea that nature withholds her secrets from vulgar and ignorant eyes. The thought itself was not new. 85 Macrobius stated it, however, in terms that would be profoundly suggestive for medieval poets and Renaissance artists. Nature, he says, is hostile to “a frank, open exposition of herself,” and “has withheld an understanding of herself from the uncouth senses of men by enveloping herself in variegated garments.” She reveals her secrets (arcana) only to “men of superior intelligence,” who understand that they are to treat them in terms of fable. 86 The exposure of Natura to public view without the protective covering (integumentum) of figurative or allegorical presentation (narratio fabulosa) is an offense to the goddess described by writers from Virgil to Alan of Lille, often in equally fabulous metaphoric form. One Chartrain writer, for example, imagines wild beasts as Nature’s protectors, who drive away intruders attempting to “broadcast her secrets and expose her to the eyes of the vulgar.”87 He echoes an earlier figure of nature who will return in the Renaissance as the goddess Diana surprised at her bath by Actaeon, whose illicit sight of her naked body resulted in his being torn to death by her hounds. A third Neoplatonist, Chalcidius (fl. 325), contributed significantly to the medieval conception of nature. In his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, which would be critically important in the Renaissance, natura is a link between the ideal and material worlds, as the world soul was for Plato, but now more as a personification than a simple abstract noun. 88 In describing nature’s work, Chalcidius distinguishes between matter (silua) and the idea to which things owe their likeness. Matter is compared to a mother, the image-giving idea to a father, and the generated species to a child. 89 Contending that matter is immaterial, insignificant, and evil, Chalcidius exaggerates Aristotle’s gendered construction of form and matter, stating

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that matter is ugly and lacks form, like a woman without a husband. Matter desires form, as the female desires the male, but form cannot desire anything, as it lacks nothing. The world, he says, was given good things by God, its munificent father, and given evil by matter, its mother.90 Claudian and Boethius present a more positive and powerful Natura—a figure who rules not just the sublunary world, but all creation. In De raptu Proserpinae, Claudian (c. 370–404) describes a tapestry sewn by Proserpina, on which she embroiders images of the creation and design of the universe, showing how “Mother Nature made order out of elemental chaos.”91 Later in the text, Natura brings agriculture to humankind.92 Assigning Natura godlike creative powers and a guiding role in managing the earth’s fecundity, Claudian elevates her to a cosmic power even as he preserves, through the metaphor of the tapestry, an ancient association of weaving and spinning with woman’s procreation and sustaining of new life.93 In a text widely read in the Middle Ages, The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius (c. 475?–525?) broadens the dimensions of personification to create a visually evocative figure. Natura appears before him, ageless yet youthful and vigorous, tall enough to pierce the heavens, wearing a garment of fine threads woven by her own hands. She tells him that the garment, eternally durable though darkened by time, and bearing the Greek letters theta and pi, had been cut away and torn by wicked men who tried to usurp and possess her powers.94 Boethius carries forward Macrobius’s metaphor of the integumentum, the garments that protect Nature’s secrets. Later, he describes this figure as a supreme power, natura potens, who drives the universe as a charioteer drives his team: How the first reins of all things guided are By powerful Nature as the chiefest cause, And how she keeps, with a foreseeing care The spacious world in order by her laws, And to sure knots which nothing can untie, By her strong hand all earthly motions draws— To show all this we purpose now to try Our pliant string, our music’s thrilling sound.95

Boethius’s Natura, a very different figure from preceding personifications of nature, has been interpreted as a poetic mythological reincarnation of the Great Mother, “the age-old Mother of All,” whom Boethius would have encountered in the tenth Orphic hymn. The Orphic Physis was also a charioteer who commands the world with her reins, and a figure who represented, according to Ernst Curtius, “one of the last religious experiences of the late-pagan world.”96

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

There is no visual image of Natura in medieval art to equal Boethius’s and Macrobius’s powerful poetic figures.97 Nature is figured in medieval art in more restricted form, as the nurturing earth mother or symbol of the geocosm, within a new representational convention that countered Roman naturalism. The attraction of symbolism for medieval artists and patrons was precisely its correspondence to the philosophical idea expressed by Macrobius and Chalcidius: that an invisible truth or greater reality lies behind the veil (or within the shell) of the surface world of corrupt and deceptive matter. The materium of the physical world is validated by its capacity to function as a signifier (signum, in Augustine’s terminology) of a transcendent reality. As Hugh of Saint-Victor, writing in the twelfth century, would state this idea: “A symbol is a juxtaposition, that is, a coaptation of visible forms brought forth to demonstrate some invisible matter.”98 A bird, for example, could stand for the Holy Spirit, though that did not mean that individual birds contained the spirit itself. Accordingly, it was the form of the bird, schematic and simplified, not its material particularity, not its feathers, color, or species, that the artist represented. Numerous plants and animals appear in painted vaults and floor mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries, where they symbolize seasonal or geographic divisions of Creation, such as Earth and Ocean.99 Alternatively, Earth and Ocean could be personified. In a ninth-century manuscript, a fecund mother Earth nurses two children, one attached to each breast (Fig. 9).100 This image was probably derived from the Roman Ara Pacis Augustae (Fig. 10), where Tellus symbolizes the earth and its fruits.101 By the Middle Ages, Tellus had become Terra, who represented a more narrowly restricted place and was formally no more important than other personifications or human figures. Terra’s lingering attributes—nursing children or animals, cornucopias—recall the wider domain of a procreative Natura who ruled over all things, people, and animals, yet she has been pictorially devalued by subordination to Christ, the new Pantocrator, just as the world itself was subordinate to the greater reality of heaven. Another means of devaluing nature is seen on a Carolingian ivory, where serpents circle Terra’s arm and nurse at her breast (Fig. 11).102 The image somewhat surprisingly preserves the ancient Mother Goddess’s association with snakes, which may have survived into the Middle Ages by way of the Isis cult in Rome.103 But to medieval Christians, the snakes would have evoked Satan’s serpent and the disobedient first woman, negative connotations better suited to the earth/nature of Christian theology. In this ivory, Earth is crowded at the base with Ocean

9.  Terra nursing two children. Detail of the miniature Christ between Two Seraphim, Sacramentary of St. Denis, c. 870. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Manuscrits occidentaux, ms Lat. 1141, fol. 6. Photo: BnF. 10.  Tellus (Mother Earth), 13–9 bce. Marble relief from the Ara Pacis Augustae. Museum of the Ara Pacis, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

and Rome, while the Sun and Moon are located in roundels above, near the head of Christ. Subordinated to the crucified Christ, Terra is placed in a position associated with evil, as if to say that this wicked world is identical with the Satan defeated by the Savior. The medieval vision of the natural physical world as illusory and evil was greatly assisted by the continuing association between nature and woman, given that women were regarded

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The Gendering of Nature as Female

11.  Personifications of Earth, Rome, and Ocean. Detail of a Carolingian ivory Crucifixion, c. 860. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

theologically as deficient and dangerous. Thus the ancient goddess of nature with her serpents and beasts was transformed into the biblical Eve, and also into personifications of Luxury and Lust. The image of terra nutrice, a woman nursing animals, was easily read as a woman being attacked by those animals, especially serpents, which led to the interpretation that she was being punished for notorious alleged female vices. Hence personifications of Luxury and Lust appear as images of women with serpents or other “foul” beasts dangling from their breasts.104 In the Utrecht Psalter of c. 830, Terra is a more vigorous and sometimes majestic figure. She appears frequently in this manuscript, always seated, as were the Roman Ceres and other ancient earth goddesses.105 In fol. 28v (Fig. 12), she is crowned and holds cornucopias filled with grain, which flank the orbis terrae in her lap. Terra is made subtly heraldic by her axially central position, her prominent size, and the cornucopias on either side of her. Some sense of the Psalmist’s lyric delight in God’s creation of an abundant earth and its pulchritudo agri is suggested here, and perhaps more than necessary. For on the left and right appear two groups, the beasts of the forest and fields and the wicked people who cast aside God’s covenant, all of whom seem subtextually to align themselves in reverence, not toward Christ, but to the Earth Goddess who sits enthroned and crowned beneath Him. Occasionally, Natura’s broader roles as procreatrix and nutrix are given powerful visual formulation. In one of many South Italian exultet rolls in which Terra appears (Fig. 13),106 she is a heraldically positioned, expansive half-figure, physically one

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with a rising mound of earth, the wide outreach of her arms recalling that of ancient goddess figures (who were sometimes shown mounted on the cone of the omphalos). She nurses a bull and a serpent and, implicitly, is the emanating source of the abundant plants that surround and virtually crown her. In an exultet roll from Bari (Fig. 14), Terra stands full-length, wearing a dress inscribed with symbolic vegetation and a headdress of plant forms, firmly gripping two trees that flank her heraldically. At her feet, animals complete her visible domain. The vigorous Terra of the exultet rolls has the bearing of a goddess who, like Boethius’s Natura, drives the natural world. Such images may have contributed to the poetic vision of the goddess Natura whom we encounter full-blown in the twelfthcentury School of Chartres. nature’s competitors: god the creator and homo artifex The “Renaissance” of the twelfth century, generated by scholastic philosophers, especially of the so-called School of Chartres,107 included an incipient new interest in earthly reality and physical nature, whether of plants, animals, or the human body. As M. D. Chenu has noted, this “discovery of nature” included not only appreciation by poets and artists of the myriad elements of nature’s creation, but also the recognition that humans too formed part of the framework of nature and “were themselves also bits of this cosmos they were ready to master.” 108 In the spirit of cosmic wholeness that permeated Chartrain thought, the world was widely perceived as an

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

12.  Terra enthroned, flanked by animals and peoples of the earth, c. 830. Utrecht Psalter, Psalm 50 (49), ms 32, fol. 28v. University Library Utrecht. Photo: University Library Utrecht. 13.  Terra. Exultet roll from Monte Cassino, eleventh century. British Library, London. Photo © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Add. 30337). 14.  The Earth in summer dress. Exultet roll from Bari, eleventh century. Bari Cathedral Archives. Photo from Grabar, 1958, 147.

universitas, a universal whole, or in the words of William of Conches, “an ordered aggregation of creatures.”109 The twelfth-century scholastics’ belief in an absolute unity that subsumed and transcended all diversity was inspired by the cosmic vision of Plato’s Timaeus, in particular the world soul, which they understood to parallel their “Natura” in mean­ ing.110 Yet the scholastics’ quest for understanding nature in rational rather than mystical terms pointed to the new Aristotelianism that would ascend in the thirteenth century. This in­ volved what Chenu has called the “desacralizing of nature.”111 The Chartrain philosophers were highly skeptical of miracles and supernatural explanations. William of Conches shocked contemporaries in saying that the first man came from nature, not God, and the first woman, not from Adam’s rib but by means of natural science. Hugh of Saint-Victor interpreted the account of Creation in Genesis as a poetic explanation of the natural working of the elements.112 The Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) shared many of the philosophical premises of her Chartrain contemporaries.113 Hildegard’s writings are fully representative of the twelfth-century Renaissance—indeed, she brings to mind Leo­nardo da Vinci of the later one. In Scivias, she invented new words for things in the natural world; her Physica included a taxonomy of plants and animals that pioneered zoology.114 In The Book of Divine Works, Hildegard advanced a cosmic vision of divine immanence, while in Scivias she developed a macrocosm-microcosm theory that postulated humans within nature as a harmonious continuum. Her description of creation is distinctive for a metaphor drawn from the mundane

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The Gendering of Nature as Female

activity of cooking: Adam is made of the earth and other elements, then stirred and cooked to become a man. For Hildegard, the principles of gender complementarity and the mutual dependency of male and female were paramount.115 In the philosophy of the School of Chartres, prominent positions are occupied by both nature and man, with an enlarged importance for each. Man, the microcosm, is accorded elevated powers to comprehend the natural cosmos, a complex yet harmonious whole that mirrors its transcendent prototype. The natural sphere is expanded to include two entities, a guiding intelligence within and the realm of matter it governs. These entities are personified in literary works by two major writers of the Chartrain school, Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille. The Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris, written in the 1140s or ’50s, reflects the fusion of the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and hermetic traditions that was a particular accomplishment of twelfth-century theologians.116 Drawing upon Chalcidius, Macrobius, the hermetic Asclepius, and other texts, Bernard constructed an “allegorical fable” (integumentum) to explain the creation of the universe by God through his agents, personified as three females, Noys (Plotinus’s masculine nous), Natura, Endelechia, plus a shadowy fourth, Imarmene. Noys, “the intellect of the supreme God and born of his divinity,” mediates between God and the physical world.117 She passes the divine ideas to Endelechia (Aristotle’s entelechy), who gives them substance and passes them along to Natura, who gives them bodies. Subordinate now to both Noys and Endelechia, Bernard’s Natura is nevertheless a critically active figure. She complains to Noys, the embodiment of divine Wisdom, about the shapeless disorder of matter, pleading with her to put it in a more beautiful form. Speaking on behalf of disordered matter, she says it longs to receive masculine form (as per Aristotle and Chalcidius).118 Noys complies, bringing forth the four elements, angelic hierarchies, stars and planets, with the earth set at the center and filled with animals.119 Noys then instructs Natura to create Man. Operating at the midpoint of “Homer’s golden chain,” Natura integrates the soul supplied by Urania, queen of heaven, and the body supplied by Physis, to unite the divine and material universe in man. It is a creative act that parallels that of God himself.120 Natura is thus a cosmic power, described by Bernard as both artifex and mater generationis, maker of worlds and the generative force of human procreation.121 The business of creation and procreation was assigned perforce to God’s female agents in the poem, because Bernard’s Christian God was assimilated with the Platonic highest divin-

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ity to stand for pure self-contained mind. This left Noys and Natura, personified as goddesses, to maintain primal creation and the perpetuation of human life. Like formidable executive secretaries, they wield more worldly power than the nominal head of the corporation. In medieval terms, Natura was conceived as an opifex, an operator, herself a creation of God, who continued the original work of the Creator through her operations, from which he now stands apart.122 In his De planctu naturae (1160–1172), Alan of Lille built upon Bernard’s allegory to create what has been described as “the most heroic figure in medieval personification allegory.”123 The goddess Natura is fully visualized, with long passages devoted to her physical appearance. Her crown with sparkling jewels represents the firmament, planets, and signs of the zodiac. On her garments are depicted the “creatures of the air,” the “creatures of the waters,” and the “animals of the earth.”124 The image recalls ancient statues of Diana of Ephesus, with the difference that the larger part of Natura’s garment is now reserved for man. As she approaches the poet in her chariot, Natura is drawing pictures of things on tablets, which fade away as quickly as she draws them. The perfect cosmological order of the universe, from the heavens down to the smallest flower, is represented in Natura’s image, just as her constant drawing of pictures that rapidly disappear stands for her continuous activity as procreatrix in a mutable world of change, decay, and death. In Natura’s imaged garment, however, the portion assigned to man is badly torn. The poet explains that, of all creatures, man alone disobeys Nature’s laws, by engaging in unnatural sexual love. By violating Nature his mother, man has separated himself from her and abused his natural context. Natura complains that “by the unlawful assaults of man alone the garments of my modesty suffer disgrace and division.”125 The idea that nature’s truths are concealed in the integumenta of fable, and not to be exposed to the vulgar, is drawn from Macrobius, while the image of the torn tunic may come from Boethius. A new metaphor for the relation of Nature and Art would grow out of this. In the Renaissance, the torn tunic would no longer represent a violated Natura but heroic Man uncovering Nature’s hidden truths and secrets. In Alan’s De planctu, Noys does not figure at all, and Natura’s role is weaker than that in Bernard’s conception. Her power is limited to procreation in this world; she is God’s vice-regent, imperfect and finite, who faithfully and mindlessly executes His divine plan.126 Natura claims, in a metaphor borrowed from Macrobius, to be “a coiner for stamping the classes of things . . . minting the copies of things on the appropriate

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

anvils,” and not allowing “the shape to deviate from the shape of the anvil,” so as to provide stable continuity for the human race.127 Despite the limitations on creativity imposed by the job, Natura is figured as an artisan at her forge in late medieval manuscripts in a colorful and visually imaginative way, cheerfully hammering out bodies (Fig. 15).128 Natura’s work as artifex is overshadowed by a masculine personification called Genius, who makes his first appearance in Alan’s poem. Genius performs an elevated function: he is to excommunicate those who disobey Natura’s laws (sodomites are specifically indicted). His robe bears images that are constantly appearing and fading, representing, like Natura’s garment, the world of mutability and change, birth and death. But, unlike Natura, Genius sets aside these rags to don sacerdotal vestments. In his priestly role, he enforces the moral order that Natura merely upholds and fulfills the role left vacant by Noys. Moreover, through a cosmic kiss, Genius inspires Natura to produce a daughter, Truth, a figure said to express “the transmission of the Divine Wisdom into the sphere of Nature.”129 Alan’s Natura, unlike Bernard’s, is dependent upon God and the masculine Genius to carry out activities she cannot.130 Expanding on Chalcidius, Alan of Lille presents a three-part interplay of creative and generative powers, by God, Nature, and a male agent, with a new balance among the powers.131 God, Natura, and Genius all function as artifex, yet their spheres of influence are now sharply differentiated by gender. God is the creator of the stable firmament of the universe. Natura generates a world of instability, change, and images that do not last. Genius alone is able to rise above his given situation, changing clothes like Superman to acquire agency in the sublunary world. Nominally subordinate to Natura, Genius mediates between her and God, and he exercises godlike moral authority, godlike powers of cosmic insemination, and Christlike healing and redemptive ability.132 Genius anticipates Pico della Mirandola’s figure of Man, who can uniquely transcend his position in the Chain of Being through his ­reason—an idea that would become a central tenet of Renaissance Neoplatonism, with special importance for the emergent myth of the superior creativity of the artist. The attributes of Genius also foreshadow the future by consolidating the association between artifex and masculinity. When Genius first appears, he is a man shaped by techne, his hair cut by scissors and tamed by a “mechanical comb.” 133 He continually draws images, as does Natura, but he creates images that are more effectual and permanent, changing “shadowy outline[s]” into “the realism of their actual being.” 134 And

15.  Natura at her forge, from the Roman de la Rose, fourteenth century. British Library, London. Photo © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (ms Egerton 881, fol. 124r).

Genius draws images with a pen on the pelt of a dead animal shorn hairless, like his own face, “by the razor’s bite.”135 His transformation of an animal’s pelt into a tablet hints at the incipient theme of culture’s mastery of nature. In many important respects, Alan’s Genius prefigures the Renaissance artist who transforms base materials into art through his possession of ingegno and who, as priest, serves as magus, intermediary to the divine. There was a real-world basis for Genius’s artifactory raid on the natural habitat. The twelfth century has been described as a turning point in the history of technology, when European life was fundamentally changed by the growth of a market economy and new techniques of production. The twelfthcentury technological revolution brought, among other things, the engineering feat of Gothic architecture, the harnessing of water and wind power, advances in navigation, agriculture, and medicine, and the invention of the compass and mechanical clocks.136 In practical terms, the role of homo artifex was expanding, no longer comfortably positioned within the balanced Chalcidean framework of God, nature, and the human artisan.137 In the De planctu, Genius’s claim on culture is still relatively modest. He does not defy but upholds Nature’s laws, and his special powers wait to be put to larger use. Throughout the Middle Ages, in philosophical and literary texts, as well as images, Nature’s creative superiority over human art remains ascendant, sustained by the ontological superiority of her

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The Gendering of Nature as Female

16.  Art kneels before Nature, from the Roman de la Rose, fourteenth century. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, ms Douce 195, fol 115v. Photo: Bodleian Library.

creations to those of humans. Thomas Aquinas wrote that “Art operates on materials furnished by nature” and at best could only rearrange them, while St. Bonaventura claimed that “The soul can make new compositions but it cannot make new things.”138 That priority is reflected in a fourteenth-century manuscript illustration of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, which shows a female Art kneeling before Nature (Fig. 16). Yet within this framework lurks the prospect of challenge. Chaucer, who drew upon both Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun, sets up the theme in the Canterbury Tales. In the Physician’s tale, Nature boasts of her work as artifex and challenges famous human artists—Pygmalion, Apelles, Zeuxis—to “paint” better creatures than we see in her own work. “They cannot match it, of course,” George Economou notes, “and were they to try, their vain attempt would be a presumption.” 139 Perhaps so, yet the possibility of the artist’s successful competition with nature, raised by Chaucer through denial, was a dream articulated in antiquity as well as in the coming Italian Renaissance. For the Romans, Nature’s competitors were human artists such as those evoked by Chaucer. In antiquity, as Erwin Panofsky

26

explained, there were two opposing positions on the relative powers of art and nature, each to recur in the Renaissance. One was the idea that art could at best only imitate nature or her operating principles, a position framed by Aristotle and exemplified by Pliny’s approving report that Lysippos claimed to have imitated nature alone.140 The opposite position, that art improved upon nature’s deficiencies by creating more perfect beauty, is a Platonic formulation represented by Xenophon’s account of Socrates asking the painter Parrhasios whether an artist might profitably combine the beauty of different individuals into one body.141 In the second of these theoretical stances, a superior artistic creation could emerge, potentially better than Nature’s productions. Although this view was not generally tenable by medieval scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, at least, would raise new possibilities for art as the status and nature of Nature began to change. A text similar to those of Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille, but much more widely read, was the allegorical poem Roman de la Rose, begun around 1235 by Guillaume de Lorris and completed around 1275 by Jean de Meun. Here, Natura is a much diminished character. Although Jean preserves essential features of Natura—vicaria Dei, mater generationis, and moral judge in her domain—her status is eroded by her increasingly gender-stereotyped relationship with Genius. He now figures as Nature’s priest, to whom she confesses her complaint, and from whom she requests absolution—which he bestows in one manuscript illustration with a startlingly phallic wand. In another passage, Genius ridicules woman’s inability to keep a secret.142 The outright misogyny of Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose has been noted by many critics. More than a century after Jean completed the poem, Christine de Pisan sustained a debate with leading French intellectuals, in which she took on, not only Jean de Meun, but contemporary theologians and even Ovid, to protest the misogyny of the Rose.143 Jean’s Natura (Lady Nature) demonstrably speaks for new values. Against Lady Reason’s advocacy of Christian morality, Lady Nature ordains sexual intercourse for the married and unmarried alike, in order to propagate the species. For both Natura and Genius, heterosexual promiscuity is preferable to both categories of holdouts “against nature,” contra naturam—female virgins and celibate homosexual monks.144 Nature is now figured as a morally degraded promoter of sexual license in opposition to marital duty. As Nature and Reason diverge in the Rose, each figure acquires a part of Nature’s previous identity. In principle, this separation simplified Nature’s nature by dissolving an ambigu-

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

ous union that some writers have found deeply problematic— her double identity as both moral tutelary guide and agent of sexual procreation.145 Yet Natura’s longstanding fusion of the moral and physical realms did not disappear with the Rose. In fact, the ambiguity served a useful social function, disguising the contradiction between what is and what ought to be, between “natural” human sexuality and custom proclaimed as the “law of nature.” Since ideologies are supported by the claim that they represent natural practices, nature is often enlisted to help censure a perceived vice such as homosexuality, which was (and still is) widely denounced as contra naturam. And nature-as-reason is invoked to endorse woman’s marital and procreative duty whenever feminine nature-as-eros is seen to get out of hand. Nature was a split figure for men in the late Middle Ages because the allegory’s function was expanded to mediate not only man’s relationship to the cosmos but also his relationship to human women. Depending on what corrective was needed, Natura could become nurturing mother, moral guide, ideal beloved, or shrew. In the later Middle Ages, Mother and Reason (now as Sapientia, or Wisdom) were combined in the figure of the Virgin Mary, who shared many of Natura’s characteristics. Mythically modeled on Cybele or Diana of Ephesus, Mary later absorbed the qualities of surviving fertility cults.146 The Marian cult carries traces of the Virgin’s nature-goddess origins: her relationship with her son echoes that of Isis and Horus, while her association with the earth as the Madonna of Humility both visually and etymologically recalls Natura’s locus.147 There is also a basic parallel between the Virgin and Natura as female agents of a masculine creator, and in the principle of maternity they both represent. Theology rendered Mary unique, mother not of all humanity but of one divine male, yet as type of the Church, Mary-Ecclesia, the Virgin was mother to the faithful, an identity imaged in ways that recall Mother Earth.148 For women, accustomed to generic identification with her, the personification of Nature could serve different purposes. Barbara Newman discusses three late medieval texts as alternative constructions of Nature: Christine de Pisan’s Book of the Mutation of Fortune (1403) and Christine’s Vision (1405), and their thirteenth-century antecedent, the Roman de Silence by Heldris of Cornwall, who is thought to have been female.149 Both Heldris and Christine reposition the figure of Nature against an opposite, to explore issues of gender. Heldris sets Nature in dialogue with Nurture, to debate the gender of a sexually ambiguous protagonist named Silence. Nature and Nurture’s debate seems eerily postmodern; its real subject is what we would today call the social construction of identity: the alle-

gories debate whether innate gender or masculine social advantage count for more. Heldris inverts Aristotle to privilege matter over form, deeming Silence’s substance (fine white flour) to be more fundamental than the superficial gender (coloring) that is inscribed on her/him. Christine de Pisan’s Nature is an ideal mother who gives her daughter masculine powers, but whose intentions are distorted by custom, or Culture. Sustaining kitchen imagery used by both Heldris and Hildegard of Bingen, Christine invents a myth in which Nature is a cook who feeds Chaos. The gender roles are reversed; the masculine Chaos stands for inchoate matter, corporeality, and appetite, his mouth a womb to be filled. In the end, Nature returns as patron and muse of the author’s literary work, to bring her the gift of intellectual talent. It is Newman’s important point that Christine does not oppose Nature and Culture; rather, Nature demonstrates in the example of Christine herself that it is not unnatural for a woman to be a writer, and she promotes women’s cultural achievements. Christine turned Lady Nature into a champion of her own sex, an icon of a female creativity that could embrace both motherhood and intellectual work. And thus, Newman concludes, “the goddess’s old covenant with Reason, broken by Jean de Meun, is back in force.”150 the new aristotelian philosophy and the descent of natura In the thirteenth century, the status of nature changed in philosophy as well as poetry. In 1255, around the time that Jean de Meun completed the Romance of the Rose, Aristotle became required reading at the University of Paris and eventually throughout academic Europe.151 St. Thomas Aquinas is generally acknowledged as the leading figure in this change. Before Thomas, the Aristotelian conception of nature had been considered a threat to the Christian view of reality.152 In the newly formed universities of the early thirteenth century, the philosophy faculty—growing rapidly as agent of the new interest in Greek and Arabic science—was held apart from the theology faculty devoted to biblical tradition. Building on the work of the Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Averroës, and his fellow Dominican and teacher Albert the Great, Aquinas forged a connection between Aristotle’s natural philosophy and Christian theology, on the grounds of empiricism and reason. In effect, he rationalized a theology seriously threatened by the new scientific zeal, giving it authority on terms acceptable to the modern thirteenth-century mind. The new Aristotelianism presented a fundamentally new

27

The Gendering of Nature as Female

view of nature, from what would be called a scientific perspective. Whereas in the worldview of the Chartrain Platonists, Nature’s operations were mysterious and not to be revealed to vulgar eyes, her secrets protected by the integumentum of allegory, the new translations of Aristotle and the commentary of Averroës gave the Latin West, in F. J. E. Raby’s words, “a completely naturalistic system, in which the integumenta were removed from nature and she was revealed to common view.”153 Philosophers now recognized physical nature as an independent reality that could be investigated in its own terms. The Averroistic current of Aristotelianism, which prevailed in Italy and especially Padua, has been distinguished from the rational scholasticism of Thomist Aristotelianism by its focus on scientia rather than sapientia, the quadrivium and not the trivium—that is, an interest in the analysis of nature’s concrete manifestations rather than in theology or rhetoric.154 This “naturalist” turn of thought, shared by the fourteenth-century Platonic empiricists at Oxford (Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham), led to the empirical approach to natural phenomena and to the “natural philosophy” that would become modern science. Scholastic philosophy found a conceptual framework to accommodate the new Aristotelianism. Following Aristotle, and opposing Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas conceived of nature as the principle that is natura naturans, embracing the birth of things, change, and fulfillment—all set in motion by the unmoved Mover, i.e., God.155 In Avicenna’s thinking, natura naturans and natura naturata, spirit and matter, are sharply differentiated, and man is separate from nature, not a part of it.156 Thomas adopted Aristotle’s teleology, which conceived form and matter as interdependent, rather than the Platonic model, which held them apart. He emphasized their union rather than their dualism and did not subordinate matter to form as severely as did Aristotle.157 At the same time, like most medieval theologians, Thomas considered women inferior to men in the natural sphere.158 In both their ancient and medieval incarnations, two members of a great philosophical pairing offered opposing positions on the concept of nature and the idea of woman. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas postulate a Nature immanent in the world, of which man is a part, but they substantially preserve gender polarity and masculine dominance in the real world. To some extent, Plato and Avicenna embrace gender complementarity, yet Platonic mysticism, at least in its post-Chartrain incarnations, tended to represent “an escape from the materiality of nature, a flight from world.”159 Platonic and Aristotelian (or Avicennean and Thomist) philosophy did not arrive in fif-

28

teenth-century Italy as pure and separate strains; there was much mixing and modification. Yet two features survived stubbornly, one from each philosophical matrix: the principle of gender polarity and masculine superiority, and the desirability of freeing masculine form to rise above feminine matter. Thomas Aquinas also contributed to the growing privileging of art over nature that we observed in the rising powers of Genius. In Thomas’s thinking, art depends upon nature, but nature depends upon God, whose making of the universe was a specifically creative act: “All natural things were produced by the divine art, and so in a sense are God’s works of art.”160 One consequence of this idea, expressed frequently by Thomas, is the thesis that nature imitates art, by fulfilling through its operations “the intention of the divine Logos.”161 God’s art is, of course, greater than the work of human artisans, yet Thomas implicitly allows for their access to divine art through nature, since nature’s own creation of natural things is informed by an “intelligent substance.”162 Nature has become an intermediary between two forms of art, just as Alan of Lille’s Genius wielded priestly powers that transcended those of Nature. Though not intended as such by Aquinas, embedded here is a theological justification for the divine powers of the artist that would be claimed in the Quattrocento. Allegorical Naturas survived in literature—a late example is Spenser’s The Faerie Queene—but in the wake of neo-Aristotelianism, they were increasingly rare. As Paul Piehler describes it, allegory waned when “a more strictly analytical approach to the phenomenal world made allegorizing seem intellectually trivial.” And in the spirit of the new particularity, specific individuals replaced personified abstractions to represent the same symbolic ideas—Dante’s Beatrice, to name a leading example, acquired many of the attributes of Natura, Reason, and the Virgin Mary.163 Similarly, in the visual arts of the fourteenth century and the Renaissance to come, Terra and Lady Nature disappear,164 and Natura is figured directly only in her Diana-of-Ephesus surrogate. Natura’s powers and attributes live on more vitally in other personifications: the Virgin Mary, the postlapsarian Eve, and Venus. The figure of Genius disappeared as a personification, to reappear as a theoretical concept. The word ingenium, which underlay the naming of Genius, was already conceptually connected with art in the Middle Ages. The phrase ars et ingenium was a medieval commonplace, two words linked in rhetorical praise, though slightly distinguishable (following classical rhetoric, ars represented teachable skills, while ingenium stood for innate talent).165 Ars et ingenium took on new life

From Prehistory through the Middle Ages

in the fifteenth century, when Florentine humanists rationalized the application of both terms to painters and sculptors, placing increasing emphasis on the imaginative genius of the artist, and elevating ingegno to a key critical principle.166 The deconstruction of Natura as a creative entity was accompanied by the increasing depiction of natural forms in art. Now understood as naturata and not intrinsically divine, the multiple forms of created nature were observed and depicted in their particularity and variety. In fourteenth-century art, birds and flowers populate paintings, plants and animals are differentiated by species, and human faces gain individuality (Fig. 17). Increasing naturalism in Italian art, which can be traced from the beginning of the fourteenth century through the mid-fifteenth, is often treated as a form of cultural progress. Yet it can also be considered another means of disempowering Natura, now transformed from singular and active naturans to multiple and passive naturata. “She” is no longer there, replaced by trees, birds, clouds, and rocks. Once nature was desacralized, natural imagery became available to take on secular meaning in the context of territorial politics. A key example is Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Good Government fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, which presents one of the first depictions since antiquity of an extensive natural landscape, filled with vineyards, haystacks, trees, and peasants working the land, juxtaposed with a view of the city (Fig. 18). The Sienese landscape represents the contado, surrounding territory owned by the city. “Nature” in this fresco is the conceptual counterpart of “culture” (the city), now politicized as its extension and possession. Since acquired territories bolstered civic identity, they were often represented in town hall frescoes such as the Sienese Palazzo Pubblico and, later, the Florentine Palazzo Vecchio.167 With its sharp distinction between urban and rural, the Siena fresco revives the ancient Roman city-dweller’s nostalgic “appreciation” of nature—indeed, it has been proposed that Ambrogio was inspired by reading Pliny168—but with a significant difference. For an inhabitant of the Roman Empire’s largest city, nature represented relief from urban pressures, a locus amoenus to restore the spirit. For the citizen of the much smaller Siena, one of many competing city-states, the contado was a civic asset, both for its agricultural production and as a symbol of civic power. The Roman muralist juxtaposes landscape and architecture to contrast nature and art, setting up both vibrant tension and harmony between the two. The Sien­ ese painter juxtaposes and interweaves city and country to unite them as a political-cultural continuum.169 Both urban per­ spectives on nature—as private solace or public possession—

17.  A knight and a lady, scene from the Châtelaine de Vergi (detail), 1390s. Wall painting. Palazzo Davanzati, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

would surface in the Renaissance: in Venice in the form of the pastoral and in Florence as Medicean power politics. In this introductory chapter, I have touched on some but not all of the guises of nature known before the Renaissance. I would emphasize here, however, the constants that will concern us in the chapters to come: the demonstrable power of Nature to create new life and her competition with God in this respect; the positive definitions of Nature as creative artifex and maternal guide; and her negative definition as evil and corruptive feminine matter, inferior to masculine form. Issues continually debated are whether spirit is immanent in matter or transcendent, and whether art can compete with Nature in the creation of beautiful or perfect things. In all these categories, Nature is inferiorized by association with stereotypical femininity. We have seen Nature figured as female in varying forms: as a fat and bulbous naked woman who gives or symbolizes birth; as a tall and powerful goddess in radiant dress who drives the universe like a charioteer; as a depleted, haglike nursing mother; as an elegantly dressed lady improbably hammering

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The Gendering of Nature as Female

18.  Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Government in the City and the Country (central part), 1337–40. Fresco. Sala dei Nove, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

at a forge. It would be difficult to generalize about changes in her depiction over so long a period, yet it is possible to say that Natura slowly declined in status and power—for at any point one chooses to look, she is usually a little less powerful, a little less respected than she had been previously. But Natura never subsides entirely, and though she may take different forms, she is always a force that is said to need reckoning with. In the Quattrocento, the artist will begin seriously to compete with her, escalating his claims—first of equality, then of superiority—over the next three centuries, until he virtually shouts his insistence. Nature herself—that

30

is, the allegory who has been given a speaking voice—falls silent. Indeed, “she” exists primarily in the minds of those who would transcend her, wielding a power that is kept alive by its very denial. Nature’s power is also kept alive by the manifest reality of her creations, which, unlike the creations of artists or the reality of God, do not require the support of texts or beliefs. As Savonarola would insist (echoing Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, and the Romance of the Rose): “art cannot imitate nature entirely, even if the artist is perfect, because, even if a painter makes something similar to man in everything, yet it will not have life.”170

part ii

Nature and Art in the Quattrocento From Pupil to Equal

Daedalus . . . craftsman supreme of all time, whose manhood amazes Nature, mighty and wise though she be.  —petr arch, Bucolicum Carmen

Technology and the Mastery of Physical Nature Chapter Two 

Brunelleschi and Alberti

In the year 1430, the humanist Poggio Bracciolini and his friend Antonio Loschi sat together on the Capitoline Hill, reflecting on Rome’s ruined buildings, the fall of its empire, and the “deplorable inconstancy of fortune.” Loschi recalled Virgil’s celebration of great Rome’s triumph over nature (“Golden now, once bristling with thorn bushes”) to invert it sadly for modern times: “Golden once, now rough with thorns and overgrown with briars.”1 Rome, said Loschi, “the cynosure of all the world, now lies so desolated and ruined, and so changed from its earlier condition, that vines have replaced the benches of the senators, and the Capitol has become a receptacle of dung and filth.” Bracciolini described Rome as a “wild wasteland . . . ruined and overgrown with vines . . . a neglected desert.” For these men, the ruins of Rome were a tragic sign of Fortune’s power to destroy monumental buildings, colossal statues, and palaces. Fortuna and Natura are here joined—as they often were by the humanists2 —for the physical sign of calamitous fortune was the vegetal overgrowth of ancient Rome, nature run amok. The physical devastation that shaped these humanists’ figures of speech had, of course, been visible in Rome throughout the Middle Ages. What was different in the early fifteenth century was that the ancient buildings now represented a beacon of hope in a time of ecological desperation. Europe, relatively disease-free since the late eighth century, had been struck by the great plague that, between 1347 and 1351, swept away from one third to one half of the European population.

The Black Death, which has been described as “the greatest natural disaster in European history,”3 was the first of a series of pandemic plagues that recurred every few years throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, bringing chronic crop and food shortages, depopulation, and economic crisis. These were experienced in a radical and concentrated form in the second half of the fourteenth century.4 For art historians steeped in Millard Meiss’s classic study of Tuscan painting after the Black Death, this event and its alleged decimation of art production are familiar. Many scholars have modified Meiss’s conclusions about the effects of the plague on art in stylistic, social, and economic respects but without doubting the severity of the impact.5 There is, however, a different question to be posed about the relationship between this natural disaster and cultural production. Was the humanistic enterprise in part a response to the perception of nature as disorder, which required the necessary supplement of art? In this chapter, I propose that we look at the dramatic rebirth of the arts at the beginning of the fifteenth century not simply as the revival of antique models, but as an applied use of them in a time of acute need, as part of a massive effort to reassert human control over nature’s dangerous and chaotic forces through the discipline of measure and rule. Recent scholarship has corrected the view of Meiss and others to show that art production in Tuscany did not slow significantly after the plague began to strike. Samuel Cohn found substantial evidence that, in Florence and other Tuscan

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Technology and the Mastery of Physical Nature

and Umbrian cities, private commissions of paintings and other art forms grew after 1348; more art, not less, seems to have been called for. Cohn connects this phenomenon with art’s commemorative function, calling it a “cult of remembrance.”6 And, as I shall shortly explain, large-scale building and public projects also continued and expanded after midcentury.7 These responses to the Black Death, renewed commitment rather than paralysis, suggest that we should bring another dimension, the psychological, to supplement the material and social, in order to better understand the function of art in a sophisticated society that has been traumatized. The drastic circumstances of the later fourteenth century set the stage for the first act of the humanist-artists: to save Roman culture from the morass in which nature had put it. The exhortations of Loschi and Bracciolini carried the subtext of an agonistic drama: man’s heroic task was to purge the symbolic cultural site, Rome itself, of the signs of change, decay, ruin, and death that belonged to Nature’s domain of mutability and corruption. It was a theme sounded earlier by Boccaccio, when he described Petrarch’s cleanup of Parnassus to assist the “return of the muses”: “by clearing away the brambles and thickets with which he found the path encumbered through the negligence of mortals . . . Petrarch cleansed the fount of Helicon, swampy with mud and rushes, restoring its waters to their former purity, and reopened the Castalian cave which was overgrown with the entwining of wild vines.”8 The same idea undergirds the Virgilian “Golden Age” myth, which posits an original pure “natural” order, weakened by decay and corruption until a rebirth or renewal (renovatio, restitutio) brings a return to ancient perfection.9 Bracciolini’s call for restoring Rome’s architectural monuments, as well as the ongoing recovery and imitation of ancient sarcophagi and sculptures, which artists such as Brunelleschi and Donatello set out to do around 1400, were efforts at a renovatio that would shift the balance of power between culture and nature in the physical world. The remnants of ancient Roman civilization, precisely because of their long survival, effectively symbolized the cultural aspiration to permanence and durability. Yet the fragile and deteriorating condition of these monuments was a reminder of nature’s corrosive and destabilizing power. Their restoration and replication would tilt the balance on behalf of culture, which would then be able at least to hold its own against destructive nature—and in the Quattrocento, not more was claimed or sought. The chief site of the effort to mount culture’s defense against nature’s unraveling was Florence. In the second half of the fourteenth century, at the height of the Black Death, the Flo-

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rentines maintained an unprecedented building campaign.10 Unlike Siena, also plague-ravaged, and unlike Rome as well, Florence had a city center laid out on a still-visible Roman colony grid plan, something that may have subliminally strengthened the citizens’ belief in the power of geometric order as a cultural buttress against nature’s disorder. Urban growth in the thirteenth century, accompanied by the commune’s increasing strength, had culminated at the century’s end in an ambitious city planning and building program. Beginning in 1284, the main streets were broadened and straightened, especially the Roman cardo, now Via dei Calzaiuoli, which linked the new civic structures of cathedral, town hall, and guild hall. By the mid-fourteenth century, these structures— the new cathedral, the Palazzo Vecchio, and Orsanmichele— were completed or nearly so.11 With the onset of the plague, construction intensified, as guilds such as the Arte di Calimala and the Cambio built new halls and founded hospitals. In 1360, it was decreed that the building of the cathedral would continue, despite the economic crisis and the costly war with Milan.12 These decisions followed earlier commitments to confront natural or social disaster with architectural declarations. For example, in 1334 Giotto was appointed architect of the Campanile, and its celebrative cornerstone was set, to commemorate Florence’s recovery from the great flood of 1333.13 The psychological importance of the late Trecento building drive can be measured in the anxiety sometimes expressed about the durability and permanence of the new bastions. In 1381, the humanist Coluccio Salutati looked down on Florence from a nearby hillside and proudly described its vast churches, splendid towers, and palaces. Yet he worried about their deterioration. “The Palazzo del Popolo,” he said, “is collapsing on itself and is falling apart with gaping cracks . . . it already seems to be foretelling its own eventual, gradual ruin. Our Cathedral [is] a wonderful work with which . . . no building made by human beings could be compared. . . . But the Cathedral has developed a fissure and seems about to end in a state of hideous ruin: soon it will be in need of restoring quite as much as completing.”14 Fortunately for Florence, a hero would soon appear to rescue the city’s major building. Filippo Brunelleschi’s design and construction of the cathedral dome (Plate 1 and Fig. 19), carried out between 1420 and 1436, was the largest creative project of the fifteenth century. This project was also a key site of the contest between art and nature, for its history embraces the critical issue of the relative creative powers of Nature and the individual artist. The issue was mediated in theoretical terms

Brunelleschi and Alberti

19.  Florence Cathedral, profile of dome over city. Begun by Arnolfo di Cambio, 1296; dome by Filippo Brunelleschi, 1418–36. Photo: Vanni/Art Resource, NY.

by Leon Battista Alberti, who dedicated the Italian edition of his treatise on painting, Della pittura, to his friend. Brunelleschi was for Alberti the personification of the modern artist and the symbol of the idea that progress in the arts was possible. In Alberti’s view, modern artists surpassed the ancients in their invention of new technology, a category singularly exemplified by Brunelleschi’s miraculous achievement of designing an enormous cupola for the cathedral of Florence.15 Trained as a goldsmith and sculptor, Brunelleschi became the first artist/engineer, a man said to possess ingegno, a magical blend of creative abilities that would later bifurcate into the separate categories of artistic genius and engineering.16 He was the first artist to be the subject of an individual biography, and the first to be celebrated for breaking the mold of craftsman to apply his intelligence to the invention of new things.17 Brunelleschi’s construction of a dome for Florence Cathedral was regarded as a technological triumph, while his perspective demonstration of 1425 initiated a radically new way of representing the world. He is uniquely credited with the revival of classical forms in architecture, which initiated that fundamental change in the physiognomy of European cities that we take

as the defining moment of the Renaissance itself. Brunelleschi also reportedly designed clocks, hoists, cranes, and other lifting machines, inventions recorded in drawings by contemporary artists, and he is said to have conducted experiments in hydraulics and pneumatics.18 Brunelleschi’s position in the developing history of technology was recognized by his contemporaries, who compared him to Daedalus, the master artificer of ancient Crete. In an epitaph composed on the architect’s death in 1446, Carlo Marsuppini wrote that he “excelled in the Daedalian art, inventing not only the dome but many machines with his divine genius.” Other writers described Brunelleschi as “our Daedalus,” among them the architect Filarete.19 This epithet was apt for, like Brunelleschi, Daedalus was an inventor of tools, a sculptor and builder, and of course the fashioner of the wax wings by which he and his son Icarus escaped from Crete. And if Icarus has come to symbolize hubris, in his failure to respect the limits of human flight imposed by nature, Daedalus’s ability to construct tools to transcend nature’s limits effectively symbolizes the triumph of technology over nature. This, as we will see, was Brunelleschi’s mythic achievement.

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Technology and the Mastery of Physical Nature

20.  Andrea di Bonaiuto (Andrea da Firenze), The Church Militant, including Florence Cathedral with its projected dome, c. 1365–68. Fresco. Right wall of Spanish Chapel, Chapterhouse, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

the dome and the mother The method of vaulting the dome of Florence Cathedral that Brunelleschi advanced in 1418 is said to have solved a six-decade-old structural problem. The Florentines had long intended to surmount the cathedral with a dome, an idea that may have originated as early as 1294, with the church’s architect Arnolfo di Cambio, but certainly by 1367, when the consuls of the Wool Guild decided to enlarge the structure and surmount the crossing with a cupola.20 The civic importance of completing the cathedral with a dome is documented in a

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fresco in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella, painted around 1365–68 (Fig. 20), during the years when the dome was planned but before it could be realized.21 Although a model was produced in 1367, the master masons who guided the project did not yet have the technical knowledge to construct such a dome, since the octagonal drum at the crossing of the church measured over 140 feet across, too wide a span to be bridged by any conventional form of wooden scaffolding normally used for vault construction. Why did the Florentines so badly want a dome? The domical

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form had long been considered a powerful and dignified crowning of a structure, by analogy with the human head. In a metaphor of body that has been traced back to Plato, the dome is the superior part of a building, as the head is the body; there is a decline in dignity as we move down to the inferior parts of the structure, its belly and knees, so to speak, which were compared to vulgar women and artisans.22 Domes also carried ancient associations with the cosmos and the vault of heaven.23 The Pantheon in Rome (Fig. 21), one of the most imposing surviving structures from antiquity, expressed this concept through its pure hemispherical shape and its dedication to all the gods. The Pantheon was a great inspiration for early Quattrocento artists, including Brunelleschi, and it is well known that the cathedral dome was conceptually modeled on that Roman monument, which it was planned to equal in size.24 The potency of the Pantheon as the Duomo’s model can be seen in fifteenth-century copies of Brunelleschi’s dome that stubbornly reproduce it with the flatter proportions of the Pantheon, despite its actual steeped appearance.25 Yet there are other functional meanings of domes in Flor­ entine culture of the fourteenth century, which have been insufficiently linked to Brunelleschi’s cupola. The cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, with whom the church itself is deeply identified.26 In theological tradition, the body of Mary was understood as a domus for divinity, the tabernacle of Christ.27 (This is reflected in the Italian name, Duomo, which refers to the church, not the dome.) Mary was further identified with Mater Ecclesia, the Mother Church, embodiment and merciful protector of the congregation, deriving from the Scriptural tradition of the Church as the Bride and Spouse of Christ.28 Long before the Church was identified with Mary, the supportive love of the Mother Church was described by Irenaeus and Tertullian as the “sustaining bounty of her breasts,” while St. Cyprian described Mater Ecclesia as “One Mother, prolific with offspring: of her we are born, by her milk we are nourished, by her spirit we are made alive.” 29 This iconography continued after Mary’s conflation with Mater Ecclesia; William of Saint-Thierry wrote of the Church, “it is your breasts, O eternal Wisdom, that nourish the holy infancy of your little ones.”30 The idea of the Florentine Mother Church as both mother in architectural body and mother of the citizenry has often found local expression. Alberti described Brunelleschi’s cupola as large enough to cover all of the Tuscan people with its shadow.31 It is a figure of speech evoked in Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Spanish Chapel fresco, which shows the measured embrace by

21.  The Pantheon, Rome, 118–25 ce. Photo: Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

the domed Mother Church of her congregation below (Fig. 20). Even today, according to Frederick Hartt, Florentines speak of the dome as if it were their nurturing mother: “Io son fiorentino di Cupolone” (“I am a Florentine born of the great dome”).32 Finally, the cluster of associations that link the Virgin with domed structures may account for the name long popular in Rome for the Pantheon, “Santa Maria Rotonda.”33 It cannot have been lost on Quattrocento Florentines that the shape of the cathedral’s dome visually resembled an emblem of the mother’s nourishing power, the female breast. As Caroline Walker Bynum has shown, medieval viewers saw bared breasts in art “not primarily as sexual but as the food with which they were iconographically associated.”34 It would have been natural to read in the cathedral’s single dome the idea of a single nurturing female breast in that period, when images of the nursing Virgin Mary were so prevalent. The theme of Madonna lactans, in which Mary nurses the Christ Child from one exposed breast, proliferated in Tuscan sculpture and painting in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Fig. 22). Margaret Miles has connected the production of these Madonna lactans images with the recurrent plagues that began with the Black Death, which were accompanied by severe food shortages and population decrease. She argues that in such periods of instability, malnutrition, and fertility deficits, people were drawn to “symbolic expressions of nourishment and dependence.”35 As Mother Church and Mother of God, the Virgin Mary

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Technology and the Mastery of Physical Nature

22.  Nino Pisano, Madonna lactans, 1360s. Marble. Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. 23.  Madonna della Misericordia, fifteenth century. Gilded wood. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

exercised a singular power to nourish and shelter the faithful. She was depicted in this capacity in the Black Death period as the Madonna della Misericordia, who, as intercessor before God, embraces and shields her supplicants under a broad, tentlike mantle. Architectonic images of the merciful Virgin (Fig. 23) were frequently commissioned as thanksgiving for her protection against plague.36 The Bargello Madonna della Misericordia, like that painted by Piero della Francesca, structurally expresses the Virgin’s encircling and protective power, as well as her signification of stability for the fragile and diminutive supplicants who depend on her mercy. These powers are demonstrated in a key Marian monument of fourteenth-century Florence: the tabernacle by Orcagna within Orsanmichele, which was a focal point for “the spiritual and physical nourishment of the city,” according to a study by Nina Rutenburg and Nancy Fabbri.37 Orcagna’s tabernacle (Fig. 24) was constructed between 1352 and 1359 to house the second replacement (by Bernardo Daddi) of a thaumaturgic, or miracle-working, image of the Virgin that had been erected in the grain market of Florence in the late Dugento.38 Designed

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to serve as a “diminutive church” for the Virgin, Orcagna’s tabernacle was surmounted by a dome, a feature that may link it with the cathedral dome project of 1357, but is perhaps best explained by the Virgin’s association with the food supply.39 The grain market at Orsanmichele served as the distribution center for bread given to the poor, an activity so important in the plague period that in 1365, the Virgin of Orsanmichele was made the special protector of Florence. The protecting Virgin’s nurturing role is reflected in the Life of the Virgin reliefs on the base of the tabernacle, the first (surviving) Marian cycle in Florence executed after the Black Death, which includes a nursing Charity, as well as images of cornucopias and sheaves of wheat.40 As Fabbri and Rutenberg describe it, the tabernacle was a destination for visitors who “sought solace from the thaumaturgic image of the Madonna in this civic pilgrimage center.”41 On the exterior of Orsanmichele, a late fourteenthcentury tabernacle contains a sculpture group representing the Virgin and Child; again Mary is given a domed canopy (Fig. 25). Of the fourteen statue-filled tabernacles that encircle Orsanmichele, only this one is surmounted by a domical

Brunelleschi and Alberti

24.  Orcagna, tabernacle of the Virgin, 1352–59. Orsanmichele (interior), Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. 25.  Niccolò di Pietro Lamberti (?), tabernacle of the Medici e Speziali Guild, with the Virgin and Child (the “Madonna della Rosa”), before 1399. Orsanmichele (exterior), Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

canopy, a fact suggesting that this form was considered intrinsic to the Virgin’s identity.42 The persistent linking of the domical form with the Virgin Mary, as seen in these Trecento examples, helps to clarify both the Florentines’ determination to crown the cathedral with a dome, and the meaning this dome is likely to have had for the citizens. Conceived and planned in the midst of economic and social crisis, the projected dome would offer a stable sign of nature’s power, solidified in theologically appropriate form, and would provide psychological comfort, through an image that signified, for every Florentine, the nurturing and protective Mother Church.43 Several scholars have noted the connection between domed churches and the Virgin Mary. Richard Krautheimer called attention to numerous round and/or domed churches dedi-

cated to the Virgin in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and suggested that the Virgin’s Tomb, traditionally identified with a sixth-century domed martyrium outside Jerusalem, might have been a model for Marian churches.44 Heinrich Klotz noted the frequency of domed basilicas in Tuscany, citing among key examples that predated Brunelleschi’s dome the cathedrals of Siena, Pisa, and Massa Marittima, all dedicated to the Virgin.45 Not all domed structures carried Marian associations, of course, and not all Marian churches were domed. Yet the recurrence is significant enough to have provoked explanations. One not previously offered is that which I propose: the dome as sign of the Virgin’s power to nourish and protect—not only the faithful but the commune. As a civic emblem dominating the profile of the city, the dome could function apotropaically, displaying and flaunting Florence’s special protection by the

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Technology and the Mastery of Physical Nature

26.  Siena Cathedral, profile of dome over city. Original dome, 1259–64; present cupola and lantern, seventeenth century. Photo: iStockphoto LP.

Virgin Mary against her enemies, including the Republic of Siena, which also claimed the Virgin as the city’s special protector (Fig. 26). The urgent need for protection in the areas of health, nurture, food supply, and procreation, as well as the continuing rivalry with other cities in the late fourteenth century, may thus have shaped the decision in about 1360 to dome the crossing of Florence Cathedral, in order to bolster its Marian powers. This would have been consistent with the renewed dedication of the cathedral in 1412 to the Virgin as Santa Maria del Fiore, a rededication that, as Mary Bergstein has argued, was prompted by a need to consolidate the Virgin’s identification as the queen of Florence in the face of local famine and plague, war and insurrection.46 The discourse of Marian civic nurture is conspicuously missing from the narratives of Renaissance architecture. Rudolf Wittkower, for example, in a classic discussion of the dome and the circular church plan in the Renaissance, interpreted these forms as Filarete and Palladio had done, as symbols of

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the geometric perfection and eternity of God.47 Almost as an afterthought, Wittkower acknowledged that “many centralized Renaissance churches, though by no means all, are dedicated to the Virgin” and mused briefly that the choice of the central plan for Marian churches might have been prompted by associated ideas such as the crown of the heavenly Queen, the martyrium over her tomb, and “the roundness of the universe over which she presides.”48 “Moreover,” he adds enigmatically, “there always was the connotation that it was she who had reared the Child.” This masterpiece of understatement signals that something has been suppressed, if not by that eminently rational scholar, then by his sources. We have not far to look. In his architectural treatise, Alberti eulogized the circle as endorsed by Nature herself, who “enjoys the round form above all others,” as seen in her own creations such as “the globe, the stars, trees, animals and their nests, and many other things.”49 It is curious that Alberti should name things remote from roundness such as trees and animals, and leave out the obvious—female breasts—considering the

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prominence of overt breast imagery in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century depictions of the Virgin. It is also difficult to understand why associations brought to the dome have remained so resistantly abstract when we consider the extensive architectural theory devoted to the idea that building proportions were derived from the human body. Alberti himself proclaimed, following Vitruvius, that in an ideal church all the parts should be harmoniously related like the parts of a body.50 This concept was literally applied in the Christian Latin-cross plan, which has long been understood to refer to the cross and the body of the crucified Christ, while the idea that architectural forms are derived from the human body is expressed in drawings by Francesco di Giorgio (Fig. 27).51 Some bodily references, it would seem, are simply not worthy of consideration— or else too dangerous to be mentioned.

27.  Francesco di Giorgio, Latin cross plan inscribed with male figure, fifteenth century. Drawing from the Codex Magliabechiano, fol. 42v. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. Photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale.

the construction of the dome: technology and the egg I will return to this question of the suppression of female associations for the Florentine dome. But let us first look more closely at how Brunelleschi achieved his technological triumph. According to both Manetti and Vasari, the problem facing the Florentines was to find a way to vault the great octagonal space over the crossing of Santa Maria del Fiore that would not require extensive wooden scaffolding, or centering.52 (Although wooden centering was the common practice in constructing architectural vaults, its use was problematic in so large a space as the Duomo.)53 Modern architectural historians agree that Brunelleschi’s achievement was to construct the dome without scaffolding, senza armadura, though they have explained it in a variety of ways. As a different approach to understanding this engineering feat, I begin with Vasari’s curious explanation of how Brunelleschi won the competition to create the dome. In Vasari’s account, the decisive moment came when the many competitors gathered to present their models. Unlike the others, Brunelleschi produced no model or plan; instead he brought forth a simple egg, proposing that whoever could make the egg stand upright on a flat surface be given the commission. Each master tried to make the egg stand on its end; each failed. Taking his own turn, Filippo lightly broke the end of the egg on the marble, leaving it to stand on its shards.54 When the architects protested that they too could have done that, Brunelleschi replied, laughing, that they would also know how to construct the dome when they saw his design. He then wrote a detailed version of his plan, so technical, according to Vasari, that the magistrates could not understand it, but impressed by Filippo’s confidence, they awarded him the commission anyway. Logically considered, the egg story has no point. Even if Vasari’s account were accurate—and many assume it was an invention—the test turns out to be a silly trick whose solution lies outside the stated terms, and offers no practical way to vault the space. Such a demonstration might have been meant to show the magistrates that the problem could be solved by a bold, imaginative stroke, a show of force beyond given parameters. Yet it is also possible that the egg itself was relevant to the engineering dilemma, adduced by Brunelleschi either to taunt and mystify his competitors (if Vasari told the story correctly), or to explain his proposed solution (if Vasari garbled the original account). Thirty years ago, Alessandro Parronchi pointed out that the elliptical form of Brunelleschi’s dome resembles the shape of 41

Technology and the Mastery of Physical Nature

28.  Quinto acuto, or pointed fifth, as demonstrated in a drawing of 1425–26 by Giovanni di Gherardo da Prato. Diagram from Battisti, 1981.

the egg, a natural form known for its unusual strength.55 Parronchi suggested that Vasari’s account might represent an only slightly mangled version of the truth: Brunelleschi had presented the egg to the committee as an organic structure that offered a key to the structural principle needed to solve the problem. Parronchi’s proposal has not dented Brunelleschi scholarship, however, despite Renaissance descriptions of this dome and others as “half-eggs.”56 With the important exception of George Hersey, who recognized the egg story as potentially significant, Vasari’s account continues to be treated as a meaningless anecdote.57 In part, the egg analogy may seem irrelevant because the slightly elongated pitch of the cathedral dome can be expressed in geometrical terms. When he set the shape for the dome’s curvature, Brunelleschi proposed to follow the principle of the quinto acuto, or “pointed fifth,” as had been established in the model of 1367.58 The “pointed fifth,” which had been earlier employed in the Florentine Baptistery and elsewhere, is a shape produced by intersecting arcs, each of whose radii is one-fifth greater than the diameter of the vault to be spanned (Fig. 28).59 It is a shape that becomes a Gothic arch if the point is preserved and an elliptical vault if closed as a curve. Parronchi argued that the actual shape of the Florentine dome appears more complex than the quinto acuto—seen from the street, the curve of its profile seems to steepen slightly near the top—and he proposed that it was derived instead from a combination of the parabola and the ellipse. (If so, the dome’s curve would begin at the drum as an ellipse, then straighten slightly near the top to become a parabola.) As it happens, parabolas and ellipses were much discussed by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes, and Parronchi argues that

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Brunelleschi derived his design from Archimedean principles.60 Certainly, there is solid evidence that Archimedes’ work was translated and circulated in Florence in this period.61 And, as Parronchi notes, Brunelleschi is known to have studied elliptical forms such as the Colosseum while he was in Rome.62 Yet the overlay of a diagram of the quinto acuto on a section of the dome shows that they basically correspond.63 And in a structure as large as the dome, any subtle difference between the dome’s actual contour and the standard quinto acuto might be ascribed to deviations introduced during construction. Parronchi’s important insight, however, was to see that the egg offered a natural model for the principle of self-supporting structure that was Brunelleschi’s innovation. As we have seen, the dome had to be self-supporting during construction if it was to be built without centering. According to Parronchi, Brunelleschi found in Archimedes’ work the principle that the parabolic or elliptical curve in a three-dimensional body does not distribute its weight on its sides, but onto a center of gravity inside the form.64 Yet, although a slightly elliptical shape may have helped reduce the thrust at the dome’s base,65 a parabolicplus-elliptical curve was probably not essential for construction without centering, for as the technological success of the Pantheon, Hagia Sophia, and numerous other domes shows, any dome—or even an igloo—will be self-supporting if it is constructed in regular circular courses, provided these rest on a circular base. As Marvin Trachtenberg has pointed out, Brunelleschi’s real challenge was to construct the cupola on top of the existing octagonal base, since vaults built from such a base required conventional centering.66 Drawing on the work of Rowland Mainstone, Trachtenberg proposed that Brunelleschi was able to create the structure without centering by converting the octagonal base into a circular one, probably with the use of hidden squinches, so that the cupola could be constructed as a true dome, built in a series of circular courses from the drum up, each course self-locking due to the closing circular structure.67 In effect, Brunelleschi inserted a hidden circular-in-plan structure between the two shells, each of which preserves the octagonal shape. Yet, unlike the Gothic cloister vault, the dome’s support depends not only upon the ribs but also upon the surfaces between the ribs. As he neared the crown, where downward and inward pressure increased, Brunelleschi used a herringbone brick pattern, or spinapesce, to help hold things together (Fig. 29).68 In effect, his method was to combine a dynamically efficient shape with a continuous surface made strong by its tightly interlocked, almost molecular, unity.69 Howard Saalman and other architectural historians have

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described the dome’s structure as dynamic and even “organic,” and have cited Alberti, who generically counseled the architect constructing a vault to “imitate Nature throughout, that is, bind together the bones and interweave flesh with nerves running along every possible section . . . [so as to] copy the ingenuity of Nature.”70 Yet few scholars have acknowledged the obvious, which is that nature provided a precise model for such a structure in the egg. Indeed, if we take a particular egg painted by Piero della Francesca to represent the shape of Quattrocento Italian eggs, and invert it, we find that its shape matches the shape of Brunelleschi’s dome as well as does the pointed fifth (Fig. 30 and Fig. 28). This works because while the egg could be described in mathematical terms—either as a pointed fifth, or as a combination of parabola and ellipse— one could also describe the dome in organic terms and bypass mathematics altogether. Historians’ dismissal of the egg story probably results less from misunderstanding than from resistance. Mathematicians have long been repelled by geometrically eccentric forms, considering forms such as the circle to be more perfect. One example of this is the medieval copyist who persistently misdrew Archimedes’ parabolas as semicircles.71 Another is the belief held by thinkers such as Albertus Magnus and Avicenna, and also Leo­nardo da Vinci, that perfectly round eggs produce male chicks, while oblong eggs produce females.72 Still another is the resistance of both Galileo and Kepler to the idea of the elliptical orbits of planets, even when faced with the evidence of science, because they believed in the perfection of circles.73 Yet the egg was not resisted merely because of its nongeo-

29.  Diagram of brick herringbone construction called spinapesce. From Rossi, 1982. 30.  Detail of egg from Piero della Francesca, Madonna and Child with Saints and Federico da Montefeltro (Fig. 31), inverted and superimposed on section of Brunelleschi’s dome from William J. Anderson and Arthur Stratton, The Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy, 5th ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1927).

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31.  Piero della Francesca, Madonna and Child with Saints and Federico da Montefeltro, c. 1472–74. Tempera and oil on panel. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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metric shape. The egg that hangs in dramatic suspension at the compositional heart of Piero della Francesca’s Brera Madonna (Fig. 31) alludes, as Millard Meiss has shown, to the custom in fifteenth-century Italy to hang eggs within churches. In the Florentine Duomo, a large marble egg hung over the high altar (which was dedicated to the Virgin), and two such eggs hung over the high altar of Siena Cathedral.74 Through folk tradition, eggs maintained a residual association with fertility in general, and in juxtaposition with the Virgin Mary, the egg expresses the key Christian concepts of the miraculous virgin birth and Christ’s miraculous resurrection. The egg’s Christianized symbolism always points to Christ, the prized end-product. Yet in both in Piero’s painting and in real-life Quattrocento practice, it stubbornly retains its pre-Christian meaning: suspended within a domed Marian church, the egg more naturally symbolizes the Virgin herself and invokes by its shape the larger fertility reference in the breast-formed dome above. The egg so pictorially privileged in the Montefeltro altar— splendidly pure, gleaming in ovoid perfection—was not for Piero a model of geometric order. It is not showcased in the painter’s treatise on the “five regular bodies.”75 Piero elevated the ovoid form to the level of the ideal in his art, as a perfected shape for the human head, especially that of the Virgin, seen here and in other paintings. But he does not name or theoretize this form that he so privileges in images, because the egg is a form outside geometry. Its shape is infinitely more complex than a circle or an ellipse, and to call it a combination of ellipse and parabola is only an approximation. The egg offers an unspeakable form of perfection, with a symbolic scope far broader than its specific context in Piero’s painting. Eggs figure prominently in Christian symbolism, but they carry much older associations with genesis and birth. In ancient origin myths, as we saw in chapter 1, the cosmic egg is the source of all life, the primordial form of creation itself, containing the universe in embryo. Orphic theogony, which influenced early Christian imagery, described the primordial egg split in two parts to form heaven and earth.76 The egg is not simply a sign of fertility, it is the prime symbol of the divine creativity of the female cosmic power. Piero himself probably did not have all this in mind. Yet the Brera Madonna expresses, in a subtextual way, the irreconcilability of two world orders. Piero suspends the egg in an architectonic cage: a captive specimen of Nature’s order, on view in the brave new world of geometry. Captured and contextualized, the egg is reclaimed by Piero from nature for art, its powers both tapped and tamed through reverential and mystified representation.

If the egg afforded Brunelleschi a model for a dynamic and organic solution to his vaulting problem, he too was careful to tame it by contextualizing. Having discovered one of Nature’s secrets in the structural strength of the egg, Brunelleschi makes the egg perform for him, putting it to larger use by imitating Nature’s mysterious designs on a grand scale. The concealment of his sources, both in the apparently cryptic egg demonstration and in the hiding of the dome’s true structure behind ribs that tectonized its breast- or egglike form, may bespeak an unacknowledged competition, between the creative powers of Nature and those of the artist. At this stage, art’s special powers are not articulated directly, and Nature is still credited as their source—as we saw in Alberti’s recommendation that architects follow “Nature’s ingenuity” and her biological order in their vault designs. Yet, as the dome’s actual construction showed, Nature’s living structures could be improved upon, if they were set in larger and permanent form. And, as Brunelleschi’s new system of linear perspective demonstrated, art could create entirely new kinds of order, marked by mathematical rationality rather than organic design. alberti and nature In his treatises on painting and sculpture, Leon Battista Alberti offers the first fully articulated theory of the relation between art and nature produced in the Renaissance. While acknowledging the artist’s dependence upon nature, Alberti qualifies that dependence and grants the artist a new capability: to create a beauty superior to what can be found in the natural world. For, he argues, although Nature must be followed by the artist as a guide who shows the way, her material manifestations are subject to improvement and correction. In making this distinction, Alberti evokes the medieval concepts of natura naturans and natura naturata. Although he does not use these terms, implicit in his argument is a recognition that Nature, the “wonderful maker of things” and source of underlying principles, is differentiated from those things in the natural world that artists study. Introducing the book on sculpture, he asserts: “For just as in a tree-trunk or clod of earth Nature’s suggestions made men feel it possible to create something similar to her products, so in Nature herself there lies to hand something which provides you with a method and certain, exact means whereby you may with application achieve the highest excellence in this art.”77 Alberti’s distinction between abstract principles and material things echoes the ancient binary opposition of mind and matter. There is no question which has the higher value for him. He

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announces in the introductory paragraph of De pictura that “Mathematicians measure the shapes and forms of things in the mind alone and divorced entirely from matter. We, on the other hand, who wish to talk of things that are visible, will express ourselves in cruder terms.”78 Mind is superior to matter, and the most admired of the liberal arts, mathematics, does not deal in matter at all. Cruder though painting may be, it nevertheless aspires to a higher position, an effort best supported— as would be argued throughout the fifteenth century—by the proximity of its operations to those of mathematics.79 Marsilio Ficino celebrated man’s creative achievements in the arts of navigation, astronomy, and irrigation, and sang the praises of the liberal and intellectual sciences. Anticipating the dream of modern technology and science fiction to escape the physical entirely, Ficino described man as master of the elements, who “ascends in the air by the highest towers, as I pass over the feathers of Daedalus or Icarus,” exclaiming: “in all of these [arts] the soul of man despises the ministry of the body as though he one day would be able and now already begins to live without the aid of the body.”80 For Ficino, as for Alberti, the arts ascend through their victory over nature, and by homo faber’s projected escape from the unfortunate tether of all too solid flesh. The principle of hierarchy runs through Alberti’s treatises. In perspective, the centric ray is superior to all other rays; the art of painting is ascendant over architecture and sculpture; light is superior to dark; large is better than small; and gold is better represented by colors than by real gold.81 The last of these claims, repeated in the treatise,82 is perhaps the most revealing of Alberti’s disdain for unreconstituted matter. In asserting that gold and lead worked by art are more valuable than in their raw state, Alberti echoes Aristotle’s dictum of the superiority

32.  Diagram of Alberti’s perspective construction. From Kemp, 1990.

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of creative form to inert matter. Alberti was all too aware of the dangers of art’s involvement with crude matter through its unmixed pigments and unworked clay or stone. Art was also dangerously involved with the material world in its effort to reproduce the inferior visible elements of nature, particularly by comparison with mathematics and philosophy. It was necessary, therefore, to develop a strategy of transcendence that would free art from negativizing associations with the material and physical and elevate it to the realm of mind and intellect. Brunelleschi’s system of linear perspective, as explained by Alberti, offered a perfect method for this subordination of the material to an abstract structural system, in which the optical was privileged over the tactile. 83 Somewhat surprisingly, Alberti claims Nature as the model for his abstract principles and categories: “We divide painting into three parts, and this division we learn from Nature herself.”84 He calls these three parts circumscription, composition, and reception of light, explaining that circumscription is enclosure or containment, as in outlines; while composition is the correct, fixed relationship of things to each other. If we stop to consider that these are odd things to find in nature—for contour lines are an accident of vision (as Leo­nardo later observed, there are no lines in nature), and people do not normally assemble in rectangles as they do in Masaccio’s Tribute Money—we can more easily recognize that Alberti’s “discovery” of nature’s principles is the result of a deductive, not inductive, process. He found in nature what he was looking for.85 By contrast with the “imitation” of nature’s specific objects, an inductive process that places the artist in a passive position before nature (the third element, reception of light, requires more of this), circumscription and composition are the tools of ordering and control. Dimensio and finitio, devices of proportional measurement, are openly presented by Alberti as instruments of control: “I will set out the advantages they offer, for they have amazing and almost unbelievable powers.”86 Power is the hallmark of linear perspective, vested first in the artist who constructs it, then in the viewer who apprehends it, for perspective construction assigns to his eye hierarchic pri­ority over the segment of the visual field that it surveys, metaphorically the whole of nature. In Alberti’s constructed field seen through his “open window,” all orthogonal lines converge on a centric point (vanishing point), and all figures depicted are larger or smaller according to their proximity to the centric point (Fig. 32). Their heads, however, are all on the same level, which coincides with the horizon line. This phenomenon, Alberti maintains, is demonstrated by nature ­herself. 87

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33.  Albrecht Dürer, perspective demonstration. Woodcut from Unterweisung des Messung, 1525. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

In fact, it is in the eye of the artist/spectator that the phenomenon occurs, because of the individual position of that eye relative to the horizon line and to the objects perceived. The artist and his subjective experience are actually part of the “nature” that Alberti identifies as the demonstrating agent. But in Albertian perspective, the artist positions himself outside nature, the better to gain mastery over it. There, he is doubly privileged, as an entity larger than all things surveyed and the reference point from which all forms diminish, and (because the visual cone works in two directions, on both sides of the picture plane), his eye is the point where all rays of light converge, the transcendent focus of the image’s magical workings. What counts is not how large or small things actually are, but how they appear before the lens of the judging eye. Erwin Panofsky noted the subjective factor in perspective construction long ago, in his Perspective as Symbolic Form. But for both his generation and more recent writers, this subjectivity was a psychological or philosophical factor, to be viewed in positive terms. 88 However, the postmodern—more specifically, the feminist—critique of subjectivity is that it is a social factor, associated with power. Linear perspective gained its prestige initially with the aid of gender inequities. It was aligned with men, such as the creator-genius Brunelleschi and the interpreter-publicist Alberti, who hinted at their competition with female nature, in a game of challenge and dominance that male artists would later claim to have won. When, thanks to the efforts of such artists as Piero, Leo­nardo, and Luca Pacioli, perspective theory moved into the category of science, it was on the grounds of its claim to objectivity. Finally, linear perspective became the “accurate” way to present the world,

and its authoritative representation of visual experience lasted through much of the nineteenth century. It was replaced, not by a superior form of accurate representation, but by a denial of the artistic value of objective vision itself, and a glorification of subjective expression over both visual experience and nature.89 Alberti’s costruzione legittima is the archetypal embodiment of the principle of power hierarchy, for scale hierarchies operate in every millimeter of depicted space. A less visible but equally important hierarchy is that implied in the relation between the costruzione legittima and the world of nature. It begins (at the lowest level) with the material world of objects and forms, whose relationships are random and disorganized. At a higher level are the ordering principles known to creative Nature, which set the random elements into a more coherent and structured relationship. Perhaps above this, but in any case apart from it, is the artist, who learns what he needs to know from Nature, in order to create the image of a spatial field in linear perspective. The latter work of art is an end product that may be highest of all, as a parallel world potentially more perfect than that created by Nature. As a modern writer observed of linear perspective, “by discovering, obeying, and manipulating natural laws, with an increasing emphasis on quantification and measurement, art was seen to deprive nature of mysteries and to achieve a mastery exemplified by rational prediction.”90 A woodcut of 1525 by Albrecht Dürer illustrates a practical application of perspective theory in terms that clarify both its gender and its power underpinnings (Fig. 33). A male artist is shown partitioned off from his model by the framing device

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described by Alberti, a veil stretched on a rectangular frame, whose warp and woof form a grid structure, through which the artist clinically scrutinizes her proportions and transfers them to a squared sheet. Through the Albertian gridded velo and its drawing-board counterpart, Dürer’s draftsman organizes nature’s forms, appearances, and proportions into a system whose order and logic depend entirely upon the man’s controlling eye—subjectivity enshrined as mathematical law—whose masculinity is appropriately (and comically) underscored by the phallic object that establishes the sight line. Dürer’s reclining female body is, surely, a metonymic figure for Nature herself. This is signified not only through her sex (at a time when female models were not commonly used in the studio), but also in her recumbent positioning that echoes the horizon itself, with an identity implied between her breasts and the pair of like-shaped mountains directly above them. Creative and material nature are here conflated into a single entity: she is objectified, passive matter, a mere model waiting to be given meaningful form by the creative powers of the artist. Yet she is also Natura, ignominiously laid out on a table, her whole body, and perhaps her generative organs as well, exposed to the artist’s searching, controlling gaze, whose secrets are to be exposed to rational analysis and technological ordering.91 Considered metaphorically, Alberti’s veil image seems to reverse the ancient formulation of Macrobius: the veil is no longer Natura’s protective covering of her secrets, but a construction of the artist, who uses it to assist his miraculous reproduction of her body.92 In structure, the simile is the same—a veil stands between the artist and nature—yet each term has a new position. Nature has gone from being naturans to naturata, and the veil is not hers but his. Previously figured with all the things that she knows and concealing what vulgar eyes should not see, the veil is now transparent or translucent, so that the artist sees through it to obtain and measure her secrets. The artist’s action is not an intemperate, illegal violation, but a cool, rational, and legitimate process. Alberti’s very term, costruzione legittima, bears the trace of argumentation, a sub­ textual insistence that no one—least of all, Nature—has been violated in this process. Although Dürer’s woodcut illustrates and derives from the perspective theory first codified by Alberti,93 Alberti himself did not pose the artist’s relationship with Nature in such extreme power terms. However, Alberti’s position on women in general was equally misogynist, and he articulated the case for patriarchal rule in absolute terms. In the treatise De familia, largely written in the early 1430s, Alberti describes the ideal

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family ruled by its proper pater familias, the absolute master of everyone beneath him: children, wife, relatives, and servants. Because men are of stronger character and “by nature of a more elevated mind than women,” who are “timid by nature, soft, slow, and therefore more useful when they sit still and watch over our things,” wives should obey their husbands, submit to being trained by them, and maintain silence in the household.94 In De iciarchia, a dialogue written late in his life, Alberti sustains the same model for civic and familial harmony under patriarchy. By contrast with women, who are associated by nature with cupidity, incontinence, inconsiderateness, bad language, and superficiality, man is by nature impelled to know things, distinguished above all by his reason, his disposition to learn and to teach.95 Alberti’s model was, of course, not so different from actual bourgeois family life in Florence, which it may have influenced (De familia was circulated as a handbook among fifteenthcentury Florentine families).96And yet the patriarchal binaries that govern Alberti’s description of male-female relationships in the social treatises—domination and submission, active and passive, rational and irrational—are totally absent in his characterization of the male artist and female Nature. I suggest that this was because for Alberti, and for this period in general, Nature was more like a mother than a wife. The artist did not yet dare regard himself as Nature’s legitimate superior, for she had greater prestige. Like a boy speaking of his biological mother, Alberti describes Nature in carefully respectful terms, while sneaking in occasional proud boasts of his own. In the Ten Books on Architecture, he strongly affirms Nature’s superior power, and cautions against open disobedience: “For so great is Nature’s strength that . . . she will always overcome and destroy any opposition or impediment; and any stubbornness, as it were, displayed against her, will eventually be overthrown and destroyed by her continual and persistent onslaught. . . . We ought to be careful, then, to avoid any under­ taking that is not in complete accordance with the laws of Nature.”97 In the prologue to Della pittura, Alberti characterizes Nature as the producer of artists, like the progenitor of a race. Lamenting the disappearance of the great artists of antiquity, he writes that “Nature, the mistress of things, had grown old and tired. She no longer produced either geniuses or giants which in her youthful and more glorious days she had produced so marvellously and abundantly.”98 In this formulation, Nature is a mother who, in her production of creative artists at the peak of her maternal powers, is a natural collaborator with the artist, his facilitator and not his opponent. But if Mother Nature is

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nurturing and noncompetitive, the artist himself may, as he matures, wish to alter the power terms of the relationship. Like a parent, Nature “is not at all easy to understand and very perplexing,” yet Alberti assures his artist brothers that her secrets can be found by a man “if he uses his ingenuity.”99 The architect is advised to “gather and store in his mind anything of note, either dispersed and scattered abroad, or hidden in the remotest recesses of Nature, that might lend his works remarkable praise and glory.”100 The respectful yet slyly subversive son now recognizes that if he steals his mother’s secrets he can put them to new advantage. In his quest to discover Nature’s principles of operation, Alberti expresses both an abiding respect for Nature’s wisdom and a growing confidence in the artist’s creative intelligence. Like Dürer, Alberti invokes Macrobius, who had described Natura as hostile to exploitation by the vulgar and willing to reveal her secrets only to superior intellects. Brunelleschi’s position was similar, and perhaps even more elitist, to judge from scattered remarks plausibly ascribed to him. The architect allegedly recommended the entrustment of nature’s secrets to experts,101 and in a sonnet, he once claimed: “Only the artist, not the fool / Discovers that which nature hides.”102 A changing power relationship is implied in the latter formulation, which brings it closer in spirit to Dürer’s print, for the artist gains power from Nature by making her reveal what she wishes to withhold. Later, in sixteenth-century art theory, seventeenth-century scientific writings, and in ubiquitously gendered language, this would become much more explicitly a quest to tease out Nature’s secrets for the sake of gaining power over her. In the Quattrocento, however, the construct is not yet sexualized: Nature is still Mother, not yet wife or mistress. The artist is Nature’s competitor, but he does not yet dream of mastery, only of rivalry. That Alberti and Brunelleschi sought to justify their activity through reference to Nature is, simultaneously, a sign of the awe in which Nature was still held in the Quattrocento and a clue to what they were up to. They had set out to rival Nature, which effectively meant to displace her in the physical world through cultural production, but this could not be admitted openly, and thus the effusive and somewhat disingenuous homages to Nature’s superior wisdom. The incipient competition was revealed, however, in their growing masculinist claims for the genius of the artist and his creations—most especially the great dome—which externalized their psychic struggle with Nature as a psychomachia of gender.

the dome and masculinist mythology Obsolescent as a symbol of Mother power, the dome’s ovoid structure was, ironically, still needed for support (oddly, the formulation works for both architecture and childrearing). It may have been the growing desire to suppress this fact that produced exaggerated claims for technological achievements. Virtually the only new thing about Brunelleschi’s plan for vaulting the dome was his promise to construct it without centering.103 This proposal, which had been specified in the original program, thrilled the architect’s contemporaries and followers. Why was it so important to build the dome without centering? And why was Brunelleschi heroized for the mere technical execution of what had already been envisioned? Indeed, the terms of his glorification seem excessive for his actual achievement. Though practical considerations were significant, they were surely not insurmountable. The obsessive desire to build the dome without armature and the extravagant praise heaped on Brunelleschi for this achievement suggest a symbolic rather than technological reading. They point to a hero narrative: Brunelleschi as the divine talent, God’s engineer, who saved a situation that Antonio Manetti described as “desperate.”104 But the documents do not support this singularity of achievement. For one thing, Ghiberti’s role in the dome’s design may never have been properly credited, as Trachtenberg has argued.105 (Likewise, although the design of the Campanile was the composite production of Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Francesco Talenti, it was Giotto who became the heroic designer of that equally aspiring structure.)106 To raise the great dome unsupported from the ground, to make it self-sustaining, is to escape the gravity that is the earth’s force. To leap into the air, or to fly free of the earth, is a recurrent dream of masculinist mythology, reenacted by heroes from Perseus and Daedalus to Superman and Batman. A sculptural relief on the Campanile depicts Daedalus (Fig. 34), the Promethean hero who, in a modern writer’s description, “captured the imagination of man as first conquerer of the air.”107 In mythic terms, Daedalus’s flight represents the transcendent escape from the earth itself—anciently the site of dark, chthonian female powers—by the male hero, who is identified by contrast with the sky, with light, and with the alleged superiority of spirit over matter. Brunelleschi himself embraced the Daedalian dream in his sonnet addressed to Acquettini: “We rise above corruptible matter / And gain the strength of clearest sight.”108 The dream of transcending the material world figures in another fable of the Florentine dome. All of Brunelleschi’s 49

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34.  Workshop of Giotto and Andrea Pisano, hexagonal relief of Daedalus, 1330s. From the Campanile of the Cathedral, south face, first zone. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. 35.  Pollaiuolo, Hercules and Antaeus, c. 1460. Tempera on wood. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

biographers mention unsuccessful proposals for vaulting the dome, but they describe only one: filling the vault with earth to support the shell during construction.109 As Vasari embellished his description, the earth mound would contain coins, to insure its later removal without cost, because the citizens could be expected to dig it out to get at the money. This solution, a variation on an established medieval practice,110 was in Manetti’s narrative rejected by the operai. Obviously, it was old-fashioned: literally earthbound, rooted in physical matter and in the materialism ascribed to the Florentines. One sees the metaphoric valence of the earth mound story in the fact that it was also told about the Pantheon. Jacopo da Voragine, wanting to deprecate a pagan structure, described the Pantheon’s earth-and-coins construction with exactly the same details, deeming it unmiraculous and ultimately a failure (he viewed the oculus as a collapsed vault).111 Brunelleschi’s transcendent solution, a triumph of mind over matter, was consonant with a familiar humanist claim that the difference between nature and art was mind.

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The liberation of man’s creative spirit from the sphere of Mother Earth is also symbolized in the numerous Quattrocento depictions of the theme of Hercules and Antaeus. In Pollaiuolo’s diminutive sculpture and painting on this theme (Fig. 35), Hercules, a hero with whom Florence was infatuated, defeated Antaeus by lifting him and disconnecting him from the earth, the source of Antaeus’s great strength (he was the son of Neptune and Gaia), thus disempowering an opponent who was a kind of stand-in for the Mother power.112 The theme of Hercules and Antaeus, rarely imaged in antiquity, was not even one of the canonical twelve labors, yet this scene was chosen around 1400 to represent the deeds of Hercules on the Porta della Mandorla of the cathedral, along with the hero’s first two labors, the killing of the Nemean Lion and the slaying of the Hydra. The same trio recurs in three large works painted by Pollaiuolo for the Medici Palace (the diminutive Uffizi pictures derive from two of these).113 In the circle of Mantegna, the encounter with Antaeus was the single most frequently depicted deed of Hercules.114 The exaggerated importance of

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36.  Pisa Baptistery, with the Cathedral behind, twelfth–thirteenth century. Photo: SEF/Art Resource, NY.

this theme is a clue to its core meaning in the Quattrocento: this was, I suggest, the struggle of the male hero, whether Hercules, Daedalus, or the artist, to escape the domination of female Nature.115 The transcendent liberation of spirit from earthbound matter is also expressed in the external articulation of the Florentine dome. Brunelleschi successfully concealed the dome’s visual resemblance to its organic model by laying another structure over the ovoid core. The dome is reformulated as a dynamic, upward-thrusting shape through the eight strong ribs and the powerfully vertical lantern that caps it. This shaping in the finish distinguishes the Florentine Duomo from all the domed structures that preceded it. It differs dramatically from the smoothly rotund Pisa Cathedral dome crowned with a ball (Fig. 36), or the more squat Siena Cathedral dome that originally resembled the Pisa dome (Fig. 26).116 Brunelleschi’s dome also differs subtly from the one depicted in the Spanish Chapel fresco (Fig. 20), painted in anticipation of the arrival of God’s engineer. In Bonaiut0’s Trecento image, the dome is

essentially hemispherical, and though it has ribs, they lack energy, dissolving into meandering floral decoration, while the structure is crowned by a delicate onion-tipped lantern with Gothic arches that are not aligned with the ribs that gather at its base. By contrast, the lantern designed by Brunelleschi (completed after his death in 1446) is now in a pure classical vocabulary (Plate 1), and proportionally taller than earlier lanterns. This powerful and dramatic terminus gathers the lines of force traced by the ribs into a concentrated structure, sustaining the vertical drive initiated in the dome’s elongation, and pointing upward to the sky in sheer aspiration, like Daedalian wings. Brunelleschi’s aesthetics of upwardism had a counterpart in Alberti’s personal device, the image of a winged eye (Fig. 37). Here is an emblem that champions vision over all the other senses, and privileges transcendent flight over material, earth-based nature. Alberti’s accompanying legend Quid tum? or “what next?” might be said to epitomize progressivism and upwardism.117 This upward aspiration was again expressed

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37.  Matteo de’ Pasti, commemorative medal of Leon Battista Alberti, 1446–50. Verso: Alberti’s impresa of the winged eye and motto quid tum. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

when the dome was consecrated in 1436, a ritual event marked by music and art that evoked the celestial Paradise and celebrated the Assumption and Coronation of Santa Maria del Fiore as Queen of Heaven (and Florence)—the Virgin now taken literally to new heights, ascending from the earth that she had only recently ruled as the Madonna of Humility.118 Metaphors of flying and sailing are evoked in the language of the dome’s documentation. Manetti describes Brunelleschi’s method of vaulting as a form called “crests and sails,” the dome’s ribs being called creste in the documents, and the surfaces of the exterior vault between them, vela.119 This figure of speech, as well as Brunelleschi’s expressed desire that the cupola have an inflated form,120 moves the dome, metaphorically, away from the old realm of the Madonna’s nursing breast to the new world of terrestrial navigation. Indeed, the development of linear perspective and Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America in 1492 have been linked. Samuel Edgerton connected both with the early Quattrocento discovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia, which included a system of mapping the globe, and argued that Brunelleschi’s “geometrical grid system for visualizing spaces” lay behind his friend Paolo Toscanelli’s advice to the Portuguese court in 1474, and later to Columbus

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himself, on how to chart navigational routes on the spherical earth.121 Edgerton emphasizes the technical connections, but I would call attention to the mythic and symbolic ones: Brunelleschi’s miraculous appropriation and technological transformation of the round cosmic mother symbol could have emboldened those who envisioned the circumscription of the globe. The Age of Exploration that ensued is a logical extension of Alberti’s costruzione legittima, fueled by the desire to survey and map, and the drive toward conquest. In perspective construction, the natural environment is plotted and populated with specific objects; in the eyes of the explorers, the natural world was viewed as measurable territories and controllable peoples such as the Indians of the New World, whose difference—in their avowed closeness to Mother Earth, they were Nature and Other—generated new metaphors of culture and nature, of virgin land and peoples in need of cultivation.122 From this viewpoint, it is entirely understandable that Vasari’s story of Brunelleschi smashing the egg on end was also told in Renaissance Italy with Columbus as the hero.123 Not all anecdotes that accrue to history reveal deeper meaning, of course, yet some, such as the egg story, point to mythmaking shaped by collective wish fulfillment. Another tale told about Brunelleschi’s dome further indicates that the project was understood on some level as a symbolic gendered competition. According to his Renaissance biographers, Brunelleschi’s model for the lantern brought forth competitors, including an anonymous woman who had the nerve to produce her own model.124 This story is unlikely to be true, since women at that time played no part in the world of architecture. It is tempting to imagine that the architect’s invisible competitor, Natura, has been domesticated as a Florentine woman—according to Vasari, she came from the house of Gaddi. In the topsy-turvy realm of mythic rationalization, this woman competes to design the very part of the structure that was most novel and most masculinist, and of course she loses, yielding the palm to Brunelleschi’s superior model. Is this a way of mediating Mother Nature’s potential displeasure at an improper erection? For, through the design of the lantern, Brunelleschi effectively changed the cupola’s gestalt. With its swelling curves, the dome continues to evoke the egg, the natural shape that was its model, and the female breast that symbolizes the function of the church it surmounts. These associations have been obfuscated and countered, however, not only by the architectural theory that directs our minds elsewhere, but also by the

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strongly vertical lantern that caps the dome. It is telling that Brunelleschi’s lantern was occasionally described in the Quattrocento as a pinna,125 which, in addition to being the root of our word “pinnacle,” is an alternative form of the word for wing or feather, penna. Both words are also close to pene, penis, a resemblance that modern feminist scholars have drawn upon to connect the pen with the masculinity of authorship.126 With this pinnacle, an archetypal phallic form that pierces an archetypal female form, Brunelleschi effectively neutralized the ancient female powers of the dome.127 For if the dome is the crown of the church—its superior, ruling element—then the lantern is the crown of the dome, its dominator. To be sure, lanterns are necessary for the stability of domes. Yet earlier lanterns more frequently surmounted angular shapes, such as the Florentine Baptistery, and if they crowned domes, as in the Pisa Baptistery (Fig. 36), they were conceived more organically, as a part that flowed from the cupola itself, like the nipple of the breast.128 By separating this element from the dome, Brunelleschi transformed a unitary natural allusion into a binary, to create a reconfigured cosmic theme: matter uplifted by spirit, nature perfected by art. The mythic struggle between the female force of nature and the male force of art is carried to the very summit of the lantern, where their powers are symbolized in the orb surmounted by the cross, emblem of Christ Pantocrator, ruler of the earth. This union of male and female symbols predated Christianity. However, its ancient Egyptian form, the ankh, had the orb on top, and the crosspiece on the bottom, an ideogram that survives in the scientific symbol for woman. The early Christian church inverted the form, one of many patriarchal appropriations and inversions of ancient symbols of female power, to produce the symbol of Christ Pantocrator, and later, of the Church Triumphant.129 The orb and cross that surmount the Florentine dome, later added by the sculptor Verrocchio, were explicitly called for by Brunelleschi.130 He was not the first to place this Christian symbol atop a building, but he was the first to crown a large domed structure with a separate, tectoni-

cally defined lantern, creating a two-part form that replicated in grand scale the symbolic ideogram that crowned the whole. This symbolic appropriation and containment of female cosmic powers would be repeated in the succession of great Christian domes, from St. Peter’s to St. Paul’s and beyond. When Brunelleschi’s dome was completed in 1446, and the lantern, globe, and cross set in place a few decades later, Florentines were given a symbol that transformed the nurturing and protective powers of the Virgin into a bright new vision of security and progress as promised by technology. A contemporary celebrated Brunelleschi for the spectacular achievement that would insure his everlasting fame, invoking the theme of the permanence of art over corporeal mortality: “Even if a body is dead fame does not die/Not that of Filippo di ser Brunellesco/Nor will it ever die until the end of time.”131 Nature was seen as challenged by this gigantic miracle of Art, so large that it intrudes into her own physical realm (Fig. 19). The same poet described the dome as “tall as a great mountain,” while Vasari later boasted that the dome “rises to such a height that the mountains about Florence look like its companions.” 132 (Francesco Bocchi would later repeat the description of the dome as a “formidable mountain,” framing his discussion with the theme of Nature vanquished by Art.)133 Embellishing his own vision, Vasari imagines a worried Nature, angry to be outdone by this man-made mountain: “Indeed one would say that the heavens are incensed against it since it is continually being struck by lightning.” The conceit of Nature’s jealousy of triumphant Art would be sustained in the sixteenth century, but that is a story for a later chapter. This story, however, has an epilogue. In 1601, half a century after Vasari’s account was written, the giant orb and cross surmounting the cathedral dome were struck again by lightning, and this time the Christianizing, patriarchalizing emblem was destroyed, along with the tip of the lantern.134 I cannot tell you who was responsible, but if Nature had her own mythographers, I’m sure that we would know.

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Reproduction is essentially that work, that production by women, through which the appropriation by men of all the work of women proceeds.  —monique wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays

Genesis and the Reproduction of Life Chapter Three 

Masaccio and Michelangelo

Dante once visited Giotto’s home, according to a fourteenthcentury commentator, where he was surprised to see that several of the artist’s children were very ugly. The poet asked the painter how it was that he made figures so attractive in his art, “while your own family is so dreadful.” Giotto answered: “Because I create by daylight but procreate in the dark.” This pun (which is ancient, for Macrobius told a similar joke)1 depends upon a connection between the products of the artist’s paintbrush and his penis, and it may serve to introduce a complex interdependent relationship in Western culture— linguistic, conceptual, and visual—between artistic creation and human procreation. In Renaissance art theory, human artistic creation is persistently described in the terms of birth and reproduction. For sixteenth-century theorists, the highest plane of artistic activity was characterized by the words concetto (concept or idea) and ingegno (genius or superior intelligence), which are manifestly superior to arte (skill of hand) and pratica (studio practice). Concetto (Latin, conceptus, concipire) and ingegno (Latin, ingenium, ingenere) are etymologically linked with the conception and generation of human life.2 Indeed, a birth metaphor is central to the self-characterization of the period we still call the Renaissance. The term rinascita, rebirth, supposedly first used in the sixteenth-century, implies that a cultural revolution had been naturally born, not made.3 The definition of art and culture through metaphors of birth stands at odds with an equally ancient comparison between

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human artistic creativity and God’s creation of the world, so old and pervasive it has been called “the great analogy”:4 the male deity creates the universe out of nothing, breathing life and “spirit” into inanimate matter. Man, created in God’s image, alone of all creatures has comparable creative powers— an affiliation formulated theoretically by Leon Battista Alberti, Marsilio Ficino, and Leo­nardo da Vinci, and expressed in Michelangelo’s celebration by his contemporaries as a divinely inspired genius.5 In the preface to the Lives, Vasari intertwines God’s creation of the world with the beginning of artistic creativity.6 Yet whereas man’s creativity is expressed in metaphors of biological reproduction, God’s primal creation is defined in metaphors of art: as we saw in chapter 1, Plato’s cosmic creator was an artisan-god, and the creator God of Genesis is described as a “divine potter.” This is the language, as John A. Phillips has pointed out, not of births such as those described in female creation myths, but of craftsmanship and technology.7 Curiously, the biosphere is said to have been fabricated, and cultural events are said to have been born. The universe was created by deus faber, while homo faber operates as a parturating mother. This displacement of biological and technological functions is a sign of the missing, suppressed term of “the great analogy,” which is the reproductive power of both women and nature, everywhere apparent in the world yet nowhere mentioned in the texts. Observing that the transcendent Jehovah (Yahweh) of Genesis makes a world with his hands, not from

Masaccio and Michelangelo

his body, some writers have suggested that Yahweh’s ex nihilo creation was framed in opposition to the Mother Goddess of ancient Mesopotamian creation myths who created life out of her own substance, the way that living women do. Yahweh, whose historical appearance coincides with the establishment of patriarchy, may thus have been invented “in order to break the ties of humanity to blood, soil, and nature.”8 The patriarchal model was supported by mythology that inverted natural processes. Eve is “born” of Adam’s rib. Zeus impregnated and then swallowed the Titan Metis, so that she could give birth only through him. The outcome was Pallas Athena, “born” full grown from the head of her father. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Apollo declares apocalyptically that women don’t give birth at all: “The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows. . . . There can be a father without any mother. . . . ”9 This viewpoint is echoed in Aristotle’s dictum that woman cannot procreate, for “having no seed she is without the causa formalis that can generate her own essence out of herself. Her essence is thus subject to the male, in whose essence is male and female both.”10 Improbable as it seems, Aristotle’s version of male-sponsored generation and the biblical myth of God’s creation of Eve from Adam’s body have remained Western civilization’s chief paradigms for the prevailing view of the roles of the sexes in procreation. The influential combination of scriptural and Aristotelian explanations of human generation produced a dogma that survived virtually unquestioned until the modern era: the male spark is primary in the creation of life, since it infuses spirit into the receiving matter of the female body. Not until the nineteenth century was the female egg and its role in reproduction scientifically confirmed.11 Masculine denial of the female role in generation is all the more remarkable as it ignores the physical evidence: babies emerge from and are nourished by the mother’s body, which is visibly transformed by pregnancy and lactation. Are the masculinist explanations of reproduction simply wishful reversals of the fact that human life is generated from the female body? Psychologist Karen Horney thought so, naming the phenomenon “womb envy,” an idea problematic only in requiring us to believe that men both recognize and value female procreation, while all around are signs of its devaluation.12 One such sign is that the metaphoric connection between creativity and procreativity works for men only. Female reproduction has not been allowed resonance in the symbolic realm. But if we practice what Andrea Dworkin called “double, double unthink”13 and reverse the message of this construct, we might

conclude that men claim to have it all because they deeply fear that women might really have it all, i.e., the power both to bring forth life from their bodies and to generate ideas, thought, and creative energy from their minds.14 To prevent the undesirable gender imbalance that would ensue, men co-opted the metaphoric construct to produce gender imbalance in their favor, claiming creativity uniquely for themselves while assigning to women procreation as a lower category. Male envy of the female role in procreation is perhaps nowhere so transparent as in the practices of alchemy. Alchemy’s central project, the transubstantiation of matter, has been said to mimic the pregnant female body’s transformation of food into milk and tissue into blood. Sally G. Allen and Joanna Hubbs have argued that alchemical symbolism displays “an obsession with reversing, or perhaps even arresting, the feminine hegemony over the process of biological creation.”15 The alchemists claimed to assist Nature in her processes by jogging her rhythms. As a fourteenth-century alchemical text states, “what Nature cannot perfect in a vast space of time we can achieve in a short space of time by our art.”16 Alchemists were especially interested in assisting the generation of metals in the “bosom of the Earth-Mother,” as Mircea Eliade describes it, and they explained the “birth” of ores as the union of two principles, mercury and sulphur, feminine and masculine respectively, which behave like the female and male seed in the conception of a child.17 A frequent alchemical image is the birth of a male child, who, Paracelsus claimed, “by art received life, through art . . . received a body, flesh, bones, and blood, and through art . . . was born.”18 The dream of masculine birth, as Francis Bacon named it,19 and the demotion of the female to nurse, is shown in the first two engravings in Michael Maier’s influential alchemical treatise, Atalanta fugiens of 1618. The first presents Mercury as a virile god pregnant with a child in his belly (Fig. 38). The child is Sulphur, who will become the Philosopher’s Stone. Mercury’s creative powers are stressed in the bursting of cosmic winds from his head, and his hands that echo the life-creating gestures of Michelangelo’s Sistine Jehovah. The second image (Fig. 2) presents the child Sulphur breast-fed by a Mother Earth who serves as its nurse.20 The restriction of the female to a nurturing role in the realm of “mere” animal nature is emphasized in the adjacent figures of animals suckling human babies. Masculine appropriation of maternity could not be more obvious.21 Despite their effort to appropriate her functions, the alchemists continued to acknowledge Natura’s superior powers as late as the seventeenth century. The centrality of Nature as

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Genesis and the Reproduction of Life

38.  Michael Maier, “The Wind Has Carried It in His Belly.” Emblem I from Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim: Hiernymus Galler for Johann Theodor de Bry, 1618). Photo from de Rola, 1988, 71; courtesy Thames and Hudson, London.

their model can be seen in Maier’s Emblema 42, which pre­ sents a personified Natura leading a stumbling artist (or alchemist) down a dark path into the light, while the commentary solemnly warns that “Nature must be the Artist’s guide.”22 In this, the alchemists differed from visual artists, who were by the seventeenth century boasting outright that their own creativity was greater than that of Nature. At the beginning of the Renaissance, however, Nature’s creative power was still regarded as greater than that of Art, and the theory that would support and rationalize art’s triumph over nature had not yet been written. The Quattrocento advocates of art were the first to challenge Nature on her own turf, both through technological displacement, as we saw in the preceding chapter, and in the reproduction of life. In this chapter, I will discuss the second of these, which was a major theme of the early Renaissance: the artist as nature’s competitor in creating living forms. art and the lifelike The great breakthrough in the creation of “lifelike” images has since the fourteenth century been ascribed to Giotto. According to Boccaccio, “Giotto painted all natural objects and arti-

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facts in a completely lifelike manner, so that many persons considered them to be real.” 23 Elsewhere, Boccaccio explains this achievement as a competitive triumph, describing the “powers of ingegno . . . to make each thing resemble nature, intending through this, that these things have the very same effects as do those things produced by nature.”24 A bit later, Filippo Villani wrote that Giotto influenced others to bring “about an art of painting that was once more a zealous imitator of nature, splendid and pleasing.” Giotto’s artistic progeny included a certain “Stefano, nature’s ape,” who so successfully imitated nature, especially the arteries, veins, and sinews of the body, that “as Giotto himself said, his pictures seem only to lack breath and respiration.”25 In the Quattrocento, lifelikeness remained the principal critical and rhetorical standard by which art was measured. Deceptively lifelike images abound in fifteenth-century writings, from timeworn topoi to new examples. Filarete related the standard ancient anecdotes: the painted roof that crows tried to land on, grapes pecked at by birds, dogs barking at painted dogs, and Giotto’s painted flies that fooled Cimabue.26 The Venetian painter Marco Zoppo is said to have painted fruits that deceived his daughter; while a Sicilian rhetorician says of an image in inlaid wood that he “cannot believe it is feigned . . . the books seem truer to me than the true.”27 On the simplest level, these examples extol an art that impersonates the natural world, tricking you into believing that it is not art, but the “real” thing. Art is valued for transcending its genre, which might be taken as a sign of its relatively humble status at that time (though the delights of trompe l’oeil are not time-bound, and may be seen in many different cultures).28 More was at stake, however, in the Trecento and Quattrocento, for the “nature” that was successfully imitated in painted images was not merely things in the world—human bodies, birds, grapes, and flies—it was also the Nature that created the prime examples of those living forms. To paint an image that virtually comes to life is to steal a little of Nature’s awesome power to create life. Hence the most enduring of the rhetorical formulae for defining art’s successful imitations of nature are those that emphasize breath and speech, the telltale signs of a living human: signa spirantia (statues that breathe) and vox sola deest (only the voice is lacking).29 Donatello’s Campanile statues are said to have lacked only the power of speech, provoking the sculptor to shout repeatedly at one of them, the Zuccone, “Speak, speak!”30 These formulae were repeated in the Renaissance, sometimes mindlessly, and sometimes as a handle to philosophical speculation about the relative powers of nature and art. The

Masaccio and Michelangelo

Byzantine humanist Manuel Chrysoloras wondered why representations of living objects “are praised in proportion to the degree in which they seem to resemble their originals,” yet admired over their models in life. The reason, he concludes, is that “we admire not so much the beauties of the bodies in statues and paintings as the beauty of the mind of their maker.”31 Poggio Bracciolini mused about the antique sculpture he collected: “I am moved by the genius of the artist when I see how the very forces of nature are represented in marble. . . . True, nature herself must be greater than those who work like her; but I am forced to admire the art of him who, in mute matter, expresses [her] as living so that often nothing but the spirit seems to be lacking.”32 Bracciolini valued art for transforming its material base into an image of the lifelike, while conceding that nature as creator is greater than the artist. But if the humanist connoisseur was willing to let the matter stand, early Renaissance artists believed and demonstrated that they could steadily improve the simulation of the living in art. The increasingly lifelike depiction of objects is dramatically visible from Giotto through the next generation after him, and this drive (stalled temporarily in the calamitous second half of the Trecento) was resumed as a quest by Masaccio and his Quattrocento followers. Art historians no longer believe that art “progresses,” of course, but we must remember that the Renaissance itself valorized and first theorized the idea of artistic progress. The litany of progress in the imitation of nature was set in Dante’s claim that Giotto had overtaken Cimabue in painting, “so that the fame of the former is obscured.”33 The Cimabue-to-Giotto progression was embellished by Filippo Villani around 1381–82, and then by Lorenzo Ghiberti who, around 1447, set out a literary model for the idea of progress in art, which he got from Pliny’s description of the rise of ancient art.34 In 1473, the Florentine humanist Alamanno Rinuccini expanded the sequence to assert that the arts of painting and sculpture, “graced in earlier times by the genius of Cimabue, of Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi,” had been carried to even greater heights by his own contemporaries—Domenico Veneziano, Donatello, and Masaccio. The latter, he said, “expressed the likeness of everything in nature so well that we seemed to see the things themselves with our eyes.”35 The theory of linear artistic progress in Florence reached its most developed form in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), which presents the rise of art from crude origins to increasing perfection, first in antiquity and again in “modern” times, a rise that Vasari traced from the primitive Cimabue to the genius Michelangelo, the summa of artistic achievement.36

The mentality of what we might call “progressivism” represents one of two modes of perceiving time, named by Stephen Jay Gould “time’s cycle” and “time’s arrow.” 37 In the older, cyclical view held by early agricultural societies, states of being are seen as nature’s own, recurring and fundamentally unchanging, and time has no directional development. By contrast, the historicism of “civilized” societies posits a narrative chain of unrepeatable and uniquely signifying events, which move us toward a causally directed future: God created the world, Noah survived a great flood, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. The polarity of time-thinking has gender dimensions in the sense that it juxtaposes “nature’s” rhythms, the endless, unchanging, female-linked cycles, against the progressive and developmental values of male action upon and in history. The progressivism of artistic style in the Quattrocento, a salient example of “time’s arrow,” was poised to claim success by its own standards, and it had an edge. Through progressive style change, art’s competition with nature could be conducted at a level more sophisticated than that of the rhetorical conceit of figures lacking only speech. For whereas Nature can endlessly replenish the supply of living things in the world, Art can produce an endlessly more lifelike succession of images, a selfimproving commodity. Nature’s specimens not only are imperfect, they do not improve (at least until Darwin came along). Progress ratchets up art’s side in the competition with nature, since to make a better example of a living being is something nature cannot do. Art’s capacity for development was thus deemed superior to the static and cyclical character of nature’s creativity.38 In the later fifteenth century, Francesco di Giorgio contrasted art’s invention of new artifacts that are “almost infinitely various” with animals, who “when they make their nets and webs . . . work always in the same way.” He praised the capacity of human freedom “both to guide nature to her own goals (which only the human intellect could understand) and, beyond nature, to invent new forms that met human needs and embellished human life.”39 Though Francesco spoke of variety rather than progress, he implied that the artist could envision larger goals and inventions to meet new needs. Hence each advance over the preceding level of lifelikeness was also a step toward the goal, as yet only vaguely articulated, of beating Nature at her own game. To fifteenth-century eyes, the most dramatic example of art’s miraculous advance on life-giving nature was the achievement of Masaccio. Seven years after his death at age twentyseven, Masaccio was the sole painter named in Alberti’s preface

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Genesis and the Reproduction of Life

to Della pittura as a founder of the new art, along with Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, and Luca della Robbia. The radical new standard of lifelikeness set in the Brancacci Chapel by this young artist was recognized immediately by his contemporaries, and he soon took his place as the second star, after Giotto, in the trajectory of progressivism. Cristoforo Landino described him in 1481 as the “best imitator of nature,” praising the high relief of his depicted figures, his skill in composition, and his pure, unornamented manner. 40 Michelangelo confirmed these judgments in his early choice of Florentine masters to copy, drawn to Giotto and Masaccio exclusively.41 Around 1500, Leo­nardo explicitly named Masaccio as Giotto’s successor in taking Nature as his teacher and source of artistic nourishment.42 On the framing entrance piers of the Brancacci Chapel, Masaccio’s image of Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden (Plate 2) directly faces Masolino’s image of the Temptation, a Wölfflinian comparison before its time. Masaccio’s giant step beyond Masolino’s rather timid and uninspired figures did not lie in greater anatomical naturalism, for Masolino is comparably advanced, but in form and expressive impact. 43 With their enhanced physical reality—their bulk, the space they carve out, their forward motion—and the recognizable human emotions they so persuasively experience, these human actors appear almost literally to have come to life, to precipitate an anguished moment in a real space. It is the special power of this artistic creation that it still stands as a paradigm of naturalism; for myself and perhaps for many others, no more lifelike image has ever appeared in art. By endowing his Adam and Eve with such marvelous humanity, Masaccio would seem to have performed God’s act of creation. Divine creativity was not yet ascribed to the painter, however; the visual arts remained beneath other art forms in this respect. Cristoforo Landino argued in 1482 that the poet was divinely inspired, creating ex nihilo, out of nothing, like God, by contrast with those human arts that merely transformed matter.44 Because they worked so closely with physical materials, painters and sculptors could not easily detach themselves from the inferior part of the Aristotelian form-matter dyad. Perhaps for this reason, progressive naturalism in the early Renaissance found a powerful strategy for competing with Nature in the realm of depicted space, as a negation of that materiality that so stubbornly clung to art. To create the illusion of a living, vital space on the surface of a wall or panel is to dissolve that material surface, to sublimate matter. The painter’s new creation is empty space, a magic realm in which lifelike depicted bodies could function, and through which

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homo faber could escape the material world that binds him to the physical earth. Masaccio achieves dematerialization partly through linear perspective, but primarily by creating virtual sculptures, aggressive bulky solids that stand out against a recessive background. With the powerful tool of invented light, he gives the forms mass and volume, which makes the surrounding space seem empty. Indispensable for the illusion of light is the cast shadow, which, like God’s inspiriting breath, brings dimension and life to the image. As E. H. Gombrich observed, “the appearance of a shadow testifies to the solidity of an object, for what casts a shadow must be real.”45 The shadow is a duplication of essence, a thing reified by its double. Most simply, light and shadow introduce the element of specific time into art. Masaccio’s fusion of light-shade, real time, and the breath of life was caught by Paul Hills, who wrote of the Tribute Money: “As we are each conditioned by the diurnal cycle from night to day, darkness to light, sleep to waking, so it may dawn upon us that Masaccio’s light is as much an expression of the fundamental sense of being alive as a representation of a visible reality.”46 It was their ability to create new life that distinguished Giotto and Masaccio for their peers and successors. The epitaph written for Giotto over a century after his death by Agnolo Poliziano sustained his mythic status in just these terms: “Lo, I am he by whom dead Painting was restored to life, by whose right hand all was possible, by whom art became one with nature.”47 The epitaph written for Masaccio in 1550 by Annibale Caro similarly defines him as life-giver: “I painted, and my picture was like life;/I gave my figures movement, passion, soul:/They breathed. Thus, all others/Buonarroti taught; he learnt from me.” Another epitaph laments the taking of Masaccio, in the flower of his youth, by jealous Lachesis, the Fate who measures the length of human lives.48 These writers catch the irony that Masaccio gave life to art and gave up his own life almost in the same breath. genesis, generation, and population Masolino and Masaccio’s choices of Genesis subjects, the Temptation and Expulsion respectively, though perhaps arbitrary, were poetically apt. Masolino’s couple, in more archaic style, remain in the Garden, a world in cyclical time without seasons, change, or (until this moment) incidents.49 Masaccio’s banished first parents, by contrast, step into progressive time, into a world of raking light and cast shadows, nights and days, beginnings and endings, mutability and mortality. A new ar-

Masaccio and Michelangelo

tistic modality is inaugurated in Masaccio’s images of the first humans, who step into the order of human time and accelerate the narrative time of art. The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise is often taken to symbolize the beginning of history, the moment that separated the world of the Garden, where humans lived in freedom without responsibility, sharply and forever from the world they were cursed to enter, the painful world of work (Adam) and ceaseless reproduction (Eve). Some writers have interpreted the story as a myth about the transition from Paleolithic hunting-gathering to Neolithic agriculture.50 Others have argued that the Expulsion was a parable of inversion, created to support the beginnings of patriarchy and the death of the Mother Goddess religion. Like Gaia and Natura, Eve may be an inverted remnant of the ancient generative Mother Goddess, with whom she is linked through her Hebrew name Hawwãh, which means “Mother of All the Living.”51 In Christian interpretations of Genesis, Eve is said to bring death into the world, and she represents “fallen nature,” fallen by her very nature and as a symbol of Nature itself.52 The doctrine of Original Sin was woven out of Creation texts to explain the natural world as flawed and humans as fallen, and to blame the female for the loss of Paradise. According to some accounts, it was not the Temptation, but Eve’s creation alone that brought evil to the world.53 Early Christian theologians, conspicuously Augustine and Tertullian, identified female lust as the cause of original sin.54 The Judeo-Christian identification of Eve with fallen, corruptive nature defined her for the Middle Ages as diabolical and evil.55 In the canonical Creation narrative, Adam is created by God from dust of the earth, while the inferior Eve is created out of Adam’s body, secondary both to Adam and to God.56 The serpent tempts Eve, not Adam, because she is weaker in reason and subject to flattery. She is also closer to bestial nature, often materially identified with the serpent, who is sometimes shown with a female head; occasionally Eve is present as the serpent.57 Eve represents carnality, opposed to Adam’s spirituality. Many thinkers were discomforted by Adam’s origins from humble earth, but they rationalized it on philosophical grounds. The Renaissance humanist Gianozzo Manetti compared the initial act of human creation, when Prometheus gave sculptural form to clay, to God’s “mould[ing] man as a form in His own image, than which nothing can be more perfect, from the mud of the earth.”58 Adam is the model for human free will and creativity. He is given the power by God to name the animals, even to name Eve. Adam’s relative free will defines him as outside nature,

like God, and outside the natural cycles that are woman’s realm. He is also distinguished from woman/nature by his moral strength. In the apocryphal Books of Adam and Eve, Eve is seduced by Satan not once but twice, and she moans to Adam that she should die for her weakness and infidelity. Adam, “heroic and strong,” obtains forgiveness for her, in order that the race be perpetuated.59 Because he assumed responsibility for the fate of civilization, Adam became the antetype of Christ, who was described by Paul as the second Adam. 60 By contrast, Eve is the antetype of Mary, who redeems her sin. The female sex comes in two varieties, evil and perfect, while the male sex offers a single, endlessly repeatable model of perfection itself. For nineteenth-century biblical scholars, tasting the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge was inappropriate for Eve but not Adam, since knowledge fitted him for civilization. 61 This creative misreading of Genesis was grounded in Renaissance interpretations of the Fall as expressing “the human achievement of self-consciousness,” the species distinguishing itself from nature.62 Quattrocento Florentine humanists used the Creation legend to mythologize the beginning of human arts and industry. Manetti proudly described man as creator of a “second nature,” the historical and technological world superimposed on God’s divine natural creation: After that first, new and rude creation of the world, everything seems to have been discovered, constructed and completed by us out of some singular and outstanding acuteness of the human mind. For those things are ours . . . are seen to be produced by men: all homes, all towns, all cities, finally all buildings in the world. . . . Ours are the paintings, ours the sculptures, ours the arts, ours the sciences, ours . . . the wisdoms, . . . ours are all the different kinds of languages and literatures.63

As a fable of patriarchal self-discovery, the Fall brought pain and work, but also creative opportunity. And thus were Adam’s agricultural and constructive labors validated over Eve’s biological ones. In Trecento imagery, Adam’s labors initiated the development of the arts. The hexagonal reliefs on the Florentine Campanile (1334–before 1348), executed by Andrea Pisano probably after designs by Giotto, begin on the western face with the Creations and First Labors of Adam and Eve, and continue with Jabal (the first herdsman), Jubal (inventor of musical instruments), Tubalcain (first smith), and Noah (first cultivator of the vine). On the southern and eastern faces appear personifications of mechanical arts such as astronomy, medicine, weaving, navigation, agriculture, sculpture, paint-

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ing, and architecture. Noting that the Fall is absent here, Marvin Trachtenberg claimed that the Campanile program celebrated “the theme of creativity” itself: God’s creation as a model, and the activities of the first parents as “the first creative acts of mankind.”64 Yet, even as early Quattrocento theologians, humanists, and artists assigned God-like creativity and free will to man, they made an equally strong case for man’s ascendant role in procreation and human reproduction. They wished to claim Natura’s powers along with those of God. Gianozzo Manetti, for example, asserted that men “profit future ages” and gain immortality of the soul by planting trees, constructing buildings, writing works of art and science, and by their “continuous procreation of children.”65 The belief that human conception was primarily brought about by males remained the dominant view throughout the Renaissance, thanks largely to the long shadow of Aristotle, whose ideas on human generation were accepted through the sixteenth century. Aristotle’s position that female seed did not exist was generally maintained in the Renaissance against clear evidence to the contrary. Hippocrates’ belief that both sexes had seed (or life-generating organs) had been confirmed by Mundinus (1275–1326), whose dissections led to the discovery of the ovaries. Galen, too, had identified the ovaries, but called them “testes,” female testicles that were smaller and weaker than those of men. The Hippocratic-Galenic doctrine of the four humors, in which women are cold and moist while men are warm and dry, was joined with the Aristotelian view that women do not generate enough heat to produce semen, to establish the Renaissance position. 66 Dante twice describes the dominant male role in procreation, reflecting the understanding of his era that would remain authoritative for the next three centuries. In the Convivo, Dante explains generation as the result of male seed implanted into its female receptacle, deriving its power from the soul of the father—a pure echo of Aristotle’s doctrine of masculine form acting on feminine matter. In the Purgatorio, the Roman poet Statius lectures Dante and Virgil on human embryology, describing the male active power, semen, as coagulating and vivifying the matter it causes to “set.” The resultant embryo, produced by Nature, is then given spirit, rational soul, by the Prime Mover, i.e., God, who breathes the spirit into it.67 The Aristotelian model of reproductive biology interacted dynamically with Renaissance art theory, as modern writers have shown.68 Just as Aristotle, Galen, and Thomas Aquinas had explained procreation through the analogy of art, equating the artist with masculine form and the artist’s materials with

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female matter, so sixteenth-century theorists like Vasari and Cellini named disegno or rilievo, drawing or sculpture, as the “fertile ‘father’ from whom the arts were born.”69 I will return to these Cinquecento writers in chapter 9, but let us consider for a moment the application of the form-matter dyad in its pretheorized manifestation within the fictive world of early Quattrocento painting. Within this imaginary realm, it is not the materia of paint that corresponds to matter, but space, now set into a binary relationship with form. Like matter, space is dependent upon form to give it substance. Otherwise it is literally nothing— passive, inert, invisible. In Aristotelian terms, form has the seed, space doesn’t. The artist cannot “create” space directly, only by constructing forms whose relationships to each other establish a spatial envelope around and between them. And thus he gives conceptual form to inchoate space, an idea expressed vividly in perspective construction. In Western art discourse it is always tacitly clear that form is valued more than space. The creation of rilievo by Giotto and Masaccio, for example, is expostulated and praised by Cennini, Alberti, and Landino.70 This inferior position of pictorial space derives from its feminized position in the dyad of form-space, which is shaped by the Aristotelian dyad of form-matter. In Oriental art and thought, by contrast, form and space are regarded as dynamically interdependent, philosophically equal, as in the archetype of Yin and Yang. Characteristic is Lao Tse’s description of a ceramic vessel: “With a wall all around/A clay bowl is molded;/ But the use of the bowl/will depend on the part/of the bowl that is void.”71 The ascendant values that would resonate in Western art theory—down to Lionello Venturi’s plastic solidity, Clive Bell’s significant form, and Bernard Berenson’s tactile values—were grounded in the fifteenth-century practice that produced weighty and palpable, rounded solid forms in an airless space. The gendered roles of form and matter in reproduction (both kinds) find a moral counterpart in the idea of procreation as a male-generated activity that battles death. The narrative and visual imagery of Genesis helped naturalize this idea. Eve brings time, death, and human weakness into this world, while Adam gains both Natura’s procreative powers and God’s creativity and moral compass. Masaccio’s Expulsion, once more, is a potent exemplum. In carefully differentiated ways, the figures’ gestures and expressions telegraph their grief and shame, the first human emotions. Their hands fly to where the implications of their trespass lie, implications that are genderdistinct. Eve covers her genitals and breasts, because ceaseless

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procreation will be her lot; while Adam’s hands go to his head, the seat of consciousness, since he alone has comprehended their tragic fate.72 The figures are marked by a critical anatomical difference. Eve’s covering of her genitalia signifies the shame of original sin, but Adam’s genitals are not only not covered, they are unusually prominent, as has been revealed in the restorations that removed the foliage now believed to date from the eighteenth century. The extent to which Masaccio’s de-figleafed Adam has turned out to be unusually well endowed is measured in the hue and cry about the exposure of his genitals that followed the conservation of the frescoes, ranging from shock at religious impropriety to Florentine macho pride.73 A theological question might well be posed, for if both parents were guilty of original sin—and indeed, Italian medieval and Tre­ cento Creation cycles typically show both figures covering their genitals74—why should Adam’s genitalia be so flamboyantly displayed? Cennino Cennini effectively answered this question when he described Adam as “so royally endowed by God as the source, beginning, and father of us all.”75 Masaccio gave his Brancacci Adam prominent genitalia to convey the point that he was responsible for initiating the process of human generation that would follow the Fall. This idea was forcefully expressed in the twelfth-century Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris. Describing the creation of man by Natura, Bernard states that man will have both divine and human aspects, possess creative powers, decipher and guide nature through his mastery of all the arts, and dominate the animals. The book concludes with a celebration of the male sexual organs. These organs, “the unconquerable armies of procreation, fight with death, renew nature, and perpetuate the species. They do not permit what is dying to die, what is falling to fall, nor do they allow mankind to perish from its stalk.”76 “The phallus wars against Lachesis,” Bernard continues, “and carefully rejoins the vital threads severed by the hands of the Fates.” Thus the phallus is cast as the restorer of natural order, more natural than Nature herself, and pitted against Fortune, who could be malicious as well as benign. Subsequent writers addressed the restorative powers of the phallus, notably Boccaccio, who is credited with copying Bernard’s Cosmographia and saving it for posterity. In the introduction to the Decameron, written in the mid-fourteenth century when the plague was threatening Italy, Boccaccio associates Nature not with the allegorical mater generationis, as had Bernard, but with a corrupted force that “engenders chaos and death.” For Boccaccio, the plague is responsible for infecting

and damaging the genital organs, undermining the only means by which life can be perpetuated on earth within Nature’s own order.77 Bernard and Boccaccio both assign to Adam/Man the leading role in human procreation and the responsibility for perpetuating the human race against Nature’s destructive whims, renewing nature against Nature. Framed in these terms, procreation is not so mere. Although the Fall brought death as the sentence of the human condition, the race is permitted to endure through procreation, ultimately to be redeemed from original sin by Christ’s incarnation and Resurrection. Leo Steinberg has amply demonstrated the emphasis in Renaissance art on Christ’s phallus as sign of his participation in humanity. As “second Adam,” Christ reenacts Adam’s humanation, now expressing “corrupted nature’s correction.”78 Like Adam, Christ initiated a new period in human history; he is, so to speak, the first patriarch of the religion founded in his name. Christ’s birth, like Adam’s, is the result of divine masculine spirit breathed into female humus. The myth of Christ’s miraculous rebirth, though originating in ancient “dying-god” nature religions, reversed their symbolic reiteration of nature’s rotations, to claim historical uniqueness (time’s arrow, not time’s cycles). The phallus of Christ was symbolically powerful, as Steinberg has shown, yet this was not entirely because of his divinity—it was enough that he was male. Armed by their virile members, Christ and Adam wield power over Nature, one by intervening in the natural order, the other by keeping it going.79 In the worldview framed by Bernard Silvestris, Masaccio’s potently charged Adam is uniquely and heroically empowered to sustain a species at perennial risk. Adam’s generative powers are emphasized in several prominent artistic cycles commissioned for Italian public spaces in the second and third decades of the Quattrocento. The first was Jacopo della Quercia’s Fonte Gaia, the large public fountain in the main civic square of Siena. Here, as in the Brancacci Chapel, two scenes from Genesis were grafted onto a program to which they were only marginally relevant. 80 Although the Expulsion relief is badly damaged, its main compositional lines are preserved in later replicas. One of these (Fig. 39) informs us that Quercia’s Adam splayed his legs slightly, to present the emphasized genitals frontally and dramatically bared.81 Adam’s specific importance for the Fonte Gaia program is doubled by the inclusion of the scene of his Creation (alone) at the other end. 82 Adam’s genital strength is even more emphasized in the ten jamb reliefs created by Quercia for the façade of San Petronio in Bologna, of 1425–38, one of the most extensive Genesis

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39.  Copy of Jacopo della Quercia, Expulsion from Paradise, on the Fonte Gaia, 1414–19. Marble relief (original). Piazza del Campo, Siena. Copy from early sixteenth century, in Piccolomini Library, Siena. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

40.  Jacopo della Quercia, The Creation of Adam, c. 1429–34. Marble relief. San Petronio, Bologna; one of ten panels flanking the main portal. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY. 41.  Jacopo della Quercia, The Temptation of Adam and Eve, c. 1429–34. Marble relief. San Petronio, Bologna; one of ten panels flanking the main portal. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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cycles of the period. 83 Adam is far more active than his consort, responding intelligently to his Creation by God (Fig. 40), and belligerently resisting the punitive angel in the Expulsion, as if to demonstrate his much vaunted independent will, which the obedient and subtly pudens Eve lacks. In the Temptation (Fig. 41), Adam conspicuously frames his penis between his thumb and forefinger, perhaps in the dawning discovery of sexuality. But this move may also signal Adam’s awakening moral awareness of his genitals’ procreative future, for he glares at Eve’s incipient intimacy with the serpent with a stern frown and forbidding gesture. The sharp angle of his framing hand resembles the compass of God, architect of the universe (Fig. 3), suggesting that Adam will appropriate the role of the Fates in the measuring and spanning of human lives. In many of the Bologna Creation scenes, the figure of Adam is subtly vitalized by a tree that grows behind, as if from, his head. This may be the Tree of Life, according to an arboreal iconography implied in Trecento Genesis cycles. In the cycles at Bologna, on the Florentine Campanile, and in an earlier cycle on the Orvieto Cathedral façade, a generic broad-leafed tree stands behind Adam’s head in his Creation scene (Fig. 40). In all three cycles, the tree appears behind Adam in the Creation of Eve. Also appearing in these cycles is the snake-wrapped Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, associated with Eve by its positioning. Both trees figured in Christological symbolism: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or dry tree, was associated with mortality and death, but became the wood of the cross, which led to redemption by Christ, while the Tree of Life, or green tree, was said by Bonaventura to bear fruits that represent Christ’s virtues. 84 The Tree of Life, which came into the Hebrew scriptures from an older Near Eastern tradition, bears longstanding associations with immortality and regeneration, and, through the spread and growth of its seeds, with culture and civilization.85 Adam’s association with the Tree of Life, understood in these terms, is consistent with his procreative responsibility to populate the earth. The theme of generation is sounded both in arboreal imagery and in the very design of major Genesis cycles. The most prominent is located on the Florentine Baptistery, Ghiberti’s second set of bronze doors called the “Gates of Paradise” (Fig. 42), begun in 1425 and substantially completed by 1437. The Creation and Expulsion scene is the first of ten narrative panels that present the main chapters of Old Testament history. Scholars have offered diverse proposals for the overarching theme of the Paradise Doors,86 but one that has not been named is the generational succession of the ancestors of Christ. We move, in descending sequence, through panels popularly

called by the names of their central heroes: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, David. The doors are framed at the top and bottom by reclining figures of Adam and Eve, Noah (Fig. 43) and his wife Puarphara. Both Adam and Noah are draped, and Noah exposes his genitals—a frequent image in Noah narratives, which supposedly alludes to the shameful episode of his drunkenness. This is surely not why Noah’s genitals are exposed, for an allusion to his shame would be an odd and irrelevant emphasis for this showcased figure. It is more likely meant to stress his identity as the prime patriarch responsible for sustaining the human race. Noah’s salvation of his people following the flood is comparable to Adam’s prime generative act, as we are reminded by exegetical commentaries on Genesis. 87 A modern commentator, H. Hirsch Cohen, observes that Noah’s winedrinking, reflecting an ancient Mediterranean belief that wine aids sexual potency, represents the aged Noah’s way of empowering himself to carry out God’s commandment to “be fertile and increase, and fill the earth.”88 Noah’s exposed genitals thus allude to his procreation, as does the vineyard that usually accompanies him. Noah’s patriarchal identity is consistently stressed in artistic imagery: his genitals are invariably exposed; he is sometimes backed by an extra upright tree to connote procreative potency; and frequently, as on the Florentine Campanile and Baptistery, he is conformed with Adam through placement and pose. 89 The prominent civic location of the Genesis scenes on the Florentine Baptistery , the Sienese Fonte Gaia, and the façade of San Petronio, Bologna, indicates that the cycles held important public meaning. I suggest that these and other Genesis cycles of the period90 may have addressed a matter of great concern in early fifteenth-century Tuscany, which was a serious and unprecedented dearth of population. Following the Black Death and subsequent plagues, Tuscan cities experienced a dramatic drop in population that would last five generations. The population of Florence and its territories in 1427 was one third that of 1338.91 A new low was reached in the second decade of the fifteenth century, following a succession of plagues, famines, and the debilitating wars with Milan and Naples.92 Government and economic leaders in Florence fostered marriage and birth in order to arrest the demographic decline. Concern for the precarious population was evident as well in Siena, which also suffered great population losses. In 1427, the Franciscan preacher Bernardino fulminated against the “unnatural” sexual practices of sodomy and abortion, lamenting that they caused “the shrinkage of the world,” and urging

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42.  Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise, 1425–52. Gilded bronze. Baptistery, Florence; east doors. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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married couples to “increase and multiply” as the Scriptures instructed.93 Each city had a vested interest in keeping population levels strong, since the competitive military strength of the commune depended upon an adequate supply of males for warfare and females to help generate citizens for the next generation. Government policies in the mid-1420s were strongly natalist and pro-family, including initiatives such as a proposal that only married citizens could hold public office.94 In this context, we can better understand the civic centrality of artistic cycles that stressed generational succession. In a time of epidemic disaster, Nature must have been perceived as unusually adversarial to human fortune. It fell to Art to help right the balance, to supplement deficient Nature by supplying in the fictive realm what Nature either chose to withhold or could not deliver.95 As in the Grail legend of the Fisher King,96 a sickness in the form of plague has brought diseased genitals, and the disruption of natural procreative continuity. As it attempted to encourage the self-renewal of its citizens, the commune drew inspiration from Adam and Eve’s genesis of the fragile human race and its salvation by Noah after the disaster of the universal deluge. The art that imaged these stories met urgent civic need by performing a therapeutic function, as if by mirroring modern disaster in biblical myth it would be possible to purge evil and call down redemption. The civic application of the Sienese Fonte Gaia and Florentine Baptistery generational cycles may be revealed in the fact that each appears to present a genealogical descent from the first parents down to the modern city. The Fonte Gaia’s civic iconography is expressed in its two framing female statues (Fig. 44). Traditionally identified as Rhea Silvia and Acca Larentia, the mother and foster mother of Siena’s founding

43.  Lorenzo Ghiberti, Noah. Detail of Gates of Paradise (Fig. 42), bottom of frame, left door. Photo: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Firenze. 44.  Jacopo della Quercia, Rhea Silvia, from the Fonte Gaia, 1414–19. Marble. Piazza del Campo (presently in Palazzo Pubblico), Siena. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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twins Romulus and Remus, the figures help establish a local civic context for a fountain whose central presence is the Vir­ gin, political and religious protector of Siena. On the Florentine Paradise Doors, the narrative culminates at the lower right in The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, which takes place in a Gothic church. If, as has been proposed and is widely believed, this panel subtextually alludes to the reunification of the Greek and Latin Churches at the Council of Florence, whose final sessions were held in the (Gothic) interior of the Duomo in 1439,97 that would literally bring this narrative of the human race down to Florence itself. generation and lineage in patriarchal society In patriarchal cultures, women have babies, men have progeny. It is precisely because the male claim on birth is so slight that it must be overstated, because it is so invisible that it must be mystified. Accordingly, the myth that men alone were responsible for the miracle of life was advanced in numerous Renaissance visual forms. Birth had both dynastic and financial significance in Quattrocento Florence, since marriage was a primary channel of economic exchange, especially for the oldest and wealthiest families, brides and their dowries serving in effect to transfer property between households. High fertility served the interests of property, because if it lagged, families could and did die out. As the dying patriarch in Alberti’s Della famiglia exclaimed: “How many families do we see today in decadence and ruin! . . . Of all these families not only the magnificence and greatness but the very men, not only the men but the very names are shrunk away and gone.”98 The great emphasis placed on patriarchal lineage is summarized in the perennially favorite image of the family tree: a prominent example in the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence shows the perpetuation of the Davanzati name from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century. When the Davanzati line began, however, patriarchal lineage was a comparatively new phenomenon. Agnatic lineage, the tracing of kinship through the male line, dates in Europe only from about the eleventh century. Family (masculine) surnames were not used regularly in Florence before the thirteenth century, and Florentines began to construct family trees only at the end of that century.99 The growth of the patriarchal ideal is reflected in the masculinization of the Tree of Jesse (see Fig. 51), through which the ancestry of Christ was traced.10 0 Although it was through his mother, Mary, that Christ descended from David and Jesse, the “rod from the root

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of Jesse” was widely understood in masculine terms, and, as Pamela Sheingorn has noted, the genealogy of Christ appeared in religious art when patrilineage became important in human families.101 Sheingorn correlates the emergence of Tree of Jesse images in the eleventh century, and their increasing occurrence in the next two centuries, with the rise of agnatic lin­ eage. In early examples, the tree that grows from the loins of Jesse culminates in a large image of the Virgin and Child. This type was replaced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by images that stressed Christ’s descent through the Kings of Israel, such as we see in the elaborate Jesse Tree on a pier of Orvieto Cathedral, where Mary is sandwiched vertically between six patriarchs and her son.102 In a patriarchal system, the private family is closely linked with public life. The nuclear family is nested within a larger family clan; in Florence, a small percentage of a few hundred aristocratic families ruled the city.103 A case in point is the Palazzo Davanzati. In its nuptial bedroom appear not only the heraldic shields of the Alberti and Davanzati, the two families brought together by marriage in 1350, but also those of other prominent Florentine families—the Strozzi, the Bardi, the Capponi. The implication of the entire patriciate in the fortunes of a specific marriage exemplifies the extent to which civic interests were at stake for the Davanzati family, and at a ­moment—the bride’s father had died of the plague in 1348—when the stability and health of the commune itself depended so critically on marriage and progeny.104 The Florentine commune’s perception of procreation as a civic investment continued, as plagues continued, well into the Quattrocento. We see this in the dowry fund established in 1425, the Monte delle doti, whose purpose was to support marriage, especially of poor women who could not marry without it. The institution of the dowry fund closely followed a severe recurrence of the plague in 1423–24 and, like the institution of the first progressive income tax, the catasto, in 1427, was among other things a response to the population crisis, an effort to encourage marriage and thus replenish the ranks of the commune.105 Ironically, the population crisis coincided with a diminishing of women’s genealogical value. Around 1427, the number of marriageable women was significantly greater than the number of available grooms, due to the loss of men in wars and to the tendency of Florentine males to postpone marriage.106 In Della famiglia, Alberti laments the latter tendency: “According to the count I took a few days ago, no fewer than twenty-one young Alberti males are living without a partner, without a wife, and none of them is younger than sixteen years

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45.  Unknown artist, Mercato Vecchio, Florence (with Donatello’s Dovizia of c. 1430 on a column at left), late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Oil on canvas. Calenzano, Berini Collection. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut.

of age, and none older than thirty-six.” 107 Alberti’s concern for the extinction of his own line mirrored that in other Florentine families, and, indeed, Della famiglia was written as a jeremiad on the fragility of family lineage. But it was the males who were valued, for within a belief structure that assigned reproductive power to the disappearing sons, daughters were perceived as burdens rather than assets,108 at least until their transfer through marriage to new households, where they promptly became assets because, theory apart, they produced children. A prominent Florentine civic monument expressed the idea of human procreation as a communal asset in female form. This was the statue of Dovizia by Donatello, a now-lost work of about 1430. This female allegorical figure, who held a cornucopia in one hand and balanced a basket of fruit on her head, originally stood atop a column in the Mercato Vecchio (Fig. 45). Numerous replicas of Donatello’s Dovizia attest its importance in Renaissance Florence.109 Its name, Dovizia (Latin, divitiae), means great abundance or prosperity. The statue, called Abundance by several later writers, was placed in the city’s commercial center, site of the guild halls and houses of the

oldest and most powerful families.110 The figure was understood to refer to both agricultural bounty and domestic fecundity, the latter dimension attested by numerous terracotta replicas from the Della Robbia workshop showing the Dovizia accompanied by male children (Fig. 46). The Dovizia may thus have served as a “fertility idol,” meant to bring about the hoped-for abundance, like the patron saints that other cities put in their main squares.111 As a symbol of the common wealth of Florence, including both the crops from her campagna and the sons and daughters essential for repopulation, Donatello’s Dovizia effectively signaled Florentine aspirations in the 1420s. In a detailed study of the monument, Adrian Randolph has specified these more clearly, pointing to its function as a symbol of civic wealth and unity at a time when the Florentine oligarchy faced serious political disunity.112 Randolph argues that, as a female allegory of agricultural and biological fertility, the Dovizia would have served to reinforce gender roles, suggesting to women that procreativity was their civic duty, as Matteo Palmieri had maintained in his Vita civile.113 As other writers have shown, however, allegorical images

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46.  Giovanni della Robbia, Dovizia (replica of Donatello’s lost statue), sixteenth century. Polychrome glazed terracotta. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

speak their real meaning on a deeper level. Allegory (from the Greek, allos, other) speaks of alterity; as Angus Fletcher put it, allegories say one thing but mean another.114 The image of Charity as a nursing mother does not mean what it “says,” which is that children are produced and nurtured by the female body. Rather, motherhood is a metaphor to express the abstract principle of charity for one’s neighbors. Similarly, the Dovizia did not mean what it “said,” that human offspring are generated by women and crops by the (female) earth. Instead, it expressed the civic and political use of the female body’s production to glorify the state as a larger “family.” As one Florentine put it, “The patria is more important than our children and everything should be done for its protection.”115 Female birthing is displaced from the realm of nature and blood 68

ties to become an asset of the patriarchal family line and, in turn, of the commune, symbolized by a female statue who represents the state’s property and wealth in two senses. Allegory has also been described as the use of the female body to represent activities that women are unlikely to practice. Justice, for example, could be represented as female, because women were not normally judges. Thus, as Madlyn Gutwirth points out, allegory when read by women carries a proscriptive, prohibitive function—this is what you are disallowed—and consequently allegorical images offer “a species of representational incarceration for women.”116 The Dovizia tells us what this meant in fifteenth-century Florence: that women’s reproductive function could safely be symbolized by a woman because women had been radically displaced from the generative role in birth, functioning only to “deliver” the male-­engendered child. In other Quattrocento imagery, women are associated with children primarily in roles of nurturing and caretaking; they do not initiate genealogical descent. Despite the elaborate social rituals that surrounded births in Quattrocento Florence, of which the desco da parto was the prime product, birth itself is neither directly imaged nor presented as a female achievement.117 In formats used for both deschi da parto and religious subjects such as the Nativities of Christ, the Virgin, or St. John, it is the aftermath of birth that is displayed. The mother reclines in bed in the middle distance, while the child is “presented” in the foreground, in a cradle or receiving a bath from one of numerous female attendants. Such imagery emphasizes the female’s role as a protector of human life (life implicitly more important than hers), but not as its origin. Like Natura, the human or biblical mother is nurse, not progenitor; her work has been reduced from the cosmic to the domestic, from mater parturans to mater parturata. Baptism, by contrast, which marked the child’s first presentation outside the home, was a masculine ritual intended, as Jacqueline Musacchio observes, “to link the father and his lineage in a spiritual and political manner to the chosen godparents.” The mother was left at home, represented at the baptism by a godmother. And godmothers themselves were not especially important; they were rarely named in the father’s written account of the baptismal ceremony, though godfathers’ names were always recorded.118 Judging from the evidence of art, a significant demotion of the female role in birth occurred between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the fourteenth century, as we saw in the preceding chapter, female reproductive power was embodied in the Virgin Mary. Images of the Virgin—enthroned, nursing

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47.  Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child with the Birth of the Virgin, 1452–53. Oil on panel. Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

the Christ Child, or seated on the ground—link her conceptually with wisdom, physical nourishment, and Mother Earth, and with Nature’s powers. As Madonna of Mercy, or in the Maestà, she is the largest figure, at the center of an axial composition that includes saints or diminutive humans. The key idea is her universal motherhood: she mothers all humans, the patrons and viewers as well as the Christ Child. In the early to mid-Quattrocento, however, a change occurred across these iconographic traditions. Millard Meiss noticed it in the Madonna of Humility, a figure who became steadily more removed, refined, and elevated. The maternal Vir­ gin was replaced by a younger, sometimes adolescent woman, who sits elevated and ennobled upon a dais. She rarely if ever nurses the Child, instead displaying Him to the viewer.119 This change corresponds to a change in the language of Passion sermons noted by Donna Spivey Ellington, in which Mary’s earlier tactile and bodily relationship with her son was replaced by a more detached and priestly role for the Virgin. Ellington connects this trend with a general shift in European culture between the late medieval and early modern periods, noted by historians, in which the earlier religious focus on the immanent and physical morphed into a focus on the transcendent and spiritual.120 The transformation of the Virgin from maternal emblem of human procreation into the nubile household facilitator of the

48.  Unknown artist (formerly attributed to Masaccio), childbirth tray (desco da parto), mid-fifteenth century. Painted wood. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

patriarchal reproduction engine occurred just as a dramatically shrunken population heightened the social demand for childbirths. Targeted especially to meet this demand were wealthy families, who had the highest fertility rate and were motivated by the desire to sustain family lineage, and who commissioned private art. Exemplary is Filippo Lippi’s Pitti Madonna and Child with the Birth of the Virgin (Fig. 47), a tondo painted perhaps for Leo­nardo Bartolini in 1452–53. The tondo format connects this picture with the desco da parto and rituals of childbirth.121 New pictorial features indicate the shifting demographics: the young model for the Virgin, who can hardly be more than eighteen, would have had a particular appeal at a time when there was an growing age gap between older husbands and younger wives.122 We can glimpse this transition in progress in a rare image that appears to resist it. In a desco da parto formerly ascribed to Masaccio (Fig. 48), a birth narrative takes place within three arches of a Brunelleschian arcade.123 On the right, a mother and her newborn are attended by four women; at center, five

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more women, including two nuns, arrive to pay a visit. On the left, trumpeters herald the arrival of a masculine contingent, bearing gifts and wielding banners. This curiously frank image seems almost to parody the patriarchal takeover of birth. The men proclaim and define the birth in the context of family lineage. The women in the middle group are surprised, even disturbed, by the men’s arrival, especially the central nun. As Paul Joannides observed, the raised trumpet and banner “violate” the [female] space, providing “a visual equivalent of the aural effect of the trumpet call, to which the members of the female procession react.”124 The desco resounds with social implications. The highly public nature of this birth-day party is signaled in the grandiose Brunelleschian architecture—much grander than any building in the Brancacci frescoes—and in the heraldic banner whose imprinted fleur-de-lys implies that the “family” in question is Florence itself. Read structurally, the image speaks of birth in this city as a socially desirable occurrence, over whose management there is a gender struggle. The resistant nuns, especially she who advances toward us, are the compositional fulcrum and its emphasis. It is a visual statement that undermines the ideology of the masculine control of birth, for its discourse is about men’s effort to control birth, and women’s subtle resistance to their claim. Might a woman have painted this birth tray? It is possible that the artist was a nun, for nuns made up a large cohort in Quattrocento Florence, coming primarily from the ranks of the wealthy, and some were skilled in painting.125 A distinctly female point of view on birth was surely entertained in Quattrocento Florence, for the theological doctrine of masculine generation could not have been universally admired by women who had intimate knowledge of the process. The Berlin desco may offer a rare expression of that viewpoint. It could be read in other ways: as a face-saving statement that birth was flourishing in Florence (despite the evidence), to express disapproval of nuns as nonparticipants in an urgent social agenda, or as a simple proclamation that birth occurred in a civic framework ruled by men. But if we choose the latter reading, we must consider the nuns’ wary response to the men, which signals that the masculine claim on birth in these terms may be neither natural nor longstanding. the genealogy of christ and the virilization of style In a patriarchal system, it is only through genealogy that reproduction is allowed to enter history. There can be no female

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genealogical line for, just as the Virgin was an aberrant link in the all-male Tree of Jesse, so Florentine women were continuously assimilated to their husbands’ families. The Virgin, however, always exceptional among women, was uniquely imaged with her own mother, St. Anne, as an expression of her Immaculate Conception in her mother’s womb. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art, Mary is seen first as a child in her mother’s arms holding the infant Christ, to make a three-generation grouping. Later, both are depicted as adult women.126 Representative of the latter type is Sant’Anna Meterza, a collaborative production of Masaccio and Masolino from 1424– 25 (Fig. 49).127 Scholars often interpret images of St. Anne politically, emphasizing her role as a Florentine protector and symbol of republicanism, because the duke of Athens was expelled on St. Anne’s day in 1343. It is true that a number of Trecento images of the saint are grounded in that civic iconography.128 However, this does not explain the popularity of the family grouping, two mothers and a child, a type known as the “Holy Kinship,” nor its frequent appearance elsewhere in Italy and in northern Europe.129 The Masolino/Masaccio Sant’Anna Meterza, in which Christ’s earthly family is headed by its matriarch, St. Anne, offers a matrilineal alternative to the patrilineal Tree of Jesse.130 The line of genealogical descent is stressed by the vertical declension that originates in an angel’s gaze and moves down the strong central axis, through Anne and Mary. And the compact triangular group demands to be read as a kind of trinity. Masaccio’s slightly later fresco version of the (orthodox) Trinity of 1425–28 (Fig. 50) must be understood in this context. The almost obsessive focus of scholars upon the innovative perspective construction of this fresco has distracted us from another original feature: its assertive rejection of matrifocal holy kinships, a genre the artist obviously knew well. Masaccio replaced these with a patrilineal image of a type that was not unknown in Florence, but was unprecedented in its monumental scale.131 The exceptional “trinity” of St. Anne, the Virgin, and Christ Child is here supplanted by the canonical masculine Trinity. God the Father and His Son command the central axis, while Christ’s earthly mother stands to the side, displaced.132 Below is a tomb, whose skeletal inhabitant is either a generalized memento mori or, more likely, Adam, who will be resurrected by Christ’s dripping blood, the vehicle for rebirth in the male line.133 It is an image that strongly reasserts the form of the Tree of Jesse: the cross (made from the Tree of Life) rooted in the recumbent body of the founding patriarch, and its upper branch supported by God (Fig. 51).

Masaccio and Michelangelo

This comparison offers yet more evidence that the new Re­ naissance style accompanied a neo-patriarchal social agenda. Sant’Anna Metterza is structured in curvilinear and rounded forms, stated in the Gothic finials of the throne and base, and in the women’s bodies, which constitute the sole environment. At the core of this physiological universe, Mary’s swelling body pulsates outward, her curved embrace of the Child evoking the womb inside. Mary sits between Anne’s knees, expressing her birth from her mother’s body. In the Trinity, by contrast, God presents His crucified Son in an image that is both figuratively and literally a monstrans. Generation, firmly pronounced to be masculine, proceeds through detached display, through showing rather than touching. Indeed, this simulacrum of a funerary chapel, unlike a real one, cannot be physically experienced at all; it is only accessible to the eye.134 Paradoxically, the magical illusion of a measurable chapel and life-size figures that cast shadows suggests that these are real bodies sharing our time and space, yet it denies the actual participation that chapels normally afford. The displacement of the tangible and physical by the metaphoric and visual has a counterpart in the function of this image. Masaccio’s fresco may have been the focal point of the citywide celebration of Corpus Domini in Florence in 1425.135 The feast of Corpus Domini was founded in the thirteenth century at the same time as the Feast of Corpus Christi, in order to prove the theological doctrine of transubstantiation that the latter feast commemorates. By the fifteenth century, Corpus Christi was the principal feast of the Church.136 In the doctrine of transubstantiation, which holds that the wine and bread are not merely symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice but literally his body and blood, the living Christ is reborn within the Christian who takes the Eucharist. This doctrine has understandably met with bewilderment and doubt: what happened to the wine and bread? How can Christ be in so many bodies at once? To explain, theologians insisted that transubstantiation was the mystical conversion of ordinary substance into an altogether new mode of being. The notion of a mysterious transformation of matter within the body to produce spirit quite patently mimics the female body’s power to grow life within itself. Masaccio’s fresco is faithful to the theological doctrine it embodies. Style is now a tool of gender differentiation, both sign and agent of the masculine model of human generation. Architectural geometry insures that the holy figures are separated from each other physically and spatially, and that the spectator is situated below and apart from them. Perspective is used to replace a physical experience with a visual one. For churchgoers accustomed to chapels and familiar with altar

49.  Masaccio and Masolino, Madonna with Child and Saint Anne (Sant’Anna Meterza), 1424–25. Tempera on wood. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

paintings headed by women, this might have been shocking. There is no more mother-space. The compensation for that loss is the doctrine of transubstantiation: You, the spectator, see God generate his crucified son, and you experience, even if you are male—especially if you are male—the miracle of the living Christ within your own body. The fresco’s Brunelleschian architecture and its setting within Santa Maria Novella give immense dignity to this father-son genealogy. Masaccio’s picture is inscribed in a public space, a fictive chapel that addresses the “street” of the church’s

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50.  Masaccio, Holy Trinity with Mary, John the Evangelist, and Two Donors, 1425–28. Fresco. Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY. 51.  Tree of Jesse, mid-twelfth century. Psalter. British Library, London. Photo © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (ms Nero C. IV, fol. 9r).

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nave more assertively than do literal chapels in similar spaces.137 The painting’s rigorous geometry and the participants’ sober austerity lend authority and gravitas, underlining its public function. Countless writers have used these very words to characterize the new style in painting that Masaccio dramatically initiated. Landino’s description of Masaccio’s art as “puro senza ornato” is echoed in a modern writer’s description: “classical in its austerity and in the moral values it endorses”; Masaccio “spurns florid colours and adornments of gold, and treats his subjects with gravity.”138 Austerity has had a long, successful run as a superior and gender-inflected value, particularly against its implied or stated opposite—the too ornamental or brightly colored. Quintilian and Cicero praised rhetorical simplicity and denounced excessive ornamentation in speech and writing, contrasting “madeup,” effeminate rhetoric with healthy and virile oratorial eloquence.139 Pliny preferred colores austeri to colores floridi, as did Vitruvius.140 Alberti used Vitruvius’s gendered hierarchy of architectural orders—the Corinthian order was like a young graceful maiden, suited to decorative effects—to set up a cautionary discourse against ornament. Whereas beauty was “proper and innate,” creating a harmony of parts such “that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse,” ornament was “somewhat added or fastened on.”141 As Donald Hedrick has observed, ornament is the marked feminine of the two terms, linked with other feminine negatives: duplicity, impermanence, jealousy, and vanity.142 For Alberti, the gilded backgrounds of altar paintings had ceased to symbolize the divine. He considered them ornamental, preferring the divinity of mathematical harmonies.143 Alberti’s polarization of geometrical beauty and pictorial ornament was probably influenced by a radical model of style polarity visible in Florence a scant decade before Della pittura was written. In 1423, the most extravagant example of International Gothic style ever seen in Florence appeared in an altar commissioned by the superwealthy Palla Strozzi for the sacristy of Santa Trinità: Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 52). When Masaccio and Masolino began to paint in the Brancacci Chapel two years later, the new austerity and simplicity of their frescoes (Fig. 53) offered a marked contrast to that floridly ornamental and decorative altar. The comparison of Gentile’s Adoration and Masaccio’s Trib­ ute Money is a commonplace of art history, and since Antal it has usually been interpreted in social terms, to reflect the tastes of courtly aristocracy vs. civic humanism.144 Yet it is revealing to situate their differences in the discourse of the changing powers of nature and art. I suggest that “humanist art” arose

in opposition to the then ascendant “International Gothic” not merely as a politically desirable alternative, but also as a motivated defiance of two gender-based intolerables: one was female Nature’s status as the superior creator, and the other was the feminized status of art itself as “handmaiden” to Christian theology and practice. The new style of painting announced in the Brancacci Chapel represents a critical moment in the formation of art’s self-conscious agenda. Gentile da Fabriano, recently arrived from northern Italy, shared with artists like Pisanello and the Limbourg brothers a visual appreciation for the diversity of the natural world. The Strozzi Adoration is composed like a tapestry: the distant horseback procession is seamlessly connected with the monkeys, leopards, and falcons in the foreground who join the crowd gathered to worship the Child. It is a world of lush ornament, glittering gilded livery, and richly patterned brocades and silks. The whole structure seems conceived organically, from the plant forms that decorate the frame to the fruit and flowers that burst from behind it, like those that grow around architectonic edges in illustrated manuscripts and Gothic cathedrals. Whereas Gentile projects a sense of the connectedness of nature’s parts and their unfocused sensory interdependence, Masaccio asserts the principle of heroic individuation. In the Tribute Money (Fig. 53), each apostle stands in his envelope of space—alone, yet identified with a social group whose unity is expressed as a coherent geometric shape. The linked and echoing gestures of Christ, Peter, and the tax collector carry a moral charge, conveying the dramatic significance of each actor’s role. The highly individualized rough and plain faces, the virile and solid bodies, and the simplicity of dress depart, surely intentionally, from Gentile’s stylish elegance and decorative surfaces, and the gently lyrical movements of his graceful women and feminized men. Gentile offers a loving emulation of created nature as the adornment of the Lord’s firmament. He may have started as Pisanello did, with separate drawings of observed vignettes— a foreshortened face, a crouching greyhound’s curved back. From these formal motifs, Gentile developed an elegant Scurve compositional structure, like a plant tendril, that runs through the line of heads, down to the kneeling magus, up to the Virgin. There is little space here, only forms stitched together on the surface plane. Masaccio, on the other hand, was not content to copy the minutiae of natura naturata; he wanted to work as a designer, like God. He began by creating a perspectivally structured spatial field, imposed on the wall the way God imposed form on matter.145 Perspective establishes

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52.  Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi (Strozzi altarpiece), 1423. Tempera on wood. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY. 53.  Masaccio, The Tribute Money, c. 1424–27. Fresco. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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priorities: the human actors loom large in the foreground, while mountains, trees, and clouds are pushed to the back. The painter’s creative magic is deployed to echo that of natura naturans, for he too could create living bodies, actors in the dramatic human narrative. However deliberately Masaccio’s challenge to Gentile may initially have been posed, once in place it effectively invoked a set of linked binary oppositions—virile vs. effeminate, strong vs. decorative, restrained vs. excessive—that echoed and drew strength from the ancient construct of the necessary and the contingent.146 “Late Gothic” style did not look “feminine” until its virile opposite was created. Masaccio brought an oppositional energy that served to install gender as a component of artistic style, initiating a polarization of gendered style categories, most conspicuously the dyad of disegno vs. colorito, drawing vs. color, that would dominate academic discourse in later centuries. Conditioned as we now are to these binaries as seemingly permanent fixtures of art history, we can easily miss the immediate outcome of Masaccio’s innovation and its literary celebration. The new style, by presenting itself as virile, progressive, and strong, in opposition to an older art now identifiable as feminine, conservative, and soft, could help advance art’s claim as a respectable intellectual discipline, and support the Renaissance effort to elevate its status.147 Art could now buttress its case against Nature in the same gendered terms: as a progressive and virile, youthful and healthy, creative force that opposed a Nature now seen as corruptive and corrosive, old and weak. Alberti frames this very distinction in the opening lines of the prologue to his treatise on painting, juxtaposing a Nature who had grown old and tired and no longer produced geniuses and giants, with the new artists of his generation, implicit successors of the “noble and amazing” intellects of antiquity and their “excellent and superior” arts (see chapter 2, p. 48). the brancacci narratives As if to exult in his triumphant achievement, Masaccio makes a cameo appearance in the Brancacci Chapel, in the right corner of the scene of St. Peter Enthroned, where we see his self-portrait along with portraits of Brunelleschi and Alberti (Fig. 54).148 This is an early instance in painting, perhaps the first, of the gratuitous inclusion of contemporary portraits in religious narratives. The painter uses it to say something about art and its powers. One important detail of this passage has been changed. Originally, Masaccio reached out with his right hand to touch

the edge of Peter’s mantle.149 It was not a devotional gesture, for the artist does not look at St. Peter, he looks out at us. The gesture becomes comprehensible if we look closely at the spatially confusing figure of Peter. Ostensibly seated, he does not really sit on anything, and certainly not within a grand church as the Golden Legend specified. He seems strangely suspended before the cloth of honor that hangs on the wall behind him, not even casting a shadow. Is Peter included, not as a “real” figure, but as an image on the suspended cloth?150 The ahistorical presence of the monks and artists suggests that we see here a meditational representation of the historically and physically distant Peter on his Antioch throne. Such an evocation would have been relevant to contemporary Florentines, particularly those Carmelites who supported the papacy.151 As a miraculous image painted on a cloth support, this St. Peter would have been, like the sudarium of Veronica, a “true icon.” Masaccio’s seemingly irreverent touching of Peter could then be understood as demonstrative: he is presenting the figure to us as his own creation, a miracle of the painter’s art. It is telling that Masaccio should make such a visual boast in the Brancacci Chapel, for this renowned fresco cycle joins Brunelleschi’s dome as a charged site of the displacement of women and nature by men and art. Most iconographic interpretations of the Brancacci Chapel link the imagery with specific political circumstances of the period, such as the institution of the catasto, or the reaffirmation of papal primacy.152 From the viewpoint of this study, however, it does not matter how much or little Felice Brancacci or Pope Martin V had to do with the iconography, for these men would have shared certain assumptions that underlie the imagery. I call attention instead to the cycle’s innovative shift of gender structures. Eve apart, not a single female appears on the entire left wall of the Brancacci Chapel. Only a handful of women are seen on the other walls, solely in passive or caretaking roles. A mother holding a child receives the distributed goods; four or five other females, nearly all nuns, raptly admire the preaching or miracle-working Apostle. Men dominate the public spaces, even in scenes that include women, especially the Healing of Tabitha and the Lame Man (Fig. 55), where the public arena is defined patriarchally. Two contemporary Florentine gentlemen share the foreground with the miracle-working saint and his male companions. Segregated at the back of the piazza, in a domestic zone banded by a change of ground color, appears a scattering of women, children, and old men.153 Such genderstructuring of public spaces contrasts distinctly with comparable Trecento scenes, e.g., the Good Government fresco in Siena (Fig. 18), where women and men interact in public on

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Genesis and the Reproduction of Life

54.  Masaccio, St. Peter Enthoned, c. 1424–27. Detail of Peter, with Masaccio self-portrait and portraits of Brunelleschi and Alberti at right. Fresco. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

equal terms, not markedly distinguished in dress or behavior, or a miracle-working scene in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella (Fig. 56), where it is women who attend the re­ suscitated girl. The episodes in Peter’s ministry are dramatized to emphasize his miraculous life-giving role, a role traditionally played by Nature and women, as if to expand upon the theme of the first parents on the chapel’s framing piers, in which the male role in procreation is stressed. No compelling explanation has been offered for the presence of the Temptation and Expulsion in this cycle devoted to the acts of St. Peter.154 Adam and Eve’s prominent role in the Brancacci Chapel presents yet another instance of civic preoccupation with Genesis in the 1420s. Two of the four largest scenes are devoted to Peter’s restoration of

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life to a dead person, each scene gaining narrative direction from its juxtaposition with Adam or Eve. On the right wall, Eve succumbs to temptation, bringing mortality to the human race, while next to her Peter brings Tabitha back to life, restoring the natural order through miraculous means. This Peter is an imperious figure (especially for the phlegmatic Masolino), who works his miracle with a commanding gesture, almost like God the Father creating Eve. The image contrasts sharply with Trecento images of miracle-working santi—comparable, again, is the Spanish Chapel St. Peter Martyr scene, in which the saint is barely identifiable in the crowd. On the left wall, Adam’s assumption of his masculine responsibility to perpetuate life (Plate 2) is reiterated within history. We are directed to the relevant scene on the tier below

Masaccio and Michelangelo

through a line initiated in Adam’s penis. The incident of Peter’s revival of the prefect’s son (Fig. 57) is absurdly monumentalized, considering that in the Golden Legend this minor episode served solely to prompt the prefect Theophilus to build a magnificent church—which is not here depicted. Instead, the revived boy is at center stage, the focus of attention from a grand throng; he is spotlighted by the white cloth beneath him and accompanied by skulls and bones that, associatively, evoke the skull of Adam at the foot of Christ’s cross. How are we to understand the extranarrative importance this boy is given? It is helpful to consider a painting of the 1450s that was inspired by the composition of this central group.155 A threepart panel ascribed to Giovanni di Francesco depicts three miracles of St. Nicholas of Bari.156 Its central scene (Fig. 58) represents the saint’s miraculous restoration of life to three boys salted in brine by a wicked innkeeper. The painter sets one boy at the center in a pose that reiterates the Brancacci image, as well as its theme—the resurrection of a near-naked boy by a priestly figure. Behind him, as in images of Adam’s creation, a tree breaks through the wall, as if to underline the boy’s revival. The subtext here is regeneration; the boys are composites of newly created Adams and neophyte Christians, symbols of new life brought by a Christian patriarch, the bishop Nicholas. In a second panel, Nicholas supplies a dowry for three unmarried daughters of an impoverished nobleman. The daughters’ despair and their visible lack are vividly conveyed by the painter, who underlines the outcome of the hero’s action by placing next to Nicholas a tree that miraculously sprouts a new branch

55.  Masolino (with Masaccio?), Healing of Tabitha and the Lame Man, c. 1424–27. Fresco. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. 56.  Andrea di Bonaiuto (Andrea da Firenze), St. Peter Martyr Reviving a Drowned Girl, 1365–68. Fresco. Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Photo: Antonio Quattrone, Florence.

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57.  Masaccio (completed by Filippino Lippi, early 1480s), St. Peter Resurrecting the Son of Theophilus. c. 1424–27. Fresco. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 58.  Attributed to Giovanni di Francesco, three-part panel representing miracles of St. Nicholas of Bari, mid-fifteenth century (after 1452). Central scene showing the saint’s miraculous restoration of life to three boys who had been salted in brine by a wicked innkeeper. Casa Buonarroti, Florence. Photo from Luciano Bellosi, ed., Pittura di luce: Giovanni di Francesco e l’arte fiorentina di metà Quattrocento (Milan: Electa, 1990), 58–59.

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from a dead stump.157 In selecting these incidents from St. Nicholas’s many miracles, the artist or patron clearly aims for contemporary relevance, for the shop sign in the form of a crescent moon points to a larger menace: the wicked innkeeper is, pointedly, a symbol of the dreaded Turks whose assault upon the Eastern Church resulted in the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The theme of these panels thus appears to be the Church embattled against its enemies—the threat of extinction from underpopulation, the threat of foreign aggression—met in each case by a protagonist who possesses the miraculous power to save and bring life. If these paintings and Masaccio’s Resurrecting the Son of Theophilus are connected by meaning as well as form, the Brancacci Chapel would have been a model for the execution of a deficient Nature’s functions by male figures who represent both the Church and the patriarchy. The separate doctrines of Aristotelian embryology and Christian theology converge on the principle that birth and miraculous rebirth are powers controlled by men. In this highly public forum, women are displaced from their natural role as active birthgivers into modern social roles as caretakers and nonmothers (nuns), and replaced by Peter, Christ, and Adam, whose moral and spiritual powers include the ability to engender life, as well as to shape human affairs within a sociopolitical structure. It is important to recognize that the insistent inscription of the theme of masculine empowerment in the Brancacci Chapel and other Quattrocento monuments here discussed was not a reiteration of longstanding social hierarchies but, rather, a projection of values that, around 1425, men intensely wished to see as dominant. In the depth of population decline, to insure the continuation of patrilineal succession young males had to be seduced to their genealogical duty through the heroic elevation of the male role in procreation. This function was enhanced by the heroizing of male procreative power in art and by the enlarging of attendant ideas such as miraculous resurrection and God-like artistic creativity. The latter idea, especially, was celebrated in art, and so it was that at a critical social moment, when Art was usefully employed in man’s struggle against an indifferent or unkind Nature, artists began to dream of stealing her powers. masculine generation in the sistine ceiling In his monumental study of the Sistine Ceiling, Frederick Hartt argued that its iconographic and formal structure was based upon the Tree of Life. Hartt’s interpretation has long

59.  Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Nude male figure (ignudo) with oak garland. Fresco. Vatican, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

been controversial, first set in opposition to Charles de Tolnay’s Neoplatonist reading and then implicitly refuted by Esther Dotson’s magisterial Augustinian interpretation.158 Yet in the course of writing this chapter it became apparent to me that Hartt was right, if not about the structure of the Ceiling, at least in his belief that the Tree of Life is one of its dominant themes. Without attempting to review all aspects of this monument’s complex iconography, I will show that the Sistine Ceiling offers an account of human history predicated on masculine generation, through imagery that is completely continuous with the Quattrocento traditions we have just explored. A salient feature of the Ceiling is the repeated incidence of nude male figures (ignudi) who support oak garlands that run its length, connecting and punctuating the histories (Fig. 59). As has long been recognized, the garlands and their prominent

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Genesis and the Reproduction of Life

acorns are, on the primary level, an emblematic reference to the patron, Pope Julius II, symbolizing the impresa of the Rovere family. Hartt observed that the pope must have seen “a poetic resemblance between the tree of his family emblem and the Tree of Life,” and amplified the connection. Linking the acorns with the fruit of the lignum vitae—which was the eucharist, according to St. Bonaventura—Hartt expounded the long tradition that has connected the Tree of Life with both the Tree of Jesse and the Cross of Christ, finding expression of these linkages in the Sistine Ceiling vault and Raphael’s Stanza d’Eliodoro.159 This explication completed the Ceiling’s meaning for Hartt, who implicitly shared the theologians’ perspective that its iconographic significance lay in the expression of a cardinal principle of Christianity: Christ as the second Adam who redeems the human Fall. From a perspective outside the patriarchal framework, however, we might say that hermeneutic connections between the biblical Tree of Life and the Cross of Christ, and with the succession of patriarchs who linked them, express instead a cardinal principle of patriarchy itself: the mystical role of males

60.  Albrecht Dürer, The Fall of Man, 1504. Engraving. Bibliothéque Nationale de France. Photo: Bridgeman-Giraudon/ Art Resource, NY.

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in sustaining human life. Whereas Hartt and the Church Fathers found meaning in typological echoes among these themes, I find meaning in the absence of analytical commen­ tary, in the volumes of theological commentary that exist, upon this singular consistent feature shared by Judaism and Christianity, the principle of masculine sovereignty in generation, which is at once an unquestioned tenet of belief and a doctrinal principle reiterated in art. Let me then gloss the Sistine Ceiling, not with the aim of replacing the learned readings—for they are certainly not incorrect, if viewed from within theological tradition—but with the goal of amplifying another meaning that is also stated there tacitly. This oxymoron, to “state tacitly,” captures the Derridean fissure opened at the end of the preceding paragraph: if a principle is unquestioned, why should there be a need to reiterate it? I will return to this point shortly. Few viewers have missed the resemblance of the Rovere acorns to the equally prominent penises of the ignudi. The resemblance is more than visual, for these forms are linked through the Latin word glans, which means both acorn and head of the penis. Moreover, the oak tree has a longstanding association with strength (robur, strength, literally, oak; robustus, of hard wood, oak, strong, powerful, hard, firm, solid), and also with male potency. The phallus is similarly identified as the embodiment of virile strength. An ancient text of Artemidorus well known in the Renaissance described the penis as “a symbol of strength and physical vigor, because it is itself the cause of these qualities.” In a sermon preached before Julius II in 1508, Battista Casali described the phallus as “the greatest testimony of fortitude,” taking for granted, as Leo Steinberg observed, its equation with power.160 St. Thomas Aquinas had celebrated the magical power of the phallus in describing this “organ of generation” as the “remedy for original sin which is transmitted through the act of generation.”161 The conflation of sinful generation and regenerative phallus is implied in Dürer’s engraving of the Fall of Man (Fig. 60), where Adam’s genitals are covered by the oak branch of procreative strength while Eve has the apple branch of sexual guilt. In the Sistina, Michelangelo produced a far more dynamic metaphor for male fertilizing power, directly uniting the phallus and the tree (combined only implicitly in earlier Trees of Jesse) in the recurrent images of the ignudi and their oak garlands. As acorns are seeds of the oak whose propagation reforests the land, so in Old Testament parlance, men sustain procreation through the propagation of their seed.162 Julius II made ample metaphoric use of the arboreal imagery prompted by his name. A study by Michelangelo for the pope’s tomb

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(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) includes a relief depicting the Julian oak, with falling acorns being gathered below.163 And in a sermon of 1507, Giles of Viterbo eulogized the Rovere oak, whose branches would spread the pope’s glory across the globe.164 The Sistine male nudes and their acornbearing garlands embody and sustain these linked ideas— masculine procreation and Julian dissemination—across the Ceiling. The ignudi themselves constitute one of the least discussed but most puzzling features of the Sistine Ceiling. Their precise meaning in the scheme has remained fuzzy; theories about them tend to follow scholars’ overarching theses. Tolnay considered the nudes to be genii of the rational souls of the prophets.165 For Hartt, they are acolytes presiding at Christ’s symbolic sacrifice, whose oak garlands symbolize Christ’s blood (the acorns are said to resemble grapes), and the medallions, which bear five slits, represent Christ’s Passion and the host.166 Dotson identified the ignudi with the contemplative angels who witness God’s Creation in the Heavenly City of Augustine’s allegory, contrasted with the unholy angels of the Earthly City represented in the bronze-colored figures “imprisoned” below the entablature.167 Few writers have directly confronted what should have been the nudes’ most outrageous aspect: the appearance of naked adult human males in this major, quasi-public space of the Catholic Church. Why were these figures accepted by the clerical patrons, when such a fuss was raised barely thirty years later over the shocking appearance of male genitals in the Last Judgment? The answer usually given is that Michelangelo himself loved the male nude body, and his tastes were indulged by the humanist, art-loving Julius II.168 Yet the blatant nudity of these males, unparalleled in religious imagery apart from Adam or the resurrected dead, problematizes their identification as acolytes or angels. Only Tolnay’s reading of them as reflections of states of the soul, their torsions expressing the struggles of the human condition, is compatible with both their nudity and the artist’s formal and private concerns. It is possible to interpret the ignudi as carriers of meaning that requires their nudity, however, if we understand the phalluses and acorns as rhyming metaphors for male procreativity. We saw that in earlier Quattrocento tradition, procreativity is divine, a power and responsibility given by God to Adam. The Ceiling says this too. Michelangelo visually connects the procreative acorns with God’s agency, for they spill into the Separation of Light from Darkness (Fig. 61) and the Creations of Eve and Adam, while in the Expulsion they hover over Adam. The burden of sustaining life has been entrusted to the more

potent of the sexes, as theology requires, and this theme is enunciated through the emblem of male fertilizing power, the phallus, made visible in eleven of the twenty ignudi who populate the Ceiling. In this respect, the ignudi are direct descendants of antique genii who held cornucopias of seed or flowery garlands, as “simile[s] for the male seed” by which families were ­perpetuated.169 The inspiration that Michelangelo drew from the heroic nude Adams of Masaccio and Jacopo della Quercia has long been considered a simple affinity of style. Yet his interest in those models is unlikely to result simply from the artist’s personal penchant for the male nude. The precedent of Quercia’s cycle in Bologna, especially, would have been fresh in the memories of both Michelangelo and Julius II in 1508, as they were each at San Petronio in 1506.170 Through a perhaps fortuitous convergence of artistic and theological agendas, both men joined in renewing the ancient masculine covenant with Bernard Silvestris. The theme sounded in the Adams of Masaccio and Quercia—that the phallus does battle with Nature’s afflictions and sustains the human race—is given expanded form, in a hyper-virilized style, in the Sistine Ceiling. The ignudi and their oak garlands link episodes of human history that reiterate the concept of male-powered human generation, which is in many respects a dominant theme of the Ceiling.171 In the scene of the Deluge (see Fig. 65), for example, the whole point is generational continuity. The survivors of the shipwrecked Ark conspicuously include family groupings, whose intent is to endure as a race. The Drunkenness of Noah (Fig. 62) expresses in several ways the idea that Noah is a second Adam, whom God has given responsibility for the survival of the human race.172 Noah reclines in the foreground, his prominent genitals exposed—as with Quercia and ­Ghiberti—to emphasize his procreative role. Adam’s assignment is echoed in God’s charge to Noah and his sons: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.”173 In the middle distance, a younger Noah is shown digging, preparing to plant the vine—supposedly an allusion to the wine he will drink, yet as we have seen this more likely refers to the planting of his generative seed. Indeed, Augustine explicitly says that Noah’s vineyard can be equated with the race of the Israelites, the “vineyard of Israel” in which Christ was incarnated.174 The age difference between the two images of Noah establishes, moreover, that the planting of the vine long preceded the drunkenness, thus urging its interpretation as a metaphor of procreation: the harvest of Noah’s digging is his progeny, through whom his work of generation will be accomplished.

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61.  Michelangelo, The Separation of Light from Darkness, with adjacent oakgarland-bearing ignudo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Fresco. Vatican, Rome. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 62.  Michelangelo, The Drunkenness of Noah, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Fresco. Vatican, Rome. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Masaccio and Michelangelo

The unprecedented nakedness of Noah’s sons, complete with genitalia—for which no plausible explanation has ever been offered—is surely meant to express the idea that they will fulfill their father’s charge to people the earth, and indeed they do, for the generations of the sons of Shem, Ham, and Japheth fill an entire chapter of Genesis.175 The Sistine Genesis cycle begins with God’s cosmological creative acts, continuing with the births of Adam and Eve and their Fall, and ends with a fresh beginning in Noah, who generates new life after the flood. The next phase of human generation is presented in the spandrels, where the Generations of Israel are represented as nuclear human families, each headed by a named patriarch (while nameless mothers tend the children). The ancestors of Christ continue in the lunettes as family groups, their patriarchs named prominently on tablets, ending with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whose names originally appeared on tablets on the altar wall. The Ceiling can be understood, in a purely natural reading, as a narrative of human history from the first moment of Creation to Christ’s human ancestors, told as a story of birth and generational succession.176 Such a reading is consistent with the most plausible overarching interpretation of the Ceiling’s meaning. Dotson has persuasively shown that it is structured by Augustine’s exegetical method demonstrated in the City of God. Augustine presented the two Cities—one historical, the other allegorical—as apparent opposites, “complements within a hierarchy, a higher reality completing, fulfilling, or correcting a flawed or incomplete reality.”177 Nature, corrupted by Original Sin, is redeemed by divine grace; and the guilt of human generation is redeemed in the Heavenly City. In Dotson’s reading, each history scene mirrors an invisible divine counterpart: the Deluge and Christ’s Baptism, the Temptation/Expulsion and the Crucifixion, Eve and the Church, et cetera. Because Christ’s birth was an intervention in history, reversing the meaning of the Fall,178 the divine narrative overlays in reverse the narrative sequence of the histories, changing direction at the scene of Noah’s Drunkenness, which typologically stands for Christ’s Incarnation. It would be consistent with Augustinian theology, I believe, to identify the ignudi as the continuous spirit of earthly human generation, symbolized by virile youths whose genitals are visually linked with the “seed” of oak trees, overlaid with a Christian reference in the slitted “host.” The symbols are merged to produce a metaphor that works, like the Ceiling itself, both backwards and forwards. The Tree of Life is implied literally in the arboreal chain of oak garlands that animates the whole narrative, and it is implied figuratively in the reference

63.  Michelangelo, The Prophet Jonah, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Fresco. Vatican, Rome. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

to Christ’s sacrifice, which occurred on the cross made from the dry tree, as well as in Augustine’s speculation that the mysterious Tree of Life in Genesis “must be Christ himself.” 179 The visual culmination of this sequence is the figure of Jonah who hovers over the altar, a clear prefiguration of Christ (Fig. 63). Jonah’s connection with the generative tree is emphasized in the leafy gourd vine above his head. The gourd is Jonah’s attribute, yet in form and positioning it resembles the Trees of Life that rise behind the heads of Quattrocento Adams (e.g., Fig. 40), invoking a relationship of contrast. Jonah’s “issue” is emphatically spiritual, like Christ’s—the heavenly antithesis of human generation on earth.180 Let us see what else is being said. As in all binary polarities, the superior part requires the inferior part for its identity: Christ, like the celibate priests who alone may perform the mass,181 is above ordinary human procreation. Yet the lower term also has spiritual potential, which is expressed in its simultaneous presence: human birth is glorified in the divine rebirth of Christ, as the earthly city finds fulfillment in the Heavenly City of God. The metaphor works, of course, only insofar as human birth is male-driven. The ignudi project an image that speaks simultaneously of human struggle and divine perfection, of man’s

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64.  Michelangelo, The Temptation, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Fresco. Vatican, Rome. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

physical beauty and Christ’s spiritual beauty in one package. Male fertilizing power is set in explicit relationship with the great creative power of the Almighty in the scene of the first act of creation (Fig. 61). Here, God’s spiraling, open-armed movement is rhymed with the spiraling contrapposto of the adjacent ignudo. The nude’s heaving of the enormous burden of human procreation contrasts with God’s free-floating creative freedom, shaping the light and dark with his hands. Yet, the visual point is made: their tasks are analogous. In these terms, the opening chapter of the Sistine Ceiling would have provided an inspirational image for a Renaissance male, prompting memory of Pico della Mirandola’s stirring definition of man’s miraculous potential, expressed in God’s charge to Adam to be the “sculptor” of his self.182 The Sistine Ceiling offers no such uplifting message to women. It had no obligation to do so, to be sure, since women were not ordinarily admitted to the Sistine Chapel.183 Yet the self-congratulatory message of the Ceiling to its all-male audience was clear: the male role in reproduction is spiritualizing and ascendant, the female role is debasing and decadent. Whereas the male element in generation is associated with the Tree of Life, the female element is linked with the Tree of Knowl-

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edge that withered and died because of Original Sin. The iconography of green and dry trees is here given more explicitly gendered expression than in Trecento and Quattrocento examples. Green oak branches are conjoined directly with males— the ignudi, God, and Adam—while dead trees or withered tree trunks are juxtaposed with Eve. The most conspicuous instance is the Creation of Eve, in which a dead tree trunk is insidiously linked with Eve through its precise formal echo of her rising diagonal movement. This is a visual statement of what some theologians claimed, that Eve, who brought the Fall, was sinful in her very nature. Again in the Temptation (Fig. 64), a withered stump mimics Eve’s pose, to imply her sex’s greater responsibility for Original Sin—a theme stated also in the female serpent. Adam, too, reaches for the fruit, unusually sharing blame with Eve; yet with his other hand, he firmly grasps the flourishing green branch of the tree that may be a composite of the Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge, as if to say that the outcome of the Fall for him will be responsibility for the continuation of the ­species.184 Dry and green trees mediate the two sides of the Deluge (Fig. 65). The somewhat more male-populated island on the right side is contrasted by its green tree with a somewhat more

Masaccio and Michelangelo

65.  Michelangelo, The Deluge, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Fresco. Vatican, Rome. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

female-populated left side, surmounted by a dry tree. The right side offers a model of hope in adversity—seemingly miraculous hope, for the green tree still flourishes, despite being struck by a lightning bolt (now invisible because of damage).185 Civilized refuge is found on a providential rock, in the improvised shelter that is the product of human techne; figures reach out to help new arrivals, by contrast with the selfish, fighting figures who beat each other off in the boat, and on the ark. The left side presents a different theme. The survivors gain the dry ground, ascending the hill in embryonic family groups, but their survival is tempered morally by the symbolism of the dry tree. Here we see the kinds of human families that are not acceptable. In a zone framed vertically by the leafless tree at the top left and the withered dry stump below it, three kinds of “wrong” families are situated; a single mother who copes alone with two children; two male lovers plus a third male who “fruitlessly” climbs the dry tree,186 and the dry-breasted woman draped over the withered stump, whose inadequacy is mourned by a child. This hopeless woman points to the ground, as if to inscribe the dual barrenness of the earth and her body. The figures who ascend the hill below them, not yet formed into families, will have to run the gauntlet of this danger zone

to reach the model preferred by the Church, presented on the far left: the nuclear family with a father, mother, child, and a donkey—an image saturated with reminders of the Holy Family: Joseph, Mary, and Christ. It is a message to the faithful: go forth and multiply, but in the right way. The two sides of the Deluge are contrasted as positive and negative, exemplary and cautionary, through an iconography that draws upon traditional gendered meanings. Lightning is a perennial emblem of “the energy, the chaos, and the unpredictability of Nature” (I heard that said on TV the evening I wrote this very passage). The lightning bolt that originally struck the green tree represented the onslaught of hostile Nature, resisted successfully by the Church and the salvation of the Cross. The oak tree was anciently believed to protect against lightning, a belief that supported the papal claim of the lightning-resistant green oak as a symbol of the miraculous power of the cross.187 The right half of the Deluge celebrates heroic defiance of natural catastrophe by the agents of masculinist regeneration and institutional stability—literally, the human family of Noah’s entourage, and figuratively, the Christian Church of Julius II. The right side affirms masculinist values and institutions, while the left (or sinister) side warns

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66.  Michelangelo, details of heads of the Cumaean Sibyl and the Persian Sibyl, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Vatican, Rome. Photos: both Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

against deviancy, both homosexual and female—the human forms that Nature’s assault on Christian values takes. The negativizing of the female, the reinforcing of her ancient associations with (now) spiritually barren physical nature, is a persistent pattern in the Ceiling. The Creation of Eve, for example, is often characterized by its allegorical reference to the creation of the Church, yet through its position in the ceiling, the Creation of Eve introduces the historical time of fallen man. Situated at the midpoint of the nine histories (between four scenes of the male god creating, and four of the fallen human race struggling to survive), the Creation of Eve originally marked the transition point between the sacred space of the chancel and the lay area, or, in architectural body imagery, between the spiritually ascendant head or upper body and the sexually fallen lower part of the body.188 The Creation of Adam, nearer the chancel, connects Adam with God’s perfection, while Eve is joined to the realm of fallen, reproductive Nature.189 The sibyls also establish the female realm as that of deficient Nature. The visionary powers of the prophets increase in their proximity to the altar, while those of the sibyls decline; the men become younger and more virile, the women older and weaker (with the exceptions of Libica and Jeremiah, who reverse the progression at its climax).190 Tolnay explained that the sibyls represent the pagan world, whose prophetic vision dims as we approach the Christian sanctum sanctorum. Yet in their stage of greatest power, the sibyls hint at evil. The oldest, Cumaea and Persica (Fig. 66), are crones uglified to the point of caricature (unlike the prophets, who gain rather than lose social dignity as they age). Persica, shown in a deeply shadowed lost profile, even recalls that ultimate paragon of evil, Judas in Leo­nardo’s Last Supper. Other women in the ceiling have distorted, haglike features: Eve in the Expulsion (also with long stringy hair), and Puarphara in the Sacrifice of Noah (Fig. 67). The evilness of Eve

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we of course understand, but Puarphara was surely no guiltier than her husband, and especially not if this scene expresses God’s sign of salvation to Noah’s family.191 Why should the Sistine Ceiling program so insistently celebrate the male role in procreation and present so negative an image of woman? Or, as I posed the question earlier, why should the principles of masculine generative ascendancy and feminine sinfulness, long orthodox in patriarchal Christianity, need to be strongly reiterated here? Contemporary social circumstances spring to mind. Scarcely twenty years before the Sistine Ceiling was painted, the witch-hunts had begun. “Witches,” as blasphemous, uncontrolled, evil women whose alleged practices satirized normal procreation and the Christian family, were the natural enemy of the papacy. The now-infamous Malleus Maleficarum, the “Hammer against the Witches,” was an inflammatory text published in 1487 by two Dominican inquisitors in Germany, Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger. Papal support of the inquisition against witches began three years earlier, when Innocent VIII issued a bull aimed at removing obstacles facing Kramer and Sprenger. The Malleus was published with the pope’s full approval, and with his papal bull of 1484 as its preface. By 1520, the Malleus had seen fourteen editions and, in part because of its papal support, it became “one of the most influential of all early printed books.”192 As a compendium of folk beliefs about the powers and evils of witches and women, the Malleus inspired a frontal attack on witches by the papacy. In 1501, Pope Alexander VI wrote a letter to the inquisitor of Lombardy authorizing the pursuit of witches in that region and initiating witch-hunting as a permanent aspect of papal policy.193 Julius II, Alexander VI’s successor, inherited that papal com­ mitment. Julius and Leo X issued statements encouraging the prosecution of witches, as did Leo’s successor, Adrian VI.194

Masaccio and Michelangelo

67.  Michelangelo, details of heads of Eve in the Expulsion and Puarphara in the Sacrifice of Noah, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Vatican, Rome. Photos: (Eve) Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY; (Puarphara) Scala/Art Resource, NY.

The Julian court could hardly have remained untouched by prevailing attitudes about witchcraft and female nature, considering the pervasive extent of the scapegoating of women and the papacy’s deep involvement in the persecutions. Yet although witch imagery in art, especially that of Northern Eu­rope (Fig. 68), has been duly studied by art historians, some­what surprisingly, the diabolical characterization of certain female figures of the Sistine Ceiling has not been previously noted. I do not argue that the program as a whole was slanted toward witch-hunting, for it is far more complex than that. However, I think it probable that Julius’s continuation of his uncle Sixtus IV’s mission for the chapel, to proclaim the power of the papacy,195 gained focus and energy from the identification of a new class of heretics and sinners, the witches, whose nefarious practices could be evoked by visual referents within an already theologically negativized set of female ­characters. The emphasis upon masculine generative strength in the Ceiling may have been prompted by a related factor. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe, and particularly Italy, saw another set of natural disasters threaten the pop­ ula­tion. Following what has been described as the “second major European grain crisis of the fifteenth century,” in 1481– 83, witches were accused of causing both crop failure and barrenness in families.196 Witches were also blamed for the first outbreak of syphilis in Europe, which came at the end of the fifteenth century, bringing an unprecedented epidemic

68.  Hans Baldung Grien, Witches’ Sabbath, 1510. Chiaroscuro woodcut. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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of venereal disease that was linked with infertility. (It may be relevant that Pope Julius II himself suffered from syphilis.)197 Once again, as in the early Quattrocento, Nature—now localized as a malevolent force in human witches—was blamed for procreative dysfunction and the disruption of generational continuity. What began in the fifteenth century as a broad shift from sensory and bodily frames of reference to abstract and spiritualized ones, visible especially in depictions of the Virgin—in effect, a movement away from nature and deeper into culture— had developed by the sixteenth century into more negativity about women and female nature, and a greater distrust of women’s bodies.198 The witch-hunting craze is the most chilling example of this phenomenon. The period also saw an intensification of the Mary-Eve binary, in which natural female sexuality is distorted into the extremes of perfection and depravity. It is telling that papal support of the Malleus Maleficarum coincided precisely with papal institutionalizing of the

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doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.199 Effectively, the Church doubled the Virgin’s purity and double-purged her human physicality at the same time that it doubled Eve’s sinfulness by demonizing sexuality in human women. Michelangelo the artist had a more ambivalent and complex relationship with Nature than appears in the Sistine Ceil­ing, as we will see in later chapters. Yet in this context, the hypervirility of both his male and female figures, their very muscular masculinist excess, can be seen as the climax of a progressive virilizing, beginning with Masaccio and Jacopo della Quercia, that supported both the theological case for male priority in procreative reproduction and the aesthetic case that the (male) artist’s creative powers could vie with those of Nature herself. In these instances, the nude male body is the paradigm for both sexual and creative energy. In the next two chapters, I examine other changes in the artist’s evolving relationship with Nature, which occurred in the period between the frescoing of the Brancacci Chapel and that of the Sistine Ceiling.

All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.  —william butler yeats, Easter 1916

The Rebirth of Venus and the Feminization of Beauty Chapter Four 

Botticelli the double venus Early in the fifteenth century, Antoninus, bishop of Florence, raised a complaint about modern art: “[Painters] commit an offense . . . when they create images provoking desire, not through beauty, but through their poses, as of naked women and the like.”1 Since Antoninus was sometimes naive about Christian iconography, his scorn may have been aimed at images of the fallen Eve. But the “naked women” he had in mind were more likely images of Venus that had begun to crop up in Florence. The Venus who emerged in Renaissance imagery paralleled Eve in her association with sexuality and depiction as nude, yet she came to present an opposing valuation of sexuality, now as a principle of pleasure and good rather than sin and evil. By the later fifteenth century, Venus had become far more central in Florentine art than Eve, most conspicuously as the leading character in the paintings known collectively as Botticelli’s mythologies. In the Primavera (Plate 3a) and Birth of Venus (Plate 3b), Venus reigns supreme, an axially dominant figure with a complex identity, which might be broadly glossed as representing physical nature in a positive form. Venus’s ascendancy signaled a broader shift in the discourse of art and nature. Procreation was still a desirable social good in late Quattrocento Florence, but Nature now posed a less immediate threat to genealogical continuity. With rising communal wealth vested in a growing number of powerful families, art was commissioned by a leisure class with concerns less drastic than bare survival. Historian Richard Goldthwaite has described the emergence in the fifteenth century of a “culture of consumption”

that increasingly focused on the decorative enriching of private houses,2 whose furnishings and imagery supported the marital and birth economy. Accordingly, another interpretation of Nature emerged: as an artful power who practiced her creativity in kindly ways, mediating human pleasures. The early Quattrocento construction of Nature as mother, represented by the Virgin Mary whose nurturing maternity is symbolized in the Florentine dome, was supplanted by the figuring of nature as a beautiful young maiden, who presides over a realm of vegetative and human fecundity mediated by the rules of civilization. Because the ideal of love is a key principle in this construction, Nature’s powers are effectively represented by the figure of Venus. Previously, the artist had chal­lenged Nature’s ascendancy in the reproduction of life; now, he competes with her in the creation of physical beauty. In the complex figure of Venus, however, beauty is never entirely separable from procreative power. In the Renaissance, as in antiquity, Venus represented erotic love as a powerful and elemental aspect of nature, which transcends moral boundaries and may support or subvert social ideals. Boccaccio had defined her range: Venus is double, since by the first we say and ought to mean every proper and licit desire, such as the desire to acquire a wife in order to have children, and desires similar to this; and we do not speak of this Venus here. The second Venus is that by which every lasciviousness is desired, and who is commonly called the “goddess of love.”3

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In identifying a double Venus, one a chaste and proper lady who governed marital procreation, the other a dangerous and amoral erotic figure, Boccaccio reaffirmed a polarity that had been expressed in the Middle Ages by the opposition of Mary and Eve. But the Renaissance Venus is more sophisticated than the Renaissance Eve, for whereas Eve was cast by Christian moralists as all-evil libido, set in opposition to the beleaguered masculine superego, Venus embodied within herself the opposing concepts of sexual delight and sexual control. She simultaneously represents erotic desires and their responsible management. Venus is trickier than Eve, for she is not merely the projection of masculine anxieties about sexuality onto a demonized female Other. Rather, Venus’s intricate identity embraces all the terms of men’s discourse with themselves, and her multifaceted representations in literature and art reflect her service as the repository of a broad range of masculine attitudes toward the erotic—from sublimated fascination to open desire, and from ascetic prohibition to outright fear. Created within the intellectually refined ambients of the

69.  Giovanni Pisano, Temperance or Chastity, 1302–10. Marble pulpit. Pisa Cathedral. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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Medici household and Neoplatonic philosophers, Botticelli’s monumental Primavera and Birth of Venus present a Venus who is both physically beautiful and philosophically charged. The Primavera will come first in this discussion, as it did chronologically, but it is helpful to begin with larger considerations that apply especially to the nude protagonist of the Birth. In this picture, Venus is purposefully elevated above medieval associations of nudity with sinful carnality, to become the Platonic celestial Venus, embodiment of pure Mind and stranger to corporeal matter, as Ficino explained her. Botticelli’s nude Venus, based on antique models, is highly sensuous by comparison with earlier, non-classically inspired images of Venus. 4 The formal sophistication of Botticelli’s Venus—her graceful contrapposto, her more credible anatomy—is matched by his display of a more accurate knowledge of Venus’s literary identity. Botticelli’s combination of physical sensuality with conceptual purity, however, was essentially new. Because Botticelli’s majestic nude Venus offers a Greek-like celebration of physical beauty, it is often taken as an emblem of the Renaissance itself, a rebirth of ancient values, both moral and aesthetic.5 Yet the artist’s choice of a female figure to express moral philosophy was very risky. The male nude was unproblematically heroic; thus Adam could be fused with Hercules or Christ or David, since all these were paragons of masculine virtue.6 The female nude, on the other hand, certainly in Christianity but also in antiquity, always carried a taint of the sexually improper. Venus especially was so charged, with the result that her reappearance in the Renaissance and her idolization by Botticelli and the Neoplatonists was inherently problematic. In post-medieval culture, the female nude could not securely sustain elevated or morally idealized meaning, because such meaning was always subject to the destabilizing influence of the femininity syndrome (virgin-whore; Mary-Eve), by which the erotic and shameful accrue to female nudity as its primary signification.7 Put simply, the male nude tends to connote virtue, while the female nude tends to connote vice. Botticelli’s effort to create a pure Venus separable from her carnal roots was compromised by the perverse polysemy of visual images: they are often shaded by trace meanings from the past, sometimes contradictory ones. A prime example is the nude female figure on Giovanni Pisano’s Pisa pulpit (Fig. 69), which represents Temperance or Chastity, but was modeled on an antique Venus pudica. She is pudens to express the Christian idea of shame in the body, a virtue who compensates for inherent female sinfulness by doing all she can to cover it. The antique Venus has been subtly converted into a naked

Botticelli

woman seemingly embarrassed by her exposed body, whose turning head and raised right hand connote an otherworldly longing. 8 Yet although her Christian meaning may be intellectually clear, this allegorically divine figure is visually still a naked body, and so Pisano’s Chastity projects contradictory allusions to both pious female virtue and evil pagan sexuality. Indeed, the visual histories of Eve and Venus inform and shadow each other: a single antique Venus of the Capitoline type probably inspired both Botticelli’s chastely beautiful Venus and Masaccio’s sinfully carnal Brancacci Eve. On the Italian peninsula, the boneyard of Roman art, images of the nude Venus never entirely disappeared. Reported sightings of Venus statues suggest the fascination they held, even in a climate of official Christian shame in the body. An English visitor to Rome in the twelfth century, Magister Gregorius of Oxford, admired the “magic spell” of a Venus statue that he visited endlessly.9 A celebrated statue of the nude Venus was exhumed in Siena in the mid-fourteenth century, allegedly signed by Lysippos. The Sienese proudly mounted the figure on the Fonte Gaia, but in 1357, blaming the pagan statue for the city’s recent military disasters, citizens removed and buried it in Florentine territory to transfer its malevolent powers to the enemy. Some scholars have claimed that the issue was idolatry, but it must also have been the display of female nudity, which was described by contemporaries as “disgraceful” (yet, interestingly, accounted for the statue’s magical powers).10 Another Venus statue in a Florentine private house was described in a late fourteenth-century Dante commentary; Ghiberti saw yet another in Padua, owned by the marchese of Ferrara.11 All these figures, along with the Roman Medici and Capitoline Venuses on which they were based, descend from antiquity’s most famous artistic prototype, the lost Knidian Venus of the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. That statue, whose general appearance is known from copies (Fig. 70), is central to any discussion of Venus, because the concept of the double Venus is linked with its history. As Pliny recounts and the Renaissance knew, Praxiteles made two statues of Venus, one draped, the other nude. The nude Venus was first offered to the citizens of Cos but, when they rejected it, given to Knidos. As the first monumental undraped female figure in antiquity, the Knidian Venus was highly celebrated, even a tourist attraction.12 We know little about Praxiteles’ draped Aphrodite (presumably less famous because less original) other than that Pliny’s linkage of her with a nude counterpart has been taken to reflect the concept of the Venus with dual aspects that characterized the goddess in antiquity and again in the Renaissance.

70.  The Knidian Aphrodite. Roman copy after an original by Praxiteles of c. 330 bce. Marble. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican, Rome. Photo: Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY.

Plato articulated this duality in the Symposium, distinguishing between the heavenly and the popular Aphrodite. The former, Aphrodite Ourania, is called “motherless,” an allusion to her divine birth, according to Hesiod’s Theogony, from a sea fertilized by the severed genitals of Uranus, who had been castrated by his son Cronos. Aphrodite Pandemos, the popular or vulgar one, is described as the daughter of Dione and Zeus,

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The Rebirth of Venus

71.  Venus, detail of wall painting, fifteenth-century reconstruction of early fourteenth-century cycle. Salone, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua. Photo: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Soprintendenza P.S.A.E. per le province di Venezia, Belluno, Padova, e Treviso.

in accord with Homer’s account.13 Plato’s interpretation of Aphrodite’s duality as representing intellectual and sensual love was popularized in the Renaissance through Florentine Neoplatonist writings, particularly Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on the Symposium. Modern scholars, notably Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind, considered Botticelli’s two large Venus paintings to represent Neoplatonized versions of Plato’s celestial and natural Venuses.14 This reading is supported by the works’ comparable and unusually large dimensions, and the assumption that they were related in commission and dating.15 Panofsky interpreted the nude figure in the Birth as Plato’s celestial Venus, who dwells in the zone of the Cosmic Mind and symbolizes the beauty of divinity itself, deriving from Praxiteles’ Knidian Venus; and he interpreted the clothed Venus in the Primavera as the natural Venus, ruler of the vegetative sphere, identifying her with Lucretius’s Venus Genetrix (and Ficino’s Humanitas). Panofsky missed the point, however, that in presenting celestial Venus as nude and earthly Venus as clothed, Botticelli radically deviated from both ancient and medieval tradition.

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Venus’s double nature had taken a variety of forms, but the goddess consistently governed a dialectic that set in opposition pure or chaste love (whether marital or intellectual) and sensual or carnal love (whether desirable or sinful). In that dialectic, the purer Venus was invariably represented by a clothed figure, and the carnal Venus by a nude one. This was certainly true in Trecento Italy. For example, in the Salone of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, a fifteenth-century reconstruction of a fourteenth-century cycle, the “higher” form of Venus appears in the guise of the Virgin (they are linked through association with marriage and procreation), wearing a gown and crown and holding a child (Fig. 71). In the same cycle, the carnal Venus appears naked, holding a mirror to symbolize earthly vanity. The Venus who appears on the Florentine Campanile, shown clothed and holding a diminutive loving couple, similarly presents the goddess as protector of marital procreation.16 The natural or carnal Venus, when set in opposition to the celestial goddess, was invariably presented as nude. In Boccaccio’s Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Venus appears to Fiammetta as nude (though partially wrapped in purple), to identify her as the diabolical opposite of the celestial goddess Fiammetta thinks she is.17 Panofsky himself had adduced medieval images that juxtaposed Eve and Mary, or Nature and Reason, in which nudity represents fallen or unredeemed human nature while the draped figure “stands for the loftier principle.” Noticing that Titian had reversed the types in his Sacred and Profane Love, Panofsky explained the difference by what he called the iconographic “ambivalence of nudity.”18 Yet because he did not spot the complete reversal of tradition in Renaissance twin Venuses, Panofsky oversimplified the goddess’s history and neutralized the contradictions that make Botticelli’s Venuses both startlingly original and conceptually problematic. Botticelli’s inversion of identities—presenting the physical Venus as draped and the celestial Venus as nude—was assumed by Panofsky to follow the antique model of the two Venuses, as expounded by Plato and illustrated by Praxiteles. However, there is no reason to suppose that the Platonic twin Venuses were differentiated in antiquity by dress or undress.19 Plato characterized the divine and natural Venuses without envisioning them in physical form. In the poetic/philosophical accounts of Plato, Lucretius, Ovid, and Virgil, Venus’s appearance is never described explicitly. The famous visual ­archetypes—​ Praxiteles’ Knidian Venus and Apelles’ Venus Anadyomene (known solely from descriptions)—present the goddess as a nude woman. But in Greek art, from the Archaic through the Hellenistic period, Aphrodite was depicted alternatively as

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nude or clothed, with no known differentiation of iconography nor polarity of meaning.20 Further, the idea that there are two Venuses, expounded by Plato in the Symposium through the speaker Pausanias, did not necessarily reflect a consensus of his time. As commentators have observed, Pausanias was an exponent of sophistic reasoning. His suggestion that there must be two Eroses and therefore two Venuses has been identified as an attempt, for the purposes of his argument, to “divide the substance of a goddess who is one.”21 Before the later Hellenistic period, Aphrodite was more generally known in a singular form. Plato’s contemporary, Xenophon, for example, may allude to Plato’s distinction when he says, “whether there is one Aphrodite or Two, Celestial and Common, I do not know.” 22 The depiction of Aphrodite as nude, initiated in images by Praxiteles and Apelles, was not meant to mark her identity as celestial, to be contrasted with another level of identity (the second, draped, Praxitelean sculpture was a substitute for the first, not its pendant). Nor, if the Symposium is taken as a whole, did Plato distinguish the two Venuses hierarchically. As Platonic commen­ tators have explained, Pausanias distinguished two kinds of Aphrodite to advocate the higher nature of homosexual love.23 Plato allows this position to be refuted by Diotima in the speech of Socrates, where we find the popular Aphrodite identified with the realm of procreation, while the celestial Aphrodite is disparaged as only sterile, one who “partakes not of the female but only of the male.”24 Plotinus distinguished the two Venuses by birth and function, as had Plato, but, representing only the position of Plato’s Pausanias, he set the procreative realm beneath the celestial: “the higher was not born of a mother and has no part in marriages, for in Heaven there is no marrying.”25 In his commentary on the Symposium, Ficino affirmed and eventually popularized this hierarchic distinction. Drawing more on Plotinus than Plato, Ficino described the heavenly Venus as Angelic Mind, who transfers sparks of divine splendor into the terrestrial goddess, World Soul, who is enmeshed with the matter of the world.26 Platonic and medieval dualisms have obscured the largely unitary nature of Venus in antiquity, a goddess who descended from a pre-Hellenic deity of regenerative nature. The Romans called her Venus Physica, or Venus Genetrix, the latter in part because of her politically important identity as the mother of Aeneas and founder of the Julian line.27 Yet “genetrix” also characterized the powerful Olympian Aphrodite of Greek mythology, whom the Romans took over and merged with “Venus,” a relatively minor deity of herb gardens.28 The com-

posite Venus Genetrix, as defined by Lucretius, was a cosmic power with jurisdiction over all human, animal, and vegetative generation, an independent figure not subject to the limiting alternatives of “celestial” vs. “carnal.” Lucretius’s Venus Genetrix, like the Greek Aphrodite who preceded her, was a “liminal” deity who bridges categories in the cultural system that are normally opposed. Aphrodite combines active sexuality (normatively masculine) with seductive feminine sexuality (in Homer, she is never raped or assaulted by a male; instead, she initiates love). She includes both proper marriage and prostitution; and she bridges nature and culture in her very identity: the erotic impulse is natural, while the arts of love are cultural;29 the pearl, a prime Venereal attribute, is a product of nature, born in the oyster, yet when worn as adornment becomes art. As the divinity of sexual love, Aphrodite represents, in Paul Friedrich’s words, “the dyadic union that so often dissolves the grids and paradigms of life.”30 The long survival of Aphrodite as an archetype may bespeak a human psychic need to dissolve over-acculturated divisions, yet her liminal identity also reflects a prehistoric unity of these now opposed categories. The Greek Aphrodite, sometimes identified with the Phoenician Astarte, has been traced back to an Indo-European Bird Goddess seen in Minoan and Mycenean art and, beyond, through the Akkadian Ishtar to the Sumerian Inanna.31 Inanna, like Aphrodite, was an astral goddess, identified with the planet now named Venus and called “the lady of the Evening Star.” Like Ishtar, Astarte was a syncretic figure whose attributes combined marine origins, erotic fecundity, sen­ suous nakedness, and the “blood of soldiery.” She has been described as “the great nature goddess . . . regent of the stars, queen of heaven, giver of life and source of women’s fecundity,” who appeared as a long-haired, naked female who might support her breasts with her hands, nurse a child, or hold a dove.32 The Greek Aphrodite shares many attributes with Astarte: the dove, and most important, her nudity (for which she was unique among the Olympians), a sign of both divinity and power.33 The Knidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles (Fig. 70), its modern reputation to the contrary, still embodied qualities of Aphrodite’s broader range of generative powers. Christine M. Havelock has argued that this sculpture displayed her divine power through her nudity in keeping with the Greek proclivity for expressing the divine in physical terms. Because erotic sensuality is the very essence of Aphrodite, the Knidian Aphrodite’s nudity “is a recognition that the sight of her could epitomize the nature of desire and therefore render her power explicit.” 34

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72.  Aphrodite, from Cyprus, late seventh century bce. Stone. Department of Classical and Near Eastern Antiquities, National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen (inv. no. 3719). Photo: National Museum of Denmark.

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Havelock interprets the gesture of the Aphrodite’s right hand, later taken as maidenly modesty, as an echo of earlier Aphrodite images that sustain the goddess’s generative associations (Fig. 72).35 This gesture was described by Lucian as functioning to hide her aidos, a word meaning reverence, awe, or respect, whose derivatives pertain to genitalia and sight. In Greek mythology, Havelock reminds us, mortals were severely punished for the crime of accidentally viewing the bodies of immortals. Thus, the right hand of the Knidian Aphrodite functions to celebrate and conceal the goddess’s sacred genitalia, and to ward off the inappropriate viewing of her awesome parts by mortals. By the Hellenistic era, the union of Aphrodite’s divinity with her sexuality had weakened. Late antique and post-antique culture increasingly saw the erotic as self-centered pleasure rather than as human physical nature with metaphysical dimensions. The shift of values is reflected in the Capitoline and Medici Venuses, which differ from their Praxitelean model in suggesting the figure’s awareness of an implied observer and, consequently, project a more secular eroticism. The beauty of Praxiteles’ Venus was celebrated in a later body of Greek poetry that relished its nudity, as well as in the legend of the sculptor’s use of his mistress, Phryne, for his model (the famous Greek courtesan Phryne was also said to have been the model for Apelles’ Aphrodite).36 Venus thus came into the Renaissance carrying doubly dualized charges: late antiquity’s polarizing of the generative and erotic, and Christianity’s opposition of the chaste and the carnal. Botticelli knew this—he was unquestionably familiar with both Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium—and he preserved these tensions and contradictions in his two images of the goddess. In the Birth, the sensuous physical beauty of Venus’s naked female body, virtually unprecedented in art since antiquity, is contradicted by the philosophical rigor of her position as embodiment of pure Mind and celestial Beauty. Does the position of her hands inscribe pudens or genetrix? Is her long golden hair virginal or erotic? Excessively abundant, it serves as chaste cover for the genitals; its main body is tightly bound, yet it flows in wildly energetic sinuous locks.37 Like Pisano’s Virtue, this figure projects the opposing messages of divine chastity and human sensuality. But it will not work to say that she is the liminal Venus who embraces both realms, for these had long been split into oppositions. Once divided, she could never be whole again. The Primavera Venus is a figure similarly full of contradictions. Elegantly dressed, demure and chaste, she rules over

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73.  Florentine follower of Masolino, Garden of Love, 1420–40. Wooden childbirth tray (desco da parte). Princeton University Art Museum, Bequest of Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. Photo: Bruce M. White.

love and generation in what is surely the most unnatural of natural worlds, an airless hermetic garden whose forms bespeak the very opposite of the sexual passion and bursting growth that springtime signifies. Like her sister, she is a lady of great refinement, a cultural product. Nominally, Venus Naturalis is ruler of the lower sphere, vulgar nature, yet her realm is courtly and resplendent of art, not nature. Through the painter’s art, the ancient erotic and generative powers of the goddess Aphrodite have been civilized, changed from wild, dangerous, and boundless to tame, safe, and contained. Love rules, and eros is constrained. Together, Botticelli’s two mythological paeans to Venus constitute the first major iteration in the Renaissance of the cosmological, female-gendered Nature, inflected by the high philosophical status assigned to Venus by the Neoplatonists. Yet this vision is severely compromised by gender considerations, as we will see. At the same time, Botticelli’s pictures articulate and embody a dialectic on the relation between Nature, Art, and Beauty that radically advances the case for Art’s powers relative to those of Nature. In the rest of this

chapter, I focus almost exclusively on the two paintings, whose monumental scale I take as an index of their ambition and perceived importance. the social primavera Nine characters, six female and three male, inhabit a closed garden filled with flowers and fruits. The locale has been identified as the Garden of Venus, whose description by the Roman poet Claudian was evoked by Neoplatonist Agnolo Poliziano in the Stanze per la Giostra.38 Yet the Primavera’s garden also partakes of a Quattrocento Tuscan visual tradition depicting the Garden of Love.39 As this allegorical theme evolved in art and literature of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Gardens of “Vanity” became Gardens of Love, and Venus herself was transformed from dangerously erotic to pleasurably erotic. 40 In early Florentine Quattrocento art, on deschi da parto and other birth-related objects, the fertility of the Garden is connected with marriage and childbirth, either through a central fountain said to insure fecundity (Fig. 73) or through the pres-

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ence of Venus herself.41 The function of this imagery is unequivocal: Venus brings love and marriage and children. The Primavera shares many features with the Garden of Love tradition: the floral bower, the theme of love instilled by Cupid, the triadic groupings.42 As in Garden of Love imagery, Botticelli’s clothed Venus is the arbiter of human and vegetative procreation, a strong indication that the painting’s context is marriage and reproduction. Yet setting it within that genre reveals its greater ambition. By contrast with the deschi da parto, the Primavera is gigantic, a full-size wall painting. It is therefore likely to have shared mytho-political significance with other large wall paintings created or owned within the Medici family circle: the Uccello equestrian battle pictures and Pollaiuolo’s (now lost) deeds of Hercules. 43 It is obvious how heroic male battle scenes would have supported the political agenda of the Medici family and Florence in general. Having traced the masculinization of reproduction in the preceding chapter, we are now in a position to see that the celebration of love and procreation in a painting as large and prominent as the battle pictures might have formed an important part of the same agenda.44 Although the circumstances of the Primavera’s commission remain unclear, its history is unmistakably Medicean. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, the second cousin and ward of Lorenzo Magnifico, owned the work at least as early as 1499, when, according to an inventory, a painting that appears to have been the Primavera was hanging in a house on Via Larga in Florence, in which Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco was then living. At that time, it was mounted above a lettuccio (day bed) on the wall of a room next to Lorenzo’s ground-floor bedroom.45 The picture’s earlier whereabouts remain undocumented. It has been suggested that Lorenzo Magnifico might have commissioned the Primavera for the young Lorenzo, perhaps for the young man’s wedding in 1482.46 On stylistic grounds, however, it is improbable that it was commissioned for Lorenzo’s wedding, for the likely date of the Primavera is 1476–78, and by 1482, Botticelli’s style had changed appreciably. 47 Conceivably the Primavera was painted for some other Medici wedding or, as I shall later explain, the painting might pertain to marriage without celebrating a specific wedding.48 Lilian Zirpolo has radically reoriented how we might understand the Primavera in a marital context, taking her cue from the episode on the right side (Fig. 74), which represents the rape of the nymph Chloris by the west wind Zephyrus. Wind had explained the Ovidian episode as a metaphor for earthly fertility: “Flowers burst forth when the cold earth is transformed by the touch of Zephyr.”49 Zirpolo focused instead upon

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the adjacent figure of Flora, the matron into whom Chloris was transformed by marriage, arguing that the prominent metamorphosis of nymph to wife in the Primavera alludes to Renaissance nuptial rituals and imagery, which often justified dynastic possession through the depiction or evocation of rapes such as those of Proserpina, Helen, and the Sabine women.50 In Zirpolo’s reading, the Primavera advocates chastity as the young wife’s duty, through the hortatory model of the transformed Chloris-Flora and also through the Graces, virginal attendants of Venus who are about to be similarly transformed through Cupid’s arrow. Inscribing the Primavera within the social nexus of Florentine marriage customs identifies its function as proscriptive: “a lesson for the bride” as Zirpolo called it, simultaneously an education in family duty and rationalization of its repressive conventions. Zirpolo’s reading calls into question modern interpretations that treat the painting as a benign celebration of love and female beauty. Ronald Lightbown, for example, saw the Primavera as a straightforward allegory of marriage “where Venus and Cupid and the plucking of the rose sheathed in the sweetness of amorous metaphor the realities of desire and enjoyment.”51 Charles Dempsey, pointing to the recurrent invocation of love in poetry of the Medici circle, identified “the idea of Love in all its perfection and potency” as the “moving force behind the invention of the Primavera, whose real theme is the progress of love.”52 Perhaps so. But, as we are admonished in 1 Corinthians 13, “Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” In the wake of modern feminist scholarship, it is no longer possible to regard the masculine celebration of female beauty and love as innocent or unmotivated. Howard Bloch has pointed to the late medieval discrepancy between the artistic idealization of women and their secular denigration. In Bloch’s view, the invention of romantic love was a strategy of resistance of the “marriage-minded nobility against the increasing economic power of women.” He observes that when woman was property to be disposed of, she was treated misogynistically as the “root of all evil,” but when she herself could dispose property, she was idealized according to the conventions of courtly love.53 Idealization of women, Bloch argues, is merely the inverted mirror of their conception as morally and materially base, and equally a technique of control. It is a syndrome feminists have identified as “doormat-pedestal tactics,” revealed in the remark of Sacha Guitry: “I would gladly agree that women are superior if it would discourage them from becoming equals.”54 Although the economic circumstances in late Quattrocento Florence were different from those described by Bloch —for

74.  Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (detail of Plate 3a, right side: Flora, Chloris, and Zephyrus), c. 1476–78. Tempera on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

The Rebirth of Venus

75.  Workshop of Sandro Botticelli, The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti (first episode of four), from Boccaccio’s Decameron, c. 1483. Spalliere painting on panel. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

one thing, not many Florentine women had the power to dispose property directly—the “doormat-pedestal” syndrome can be observed in related Botticellian commissions. Shortly after the Primavera was painted, the Botticelli workshop produced a set of spallieri paintings illustrating Boccaccio’s fable of Nastagio degli Onesti (Fig. 75). The four panels tell the story of a young man spurned by his beloved. Walking in a wood, he witnesses the ghostly reenactment of a woman’s bloody murder by a knight who was similarly turned down by his own lady. The knight tells Nastagio that the ritually recurrent slaying is punishment for his lady’s cruelty, which led him to commit suicide. Taking advantage, Nastagio stages a banquet on the site, knowing it will be interrupted by a repeat performance of the violent event. This produces a change of heart in Nastagio’s beloved, who fears a similar fate; the final scene is their triumphant wedding. The panels have long been recognized as a morality lesson to reinforce the desirability of matrimony, influenced by features of the marriage market in Quattrocento Florence, such as high dowry prices that had made brides exceptionally choosy.55

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Christina Olsen offered a deeper reading of the Nastagio series by juxtaposing it with Botticelli’s Venus and Mars (Fig. 76). Here, the woman has the upper hand. Through astrological status, Venus is ascendant over Mars; as Ficino specified, he is in thrall to dominant Venus.56 The theme of Venus’s power over Mars, popularized in Quattrocento imagery as Love’s chastening power to tame masculine ferocity, finds its dark opposite in the Nastagio panels. These panels present, Olsen says, a “refigured marriage” of Venus and Mars, which inverts the imagery of victorious female and mastered male to reheroize the masculine principle. Giannozzo Pucci, the groom for whom the panels were commissioned, was, like Nastagio degli Onesti, of a family that had only recently acquired status and wealth. Because the Pucci were minions of the Medici, Olsen suggests that the prominent Medici arms set between the Pucci and (bridal) Bini blazons in the final scene may acknowledge Lorenzo’s role as negotiator of the marriage. In Olsen’s reading, the panels support the groom’s social rise by a fantasy revoking of his actual “diminished status in relation to the bride.”

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The high level of masculine gender anxiety implied by the misogynist violence of the Nastagio panels is only seemingly belied by the chivalric elevation of woman in the Venus and Mars. Like the Primavera and Birth of Venus, the Venus and Mars was created within a specialized, Medici-circle discourse that wrapped art and poetry in the rhetoric of love—a rhetoric that not only cannot be taken at face value, but may have served to conceal a harsh reality of gender relationships behind the mask of chivalry. This much-romanticized Camelot deserves a closer look. A longstanding argument revived by Dempsey is that the Primavera directly concerns Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, the chivalric ideal par excellence. As the ideal beloved of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s brother Giuliano, Simonetta was the heroine of Poliziano’s Stanze, the Medici court poem that commemorated Giuliano’s triumph in the tournament of 1475. Dempsey situates the Primavera in this context of courtly love, invoking the principle of spiritual ascension demonstrated in Lorenzo’s sonnets addressed to his ideal donna. Love incites desire in the poet, initiating his ascent to a more pure and spiritual plane of love. In Dempsey’s reading, both the sonnets and the painting celebrate Lorenzo’s lady, who was at different times Lucre­ zia Donati and Simonetta; and the gaze of Venus is meant to evoke Dante’s first encounter with Beatrice, leading the poet to partake of divinity by comprehending “the universal goodness of love.”57 The interconnected figures of Simonetta and Lucrezia—who appear in the painting, as Warburg suggested long ago, in the figures of Flora and Venus—together represent

the new humanist muse who embodies love and gentility, while also symbolizing the poet’s philosophical progress.58 Recent feminist essays have debunked both the cult of Simonetta and Lorenzo’s high-minded philosophizing as extravagantly masculinist.59 A feminist reading would also probe discrepancies among the possible meanings of the Primavera. The theory that the Primavera figures the courtly love ideal in the beloved Simonetta seems at odds with the perspective that situates the painting in the genre of procreation and marriage. How could Flora simultaneously represent Simonetta, chivalric love object and philosophical muse, and the matronly, motherly ideal? Dempsey’s learned reading appears to conflict with the simpler but equally plausible interpretation of Zirpolo, who sees Flora as a figure of potential fecundity, specifically that of the “tamed and domesticated” wife. What sort of Florentine woman did the Primavera address? In a penetrating essay, Luce Irigaray applied Marx’s analysis of capitalist commodity exchange to the patriarchal social exchange of women.60 Women, she says (with a nod to LéviStrauss), represent a form of wealth circulated among groups of men, whose reproductive use value “underwrites” the symbolic order of the fathers. As a commodity in such a system, women themselves hold only symbolic value, their bodies treated as abstractions and their worth transcending the natural and particular. She speaks of the fabricated character of this commodity, its “trans-formation” from the “coarseness” of her physical body by man’s social and symbolic labor into a “supernatural” supplement (italics mine). As the product of man’s

76.  Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars, c. 1483. Tempera on panel. The National Gallery, London. Photo © The National Gallery, London.

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labor, the fabricated social woman is submitted to “specularization” and turned into a standardized signifier. “On this basis, each one looks exactly like every other. They all have the same phantom-like reality.” Irigaray’s model is unusually relevant to the Florentine marriage market, whose economic basis has always been conspicuous, and her analysis provides a key to understanding the function of the chivalric ideal in supporting it. In this system, all women have the same value, fluctuating only according to the size of their dowries, and all are essentially coins of a realm sustained by their reproductive bodies. The chivalric model attempts to disguise this gritty reality by inverting its terms, setting forth the fictions that (1) certain women (like Simonetta) have greater value than others, in terms not of economics but of love and philosophy; and (2) such women are prized not as dreary pawns with reproductive organs, but for their exciting virtues of beauty, youth, glamour, and unattainability. The disguise is well exemplified in the cult of the nymph, a favorite trope of Petrarchan and Medicean poetry. Nymphs had loosely flowing, golden hair, and they wore thin garments that revealed their limbs.61 In real life these attributes would have been erotically provocative, and nymph couture was predictably protested by Christian moralists. Savonarola railed against Florentine women who dressed and adorned their daughters “so as to resemble nymphs.”62 Yet nymphs were not bimbos, for they had philosophizing potential. Simonetta Vespucci was described as a nymph by several poets, a trend that reached its apogee in Poliziano’s Stanze.63 The hunter Julio/ Giuliano pursues a deer, who turns into Simonetta, “a lovely nymph.” She reveals her true identity to Giuliano, then leaves him changed, now desperately in love. In Neoplatonic terms, Giuliano’s longing for the vanished, unattainable nymph marks the first stage in the hero’s progress toward enlightenment. For Poliziano and also Lorenzo Magnifico, as David Quint has explained, Giuliano’s hunt symbolizes progressive stages of civilization. He lives first as a hunter, close to nature, indulging thoughtlessly in its pleasures, but gradually turns toward more civilized pursuits, culminating in love as the supreme humanizing value. Giuliano’s socialization, mediated by Simonetta as nymph, is described by Quint as an Ovidian metamorphosis whose terms are reversed.64 This progression from nature to culture, from wilderness to civilization, is echoed in the Nastagio degli Onesti cycle, where, as Olsen observed, the transformation of the setting from pine forest to elaborate architecture expresses the progressive controlling and shaping of (female) nature. 65 The

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nymph in the Stanze, at a stage beyond nature, offers access to civilized love, even though mythological nymphs are forest creatures, consorts of satyrs. The apparent contradiction that nymphs are simultaneously close to nature and creations of urban style is easily resolved for those who follow fashion. Nymph couture created a “look” that feigned the natural: loose, “unkempt” hair; flowing clothing seemingly artlessly assembled. Dress that artfully fakes the look of the natural is familiar to us, from the shepherdess costumes favored in Marie Antoinette’s court to the garb of teenagers today, but the practice was known in the Quattrocento as well. The girls’ behavior also represents a world we can recognize: young women wanting to be sexy, because inciting male desire in a safe context is fun. The role of nymph was safe; one could remain virginal and chaste while deploying erotic power through one’s very unavailability.66 When young women become brides, however, they turn in their nymph credentials, changing from wild and free to tame and controlled. They are no longer desirable, for they have joined the reproduction machine, while their husbands are free to answer Venus’s appeal once more, as Cupid inflames fresh love in new nymphs. In dress and appearance, the Quattrocento nymph may have been sexually provocative, but when mythologized or distanced by art, the pseudo-natural nymph— for ­example, Chloris or the Graces in the Primavera—represented elusive, unattainable youthful beauty, material for fantasy that posed no threat to the social fabric. Indeed, it helped to strengthen that fabric, by presenting a dream—culture disguised as nature—that offered an appealing fictional sugarcoating of life within the reproductive cycle. The chivalric model glamorized the special license of those whose social position placed them above the ordinary economy: men who were free to pursue a form of love free of reproductive association, and women who were offered the fantasy of an enriched female role. Potential Florentine brides might imagine themselves able, like Simonetta, to acquire through exquisite beauty the power to choose. A bride could envision herself, not merely as an asset to be passed from one male house to another, but as an eternally youthful beauty, like those in the fictional world of art and court ritual. And the chivalric example offered the ultimate inducement to marriage for choosy brides: a vision that romanticizes the inevitable union, while holding out a subliminal promise of options for both sexes. If Simonetta is in the Primavera in some way, it is perhaps as both Flora and Chloris, simultaneously respected wife and extracurricular love-object.

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The Primavera presents marriage and procreation as desirable goals for young women, a dream of fulfillment enhanced by Venus’s gentle tutelage and rule of a nature whose fecundity mirrors that of humans. Sexual initiation is mediated by romance: the rape of Chloris, which reenacts and justifies the rape of every bride,67 results in the nymph’s transformation into the beautiful, yet still pre-maternal wife. This is a message of importance to the entire Florentine community. Indeed, considering the public scale of the Primavera and its semipublic location in a ground-floor apartment in 1499 (a setting that its scale would have demanded in any earlier installation), the painting would have functioned as an equivalent to Donatello’s Dovizia (see chapter 3), expressing, in broad intention if not in originating circumstance, a communal desire for submissive brides and fruitful unions. It is in this sense that the painting may be about marriage and procreation in general but no one’s in particular. Such a civic meaning for the Primavera is supported by the thesis of Janet Cox-Rearick that the figure of Flora is to be understood metaphorically as Florence herself. Cox-Rearick interprets the Primavera as an expression of Medici rule in Florence, in which the allusion to Florence in Flora is interwoven with Medicean references, such as the family’s heraldic palle in the golden fruit or Laurentian laurel in the trees on the right.68 Cox-Rearick has abundantly documented the theme of springtime regeneration as a symbol of Medici dynastic continuity, which originated in the personal iconography of Lorenzo Magnifico’s circle (specifically, the emblem of the broncone, or green sprig blooming from a dead stump; Lorenzo’s chosen motto, “le temps revient”; and that of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, “par le fue reverdira”). And she demonstrated its elaborate iconographic amplification by Lorenzo’s son Giovanni (Pope Leo X), and subsequent Medici rulers, whose commissioned imagery relentlessly linked the myth of Medici returns with astrological cycles of time.69 Although it is doubtful that the Primavera was meant narrowly as a statement about the dynastic ambitions of the Medici family, it is nevertheless possible to link the procreative and the political as complementary and not conflicting agendas, especially when we consider the Primavera‘s grounding in seasonal fertility rituals. As Dempsey has shown, the structure of the Primavera was partly based upon the primitive farmer’s calendar, as described by Lucretius and other Roman writers, in which the months and seasons are represented by deities who appear in the painting. Zephyrus’s rape of Chloris initiates springtime growth and represents March; Flora, strewing the

earth with spring’s flowers, is followed by the season’s fullness in Venus, traditional goddess of April. The cycle culminates in Mercury, god of the springtime and of May in Roman rustic calendars.70 Dempsey explains that the characters in the Primavera were meant to be understood as archaic deities; thus Venus appears as goddess of the garden, an old-fashioned and rustic Roman deity. The archaic guise of the characters is signaled by the slightly out-of-fashion style of their clothing. The chemise of the central Grace has old-fashioned rows of buttons, Venus’s mantle is a type no longer worn except by nuns and older women, the ragged hem of Flora’s dress was in fashion seventy years earlier.71 These archaizing touches are combined with allusions to the Medici-specific present: the finely tooled showpiece falchion worn by Mercury, and the floral patterns of Flora’s dress that may replicate hand-painted festival costumes of Medici jousts.72 The Primavera‘s conjoining of antico and nuovo had a popular counterpart in the Tuscan Calendimaggio, which sustained ancient festivals such as the Roman Floralia. As Dempsey observes, Botticelli’s painting echoed Poliziano’s linguistic work in uniting the classical Roman and vernacular Tuscan within the new culture of humanism, ancient truth reaffirmed in present reality.73 Yet the deliberate archaisms of the Primavera also point to an identification with the rustic that was, like the Romans’ own pastoral art, essentially nostalgic about nature. Significantly, the identification of the Primavera with the archaic farmer is expressed through clothing that is just barely out of style—something only the fashion-conscious would pick up on. Authentic “rus” is far from us now; this is an urban vision, a pastoral idea about nature. Botticelli revived a local genre of Garden of Love imagery that had recently waned,74 and grafted onto it a celebration of ancient calendar deities, conveyed through figures dressed as modern Florentines—yet not exactly modern, but a generation out of date. Why such carefully nuanced revivalism? One answer is that archaizing is sometimes used to naturalize political practices by endowing them with the semblance of timeless truth. It can be invoked to support a shaky succession, as in the case of Simone Martini’s portrait of St. Louis of Toulouse. (On his abdication from the throne of Naples, St. Louis was succeeded by his brother Robert of Anjou; the legitimacy of the succession was strengthened by the deliberately old-fashioned style of the painting.) 75 Political circumstances may have called for archaism in the Primavera as a device to preserve power, for whether it was painted before

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or after the Pazzi assassination of Giuliano de’ Medici in 1478, Medici rule had been under continuous challenge since the mid-Quattrocento. “Le temps revient” was always a motto of timely relevance: “We will endure, for the Medici return is as sure as the return of spring.” The principle of rinovatio is also used to naturalize social practices. Its implied message is something like this: “The cycle of seasons that sustained our Tuscan ancestors will sustain our own way of life; the orderly passage of nymphs to brides to mothers will support our population and our wealth. Under Medici rule, beneficent and renewable, Florence prospers in vegetal, amorous, and procreative abundance.” Thus, the theme of spring’s inevitable return was used in the Primavera to foster Medicean and Florentine social agendas, both of which rested on the bedrock of civic procreation. the philosophical primavera The Botticelli mythologies are not only about the control of women and the social management of procreation—or rather, they are not this obviously so. The Primavera has traditionally been accorded great philosophical seriousness; indeed, for a very long time, the philosophical was its only dimension to engage attention. The Neoplatonic readings of Panofsky, Wind, and others presumed that the painting’s primary purpose was to expound philosophical ideas. Gombrich saw Botticelli’s Venuses as a contemporary application of Ficino’s concept of humanitas, set forth in his letter to the young Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, which expressed through Venus the notion of a “universal” humanity (one that, ironically, excluded woman except as symbol).76 Recent scholars have sustained philosophical meaning while broadening the frame of reference. Contextualizing the Primavera in contemporary Florentine ritual, Dempsey stressed the connection between its primary theme of springtime and the central figure of Venus.77 He grounded Botticelli’s Venuses in Lucretius’s Venus Genetrix, observing that when a manuscript of the De rerum natura came to Florence, readers recognized in it the goddess Natura, celebrated by Bernard Sylvestris and Alain de Lille as the “author of the world’s generation.” 78 Connecting Botticelli’s painting with a passage in the De rerum natura that describes seasonal change, Dempsey characterized the Primavera as “a hymn to . . . the regenerative spirit of life in nature,” a spirit summarized in the Venus Genetrix (or Physica).79 Panofsky had similarly considered Botticelli’s natural Venus to be a “vis generandi, which, like Lucretius’ Venus Genetrix, gives life and shape to the things in nature.”80 Stir-

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ring as these descriptions may be, they blur an important distinction, for between Lucretius and Botticelli had come a significant decline in Venus’s powers. If Botticelli modeled his Venus on the De rerum natura, it is telling that he bypassed its famous opening lines: the invocation to Venus that describes the sovereign goddess in terms that surpass all other Roman characterizations of her. In particular, Lucretius’s Venus eclipses that of Columella, whose Virgilian georgic, De re rustica, is named by Dempsey as Botticelli’s source for Venus as a garden goddess. Columella addresses a Venus subtly linked with desiring and compliant goddesses who are fertilized by male gods—Tethys by Oceanus; Amphitrite by Neptune; Mother Earth, who “lies softly open for easy plowing,” by Zeus. Columella’s Venus is likewise fertilized by Cupid, her son, and satiated (like an old sow?), she brings forth offspring and is reduced to a passive role in childbearing. Virgil presents a similarly patriarchal model: springtime is initiated by the “father omnipotent, Aether,” who descends to impregnate the body of his “joyful spouse.”81 Lucretius, by contrast, describes a Venus “who governs the nature of things,” an entity whose advent causes the movements of all of earth’s elements: the fleeing of clouds, the laughter of oceans, the glowing of daylight. All creatures fear and seek to please her, “pierced to the heart” by her power. Venus inspires creatures to procreate; she herself is not the birth-giving body, and she is certainly not reduced to a desiring goddess who needs a male to fertilize her.82 Her cosmic powers both embraced and were symbolized by genital physicality. The principle of Venus Genetrix is, in its pure form, an assertion that the highest creative power in the universe—what brought the world into being and sustains its activities—is female.83 Of course this principle was never purely expressed in patriarchal culture. But Lucretius approached it, as occasionally did others. In book 4 of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser reworked the Lucretian invocation to the “Great Venus,” adding a stanza that begins: “So all the world by thee at first was made.” As Barbara Bono has observed, this “comes daringly close to conflating her with the creator-God of Genesis.”84 The boldest example of natura creatrix before the Renaissance was the twelfth-century Natura. As we saw in chapter 1, the theologians of Chartres claimed that Natura was both artifex and mater generationis, a combination of guiding reason and the force that sustains natural life. She retained a close connection with divinity, responsible for all aspects of the geosphere and cosmos except the original act of creation (the only role allowed to God). Venus, as Natura’s stand-in, carried similarly elevated powers for Chartrain philosophers.85 In the

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late Middle Ages, however, as Natura disintegrated into neoAristotelian science, Venus descended accordingly. In the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, she was reduced to Nature’s helper who wickedly subverts her goals.86 The Florentine Neoplatonists revived Natura, in the name of a much-exalted Venus. But though the Neoplatonists may have intended to elevate her, they diminished the goddess by hierarchic dismemberment, producing one Venus who was only celestial, another who was only procreative. In this way of thinking, the generative world is severed from creative purpose and the cosmic mind is severed from physical nature. Botticelli’s Primavera Venus is a nominally a personification of Natura’s generative powers, but she does not generate. She is presented as an elegant cultural artifact, dignified only by her central position, who causes none of the activities in the painting. As a young, virginal maiden—a girl no older than the young matron Flora87—Venus is especially disempowered. That the goddess of love and marriage, the mature and experienced tutor in her subject, should be envisioned as youthful is consistent with the juvenilizing of the Virgin Mary in mid- to late-Quattrocento paintings (discussed in chapter 3), a process initiated by Filippo Lippi and his generation, and continued by Botticelli. The Graces of the Primavera are also young women, unmarried maidens, according to the codes of hairstyle, mediated by a Venus who seems, indeed, younger than springtime. But, to be fair, Mercury too is young (not to mention Cupid); why shouldn’t a painting that celebrates the first spring of the world also celebrate youth? In the face of such sweet and dazzling youthful beauty, who can think of raw power? Women can, perhaps, for in this painting youthful beauty marks a weakened power position only for the females. In earlier Garden of Love imagery, men are usually more numerous than women, but the sexes interact on equal terms (Fig. 73). In the Primavera, although males are outnumbered by females two to one, they initiate the significant movements of the painting: Zephyrus assaults Chloris; Mercury pokes the clouds; Cupid shoots his arrow. The superabundant females are merely acted upon: Chloris is raped, Flora created, while the Graces form a closed group, acting only upon each other. Cupid does, while Venus merely is. Displaced to the periphery but only apparently marginalized, the male remains the superior agent within. And also without. Through her gaze and gesture, Venus receives the male viewer, welcoming him into the picture as a “votary to love.” His implied presence heightens her primary identity as a specularized object, only to be looked at. Venus’s direct gaze (echoed in Flora, and in her Birth of Venus

counterpart) subjects her to the man who stands outside this pictorial realm, authorized to manage her. The power of women’s gazes was thought remarkable in antiquity and the Quattrocento; in both cultures, a gazing woman could be inter­ preted as a prostitute. For this and other reasons, in Quattro­ cento portraits “proper” women’s eyes were contained by the profile view.88 Venus is of course exempt from such requirements. Even so, Botticelli’s presentation of a gazing goddess of love renders her subliminally erotic, a remote divinity with the subtlest hint of carnality. It is a daring device, evoking an eroticism that ought to be foreign to the realms of both proper marital procreation and cerebral beauty. But that is just the point; these Venuses must hint at what they otherwise deny so that denial can triumph, marking them as images of female power disempowered. At play in the Primavera is a suppressed erotic current that supports the power dynamic. Notice how subtly sexuality is wedded to philosophical meaning. Zephyrus’s rape of Chloris represents the idea of divine love as a “rapture.”89 The journey of the love-impelled soul toward the divine is initiated by Cupid shooting his arrow—a metaphor for masculine penetration. The Graces (Fig. 77) offer a feminine sexual metaphor, more elliptically allegorized. For Seneca, the Graces stood for “benefits” and giving; their drapery is transparent because “benefits should be seen.” Alberti, following Seneca, interpreted the Graces as “liberality”: one gives, another receives, the third returns the benefit.90 Castitas (chastity), the “highest” and pivotal figure of the group, influenced by Voluptas (pleasure or joy, on the left) and Pulchritudo (beauty, on the right) looks to Mercury as the amor divino, transcendent love, toward which she is driven by the flame of Cupid’s arrow.91 Venus’s melting gaze invites the male viewer to join a philosophized progress of love that begins in the contemplation of the beauty of the Graces. Here, however, we encounter a problem of subjects and objects. If it is the male quester who is to be inspired onward, why does Cupid aim his arrow at one of the Graces?92 How can she be both Beauty (object), and the philosophical pilgrim impelled toward the divine (subject)? The structure of the left side only makes sense, I submit, if we imagine the female Graces to be covert stand-ins for males. It could hardly be otherwise, considering the meaning of the two Platonic Venuses as refocused by Ficino and the Neoplatonists. Plato had asserted, through the speech of Pausanias, that the love ruled by Vulgar or Popular Aphrodite involved sex (with boys or women) for purposes of physical gratification or procreation. The Heavenly Aphrodite ruled a higher form of love, oriented

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77.  Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (detail of Plate 3a, left side: Mercury, the Graces, Cupid, Venus), c. 1476–78. Tempera on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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to the intellect and education—thus “pederasty” and “pedagogy” are etymologically linked—found in relationships between men and older boys.93 Ficino develops the point in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, claiming that the Heavenly Venus instills the desire to contemplate beauty, while the Earthly Venus moves us to propagate. The beauty of a human body appeals to our intellect, he says, because we recognize in it a glimpse of divine beauty. The desire to enjoy beauty is to be distinguished from mere lust, for the beauty of the soul is perceived by the intellect alone. Among lovers, “beauty is exchanged for beauty”; the man enjoys the beauty of the beloved youth with his eyes, while the youth enjoys the spiritual beauty of the man through his mind. Ficino calls this a “wonderful exchange,” because the older man is pleased in both sight and intellect, while the younger man acquires beauty of the soul, now added to the beauty of his body.94 As in Greek culture, the older male-younger male relationship was structured around the idea of mutual gifts, the boy granting his favors out of kindness, and the man providing status, training for manhood, or even money.95 We are close to the Seneca-Alberti model of “benefits.” Ficino’s commentary on Plato, as a barely coded argument for the homoerotic as the highest form of love, has direct bearing on the Primavera. The invited male viewer is the imaginary lover and connoisseur of the three beautiful bodies that are the Graces. Their slender physiques diverge subtly from the more feminine bodies of Venus and Flora; two of them have no visible breasts and their bodies are not really gender-specified. (If imagined as a boy, Voluptas, the most sensuous figure in the painting, might convincingly represent divine joy, untainted by the negativizing that accompanies female sensuality.) They are not boys, of course, yet their androgynous bodies sup­ port a philosophically correct reading. We gaze at Castitas, she gazes toward Mercury. As in Ficino, the male viewer enjoys the physical beauty of a youthful body, while the young beloved gazes upon a figure who stands for beauty’s higher forms, enjoying the spiritual beauty of the reasoning Mercury. With perfect fidelity to homosocial Neoplatonism, Botticelli invented a structure for the Primavera that significantly deviated from the ancient literary texts.96 The left half of the picture is devoted to the “higher” dimension of Venus’s realm, while the right half concerns the earthly realm of the popular Venus. When the Primavera was painted, the Birth of Venus was not yet on the horizon. Consequently, there is no reason to suppose that the Primavera is dedicated to only one Venereal dimension, when Botticelli has clearly embedded two aspects, her terrestrial domain on the right, her celestial side on the

left. The Primavera‘s division by halves into the spheres of the two Venuses establishes a two-pronged dynamic that operates both philosophically and socially. Ruled by Venere volgare, the right side presents natural female eros converted into proper wifehood, with procreation to ensue. The left side, ruled by Venere celeste, defines love as the supreme pleasure of the elevated and sublimated male eros. On the right is a message for the bride and groom; on the left is a message for the nonprocreative lover. Whatever one may think about female role assignment under patriarchy, the females of the right side at least model a dimension of real women’s lives. The Platonized left half, however, is not about women at all, but about masculine d­ esire— not desire for women, but desire that women be disciplined by allegory to play the right roles, symbolic as well as social. It is a discourse articulated through female bodies that mime the relational aspects of beauty, love, and pleasure in terms foreign to female experience, while presenting a model of ideal beauty that living women might admire. Botticelli’s elevation of these values to a philosophical plane amounts to the feminization of beauty within a masculine discourse. That he successfully concealed this as art is a sign of art’s profoundly subtle new powers. nature into art The right-to-left progression in the Primavera presents a translation of the female from the natural to the symbolic realm, from physical to cerebral, and from nature to art. We begin with Chloris, the natural nymph in nature, whose appearance, as Zirpolo noted, suggests a panic-stricken and defenseless hunted animal.97 Her genitals are visible (like those of animals) through her diaphanous gown. Like all-blue Zephyrus, Chloris is one color, golden-white, connoting a raw and pure state of nature. Roses flow from her mouth, one delicately overlapping Flora’s dress (Fig. 74)—nature’s flowers become art’s flowers, sprinkled on the field of Flora’s painted dress, itself an artist’s creation.98 Flora’s face itself is literary art, for its delicate features, pearl-like teeth, and ivory complexion constitute a visual counterpart of Petrarch’s and Poliziano’s descriptive norms.99 Yet Flora is a transitional figure, for although she wears the collar and girdle of a fashionable married woman, these are made of flowers, not jewels, as they would be in life.100 Her head is decorously covered, her hair appropriately coiffed, but lightly overlapped by bending laurel branches, to indicate that she is still in nature’s realm. Venus represents the next step out of nature, her position

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firmly distinguished from Flora’s. She stands out from an obediently receding clump of myrtle. The goddess’s power to move and shape the elements is implied in the trees behind her, whose contours form a clean Roman arch (Fig. 77). Or is it Cupid the archer (arciere) who makes the arco (arch) with his arco (bow)? More likely the latter, for Cupid himself is the arch’s keystone; his limbs complete its shape, while his bow underlines its presence through the visual pun. Botticelli’s potent little Eros could have been a source for a visual metaphor used by Raphael, Michelangelo, and others, as we will later see, in which the winged Cupid stands for the artist as inspired marksman. The artist-Cupid metaphor may already have been in force in the Quattrocento. Alberti had compared the artist to an archer: “Never let it be supposed that anyone can be a good painter if he does not clearly understand what he is attempting to do. He draws the bow in vain who has nowhere to point the arrow.”101 Or Botticelli may have been thinking of Dante, who compared the human life span to an arch or bow, initially rising upward and then turning back from its apex (set at the thirtyfifth year).102 If this is applied to the Primavera, the arch framing the earthly Venus might stand for the natural span of human life; Cupid arrests its decline into senescence with the bow and arrow of timeless art and love. This symbolically charged Eros also fits Ficino’s elevated definition of Love in his gloss of Plato’s Symposium: Love is crafty, a hunter, a magician; he is positioned midway between ignorance and wisdom; and he leads the souls of men up to celestial things.103 In the Primavera, Cupid’s dead-accurate aim on the Graces consummates the Platonic conversion, transforming the natural realm behind his feet into the realm of art that the Graces represent. At the center of the transition from natural to artificial is Venus, whose adornments allude to nature through the materials of art. Her astral and generative powers are summarized in the pendant she wears, a golden crescent moon framing a ruby;104 the embroidered golden flames that edge her neckline; and the pearls that adorn her yoke and hemline. Venus was known to antiquity as the margarita (pearl) incarnate, born from the oyster shell. Gold and pearl adornments followed her into various incarnations, as signs of Venereal identity.105 Like ancient Aphrodite, the Renaissance Venus bridges nature and culture. Her civilizing role was revived in Ficino’s Venus Humanitas, who carries out the work of Venus volgare in refined cultural terms. Responsible for making “all the bodies of the world seem beautiful” to the human eye, Venus Humanitas creates, in Panofsky’s words, the “perishable but

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visible and tangible images of Beauty on earth: humans and animals, flowers and trees, gold and gems, and works contrived by art or skill.”106 Botticelli’s ornamented Venus mediates the passage of females from natural to acculturated state through the language of jewelry and fashion. In Poliziano’s Stanze, too, nature and culture are set into reciprocal exchange. Julio advances from pastoral innocence to Venus’s urbane Cyprian garden—site of the marriage of Venus and the master craftsman Vulcan.107 The golden-canopied temple of Venus is a product of Vulcan’s “marvelous artifice.” On its doors, carved images present a roster of amorous mythology, including the birth of Venus, and within it, a self-portrait of Vulcan, the “divin fabro.“ Vulcan’s depictions are said to be so beautiful and lifelike that “nature herself is put to shame.”108 Vulcanthe-artist emerges as the hero, while Venus merely supports his creativity. Botticelli’s Venus volgare similarly rules over a world that conspicuously connects nature and art, but privileges art. The goddess’s nod and benedictory gesture direct us to the left side of the picture and the higher stages of our progression. The Graces mediate culture through an intricate discourse of haute couture: they are dressed in golden-white translucent veils that resemble Chloris’s light draperies, but are subtly differentiated, for their garments have been designed. Nuanced differences among the three Graces express the measured translation from the state of nature to that of art. Pulchritudo is the most artificially fashioned. The tight curls of her hair are interlaced with pearls; the plaited ends join a horsehair extender to support a jeweled pendant. Voluptas wears a brooch and pearl, but her hair is less disciplined. She is the least reconstructed, nearer the natural Chloris. Castitas has no visible ornaments, except on the edge of the chemise that slips off her shoulder to hang in decorous disarray. This detail may allude to her virginal state,109 for Voluptas and Castitas are maidens, still to be converted into the perfected beauty represented by Pulchritudo. This triad repeats, in inverted form, that of Chloris-FloraVenus: its two more natural members correspond to the two acculturated members of the other group, as the “pure culture” Pulchritudo corresponds to the “pure nature” Chloris. If Pulchritudo is the antithesis of Chloris, Mercury is the antithesis of Zephryus. Both are flying gods, but mirror opposites. The rampant lusty wind god—barely draped and naturally winged—opposes the statuelike Mercury (he recalls the Davids of Donatello and Verrocchio), whose wings are part of his shoes, made of finely tooled metal, as is his helmet. Mercury is, from top to toe, a work of art. The sword at his side, a ceremonial chivalric falchion, is associated with the

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78.  Attributed to Giovanni di Stefano, Hermes Trismegistus, 1480s. Sgraffito on pavement. Siena Cathedral. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

harpe, a tool for pruning trees and vines—and with the sword Mercury used to kill Argus. With this harpe, Mercury has also pruned the Garden of Venus, so conspicuously tidy and neat (the left side subtly more so than the right).110 The instrument’s multiple allusions imply that, on several associative levels, its owner has cut down and tamed wild Nature. Mercury, guide of souls (psychopompos), cloud-skimmer, and leader of the Graces, was for the Neoplatonists “the ‘ingenious’ god of the probing intellect.”111 Ficino contrasts Mercury’s astrological qualities and “the strenuous movement of his versatile mind,” with those of Venus, who signifies “a force and spirit that is natural and genital.”112 Ficino’s assignment of Mercury to the intellectual sphere and Venus to the procreative realm corresponds to their contrasted roles in the Primavera. Mercury and Zephyrus, on the other hand, constitute the dual dimensions of the masculine role as Quattrocento Florentines con-

ceived it. Together, Mercury and Zephyrus drive both intellectual inquiry and the inseminating life force. Between them stand six women who do little but receive their energies. As the culmination of the progression from nature to culture, Mercury has a special relationship to art. Poking the clouds with the caduceus defines him as revealer of divine secret (hermetic) knowledge.113 The Neoplatonists identified Mercury with Hermes Trismegistus, whom they reclaimed from his long medieval association with diabolical magic to represent the highest philosophical wisdom. This Hermes is depicted in a prominent sgraffito on the pavement of Siena Cathedral, in his newly authoritative triple capacity as priest, philosopher, and lawgiver (Fig. 78).114 Ficino, who translated the major hermetic texts, explained the principle of sympathetic astral magic given in the Asclepius as “draw[ing] down the life of the heaven.”115 Building on the Hermetica, Ficino

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suggested that the “world soul” could be drawn into the “deteriorated” forms of the sensible world by making images that re-form these forms. Images thus become an instrument for the conversion of natural forms into a likeness of divine ideas. For Ficino, Mercury is the magus, or magician, who knows how to draw down the divine forces. Pico della Mirandola expanded on these powers in his “Dignity of Man” speech: “the Magus marries earth to heaven, that is to say the forces of inferior things to the gifts and properties of supernatural things.”116 The idea of man’s divine creativity was not in itself new. Yet Pico’s leap was of significant benefit for artists, for he cast these powers in the language of art, describing Man as a demigod and surrogate of the Creator, and as “sculptor and molder of the self,” who uniquely possesses the freedom to participate in the world at whatever level he chooses.117 As Frances Yates pointed out, “the operative Magi of the Renaissance were the artists.”118 Elsewhere, Ficino articulates the artist’s relationship with nature in terms relevant to the Primavera. There is a hierarchy, he says, with God at the top, as pure act, and matter at bottom, as pure potential. God prepares matter for nature, and nature prepares matter for art. Prime matter, analogous to the material of the sculptor, is called a womb, without form or color, intangible, and without quality or quantity.119 Stones, wood, iron, have the potential to become statues, but if not given form by the artist, they remain unformed matter. Although Ficino presents this as a straightforward hierarchy, his description implies a kind of circularity, since nature’s matter does not ooze up from primeval sludge, but is prepared by God to be transformed by the artist, whose creativity mirrors that of God Himself. As God has in Himself the ideas of all created things, the artist contains in his mind the forms of his works. Botticelli’s painting gives structured expression to this model of the relation between art and nature, animated by a visual dynamic of vertical differentiation and lateral progression. Nature’s prime matter enters from above on the right, identified, through the Chloris figure, with the womb and the female potentia. It is transformed by Zephyrus’s insemination, for we are here in the realm of pure procreation. But the artist’s shaping hand begins almost immediately to turn nature into art, hence the painted and styled Flora. On the left, a similar transformation occurs in a higher key. The Graces are a mixture, like everything in the world, of artful and natural, formed and unformed (Ficino’s “natural unions of form and matter”). Mercury, as the shaper of nature and intellectual guide, is the artist. Mercury looks up to the outside-the-picture space where

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ideas dwell, and from whence they return, on the right, as unformed matter prepared for nature’s work, which resumes the cycle. venus, marsyas, and pan Classical metaphors and similes pervade Laurentian-age poetry and imagery, often with shifting meanings as writers make associative leaps from one myth to another: Giuliano and the nymph turn into Apollo and Daphne. In the play of metaphors, one must look for analogies of structure, not of literal detail. In Poliziano’s poem, Venus and Vulcan are conjoined; in the Primavera, it is Venus and Mercury. In each case, Mercury’s intellectual qualities and Vulcan’s creative powers oppose those of Venus, who represents love and nature, a static resource for the operations of her creatively intelligent counterparts. When an all-male model is taken up, the elements are configured differently. Marsyas and Pan are mythological figures who, like Venus, mediate the realms of art and nature, yet the gender difference is instructive. Marsyas is a figure for man’s bestial nature, his lower self. He is an open antagonist of the higher self, represented by Apollo, whom Marsyas challenges to a contest of musical art. After winning the musical contest, Apollo flays Marsyas, taking over his skin.120 Art conquers Nature, then appropriates its powers. The theme of Apollo and Marsyas figured prominently in Medicean art. It appears on a much-copied gem that was owned by the family.121 Two antique statues of the vanquished Marsyas guarded the entrance to the garden of the Medici palace, each presenting the defeated challenger suspended from a tree by wrists tied over his head. They were acquired successively by Cosimo de’ Medici and his grandson Lorenzo Magnifico, and according to Vasari restored, respectively, by Donatello and Verrocchio. The statues were long considered lost, but the former is now believed to be identical with a statue in the Uffizi, restored not by Donatello but perhaps by Mino da Fiesole (Fig. 79).122 As a figure who plays nature to Apollo’s art, Marsyas appropriately mediated the entrance to the garden, realm of nymphs, satyrs, and nature in general. But, as Paul Barolsky has shown, Marsyas could represent art as well, his silenic shagginess equated with Socratic typology, genius concealed under an ugly skin. Lorenzo himself was cast in the role of Socratic silene by Pico and Vasari.123 Lorenzo preferred to be identified with Pan, a more complex figure than Marsyas and a more heroic emblem of nature. At the Villa Careggi, Lorenzo established a cult of Pan; he wrote

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an eclogue on Apollo and Pan, and elsewhere described Pan as cosmic ruler and universal god of nature “who holds sway over that which decays or generates.”124 Pan’s powers were relatively modest in antiquity, but the Neoplatonists gave him a more cosmic identity. For Pico, Pan represented the transcendent unity of the world, in whom all opposites are one.125 In Signorelli’s School of Pan (Fig. 80), a now-destroyed picture probably painted for Lorenzo, Pan sits enthroned at the center of his court, a supersatyr who combines sexual fertility with cosmic wisdom.126 Pan’s cosmological range from divine to earthly is inscribed in his bodily image (which comes from Statius): his upper body is celestial (horns like the sun and moon, a ruddy face “in imitation of air,” stars on the fawn skin on his breast), and his lower body is terrestrial (hairy and with goat’s feet, to tie him to the earth, plants, and wild beasts). Signorelli’s Pan was identified as Lorenzo himself by CoxRearick, who associated the picture with Medici rule and its recurrence.127 Pan is comparable to Venus as a figure rooted in nature who epitomizes erotic energy and connects the realms of nature and art, wildness and civilization.128 He was often paired with Aphrodite in Hellenistic art, because of their shared association with passion and sexuality, but his eroticism is wilder and purer, not dualized by connotations of shameful sex and honorable marriage. Indeed, Pan’s erotic passion catapulted him directly from nature to art, for in pursuit of the nymph Syrinx he invented the pipes of Pan, which came to symbolize pastoral music.129 In Panic mythologizing, nature’s mysterious and vital powers are gathered in the god himself, who channels them into his pastoral art. He is both nature and artist. Venus, by contrast, rules a nature whose passive procreativity she echoes, the resource for an artistic transformation that she herself will not work. Pan acquired increasingly elevated meanings, rising from a simple goat-god to a cosmic deity who could also represent culture and princely rule. Because masculine sexuality was not believed to conflict with masculine intellect or power, Pan escaped the dichotomizing to which Venus was subjected, which eventually debased and diminished her. In Medicean art, Venus signifies a different discourse of art and nature, which now involves beauty. In the early Quattrocento, Art was employed to combat calamitous Nature. The late Quattrocento saw Art’s adversary in the Nature that creates beauty in the sensible world. One clear sign of this discourse comes from a skeptic who distrusted art and spoke up for nature. In a sermon of 1496, Savonarola said, taunting “artificers” who try vainly to imitate nature, that “works of nature are more beautiful than man’s artificial works.”130 This

79.  Marsyas Flayed, Hanging from a Tree Trunk. Roman copy of a Greek original of the third century bce, restored by a Renaissance artist (Mino da Fiesole?). Marble. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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80.  Luca Signorelli, School of Pan, c. 1490 (destroyed 1945). Oil on panel. Formerly Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

polarizing of the artist and nature around the issue of artifice had been strengthened in Medicean culture by the philosophical elevation of beauty and the acknowledgment of art’s special role in its creation. “Beauty” had not been a transcendental category for Plato. It was made so by the Florentine Neoplatonists (and not by Plotinus, though they followed him in elevating the concept), as they raised Beauty to the highest artistic and intellectual level.131 They did so with the help of art and artists, who provided the exemplary models. The idea that the artist creates a superior form of beauty had appeared in art theory since antiquity. Perhaps the most famous topos is the story of Zeuxis, who painted an image of Helen by selecting features from a number of different maidens to produce one superior example.132 The principle of concentrat-

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ing scattered beauty was expressed in another topos known both in antiquity and the Renaissance: when the bee gathers honey from a variety of different flowers, he doesn’t bring all the flowers home, but instead synthesizes the honey within his body.133 Petrarch took up the metaphor, exhorting the writer to convert his gatherings at the honeycomb, to produce a better example from a variety of sources; while the painter Cennino Cennini recommended copying from a single best example. Half a century later, Poliziano joined the debate, recommending that many authors be used, not just the best one, and referring to the example of the bee.134 The bee metaphor may be represented in Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, where bees (or wasps) swarm around the head of the sleeping Mars, some returning to a nearby hive (Fig. 81). Con-

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81.  Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars (detail of Fig. 76: Mars, with bees). Photo © The National Gallery, London.

sidering that this feature of the painting has never been satisfactorily explained, and that Poliziano has been identified as a source for other aspects of the picture,135 it seems likely that Botticelli here alludes directly to the artist’s power to create out of nature’s scattered examples a single sweet flavor of beauty. The allusion is appropriately located next to the figure of Mars, who has been described as the consummate example of male beauty in Botticelli’s art.136 The allusion to the artist’s powers in the Venus and Mars could serve as a needed gender balance, to counteract the superiority of Venus over Mars. This image of the sleeping Mars, disarmed and vulnerable, watched by a wide-awake Venus, echoes the Petrarchan trope of the dominatrix mistress and her male subject. When Petrarch framed this model, he was careful to offset the male lover’s vulnerability by deploying his mastery of the poetic art. As Nancy Vickers has shown, Petrarch neutralized the potentially threatening subtext of castration by using art to reverse the power structure, “scattering the body of his mistress” in the rime sparse of his poetry.137 In juxtaposing the bees and hive with the head of Mars, Botticelli invokes a familiar metaphor for art’s power to gather scattered beauty, set within an image that frames the male-female power dynamic in Petrarchan terms. Woman is elevated so that she may be controlled. Although the threat she poses to unguarded

virility is merely hypothetical, it is imaged so that it can be safely rechanneled. Thus, the potentially dangerous, castrating female is disarmed through art. Yet art manages nature in terms both imaginary and real. Since mothers and reproducing female bodies are a constant presence in men’s lives, as Irigaray observed, man can never fully escape his dependence upon the “natural.”138 (The forbidden thought is that her “nature” is also his.) Only in art can this reality be avoided. Consider the Primavera as an expression of man’s effort to free himself from dependence on woman’s body, its imagery staging his progressive liberation. Our visual passage through the Garden of Venus, metaphorically the female body, reenacts man’s dangerous journey.139 Zephyrus’s aggressive entrance symbolizes the penetration that initiates deflowering, the first phase of nature’s conversion into culture. Through progressively artful adornment, the female figures display their own transformation. Finally, Mercury mediates man’s escape from woman’s body, freed through transcendental meditation from dark, female earth into the spiritual beyond that is air and sky. In this progression, Beauty, Love, and the Divine are principles that spur the conversion of the natural female into the transcendent philosophical feminine principle. The next step would logically be represented by the Birth of Venus.

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the philosophical birth of venus The origins and purpose of the painting known as the Birth of Venus (Plate 3b) remain a mystery. Because the Primavera and Birth of Venus hung together in the early sixteenth century in the Medici villa at Castello (where they were seen and described by Vasari), it was long believed that they were painted for a single patron, perhaps with a common program. But the pictures probably had separate beginnings. The Birth of Venus differs from the Primavera in being painted on cloth rather than panel and in its slightly smaller dimensions. These factors have suggested its possible creation for a villa, whose decorations were often of cheaper materials and less serious subjects than town-house imagery.140 Although documents do not support the picture’s origin as a Medici commission, that remains the most likely presumption.141 Now that the Birth of Venus has been uncoupled from the commission of the Primavera, scholars have rightly pushed for a later dating, most credibly c. 1484–86.142 Yet though not literally pendants, the Primavera and Birth of

82. Botticelli, Birth of Venus (detail of Plate 3b), c. 1484–86. Tempera on canvas. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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Venus unquestionably speak to each other, and have come to collectively invoke what the Primavera alone initially embraced: the two aspects of Venus. Botticelli’s nude Venus (Fig. 82) was probably modeled on Poliziano’s description of Venus’s birth, combined with antique images reflecting Apelles’ lost painting of Venus Anadyomene.143 Both these models represented Venus Anadyomene, not Venus Genetrix (logically, the newborn is undressed). But the juxtaposition of Botticelli’s second Venus with the Primavera, whether literally or conceptually, transformed the Anadyomene into Venere celeste, marking her as superior to her clothed counterpart. Botticelli does not precisely follow Poliziano, for he presents Venus as she arrives on the shore of Cythera, not at the moment of her birth.144 Yet he visually alludes to Hesiod’s description of the goddess’s birth from Saturn’s castration of his father Uranus. The white-edged pockets of foam that advance to the foreground, curling and bubbling at the base of Venus’s massive conch shell, represent the seminal foam that surged up when the dismembered testicles of Uranus were cast into the sea,145 which united with the water to produce the goddess. The intertwined lovers on the left are Poliziano’s zefiri amorosi, symbols of love who predate the goddess (the Primavera Zephyrus reappears as one of them). They blow shell-borne Venus to shore, scattering roses to perfume her arrival. The Hora of Spring, who resembles Flora in the earlier painting, lifts a flowered mantle to cover Venus. The goddess herself, a monumental Venus pudica, covers her genitals with one hand and rests the other on her breast. This figure has been much exalted. Hecksher calls her “a declaration of new faith in man’s ability for regeneration,” while Wind describes the Primavera Venus as the “vicar of a higher Venus of whom she is only an image or shadow.”146 These scholars and others offer reverential interpretations of Botticelli’s second Venus, accepting the Neoplatonists’ definition of the goddess’s celestial aspect as the ultimate transcendental position. I must depart from their enthusiastic readings, because Botticelli modifies this Venus’s powers considerably. The superior nature of the uranian Venus is manifested in a transcendent passivity. Natura naturans has become naturata. A still and narcissistic center surrounded by frenetic activity, she stands (like her sister) in stark contrast to Lucretius’s Venus, who drives the elements of nature. That principle did survive faintly in Quattrocento art, as is manifested in the planetary Venus of the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini (Fig. 83), an energetic and purposeful figure who brandishes her shell as she marches on the elements.147 Yet Botticelli’s Venus is not remotely related to

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the Venus Genetrix, for she is a symbol of an idea or principle that has no connection with generation. She is a dutiful daughter, a result not a cause, who is both above and not of this world, more and less than life itself. Admittedly, Botticelli’s Venus is now a cultural cliché; her composite identity includes countless tableaux vivants on her now hopelessly stereotyped pose, as well as smirking descriptions of “Venus on the half-shell.” Yet Botticelli is partly to blame, for she was already a quotation before the paint had dried—of Apelles, Poliziano, the Medici Venus—a figure selfconsciously striking a pose steeped in literary signification. She enters the painting not as the goddess of nature, but as a metaphor for the beauty that is produced by art. Indeed, every­thing in this painting is a quotation from art, not only Venus but Zephyrus and “Flora,” characters from Botticelli’s earlier Primavera. The painter resumes the discourse of art and nature in the Birth of Venus, but now as a fait accompli, for art’s superior position is loudly claimed, while nature is rearranged according to the fine conceptual filter of the artist’s mind. She is like Ga­latea, the creation of the artist Pygmalion, brought to life by her creator (a subject Botticelli may in fact have painted).148 There are significant parallels for Botticelli’s goals and methods in Ficino’s hierarchy of form and matter and in Pico’s doctrine on the creation of beauty. Ficino’s hierarchy consisted of Cosmic Mind, Cosmic Soul, the Realm of Nature, and the Realm of Matter. The Realm of Nature partakes of divinity and beauty from above and corruptibility and ugly formlessness from below. Venus Coelestis, who dwells in the realm of Cosmic Mind, is “pure intelligence,” reflecting the splendor of divine beauty, by contrast with the Venus Vulgaris, who represents a beauty manifest in the cor­ poreal world.149 Ficino identified matter with “mother,” and explained the words materia and mater (perhaps wrongly) as having a common etymology.150 Yet it was natural for him to connect the terms, since in the Aristotelian reproduction model, the mother was matter awaiting the form given by the father. Venus thus arises from the descent of the god Uranus into formless matter, which he impregnated with the seed of ideal forms. Botticelli’s natural world—serene and pure, yet vacant and lifeless—is a visual paradigm of the Neoplatonic form-matter hierarchy. Matter is as nonexistent as is possible in representational art, a colored but textureless substance pressed into entity by the shaping contour line (the most abstract and least material of art’s elements), and by modeling that results from no natural light source, but from pure invention. The

83.  Matteo de’ Pasti (?), Venus, 1450s. Marble relief. Chapel of the Planets, Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini. Photo from Pope-Hennessy, 1985a, fig. 101.

water is as neutral and inert a surface as can be imagined. The horizon of the Birth of Venus, like the distant background in the Primavera, offers no sign of life, only emptiness. Empirical realities are radically suppressed in favor of transcendental ones. I do not argue that Botticelli illustrates Ficino’s ideas. Rather, the philosophical structure of Neoplatonic thought resembled the painter’s independent development in a different medium. Pico della Mirandola offers a similar parallel. In his commentary on a Platonic love poem by Girolamo Benivieni, Pico discusses the lover/quester’s ascent from terrestrial to transcendental beauty (represented by the celestial Venus), up a six-staged “ladder.” Desire begins in the love of a beautiful physical image, which the lover refashions in his imagination into something more spiritual and perfect. In the third stage, the soul abstracts

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84.  Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus (detail of trees), c. 1484–86. Tempera on canvas. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY. 85.  Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (detail of trees), c. 1476–78. Tempera on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

a notion of universal beauty from this perfected sensory image. In the fourth stage, the soul becomes aware of the power of abstraction it has just employed, and finds in itself the image of ideal beauty. In the fifth stage, the soul rises to approach ideal beauty intellectually, and in the sixth stage it merges with Angelic Mind, to achieve complete understanding of the highest form of beauty in the mind of God.151 This philosophical progression—from the perception of beauty in the physical world to its transformation in the mind, a progressive abstraction that leads to ever-higher levels of idealization—resembles nothing so much as the modus operandi of Botticelli. Between the Primavera and the Birth of Venus came a process of abstraction, a deliberate moving away from natural perception that might be called “progressive unnaturalism,” with each stage depending on a calculated refinement of the previous one. Consider, for example, the highly stylized trees in the Birth, with their unnaturally regular leaf structure and gilded outlines (Fig. 84). An abstract pattern is developed in the gold hatching on the trunk and branches, as in the repetitive V-shaped waves, that proudly asserts its distance from the far more varied and subtle forms of nature presented in the

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Primavera (Fig. 85), which seem quite organic by comparison. Botticelli’s extreme abstraction in the Birth sets him apart from many of his contemporaries, particularly Ghirlandaio, who in the 1480s was presenting nature in its smallest details, with pebbles or blades of grass meticulously drawn. Since the Birth of Venus was probably painted before Pico formulated his theory, Botticelli’s example might have given the philosopher a sensory model for his theory. Like Pico’s philosopher, the painter refines his initial natural perception to conform to a more perfect idea in the mind. As in Pico’s model, the higher stage represented by the Birth is based not on direct natural perception, but upon the preceding stage. The Primavera has become the natural model for the Birth, and thus it represents the nature over which the Birth of Venus, standing for art, now triumphs. Ironically, in this new realm made up of Platonic abstractions, the organic forms of nature would be an unnatural intrusion. As if to nudge the viewer into understanding the new hierarchy, a game of nature and art is played out in the painting. The hem of Aura’s cloak curls around a piece of landscape, as if to frame natural nature within a painted border. We saw the

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same gambit in the Primavera Flora’s real and painted flowers. Yet Botticelli now daringly exaggerates his arbitrary deviations from natural appearances. The intricately interlocked limbs of the zephiri cockily repudiate both anatomy and logic (the female figure’s left leg, if visible, would be attached somewhere around her navel). The nude Venus, already doubly modeled on antique precedent, is further artificed as the painter takes calculated and recognizable liberties with the proportions of her body, attenuating the neck and overstating the slope of the shoulders. Botticelli will do this again in the Calumny of Apelles, in which the figure of Truth is an “improved” quotation of the Venus. The huge oyster shell casts a strong shadow (no other form in the painting does so), as if to emphasize its origin in Platonic pure form and descent into the realm of matter, a sign of divine essence in a material world too insubstantial to cast shadows. (Venus herself has no such substance, she remains a ghostly arrival from another world who has no effect on this one.) The license Botticelli takes with normative proportions and logical lighting will provide a basis for Florentine Mannerism, and I would suggest that the arbitrary and capricious distortions we associate with Mannerist style begin here—the pregnant point of departure for the forceful assertion of art’s freedom to deviate from nature. Botticelli now positions himself firmly “against nature,” in both its naturans and naturata aspects, at just the time when the theoretical case for the superiority of the artist’s creativity to that of nature begins to be made. Ficino, rejecting Aristotelian mimesis as the basis for artistic creativity, loudly proclaims the Platonic ideal of perfecting nature: What is quite wonderful is that human arts produce by themselves whatever nature itself produces, as if we were not the slaves but the rivals of nature. . . . Thus man imitates all the works of the divine nature, and perfects, corrects and improves the works of the lower nature. Therefore the power of man is almost similar to that of the divine nature, for man acts in this way through himself.152

The artist takes precedence over nature for Pico as well. He explains the Platonic position with an example: the form of a building that the architect has in his mind is truer and more perfect than the actual building he produces, the ideal taking precedence over the material. “The Form can be in the matter,” he says, “only to the extent that [the architect] has conceived it within himself.”153 For these key Platonists, Ficino and Pico, it is the artist’s inner will, not external natural forms or natural

materials, that is the starting point for the creation of art. The assertion of the superiority of the artist’s independent spirit over his natural model in the creation of art—in effect, a claim for his subjective freedom—was consistent with the celebration by both Ficino and Pico of man as a microcosm of the universe, uniquely empowered to move within a system he also dominates. Botticelli does not overtly claim artistic subjectivity as Leo­ nardo and Michelangelo will later do. However, his example of a personal style development toward an abstraction of his own invention was an extremely important step in the history of the artist’s competitive challenge to Nature. Botticelli would appear to be, among those artists for whom an oeuvre survives, the first to alter his style over time deliberately and self-consciously, thus initiating a trajectory that ultimately led to Picasso.154 the (homo)social birth of venus I return now to a question that has nagged from the beginning. The Venus of Botticelli’s Birth represents the highest cosmic form of the goddess, located in the realm of Angelic Mind, the next floor down from God himself. Unlike God, however, Venus is splendidly nude. We are meant to believe that the beauty of this body is the intellectual equivalent of the celestial beauty of pure mind—a contradiction that strains credulity. How, in the Western tradition, which dichotomized mind and body, can pure mind be represented by pure body, and a female body at that? I suggest that here, more explicitly than in the Primavera, we see a coded symbol of pure beauty that was not representable as male. Such an interpretation is fully consistent with the philosophical culture that surrounded the artist. For Ficino, as we have seen, the Aphrodite Uranus represented the higher form of love, that between men, while the Aphrodite Pandemos governed the lesser, heterosexual forms of human procreation and generation. Pico elaborated further in his commentary on Benivieni’s poem, explaining that his poet speaks of heavenly love in the masculine gender—unlike the poet’s model, Guido Cavalcanti, who uses the feminine—because Guido treats vulgar love, which is not true love at all. Pico claims that “the imperfect nature was signified by the feminine and the perfect by the masculine,” adding that vulgar love “is more fittingly a love for women than for men,” whereas “the heavenly is the opposite, as Plato wrote in the speech of Pausanias in the Symposium.”155

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Because of the powerful social interdiction against sodomy, Pico was careful to explain that only the vulgar form of love finds sexual expression. Coitus is “less unsuitable for the female sex than for the [male]” because it is irrational. “The opposite is heavenly love, in which this danger does not arise, but everything is directed towards the spiritual beauty of the mind and intellect, which are much more perfect in men than women.”156 Ficino too claimed that heavenly love was pursued by men who loved men more than women, because such men were mentally more keen and wished to cultivate that higher beauty that is essential to knowledge.157 The homosocial preferences of Ficino and Pico, and Poliziano as well, were probably not as chaste as they seemed to claim. As Giovanni Dall’Orto has explained, the Neoplatonist theory of Platonic (or Socratic) love was framed with an intentional ambiguity designed to protect those who had homosexual proclivities.158 Ficino openly announced his passion for Giovanni Cavalcanti in letters to his beloved, to whom he dedicated the Commentarium. Pico della Mirandola was buried in the same tomb with his beloved friend, the poet Girolamo Benevieni.159 Poliziano, whose Orfeo (1480) proclaims the superior love of the “better sex,” is described by James Saslow as “the most colorful and frankly sexual among scholars . . . whose Greek epistles beg kisses and caresses from specific young men and who reportedly died from getting out of his sickbed to serenade a youth he’d been smitten by.” 160 Botticelli may have shared the same-sex preferences of his cohort. A lifelong bachelor, Botticelli was accused of sodomy with one of his garzoni in 1502.161 He was reportedly a man highly averse to marriage, who claimed that the production of offspring was not for him. According to the Anonimo Gaddiano, Botticelli described a dream in which he had taken a wife (on the real-life urging of Tommaso Soderini), a dream so disturbing to the artist that it provoked insomnia and nighttime wanderings.162 Botticelli might have agreed with Ficino that “Some men, either on account of their nature or their training, are better equipped for offspring of the soul than for those of the body. Others, and certainly the majority of them, are the opposite. The former pursue heavenly love, the latter earthly. The former, therefore, naturally love men more than women.”163 The horror that the thought of marriage allegedly instilled in Botticelli reminds us that misogyny has often been considered implicit in male same-sex preference. Bernardino of Siena, railing against sodomy in the 1420s, proclaimed that “The

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sodomite hates women . . . can’t bear the sight of women”164— a sweeping statement, to be sure, yet perhaps not sweeping enough. For in a generally misogynist culture that consistently devalued both women and femininity at all levels, the “sodomite” perhaps differed from more heterosexually oriented men only in degree, not in kind. He expressed his misogyny in a more positive form, we might say, by actively loving other men. Homosexual practices were an endemic aspect of the deeply homosocial culture that was Florence, yet in the wake of the demographic crisis of the early Quattrocento, sodomy was strongly denounced and punished for being a disincentive to repopulation.165 The Quattrocento Neoplatonists were protected, not only by their high social connections, but also by the ambiguity of their theory of Platonic love, whose sexual aspect they neither clearly explained nor fully denied.166 It also surely helped that the structure of Platonic love paralleled the heterosexual chivalric model. As the Medici elevated Simonetta Vespucci to Petrarchan heights, Platonic lovers posited an ideal that redirected love’s erotic charge from carnal to chaste. The glorified woman of Petrarchan poetry and art could be appropriated by the homosexual male, as a model for the pleasure he took in the feminine when it was detached from negativizing associations with the reproductive cycle. Male homosexual play with femininity can be glimpsed elsewhere. Bernardino had claimed in his sermons that married sodomites were immune to their wives’ efforts to keep their attention through provocative dress and cosmetics, since such men would find these beauty-aids repulsive and ridiculous, and would flee in disgust to their pretty young men.167 Pretty they were, indeed, if Bernardino is to be believed. He describes the fanciulli, young sexual partners of the older sodomites, as wearing “see-through shirts, with little doublets that don’t cover half their bodies, with flamboyant clothes and stockings slit up the legs, with braids in their hair.”168 These fanciulli sound a lot like ninfe, in fact, and it may be that in their styles of provocative dress, boys and girls approached a unisex model. In the Primavera, Mercury and the Graces present bodies suggestively covered and exposed at the same time, offering the visual appeal of youth both to male-loving and female-loving eyes. The intended viewers of the Primavera were like the guests at Plato’s Symposium, who go home to join their wives or young men, having shared, as Michel Foucault describes it, “a common enchantment with the beauty of a girl or the charm of boys,” their appetites now

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kindled for love “that some would look for in women, others in young men.” 169 The Birth of Venus, created several years after the Primavera, comments on its model’s imperfection in yet another sense, by presenting a higher stage in the ascensio: Platonic male love is here signified, paradoxically, by the sensuous body of a beautiful woman. Yet if we understand that body as a coded stand-in for the beautiful male nude body, as a masculine homoerotic sensibility sublimated and allegorized it, then Venus’s seemingly contradictory combination of sensuality and pure mind becomes more comprehensible. As a monumental, counterpoised female nude, something rare in Quattrocento painting, this Venus has too much presence to be simply a woman. And she is not, for Venus Anadyomene has been iconologically shaded by masculine meaning. First is the longstanding parallel in art between the Birth of Venus and the Baptism of Christ—both present a divinity distinguished by sacred nudity, standing in water, flanked by attendants. In dramatizations of the Baptism in Renaissance Italy, the role of Christ was played by a nude actor, according to Hecksher, who explains that the association of the two themes helped sustain the “powerful theological and ethical overtones” of Botticelli’s Venus.170 Second is the tradition of a bearded or male Venus. Macrobius noted the existence in Cyprus of a bearded Venus in feminine dress, whom the Cy­ prians believed to be both man and woman.171 The masculine Venus, who is found also in Renaissance illustrations, implied the broad gender scope of the goddess who, with Mercury, was the parent of Hermaphroditus.172 Such associations were not beyond the infinitely learned philosophers of the Medici circle. But there is a more direct way to understand Botticelli’s celestial Venus as a disguised masculine image. According to recent studies of homo­ sexuality in the Quattrocento, an “equivocal code” referring to transgressive sexual practices existed in Italian poetry through­out the early modern period. Drawing upon the pioneering work of Jean Toscan, Alan K. Smith has explicated the code in the poetry of il Burchiello (1404–49), a poet of the carnvalesque or comico-realistica genre.173 One of Burchiello’s best-known sonnets, “Nominativi fritti,” juxtaposes a ­dazzling confusion of incongruous objects: “Fried nominatives and maps of the world,/And Noah’s Ark between two columns/ Were all singing ‘kyrie eleison’/Under the influence of misshapen plates.” This is not an exercise in proto-Surrealist or Bob Dylanesque illogicality, for the words have precise equivalents in the sexual terminology of an underground language.

In grammatical terms, the nominative is the upright case, the retto, and so a phallic metaphor. “Fried” means sodomized. The “specialized” phallus, the one fit for anal sex, is signified by blond or yellow hair.174 I would not claim that the Birth of Venus was created primarily to express a secret homosexual code, only that the given terms of its theme, the centralized image of an upright, blondhaired nude figure, could not have helped but trigger the association for homosexually oriented Florentine males. Whoever commissioned the Birth, the picture’s immediate audience is likely to have included members of the Medici cultural circle, men who would surely have understood its double meanings.175 Defiantly, or perhaps jokingly, the Birth of Venus sets itself “against nature,” in two senses that are philosophically one.176 In the dialogue now established between Botticelli’s two Venus pictures, “nature” is identified with the procreation necessary to sustain Florentine society. Human generation provided an honorable channel for a man to escape mortality, by living through his progeny. But the higher calling is that of fame, achieved through the life of the Mind and the pursuit of Beauty. This path might include homosexual love, homosocial bonding, or any other form of expression as long as it was exclusively masculine, a realm from which the merely generative female was firmly banished. The perversity of expressing this idea through a female allegory is equaled by the perversity of artistic style in this picture, its bold step beyond the Primavera in deviating from natural appearances and natural proportions. It was perhaps through an affinity with Neoplatonist Socratic love that Botticelli was drawn to progressive idealization as a means of transcending the material world, identified with both reproductive procreation and nature rendered naturalistically. If so, it may be that for Botticelli, the “natural” world was identified with debased femininity, to be escaped through the construction of an ideal world of art. The idea that Botticelli sought to escape femininity may seem paradoxical, because his name is virtually synonymous with beautiful female images. This can best be explained by emphasizing that his images of women were not representations of existing women, but constructions of women, simulacra in a Baudrillardian sense, whose beauty was foregrounded, both to provide a socially acceptable cover for the images’ deeper Platonic meanings, which conflicted with cultural prohibitions, and to advance a claim for the supremacy of art.

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86.  Workshop of Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Woman, early to mid-1480s. Tempera on panel. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. Photo © Ursula Edelmann–artothek.

the feminization of beauty and the transcendence of art The artist’s ability to create a beauty superior to that created by Nature is emphasized in the late Quattrocento female profile portrait, especially in paintings from Botticelli’s workshop (Fig. 86). Such portraits were vehicles for the display of a bride as commodity, adorned by clothing and jewelry that accompanied her transfer from her father’s house to that of the groom.177 Yet they also called attention to the skill of the artist in perfecting his visual model through the refinements of art. Ostensibly portraits, the women have become types, even less individualized than the mythological females in the Primavera. Their adornments and hair, wrought with aesthetic perfection, are more vital than their faces. Indeed, the epigram affixed to

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Ghirlandaio’s portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni speaks more of art than of the woman depicted.178 Such portraits announce subtextually that the creation of feminine beauty is the artist’s achievement, which led to the idea that feminine beauty was a metaphor for art itself. This concept, which would become familiar in the sixteenth century, should be traced to Botticelli’s pioneering examples. The power of imaged female beauty to represent art metonymically gained strength from an unstated assumption: woman converted into art is equivalent to nature converted into art. The female image is a displaced signifier for Nature herself, who creates all earthly beauty not made by man. The artist’s creation of beauty becomes an inroad on her domain, a sign of Nature’s defeat by Art. The point is underlined in the Frankfurt portrait, in which the sitter wears a medallion modeled on a reverse replica of a gem in the Medici collection, which boasts the image of Apollo’s conquest of Marsyas.179 Conspicuously positioned, the medallion encapsulates the topos of the conquest and taming of rough nature by refined art. The woman in the portrait is aligned with Marsyas, both as previously untamed nature, and also through the insistently unruly locks of her hair, a feature common to all the Botticelli workshop female portraits. As in the three Graces of the Primavera, hair and ornament are intricately conjoined to play out abstractly the theme of natural ebullience harnessed by civilized restraints. Some time ago, Elizabeth Cropper identified a set of early sixteenth-century female portraits that functioned as synecdoches for the beauty of painting itself and noted the dependence of Cinquecento theories about female beauty on Platonic and Petrarchan concepts developed at the Quattrocento Medici court.180 It is important to recognize that the iden­ tification of beauty with imaged women need not have depended on Neoplatonic or Petrarchan theory, but could be seen in Botticelli’s art. He was the first to thematize this subject, and in effect to feminize beauty, in a visually substantive way.181 Moreover, Botticelli counters the Petrarchan model, in which the poet’s words supersede the painter’s creation, by presenting beauty incarnate in a solid visual exemplum. These icons of feminine beauty, however idealized they may be, convey an optical particularity that no poetic description can match. In the sixteenth century, the artist’s creation of beauty was repeatedly celebrated as a metaphor for Art’s appropriation of Nature’s powers. With the advent of Mannerism, as we see in chapter 8, style itself was feminized, and came to function as

Botticelli

a covert sign of that metaphoric femininity which Botticelli first fashioned. I do not intend to trace the feminization of beauty in the Renaissance, only to locate its inception. One key Cinquecento text may suffice to demonstrate Botticelli’s legacy: Agnolo Firenzuola’s treatise, On the Beauty of Women, published in 1541, in which beauty is identified almost exclusively with women in artistic images and art’s creative transformation of nature is extolled.182 The very structure of the dialogue frames its theme as conversion from nature to art. In its two books, conversations occur in two settings: a garden in which “universal beauty” is discussed, and a soirée in the hall, where the topic is the artificial creation of beauty. As Firen­zuola’s translators have noted, the movement from natural garden to social hall “echoes the movement from Nature to Art, from divinely created beauty to humanly created beauty.” The four women represent natural elements, while the male character, Celso, is the elevated mind who turns their desultory conversation about beauty toward meaningful philosophical resolution.183 Female beauty, Firenzuola argues Neoplatonically, is God’s greatest gift because it provides access to the divine. Beauty is not found in real women, however, only in created or imagined ones such as Zeuxis’ Helen.184 Nature is credited with constructing the parts of the body logically, but these must be judiciously combined to result in beauty.185 Celso constructs an imaginary ideal figure out of parts of the four women, to show that art creates a beauty better than Nature’s examples. Ideal proportions are not exhibited naturally in women’s bodies (as Cennino Cennini had put it, women’s bodies don’t have set proportions) but must be constructed by a formula, as per Vitruvius.186 Whereas men exhibit a beauty that results from their naturally balanced systems, women are prone to exhibit a “bad air,” as well as uneasy consciences.187 Accordingly, Celso only speaks of the beauty of female faces, not going below the breasts. Lacking the proportions of pure and universal (geometric) forms, women must be made perfect by art; the proportions of their bodies are assimilated to vases, which are a product of art.188 The seeming contradiction that, although in the Cinquecento men’s bodies were considered more beautiful than women’s, the cult of beauty was focused upon the female is explained by the fact that female beauty was understood to be a masculine achievement. The key to this dynamic is a man’s judging eye. Prime examples are the perennially popular themes of the Judgment of Paris, the archetypal beauty contest, and Apelles’ portrait of Campaspe, esteemed by Alexander for

the female beauty created by the artist. As Firenzuola insisted, women themselves don’t know and can’t judge beauty, except when shown it by men.189 But if supreme beauty lies in proportional harmony, why not exemplify it through the male body? The answer lies in the subject-object problem: if the male is the judge of beauty, he cannot be its demonstration model (though Michelangelo would show otherwise). Both his virility and his unmeasurable natural perfection would be compromised by the role. The ongoing celebration of female beauty is peculiar because it is so relentless, seemingly obsessive. But the obsession itself is a means of control: first, the control of nature by art, and, second, the control of real-life women, who spend their lives trying to measure up to the standard of perfection set out for them. The standards set by Firenzuola are all too familiar, for they remain in force today: the ideal female body is nonfunctional, its perfection is unattainable by any human woman, et cetera.190 If art is an instrument for the management of nature, it is also an instrument for the management of women. With the death of Lorenzo Magnifico in 1492, the end of Medici rule in 1494, and Savonarola’s rise to power and influence in the 1490s, Florence was plunged into a confusion as much intellectual as social. At first, the Neoplatonists enthusiastically supported Savonarola and his political and religious reforms. Giovanni Nesi, a disciple of Ficino, cast Savonarola in his Oraculum as a hermetic prophet; the poet Benivieni, once Pico’s Orphic muse, became the songwriting publicist of the Savonarolans. In the late 1490s, however, when Savonarola preached against the Platonists, resisting their effort to merge Platonism with Christianity, they turned away from him. After Savonarola’s death at the stake in 1498, Ficino denounced him as an “antiChrist.”191 Yet despite their fierce doctrinal differences, the Platonists and the piagnoni shared a patriarchal theology. Religious fanaticism and philosophical extremism were fundamentally alike in their horror at a common cluster of enemies: the natural world, female ornament, and materiality in general— all inimical to the pristine perfection of spirit, mind, and God. In the late 1490s, Botticelli was caught up in the growing response to Savonarola’s messianic cause, and may even have become a piagnone.192 The apocalyptic themes of his last paintings, which concern the salvation of a repentant Florence and the millennial renovation of the Church, are cast in a style that represents the most extreme divergence from the natural world since the Trecento. The Mystic Nativity of c. 1501 (Fig.

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The Rebirth of Venus

87.  Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Nativity, c. 1501. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London. Photo © The National Gallery, London.

87) combines stiff symmetry with a medieval hieratic order of scale.193 It may be true, as is often suggested, that Botticelli’s personal penitential fervor shaped the strange, intensely expressive rigidity of his late works. But these pictures also represent a logical extension of the artist’s freewheeling exercise of his creative rights: abstraction and anti-naturalism carried to an extreme that was the teleological endpoint of Platonic doctrine—the Renaissance counterpart of Malevich’s White on White.

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The implication of Botticelli’s art, taken as a whole, is that the creation of personal style is a higher level of artistic achievement than the faithful imitation of nature. This important step in the art-nature discourse links Botticelli with the first-generation Mannerists, to be sure, but it also positions him in a complex relationship with his contemporary, Leo­nardo da Vinci, who articulated in art and writing many of the values set forth by Botticelli, even as he also opposed them.

part iii

A Balance of Power Pictorial Metaphors for Nature in Transition

And those men who are inventors and interpreters between Nature and Man, as compared with boasters and declaimers of the works of others, must be regarded and . . . esteemed.  —leo­n ardo da vinci, Trattato della Pittura Come forth, then, my Son, even as the bridegroom from his bridal chamber. Issue forth from my womb.  —savonarola, Sermoni e prediche (Sermon 19)

Chapter Five 

Nature’s Special Child Leo­nardo da Vinci

As we saw in the preceding chapter, Botticelli gradually distanced himself from the “natural,” spurred by a growing sense of creative freedom to produce a form of beauty distinguished by its very difference from Nature’s productions. The proud exercise of artistic freedom may have shaped many seemingly bizarre paintings of this period—for example, Piero di Cosimo’s The Discovery of Honey (c. 1500–1510, Fig. 88), where satyr families poke at an anthropomorphic tree, and geologically impossible hillocks seem to sprout clouds. Such creative perversity was explained through the idea of fantasía, the mind’s ability to form images, whether based on things seen or imagined.1 Fantasía had long been accorded a role in artistic creation; Cennino Cennini said it was used by artists to reproduce things that do not exist in nature, such as centaurs. 2 At the turn of the sixteenth century fantasía had come to be understood as art that intentionally departed from natural models.3 At the very moment that this artistic philosophy emerged, Leo­nardo da Vinci stepped forward to advance a different position: that the artist might deviate from or enlarge upon nature without renouncing her examples. In this respect, Leo­nardo resembled Piero di Cosimo, the master of fantasía, who, like Leo­nardo, enthusiastically embraced nature. Vasari describes Piero as bestiale and selvatico, uncultivated and wild, careless in appearance, like his own untended garden. 4 In his constructed biography, Piero displayed an exaggerated devotion to everything deemed natural. He ate only hardboiled eggs, would not

permit his rooms to be cleaned; given to solitude, he was irritated by crying babies, coughing men, and singing friars.5 Piero’s alleged aversions were not arbitrary—they consistently involved structured social life—and he provided a role model for the eccentric habits of first-generation Mannerists Pontormo and Rosso. Yet in his art, Piero presented nature in its most extreme, even unnatural, aspects. In such paintings as The Discovery of Honey and The Forest Fire, where animals have human faces, Piero di Cosimo’s idea of nature is indeed “fantastic,” more allied to Cennini’s centaurs than to procreative goddesses. Leo­nardo had much in common with Piero di Cosimo, and their Vasarian lives are given a similar cast: both were secretive, obsessive, fascinated with the natural world, including its grotesque and bizarre deformities.6 They shared a tender devotion to animals: Leo­nardo allegedly purchased caged birds in order to set them free, and would not eat meat; Piero loved everything wild, and avowed that “nature ought to be allowed to look after itself [and] would often go to see animals, herbs, or any freaks of nature.”7 For Vasari, however, Leo­nardo was redeemed by his gregarious nature, beauty, grace and refinement, while Piero was faulted for his rough, uncultivated nature and solitary strangeness. Sharon Fermor has rightly identified Vasari’s divergent assessment of the two artists as socially based, reflecting the priority of sociable refinement for that quintessential court artist. Yet although Vasari forced the pair through a filter that stereotyped their differences, his

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Nature’s Special Child

88.  Piero di Cosimo, The Discovery of Honey, c. 1500–1510. Oil on panel. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, museum purchase. Photo: Worcester Art Museum.

evaluations help to clarify the differing roles that nature played in their art. One example is images made by chance. According to Vasari, Piero made images from spit-stains on walls, in which he claimed to see “combats of horses and the most fantastic cities and extraordinary landscapes ever beheld.” Leo­nardo had recommended this practice in his notebooks: “If you look at a wall soiled with a variety of stains, or stones with variegated patterns, when you have to invent some location, you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes, graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in many combinations. . . .”8 Fermor points out that whereas Piero found in accidental images new fantastic shapes not seen in ordinary nature, Leo­nardo valued them as an aid to stimulate invention within a representation grounded in an informed knowledge of nature.9 For Leo­nardo, art was primarily a means of knowing nature. Consequently, he reweighted nature itself. In his oeuvre, it was no longer art’s mundane antithesis, identified with the routine and ordinary, but art’s source and creative partner—organic and vital, whole and alive. Leo­nardo, followed by Michelan-

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gelo, reconnected the diverging spheres of art and nature, restoring to some degree the ancient idea that the physical world was imbued with the life force. In their early works, both artists produced newly integrated signs of nature’s organic wholeness (though for both, beauty would become a compromising factor). These artists’ departure from the Quattrocento norm is apparent if we compare Leo­nardo’s drawing of a plant with a Botticelli counterpart (Fig. 89 and Fig. 84). The difference lies in a heightened understanding of the organic logic of a living thing. In Leo­nardo’s flower, the arrangement of leaves and petals follows the order of natural structure; their turning outward from the core suggests the motivated urgency of growth itself, unlike the stiff curves formed by Botticelli’s plants. Similarly, Michelangelo presents anatomy as shaped by inner movement (Fig. 90), rather than as patterns of muscles that remain inert, as Pollaiuolo defined them in his Battle of the Nudes engraving. In each case, movement or growth seems to be generated from a center, moved by itself rather than by an external agent. These artists’ superb depictions of natural forms are often

Leonardo da Vinci

ascribed to their “scientific” investigations of botany and anatomy, and to the principle of outdoing nature rather than identifying with her powers. Vasari asserted that “Nature herself was vanquished by [Leo­nardo’s] colors,” and that Michelangelo “surpasses not only all those who have, as it were, surpassed Nature, but the most famous ancients also, who undoubtedly surpassed her.”10 But this is the mid-Cinquecento speaking. Fifty years earlier, the goal of artists was only to equal nature, whose creative powers were still venerated, even when flouted by a Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo. When Ficino extolled the powers of art, the most he claimed was that artists

89.  Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Lily, c. 1473. Black chalk, pen, ink, and wash. Royal Library, Windsor (no. 12418). Photo: The Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

were no longer nature’s slaves but her rivals (see chapter 4, p. 115). The positions of Ficino and Vasari both reflect a competitive mind-set, but between them lay an excluded middle. In their more subtle perception of the structure of nature’s organic forms (naturata), Michelangelo and Leo­nardo reveal an openness to nature’s deeper order (naturans), on terms that do not insist on the artist’s creative priority, but rather, establish him as the pupil of the greatest teacher—maestra dei maestri, as Leo­nardo called her.11 In defining the “High Renaissance” achievement, most modern writers have followed Vasari’s paradigm of the agonistic defeat of nature by a newly enlightened art. Erwin Panofsky and Jan Bialostocki stressed the importance of the antique, which provided a model for what “natura naturans had intended but natura naturata had failed to perform” by offering a perfected, ideal form of nature, a second nature.12 This description might apply to numerous Renaissance artists and writers who discredited naturata (perhaps influencing art historians to do the same), but it does not begin to capture the diverse engagements of Michelangelo and Leo­nardo with the forms of the natural world. An overemphasis on idealization and the “grand manner” as essential components of High Renaissance style has, I suggest, obscured the equally important component of the “lifelike”—now defined in new terms by these two artists. As if to challenge Savonarola’s pronouncement that art could not imitate nature successfully because “it will not have life,” Michelangelo (who may have heard that sermon), and Leo­ nardo as well, convincingly set forms in motion, producing the illusion of life within time—analogous, in our era, to still photographs becoming films.13 Leo­nardo’s insistence on organic movement as a sign of life is seen in his repeated exhortations that painters get the motions of the body right: “When you draw the nude always sketch the whole figure and then finish those limbs which seem to you the best, but make them act with the other limbs; otherwise you will get a habit of never putting the limbs well together on the body.”14 While ancient art served Michelangelo in many ways (Leo­ nardo had little use for it as a category), the sculptor initially drew on antiquity as a guide for establishing a deeper connection with nature. His early drawings based on classical models are conspicuously more lifelike than their sources (Fig. 90 and Fig. 91), if one measures lifelikeness by muscles and limbs that seem to move, and by the presentation of the body as an elastic biological organism, with subtly varying parts.15 Some artists at the turn of the Cinquecento found formulas for body construction in classical models, but Michelangelo used them as

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Nature’s Special Child

90.  Michelangelo, Drawing of a Mercury-Apollo, and other studies from antique sculpture, c. 1501. Pen, brown and gray ink. Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 688r). Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. 91.  Hermes Farnese. Greco-Roman copy of a Praxitelean type, first century ce. Marble. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

an aid to reconstitute nature’s organic structure—naturata now conceived as living, not static. The antique was indeed a “second nature,” but in the sense of a substitute, a lens through which to see “first nature” more clearly. Leo­nardo and Michelangelo countered the late Quattrocento insistence on the artist’s freedom to deviate from nature, accepting instead a mandate to follow a nature understood in more complex terms than before. Because her order is only discoverable, as Bialostocki put it, “by the searching mind and an analytical eye,”16 the prepared artist can claim insight into the creative powers of natura naturans herself. He is poised to jump into her very skin. By identifying with Nature’s creative powers, these artists join their agenda with hers; they are now on the same side. Yet, as they increasingly heroized and idealized natural forms, their example also offered art a new and subtle power over nature: the power to transcend time and death. Thus, even as Leo­nardo and Michelangelo challenged

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the very idea of a competition between nature and art, they significantly stepped up its terms. Leo­nardo and Michelangelo’s self-identifications with Nature as a creative power may seem surprising in view of nature’s longstanding identity as female. Yet both artists were able to escape the Quattrocento’s dichotomizing of art and nature because, unlike Botticelli and the Neoplatonists, they did not associate nature with a negativized femininity. Rather, they broadened the base of the art-nature discourse by identifying with nature’s creativity on terms that did not scorn its gendered status, but accepted it, in complex individual ways. Each would proclaim the divine creative powers of the artist—more memorably than any other Renaissance artist, for although the concept was already old by the turn of the Cinquecento, we tend to associate it with these two alone. Yet each refused to set the artist’s godlike ability in simplistic opposition either to creative nature or to the physical world.

Leonardo da Vinci

92.  Leonardo da Vinci, Study of a Tuscan Landscape, 1473. Pen and ink. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

This chapter primarily concerns Leo­nardo, with Michel­ angelo brought occasionally. The art-nature dyad figures in the art and thought of both artists in diverse ways, yet there are significant differences between them. Although the concept of nature did not overtly interest Michelangelo, ideas about art and nature were often at the enigmatic core of his art and poetry, not always from a consistent point of view. For Leo­ nardo, on the other hand, art’s relationship with nature was a primary issue, one of the most important problems on his mind. Leo­nardo’s writing and art present this theme in its most complex Renaissance articulation. And gender is critical to understanding his thinking, for Leo­nardo’s attitudes to nature and to women are not only linked, but unusually positive for his time.

geology and landscape Leo­nardo’s drawing of the lily was one of many empirical studies the artist made from nature during his early years in Florence. The inventory of 1482 he compiled in Milan, summing up his Florentine production, begins with “many flowers copied from nature,”17 and throughout his life, such studies far outnumbered the paintings. Thus began a lifetime of drawing natural forms for no purpose other than visual investigation. The earliest known work by Leo­nardo is a small sepia drawing, Study of a Tuscan Landscape (Fig. 92), whose precise date he inscribed on the surface.18 Here as with the Lily, Leo­nardo does not merely record visual data, but investigates the relationships of parts and intimations of structure within a natural spectrum. He shows graphically that appearances result from natural processes: the upward thrusting of trees, their explosion into round shapes, the cliff’s geological striation. Irregular rock

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Nature’s Special Child

93.  Leonardo da Vinci, Study of Rock Formations, c. 1510–13. Pen and ink over black chalk. Royal Library, Windsor (no. 12394). Photo: The Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

formations were whimsically recorded by Verrocchio, Filippino, and Piero di Cosimo, but Leo­nardo’s cliff structures obey the laws of gravity and express the earth’s settling over time. This cliff, moreover, is visibly part of a mountain, which joins a chain lightly sketched behind. The spurting waterfall that exposed the cliff’s striations falls to merge with the expanding flow patterns of a river below. The river flows into the valley, its role in parting the mountain chains clarified by the foreground passage. Already, the young Leo­nardo wanted to demonstrate the dynamic interaction of water and rock in geological time. By contrast with this natural historical drama, the castellated city perched on a pinnacle, tightly drawn and constricted, seems relatively lifeless. None of these natural phenomena had yet been studied by Leo­nardo “scientifically,” but his later analytical investigations often confirmed his early intuitions. In a drawing demonstrat-

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ing the ramification of trees, for example, the division of branches further articulates a structure he had earlier sketched as a sequence of expanding round shapes.19 He later glossed his visual explanation of the action of water on rocks: Water “wears away the lofty summits of the mountains. It lays bare and carries away great rocks. It drives away the sea from its ancient shores. . . . ” A marginal comment on the sheet carries geology into metaphysics: “Col tempo ogni cosa va variando” (with time everything changes—or better, through time everything goes on changing).20 Leo­nardo’s understanding that the physical earth is in a constant state of change explodes, in later drawings, into virtual time-lapse images illustrating the eruptive shifting of the earth’s tectonic strata (Fig. 93). It appears that he learned about order in nature first by observing it, then theorizing it—a classic example of inductive reasoning.

Leonardo da Vinci

When Leo­nardo inscribed the drawing “from Santa Maria della Neve, August 5, 1473,” he implicitly included himself in the picture. According to Richard Turner, this Tuscan landscape was “a triumph of the eye,” but “also a triumph of the I, of an individual who takes a view from a specific vantage point, and so in a sense possesses what he sees.”21 Certainly, it is appropriate to interpret Leo­nardo’s first confrontation with large visible nature as a claim of possession, and the artist later wrote of the power of sight in a spirit of humanist mastery: Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It is the lord of astronomy and the maker of cosmography . . . it is the prince of mathematics, and the sciences founded on it are absolutely certain. It has measured the distances and sizes of the stars; it has found the elements and their locations; it divines the future from the course of the stars; it has given birth to architecture, and to perspective, and to the divine art of painting.22

Yet what is innovative in the Tuscan landscape drawing is not the idea of possession, but the element of personal discovery. From the beginning, it interested Leo­nardo to record how nature worked. Creating drawings that explain geological processes, the artist subtly assumes the role of mediator and interpreter of nature’s order. He is, in a sense, privy to her secrets. Leo­nardo said this openly: “The painter’s mind must of necessity enter into nature’s mind in order to act as an interpreter between nature and art, it must be able to expound the causes of the manifestations of her laws.”23 As the first known example of a large piece of nature studied solely for its own sake and not for the background of a figure painting, the Tuscan Landscape drawing is often described as a revolutionary contribution to the history of landscape.24 Yet if Leo­nardo effectively launched the genre of landscape, it was by introducing what would become that genre’s essential element: the artist’s personal interpretative presence.25 Leo­nardo’s insistence upon his role as interpreter distinguished him from Italian contemporaries such as Pollaiuolo, who painted extensive, dryly descriptive landscape backgrounds but subordinated these environments to human protagonists to sustain the fundamentally symbolic significance of “landscape,” as it would come to be called (though “pieces of nature” might be more accurate for this time)26—the natural setting as one part of the system of signs that make up the picture’s meaning. When elements of nature first appeared in early Trecento painting, their function was largely iconographic. In Giotto’s Lamentation, for example, the apparently “dead” tree on the right begins to bud, a rebirth in nature that foreshadows

Christ’s resurrection. In secular pictures, natural settings usually denoted nature as territorial possession—of a city (e.g., Siena’s Good Government fresco), a landed person, or a ruler. Iconographic landscape waned in the early Quattrocento, when perspective investigations expanded the settings of narrative paintings as a natural ambient (e.g., Masaccio’s Tribute Money), yet landscape elements such as trees or flowers continued to carry specific, dedicated meanings, and in portraits, landscape backgrounds subtly carried gendered associations. In the Urbino diptych (Fig. 94), Piero della Francesca delineated his sitters’ power by positioning Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza high over a breathtaking valley that is almost continuous behind the two frames. Federico dominates a view of his own property, whose tempered well-being is a sign of his benevolent rule.27 Such portraits drew on the humanist discourse that juxtaposed individuals against nature, and they literally demonstrate Manetti’s gloss of Lactantius, that man’s mind and noble sight makes him “lord of all terrestrial things,” a viewpoint echoed in Leo­nardo’s statement quoted above.28 The depiction of a city behind Battista Sforza may signify wifely submission within the political harmony that existed under Federico’s rule, as Robert Baldwin has speculated. 29 Yet there is here a hermeneutic gender imbalance belied by the symmetry of the portraits—she is to be understood as coextensive with the campagna behind her, while he is set apart from it. Natural background settings behind Quattro­ cento female images often functioned as extensions of the woman’s identity, for example, in Filippo Lippi’s Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the precisely described street seen through the window is virtually fused with the unidentified lady’s profile, perhaps to represent a family property to be conveyed to the man through marriage.30 The nexus between the female body and a natural environment drew its rationale from multiple traditions: the hortus conclusus in Marian imagery metaphorically equates the Virgin’s intact womb and a closed garden, while the Garden of Love’s fertility (or seductive delight) was connected in late medieval poetry and art with that of the female body, as we saw in chapter 4. By contrast, when a male is juxtaposed with nature in Tuscan Quattrocento art, he is often its implicit antagonist. St. Jerome and St. John the Baptist conduct their spiritual struggles against a raw or barren wilderness; Pollaiuolo’s Hercules subjugates antiheroic monsters before a passive paese that serves as foil to his assertion of power (Fig. 35).31 In construct-

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94.  Piero della Francesca, Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro, 1472–73. Oil and tempera on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Nicolo Orsi Battaglini/Art Resource, NY.

ing the Urbino diptych, Piero may thus have relied upon a convention that set men and women before nature with differing significations. Had he been a lesser artist, this might have been more obvious. The sheer poetry of the campagna depicted, its enlivenment by a delicate light that picks out thin contours, creates reflections, and unifies the panels with a soft atmospheric blanket—effects heightened in the verso scenes—signal that the painter has stolen a private pleasure in describing natura naturata, even though meaning still officially resides in sociopolitical concepts. Venetian painters would develop the poetry of light initiated by Piero. As Leo­nardo continued to investigate natural phenomena, through relentless expositions and illustrations in his notebooks, his interest was in the operations, not the visual poetry, of lighted forms in nature. Yet despite the progressive spirit of these investigations, Leo­nardo sustained one tradition in his paintings: landscape continued to be symbolic and deeply linked with the female. It was not nature’s beauty that interested him, but her power and mystery in the cosmological realm.

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woman as nature In the diminutive portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (Fig. 95), Leo­ nardo advanced two categories of art simultaneously, irrevocably altering the directions of both the female portrait and landscape. The Washington portrait dramatically departs from Piero’s Battista Sforza in its replacement of the profile image with a sitter posed in a three-quarter view who engages the eyes of the viewer. By contrast with earlier female portraits in which the landscape is a disconnected symbol, Leo­nardo’s sitter now exists in a time-space continuum: she is integrated by color and tonal adjustment with the natural elements that spread around and behind her, while real time is implied in her turning to gaze at us. Through these innovations, the Ginevra de’ Benci triggered the permanent abandonment of the static profile-portrait type customary for women in the fifteenth century and its replacement with portrait images as lifelike as those of men. I have elsewhere demonstrated that Leo­nardo is likely to have painted the picture, not as an image of Bernardo Bembo’s Petrarchan beloved as has been proposed, but to commemorate

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Ginevra herself and her intellectual or moral virtues, perhaps as a memento for her family when she married.32 Allusions to her personal identity include the reference to her name in the juniper bush behind her, repeated as a sprig at the center of the painting’s emblematic verso; and its motto, which may refer to her activity as a poet. Beyond these, the black scarf or veil she wears is likely to be a scapula denoting her affiliation with Le Murate, the prominent and intellectually active Florentine convent where Ginevra was educated and eventually buried. Leo­nardo’s portrait was unusual in its genre, since most Quattrocento Florentine female portraits were marriage portraits that celebrated the sitters’ beauty, not their cultural achievements. Yet the portrait’s gestalt parallels the emergence in late fifteenth-century Italy of intellectually active women and the growing acknowledgment of female cultural agency.33 Leo­nardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci invites comparison with a contemporary image: the striking correspondence of the aureole of foliage behind Ginevra’s head with that behind the central figure of Botticelli’s Primavera suggests intertextual discourse between the two artists. It is difficult to fix priority in dating,34 but whichever came second may have been meant as a critique and challenge, for the two painters held divergent views of the relation between art and nature. By contrast with the girlish allegorical Venus, Ginevra is a sober, specific individual, not a symbol of civic procreation. Leo­nardo’s brush probes more deeply than Botticelli’s, to describe the bone structure of the face and its nuances of color, to register differences of tex­ ture. The campagna in the background is similarly observed, with all the natural forms—such as the light reflections that enliven ripples on the water’s surface—now saturated in a bind­ ing, humid atmosphere.35 One might guess that a painter so attentive to the subtle operations of natural light would have little use for the flat generalizations of the Primavera. In fact, Leo­nardo wrote of his differences with Botticelli. He asks rhetorically, “Do you not see how many different animals and trees, too, and grasses and flowers there are?” The “universal” painter, he says, must strive to register these differences: He is not universal who does not love equally all the elements in painting, as when one who does not like landscapes (paesi) holds them to be a subject for cursory and straightforward investigation—​ just as our Botticelli said such study was of no use because by merely throwing a sponge soaked in a variety of colours at a wall there would be left on the wall a stain in which could be seen a beautiful landscape. . . . But although these stains may supply inventions they do not teach you how to finish any detail. And the painter in question makes very sorry landscapes.36

95.  Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci (recto), mid-1470s. Oil on wood. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1967.6.1.a. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

It is tempting to speculate that Leo­nardo showcased a properly observed paese within the Ginevra de’ Benci as a challenge to Botticelli. For why is it there at all? (The Benci family owned a villa at Antella, yet Ginevra had no known association with that property.) Whatever its raison d’être, Leo­nardo’s background paese presents a new minting of the woman-as-nature linkage. The sitter is not mapped like a piece of property; instead, with her alert, self-possessed head set against a natural environment that begins with her own juniper and spreads in all directions around her, she seems to claim the field behind as her own. By juxtaposing this dignified scholar-poet with the image of a moist atmospheric valley (moisture being feminine, in Aristotelian terms), Leo­nardo could have intended to convey the idea of masculine virtu located within a female body. Alternatively, he may have meant to affirm the association between woman and nature. In any event, in this first pictorial essay on a theme that would steadily grow in his oeuvre, Leo­ nardo simultaneously empowered and essentialized the female subject.

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96.  Leonardo da Vinci, Study of the Star of Bethlehem and Other Plants, c. 1506. Red chalk, pen and ink. Royal Library, Windsor (no. 12424). Photo: The Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Leo­nardo continued to explore the conjunction of female and nature in the next painting he carried to completion, the Virgin of the Rocks (Plate 4).37 Again, a critique of Botticelli is implied. In the Primavera and Birth of Venus, nature was personified as a cosmic power. Leo­nardo instead presents nature’s cosmic operations as visible in its elemental parts; natura naturata is described in meticulous detail, yet in a form that assures the presence of natura naturans. The keynote is given in the plant at lower left, whose shapes emphasize its pattern of growth, implying that the source of change is within matter. Here, and in numerous independent drawings (Fig. 96), the theme of generative growth is embedded in the plant; they are fused by the illusion of movement, which defines their shared

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participation in time.38 As form and matter are conjoined through motion, so too the barrier between form and space is broken down through the soft-edged sfumato. Like the Plato­ nizing Botticelli, Leo­nardo presents generative nature as female, yet he conceives her, not as a static abstraction, but as a dynamic presence that is immanent in the physical world.39 Conspicuously identified with the rocks that frame her like an honorific canopy, the Virgin Mary is the motivating and controlling agent of the composition. She rises from dark, dense vegetation to preside over her son and his solemn attendants in a mysterious setting of plants, rocks, and a mistshrouded distance, whose remote inaccessibility suggests recession into time as well as depth, evoking the primeval early

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life of the planet.40 Giancarlo Maiorino and Regina Stefaniak have independently claimed that this setting has cosmological significance beyond its allusion to the apocryphal meetingplace of the participants.41 Observing that a river underlies the cavernous rocks, flowing from the background to the pool at the front, each writer invoked the ancient idea of the “source,” the mythic point of origin where the rivers of the earth converge. Pre-Socratic philosophers postulated a generative fluid of creation identified with water and infinity, manifest in the waters of the earth and their circulation; Christian commentators identified these aboriginal regenerative powers with the Fountain of Life, from which flow the rivers of the world. 42 The topos of the underground source of all rivers is found as well in Plato’s Phaedo and Virgil’s Georgics—in the latter, as Stefaniak notes, “with a strongly feminine charge.”43 The source myth was applied to the Virgin by early doctors of the Church to explain her name, Maria (derived from mare, sea; plural maria). Albertus Magnus commented, “She is called Maria because just as there is in the sea [mare] a congregation of all waters so there is in her a union of all graces.” 44 Both the first Virgin of the Rocks altarpiece and the second (London) version were destined for a chapel dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, and Stefaniak has convincingly connected their imagery with the contemporary controversy over the new doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, inserted into the Roman liturgical calendar by Sixtus IV scarcely a decade before the first version was commissioned. She argues that in each, the cave and water landscape settings represent the venter (womb) of the universal earth-mother and, by extension, the venter of the Virgin’s mother, St. Anne, the locus of the dispute about where and when the Virgin received her exemption from original sin.45 The Virgin of the Rocks was undoubtedly painted in full consciousness of the Immaculist controversy, and it may be true, as Stefaniak contends, that the picture’s invocation of the source myth helped to solve a theological dilemma.46 Yet Leo­ nardo demonstrably found the source myth more interesting than the narrower points of Church doctrine that invoked it. Throughout his life, he would explore the mystery of origins, advancing the idea that—as the Milesian philosophers put it—at the source, nature and origin were the same. 47 Leo­nardo wrote that all forms of life long to return to the “primal chaos” and their “source,” and the transition from the foreground to the mist-shrouded rocks in the distance seems to express this idea.48 The Virgin of the Rocks corresponds to that “formative nature,” as Leo­nardo called it, before whose “various and strange shapes” he described his sensations of fear and curios-

97.  Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Virgin and Holy Children, c. 1483. Pen and ink over lead-point. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1917 (17.142.1). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ity. Around this time, he described a great cavern among some gloomy rocks: “There immediately arose in me two feelings— fear and desire—fear of the menacing, dark cavity, and desire to see if there was anything miraculous within.”49 The Virgin’s spiral turn, more vigorous in a sheet that includes studies for the Virgin of the Rocks (Fig. 97), suggests the idea of formative nature forming itself—herself—whose central metaphor is the generative spiral. This idea would later become explicit in the Leda studies. For Leo­nardo, the Virgin is associated, as in the ancient past, with the Great Mother Goddess, Natura, and Sophia50— this time as an extension of her own mother, St. Anne, whose womb is symbolized by the archetypal setting of river and cave. Leo­nardo’s view of Christianity was often skeptical and always unorthodox. He observed that although Christians worshipped the Son, they only built temples in the name of the Mother.51 In at least one passage, he refers to the deity not

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Nature’s Special Child

98.  Leonardo da Vinci, Two Studies of the Madonna and Child with a Cat and Three Studies of the Child with a Cat, 1470s. Pen and brown ink over black chalk and and lead-point. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum. 99.  Michelangelo, Madonna of the Stairs, c. 1491. Marble relief. Casa Buonarroti, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

as Iddio, God, but in a feminine form, Iddea.52 He frequently invoked Dante’s formula of the artist as a grandchild of God and child of Nature: in one passage, he refers to artists as “grandchildren of God,” and in another, describes painting as “a true daughter of nature.”53 In a longer exposition, he puts it differently: “painting is born of nature ( partorita da essa natura)—or, to speak more correctly, we shall call it the grandchild of nature; for all visible things were brought forth by nature and these her children have given birth to painting. Hence we may justly call it the grandchild of nature and related (parente) to God.”54 Dante’s genealogy was God–Nature–artist; Leo­nardo’s is Nature–artist–painting, and God is a relative of no specified affiliation. Leo­nardo’s idea of the artist as a child or grandchild of Nature finds early expression in his drawings for Madonna and Child compositions (Fig. 98), which are more numerous than

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his known commissions. In these, and in paintings such as the Benois Madonna, he explored various forms of interaction between the characters, assigning them changing roles. In some of the drawings, and in the original design for the Madonna Litta, known from the replica in Saint Petersburg, Leo­ nardo revived a Trecento type in which the mother nurses the child.55 Metaphorically, I would suggest, the figures enact the relation between a Mother Nature, maternal once again, who nourishes her child, the artist. Michelangelo also revived the Virgo lactans in one of his earliest sculptures, the Madonna of the Stairs (Fig. 99). If we think of Christ as surrogate for the artist, drawing nurture from Mother Nature, the image virtually illustrates a famous remark by the sculptor. According to Vasari, Michelangelo linked his own biological nourishment with his artistic nurture, saying of his early wet-nursing by a stonecutter’s wife at Settignano, “I sucked in

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chisels and hammers with my nurse’s milk.”56 As if to elevate experience to metaphor, Michelangelo repeated the theme of the nursing Christ Child in early drawings and later images (discussed in chapter 8).57 One way to understand the nursing mother as a recurrent theme in Michelangelo’s art is as a subliminally coded metaphor for the artist-nature ­relationship. In Leo­nardo’s drawings, the mother-child, or nature-artist, relationship takes more diverse forms. They take turns feeding or showing things to one another—a metaphoric model of the interdependence of nature and art that Leo­nardo would later more fully articulate. The series culminates in the unfinished painting of the Adoration of the Magi (Plate 5). Here, to continue a figurative reading that inverts conventional doctrine, the artist/child intercedes between Mother Nature and the kings of the world (patrons?). More active than in previous Adorations, this privileged Child mediates between his Mother and a world that kneels in adoration, worshipping the son, but also the great mother to be reached through his intercession. In the Burlington House cartoon and the Louvre St. Anne, discussed below, the genealogy implied in the Virgin of the Rocks and Adoration emerges full-blown: the young Christ as child and grandchild of mothers emphatically identified with cosmological nature behind them. Though it counters Christian iconography, it seems appropriate to suggest that the Child in these paintings is the special instrument of Nature, who conveys her blessing upon the artist and his work. portraiture and the transcendence of time Although the outlook on women expressed in the Ginevra de’ Benci and the Virgin of the Rocks is unusually free of masculinist bias, Leo­nardo was not a feminist in either Renaissance or modern terms, for he nowhere took up the cause of women as a theoretical or social concern. Occasionally, he is thoughtlessly conventional.58 Yet the pro-female elements in Leo­ nardo’s thought and art set him apart from the masculinist culture of his day, and injected a new and influential element into art’s mainstream discourse. In the New York study for the Virgin of the Rocks, we see the artist developing the monumental pyramidal composition, with the mother at the apex, that became the emblem of High Renaissance pictorial design. It is well known that Leo­nardo pioneered the formula that Raphael and others would repeat; rarely noted is that he atypically used a female character for the study of the human figure in motion, and that he was the first to make a viable theme of the active female body. Of six exist-

ing portraits by Leo­nardo, five represent women, one a man. Perhaps partly an accident of survival, this ratio is nevertheless highly unusual in Renaissance Italy, when a far higher percentage of portraits depicted men.59 Leo­nardo’s creation of psychologically vital images—speaking likenesses of humans who turn and move in space—was achieved through the female figure, on behalf of both sexes. In direct contrast to the Quattrocento situation, the female type now became progressive, for the new Cinquecento portrait created by Leo­nardo was based upon the study of women as prime examples of the human organism. The successors to Ginevra de’ Benci were not only Cecilia Gallerani and Mona Lisa, but also Raphael’s Bal­ dassare Castiglione, Giorgione’s “Giustiniani” portrait (see Fig. 102), and Titian’s Man with the Blue Sleeve. All but two of Leo­nardo’s known portraits were painted at the court of Lodovico Sforza in Milan, where he worked from 1483 to 1499. Most securely an autograph work is the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Fig. 100), of c. 1489–90.60 Like Ginevra de’ Benci, Gallerani was a noblewoman who wrote poetry. Acclaimed for both beauty and intelligence, she was known for her learned discussions with theologians and philosophers, and her Latin epistles and Italian poems.61 Tradition has described Gallerani as Duke Lodovico’s mistress, but her position at the Sforza court was more nearly that of courtesan, a newly emergent figure in the late fifteenth century, rhetorically celebrated as intelligent, accomplished, and outspoken. 62 In 1492, Gallerani married Count Lodovico Bergamino, and set up her own intellectual courts in Milan and in the campagna of Cremona. Her gatherings attracted writers, philosophers, musicians, and poets, including Matteo Bandello, who dedicated two novelle to her and described the “virtuosa signora Cecilia Gallerani” as “one of our two muses,” along with Camilla Sca­ rampa, one of “two great lights of the Italian language.”63 Leo­nardo’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, like that of Ginevra, is recognized as a major advance in the history of portraiture.64 This equally self-possessed woman rotates on her own axis, and firmly grasps the animal that may allude to her name ( galée, γαλέη, is ancient Greek for cat or weasel) or to the ermine that was the duke’s emblem. The forceful, ideally formed hand rhymes in shape with the ermine it controls, a sharp, fierce creature that might stand for an aspect of her personality or for someone in her power.65 Leo­nardo’s portrait projects a vitality commensurate with this woman’s historical identity. Yet contemporary literary descriptions of the portrait define Gallerani exclusively as a model of generic beauty. A sonnet of 1493 by Bernardo Bellincioni casts the portrait as the product doubly of nature and of art.66 He praises the image for showing

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100.  Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, c. 1489–90. Oil on panel. Czartoryski Museum, Cracow. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Cecilia listening rather than speaking—a curious compliment, given her legendary intellectual brilliance. As the creation of Leo­nardo’s hand, Bellincioni claims, the portrait of Cecilia will keep the sitter’s beauty alive for generations to come.67 In the context of a literary genre that reduced all women to the common denominator of beauty, two interesting facts about Leo­nardo and Cecilia stand out. Lodovico Sforza may have commissioned the portrait, but Gallerani retained possession of it after her marriage.68 And, after leaving the Sforza court, she enjoyed a continuing friendship with Leo­nardo himself, according to one of the painter’s earliest modern biographers.69 Cecilia Gallerani’s unusual cultural independence may have resonated for the artist Leo­nardo, since the relationships of artists and mistresses with their ducal patrons under-

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went a parallel transformation in the late Quattrocento. The move from mistress to courtesan mirrored that from craftsman (in Leo­nardo’s case, court engineer) to resident artistic genius, each advancing in status from a straightforward business relationship to a more personal one that acknowledged the intellectual strenghts of the artist or courtesan. Leo­nardo, who was at that moment helping to accomplish the transition for the artist,70 had reason to identify with an exceptional woman whose social progression mirrored his own. Leo­nardo set the female portrait on a new plane by offering a visual model for physical and intellectual beauty combined. His progressive female portraits took part in, and perhaps fueled, a theoretical discourse about the capabilities of women initiated in the last quarter of the Quattrocento that would change

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the conceptual terms of the gender power balance. In the 1480s, the first Italian defenses of woman began to appear—​ the treatises of Vespasiano da Bisticci (c. 1480), Giovanni Sabadino (1483), Bartolomeo Goggio (1487), Agostino Strozzi (1501), and Mario Equicola (1501)—many of them addressed to female patrons in North Italian courts.71 These texts varied in their arguments and their degree of protofeminist enlightenment, but they advanced the hypothetical possibility of women’s physical and intellectual parity with men, and the prospect of more active social roles for women. Simultaneously, Italian women writers were beginning to produce texts of their own: through poetry and correspondence, Laura Cereta, Isotta Nogarola, Cassandra Fedele, Camilla Scarampa, and others voiced the humanist concerns of learned women. Some of them, particularly Cereta, took a protofeminist position on the constraints on and capabilities of women.72 At the time these texts were produced, a number of educated and culturally active women began to reign at North Italian courts. Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), who begged Leo­nardo for a portrait and had to settle for a finished drawing, was only the most prominent. As we will see in the next chapter, Castiglione drew upon some of these women’s lives to present a new model of rational and independent women in the third book of the Cortegiano. Even though this model represented only one position in a staged debate about woman’s capabilities, it marked a significant point of change in theorizing about women, which paralleled a new stage in the conceptualizing of nature. In 1498, Isabella d’Este asked Cecilia Gallerani for a temporary loan of her portrait by Leo­nardo. Her friend agreed reluctantly, stating that through no fault of the painter, the portrait no longer resembled her.73 Perhaps intentionally, Gallerani’s response recalls Bellincioni’s poem, which celebrated the power of art to preserve nature’s creations. Yet this familiar Renaissance theme was now undergoing significant change. Alberti had noted that “through painting, the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time,” ascribing to that art “a truly divine power in that . . . [it] represents the dead to the living many centuries later.”74 Alberti emphasized vividness, the quality of seeming alive, and he typifies early Quattrocento values in praising the painter’s ability simply to extend the life of nature’s creations.75 For Botticelli and the Neoplatonists, as we have seen, the artist competed with Nature by creating a beauty that transcends natural beauty, producing a superior creation. The Botticellian shift is embraced in Bellincioni’s casting. Nature, imagined to envy the artist, is reminded that he honors her by preserving forever a beauty she created. Nature is instructed to be grateful to Leo­nardo and Ludovico, who

101.  Leonardo da Vinci, Cartoon for a Portrait of Isabella d’Este, 1499–1500. Black and red chalk. Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 753). Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

both want Cecilia “to belong to posterity.” Posterity, in turn, will understand “what is nature and what is art.” The subtext of this assertion is that art’s powers are inching ahead. Leo­nardo helped to advance art in this changing discourse. In defending painting over music, he wrote: “How many paintings have preserved the image of divine beauty of which time or sudden death have destroyed Nature’s original, so that the work of the painter has survived in nobler form than that of Nature, his mistress.”76 Like Alberti, Leo­nardo argues that the painting’s value lies in its preservation of a lost beauty, but he moves toward Bellincioni in emphasizing painting’s “nobler form,” a simple stroke that implies the new factor of idealization. This factor is conspicuous in Leo­nardo’s portrait drawing of Isabella d’Este (Fig. 101): the duchess’s pure and serene profile image is idealized both in contour and in its reference to a classicizing medal.77 In another instance, Leo­nardo praised the artist’s ability to create a virtual reality that could substitute for life itself: “The painter’s power over men’s minds is even

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Nature’s Special Child

102.  Giorgione, Portrait of a Young Man (the “Giustiniani Portrait”), c. 1498–1500. Oil on canvas. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer/Art Resource, NY.

greater [than that of the poet], for he can induce them to love and fall in love with a picture which does not portray any living woman.”78 Through his frequent celebrations of art’s power to preserve Nature’s creations in permanent and ideal form, Leo­ nardo moved the topos of art’s transcendence of nature and time to a new level. Built into Leo­nardo’s paragone of painting and music is a consideration of the relative duration of the products of the different arts. Whereas “sound dies as soon as it is born,” the “beauty of a human figure composed of fine proportions” will not be as transient as in music. The comparison then shifts to include painting’s advantage over nature: “In nature, time destroys the beauty of such harmony in a few years; this does not happen to the same beauty imitated by the painter; time will preserve it for a long while.”79 As he reflected on these things, the themes of mutability and mortality preoccupied him. “Mortal beauty passes away,” he wrote, “but not so in art.” And again, “O marvelous science, which can preserve alive the transient beauty of mortals and endow it with a permanence greater than the works of nature; for these are subject

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to the continual changes of time, which leads them to inevitable old age.”80 Leo­nardo’s championing of art’s marvelous ability to keep beauty permanently alive was echoed elsewhere in early Cinquecento art. A group of Venetian portraits advertises art’s powers through inscriptions on a parapet before the sitter, which contain the initials “V V,” “V V O,” and other variants. Prominent among these is the Giustiniani Portrait of c. 1504–6, attributed to Giorgione (Fig. 102). As deciphered by Nancy Thomson de Grummond, the formulaic “V V” revived a Latin inscription found on Roman tombs, Vivus Vivo, “the living [made it] for the living.”81 Among these portraits, Vivo sometimes meant that the image was made from, and perhaps for, a living person (to distinguish it from a posthumous portrait). In other instances, the word could signify the sitter’s immortality, “eternally vivus“ thanks to the artist’s skill. As for the vivus that describes the maker, since it would be unnecessary to state that a living artist made the image, de Grummond suggests that Giorgione meant that the artist too will be vivus forever, by virtue of the achievement that would bring him fame. In Dürer’s portrait engraving of his scholarly friend Willibald Pirckheimer (1524), inscribed vivitur ingenio, “one lives through genius,” the message seems to be that both artist and subject will live on through their cultural attainments. 82 There is yet another way of understanding the legend vivus vivo, which is that a living person is here presented to a living future viewer. This is implied in these images that poignantly proclaim from the moment of their facture that they will endure through time, vehicles through which the once living speak to the future living. In this sense, vivus vivo constructs in art a new kind of continuity through time, which apes the generational continuity of Nature’s reproductive cycles. This form of temporal continuity is better, the artist might say, than the anonymity of generations that pass like falling leaves, because art keeps alive the essence of particular individuals, and translates this to communal memory in a permanent form. The power of art to commemorate is, of course, the very point of the stone parapets, essential to the message of these painted images not only as allusions to the tomb and the death that is transcended, but in their reiteration of art itself in a doubled form. Art’s preservation of mortal beauty and transcendence of death is not conspicuously thematized in Leo­nardo’s own art (apart from certain interpretations of the Mona Lisa, which I will take up shortly). The idea was given concrete expression, however, in one of the most important unfulfilled commissions of the Renaissance: Michelangelo’s first project (Fig. 103) for

103.  Jacomo Rocchetti, after Michelangelo, Project of 1505 for the Tomb of Julius II. Pen and ink wash. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (no. 15306). Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

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the tomb of Julius II. As I have previously argued, the tomb’s first project advanced a program of Liberal Arts triumphing over Time and Death. 83 On the lower level, niches containing female personifications of the liberal arts—including for the first time the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture—alternated with bound male figures representing territories captured by Julius II. Subjugated beneath the triumphant Arts were reclining male figures, whose languid poses identify them as river gods and personifications of time. 84 The theme of the arts outlasting time and defeating death was appropriate for the tomb of Julius II, who sought the immortality of fame through his patronage of the arts. It was also of deep importance to the leading artists of the day, since they were actively engaged in elevating the status of the visual arts.85 As projected, the Julius tomb represented a moment of arrival for the visual arts in several respects. Although the power of art to confer immortality was an ancient literary topos,86 the concept had not previously been given overt visual expression. Moreover, the tomb’s almost propagandistic assertion that the visual arts were liberal and intellectual was driven in part by the changing balance of art’s competition with nature. As the artist’s concept of his position in that relationship progressed over the Quattrocento—from imitator of the lifelike, to rival creator of a parallel beauty, to victor over time and death—the philosophical framework of art’s realm had steadily enlarged. Leo­nardo’s verbal argument and Michelangelo’s visual claim for the superiority of art over nature in certain respects would be taken up almost jingoistically by artists preoccupied with the social implications of art’s elevated intellectual status. From here on, the theme of art’s defeat of nature would be incessantly sounded by increasingly academic artists. 87 Although they laid the groundwork for the Cinquecento’s long celebration of victorious art, Leo­nardo and Michelangelo did not themselves take sides so simplemindedly. In Michelangelo’s case, the pro-masculinist imagery and iconography of the Sistine Ceiling was counterbalanced by his deep attachment to nature’s organic forms. At different times, he expressed personal affinity with both female and male, and with both nature and art. One already sees a certain ambivalence in the Julius tomb imagery, where he presents art as female and nature/ time as male. Although this was strictly in accord with the traditions of tomb sculpture and other allegorizing genres, it nevertheless anticipated the cross-gender complexities of Michelangelo’s later art. Leo­nardo would continue to engage nature more deeply through art, offering numerous variations on their reciprocal relationship and its balances of power.

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the mechanical and the organic “Il dipintore disputa e gareggia colla natura,” Leo­nardo wrote; “the painter disputes and competes with nature.” At another point he describes nature as “maestra del maestro.”88 These two versions of the artist’s relationship with nature, one stressing competition and the other framing them as female teacher and male student, are not as contradictory as they might seem. Other passages could be quoted to show Leo­nardo partaking of the art-conquers-nature model. But this would falsify the larger thrust of his work, which is the acceptance of nature— mentioned in the notebooks far more frequently than God— as the greatest power of the universe. A brief look at the relation between nature and technology in Leo­nardo’s art and thought will help to reveal the particular way that he understood nature as a teacher with whom the artist should compete. When Leo­nardo arrived in Florence in the late 1460s, the crowning elements of Brunelleschi’s great dome were being set in place. (Leo­nardo might have helped his master Verrocchio make the copper ball that surmounts the cupola.) He was soon fascinated with a device that Brunelleschi had invented to help secure the cathedral dome, the “Archimedes screw,” and sought immediately to extend its practical applications, first to warfare and then to propel a flying machine. 89 Leo­nardo would have been conscious of Brunelleschi’s Daedalian persona for, since Petrarch at least, the binary opposition between Nature and the genius-craftsman Daedalus who challenges her with his art and inventions was familiar.90 And Leo­nardo shared with other men of his era the belief that art and technology could improve upon or control nature for human benefit.91 In an age of technological expansion, which included the invention of new firearms, the development of defense and drainage systems, and the invention of printing, Leo­nardo was one of many self-defined engineers—others included Taccola and Fran­cesco di Giorgio—who were asked to design devices to support these activities. Certainly, he took pleasure in designing fortifications, locks and canals, and military weapons, though as scholars have suggested, his interest in these things was probably largely aesthetic, offset by his repugnance toward violence and war.92 Yet Leo­nardo’s faith in human ability to control or direct nature was ultimately limited by his own pessimism and his respect for nature’s superiority. This point of view was not com­ mon in Renaissance Italy, when the quest to master and dominate nature grew steadily. Leo­nardo’s drawings representing the Deluge (Fig. 104) might thus be understood as a skeptical reaction to man’s dream of mastering nature. In these images of ferociously spiraling explosions of water, a giant apocalyptic

Leonardo da Vinci

104.  Leonardo da Vinci, A Deluge, with a Falling Mountain and Collapsing Town, c. 1515. Black chalk. Royal Library, Windsor (no. 12378). Photo: The Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

flood repeatedly destroys tiny townships. It is a celebration, rare in Italian Renaissance art, of the superior power of nature over human civilization, one that asserts the endurance of elemental (female) nature over fragile (male) culture. Leo­nardo’s approach to technology was guided by his awareness of nature’s complex form of creativity. At times, he acknowledges nature’s superiority to technology: “Though human ingenuity may make various inventions . . . it will never devise any invention more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting and nothing is superfluous.”93 Yet, simultaneously, he believed in art’s superior power to create more diverse inventions: “Design [disegno] is of such excellence that it not only studies the works of nature but is more infinite than those made by nature . . . and, on account of this, we

conclude that it is not only a science but a divine power.” And again, “It [disegno] surpasses nature because the basic forms of nature are finite and the works that the eye demands of the hands are infinite.”94 This line of thinking situates Leo­nardo in the theoretical stream of Francesco di Giorgio, who argued that nature’s constructions were always the same (see chapter 3, p. 57), and it is reflected in Luca Pacioli’s description of Leo­nardo as a “tireless inventor of new things.”95 But when Leo­nardo expands on the idea, he gives it a different turn: “Man is the greatest instrument of nature, because nature is concerned only with the production of its basic forms but man from these basic forms produces an infinite number of compounds, though he has no power to create any basic form except another like himself, that is to say his children.”96 Here, he is casting man and nature, not as competitors, but as

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105.  Leonardo da Vinci, Study of the Wing Mechanism of a Flying Machine, c. 1493–95. Pen and ink. Codex Atlanticus, fol 844r/308r-a. Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Photo © Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Auth. No. F25/09). 106.  Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of the Anatomy of the Hand, c. 1510. Pen and ink. Royal Library, Windsor (no. 19009r). Photo: The Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

interdependent. Both have limited powers: creative nature cannot go beyond basic forms, and creative man can only combine the forms of nature’s invention. Man, therefore, is the “instrument” through which nature is able to create compounds of her basic forms. Yet man can only invent his combinations and elaborations by understanding nature’s basic designs, hence Leo­nardo’s grounding of his inventions in intense analysis of the forms of nature, which he found to reveal and explain their functions. Leo­nardo’s design for a proto-tank, for example, was inspired by the form of the lowly turtle.97 In his abiding quest to enable human flight, he abandoned the Archimedean principle

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of the air screw to draw on the exemplary model of birds and bats.98 Some of his flying machine designs look like bat wings while, as Kemp noted, others resemble his drawing of the human hand (Fig. 105 and Fig. 106). Their combination exemplifies man’s compounds based on nature’s basic forms, produced by the artist’s rational application of fantasía. For Leo­nardo, the “ways of Nature” are not merely a rhetorical figure of speech (as they were for Alberti), they are literally encoded in visible and palpable reality: the naturata of the world as both sign and result of naturans. This is perhaps why the drawings have such a peculiar vitality, because they are informed with a sense of the organic, shaped by both analysis and intuition.

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Today we tend to consider the terms “mechanical” and “organic” as opposites, but for Leo­nardo they were intimately linked. When he analyzed the movements of animals as “mechanical,” he meant that they exemplify dynamic motion—of organically moving parts, not metal robots.99 He analyzed buildings as if they were functioning machines: as Paolo Galluzzi put it, “not merely static structures based on precise pro­ portions, but living organisms in dynamic equilibrium.”100 The metaphoric equation between organic and mechanical might run in either direction. He described the human body as “this machine of ours,” but also called machines “organisms,” their component parts “organs.”101 His “mechanical” drawings look organic when compared with those of other engineers; intent on describing functioning parts, he maps their movements like a nervous system. Leo­nardo’s drawings of domed churches sometimes almost casually echo the egg shape of the Duomo (no other copyist came this close to getting it right).102 If Leo­ nardo understood the egg-form structural basis of the Flor­ entine dome, he kept his silence, but he was not averse to using the egg as an architectural form. In a stage-set design for a Sforza wedding in 1490, he created a celestial vault “in the shape of a half-egg.”103 Brunelleschi’s breakthrough had been to mechanize the organic, to make it architectonic, but Leo­nardo’s contribution was to organicize the tectonic. Yet despite his unusual receptivity to the subtleties of organic form, Leo­nardo is also open to the charge of being hyperscientific, inappropriately rationalistic, in the face of nature. He often was mechanistic—when, for example, he depicted the trajectory of birds in flight as corkscrew spirals, producing a crude oversimplification of the rhythmic yet infinitely varied arcs of their movement in nature.104 And he sounds like an Aristotelian come unhinged when pedantically explaining how to depict the deluge that will end the world (who but he ever wanted to?), with maniacally precise instructions about angles of light reflections and the like, as if to creep up on Armageddon with a magnifying glass. But for Leo­nardo, to be accurate about nature meant to attend its naturata no less than its naturans, and to assume the role of mediator between nature and artists that would carry him through to the final flood. Among the far more mechanistic approaches of his contemporaries, Leo­nardo alone attempted to connect Daedalian man with organic nature, and so took a giant step toward a more natural natural philosophy. He seems to have known that he had unusual insight into the workings of nature, and he felt a special obligation to share this with fellow artists. He hints at this obliquely, when he unfavorably compares “boasters and declaimers of the works of oth-

ers,” men “little indebted to Nature,” with “those men who are inventors and interpreters between Nature and Man.”105 Such an interpreter as Leo­nardo could offer a road map of her subtleties to those less well informed. Perhaps this is why he laboriously filled his notebooks with advice to artists on how better to pursue their craft—advice on intricate problems of representation that he himself rarely attempted in painting. It was to fulfill the cosmic responsibility to Nature borne by her special child and partner in the enterprise of Art. anatomy and reproduction In the first decade of the sixteenth century, Leo­nardo turned from mechanical investigations to anatomical studies, which grew out of designs for machines and eventually replaced them in his interest. In these anatomical studies, Leo­nardo made an original contribution to the discourse of a female-gendered nature, by presenting evidence that directly refuted dominant views about women’s deficiencies. In one drawing, Leo­nardo depicted sexual intercourse in a way that emphasized the male role, reflecting Aristotle’s dictum that females contributed only passive matter to human procreation while the male played the vitalizing part.106 However, he increasingly questioned this theory, drawing instead upon the philosophical opinion of Lucretius and the medical opinion of Galen to postulate that both female and male contribute “seed” necessary for conception. In effect, Leo­nardo took one side of a debate ongoing since the fourteenth century among doctors and philosophers over the Aristotelian and Galenist views on procreation, with philosophers leaning toward Aristotle and medical practitioners toward the secondcentury physician Galen. Whereas the Galenists shared with Aristotelians the belief that the female is biologically inferior to the male, they believed that the mother also “seminated,” playing a more active role in conception than was accorded by the Aristotelians.107 During his years in Milan, Leo­nardo had read Galen, Avicenna, and the early fourteenth-century anatomist Mundinus, as well as Lucretius.108 In this period, he was still aligned with Aristotle, but on his return to Florence, beginning around 1504–6, he was drawn more and more to Galenist views, becoming stronger in this orientation until around 1513, when he took a stance of independence from authority, and based his conclusions strictly on observation.109 About 1509–10, Leo­ nardo obtained a copy of Galen’s De usu partium, which initiated his period of intense Galenism. The so-called Great Lady drawing (Fig. 107), which dates

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107.  Leonardo da Vinci, Composite Study of the Respiratory, Circulatory, and Urinogenital Systems in a Female Body (The “Great Lady” Drawing), c. 1510. Pen and ink and wash over black chalk. Royal Library, Windsor (no. 12281). Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

from around 1510, exemplifies his adoption of a new understanding of human generation. In an annotation on this sheet addressed to Mundinus, Leo­nardo challenges the Aristote­ lian view of generation passed on by Mundinus, that the “spermatic vessels” (ovaries) do not generate real semen, observing instead that these vessels “derive in the same way in the female as in the male.” Here he adopts the Galenic position that both sexes contribute in equal part.110 Elsewhere, citing the ability of a white mother mating with a black father to produce a child of mixed color, Leo­nardo concludes that “the semen of the mother has power in the embryo equal to the semen of the father.” 111 On the same sheet, he asserts that the mother nourishes the fetus with her life, food, and soul (anima), countering the Aristotelian belief still commonly held

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that women, deficient in soul, were mere incubators for gestation: “As one mind governs two bodies . . . likewise the nourishment of the food serves the child, and it is nourished from the same cause as the other members of the mother and the spirits, which are taken from the air—the common soul of the human race and other living things.”112 Further, Leo­nardo identified the womb as generative rather than nutritive, an important distinction for those who considered the womb to have active power: nutritive virtue would generate something joined to it, while the greater virtue, generative, would produce a distinct entity. For he both writes and visually asserts that there is no continuity between the vascular systems of mother and fetus, as if in response to a standing argument that was to reverberate down to the eighteenth century (when the position taken by Leo­nardo was finally proved correct).113 In the “Great Lady” drawing, Leo­ nardo presents a synthesized image of circulatory, respiratory, and generative processes in the female body. The distinctive graphic completeness of the drawing expresses Leo­nardo’s precocious awareness that blood flow in the female body is linked with its role in procreation and his comprehension of the systemic order of organic process in the female body, in opposition to the Aristotelian view that menstrual blood was inchoate, given form by sperm, a view that prevailed until William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in the seventeenth century.114 The well-known drawing of a fetus in the uterus (Fig. 108), though not studied from human example and inaccurate in many ways, nevertheless expresses the process of gestation and birth more clearly than a modern textbook. Having promised himself to describe what makes the fetus push out,115 Leo­nardo shows this happening, the bursting of the fetus from its uterine container into the world, in sequential small images that analogize the process to a nut breaking out of its shell. The largest image on the sheet shows the fetus coiled in its umbilicus. Its compact density suggests a seed in a pod (he had noted that all seeds and nuts have umbilical cords), while the interlocking spirals of its body convey the sense of potential growth and development. Originating in observation but developed under belief in the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, this image gives information about human birth that is of a philosophical order, expressing its connection with other forms of birth and growth in the ­universe. Leo­nardo’s drawings reveal a process of visual reasoning in which art was an instrument of discovery, a form of knowing and not merely an illustration of what was already known.116 The image of an idea is the idea, and frequently it tells us

Leonardo da Vinci

108.  Leonardo da Vinci, A Human Fetus in the Uterus, c. 1512. Pen and ink. Royal Library, Windsor (no. 1910r). Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY.

something quite different from what the accompanying words say. The words may be practical explanations of matters that preoccupied Leo­nardo, or they may be the questions that prompted him to the analysis, or they may represent an effort to rationalize in words the unfamiliar discoveries of the pen and eye.117 The drawings, however, represent the artist’s effort to infer a process of nature from a static slice. They convey his expectation that form will reveal history and that the working

of the microcosm is a key to the macrocosm—because they are related to each other, not only metaphorically, but also structurally and organically.118 This reasoning led him to conclude that the property of growth connected all organisms, including the earth itself. Because grass and leaves grow in the fields and trees just as feathers and hair grow on animals, he asserted, we can say that “the earth has a spirit of growth,” whose flesh is the soil, whose

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bones are the mountains, whose blood is its waters.119 The fetus and “Great Lady” drawings suggest that in Leo­nardo’s thinking the female body, with its regenerative capability and mysterious life-supporting powers, is a microcosm for the macrocosm that is female nature itself, natura naturans. Reaching beyond the longstanding but vague identity between reproductive females and the regenerative Earth, Leo­nardo identified Nature, as had Galen, as the “overarching, controlling force” of the universe.120 the gynocentric universe Over and over, in the Virgin of the Rocks, the designs for Leda, the Burlington House Cartoon, the St. Anne, and the Mona Lisa, Leo­nardo explicitly associated powerful female images with visually extraordinary surrounding landscapes, as if to assert the unity between female generation and the physical universe as a philosophical claim. The collective impact of this “statement” about the nature of nature may be more pronounced than that of any other single idea in his pictorial oeuvre. Whereas the Virgin of the Rocks and Leda express the cosmic female genesis of human and vegetal life, the Burlington House Cartoon and the Louvre Virgin, Christ Child, and St. Anne (Fig. 109) are meditations on human generation over time. The St. Anne images, possibly originating in political circumstance and certainly displaying advanced notions of contrapposto composition, also represent an extension of Leo­nardo’s thinking about the female and nature, now focused upon the cycles of human reproduction.121 This is suggested in the cartoon by the position of the Christ Child, which hints at his emergence from the Virgin’s womb, and in the Louvre painting by the cascading sequence of curved arms that, in conjunction with the glacial and terrestrial landscapes, implies a sequence from geological into human time.122 The monumental pair of mothers who preside over, or have generated, the earth’s formation might be thought of as a Christian counterpart to the Neoplatonic twin Venuses, St. Anne representing the remote celestial Venus, and Mary the more human terrestrial Venus. Their polarity is reinforced by the division of the landscape behind into two zones, celestial ice-blue and terrestrial warm-brown. Yet in their symbiotic configuration, Leo­nardo’s mothers are less hierarchically distinguished than generatively connected. They recall the ancient mother-daughter pairing of DemeterPersephone, who in turn reflect twin aspects of the ancient mother goddess as she appeared in many pre-Greek images in the Mediterranean world.123 It is unlikely that Leo­nardo knew preclassical images of this kind. I would suggest instead that in

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his almost obsessive representation of the highest cosmic power as female, Leo­nardo spontaneously reinvented a way of thinking periodically voiced in antiquity and the Middle Ages, which would seem less strange to us today had it not been repeatedly subjected to patriarchal distortion. The lost composition of Leda and the Swan, whose appearance is known from surviving studies and copies, is widely understood to express the analogy between female and natural procreation.124 Leo­nardo made this clear in his first conception of the theme (Fig. 110), where a kneeling Leda rises from the earth, casually embracing a rather dependent swan— who seems more an attribute than co-progenitor—and points insistently to the bursting of her babies from eggs and the adjacent explosion of growing plants. Leo­nardo converted a lesser mythological character into a female archetype, not merely one of Jupiter’s conquests, but emblem of the origin of life, both human and vegetal. Leda was better known in the Renaissance as the mother of the Dioscuri than as a generative goddess, yet there were some contemporary parallels for Leo­ nardo’s interpretative emphasis. In Neoplatonic thought, Leda’s children Castor and Pollux represented concordia while their sisters Helen and Clytemnestra represented discordia; the union of these represented the Orphic principle of generation “implied in the mystery of Leda.”125 Such texts may have led Leo­nardo to select Leda to represent natural generation, but they do not explain his depiction of her as nude, a change that links her with Botticelli’s nude celestial Venus and his own Monna Vanna (see Fig. 115). Jonathan Nel­ son has proposed that this choice signals the onset of a newly eroticized form of female beauty, and Leo­nardo’s intention to “incite men to love.”126 From the standpoint of our own era, which has now seen five centuries of eroticization of the female body, such a reading may seem reasonable. But as discussed in chapter 4, nudity signified the higher level of Venus’s divinity for Botticelli, and as I shall argue in chapter 7, the eroticizing of the female nude as the artist’s primary intention began with Raphael, not Leo­nardo. Desiring misinterpretation is perhaps inevitable as long as male gazers command the rhetorical stage, but one cannot reasonably separate Leo­nardo’s Leda studies from his larger oeuvre and concerns, any more than one can detach the figure of Leda in these studies from her natural environment.127 Throughout the early studies, Leo­nardo emphasized Leda rather than her children, and the swan is sometimes omitted altogether. One small, frenetically overworked pensiero has been identified as containing two potential subjects—Leda but also a Virgin and St. Anne—which were in Leo­nardo’s

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mind as alternative subjects while he drew.128 This strongly implies that, for him, the themes were related. The resemblance between the studies for the Virgin of the Rocks (Fig. 97) and the Leda drawings confirms this: in each, he developed the central figure as an energized spiral form emerging from the earth, suggesting an identity between the generating goddess and the human and vegetal life she generates. Studies show that abundant spiral forms would also have defined Leda’s hair and the plants beneath her (Fig. 111). Granted, Leo­nardo’s fascination with spiral motion erupted almost everywhere; he imposed a shaping spiral upon growing flowers, and also flowing water, flowing hair, the rearing of horses, and even quasi-abstract forms (Fig. 112).129 However, this fact is too quickly conflated with the artist’s mechanical

109.  Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin, Christ Child, and St. Anne, c. 1510–13. Oil on wood. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 110.  Leonardo da Vinci, Study for the Kneeling Leda, c. 1506. Black chalk, pen and ink and wash. © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees. 111.  Leonardo da Vinci, Study for Leda’s Coiffure, c. 1504–6. Black chalk, pen and ink. Royal Library, Windsor (no. 12516). Photo: The Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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112.  Leonardo da Vinci, detail of drawing with double helix, c. 1490. Pen and ink. Codex Atlanticus 191 r-a. Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Photo © Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Auth. No. F25/09). 113.  Diagram of the double helix of DNA. Photo from A. T. Mann, The Round Art (New York: Galley Press, 1979), 113.

interests such as the Archimedes screw, and too hastily interpreted as a means of “imposing a graphic order on the apparently chaotic forces of nature.”130 It would be difficult to determine objectively whether order is imposed or recognized, yet I doubt that Leo­nardo thought he was imposing order on natural chaos. For, through a combination of intuition and inductive reasoning, he was actually onto something big. The model of spiral structure did not yet exist outside engineering devices or mathematical theory,131 much less had it been identified in the movements and patterns of natural phenomena. Leo­nardo must have extrapolated from the observation of spiral forms and motions in nature—for example, in shells or flowing water—to form the theoretical generalization (expressed visually) that the spiral, or helix, was a basic structural archetype. As it happens, this insight anticipated the scientific discovery of the spiral forms of galaxies and the double helix structure of DNA, the genetic code for biological life (Fig. 113).132 It is a little strange that the Leo­nardo who is known for saying, “let no one who is not a mathematician read my principles” should have produced a body of paintings that have so little to do with mathematics, and are so full of spirals and sfumato. He sometimes wrote inscriptions proclaiming the importance of mathematics on drawings that were entirely devoted to organic forms.133 Yet in an age when mathematics

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was sovereign and often regarded as legitimizing painting as a liberal art, it is not surprising that Leo­nardo should have used it to justify his more unorthodox reasoning about organic nature.134 Despite his frequent efforts to cloak it in mathematical theory, Leo­nardo’s visual commitment to spiral structure would turn out—when science caught up—to represent a progressive understanding of nature as dynamic change and growth, not as a subset of mathematical or mechanical principles. In this, he is deeply Aristotelian, for Aristotle had defined nature (physis) as “the essence of things which have a source of movement in themselves,” placing the agent of change within matter, in keeping with his dynamic, teleological vision of nature as matter evolving from inner direction toward its final form (see chapter 1, pp. 12–13). Moreover, Leo­nardo reconciled a contradiction in Aristotle concerning the value of matter in the form-matter dyad. In theorizing reproduction, Aristotle considered matter to be inert and lacking, the lower category that needs to be vitalized by the higher category of form. Yet, in his teleology, he regarded cosmic soul to be immanent in matter.135 Leo­nardo, by contrast, consistently supports the female-marked category as equal or ascendant. The female plays an active role in generation, and the material world is imbued with cosmic power. Spiral forms are not intrinsically female, but they flourished

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in pre-patriarchal, pre-tectonic societies. There is a relation between the kind of mind that can accept the female as an equal or dominant principle and the kind that can accept the spiral as a basic form with ontological status. In both cases, the thinker is able to let go of a masculinist mathematical norm and accept nature’s priority in the world of archetypal forms. The summa of Leo­nardo’s gynocentric universe is the so-called Mona Lisa (Fig. 114). As many writers have recognized, the world’s most famous picture is not just a portrait, but an image that conflates portraiture with broader philosophical ideas. Vasari stated that a portrait Leo­nardo painted of Mona Lisa del Giocondo, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, was left unfinished when it went into the hands of Francis I at Fontainebleau. This account has long been accepted as the probable genesis of the work, seemingly confirmed by the name given the painting, “La Gioconda,” as early as a 1525 inventory of the estate of Leo­nardo’s heir Salaì.136 However, Jack M. Greenstein has recently demonstrated that no source before 1642, even writers familiar with Vasari’s account, thought the title “La Gioconda” referred to the sitter’s surname. Greenstein proposes instead, following Carlo Pedretti, that the early title was descriptive, and simply meant a jocund or smiling woman.137 He shows, further, that recent efforts to document Vasari’s identification of the portrait with the wife of Francesco del Giocondo rest on circumstantial ­evidence.138 Scholars agree that the Louvre painting was probably begun in Florence around 1503.139 Yet the portrait was never delivered to a patron but remained in Leo­nardo’s hands when he moved from Florence to Milan and then to Rome; when he went to France for the final three years of his life, he took the painting with him.140 This could have been the picture described by a visitor to France in 1517 as “a certain Florentine lady, made from nature at the instigation of the late Magnificent Giuliano de’ Medici.”141 If so, Leo­nardo may have reworked the painting for Giuliano de’ Medici while he was in the Capitano’s employ (1513–16), as Martin Kemp argued. But since, in the intervening years, Leo­nardo substantially repainted the picture along the lines of his own interests, turning it into the highly unconventional image we see today, a commission to turn it back into a portrait seems improbable. More likely is that this female image, though perhaps originating in an aborted portrait commission, primarily served the artist as a vehicle for private purposes. Greenstein suggests that it was painted for display, as a showpiece of “what art can do.” I would add the qualification that Leo­nardo also used the painting as a template for

114.  Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda, c. 1503–14. Oil on wood. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

philosophical inquiry, which led him to explore the limits as well as the powers of art. The Mona Lisa142 has often been identified as a female archetype. This is typified by Walter Pater’s famous description (1869): “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.”143 Pater’s version of the archetypal female draws heavily upon the nineteenth-century femme fatale, yet he implies an identity between this woman and the cycles of geological time. Similarly, Kenneth Clark noted that the woman’s face and the landscape background together symbolize the processes of nature in the image of a female, whose con-

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nection with human generation links her sex with the creative and destructive powers of nature.144 The medical historian Kenneth D. Keele at once localized and enlarged this interpretation, identifying in the portrait “unmistakable” signs of a woman at an advanced stage of pregnancy, which he understood as a symbol of Genesis, “God-the-Mother . . . enclosed within the body of the earth.”145 David Rosand connected the Mona Lisa with the Renaissance idea of the portrait as a triumph over mortality and death.146 Pointing to Leo­nardo’s “preoccupation with transience” and the ravages of time, Rosand quoted the artist’s proclamation of the competitive edge held by art over destructive nature.147 According to Rosand, the Mona Lisa holds in dialectical tension the fluid and changing landscape—subject to deformation by water and time—and the contrasting image of perfect human beauty, a figure who, in life, would be similarly transformed by time, but as a creation of art, will live forever.148 In this reading, the beautiful woman is not identified with the forces of nature; instead, she is symbolically allied with the realm of art, as an image of perfection and permanence. Rosand thus situates the Mona Lisa within the genre of female portraits we examined in chapter 4, in which a beautiful woman’s image stands in for the beauty of painting, to represent the transcendence of art. Similarly, Donald Strong proposed that the sitter is an embodiment of female virtue, whose beauty, “high place” location, and original framing columns identify the theme as a Petrarchan triumph of Chastity, in which the lady’s image opposes the ravages of time to express the painter’s superiority to nature.149 The Mona Lisa conspicuously departs from these conventions, however, in the hypnotic strangeness that has made it uniquely famous, and in Leo­nardo’s personal stylization of a beauty that is quite different from living or ideal specimens. Moreover, she does not contrast with, but is of a piece with her setting. Laurie Schneider and Jack Flam have pointed to “a system of similes” between figure and landscape, of visual echoes in curved arcs and undulating folds, and their fusion by consistent sfumato.150 Kemp noted the extraordinary geological activity in the background of the Mona Lisa, which he saw (as had Keele and Clark) as coextensive with the portrait image, not dialectically opposed to it. Noting correspondences between the flowing movements and dynamic processes of the landscape and the cascading patterns of the lady’s clothing and hair, Kemp describes them as united exempla of the “processes of living nature.” For Kemp, the painting expresses Leo­nardo’s idea of the earth as a “living, changing organism,” a macrocosm whose circulations of fluids are echoed in the microcosm

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of human anatomy and whose fecundity is echoed in “the procreative powers of all living things.”151 Webster Smith has likewise interpreted the Mona Lisa as a micro-macrocosmic commentary on the geological processes of the earth, pointing to Leo­nardo’s comparison of the circulation of blood in the body with rivers of the earth.152 Smith reminds us that for Leo­nardo this relationship is not merely metaphoric, since he describes the earth not as “like a living body” but literally as a living body.153 Smith is hard pressed, however, to explain why this philosophical commentary should be joined with a female portrait (he adduces the stock association with Petrarchan beauty and the paragone between painting and poetry). Similarly, Kemp does not comment upon Leo­ nardo’s persistent choice of the female figure to illustrate the analogy between “the body of man [sic] and the body of the earth.”154 Why should not La Gioconda have come to represent Natura herself? I do not want to insist upon this interpretation, only to create a context in which such a reading makes sense. The long historical association between woman and nature and its presence as a persistent theme in Leo­nardo’s oeuvre lead logically to the conclusion that the picture became for him a kind of talisman for Nature’s mysterious processes, and that its protagonist became, as the artist progressively detached her from her human model, Nature personified. The so-called Monna Vanna or Nude Gioconda at Chantilly (Fig. 115), a curious, half-length image of a nude woman believed to replicate a lost work by Leo­nardo of c. 1514–16, might represent Leo­nardo’s next step into such detached personification.155 The famous knowing smile may in each case be a sign, not of Pater’s femme fatale or Tolnay’s “sirène de cet univers aquatique,” but rather, of Leo­nardo’s natura, she who “is full of infinite causes which were never in experience.”156 Divinity itself—heretically female— confronts the viewer with an ineffable but basic truth: her forms of creativity are infinitely varied, never to be fully fathomed by man. Not even by the artist, her special child, who has devoted his life to just this pursuit? It remains significant that as the picture was originally conceived, two painted columns framed the figure, establishing her position on a balcony. The picture was known and copied in this form.157 We do not know when and by whom the columns were removed, yet one wonders who but Leo­nardo would have done this, for the elimination changed La Gioconda’s meaning. With the columns present, the painting could plausibly represent a framing of nature by culture. Joined with the space of culture’s loggia and seen against the landscape beyond, the lady would have been posi-

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tioned between the worlds of nature and art.158 But the removal of the columns eliminated the realm of constructed art, collapsing the separation between the woman and the landscape, and dislocating the artist/viewer too, for without the repoussoir, we are suddenly brought much closer to that hypnotizing gaze. We join a sphere defined by ambiguity and mystery, whose only sign of cultural habitation (apart from the chair arm) is a fragile bridge. The artist reenters the picture by inhabiting the identity of creative Nature herself. Leo­nardo’s identification with natura naturans is manifested in his effort to match in paint, as he reworked the picture, the fluidity of nature’s essentially changing character.159 In the timescape background, flowing water dissolves geological form and flowing brushstrokes dissolve bridges. The transitory, ambiguous shadows on the woman’s face similarly deny stable expression and fixed meaning. To the greatest degree pos­ sible before the invention of Baroque or Impressionist style, the artist has attempted to encode nature’s mutability within the static, unchanging forms of art. He imitates Natura’s creative process, not to defeat but to join her, by creating through the metaphor of paint a parallel universe that duplicates her essential properties, now more fully understood. It is in this way that the painting served as a palimpsest for the artist’s deepest speculations about the nature of Nature. Leo­nardo frequently discussed artistic production in the terminology of biological generation. The verbs he used—creare, partorire, nascere, generare—differ radically from the imitationinflected terms of Quattrocento usage ( fingere, figurare), revealing his viewpoint, as Kemp has observed, that “the artist, in a sense, gives birth to works of art.”160 Leo­nardo’s use of birthing terminology to describe the artist’s creative work can be understood as a form of appropriation, stealing female Nature’s mysterious powers to mystify art. Yet his identification of the artist with Nature’s generative powers may represent something bolder: Nature’s creativity is not mere procreativity, for her creative powers are aesthetic as well as generative, displayed in the design of every element of the physical universe. And if Nature is the supreme artist, maestra dei maestri, the artist is her “greatest instrument,” he who gives birth to art. Each is elevated by the other’s superior powers, and ultimately they may converge. Some years ago, a computer specialist analyzed a composite image of Leo­nardo’s self-portrait drawing superimposed onto Mona Lisa’s face and concluded that he had painted his own face in hers, producing a concealed self-portrait as a woman. The popular response to this story, widely reported in newspapers, was laughter and ridicule; even Leo­nardo scholars

115.  After Leonardo da Vinci, Nude Gioconda (Monna Vanna), c. 1514–16. Black chalk on brown paper. Musée Condé, Chantilly. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

seemed to consider the idea irrelevant to his art.161 We need not pursue the rather fruitless question of whether the Gioconda’s face resembles Leo­nardo’s own to recognize that, at the least, the portrait presents an androgynous image. This was picked up and parodied by Marcel Duchamp when he added a mustache and a scatological label.162 Yet the Mona Lisa’s androgyny has been interpreted largely in terms that presume a pathetic or ludicrous identification with femininity on Leo­ nardo’s part, and hence scorned or ridiculed. Exceeding the Mona Lisa in strangeness is the painting generally identified as St. John the Baptist (Fig. 116). The figure’s seductive gaze introduces a sexuality that has disturbed many viewers.163 For some writers, this erotic whiff is irrelevant to the picture’s meaning; for others, it is the key to a Christian message.164 I would suggest instead that the painting’s primary theme is the Baptist’s androgyny, for the master anatomist’s provision of this male saint with a woman’s unmuscled forearm was surely deliberate. Leo­nardo’s purpose here, it would seem,

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116.  Leonardo da Vinci, St. John the Baptist, c. 1513–15. Oil on wood. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 117.  Leonardo da Vinci, A Young Woman Pointing, after 1513. Black chalk. Royal Library, Windsor (no. 12581). Photo: The Royal Collection © 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

was to explore the idea of essence in gender identity. From his earliest drawings, he was fascinated by the nuances of gender differentiation within a rubric of beauty that included both sexes; he even experimentally depicted the two sexes conjoined with one set of legs in a drawing that evokes Ficino’s Platonic notion of an androgynous double-bodied third sex that predated the division of humans into two sexes.165 St. John offers another idea of what that original pregendered being might have looked like. Its form of androgyny has seemed sickly, filled with a decadence offensive to the twentieth century though positively valued in the nineteenth.166 The picture remains both disturbing and oddly fascinating, embarrassingly reductive yet filled with incomprehensible subtlety.

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It does not entirely resist rational interpretation, however, for certain fixed significations are at work. St. John confronts us boldly with three things: his own fused male-and-femaleness, his secretive smile, and his upward pointing gesture. The latter two have been understood as philosophically charged—the gesture pointing to transcendental knowledge, to which (the smile suggests) the messenger has access.167 These themes ripple across Leo­nardo’s pictorial imagery: La Gioconda also projects the secretive smile; the Burlington St. Anne points upward and smiles; even the enigmatic “Pointing Lady” (Fig. 117), smiling and gesturing toward a copse of trees, seems to be trying to tell us something.168 It is reasonable to infer that this message is related to Leo­nardo’s persistent probing of the

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nature of the cosmos, understood by Nature alone, who in all works but the St. John is gendered female. This time, Leo­nardo seems to say, the divine mind that holds the secrets of the universe is hermaphroditic and whole. The issue of homosexuality has recurred in the Leo­nardo literature as an explanatory factor. Kemp characterized the St. John’s expression as “at worst . . . the effusion of an aging homosexual,” which “would have no more value than an obscene graffito.” 169 Clark connected the strange androgyny of Leo­nardo’s art with his homosexual bent, and his “aversion to women” (“They horrified him; but so did nature”), who were “the symbol of all that was alien to him.” 170 Clark’s classic bias about homosexuality and gender (there is no documentary evidence that Leo­nardo disliked women),171 and Kemp’s attempt to set Leo­nardo’s homosexuality apart from his creative life are no longer credible following the cultural shift that occurred after these texts were written, for the role that gender and sexual orientation can play in the creation of art—as well as the even-handed and unbiased evaluative treatment these two factors deserve—fortunately no longer need to be argued. Yet I would not weight these factors equally. In the androcentric and homosocial patriarchy of his day, it was not Leo­ nardo’s sexuality, but his detached curiosity about, and comparatively unbiased observation of, the female sex that made his viewpoint unusual among Renaissance men. Modern writers on Leo­nardo, accepting the gender attitudes of Renaissance males as normative, have found his version of the female peculiar.172 Freud sought an explanation for the artist’s strange attitude toward women in homosexuality, while Clark, who came close to acknowledging Leo­nardo’s celebration of the ascendant female principle, undermined his own insight by projecting misogyny onto Leo­nardo’s art. The Mona Lisa became, for these and other writers, an expression of the alien Other—an emblem of mystery, not of the mysterious nature of biological and geological life, but of Woman unknowable and remote.173 I propose instead that the androgyny of the Mona Lisa results neither from Leo­nardo’s alienation from women nor from a desire to be one, but from the painter’s psychic identification with a female figure who holds the key to nature’s secrets. His unbiased receptivity to the female, as located in living women, in female anatomy, and in his own female anima (to invoke Jung instead of Freud), allowed Leo­nardo to develop a radical new understanding of nature in relation to art, within the gendered discourse. Unlike Sodoma, Leo­nardo was not characterized as homosexual by Renaissance writers, perhaps be-

cause such a reputation would have conflicted with his legendary beauty, divine intellect, strength, and agility.174 Although homosexual attachments held Platonic cachet, femininity was quite low in philosophical status, and effeminacy and passivity in men were disparaged.175 Thus what we might see today as Leo­nardo’s most radical dimension, a participatory identification with the female sex, was obviously missed entirely by his contemporaries and followers, for if recognized in that misogynist culture, it would have been the kiss of death. In defining a pro-female philosophical position for Leo­ nardo, I do not suggest that he represented a real woman’s viewpoint, for he did not experience the world as did Ginevra de’ Benci or Cecilia Gallerani. Nor would I propose that Leo­ nardo’s idea of woman holds some universal truth-value— indeed, from a modern feminist standpoint, his position might be criticized as essentialist. Yet if it now seems overly constrictive to define the female by procreation, we must remember that Leo­nardo’s understanding of human generation challenged a descriptive model that was both inaccurate and demeaning to women. Breaking out of the masculinist norm in two directions, he painted revolutionary portraits of culturally distinguished women, which convey their dignity and intellectual vitality. And he described female-identified nature as the greatest force in the universe, at a time when most men discredited nature’s power and sought to control it. Leo­nardo acknowledged and symbolized in positive terms a dimension of female power that the majority of men in his era could acknowledge only inversely, through the repressive strategy of declaring women inferior beings. style as philosophy Even Leo­nardo’s innovative style extends his affinity with ­female-gendered categories. Indeed, it was the connection between style and gender that led him to create a new paradigm for art. He was the first to break with the Quattrocento preference for brilliantly illuminated pictures in which dark colors were rare accents, by introducing black to model forms and create shadows. It may be true that Leo­nardo was prompted in this by the reputed example of Apelles, yet in the hierarchy of cultural generalization, darkness is female and negative, while light is male and positive.176 Unusually, Leo­nardo respected dark as much as light, writing at one point: “Shadow is of the nature of darkness . . . a more powerful agent than light.”177 In his famously dark paintings, shadow is a vital force, an enveloping prior condition before the forms emerge in light. The pervasive darkness is at times conspicuously linked with

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the archetypal feminine—in the Virgin of Rocks, for example, Immaculist iconography requires that we recognize the dark/ wet environment as primal female matter, which generates both life and form (a striking reversal both of Aristotle’s and Ficino’s version of their relationship). In Leo­nardo’s art, matter literally pre-exists form, for contrary to Quattrocento practice, he began all his pictures on a primed surface of a reddish brown ground, establishing an unusually dark tonal key. This indeterminate middle tone, still visible in the unfinished Adoration of the Magi (Plate 5), differs from the inert white ground of the typical Quattrocento panel in its pure potentiality. It might become either solid or void, positive or negative, and its vitality derives from participation in both. Space is never passive and inert in Leo­nardo’s paintings, as matter is alleged to be, but potent and palpable. He accomplishes the same effect through his distinctively individual drawing style: hatching is sometimes used to create a vibrant dark field behind lighted forms, from which they emerge as in the paintings. In both media, Leo­nardo’s forms swim in a thick substantial space that, pace Aristotle and Chalcidius, is not nothing and does not lack. Leo­nardo first gave matter an active role when he dissolved the contour line, superimposing blended colors that flow continuously over the boundaries between solid and void. Leo­ nardo observed that lines do not exist in nature, and recommended that painters avoid using them.178 His deprioritizing of line has gender implications, for in Renaissance theory, masculine form was equated with disegno and feminine matter with color and pigment.179 Leo­nardo increasingly detached color from its supporting role in the construction of form to set it into a “dynamic relationship with light,”180 and the creation of tonal unity in painting preoccupied him far more than the conceptual problems of design. Although he was fully aware that light and shadows were accidentals of appearance, Leo­nardo devoted most of his theoretical attention to such appearances.181 As Alberti described it, the painter’s investigation of light and shade is an act of reception, requiring patient attention to visual sensations; it bespeaks a willingness to accept a passive position before Nature.182 Similarly, Leo­nardo stated that the artist “should be like a mirror which is transformed into as many colours as are placed before it, and, doing this, he will seem to be a second nature.”183 With the new priority he gave to shadow, color, sfumato, and the optical merging of forms with their surrounding environment, Leo­nardo initiated the breakdown of the binary opposition between form and space, offering form-space as a new symbiotic whole.184 The originality of this artistic breakthrough

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has been recognized, but rarely has it been correlated with the artist’s equally unorthodox views on human reproduction.185 Against both the Aristotelian model of masculine form acting on female matter and the Quattrocento artistic model of solid forms obtruding into airless space, Leo­nardo postulated the cooperative interaction of sperm and egg, a more dynamic concept of procreation that found a counterpart in his paintings, where form and matter interpenetrate and fuse, producing a third entity that is neither one nor the other. In Leo­ nardo’s art, the element of movement is critical to the fusion of form and matter. (Aristotle, by contrast, had defined movement, both in reproduction and in art, as an actualizing power provided by the male element alone.)186 By introducing a new visual model, in which the dissolving of edges and the energizing of dark matter establish a keynote of dynamic change, Leo­nardo not only opened the way for Baroque style but also reshaped the philosophical framework of Italian art. Against the Quattrocento art object valued for its clean representation of distinct solid forms, he asserted a more complex formal paradigm. Matter now matters, not only metaphorically, as the analogue to pictorial space, but in a sheer physical sense (though it could only achieve validation by way of the metaphorical). The dark, oily pigments and thick, impasted shadows make a prima facie case for the importance of art’s substances. We think of Leo­nardo’s impatience with finish, his restless abandoning of a picture once the concept was set down, as a sign of the nascent superiority of idea over execution. Yet it could equally be argued that in an unfinished work, or even in an overworked notation of an idea, aesthetic expression resides more potently in the still indeterminate, pregnant material than in the unrealized concept. Certainly, this was the case in Michelangelo’s far more frequent instances of non finito, as we will see in chapter 8. In critical respects, Leo­nardo broke with the two dominant philosophical traditions, Platonic and Aristotelian. On the central issues of form and matter, movement, time, and change, he was in greater accord with Lucretius, the ancient philosopher whose ideas anticipated those of modern science.187 In both Aristotelian and Platonist views, matter was conceived as neutral and inert or as primal Chaos, awaiting vitalizing form. In each system of thought, the form-matter hierarchy shapes procreative generation into a “trickle-down” theory, in which ideas descend from the divine sphere to instill life in the terrestrial realm. Lucretius, by contrast, offered a model in which matter is constantly supplied, and is in constant motion. This materia is not an inert substance, but consists of streams

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of atoms flowing in on all sides from an infinite “void,” itself mixed up with the substance of bodies. All nature is made up of atoms and void, which together support the regeneration of humans, plants, and animals.188 Neoplatonism postulates a static universe, whose structures allow for no change other than the descent of spirit into matter, and the movement of man up or down the chain of being. Lucretius, by contrast, while solemnly lamenting nature’s inability to preserve the lives she has brought into being, nevertheless finds permanence in change itself. Everything perishes, except the primordial atoms, which must be eternal or else Venus could not regenerate new living forms.189 Lucretius sees forms as constantly taking “momentary shape out of matter that is itself imperishable.”190 The notion of the world as consisting of momentary fleeting shapes emerging from a constant core of matter is effectively symbolized in Leo­nardo’s Adoration in its unfinished state. Some writers have traced Leo­nardo’s preoccupation with change to Ovid, who wrote in the Metamorphoses that “All things are in a state of flux . . . [while] Time itself flows on in constant motion, just like a river.”191 Certain passages written by Leo­nardo were clearly modeled on Ovid.192 A useful distinction has been drawn, however, between the broader philosophical outlook of Ovid, for whom change is a “mere Protean shifting from shape to shape,” and that of Lucretius, who saw mortality as embracing everything, even gods and heavenly bodies.193

Leo­nardo also resembled Lucretius more than Ovid in his ceaseless quest to explain natural phenomena and to understand the nature of the universe. Both men were grounded in scientific observation and derived knowledge from sensory perceptions. Both were skeptical of orthodox religion, and assigned the highest philosophical truth to an impersonal and unpredictable nature.194 Leo­nardo’s skeptical ruminations on mutability echo those of Lucretius, whom he had read.195 Both were obsessed with the creative and destructive processes of nature, and the question of which would ultimately win out.196 Leo­nardo’s understanding of mortality as the defining condition of existence, involving a balance between destructive and regenerative forces, seems at times to grow directly out of Lucretius’s thought.197 In one key passage, however, Leo­nardo crystallized his own version of this philosophy, adding the dimension of human perversity and the insight it affords: Now you see that the hope and the desire of returning to the first state of chaos is like the moth to the light, and that the man who with constant longing awaits with joy each new springtime, each new summer, each new month and new year . . . does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of the world.198

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For Heaven’s sake, leave all this matter and form and male and female for once, and speak so as to be understood.  —emilia pia, in Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortegiano

For art does all it can to imitate natural things, but divine things are certainly impossible for any created genius and intellect to copy or emulate without divine help and inspiration.  —poliphilo, in Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Chapter Six 

The Goddess in Arcady Giorgione

art and nature as ideal partners: the court and the pastoral At the turn of the sixteenth century, as we have seen, Leo­ nardo and Michelangelo pioneered a model that cast art and nature as equals, ushering in a new stage of their gendered discourse. Nature, conceived in the early Renaissance as mother, and in the later Quattrocento as nymph-bride, is now imagined to be the artist’s partner, as in ideal marriage. Yet Leo­nardo also cast himself as nature’s child symbiotically bound with his nurturing mother, a metaphor that sustained the older concept of maternal nature. Venetian painters of the early Cinquecento advanced the metaphor of ideal marriage in more progressive terms—of equal partnership or complementarity between art and nature, each supplying what the other lacked. A new emphasis upon gender complementarity is found in influential treatises of the early Cinquecento such as Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi di amore.1 Building on the Neoplatonist concept of love as a path to philosophical understanding, Ebreo develops a dialogue between Philo and Sophia, male and female respectively, whose names represent the partnership between love and wisdom that results in the compound, Philosophy. Philo does most of the talking, of course, and the assumption of woman’s natural inferiority remains evident in this text, yet the new theme of male and female as balanced entities is asserted in the dialogues. Love is a desire for “the perfect union” between lover and beloved, involving “the complete interpenetration of one with the other.”2 The Universe is “a human or

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besouled creature, comprising male and female,” heaven and earth, “ever linked by conjugal love or by the reciprocal affection of two true lovers.”3 The philosophical ideal of gender complementarity is also articulated in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (begun 1508, published 1528). Although this position represents only one side of a debate in The Courtier, its very formulation points to new ideas in the air: women’s theoretical equality with men, and the interdependency of the sexes. Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici, the liberal voice of the treatise, challenges Signor Gasparo’s parroting of Aristotle’s form-matter construct to argue that “woman is not made perfect by man as matter by form, because . . . woman does not receive her being from man; on the contrary, even as she is perfected by him, she also perfects him; hence, they come together in procreation, which neither of them can effect without the other.”4 The new concept of gender interdependency was also expressed in art. Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of Marsilio Cassotti and His Bride, Faustina (Fig. 118) presents a couple yoked by Cupid, who exist on equal terms within the same pictorial space—an innovative idea in Ital­ ian portraiture.5 This change of representational convention parallels the gender-balance emphasis of the treatises and is conceptually related to the changing metaphoric relation­ship of nature and art. Yet although the ideal of gender equality was expressed at the beginning of the sixteenth century in both social and

118.  Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Marsilio Cassotti and His Bride, Faustina Assonica, 1523. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

philosophical/artistic discourses, the entities involved came from different previous power positions. The concept of nature and art as equal partners was a distinct comedown for nature from the Mother position, a descent from superiority to parity. The idea of parity for women in real life was, by contrast, a social advance. Equivalency in ideal marriage as defined in the treatises ostensibly signified an improved status for women. In reality, as feminist scholars have pointed out, it signified the opposite: a reaction to the threat of the growing power of women, actual or potential, in the cultural sphere. In Castiglione’s Courtier, women play an unprecedented part in intellectual discourse. The female protagonists were based on real women at the court of Urbino. Castiglione’s “Duchess” is Elisabetta Gonzaga, who married Duke Guidobaldo Montefeltro in 1489. Elisabetta, a close friend of Isabella d’Este and wife of her brother, was the presiding cultural figure at the Urbino court, overshadowing

her ill and retiring husband. The real “Emilia Pia” (d. 1528) lived at court as the constant companion of Elisabetta Gonzaga, after she became a widow in 1500. In book 3 of The Courtier, these women monitor the debate about the nature of the ideal court lady through their questioning of the two men, Magnifico Giuliano and Signor Gasparo, who argue respectively pro- and anti-feminist positions. The ideal court lady was partly modeled on newly emergent educated and culturally active women of late Quattrocento Italy. Isabella d’Este’s passion for collecting paintings, antiquities, and objets d’art on a grand scale is legendary, as is her exceptional art patronage, which included the creation of her studiolo and grotta at the Mantuan court. 6 Yet Isabella was one of many women who presided over culturally ambitious North Italian courts at this time. Her friend Cecilia Gallerani ruled her own cultural courts in Milan and near Cremona, as discussed in chapter 5. Caterina Sforza, though not an active

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The Goddess in Arcady

cultural patron, became a prominent and politically powerful widow-ruler who fashioned a masculine self-image in medals.7 Lucrezia Borgia presided at Ferrara over a resplendent court of artists and writers, including Pietro Bembo. Caterina Cornaro, the former queen of Cyprus, was exiled from Venice to Asolo in 1489, where she ruled a legendary court until her death in 1510. Asolo’s fame as a center of literary and artistic brilliance derives in part from its being the setting for Bembo’s Gli Asolani, but Caterina may have played a significant role. For example, there is some evidence that she fostered the young Giorgione. 8 The women who presided at the North Italian cultural courts were not proto-feminists in the same sense as were their more independent contemporaries—humanist-educated women such as Isotta Nogarola and Laura Cereta, whose writings challenged prevailing notions of female inferiority and whose very autonomy hovered as a dangerous alternative to the socially circumscribed court lady.9 Yet even the real-world court matriarchs posed a conceptual threat to male artists and courtiers, because their identification with the realm of culture potentially displaced that of the men and confused the categories. Isabella d’Este is a case in point. As Rose Marie San Juan has pointed out, the marchesa’s aggressive patronage has been described as “greedy,” “pedantic,” or “unpredictable,” though she differed in behavior from her male counterparts only in gender—which was used against her yet not openly acknowledged as a factor. Isabella’s skillful navigation of gender roles to acquire power by “inserting herself in spaces traditionally allotted to men” elicited tactical containment from her male contemporaries and misogynist revisionism from modern art historians.10 The debate over female capability staged by Castiglione has been understood to betray male anxiety about the possibility of women’s independent power (and the male courtier’s lack of it), and as an effort to contain and repress independent women.11 Tellingly, the women who witness this debate about the empowerment of women are virtually silent; Emilia Pia and the Duchess contribute only occasional questions and defer to the men on all matters. Valeria Finucci has perceptively analyzed the silencing of a real female voice in The Courtier, despite women’s conspicuous prominence in that most influential of texts, showing how Castiglione manipulates and uses female characters against themselves.12 Throughout the debate, il Magnifico adduces legendary female paradigms—who are of course exceptions to the category of woman, rather than representatives of it. Suddenly, when he attempts to speak of the contemporary Duchess as an exemplar of virtue, she deflects

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the argument that might have connected theoretical womanhood and real women, protesting, “Speak of something else and do not persist in this subject.”13 By their education and relative social empowerment in the real world, Elisabetta Gonzaga and her kind threatened the aspiring courtier simply by having an edge on him at court, the new and somewhat feminized realm to which he aspired. The more that the fictive Gasparo and the Magnifico negotiate the pitfalls by naming them—women can (or can’t) ride, hunt, rule, et cetera, as well as men—the closer they come to the position that the sexes are essentially the same in capability, differentiated only by gender roles. In the utopia under discussion, it is imperative to invent rules of conduct simply to preserve the balance of power. Accordingly, the Magnifico argues that women are capable of “virile exercises” but should not practice them; rather, they should carry out activities that are “appropriate to a woman with care and with that soft delicacy that we have said suits her.”14 In calling for suitably differentiated gender roles, the Magnifico proclaims an equivalency (not equality), in which men and women are balanced partners. Yet ultimately the claim of complementary partnership was a fiction, an artificially imposed power balance meant to restrain the threat of a new gender imbalance in the social and cultural realm.15 The new ideal of equivalency between men and women at court had a counterpart in the changing relationship of nature and art, but as a power shift in reverse: female nature’s prior ascendancy over art is now threatened by the rising male artist’s claim of equivalent powers. Ironically, the strategy that worked to contain women in the social world—honorary equality—also proved a successful way to gain theoretical masculine power in the cultural realm. Yet the two discourses are connected, for as women played a more active social role in court life, they threatened to rule the sphere of culture. Hence, they had to be reinscribed in nature—a task that art could readily assume. In this chapter, we look at a set of images in which the idea of nature and art as equal and interdependent partners is explored, not as a manifesto proclaimed, but as a position that is arrived at in gradual stages. I will argue that, by contrast to the theoretical proclamation of gender equality—which was a strategy of masculine control—the more indirect treatment of these issues in the imaginary world of art helped to bring about a new cultural perception of the relation between nature and art, and also assisted a fundamental change in masculinity on the psychic level.

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the louvre concert champêtre There is no better demonstration piece than the picture said to represent the world of North Italian courts in the early Cin­ quecento, the Concert champêtre, or Pastoral (Plate 6), painted around 1509–10 by Giorgione or Titian (I believe most likely the former).16 Two clothed men and two nude women consort in a pastoral setting comprising leafy trees and grass, a fountain, a shepherd and his sheep. As scholars have noted, the image evokes two leading texts of the new poetic genre of pastoral. One is Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505), which opens on the grounds of the castle of Asolo, where three men and three women sit in a circle on the grass, near a graceful fountain under shady laurels, to discuss love.17 In both picture and text, conversation is interwoven with musical interludes, and the sounds and smells of nature are evoked. The painting’s distinction between urban and pastoral life, hinted in the contrast between the finely dressed gentleman and the rustic shepherd in the background, recalls a second text, Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), and its hero Sincero’s double life in modern Naples and rustic Arcady.18 Although it does not illustrate either text, Giorgione’s painting epitomizes the pastoral ideal: a soft and idyllic natural setting; a locus amoenus; and an ambient of music and poetry, shepherds and sheep. The painting departs from contemporary pastoral texts, however, in its juxtaposition of modern men with nude women. (In Arcadia, nymphs are joined by satyrs.) These women are allegorical, art historians hasten to explain, carefully distinguishing the painting from its nineteenth-century descendant, Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Yet the reception of the Concert champêtre in its time may not have been so different from that of Manet’s painting. For although the sixteenth century was familiar with nude female allegories, it was not accustomed to seeing them interact with modern men.19 With the literary model of Gli Asolani at hand, viewers may have struggled, as we do now, to imagine the women as somehow not real, visible to us but not to the men. The Concert champêtre projects a tension between two possible readings: the asymmetry of modern men and allegorical women, and the symmetry of two couples on a pastoral picnic. This is a clue that the picture is likely to be mediating real life. The Concert champêtre presents the intersection of the pastoral and the modern, a binary whose terms are roughly equivalent to nature and culture. In the pastoral world, as Renato Poggioli observed, “nature is a fertile mother and generous giver.”20 The pastoral is an idealization of nature, conceived as timeless and eternally present, simple and innocent—a fiction, as David Quint pointed out, reinforced by pastoral’s associa-

tion with the Golden Age.21 Pastoral’s opposite, modern society, is bound up in its definition, just as the concept of nature depends on culture. As S. K. Heninger Jr. observes, there is always a contrast between the simplicity of pastoral life and the complexity of civilization, and the purpose of pastoral is to create “an ideal Eden-like perfection as relief from the real world.”22 In Virgil’s Eclogues, the idea of otium, freedom, ­escape—​ preferably in a locus amoenus—was set in opposition to negotium, duty, obligation.23 But, as modern debunkers have noted, the goal of pastoral is not only to offer escape but also to disguise and suppress. In The Dark Side of the Landscape, John Barrell observed that the Virgilian pastoral so popular in eighteenth-century England presented the laboring poor as “happy as the swains of Arcadia” in order to justify aristocratic landowners’ exploitative political hegemony as economic power shifted from agriculture to industry. Neil McWilliam and Alex Potts, discussing a Marxist deconstruction of eighteenth-century English landscapes, posit that all pastoral does something like this, broadly indicting as “patrician apologists” even Giorgione and Claude. 24 It is a hint worth pursuing, for although pastoral may have supplied a necessary therapeutic alternative for world-weary Venetians around 1500, it also conveniently mediated a new social reality: the emergence of culturally powerful women at just the time that male artists’ claim on culture was in formation. In the Concert champêtre, women appear as allegories rather than in their own reality as a way of distancing that reality. Their positioning as marginal to the discourse of the males at the center, “real” people, serves to naturalize men’s priority in the realm of culture. The picture thus works to disempower living women by showing their culture-fostering side as “natural,” accomplished out of essentialist identity rather than active agency. The seated woman, holding a flute that she doesn’t play, could be construed as a mindless supporter of men’s culture. The standing woman who pours water into a fountain may be channeling an arcane iconography, yet she stands isolated, in a world of her own, as if to affirm that in the Concert, as in the world of the courts, significant action occurs at its masculine heart. Yet I would further suggest that pastoral in sixteenth-century Venice did not function merely to avoid or distance a problem but also to provide a means of dealing with it. This “problem” had two distinct aspects, which were ultimately connected on a metaphoric level. One was the power balance of gender relations, which pastoral mediated in ways that we have just seen. Pastoral also mediated the exigencies of modern

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The Goddess in Arcady

political and social life. Sannazaro was not merely nostalgic about Arcady; he juxtaposed the modern and pastoral worlds to explore social upheaval in contemporary Naples. 25 For Venice, the 1490s and early 1500s was a time of terrible natural disasters—plague, drought, famine, earthquakes, and fire— and of wars that threatened the Republic’s survival. The Venetian Republic suffered acute military defeats, first by the Turks in 1499, and then by the League of Cambrai in 1509, which resulted in the surrender of nearly all her possessions on the mainland, the so-called terrafirma.26 The territories held exaggerated importance for Venice because the Republic’s viability was subject to its ecological fragility. Artificially separated by the lagoon, the city maintained a precarious access to the terrafirma. The physical separation and topographical contrast between Venice and her mainland possessions placed those lands at the center of Venetian art and poetry, filtered through the nostalgic imagination.27 (Earth, grass, and trees occupy much surface space in Venetian Renaissance paintings, though these natural elements are scarcely to be seen in Venice.) Situated across the lagoon, the lands were chimerical, physically untenable possessions—and like the Concert’s elusive female figures, both real and imaginary. These women have not been proposed as symbols for Venetian territories, but that case has been made for the women in other Giorgionesque pictures,28 thus we can regard the parallel identities of the allegories and the territories as an expression of the longstanding metaphoric equations between women and nature, women and land. The unique physical character of Venice also shaped the city’s idea of nature. Surrounded and interpenetrated by water, and literally built on pilings, Venice is a miracle of cultural artifice. Every other city is contiguous with its surrounding campagna; visiting the countryside is as easy as walking out the city gate that firmly separates nature and culture (e.g., Fig. 18). Lacking direct access to a nature that was both differentiated and inhabitable, the Venetians’ tendency was not to shut out but to embrace nature as an essential part of their culture, both as a given (the water) and an imaginary (the distant lands). The relationship of art and nature was a theme both strongly and subtly sounded in the pastoral genre that would be vital in Venice for the larger part of the sixteenth century. This theme is embedded in the Concert champêtre in every possible way. Sitting on the ground in fine clothes is a modern man who is in nature but not of it. His position close to the earth and engagement of his companions convey his desire to communicate with the natural world. As in Gli Asolani, modern man sings his appreciation of nature’s beauties, a cultural act

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that is contrasted with the natural but primitive music-making of the shepherd. We may infer that the lute-playing gentleman represents art-making in its various forms, including painting, considering that Giorgione the painter also played the lute. The seated men are differentiated from each other in culture-nature terms: the one on the right does not wear courtier clothes but rougher and plainer garb; he is barefoot, like the nude woman before him. This discourse of aristocratic and rustic genres is echoed in the background, where a white, classically proportionate building is set next to a simple rural farmhouse, over the heads of the refined and rustic males, respectively.29 Who, exactly, are the allegorical women? In a reading still persuasive to many, Patricia Egan proposed that they represent the higher and lower aspects of poetry, noting the resemblance of the seated woman to the flute-holding personification of Poetry in the Tarocchi engravings.30 For Maurizio Calvesi, the men represented the two types of music in Plato’s Republic, moderated by Temperance, the standing woman.31 Francis Broun interpreted the Concert champêtre as a Neoplatonic allegory in which the men represent Plenty and Poverty, while the women represent the twin aspects of Venus. The seated figure is terrestrial Venus; the standing figure, celestial Venus, whose pouring action connects her with the Source—in this case, God, described by Ficino as the “fountain of Counsel.”32 Broun’s interpretation of the women as the two Venuses is more plausible than his effort to fit them to standard Neoplatonist concepts.33 As we saw in chapter 4, for Ficino and Botticelli terrestrial Venus was identified with the procreative operations of nature, and celestial Venus with the cosmic love that transcends mundane generation. This conceptual structure does not quite fit the Concert champêtre, for the association of the figure on the left with the water and fountain connect her with the Source as the generative principle, not with the celestial goddess. The figure seated on the ground is not easily read as the terrestrial Venus, since her only attribute is the flute, a sign of art. Each figure is linked with signifiers of both nature and culture, and each projects mixed signals. The generative Venus generates in the cultural realm (marked by the fancier architecture and her adjacency to the city boy), while her higher position and courtly elegance suggest that she is in some way superior to the other Venus. Yet the humbler Venus who is rooted in physical nature participates in the musical and cultural discourse of the men. Marie Tanner discussed the Concert’s thematization of art and nature in more subtle terms, accounting for its melancholic tone. She emphasized the relevance of Sannazaro, who juxtaposed the continuity of nature with the transience of man.34

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In Arcadia, as in Virgil’s Eclogues, nostalgia for past beauty and personal fame, both swept away by time, is ameliorated by the power of art to transcend time and death. But only barely. At the end of Arcadia, the lovesick Sincero is led by a nymph to the source of all the waters: “Awestruck by the unfailing current and the eternal course of the waters, he is overcome with melancholy. Desiring death, he takes refuge in his music, and in his power as a poet to teach the shepherds their own longforgotten songs.”35 Tanner suggests that these themes are given literal form in Giorgione’s Concert champêtre. The poet-musician at the center instructs his artless companion in the time-defying power of song. The “nymph” at the left, identified with the source of the waters, is a descendant of the Near Eastern regenerative goddess of the spring, and of the Roman Diana, goddess of the nymphaeum. Giorgione’s knowledge of the latter theme, as Tanner observes, can be traced to Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, in which the fountain of life is “guarded by the nymph of the fountain, keeper of its secrets and mother of all things.”36 In Tanner’s reading, the men in the Concert champêtre are, like Sincero, promised only an “evanescent immortality” in the fame that accompanies their song; in time, their song too will be forgotten.37 As Tanner’s reading illustrates, the terms of the relationship between nature, art, and time were cast quite differently in Venice than in Florence. For Brunelleschi, nature was a dangerous power, for Botticelli a benign one, yet both artists considered art a corrective to undermine or improve upon a nature growingly perceived as the artist’s antagonist. Like his Tuscan compatriots, Leo­nardo associated nature with mortality and mutability, and although he went farther in acknowledging nature’s supremacy, he too claimed that its corrosive power could be checked by the permanence of art. In Giorgione’s paintings, by contrast, as in pastoral poetry, human art is acknowledged to be the fragile entity within—not set against— an enduring nature whose wisdom and vitality are honored. Tanner identified the standing figure as the nymph of the fountain, a signifier of nature’s powers, yet by identifying the other as a poetic muse, she left the two women iconographically unconnected. Broun identified the two figures as dual aspects of Venus, but assigned them conventional meaning. Both are partly right, I believe, but we can go farther, for we surely see here, not the Florentine Venerian dyad of celestial and terrestrial, but a variant of Venus’s liminal identity that was more meaningful in northern Italy: the generative and tutelary aspects of Nature. The left figure is undoubtedly the generative Venus, who sustains and renews human culture. She pours water into a

119.  Marcantonio Raimondi, standing nude woman, inscribed “Natura naturans,” c. 1510. Engraving, B. XIV.292.383. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

sarcophagus-like basin, which is old, patched, and crumbling, as Tanner noted, implying nature’s power both to mortify and revivify with life-giving waters. This woman’s identity is confirmed in a print by Marcantonio Raimondi (Fig. 119), which presents a similar figure, labeled “Natura naturans” in an inscription on the print.38 X-radiographs of the Concert champêtre show that, in an earlier stage, the woman much more closely resembled the figure in the print, facing frontally and pouring water on the ground.39 If Marcantonio’s print is an accurate guide, this figure was originally more strongly identified as the source of living waters, for her draperies spilled from her genital area, its generating function expressed in the pouring of water that gives life to vegetation. The inscription may have been

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The Goddess in Arcady

120.  Correggio, Education of Cupid, 1523–25 or 1528. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London. Photo © The National Gallery, London.

added later, yet Marcantonio’s print preserves the information that Giorgione’s figure was, at a time closer to his day than to our own, understood to represent generative nature. 40 This is further confirmed by illustrated editions of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, where “Natura” is similarly posed and the theme of the goddess’s liquid fertilization of the earth is conveyed by the spilling of milk from her breasts.41 The key to the identity of the seated Venus is the musical instrument she holds, which is likely to signify the immortality

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conferred by art. The instrument is sometimes described as a flute, yet it could be a reedpipe, which is indistinguishable from the vertical flute in this depiction.42 Both flutes and reedpipes are shepherds’ instruments; in Theocritus and Virgil, the reedpipe was the prize awarded to the victor in pastoral singing contests between herdsmen.43 The pastoral contest tradition was known in the Renaissance, for Vasari speaks of it, in describing Veronese’s Allegory of Music.44 The reedpipe figures prominently in Sannazaro’s Arcadia, in an epilogue addressed to the pastoral sampogna (now a panpipe).45 In the fifth eclogue, the significance of the pastoral reedpipe is expounded. The shepherd Androgeo is apotheosized, going to join Virgil’s Daphnis and Meliboeus and fill heaven with his music. Fame is conferred on him through his song. Androgeo will be immortal and live on “through different shepherds on a thousand reedpipes and in a thousand verses.”46 In the Louvre Concert champêtre, the seated woman does not play the pastoral reedpipe but holds it in front of her, as if to extend it to the rustic. As the bestower of pastoral fame and immortality, she assumes the role of cultural guide within the realm of nature. Venus appears in just such a tutelary capacity in Correggio’s Education of Cupid (Fig. 120), where Mercury joins her to teach their son Cupid to cultivate his mind, and in the Hypnerotomachia, where the winged and nude goddess offers her young son “for instruction” to Mercury, who gives him three arrows.47 In the Education of Cupid and its companion picture, the Terrestrial Venus (Paris, Musée du Louvre; wrongly titled Jupiter and Antiope), Correggio closely followed the Neoplatonic categories, pairing the tutelary-celestial Venus with a terrestrial counterpart. Correggio’s image of the terrestrial Venus as a sleeping nymph approached by a satyr is also drawn from the Hypnerotomachia, where the nymph is identified with the generative goddess (as we will later see). Giorgione disposes the dual aspects of the goddess differently. He gives the dominant, standing position to the generative Venus, detaching her from the art discourse group. And he sets the tutelary Venus in the spheres of both art and nature. Adjacent to the young rustic and the distant shepherd, she bestows the immortality of the pastoral orbit, where shepherdmusicians live on, not by singular fame but in generational succession, through different shepherds and different reedpipes. The pipe she offers rustic man is Nature’s reward for natural and unselfconscious art. By contrast, the finely dressed man plays a stringed lute, the modern version of Apollo’s lyre. The lute was considered a superior instrument in the Renaissance because one could sing while playing it, thus enhancing music with the word—

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unlike the shepherd’s flute, which represented the “natural voice of passion, eloquent but inarticulate.”48 In Arcadia, the lute was the modern Sincero’s instrument, contrasted with the sampogna of the shepherd Androgeo. The dialogue between two kinds of art is sustained at the heart of the composition, mediated by one form of the goddess Venus. We see in these three figures a favorite Renaissance theme, the harmony of contrarieties. 49 Concordances and oppositions are stated in their structural arrangement. The tutelary Venus complements the rustic artist: both are barefoot, their extended legs forming an implied triangle; their heads are atmospherically blended with the surrounding ambient. She has an oppositional relationship to the lutenist: the long, continuous line that runs through the reedpipe and her two shins is met at a right angle by the lutenist’s leg. The rustic, framed and regarded by the other two, forms the human transition between natural nature and urban art. If the right half of the painting speaks of concordances between male and female, the left half speaks of oppositions. The diagonal initiated in the lutenist’s leg is repeated in the contour of hill behind the standing Venus, intersecting and opposing her upright vertical. The figure’s graceful movements are rhymed in the branches above her, but they diverge from the lines set in the lutenist’s body. Most strikingly, she turns away from this seated man, as he turns away from her. Although the picture is frequently analyzed as a group of three combined with a woman who stands alone, it can also be described as two pairs of men and women, one pair in antiphonal harmony and the other pair in antipathetic contrast. Read in this way, the Concert champêtre speaks of two ways that art and nature may correspond. The particularly Venetian turn is that the lutenist’s position is not necessarily superior. He teaches art’s higher forms to the rustic. Yet he also draws psychic refreshment from the natural realm—a city dweller cut off from his roots—and ultimately, he needs Arcadia more than the rustic needs him.50 In this place he can only visit, the lutenist’s own song is not the most enduring form of art. In Arcady, where nothing dies (before Guercino and Poussin, at least), the dry reedy voice of the shepherd’s pipe endorsed by eternal tutelary Venus will live on forever, but the modern lutenist has only the claim of his difference to stake. To sing his fragile high-art song, he takes the risk that divine Venus will turn her back on him, to sustain the process of endless generation that is entirely indifferent to art. The discourse of the Concert champêtre poses a philosophical question about the relative powers of nature and art, which ultimately remains unanswered.

Earlier, I observed that the appearance of females in the Concert champêtre in allegorized form was a way of holding social reality at bay, with allegory used to relieve the threat of living women. But, from another angle, what is new here is modern man’s intrusion into an allegorical female realm that is nature. The men’s comfortable participation in this natural realm, fraternizing with the allegories, could be seen as a new stage of familiarity between cultural man and female nature. His desire to have adult intercourse with Venus represents an urge to move past the stage of artist as nature’s son, and seek to know her on more mature terms. I take this quest as serious, an authentic maturing of the male artist that has nothing to do with the social desire to control women. Rather, it is a stage in the psychic journey that represents man’s effort to define himself in relation to nature, albeit with the goal of enlarging the position of the artist in philosophical terms. In this journey, Nature will be his guide to productive and mature artistic creativity. the hypnerotomachia poliphili as psychic pilgrimage

Early Cinquecento Venetian artists produced many variations on the themes sounded in the Louvre Concert champêtre. One of these, a drawing ascribed to the “Circle of Titian” (Fig. 121), directly quotes the seated, flute-holding woman, pairing her with a man who plays a viola da gamba.51 He looks to her, while she looks into the landscape behind. Does this artist replay the theme of tutelary Natura, the artist-musician’s teacher? Is the unseen face of Natura, both here and in the Concert champêtre, meant to suggest her unknowability, her unfathomable creativity? Does her gaze reify her identity with the physical naturata beyond? Such implications stand out more strongly when we look at a cluster of variations on the pastoral theme. It seems fruitful to approach these pastoral pictures with the expectation that, though individually cryptic, they collectively project a legible sign system in which specific elements—​ pairs of nude women, musical instruments, soldiers, shepherds, satyrs, and, occasionally, weather—appear in various combinations that determine their fluctuating meanings. Once we understand the range of possible signification of the floating signifiers (women, sarcophagi, flutes, et cetera), as the Venetian art world must have done, we can better apprehend how meaning becomes denoted in specific combinations. Certainly, this is an art more imaginatively rich and more metaphorically creative than is allowed by writers who would fix meaning in a single narrative or theme. It was the play with

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The Goddess in Arcady

121.  Circle of Titian, Two Arcadian Musicians in a Landscape, 1510. Pen and brown ink on paper. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

ideas that was the point. Yet if pastoral was an art of play in which inventive recombinations of stock elements were valued, it was a subconsciously purposeful form of play, for it mediated real life. Artists employed a common visual language to create a subtextual discourse, a form of cultural story-making in which propositions could be tested or worked out visually. Undi­ rected by a single mind, and full of contradictory claims, the discourse hummed with vaguely articulated “positions” on the big subjects—Music and Love, Love and War, Art and Time. One group of paintings by a single artist presents, not just random play, but a manipulation of the signifiers that seems to move the discourse forward. Six of Giorgione’s major paintings—the Sleeping Venus, Three Philosophers, La Vecchia, SelfPortrait as David, Tempesta, and Concert champêtre—form a cluster that presents an identifiable progression. The many scholars who have tried to understand these ever-elusive paintings have

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focused on individual pictures, seeking to crack a specific iconographic code. But it may not be possible fully to interpret these works in isolation. Instead, I suggest that we look at them collectively, in the belief that—like the non-Italian-speaking operagoer who infers meaning from the structure of the ­music—​even if we cannot read their specific texts, we may be able to follow their metanarrative signification. The identifiable progression is a microcosmic version of the larger transformation of the relationship between art and nature that occurred in the Renaissance. The masculine psychic journey we are following is replicated in a key text of the Venetian Renaissance, one often connected with Giorgione’s art: the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna. This “romance” has baffled readers for centuries. Its fantastic verbal descriptions, cryptic hieroglyphs, and esoteric alchemical allusions have discouraged logical readings. It was considered a

Giorgione

model of “absurd obscurity” by contemporaries.52 However, like the pastoral and like dreams, the Hypnerotomachia is not escapist but rather may offer a way to work through the stress of change, through the dramatic interplay of metaphor and symbol. Its relevance to Giorgione’s pictures lies not in their correspondences of imagery—though these tell us that Giorgione knew it well—but rather in the psychic transformation expressed in the story as a whole. In the exposition that follows, I rely on Linda Fierz-David’s Jungian interpretation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as representing the transformation of the masculine anima.53 Her reading is a rare effort to make sense of the romance as a whole. After establishing the main features of the Hypnerotomachia as psychic pilgrimage, I will discuss the set of paintings that offer a similar mediation of a masculine spiritual crisis through a changing metaphorical relationship of the sexes. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is the story of Poliphilo, a scholar whose quest for his beloved Polia takes him on a dream journey. The very title, a pseudo-Greek compound of “dream,” “love,” and “strife,” sets its tone of obscurity and mystery. The bizarre plot and indecipherable episodes establish, in the words of Fierz-David, “a story of a mysterious action which has a secret purpose and in which the miraculous is the natural.” 54 Like dreams, the Hypnerotomachia is a symbolic narrative that demands interpretation. Learned Renaissance Venetians could have recognized it as an example of Macrobius’s “enigmatic dream,” which “conceals in strange shapes and veils with ambiguity the true meaning of the information being offered and requires an interpretation for its understanding.”55 The story functions on three levels: it can be read simultaneously as the humanist revival of classical culture, the courtly pursuit of the love of women, and the alchemical goal of the transmutation of matter. These are joined in the central idea of transformation and rebirth.56 Poliphilo progresses from a state of psychic dysfunction, through mediating influences, to a stage in which he accomplishes integrative reconnection with his female anima. One does not have to apply Jungian language, for the Hypnerotomachia’s symbolic vocabulary could be expressed entirely in Renaissance terms, and its primary theme is a recurrent structure in Western poetry, religion, and myth. It may be enough to recall that anima in Latin and Italian is not a term of psychology but simply means the soul, whose female personification in Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura is the object of each poet’s philosophical quest and agent of his spiritual transformation. The story begins, like Dante’s Commedia, with the protago-

122.  “Time.” Woodcut from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499). Photo from Colonna, 1999, 34; courtesy Thames and Hudson, London.

nist dreaming that he finds himself in a wild, dark forest, a traditional symbol for doubt, confusion, and mental conflict. Falling into deeper sleep, he arrives at a ruined city, whose monuments and fallen statues covered with vegetation introduce the theme of a troubled relation between nature and culture. A winged copper horse bears the word “Generations” on its brow; a relief on its pedestal labeled “Time” shows men and women in a circle, the men holding men’s hands, interwoven with women holding women’s hands (Fig. 122). Though sharing the task of procreation, men and women “remain strangers to each other, and are only bound in a negative way.”57 The separation of the sexes echoes the division of mind and body symbolized in the ruined city. Pure intellect, represented by a shining tall obelisk surmounting a step pyramid, is contrasted with the purely physical, symbolized by a dark bronze elephant. The elephant, an image of lower nature, forms the link with the unconscious. Nearby is a female colossus, buried in the earth, with only part of her head visible. The buried woman, like the elephant, offers a connection with deeper knowledge in the physical or earthly realm. The ruined city represents the state of primary consciousness for Poliphilo; its imagery alludes to both antiquity and the limits of its narrow frame of reference (the intellect, humanism), for one who will journey on to a deeper unity of mind and body. As Fierz-David puts it, the city is a frame he has outgrown.58 Implicit in the

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123.  “To the Mother of All.” Woodcut from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499). Photo from Colonna, 1999, 73; courtesy Thames and Hudson, London.

whole of the Hypnerotomachia is that the way to this unity and the construction of a larger self is through the tutelage of female Nature. The second stage of consciousness is found in the domain of Queen Eleuterilida, where Poliphilo encounters the rule of Venus and the realms of art and nature, both mediated by females. Here, he encounters a fountain whose central figure is a recumbent nymph. Water streams from her breasts to fertilize the region, and one breast is so positioned that passersby can drink from it (Fig. 123). An inscription on an adjacent frieze (and on the woodcut), reads ΠΑΝΤΩΝ ΤΟΚΑΔΙ, “To the Mother of All.”59 In this domain, Poliphilo is introduced to the realm of the senses. A group of maidens (whose names are Greek for Touch, Smell, Sight, Hearing, and Taste) lead him, first to a pleasurable bathhouse, then to the refined palace of Queen

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Eleuterilida, which represents the positive cultural values that complement Poliphilo’s newly awakened physical nature. 60 The productive union of nature and art, female and male, is represented by the bathhouse, which includes the fountain nymph whose breasts flow with “virgin’s milk,” and another fountain surmounted by a “pissing mannikin.” As Fierz-David explains, lac virginis and urina puerorum are common alchemical symbols, opposites that combine as the one, mercury.61 The octagonal bathhouse is a “centered whole,” where Poliphilo first experiences a balance of his natural and intellectual natures, and which represents a union of masculine and feminine principles. The crude Altar of Priapus represents the primitive masculine urge to beget offspring, yet because the masculine anima is feminine, females continue to facilitate the protagonist’s transformation. A nymph leads Poliphilo from the Altar of Priapus to the beautiful, round Temple of Venus Physizoa, Venus of Living Nature, which represents the integration of natural and cultural realms. Shapely and proportionate, replete with alchemical symbols of cosmic unity, the temple conjoins art and nature, male and female.62 At the heart of this temple, rites are performed by the high priestess, who reveals herself as Polia, the love object of Poliphilo’s quest. The lovers are ritually united and their blood commingled. In alchemical terms, this represents a coniunctio of their male and female essences. In Christian/ humanist terms, it is the rebirth of the soul as integrated and whole. In Jungian terms, it is the moment of union between the male quester and his female anima, the climax and goal of his journey. Later, Cupid takes the couple to Cythera, Venus’s island. Supposedly a place of supreme delight, the island is in fact somewhat ominous. The atmosphere is that of “salacious sweetness” and “a sensuality that is utterly careless about the object of its desire.”63 Venus herself becomes, inappropriately, the object of desire. Cupid leads the lovers to the fountain of Venus at the center of the island, whose own center is concealed by a curtain on which the word “Hymen” (ymhn) is embroidered. Cupid offers his golden arrow to Polia to tear the curtain, then (when she demurs), to Poliphilo, who “without a moment’s hesitation,” rends it blindly, greedily eager to see the goddess revealed. As Fierz-David and others have noted, the exposure of the goddess by the removal of her protective curtain closely echoes the salacious ending of the Roman de la Rose. It also echoes Macrobius’s metaphor of Natura hiding her secrets by cloaking herself in garments that the vulgar and ignorant try to tear away. The theme was sounded in antique sculpture and paint-

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ing, in images of the Discovery of Ariadne that present the reclining goddess unveiled by Dionysus and a satyr (or Pan).64 Antique examples known in Venice perhaps prompted the Hypnerotomachia woodcut that shows an ithyphallic satyr lifting a curtain to uncover the sleeping woman of the nymph fountain.65 This visual metaphor for uncovering nature’s secrets would change over the sixteenth century into a rape, to signify power over nature. But not just yet, for in the woodcut, as in antique images, the satyr does not assault the sleeper. In the Hypnerotomachia, moreover, because Poliphilo’s violation of the goddess distresses Polia, who is identified with Venus in this passage,66 the action represents desire as profanation. Venus overlooks Poliphilo’s faux pas, and blesses the lovers, restoring their sagging vitality with a sprinkling of seawater. At this moment, a proud and powerful warrior flings open the door and enters the chamber, an externalization of Poliphilo as Mars. Poliphilo’s self-identification with the war god marks, for Fierz-David, the moment of his rejection of wholeness for maleness. The moment of trustful union—of self and anima, man and woman—is shown to be brief, its ending precipitated by Poliphilo’s repudiation of the female guidance that was previously a source of transformative power. Once Poliphilo profanely violated the deity, he crossed a line. Now, no longer willing to depend upon Polia/Venus’s protection, he takes independent action. When Mars strides in to take masculine charge, the defensive warrior replaces the trusting quester. In the fraying of the sacred coniunctio, both male and female elements are debased. Polia joins the nymphs at the fountain of Adonis, but when they demand to hear the lovers’ “story,” the hieros gamos of Poliphilo and Polia is a thing of the past. Polia comes to life, but as a “commonplace, rather unpleasant girl.” She will talk throughout book 2, yet on a more prosaic plane, in a voice that sounds “uncompromisingly human.”67 The final visual image of part 1 of the Hypnerotomachia is the tomb of Adonis, surmounted by a statue of Venus nursing the infant Cupid. An inscription explains that it is not milk the child sucks, but the tears his mother weeps for the dead Adonis. Venus herself is on the brink of being diminished into a mere woman, object of sexual desire, mourner for her dead lover, nursing mother. It is a risk that accompanied her descent into intercourse with mortals. Hypnerotomachia Zorzoni

Let us now look at Giorgione’s major paintings from the perspective of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. They do not illustrate that text, yet its theme of a gender-based transformation of the

psyche provides a hermeneutic corollary to the pictures when examined in a plausible chronological sequence. Scholars generally agree that all six come from the period between 1505 and 1510 (the year of Giorgione’s death). Yet there has been no scholarly consensus on their sequence, beyond a general preference for dating the Three Philosophers earlier, and the Concert champêtre last.68 I will discuss the six paintings in a sequence that would fit the psychic developmental structure of the Hypnerotomachia here outlined, but I do not argue that they must have been painted in that order. Individually, the pictures conflate stages of Poliphilo’s progression, and their echoes of its visual imagery sometimes cross over stages. Nor do I claim that this was Giorgione’s personal odyssey. More important is that Giorgione’s pictures and Colonna’s romance concern the same issues: the spiritual quest of a male protagonist involving nature and art, male and female, and his encounter and union with his anima, which opens the way to productive and mature creativity. Giorgione’s echo of Colonna’s narrative structure was probably not self-conscious. The parallel between the Hypnerotomachia and Giorgione’s paintings points, rather, to a moment of cultural transition worked through and effected simultaneously by more than one individual in the years around 1500. Finally, I do not suggest that the significations I identify were the intended, primary meanings of the paintings. More likely, the psychomachic theme was subtextual, just under the surface. But Giorgione’s paintings present an iconographic conundrum: each picture’s general area of meaning can be specified, yet not one of them can be assigned a concrete and unambiguous meaning. In that vacuum, the interpretations presented below may offer a key even to the intended content of some of the pictures. the sleeping venus The sequence logically begins with the Dresden Sleeping Venus (Fig. 124). We must imagine this picture as Giorgione originally painted it: the beautiful nude goddess lies asleep in a landscape; at her feet is the figure of Cupid holding an arrow. (The Cupid was repainted by Titian, who overpainted other parts of the picture, and later eliminated by restorers.) 69 This conjunction of the sleeping goddess and her son in a landscape refers to a literary prototype. As Jaynie Anderson has shown, Claudian’s epithalamium, written for a wedding, developed into a glorification of love personified by Venus and Cupid. In later Latin literature, epithalamia begin with a description of

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124.  Giorgione (with repainting by Titian), Sleeping Venus, c. 1506? Oil on canvas. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Photo: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY.

Venus, sleeping or resting in her garden. Cupid arrives bearing arms, awakening his mother and urging her to action. She then travels to the wedding, where she serves as pronuba, patron of marriage.70 This marital theme fits the picture’s probable celebration of the marriage of Girolamo Marcello and Morosina Pisani on October 9, 1507. Venus was not only the patron of marriage but also the tutelary goddess of Marcello’s family, as mother of Aeneas to whom his lineage had been traced.71 If the Dresden Venus originated as a marriage picture, then seemingly plausible is Rona Goffen’s interpretation of the goddess’s gesture as an act of self-stimulation. Goffen argued that Giorgione’s Venus provided a model for female masturbation in marriage, recommended by doctors who followed the belief of the day that conception could result only if both partners achieved orgasm, preferably simultaneously.72 Many aspects of the Dresden Venus, however, are not adequately addressed by this reading. For example, the prominent tree stump at the center of the image, just above Venus’s left hand, would seem to contradict the

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theme of desired offspring, since truncated trees in Renaissance imagery usually express genealogical fruitlessness or male impotence.73 Moreover, the gravity and archetypal force of this monumental sleeping woman would seem to transcend the prosaic and narrow function of marital aphrodisiac. Images of sleeping women, which appeared frequently in prehistory and antiquity, project a mysterious power, perhaps because they seem to be in contact with another world. Prehistoric statuettes of sleeping women are thought to express the idea of communion with the dead or of prophetic dreams; in modern terms, we recognize sleep as a state of connection with the subconscious.74 In presenting Venus asleep in a landscape, Giorgione effectively joined the goddess with a popular contemporary figure, the sleeping nymph, seen in the image often named as his model: the nymph fountain in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Fig. 123).75 Other details of the painting may come from Colonna’s description of the fountain. For example, as in the painting, the nymph is said to recline “on an outspread drapery, part of which was beautifully wadded

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and folded to form a pillow for her head.” 76 It is thus implied that Giorgione understood the nymph fountain figure as the goddess Venus, if not from a deeper reading of the Hypnerotomachia, then because he shared a general understanding of what such nymphs represented. Sleeping nymphs were ubiquitous in Renaissance Italy.77 Most famous of all was the antique statue of Ariadne, known to the Renaissance as Cleopatra, which Pope Julius II put on display in a fountain in the Belvedere (Fig. 125), but there were many other examples of the type. Phyllis Pray Bober pointed to a nymph-cult in Florence and Rome in the later Quattrocento that was focused on images of reclining nymphs, such as an example in the Roman garden of Jacopo Galli.78 The collecting of nymph sculptures continued in the early Cinquecento in the circle of the poet Angelo Colucci and the German humanist Johann Goritz, for whom nymphs and naiads, figures long associated with life-giving springs, represented the awakening of Neoplatonic love and the life of the soul.79 Sleeping nymphs carried a different meaning in Venice. The Hypnerotomachia woodcut artist departed from the text to add the unveiling motif and eliminate the fountain. In doing so, he clarified the identity of the fountain nymph, visually joining her with Ariadne awakened by Dionysus, and with Venus as the all-nurturing parent. 80 Giorgione’s sleeping goddess, like her counterpart in the Hypnerotomachia who is called “Venus Physizoa,” symbolizes the female generative force of nature. Wendy Stedman Sheard distinguished the Venus Physizoa of Giorgione and Colonna from the Florentine Neoplatonist “Venere volgare,” tracing the Venetian figure to independent origins in ancient texts such as Homeric hymns and Lucretius. 81 As in these texts, and unlike the Neoplatonic earthly Venus who was conceptually inferior to her celestial counterpart, Venus Physizoa (“living nature”) vitally embraced both realms as, in Sheard’s words, “the cosmic source of life in its female manifestation.” There is no mistaking the fuller identity of this Venus of Living Nature, who is variously called Divine Mother, Mother Goddess, or Goddess of Nature throughout the Hypnerotomachia. Sharing a broad cultural understanding that nymphs represented an aspect of Ariadne-Venus as Mother Nature, Giorgione expanded upon the nymph fountain in the Hypnerotomachia to convert a goddess-deputy into the goddess herself. Giorgione may have been asked to produce a visual epithalamium, but he elevated the category by making the figure monumental and majestic, like the Vatican Ariadne-Cleopatra. Eliminating the narrative specificity of Claudian’s literary prototype, which involved extra cupids and other incidental

features, he presents Venus in splendid isolation, stressing her divinity in a sacred realm. In the Dresden picture, Venus is presented as the allnurturing parent, mother of all. The unmistakable sign of her procreative powers is the placement of a hand at her genitals, which must be intended to connote the goddess’s self-sufficient role in generation. 82 (As discussed in chapter 4, the Venus of Knidos and her Knidian antecedents also cover the genitalia with a hand to refer to Venus’s generative powers.) According to Hesiod, the Earth is autochthonous, self-generating. She comes into being spontaneously out of Chaos, and only after giving birth to the heaven, mountains, and sea does she have sex with her male consort. 83 Consonant with the principle of autochthony, Giorgione’s goddess practices solitary selffertilization, producing the world of nature that surrounds her, which she also personifies. In the Hypnerotomachia, abundant metaphors connect the elements of nature with the female body, specifically that of Polia. As Roswitha Stewering has observed, Poliphilo only finds himself in a locus amoenus when he is with his beloved. 84 If the locus amoenus is the female body, then Giorgione has given us both synecdoche and tautology: a female body within a nature that it both represents and is. The identity between Venus and her natural setting is given a visual gloss in the shape of a golden tree in the middle distance, an ovoid plane silhouetted against the sky, which repeats and rhymes with the goddess’s body. Other images of a self-pleasuring Venus can be understood to refer to her generative self-sufficiency. We see it hinted at in

125.  The Sleeping Ariadne, c. 240 bce. Roman copy of a Hellenistic original. Marble. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican, Rome. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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126.  Giulio Campagnola, Venus Reclining in a Landscape, 1510s? Copperplate engraving. The New York Public Library. Photo: The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY. 127.  After Titian (attributed to Parmigianino), reclining woman and a man in a landscape, early sixteenth century. Inscribed “man de zorzon da Castel franco.” Red chalk on white paper. Hessiches Landesmuseum Darmstadt (inv. no. 175). Photo: Hessiches Landesmuseum Darmstadt.

an engraving by Giulio Campagnola of a reclining Venus, which Marcantonio Michiel said was based upon a lost work of Giorgione (Fig. 126), in which the woman’s hand is suggestively placed inside a cloth between her legs. A drawing in Darmstadt presents a similarly reclining woman, her hand at her genitals, this time with an adult male beside her looking into the background (Fig. 127). 85 A lightly sketched figure above the woman points to this landscape beyond, as if to reemphasize that her action has brought it into being. Giorgione’s Venus and the surrounding landscape constitute a seamless whole of nature, from which Cupid would have

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stood somewhat apart. He was a visually noisy child, to judge from reconstructions based on x-rays, seated next to his mother’s feet and twisting to grasp an arrow propped upright. 86 Cupid might be understood as a metaphoric stand-in for the artist, as in Botticelli’s Primavera (see chapter 4, p. 106). Here, however, he is not an effective agent, but an image of immature masculinity cut off from productive communion with his mother. The picture corresponds to the stage represented by Poliphilo’s descent into the ruined city, when he is painfully unable to connect with female nature. Like Colonna’s female colossus buried in the earth up to her brow, Giorgione’s Venus

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is visible in her physical aspect, but her deeper dimension is hidden. She does not divulge, and her son cannot fathom, her secrets. The truncated tree stump in the middle distance might express the painter-protagonist’s disjunction from nature or represent his undeveloped virility, here equivalent to artistic creativity. Or the tree stump might serve to emphasize that Venus’s procreativity, accomplished by self-stimulation, is complete without the male element. The Dresden painting presents an impenetrable nature, isolated from cultural interference. The Hypnerotomachia woodcut underlines a different theme and a later moment in the psychic journey, when the nymph is vulnerable to a satyr who lifts her veil to probe the secrets of the goddess’s realm. This theme is sounded more violently when Poliphilo tears away the Hymen curtain of the Temple of Venus on Cythera, representing a still later stage, when the overreaching protagonist tries to uncover nature’s secrets forcibly. By contrast, Giorgione’s Dresden Venus depicts the goddess at the height of her powers, hermetically sealed, inviolate, and inaccessible to the child who cannot claim her attention. It is true that the incomparable beauty of her body is laid bare for the viewer of the painting, who may or may not respect her divinity, yet this dimension of the image was also not to be exploited until later. the three philosophers Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (Plate 7) corresponds to the next stage of Poliphilo’s progress. Blocked by his intellect’s detachment from the sensory, Poliphilo is carried farther in his quest at the bathhouse, where the awakening of his senses moves him toward a transformative integration of mind and body, male and female. The Three Philosophers similarly deals with the relationship between cognitive philosophy and the natural world—mind and body. Yet the gendered form this relationship takes in the painting also points to a later stage in the Hypnerotomachia, when the priapic, male element is proudly, though briefly, ascendant. When Michiel saw the Three Philosophers in the house of the Venetian nobleman Taddeo Contarini in 1525, he described it as a picture of three philosophers in a landscape (paese), begun by Giorgione and finished by Sebastiano del Piombo. 87 An interpretative controversy over who these men are began in the nineteenth century and has not yet ended. 88 With a brief look at diverse interpretations of this much-studied painting, I will offer a reading that does not depend on fixing the figures’ individual identities but, rather, seeks to identify the broader

themes that the picture sounds within the ongoing discourse of art’s relationship to nature. Let us begin by noting certain things that the picture is self-evidently “about.” First, a relationship is specified between the men’s philosophical interests and the natural physical environment. This could be explained by the interpretation that held sway in the nineteenth century: they are the three Magi, or wise men from the East, on their journey to the newborn Christ Child.89 Yet the setting is clearly more than a rest stop on their journey. The youngest man, seated on the ground, stares at the open mouth of a cave, which was originally more prominent, before the picture was abridged on the left side. A faint light emanating from the cave has been taken to allude to the star of Bethlehem that drew the Magi to the newborn Christ, and to support their identities as biblical wise men.90 Giorgione may have begun with this idea, yet as the composition developed he eliminated features pointing to that theme and gave the figures attributes—set square, compasses, and a tablet bearing what may be astrological images—that support their early identification as mathematicians, astronomers, or geometricians.91 Some scholars have identified the figures as specific philosophers or astronomers, such as Pythagoras, Ptolemy, and Archimedes (Baldass); Regiomontanus, Aristotle and Ptolemy (Wischnitzer-Bernstein); or Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great (Meller).92 Others have looked for Christian meaning: Abraham teaching astronomy to the Egyptians (Pigler); St. Luke, David, and St. Jerome (Parronchi); or the Three Magi (Settis). Since in Christian legend the three wise men from the East were astrologers, a fusion of Christian and philosophical meaning is warranted, such as Maurizio Calvesi’s interpretation of the picture as an allegory of Sapientia.93 The fact that the men are of three distinct ages has led some to propose as subject the three ages of man (Schrey), or the three races of mankind (Brauer). For others, the combination of tripleness with astrological symbols pointed to the three phases of hermetic initiation (Hartlaub), or the “triple Hermes” manifested in Moses, Zoroaster, and Pythagoras (Calvesi, 1970). Further clues can be found in the figures’ differentiation by attributes and arrangement. Both the older and the younger man hold mathematical or cosmological instruments: the younger uses a square and dividers, while the older holds dividers and astrological diagrams. The central figure holds no attributes, yet as a standing figure, he is aligned with the older man, toward whom he slightly turns. In their rich red, gold, and silvery-lilac garb, these two are tonally blended, while the seated young man is dressed in a more eye-catching and

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sharply contrasted dark green and white. The young man holds the privileged position, situated at the cross point of compositional lines that lead from corners to center. More actively engaged than the others and more expansively disposed, he ostensibly measures something in his visual field, defined by the compositional wedge that opens through his left arm and leg. He is seated on a natural pedestal more geometrically hewn than the surrounding wedges of rocky ground, which form irregular sloping platforms for the other figures.94 By the logic of Giorgione’s design—and by the example of the Concert champêtre—this more distinct figure of chiseled features belongs to the present, while the hazier and vaguer older men belong to the past. In these respects, Christian Hornig’s interpretation of the philosophers as representing phases of artistic creativity is provocative. Hornig proposes that we see the aged Giovanni Bellini on the right, agent of the maniera vecchia; Carpaccio in the middle, representing the historicizing or narrative manner, and Giorgione himself on the ground, standing for the maniera moderna.95 Taking the dividers to be a Platonic symbol of the artist as imitator of God (see Fig. 3), Hornig proposes that we see here a Venetian counterpart to Raphael’s School of Athens, in which portraits of contemporary artists—Bramante, Michelangelo, Leo­nardo—appear among the philosophers. Whether or not Giorgione’s figures are portrait images, the analogy with the contemporaneous Vatican fresco is telling. For, its model of philosophers merged in identity with ­artists—​ Euclid, Vasari says, is also Bramante—opens the possibility of conflated identities here as well. Bramante-Euclid is also the exponent of geometry; among the philosophers of the School of Athens can be found exponents of the canonical seven liberal arts, plus the three visual arts.96 Giorgione’s inclusion of the dividers and square similarly evokes the liberal arts and their mathematical basis in geometry and arithmetic. Others have imagined iconographic influence between the Three Philosophers and the School of Athens,97 though their nearsimultaneous dating makes this difficult to track. Given the rising rhetoric by artists and theorists on behalf of painting as a cognitive discipline, however, Giorgione and Raphael could each have addressed art’s philosophical basis without awareness of the other. Are these men, then, artists or are they philosopher/astron­ omers? There is no reason they should not be both, for, as Frances Yates and others have explained, artists were regarded as magicians, or magi, in the Renaissance. As in the natural magic celebrated by Ficino and Pico, artists were said to make images that reshaped degraded material forms into likenesses

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of the divine Idea.98 Shortly before the Three Philosophers was painted, Leo­nardo proclaimed the art of painting to be a form of natural philosophy.99 Leo­nardo and Giorgione are believed to have been in contact when Leo­nardo was in Venice in March 1500 and perhaps again around 1506.100 Leo­nardo’s alleged influence on the Venetian painter is nowhere so visible as in the Three Philosophers, which virtually images Leo­nardo’s fundamental belief that the observation of natural phenomena is the path to philosophical and scientific truth. The Three Philosophers, I suggest, presents a discourse on empirical and theoretical knowledge, new and old modes of investigating nature, that would apply both to natural philosophy and to art. The young man represents modern art and modern philosophy, contrasted by his youth and activity with the older philosopher-artists. Seated on the ground, he is implicitly closer to nature, which accords with his avid study of the dark open mouth of the cave. This prominent cave has been interpreted as the site of Christ’s nativity, or as a reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave, a metaphor for the illusory world of the senses. Yet a broader range of iconographies could apply. There is the equally ancient idea of the cave as the source of nature’s mysteries, or the Source as female Nature and the origin of life.101 The source myth is, indeed, prominent in Sannazaro’s Arcadia, when the narrator is led by a nymph to an underworld “where many lakes were visible, many springs, many caves that poured forth water, from which the rivers that run over the earth take their first beginnings.”102 Both ways of interpreting Giorgione’s cave depend upon traditional feminine genderings of this orifice of the earth, differently valued: it could be a metaphor for the degraded sensory natural world, or for great Nature as the source of both life and wisdom. As the terms are stated in the Three Philosophers, it appears that nature is the object of study rather than a source of knowledge for the modern artist/philosopher— not natura naturans, but natura naturata. The seated man uses his dividers and square to measure and circumscribe the nature before him, indicating that he is more firmly grounded in mathematics and science than the older man, who holds, but does not use, dividers that are paired with an astrological text. The seated young man is thus the protagonist of the new direction of learning, in which truth is sought from a nature subjected to analytical study. The old philosopher’s more symbolic understanding of cosmological bodies is, by contrast, based on astrological magic. The tablet he holds bears a diagram whose most legible forms are a sun and crescent moon, the latter set above the former. Prints by Giulio Campagnola close in date to Gior-

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128.  Giulio Campagnola, The Astrologer, 1509. Copperplate engraving. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

gione’s Three Philosophers show philosopher/astrologers in landscapes with similar emblems of heavenly bodies. One shows three philosophers examining a globe; another (Fig. 128) presents a single sage with dividers and a globe bearing images of a sun and crescent moon, now horizontally aligned.103 Similar schemas of sun and crescent moon, laterally polarized, appear in astrological treatises, where they carry a primary valence of masculine and feminine.104 In the Corpus Hermeticum, as in Renaissance astrology and alchemy, the universal opposites of masculine and feminine are equal in value, manifested in the sun and moon.105 Sustaining gender balance, Leone Ebreo explained that the sun was the image of human reason, while the moon was the image of the human spirit (anima).106 In the alchemical model, Sol and Luna are equally privileged as the two perfect metals not reducible by fire. The parallel status assigned to sun and moon by alchemists is slightly hierarchized by the traditional Aristotelian edge given to solar masculine over lunar feminine.107 Yet this is offset by alchemy’s elevation of the feminine principle to a position higher than the social norm: in the alchemical

system, women played an active role in generation, and the womb of the earth was a living spirit.108 Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the emergent scientific view of nature—in the writings of Francis Bacon, for ­example—​ would be explicitly contrasted with that of the Renaissance alchemist or astrologer, who stood for the old world order. Unlike his scientist-successor, he sought to influence nature but did not expect to control her. Giorgione’s placement of the moon above the sun on the bearded astrologer’s sheet implies a perception that the old man is biased toward the feminine. The old philosopher may thus represent a worldview that was already beginning to be challenged.109 In a painting that models the dawning perspective, the astrologers of the past are contrasted with the new man of art/science, who looks toward the natural sun. At this moment, Copernicus’s revolutionary proof that the earth revolves around the sun was a work in progress, and it is quite possible that Giorgione was aware of it. The De revolutionibus orbium caelestium was written between 1507 and 1530, published in 1543.110 The Copernican concept of heliocentricity was not

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129.  Jacopo de’ Barbari, Apollo and Diana (The Sun and Moon), 1495–1516. Engraving. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum. 130.  Albrecht Dürer, Sol-Apollo and Diana, 1501–3. Pen, brown and black ink. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

a new idea in the world, for certain ancient philosophers beloved by the Neoplatonists had taught that the earth moves.111 Ficino, inspired by the Corpus Hermeticum, expounded upon the ancient notion of the sun as a visible god. Scholars have recognized that although Copernicus arrived at his discovery through mathematical calculation, he was buoyed by modern philosophical interest in the sun. As Yates explains, it is “in the atmosphere of the religion of the world that the Copernican revolution is introduced.”112 Renewed enthusiasm for the sun’s divinity did not occur in a vacuum. Its unspoken yet essential corollary is the devaluation of the ancient concept of the earth as mother goddess. The privileging of the sun implied the displacement of the feminized earth in the conceptualizing of nature. As a seventeenth-

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century commentator described Copernicus’s achievement, “He snatches up the earth from the center of the universe, sends her packing, and places the sun in the center, to which it did more justly belong.”113 The dismantling of the old world order, as I have argued throughout this book, was forecast both in philosophy and art, before it was accomplished in science. Just as Brunelleschi’s mythic displacement of Natura’s powers in his heroic vaulting of the Cathedral dome helped to foster the mystification and consequent power of technology, so art may have prepared the way for heliocentrism, by rendering the goddess’s dethronement a thinkable thought, the wish that precedes the act. Artistic images offer a declarative version of Ficino’s solarascendant deviation from the hermetic principle of sun-moon

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131.  Circle of Giorgione, The Hourglass, early sixteenth century. Oil on panel. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Photo: The Phillips Collection.

and sun-earth equality. In an engraving by the Venetian artist Jacopo de’ Barbari (Fig. 129), Diana the moon goddess is driven around the edge of the earth, literally eclipsed, by the heroic sun god Apollo. Albrecht Dürer was influenced by this print to revise his drawing of Sol-Apollo and Diana in 1501–3 (Fig. 130).114 As Panofsky has shown, Dürer added the figure of Diana-Luna to the image of Apollo—surely not simply to juxtapose male and female nudity, as Panofsky suggested, but to express the supremacy of the solar divinity over the lunar one, as had Barbari. Subordinated in scale, position, and weight of line, Dürer’s moon goddess shields herself from the powerful rays of the sun-disk held by Apollo. The ancient polarization of light as masculine and dark as feminine is harnessed anew, to present an ascendant good power triumphing over a waning, weak, and negative one. Such images as these served the cause of destabilizing geocentrism, offering a visual model for the masculine sun god’s displacement of the lunar goddess, Natura’s celestial counterpart.115 In Giorgione’s natural world, the female cave and male sun are held in greater equilibrium, and their relative powers are more subtly shifted. The artist’s scrutiny of the cave is assisted

by the light of the (rising?) sun. With the sun as his ally, the artist is linked to Apollo, an appropriate partner on many levels—as god of poetry and music, victor over Marsyas, and archer. By evoking Apollo as the transcendent signifier of the masculine values of reason and art, Giorgione alludes obliquely to a theme expressed literally in a painting from the Giorgione circle. In The Hourglass (Fig. 131), Apollo sits in a landscape playing his lira da braccio, confronted by an old man holding an hourglass. The compositional balance between them is tipped by the appearance of the sun on the horizon, visible in the cleft between two mountains. Fortified by the power of the sun, his attribute and strength, Apollo makes music that will defeat time and stave off death.116 The Three Philosophers presents the ascendancy of modern empirical study of nature, in which divine Natura is no longer mother and guide. Behind the old astrologer is a vital green tree, behind the young man is a barren one. This might signify his usurpation of nature’s creative powers—his draining of them, so to speak, from the tree that is an emblem of nature’s fecundity. Through a natural metaphor, Giorgione suggests that nature is no longer needed to nourish the artist; he is

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132.  Giorgione, Three Philosophers (detail from Plate 7 of stream at mouth of cave), c. 1507? Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

equipped to learn her secrets through his own agency. By contrast, the old astrologer stands in harmonious synchronicity with a nature symbolized by the dense green foliage above him. As the old order passes, we glimpse a future dominated by a man who has outgrown his mother. The theme of the waning power of Natura and rising power of the new artist-philosopher is expressed in other details. Writers have puzzled over three features that became visible when the picture was restored in 1953: a fig tree and some ivy at the mouth of the cave, and a small stream emerging at its base. Contrary to some descriptions, this stream is not a bubbling spring117 but a small rivulet of water that flows a few feet and then ends (Fig. 132). The great Source, described by Sannazaro as the pouring forth of waters from many caves, has here been reduced to a trickle in a dry bed. Giorgione’s visual metaphor of a Source whose waters are drying up echoes Sannazaro directly. The tenth eclogue of Arcadia ends in the disintegration of the pastoral vision. As Astraea abandons the earth, we return to modern Naples where, as Quint describes it, the Source turns into a non-source.118 As pastoral Arcady

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and modern Naples critique each other, Sincero laments the loss of a nature no longer accessible through pastoral song: “Our Muses are extinct; our laurels are dried up, our Parnassus is ruined; the woods are all mute; the valleys and the mountains are grown deaf with sorrow.”119 In a more optimistic spirit, Giorgione synchronizes the withdrawing of Nature with the rise of a new means of access to her secrets. As the new-age philosopher takes her measure, the fig tree springs forth in her dry bed and, above it, the ivy. These two plants were sometimes Christological symbols in Renaissance art,120 yet the fig tree and ivy are also sacred to Dionysus.121 Considering that Christ and Dionysus have long been paralleled as gods of death and resurrection (their linked identities were of particular interest in late Quattrocento humanist circles),122 the plants inside Giorgione’s cave might allude to two male gods who emerged from the feminine— Christ’s gestation within Mary’s body, Dionysus’s nurture by nymphs in a grotto—who take on independent life as hers begins to ebb. An analogy is seen in Lorenzo Lotto’s Allegory of Virtue and Vice (Fig. 133), which formed the cover of his portrait of Bernardo de’ Rossi, bishop of Treviso.123 The picture is divided into two halves by a meteorologically moralized landscape and a dead tree that sprouts a new live branch. The living branch is positionally associated with the child’s virtuous pursuits of the liberal arts, whose emblems are scattered on the ground.124 Anticipating, or echoing, Giorgione’s hero, the child-protagonist picks up a pair of dividers, while the parched earth and dead plants around him parallel the withered tree and dryingup source. Lotto’s picture shares with the Three Philosophers the theme of a dead or dying Nature renewed through the masculine pursuit of virtù, the arts and learning. Through virtù, it is suggested, man can defy Nature’s laws, a supernatural performance symbolized by the living branch growing from a dead tree. As we have seen, this arboreal metaphor was used to express masculine regeneration, whether in common procreation or the Medicean return.125 The metaphor of the living branch would have been familiar enough for Giorgione to evoke it subtly, in the fig tree and ivy that spring from within the cave that shelters the slowly desiccating Source. Through a play of natural metaphors, the dream of masculine supremacy over female Nature is ventured in the Three Philosophers. At that moment, it was an audacious position and, like the priapic display in the Hypnerotomachia, a bald expression of the masculine principle. In both cases, masculinity is aroused through sensory perception to stake a claim on Nature’s generative creativity. In the painting, this theme is still

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133.  Lorenzo Lotto, Allegory of Virtue and Vice, 1505. Oil on panel. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection (1939.1.156). Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

carefully couched in terms of balance. The philosopher/artists approach nature in a spirit of rational inquiry that takes two forms—the old alchemical and the new scientific—and the cave remains a mystery to both. Yet in this vision, Natura is boldly imagined to step down, changing from Source to resource, from She who teaches to that which is to be studied. In the Sleeping Venus and Three Philosophers, the worlds of femi­ninity and masculinity function separately. Venus generates autonomously, immune to masculine penetration; the philosophers contemplate a world of physical nature that lacks a personified female presence. They are like the circle of men and women Poliphilo encounters in the ruined city, who form an interwoven but not interactive group (Fig. 122). Only when we consider the pictures together do we feel the tension of absence, the sadness of gender separation, that is implied in Colonna’s image. As if to bridge that gap, a Venetian allegorical painting (Fig. 134) brings the themes of the Sleeping Venus and the Three Philosophers together in a single image, with masculine-cultural

134.  Venetian School (formerly attributed to Pietro degli Ingannati), Allegory. c. 1530. Oil on panel. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. G. H. Alexander Clowes (1948.17.1). Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

and feminine-natural now directly juxtaposed. As in Lotto’s portrait cover, the tree stump reflourishes on the side of masculine virtù, where a male infant again selects dividers from other instruments of the arts. On the right, one satyr holds a wine jug; another approaches a sleeping nymph. Behind the virtuous boy is a city, the cultural sphere; behind the satyrs and sleeping woman, a thick grove of trees represents the natural realm. The imagery of this picture echoes the theme of culture’s stealthy yet still reverential march on Nature’s powers, in play in Giorgione’s Venus and Three Philosophers. The sleeping woman rests on a prominent white cloth, like that beneath Giorgione’s Venus and the fountain deity of the Hypnerotomachia. The satyr approaches her in a spirit more respectful than lustful, hinting of another way to probe nature’s se-

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crets, alternative to mastery by virtù. In this detail, the Venetian artist introduces a theme that would be developed by Titian. and La Vecchia Giorgione’s explorations of the gendered spheres of culture and nature extend to two paintings that may have been conceived in tandem. Vasari described a painting of David by Giorgione he had seen in Venice, which was reputed to be the artist’s self-portrait. This understanding led him to use a woodcut replica to head his life of Giorgione.126 Giorgione’s Self-Portrait as David is generally considered to be identical with the picture at Braunschweig (Fig. 135), which can be circumstantially dated around 1506 or later.127 This painting was evidently cut down on the sides, for Giorgione’s fuller original composition is preserved in an engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar of 1650 (Fig. 136). La Vecchia (Fig. 137), the painting of an old woman almost universally accepted as by Giorgione, was connected with Giorgione’s Self-Portrait as David by Peter Meller, who claimed that they began as pendants, noting that the two works originated in the Grimani collection.128 La Vecchia passed on to the Vendramin collection, where it was identified in a 1569 inventory as a portrait of Giorgione’s mother.129 Scholars have tended to ignore this seemingly anecdotal information, focusing instead on the cartellino held by the Vecchia, inscribed “Col Tempo,” to interpret her as an allegory of vanity, a memento mori, or memento senescere.130 Interpretations of the figure as Vanitas or Luxury draw upon the resemblance between this figure and Dürer’s Avarice of 1507, a grotesque hag with one exposed, sagging breast.131 Panofsky more persuasively interpreted Giorgione’s Vecchia as a crone who points to the inevitability of aging that she seems to speak: “with time, you will become as I am.”132 Yet, as x-rays have revealed, La Vecchia had a fully exposed, pendulous breast in the painting’s initial stages, which would seem to conflict with a personification of senescence.133 Calvesi’s more persuasive connection of La Vecchia, via Leone Ebreo, with Mater materia and her “continuous generation and corruption” of all things,134 would be consistent with an old woman displaying her breast. Meller proposed that, as pendants, La Vecchia and the SelfPortrait as David were intended to express a political allegory at a time of crisis. He identified the old woman as “Povera Italia,” the ancient Dea Roma turned into a national personification who laments her pitiful condition under foreign invasions, and David as the heroic defender of Italia against Charles VIII. The Self-Portrait as David

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This political reading is not entirely convincing—for one thing, the aspect of Giorgione’s self-portraiture is not adequately addressed—yet Meller’s proposal that the paintings were conceived as pendants is supported visually. In the original larger format of the Braunschweig picture, as reflected in the Hollar engraving, the proportion of figure to frame is close to that of La Vecchia. The two figures’ heads are approximately the same size.135 Each half-figure terminates in a parapet. As pendants, they would have turned toward one another, silhouetted against a dark empty ground, each confronting the viewer, simultaneously demanding recognition.136 They can also be understood to confront one another. More overtly than in the Three Philosophers, Giorgione expresses the artist’s prideful opposition to a diminished Nature. Armored for battle, Giorgione-David invokes analogies of the biblical warrior as a figure for the artist, such as Michelangelo’s Florentine David (1501–4), whose defeat of Goliath emblematized the artist’s struggle against his own adversary. “David with his sling, and I with my bow,” as the sculptor wrote on a sheet of studies for the David, casting his Goliath as the gigantic block of marble he would confront, with his sculptor’s tool as metaphoric weapon. Edgar Wind noted that Giorgione made the heads of David and Goliath the same size, implying that, like Michelangelo, he becomes a giant by defeating a giant.137 And Jaynie Anderson observed that the 1528 inventory description of the Self-Portrait as David was the first occasion that the artist was called Giorgione, rather than simply Giorgio, “as if in recognition that Giorgione’s face and his intellectual stature were as large as the giant whom he vanquished.”138 The figure of La Vecchia is best understood as Great Mother Nature, the larger entity that subsumes Vanitas, mementi mori, and perhaps even unfortunate Mother Italy. The phrase “col tempo” was evidently a commonplace in Italian literature of the period, even in daily speech.139 For Leo­nardo, it signified corruptive time as antipode to art’s claim to endure over time,140 and its meaning may have been similar for Giorgione, given the likelihood of the artists’ contact. The philosophical message of the cartellino would elevate La Vecchia beyond a simple portrait of Giorgione’s mother (though she could have served as life model). The contemporary information that it was “his” mother is likely to have been a garbled version of his real subject, the magna mater who was Natura herself, the mother of us all. But the artist’s relationship with her was special, for he was uniquely armed to compete with her powers. At this historical

135.  Giorgione, Self-Portrait as David, c. 1507? Oil on canvas. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY. 136.  Wenceslaus Hollar, after Giorgione’s Self-Portrait, 1650. Etching. Albertina, Vienna (inv. no. HB 29.[1] fol. 3, 6). Photo: Albertina. 137.  Giorgione, La Vecchia, c. 1507? Oil and tempera on canvas. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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moment, the artist and Nature are in critical conflict, and their tense standoff is dramatically expressed in Giorgione’s paired figures. His defiant facial expression seems to counter his mother’s knowing insistence that he too will age. Through her attribute, “col tempo,” she proclaims Natura’s power to wear away and destroy all living creatures. Her slightly extended forefinger points to her breast, source of the life that she both gives and takes away. Pointing to his own attribute, Goliath’s severed head, David responds that he has the ingegno to defeat the strongest of enemies. Though he cannot extend his own life—and Giorgione’s was, like Masaccio’s, tragically brief— the artist has the power to create art that will endure and conquer time. Giorgione’s changes of mind as revealed by x-ray often resist understanding, yet in this case, the direction of his thought seems clear. His original decision to showcase her exposed breast would have placed the emphasis upon her maternal, nurturing role—Nature as the artist’s nurse and guide. As he suppressed that attribute, he redirected our attention to the signs of Nature’s own senescence: wrinkled flesh, snaggled teeth, unkempt and lifeless hair. Nature is not a crone venerable for her timeless wisdom; instead, she herself is aging, a victim of the historical cycles she once controlled. Her abject state is another way of saying what the dry bed of the cave-as-Source in the Three Philosophers expressed: Mother Nature’s powers wane as the artist gathers his own. the tempesta Giorgione’s Tempesta (Plate 8) is the great Sphinx of art-historical interpretation. The picture may hold the record as the world’s most interpreted painting, yet no single interpretation has ever earned widespread assent.141 There is always something not quite satisfactory in the matching of meaning to image, or some aspect that remains unexplained—which only spurs us on in the hope of finally getting it right. This maddening picture is deceptively simple: a man and a woman nursing a child appear in a natural setting before a city illuminated by a flash of lightning. Yet the so-called Tempesta presents no known story or allegory unambiguously, and its indeterminate configuration of elements has led to fundamental disagreement over its very genre: is it to be understood as narrative or symbolic? The picture was first identified by Michiel in 1530 as “a little landscape with a storm, with a gypsy and a soldier, by Giorgio da Castelfranco.”142 Early generations of scholars looked for deeper meaning. The least persuasive readings have been icono-

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graphically literal: the Discovery of Paris, the legend of St. Theodore, the Birth of Apollonius of Tyana. Another interpretative casualty was Creighton Gilbert’s anti-iconographic explanation that the painting anticipated modernist formalism in having no specific literary subject.143 Other interpreters have drawn upon its archetypal features—the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air; or the triads of man-woman-child and manwoman-storm—to frame allegorical constructs. Calvesi proposed the subject to be the union of Heaven and Earth, while Wind suggested an allegory of Fortitude and Charity ruled by Fortune.144 Later writers argued that the painting is an allegory of current events. Deborah Howard and Paul Kaplan independently proposed the theme to be an episode in the recent crisis of the Cambrai wars, symbolized by the gathering storm. Paul Holberton revived Michiel’s description to read the figures as ciphers for the wandering soldiers and displaced gypsies visible in Venetian territories in wartime.145 I believe we may come closest to Giorgione’s intentions by combining features of different readings. No single explanation has sufficed because no narrow or literal interpretation can fully account for the painting’s complexity, which results from the artist’s play with multiple allusions that cohere in a unitary visual image. Here is a situation where the relationship between image and idea is inadequately transacted through verbs that imply their one-to-one identity. To say “the man ‘is’ a soldier (or Fortitude)” short-circuits the interpretative process. We might better observe what actually happens in the attuned mind: the figure activates an association, putting it in play with related concepts, which acquire focus as the figure interacts with other signifiers that are also charged with associations. This worked in the Renaissance because familiar images carried a variety of possible meanings. A broken column could represent fortitude, classical antiquity, or a war-torn country; a nursing mother could be the Virgin Mary, Charity, or a gypsy. In creating iconographically equivocal figures, I sug­gest, Giorgione may have intentionally activated a semiotic ripple effect. If so, then, the composite that results from combining single-plot interpretations may fortuitously bring us closer to the mind of Giorgione, and that of a Venetian intellec­tual culture comfortable with multiple, resonating meanings.146 In the discourse of this book, the Tempesta represents the climax of the psychic progression outlined in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Like Poliphilo, the artist-quester encounters his female anima and is transformed by dramatic union with her into an integrated and whole personality. In the first stage of his progress, represented by the Sleeping Venus, the quester’s

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artistic psyche was in its infancy, dependent upon an eternally remote mother who withheld secret knowledge from her child. In the next stage, represented by the Three Philosophers and the Self-Portrait paired with La Vecchia, he vigorously denied the powers of a nature still conceived as Mother, a rejection strengthened by growing confidence in his own creative powers. In the Tempesta, the feminine anima is confronted, and accepted as his source of nurture, knowledge and spiritual refreshment, but on new terms. The artist now presents himself as a mature and equal partner. Like the other pictures in this sequence, the Tempesta manifestly embodies the theme of nature and culture.147 At first sight, the nearly naked nursing mother brings to mind Terra or Mother Earth, before any other woman who has been proposed. Her nudity would preclude the Virgin Mary as a primary identification; her lack of identifying costume would tend to rule out gypsies; while Caritas usually has more than one child. Seated on a prominent mound of earth, beneath a flourishing bush and tree, the nursing woman is comparable to a host of images of Natura or Earth, such as the Tellus from the Ara Pacis (Fig. 10), as Calvesi long ago pointed out. Calvesi also observed that Natura, in the form of Venus suckling Cupid, appears in the Hypnerotomachia as a barefoot, lightly draped statue surmounting the tomb of Adonis (Fig. 138).148 Daniel Lettieri noted that the seventh eclogue of Sannazaro’s Arcadia contains an invocation of the “universal mother, nurturing earth,” who invites Sincero to rest upon her hills and grasses.149 The large white cloth beneath Giorgione’s woman, which rises to cover her shoulders, can be connected with the honorific drape that supported the Dresden Venus and Colonna’s nymph of the fountain. These manifold analogies point to the central identity of the woman in the Tempesta as Natura-Terra. Culture and art are represented in the architectural ruins on the left side of the painting. The juxtaposition of this signifier with the storm that can stand for the vicissitudes of fortune evokes the Aristotelian antinomy of tuche and techne, which the Middle Ages cast as fortuna and ars, contrasting the workings of nature with man’s intellectual and creative productions.150 The dyad of fortuna-virtus was a central concept in Renaissance thought. As Hanna Pitkin describes it, “Fortune is the unexpected. Nature underlies, fortune intervenes. Human virtù opposes them both, yet sometimes seems itself the product of nature or fortune.”151 The three entities are clearly at play in the Tempesta. Fortune puts at risk the city in the background, just as, over time, she has ruined the architectural monuments that symbolize cultural achievement. All the while, terra nutrice continues and flourishes.152

138.  Statue of Venus, “the divine Mother,” nursing Cupid. Woodcut from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499). Photo from Colonna, 1999, 375; courtesy Thames and Hudson, London.

Through his location, the standing male on the left is identified with techne and cultural virtù. He can also be recognized as a figure for the artist, though in a circumspect way. Despite Michiel’s identification, this man is not a soldier, for he has no martial attributes, and the straight pole that he holds is not a halberd but a shepherd’s or pilgrim’s staff.153 He might be a figurative shepherd, evoking David as a stand-in for the artist (an association claimed in Giorgione’s Self-Portrait), while simultaneously recalling Orpheus, whom early Christians conflated with David as magical musician.154 Giorgione’s figure is not exactly a shepherd, however, for he has no sheep and his dress is much too fancy. These facts lead us back to Sincero’s vision of the earth goddess in Sannazaro’s Arcadia. Sincero—a double of ­Sannazaro—​ is an urban man who has gone from his native Naples to become a shepherd in Arcady. Giorgione’s standing figure, wearing the clothing of a contemporary upper-class Venetian male155 yet holding a pastoral staff, is of similar mixed identity. Like Sincero, he is an urban shepherd, displaced from both habitats of his dual identity. Here is an example of the expressive usefulness of objects that carry multiple significations, for the staff simultaneously signals shepherd, setting up an associa-

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139.  Poliphilo and Polia before the ruins of the Polyandrion Temple. Woodcut from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499). Photo from Colonna, 1999, 238; courtesy Thames and Hudson, London.

tion with Sannazaro-Sincero’s sojourn in Arcady, and pilgrim, evoking the idea of travel or quest.156 The shepherd with no flock and the urban man with no city converge in the figure of the shepherd-artist-pilgrim who is on a spiritual journey. The quester is separated from the city in the background by ruins that block access to the path behind them. The pair of truncated column shafts on a tall base, together with a cleanly truncated blind arcade, bring to mind, as has often been observed, the illustration of the ruined city in the Hypnerotomachia (Fig. 139).157 This is not a casual quotation, however, but an allusion that functions as part of a larger whole. Colonna’s ruined city, with its buried statues and broken columns, represented antiquity as a narrow frame of reference. It was the state of first consciousness for Poliphilo, a once-spacious frame that he outgrew in his quest for an enlarged identity. Giorgione establishes a similar relationship between his shepherd-pilgrim and the ruins behind him. They are an extension of his identity,

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reinforcing his link with art and culture, yet presented as mutilated, abridged, useless. He steps away from the ruins, his former psychic home, and looks in a new direction. The marvelous prospect before him, a changed life, is a sign of good fortune, as in the Hypnerotomachia, where Fortuna presents itself as Occasio or Opportunity.158 Understood in these terms, the protagonists and setting of the Tempesta fit a type of allegorical narrative, the “visionary landscape,” in which a young man embarks upon a quest that results in a new identity. It is a pattern of medieval romances such as Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature, as Paul Piehler has demonstrated, that the poet/quester arrives at a sacred or spiritually charged place, a locus animae, where he encounters a divinity, personification, or authority figure who is usually feminine—a potentia animae, or higher spiritual power—who becomes the agent of his transformation.159 “The manifestation of goddesses in transcendent landscapes,” Piehler explains, “constitutes the central psychic experience in medieval allegory.” 160 The charged atmosphere of the Tempesta, the isolation of a significant moment in a flash of lightning, the ambiguously allegorical-real identities of the figures—all these create the appropriate dream-myth setting for such a philosophical journey. But the image resounds with a peculiarly contemporary sensibility as well, suggesting that it might be understood simultaneously on two levels, the allegorical and the modern, in a way that enriches its allegorical meaning.161 Read naturalistically, the figures are dislocated from stable life by their position outside the city in the background. In this image, by contrast to her seated counterpart in the Louvre Concert champêtre (their resemblance confirms a shared identity), the goddess Natura seems abject—not nude but naked, more displaced than reigning. In this sense, she faintly echoes images of contemporary gypsies, just as the male figure faintly echoes images of soldiers. Both were seen in early Cinquecento art: prints that show gypsy mothers holding a child, sometimes accompanied by weapon-bearing gypsy fathers, closely paralleled images in which halberdiers appear in landscapes with seated women with children (Fig. 140). Noting the contemporary presence of real soldiers in the Venetian terrafirma, John Hale suggested that the theme of these prints was “the soldier as guardian of pastoral security.”162 A contemporary political context for both Hale’s and Wind’s readings was offered by Deborah Howard, followed by Paul Kaplan, who each argued that the Tempesta’s imagery refers to the war between Venice and the League of Cambrai, as the city sought to preserve its terrafirma holdings.163 In their interpreta-

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140.  Jacopo Palma il Vecchio, Halberdier Watching a Woman Seated in a Meadow with Two Infants, c. 1515–20. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art; purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1922. Photo: Philadephia Museum of Art.

tions, the storm is a metaphor for the impending war, and the man is a patrician defender of the Venetian territories at stake, symbolized by the seated woman. Although the Cambrian wars may have provided a contemporary application for the imagery of the Tempesta, this cannot have been its primary theme—if Giorgione had intended a martial allegory, he would surely have made the man a soldier. Yet, since these wars posed for Venice the basic issue of access to and control of her terrafirma, a political interpretation would not be inconsistent with the reading here developed. The artist seeking union with female nature could coexist metaphorically with the Venetian patrician seeking to preserve connection with his lands.

Comparing the Tempesta with contemporary images of soldiers and gypsies (Fig. 140) reveals the painting’s carefully calibrated gender balance, for Giorgione negotiated the malefemale juxtaposition in a very different way. His peripatetic shepherd encounters the nursing mother on less stereotypically patriarchal terms. Though seated on the ground, she is elevated, so that her head is slightly higher than the man’s. Unlike soldier and gypsy compositions in which the man guards the mother, Giorgione’s artist-pilgrim looks up to her, more supplicant than defender. The mother’s subtle ascendancy over a male observer is echoed in a small Giorgionesque panel of unknown subject (Fig. 141). Here, as in the Tempesta,

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141.  Circle of Giorgione, Rustic Idyll, early sixteenth century. Museo Civico, Padua. Photo from Robert C. Cafritz, Lawrence Gowing, and David Rosand, Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape (Washington, DC: The Phillip Collection, 1988).

the young man encounters a seated woman with child, elevated by a hillock of earth, whom he regards with wary respect. Mother Earth is due his respect because, as the author of the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics put it, “just as the child is nourished on its mother’s milk, so mankind is nourished by the earth and this is a natural thing.”164 Yet the male figure in the Tempesta holds an equivalent power, for he embodies contemporary reality more firmly than does the half-allegorical woman. We might imagine this urban-man-playing-shepherd coming across a real gypsy mother who reminds him of the Mother Goddess sung by Sannazaro and Colonna, an imaginative leap that brings the two worlds of pastoral and modern into simultaneous view, as in the Arcadia. In this perspective, she is the goddess in mun­ dane disguise, for gypsies were said to be fertile, “hardy in the bearing of children,” and to “live . . . in the manner of beasts . . . without arts.”165 A gypsy is a natural figure, like the Earth Mother, but in the modern world she more closely resembles the homeless, made artificially natural by her separation from culture. In this degraded form, she will benefit from the urban

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artist’s complementarity, for through union with this vicar of civilization, nature can be reconnected with cul­ture to form an integrated whole. There is in this an echo of the ancient idea that art can restore “fallen nature” to what it should have been, or provide a necessary supplement that improves it.166 The expressive magic of the Tempesta lies in the tension of the male-female relationship, electrically charged by the thunderstorm. We yearn to bring together these poignantly and perpetually separated figures, whom we intuitively recognize as archetypal complements. In the picture’s broadest rubric, these figures personify culture and nature seen through the nostalgic vision of the pastoral, which postulates an original undivided unity of natural and cultural. Their separation into two realms imposes the modern condition. The prominent bridge in the middle distance is the key to understanding the two sides as contrasted but connected. Positioned beyond the protagonists, the bridge provides a way that they might be joined, yet it is a joining that remains forever in the future, or the past. The artist-quester laments the loss of a more organic

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relationship with nature, from which dead culture has disconnected him. He is cut off from the trees behind him, his own nature, by the ruined monuments that also split the foliage. He looks to nature’s side, where thick foliage dominates architecture, for reinvigoration. In his imagined reconnection with terra nutrice, he will find his missing half, the anima that makes him whole. From yet another perspective, the union of male and female is not merely imagined but already accomplished in the painting. Calvesi brought into play an alchemical model, arguing that the Tempesta presents the fertilization of feminine earth by masculine sky, resulting in the production of the Philosopher’s Stone, symbolized by the nursing child.167 The ancient idea of generation as the action of male sky upon female earth was sustained, Calvesi notes, in hermetic and Neoplatonic texts such as the Pimander and Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi di Amore.168 In Calvesi’s interpretation, the painting presents the myth of the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage of heaven and earth, expressed in the lateral axis of the man and woman and the vertical axis of sky-lightning and earth-water.169 This is a compelling and important reading. Yet Calvesi would make Giorgione a textbook exponent of masculinist creation myths, conflating his visual proposition with that of Ebreo, who called the sky the “protector” of the earth, and the earth the “receptacle” for masculine influx. Accepting the unacknowledged Aristotelian bias of this formulation as Giorgione’s own, Calvesi describes the male figure in the painting as an erect “sentinel” capable of “governing” and “penetration.” 170 He compares the gender-unorthodox Tempesta to images in seventeenth-century alchemical texts, such as an engraving of nourishing earth and fertilizing fire (Fig. 142).171 This print is indebted, however, not to Giorgione’s model, but to the type of soldier-mother images seen earlier (Fig. 140), and it further heightens the dominant position of the warrior-protector to imply his controlling supervision of the nursing mother, and to evoke the patriarchal concept of agricultural husbandry and men’s benevolent management of female ­fertility. Homer’s pre-agricultural vision of the autochthonic, “lifegiving earth” was transformed into the plowed-field analogy that prevailed in classical and subsequent times.172 The plowman’s tillage of his land with a phallic furrow both naturalizes and is naturalized by the idea of a man’s plowing the body of his wife. In this formulation, as Page Dubois says, “the function of the female is to receive the seeds of her husband and to nurture his crop.” She is “no longer the parthenogenetic

142.  Michael Maier, “Ceres and Mars.” From Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim: Hiernymus Galler for Johann Theodor de Bry, 1618). Photo from de Rola, 1988, 173; courtesy Thames and Hudson, London.

source of all nurturance but property, marked and bounded, ordered by cultivation.”173 The woman-as-cultivated-land metaphor was alive and well in early Cinquecento Venice. Luigi Dardano, for example, proposed in 1510 that women would bear productively for men if, like the land, they were properly fertilized with good seed, cultivated, and managed.174 The conceptual basis of masculine stewardship of female body/land underlay a cluster of themes that were imaged: Fortezza-Caritas, Mars-Ceres, or the Venetian patriot protecting the Republic’s territories. The patriarchal concept of masculine fertilization of feminine earth does not adequately account, however, for the disposition of the man and woman in Giorgione’s Tempesta, which evokes the sacred marriage on equal terms. More useful is Mircea Eliade’s description of the ancient hieros gamos as a moment of transformation, accomplished by the catalytic power of a thunderstorm to generate the necessary energy for the union of earth and sky.175 This ancient concept of equal powers explosively combined, preserved in the Renaissance in the alchemical coniunctio of male and female essences, as expressed in the Hypnerotomachia, better corresponds to the fluidity and instability of Giorgione’s image, which hint of a world in flux, and a transformation that may bring a paradigm shift. As the flash of the storm brings the union of male and fe-

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The Goddess in Arcady

male, art and nature, it also reveals the city in the distance, which might, more aptly than the philosophic child, be considered the real-world product of the union between nature and culture. Like the figures, this distinctly modern yet seemingly abandoned town may be interpreted on two levels. In the contemporary reading, the city and storm set the stage for the troubled times that precede the shepherd’s encounter with the goddess—the loss of lands, the crisis of fortune— functioning, like the dark forest at the outset of the Hypnerotomachia and the Divina Commedia, as a sign of difficulties to be overcome. Yet on the allegorical level, the storm that exposes the city is an agent not of disaster but of resolution on a higher plane. This city, consisting of both buildings and vegetation, offers the vision of a civilization in which nature and culture might flourish together. Cities, after all, are constituted out of art (architecture) and human generation (its citizens)—culture and nature, the components that are emblematized in the foreground.176 For the male artist, the bounty of the alchemical union of masculine psyche and feminine anima is his realization of an expanded creative self. This enlargement of identity is accomplished in the Tempesta through the sequence of gazes that moves the action from inside out. The “logic of the gaze” might suggest that the man commands the woman, despite her elevated position. Yet in a Neoplatonic mode of thought, looking at something does not mean controlling it, but drawing from it. Ficino describes the eye, “at first dark,” which “loves the light while it looks toward it; in so looking it is illuminated.”177 The artist, Giorgione states formally, draws creative power from observing nature, and this is how he learns her secrets. (Indeed, this is just how Vasari described Giorgione’s method.)178 The figure of Natura herself coolly returns the gaze of the spectator, identifiable with ourselves. As a student of mine once wrote of her, “she brings us into this world,” a wonderful double-entendre that establishes her function as both Mother Nature and Albertian commentator. But there is room for slippage here, for the spectator’s po­sition is always the same as that of the artist who created the image. The artist inhabits the Tempesta both as pilgrimshepherd within and painter without, whose presence is acknowledged by the goddess Natura. Through her charged gaze, the painter is united with his female anima, a paradigm-shifting moment that we not only witness but physically feel, as the world of the picture expands beyond the set terms of the frame: Natura stares now, not at the artist’s fictive self-image as David, but at the real man he is. Seen thus, the Tem­pesta offers an experiential metaphor for the

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enlargement of the artist’s identity through the life-giving powers of nature. art and nature in the balance The Tempesta and Concert champêtre were painted at a moment in Venetian history when the themes of time’s destructive powers and earthly transience held special relevance for the endangered Republic. Alberto Tenenti and Patricia Fortini Brown have independently identified a heightened time-consciousness on the part of Venetians around 1510. At that moment, the city’s experience of its peculiar fragility was summed up in a set of verses published there by the young Pietro Aretino, dedicated to the theme of time, which brings the fall of empires, men, and mountains.179 A perception of transience as the fundamental condition of life may find its most exquisite expression in the Giorgionesque male portrait (Fig. 102).180 The sitter addresses the viewer pensively, projecting a certain sadness of being, as if conscious of the paradox that the deepest truth that art can preserve may be the fact of our mortality. The desire for permanence in the face of death is a condition specific to humans (as far as we know), and all art on some level functions to satisfy that need. Yet this phase of Venetian painting offers a particularly sophisticated way of doing so, embracing transience as part of human nature, and embedding that ancient wisdom in a modern face. By its very formal construction, Giorgione’s art models the world as dynamic and time-inclusive. Vasari described Giorgione as practicing a new freedom with oil paint under Leo­ nardo’s stimulus, composing through color and chiaroscuro to create forms that emerged from shadows, with relatively indistinct edges.181 Leo­nardo and Giorgione both conceived pictorial space in new terms, not as inert air between solid forms as in the Quattrocento, but as an interactive field of forms bound with the ambient atmosphere. In so doing, they presented a new, modern concept of nature itself as a vital and organic process, in the spirit of Lucretius’s philosophy, which both might have known.182 Rosand rightly observed that Leo­nardo’s depiction of nature as a dynamic organism is matched in the Tempesta, which presents a similar vision of a world in flux, and he asserted that both artists present a new understanding of nature as naturans, not naturata.183 But an important corrective is needed. Artists had long recognized nature as naturans, as we have seen; what is new is the artist’s perception of himself in relation to her—namely, his identification with creative nature, on a level of parity. Leo­ nardo spoke volumes on this subject; from Giorgione, not a

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143.  Titian, The Three Ages of Man, c. 1512–16. Oil on canvas. Duke of Sutherland Collection, on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. Photo: NGS.

word is preserved. Yet in their art, both give us metaphoric constructions for the artist and Natura as interdependent and formidable partners, alter-egos in a world that is completed by their dynamic exchange. The progressively independent role played by “space” in Venetian painting—that is, by the pigment that defines the “negative” spaces in and around the “positive” forms—can be traced as a continuous development, from Giorgione’s brief oeuvre through the entire career of Titian. What we see in microcosm in the sequence from the Sleeping Venus to the Concert champêtre—a loosening of contour and build-up of atmosphere and visible brushstroke—is played out more extensively by Titian, as he picks up where Giorgione left off (perhaps before he left off ), to develop an increasingly painterly style over the next seven decades. The Concert champêtre represents the metaphoric next step after Giorgione’s Tempesta. The Concert stabilized the fragile and dramatic balance of art and nature accomplished in the Tempesta, offering a model of their future cooperative interchange. Through Venus’s interaction with men, the ideal of interdependency is advanced: civilized man may teach his rustic

cousin the refinements of art while drawing creative power from Nature the teacher. In the Three Ages of Man (Fig. 143), painted a few years after the Concert, Titian extends the concept of mutuality to a reversal of roles. The amorous couple in this pastoral scene sustain the tempered harmony of the Concert, only now it is the male figure who represents nature: nearly nude, with warm flesh and tousled hair, he seems a composite of the young rustic and the tutelary Venus of the Concert. The woman who engages him wears modern dress, which casts her as, not Venus, but art. The discourse of the flutes is similarly transformed. Vasari said that the woman extends one to invite the man to a duet,184 yet he already holds a flute, nearly invisible at his side. More plausibly, she has been playing both flutes simultaneously,185 but in this arrested moment, the extended instruments invoke the invisible complement, the young man’s penis. The pause in music making initiates the music of love; he abandons his instrument and reaches for her, aroused by her beauty. It is a witty redirection of Giorgione’s message: the art-nature discourse awakens natural man, not to creativity, but to the love of beauty.186 Contrasted with the sleeping infants and Eros

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The Goddess in Arcady

144.  Titian, Bacchanal of the Andrians, c. 1523. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

on the right (love in potentia, as Panofsky described them),187 and the old man in the middle distance who contemplates two skulls, a reminder of death and the transience of art and love, the lovers in harmonious counterpoint embody the picture’s philosophical moral. It is the timeless Epicurean mandate to make beautiful music together—in both senses—while you are in your prime, when the spirit and the senses are in balance. Titian’s Bacchanal of the Andrians (Fig. 144), painted for the camerino of Alfonso I d’Este of Ferrara, fulfills Giorgione’s vision of a pastoral realm populated by both sexes, where the

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divine and human spheres interact.188 Dancers, drinkers, and musicmakers disport themselves in a harmonious rhythmic frieze, or garland, of men and women. Titian’s image of gender reciprocity dynamically resolves the theme of gender separateness in the Hypnerotomachia woodcut (Fig. 122), where women and men form two interwoven but independent circles. Under the trees on the left, two young men in modern dress serve as commentators; on the ground beneath them, two women in contemporary dress and coif produce the music that fuels the bacchanalian revelry.189 These women, and the nude men around them, constitute a group that precisely reverses the

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terms of Giorgione’s Concert champêtre, for here it is modern women who generate the dialogue on art and the men who are the natural inhabitants of the Arcadian setting. As in the Three Ages, Titian has masculinized nature and feminized art. The reclining woman in the right corner reprises Giorgione’s sleeping Venus, but with heaving breast and histrionically tossed-back head that now suggest a postorgasmic state.190 Detached from the group, she functions as a quotation, yet one that adjusts the meaning of its source. Through her exaggerations of the Dresden Venus pose, Titian’s lazily eroticized sleeping woman presents herself as Giorgione transformed. She no longer “is” Venus but shows what Venus might become: a signifier, not of nature, but of art. Titian sustained Giorgione’s imagery, but changed the di-

rection and range of its signification. Taking Giorgione’s model of interactive art and nature as a given construct, Titian could initiate his own artistic journey at a later stage of the psychic progression that Giorgione had worked through. He would go on to alter the terms of the art-nature relationship. Imaged female beauty as a sign of the artist’s creativity, initiated in the art of Botticelli, became a key concept for Titian and other artists of the early to mid-Cinquecento. And the theme of the male artist’s identification with nature would interest Titian throughout his life. Together, these themes invert the gendered categories of art and nature. As the artist becomes nature, he enters matter, charging it with masculine ingegno. And he appropriates the powers of naturans to create a naturata that is art itself, now in feminine form.

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part iv

Art and Nature in the Cinquecento From Competitor to Master

Nature is like a vine laden with grapes, and Art, her byproduct, is the trellis which supports it.  —pietro aretino, Letters I am nature.  —jackson pollock

Chapter Seven 

Love and Death in Venice Titian

from consort to courtesan Gender equilibrium rules in the Tempesta, the Concert cham­ pêtre, and the Andrians. But as the Cinquecento progressed, the power relationship of art and nature changed, and the philosophical basis of their gendered interchange gradually weakened. This development can be understood as the next stage in the progression of the masculine psyche. Following the transformative, erotically charged encounter of the male artist with Natura, natura naturans would become naturata, the focus of his gaze rather than the agent of his philosophical development, and Venus-Natura was reduced to common humanity. This sequel was predicted in book 2 of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. When Poliphilo finally attains union with his female anima, the new phase that follows, in Linda Fierz-David’s words, “ceases to be a transformation of the man’s consciousness, and becomes a transformation of the anima.” 1 Polia tells the nymphs the lovers’ story, a matter-of-fact tale that situates her in ordinary life: she reveals herself as a certain Lucrezia Lelli of Treviso.2 When Polia finally leaves Polifilo, she gives him a passionate kiss, with “swelling tongue,” that arouses both lovers, whose amorous embrace brings a rosy blush to her cheeks. At once, Polia descends to the erotic familiar and ascends to become a “deified, celestial image.”3 On the symbolic level, Polia’s eroticization and departure can be understood as Polifilo’s detachment from his anima, a step of differentiation between masculine and feminine. When Polia disappears, the anima vanishes, leaving Polifilo now merely masculine, having

lost access to that wholeness of which he was briefly granted a vision.4 She’s gone—Polia, Venus, Natura—and cultural man will replace her with art. He winds up petrifying what he most desired, and the feminine anima becomes a static fixed image rather than a vital, glowing guide. What follows is the fetishizing of beauty—arguably, a frozen stage of masculine psychic development. As the fetishized female image is repeated, she becomes an objectified Other, and the male no longer has a spiritually legitimate relationship with her. When the philosophical dimension disappears, physical union becomes merely erotic. Eros no longer sponsors the love of ideas, as in Plato’s Symposium, just the love of women’s bodies. The eroticization of the female body, one of the most significant cultural developments of the early modern period, was launched by art such as Marcantonio Raimondi’s pornographic engravings after Giulio Romano’s I Modi, produced in 1524, which illustrate the “modes” of sexual intercourse (Fig. 145). These prints, accompanied by Pietro Aretino’s erotic sonnets, the Sonetti lussuriosi, were widely (if clandestinely) disseminated in Europe, and made spectacularly public a discourse on pornography that was earlier restricted to a coterie of elite males.5 The eroticization of the female body and the growth of pornography are often explained as self-propagating eruptions: by arousing masculine desire, pornographic images created a rising demand for more and sexier imagery. Yet the outbreak of pornography was also fueled by the debasement of the female

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Love and Death in Venice

145.  Marcantonio Raimondi, after Giulio Romano, engraving from I Modi, with sonnet by Pietro Aretino (no. 4), 1524. Photo: Fototeca Berenson, Villa I Tatti—Firenze. 146.  Albrecht Dürer, Satyr’s Family, 1505. Engraving. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

as symbol of nature and the changing position of women in society. What happened to the female body in the sixteenth century was not merely a shift in erotic sensibility, but a deeper transformation in cultural attitudes. One indicator of attitudinal change is the dramatic increase of scenes of rape in visual imagery. As we have come to recognize in our own time, rape is not about sex but power. In multiple images of the loves of Jupiter produced by Giulio Romano, Correggio, and Titian, the Olympian womanizer is no longer openly present; rather, he appears in disguise, with the power of unfair advantage. He must take his female prey by surprise, it is suggested, because otherwise she would not submit at all. And so he comes as a bull, a cloud, or a swan, or in a shower of gold. Leda, who had symbolized Natura for Leo­nardo, was by the mid-sixteenth century notable chiefly for the distinctive modi in which she was shown having intercourse with her Jovian swan.6

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The theme of stolen favors is also played out in abundant images of satyrs advancing on sleeping women. At the turn of the Cinquecento, satyrs appeared in benign family groups (Fig. 146), in which a satyr father serenaded a nurturing mother and baby, but this social arrangement changed as a new genre emerged. In an engraving by Benedetto Montagna (Fig. 147), two satyrs unveil a nursing mother; their demeanor is respectful and the setting remains domestic, yet these satyrs are clearly intruders, not consorts.7 In an engraving from the school of Marcantonio (Fig. 148), the encounter becomes confrontational: an aggressive satyr pulls at the drapery covering a vigorously resisting woman. In a woodcut ascribed to Boldrini (Fig. 149),8 the lustful satyr stealthily approaches a woman who is neither goddess nor satyress, but sleeps in an urban bedroom. In these works, the Macrobian metaphor of man tearing away Natura’s protective veil is revived in full force. Unlike the

147.  Benedetto Montagna, Satyrs Unveil a Sleeping Woman with Two Children, c. 1510. Engraving. Estampes et Photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (86C 173644). Photo: BnF. 148.  School of Marcantonio, Satyr Surprising a Nymph, early sixteenth century. Engraving. Albertina, Vienna. Photo: Albertina. 149.  Attributed to Niccolò Boldrini, Satyr Approaching a Woman, c. 1550. Woodcut. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Love and Death in Venice

satyr in the Hypnerotomachia woodcut (Fig. 123), the goat-men are not content to gaze on nature’s body; now they must ravish it. Such openly lascivious images were no longer meant to be contemplated in philosophical terms; instead, they were created for consumers who wanted to look at the female body surreptitiously, to take her on the sly, like Jupiter. This change in the sociocultural order parallels a change in the symbolic order for, as the trope returns in a gender-imbalanced form, there is no longer an implied bond of trust between the sexes. The male is aggressively dominant, and holds his position by force. In such images, art no longer supports the procreative agenda; it now sustains the fantasy life of the amoral sexual adventurer. Danaë and Io emerge from the typology of the ideal Venus to present a new category of mythological woman, whose body is explicitly a site of erotic desire. Titian’s first version of the Danaë theme (see Fig. 163) is a prime example of the trans­ formation. Titian began the composition as a near-replica of his Venus of Urbino, then changed the reclining woman into a Danaë, probably to suit the taste of his patron Alessandro Farnese. The altered picture was described by Giovanni della Casa as so sexually arousing that it would make the Urbino Venus look like a Theatine nun.9 By the 1540s, images of Danaë were under­stood to represent prostitutes, which led Titian to depict Jupiter’s descent in the form of gold coins. Formerly vaunted for her chastity, Danaë was now better known as the kind of woman whose thighs could be opened by gold.10 As images changed the meaning of their themes, female nature was now defined as mercenary or insatiable, her body explorable and possessable, her so-called secrets available to the stealthy or well-heeled taker. The eroticization of the female body in Cinquecento Italian art paralleled the changing description of nature by anatomists. In a development spearheaded by Andreas Vesalius, nature’s biggest secret—the female body’s mysterious capacity to generate life—was claimed to be discoverable through scientific investigation. The invasion of the female body by male anatomists is conspicuously imaged in the title page of Vesalius’s treatise on the structure of the human body, De humani corporis fabrica, published in 1543 (Fig. 150).11 Departing from Mundinus’s Anathomia (1315), the previous ur-text for anatomical illustration—where the object of dissection is male, to signify humanity in general—Vesalius depicted the objectified body as female and turned it from the lateral view to a fullfrontal, foreshortened presentation, exposing a huge, cavernous interior.12 The choice of the frontispiece image for Vesalius’s pioneering scientific work was undoubtedly guided by the fe-

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male body’s identification with natural processes and with nature itself. The image functioned iconically to symbolize the promise offered by the new research: to uncover the secret of life itself, guarded by nature’s closed body. Vesalius loaded his image with referents to the masculinity of the enterprise. Katharine Park has shown that Vesalius’s frontispiece was based on medieval illustrations of the Roman emperor Nero’s dissection of his mother, Agrippina.13 Nero had allegedly conducted the dissection to learn how he himself might give birth and eliminate the female role, and Vesalius similarly presented his modern dissection as a vision of male parthenogenesis, shared with the male students who were his creative offspring. As Park points out, the exposed organ under scrutiny in the Fabrica’s title page is a womb, underscoring the symbolic identity of this female body as Nature, who increasingly held no mystery in the face of advancing science. Vesalius’s aggressive objectification of Natura was modeled on the new type of eroticized female body, as seen in Caraglio’s Loves of the Gods print series (Fig. 151), where a similarly frontal Antiope yields to Jupiter disguised as a satyr, her genitalia baldly exposed.14 Its resemblance to the Vesalian image exposes their shared purpose: the demystification of the female body and its reduction to an exploitable resource. The female body could be seen to offer an apt metaphor for nature’s enigmatic ways, presenting a cryptic discrepancy between the visible and the hidden. The invisibility of woman’s generative organs might be said to constitute a resistance to scrutiny, concealing, as one scholar has put it, “an inner truth not susceptible to discovery or manipulation from outside.”15 This was conspicuously not the case in the anatomical treatises, however. In some illustrations, female exempla leap from pedestals, lifting their shrouds to reveal in their dissected abdominal cavities what has been called the “one-sex body,” a female interior anatomy that replicates the structure of the penis.16 We now see a complete inversion of the Macrobian veil with which Natura protected her secrets. Though some of these examples predate Vesalius’s Fabrica, they represent a conceptual step beyond the anatomist’s unveiling: to have Natura herself expose her not very threatening secret, a masculine anatomy manqué. Paralleling these developments was a new social ambiguity for modern women. As a protocapitalist economy took shape in sixteenth-century Italy and the division between private and public was sharpened, noble and bourgeois women were increasingly separated from commercial and public life, vanishing into the domestic realm.17 Both aristocratic and working women lost power. Venice was somewhat an exception be-

Titian

150.  Frontispiece of first edition of Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Basel, 1543). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Snark/Art Resource, NY.

cause, with the rising size of dowries, patrician women exercised financial power and enjoyed increased freedom of movement. Stanley Chojnacki has observed that the patrician wife’s altered position brought new masculine validation of her total identity, including its emotional and sexual dimensions.18 This reading does not consider, however, the social risks involved for women whose status was less secure. And it does not ac-

count for the vulnerable position of unmarried women in a “bachelor culture” in which many young men postponed marriage19—a phenomenon that might be connected with the imagery of lone, predatory satyrs. A harbinger of women’s vulnerability in these changing circumstances was the “double bind” of the donna di palazzo, as the female counterpart of the male courtier, or cortegiano,

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Love and Death in Venice

151.  Gian Giacomo Caraglio, after Perino del Vaga, Jupiter Surprising Antiope, from the Loves of the Gods, 1526–27. Engraving. Albertina, Vienna. Photo: Albertina.

was described in The Courtier.20 Her very name was an awkward alternative to the grammatical equivalent of the male ­courtier—​ cortegiana–and its avoidance signals her problematic identity. Neither wife nor prostitute, and not really courtesan, she was vulnerable to elision with all these identities, as is demonstrated in Castiglione’s effort to establish rules of conduct for male-female relationships at court, outside marriage and sex.21 The price of increased independence turned out to be a loss of both protection and respect: in terms both metaphoric and real, the ideal consort became a loose woman. The subtle shift in the status of courtly women can be measured in the difference between Raphael’s La Fornarina (Fig. 152) and its sources. The woman known as “La Fornarina” may have been Raphael’s mistress, though her specific identity remains undetermined. Scholars who note the resemblance of Raphael’s portrait to Leo­nardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci (Fig. 95) usually neglect Raphael’s transformation of that prototype.22 Gi­ nevra de’ Benci, an entirely respectable woman, was emblematized in her own right by the juniper that represents her name.

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The myrtle and quince that appear in the Fornarina, on the other hand, belong to the iconography of Venus, which is notoriously double-edged, and can connote either marriage or erotic pleasure. The Fornarina’s bared breasts could situate her equally in courtesan imagery or allegorical bridal portraiture.23 Raphael may have loved her, but the Fornarina does not look like a woman he planned to marry. The Fornarina projects a frankly erotic aura, through her half-clothed state, her visible navel, and her provocative touching of her breast. The bracelet on her upper arm all’antica, inscribed “Raphael Urbinas,” specifies the artist’s relationship to both woman and image, functioning simultaneously as a sign of sexual possession and artistic creation. She is his in both senses, a woman with no identity apart from the designs of her maker, a mere example of his discerning judgment. In these respects, the Fornarina departed from another of its putative models, Leo­nardo’s Monna Vanna, a half-length nude figure (Fig. 115) who was likely meant as a philosophical, not erotic, figure.24 Yet the very possibility of considering Leo­nardo’s Monna Vanna a courtesan— enthusiastically entertained by modern writers—points to the destabilizing of Natura’s identity that was underway by the second decade of the Cinquecento and the sexualizing of a female nudity that once functioned as a sign of divinity. As deities turned into courtesans, confusions of identity were commonplace. A case in point is Flora, known in the Renaissance as both goddess and courtesan.25 In antiquity, as in Botticelli’s Primavera, she had been Flora Mater, the deity of blossoms who represented seasonal fertility. Yet Flora also had an erotic identity. Boccaccio called her “Flora Meretrix,” identifying her with prostitutes and courtesans who traditionally took the name Flora. Flora’s dual marital and erotic associations parallel those of Venus, with whom she was continually identified. In early sixteenth-century Venice, a spate of halflength Floras appeared (Fig. 153), frequently with one breast exposed, sometimes gazing seductively at the viewer. Most commentators interpret them as modern embodiments of the patron goddess of courtesans.26 But Augusto Gentili argued that these Floras represent betrothed women, whose exposed breasts represent the “door to the soul and heart, sign of fertility, offering of love.”27 Flora’s exposed breast could be read as chastely fertile or as the erotic invitation of a prostitute. Her unbound hair was equally ambiguous, for it might signify either bridal status or wanton behavior.28 Why should it be so hard to distinguish a virtuous woman from a prostitute? We are plagued with iconographical referents that belong to both categories: not only exposed breasts and laurel but also roses and dogs, which (as we will see) could

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152.  Raphael, La Fornarina, c. 1518. Oil on panel. Galleria nazionale d’arte antica, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. 153.  Jacopo Palma il Vecchio, Flora, c. 1520. Oil on panel. The National Gallery, London. Photo © The National Gallery, London.

signify bridal or marital status, yet were also the appurtenances of courtesans. The confusion may have been deliberately fostered by women. Sixteenth-century Venetian senators complained that courtesans and prostitutes were casting aside “all modesty and shame” to appear in public as finely dressed as noblewomen, blurring the identities of “good” and “bad” women to confuse foreigners and locals alike.29 One imagines that the courtesans took an ironic pleasure in appropriating signifiers of virtue, in order to destabilize their meaning. In fact, each socially defined category of woman had something to gain from association with the other’s identity: courtesans wanted the social status of wives, and wives may have envied the glamour and independence of courtesans. Men, too, had a stake in merging the categories of brides and courtesans, since each could represent ideal female beauty. And some men held simultaneously idealizing and derogatory attitudes toward both wives and courtesans. In the next sec-

tion, I will explore, through a single key painting, the contradictory attitudes toward women projected by male patrons and artists, as they bear upon the changing relationship of nature and art. the venus of urbino What the Fornarina has done to Monna Vanna illustrates a kind of morphological Darwinism through which cultural paradigm shifts are fostered by art. Meaning is subtly changed through a sequence of linked but shifting images that gradually turn the lens. Because images are inherently polyvalent, every image simultaneously offers more than one possible signification— for convenience, let us say two (though images may generate multiple afterlives). During the period when a given image is produced, one of these meanings is normative; the other may be barely perceptible, yet it hovers, a possibility not yet utter-

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154.  Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538. Oil on canvas. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

able. But for a later generation, the second meaning may resonate, and then emerge to become the normative message for successive cultures, overlaying and eventually replacing the first meaning altogether. A prime example is the cultural transformation of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, a painting that was produced in a context of nonerotic nude females who were primarily figures of generative nature. As foregrounded by Giorgione, however, with soft flesh, perfect physiognomy, and faultless proportions, reclining in a visually luxurious landscape, the image of a nude Venus began to carry overtones of sensuality. Through the appraising eyes of a masculinist viewer or patron, she could be looked at erotically, purely as a display of feminine beauty. When Titian took up his brush to reinvent the painting of Venus he had helped complete, it was his intention to change its subject’s identity. In the Venus of Urbino (Fig. 154), the woman reclining on a couch in a domestic interior so closely resembles Giorgione’s

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Venus that she functions as a quotation, and her difference from her prototype forms part of the picture’s meaning. When the reclining woman awakens to gaze seductively at the viewer, Venus-as-nature becomes Venus-as-love-goddess. Between these two paintings had come a group of related pictures that helped to constitute the new genre. Palma Vecchio’s Reclining Venus in a Landscape (Fig. 155) is exemplary.30 As in the Venus of Urbino, the woman’s bejeweled coiffure and her worldly engagement of the viewer signal a knowing departure from Giorgione’s pristine goddess. Titian and Palma recontextualized the Dresden Venus for moderns, while advancing a discourse of the natural and artificial that was launched by the artist who taught them both. In Giovanni Bellini’s Woman with the Mirror of 1515 (Fig. 156), a beautiful nude woman looks into a mirror, adjusting an ­elegant headdress. Behind her, a poetic campagna is visible through the window. By juxtaposing two delectably painted exempla of beauty—woman and landscape—Bellini invites us

155.  Jacopo Palma il Vecchio, Reclining Nude in Landscape, c. 1520. Oil on canvas. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY. 156.  Giovanni Bellini, Woman with the Mirror, 1515. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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to compare the beauty produced by the artist with that created by nature.31 The distinction between natural and artificial beauty would be much discussed in Cinquecento art theory. Paolo Pino, for example, opens his Dialogo of 1548 with a consideration of the relative roles of nature and art in the creation of beauty, taking the characteristically Venetian position that art follows nature’s lead.32 Bellini slightly privileges art here, since woman and not landscape is foregrounded, yet he does so in a spirit of proud arrival: the artist (who is present in the signature on the cartellino) can equal nature in creating beauty. Resuming a dialogue with both mentors in the Venus of Urbino, Titian decisively altered the balance of nature and art implied in Bellini’s painting. He replaced the natural landscape with imagery of civilized modern life, producing what Aretino described as a “new nature,” now identified with the urban ambient.33 The woman reclines on a bed, complete with designer mattress-cover and house dog, in a room decorated with painted floor tiles, patterned wall hangings, and ornamented cassoni. Titian’s transformation of Giorgione’s model is also subtle: the red cover beneath the white sheet is stamped with a pattern of yellow flowers, an artificed reassembling of Giorgione’s red drapery and foliate setting.34 Nature is present only in referents filtered by culture. In the window, another paragone of nature and art appears. As Mary Pardo noted, the potted myrtle on the windowsill is perfectly shaped (human art), while a tree outside is ragged and irregular.35 Nature’s tree, moreover, is overlapped by the pure white cylinder of a column shaft, as if to say that, here, she is trumped by art. The identity of Titian’s nude has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Of the picture’s early history, we know only that it was acquired by Guidobaldo della Rovere in 1538, four years after the young duke’s marriage to his child bride, Giulia Varano. In the course of negotiations to obtain the painting, Guidobaldo referred to the painting simply as “la donna nuda”; its subject was not further specified until Vasari, who viewed the picture in 1548, described it as a “young Venus.” 36 Since the nineteenth century, the dominant critical position has been that the figure is an erotic image, perhaps of a contemporary woman who might have been the duke’s lover or a courtesan. Modern writers Charles Hope and David Freedberg have sustained this reading, placing the picture within a genre of Venetian erotic pictures that functioned primarily as pornography.37 Yet, in an interpretative line initiated by Theodore Reff and supported more recently by Rona Goffen, the picture’s Venerean attributes—the bouquet of roses, the myrtle—identify the figure as the goddess Venus, patron of marriage. In this

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view, the picture’s subject is determined by marital imagery: the dog represents fidelity, and servants remove a bride’s trousseau from the cassoni.38 Goffen explains the picture as an image of the ideal wife of Guidobaldo, commissioned in 1534 to celebrate the future consummation of the marriage, when the ten-year-old bride would come into sexual maturity, for which Venus offered the model. For Goffen, the figure’s open sexuality functioned to stimulate conception and invite love within marriage.39 This hypothesis has not met universal acceptance, however, and the Venus of Urbino remains problematized by its seemingly contradictory expressive emphases—marital iconography and voluptuous appeal. Daniel Arasse probed the picture’s hermeneutic ambiguity, particularly its structurally ambivalent division into two zones that are contiguous but not continuous.40 He observed that both the perspective and the lighting governing the background figures and the foreground figure are inconsistent, and that the separation of the two spaces by a rectilinear dark plane seems to artificially frame the scene behind, making it a kind of picture within a picture. Noting that these separate zones operate as dynamic opposites within a unitary whole, Arasse concluded that the painting offers “open” meanings, oscillating and ambivalent. But he did not apply this reading to account for the picture’s meaning on an intentional or social level. Considering that Renaissance Venetians were fully conscious of Venerean liminality, it seems mandatory to interpret the Venus of Urbino as a deliberate and witty commentary on the two worlds governed by the goddess of love: the marriage chamber and the courtesan’s bed. The key sign of the picture’s duality is the compositional screen that both splits and connects the two divergent female realms. The reclining woman surely is Venus, and not the bride per se, but she now represents Venus in a modern formulation applicable to modern marriage. If Giorgione’s Dresden Venus generates the physical nature behind her through her self-stimulating gesture, then Titian’s repetition of the gesture alludes to the generative function within marriage, and the production of beautiful children. As such, it is a wry comment on the domestication of the goddess who formerly wielded cosmic reproductive powers. The reclining figure is associated by context with the marital Venus, but by her seductive behavior with Venus the patron of courtesans. Her attributes—the little dog at her feet and the roses she lets fall—are playfully ambiguous, for dogs could represent marital fidelity or appear as companions of prostitutes, while both brides and courtesans in art hold Venus’s flower, the rose. 41 A clue to the woman’s precise identity is her provocative and erotic demeanor, which conflicts with

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longstanding Renaissance tradition that conjugal love not be eroticized. Francesco Barbaro, writing “On Wifely Duties,” explained what wives should do to please their husbands. Obedience, faithfulness, and modesty are high on the list, but when Barbaro comes to lovemaking, he emphasizes that, since marriage is for the purpose of procreation, wives should temper their passions, since “lust and unseemly desire are harmful to their dignity and to their husbands.” Following ancient writers, Barbaro described conjugal love in terms of “perfect friendship,” as did Alberti.42 Although sixteenth-century Venetian husbands are said to have treated their wives more lovingly than before, the institution of marriage remained a primarily economic arrangement.43 On the other hand, there is ample evidence that men— married and single, Venetians and foreigners—patronized courtesans in Renaissance Venice. In Titian’s picture, it is surely the goddess of courtesans and prostitutes who seductively engages the male viewer, while the Venus who governs the marital sphere is evoked in the background vignette. These spheres are formally contrasted: one is open and accessible, filled with flowing sensuous curves; the other is a closed and restricted spatial box. If the clipped myrtle on the windowsill, a plant then associated with the female clitoris, 44 alludes to the control of female sexuality in marriage, it is contrasted with the freely scattered roses that promise carnally Venerean pleasures. In such ways, the worlds comment upon each other; in Arasse’s words, they are contiguous but not continuous. In the year Titian painted the Venus of Urbino, the art theorist Lodovico Dolce published a treatise on marriage, prefaced by a dedication to Titian himself. Dolce’s treatise was in three parts. The first was a paraphrase of the sixth satire of Juvenal, which has been described as “one of the most bitter and obsessive condemnations of matrimony every written.”45 The third part was a translation of Catullus’s carmen 64, an epithalamium famous as a celebration of the “glory of marriage.” Sandwiched between these two texts that presented opposite positions on marriage was a dialogue written by Dolce himself, in which he offered practical advice on “how to choose a wife and keep her chastely hidden.” As a single volume that embraces and juxtaposes contrasting perspectives, Dolce’s treatise offers a pertinent analogy for Titian’s painting. Like the Venus of Urbino, it perfectly expresses the dual, unreconciled positions that Renaissance men held on the subject of women and marriage: that women could be sexually exciting and voracious lovers, and that marriage was essentially an economic, not sexual institution. These two positions—plus the missing term, which is that wives are also

women—were not integrated because, under existing patriarchal conditions, they did not have to be. Men could enjoy women as sexual beings outside marriage, while preserving a concept of marriage that simultaneously idealized it (in terms of its purpose) and vilified it (in terms of its burdens and woes). Intentionally or not, the Venus of Urbino coherently expresses these unresolved cultural contradictions. The fantasy lover in the foreground—the courtesan as ultimate woman— is offset by domestic reality in the background, a reminder of the marital life that might restrain, or provide operational freedom for, the extramarital relationship promised in Venus’s gaze. The painter structurally encodes the undesirability of uniting these two perspectives on women by dropping a screen behind the nude figure, creating a plumb line and a plane that keeps the two spheres forever apart. The very problem presented to modern scholars by the Venus of Urbino, that its protagonist cannot be precisely identified, is itself a cultural symptom—of a society that would neither clearly separate nor clearly unify the overlapping identities of living women and goddesses, courtesans and wives. Venus continues to represent Nature, but with a changed cultural identity. As the courtesan’s divine patron, Titian’s Venus operates “against nature” in the sense meant by Renaissance clergy: she opposes the proper function of sexual intercourse—​to procreate. As a visual object of desire, Venus performs instead on behalf of a prowling, socially unrestrained masculine “nature,” which seeks independent sexual pleasure and finds it in commercially available women. Titian’s courtesan Venus is “against nature” in a second respect, as a cultural product valued for her artificial beauty. Venetian courtesans were world-famous for their exotic dress and self-adornment; a Milanese visitor to Venice commented in 1494 that “they paint their faces a great deal, and also the other parts they show, in order to appear more beautiful.”46 The courtesan’s tricks for perfecting her body were legendary, and her perfected body held an economic value commensurate with the expense of its adornment.47 If the living courtesan was the product of artful re-creation, she was all the more so when depicted by Titian, whose brush could vie with her own adornment, producing an image that was doubly the creation of art. The glowing cheeks of the Urbino Venus—a painted image of a painted face—appear more vibrant than those of their putative model, a double artifice. Aretino praised his friend in just these terms, boasting that Titian put Natura to shame because through his art he could create life more vital than her creations. 48 In one respect,

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this is more than rhetoric, for in depicting a seductive woman with erect nipples and suggestive gaze, Titian deployed art’s power to provoke desire. The Venus of Urbino joined a lineage of images that wielded this legendary power, from Praxiteles’ marble Venus, stained by a young man’s sexual excitement, to Jacopo Sansovino’s Venus made for Federico Gonzaga, which Aretino said would incite lust in anyone who looked at it. 49 Because of his cultural prominence, Titian helped create the image of woman as erotic object, and he was a prime agent in constructing a visual form of femininity that may have helped police real women in Renaissance Venice. I do not use the term “police” as a mere figure of speech, for Titian’s contemporaries in the public sphere were actively enforcing femininity on both sides of the respectability divide, in ways that have been well documented. A taste of social reality can help illuminate what was at stake. real women In the Venus of Urbino, Titian exploited an ambiguity of identity between wives and courtesans that was becoming a social problem. In the early 1540s, Venetian authorities took steps to correct it, restricting the courtesan’s social circulation, and instituting laws to help distinguish the prostitute (meritrice) from honest courtesan (cortegiana onesta), and courtesan from patrician woman.50 The courtesan wielded unusual power, having risen in the late fifteenth century to a status unimaginable earlier, when prostitutes were virtually slaves. Like the Japanese geisha and the Greek hetaera, the cortegiana onesta was noted for intellectual and artistic skills such as playing music or writing poetry. Practiced in the art of love, the cortegiana onesta held the power to choose lovers and schedule their appointments at her pleasure, and she was widely perceived as empowered and free. Francesco Pona declared that “freedom is the most precious gem a courtesan possesses.”51 In reality, the courtesan was not all that free. Her life was economically precarious, and her independence was circumscribed in insidious ways. It was limited, first, by the fact that her power was derived from men’s values, and could only be deployed to carry out male erotic fantasies.52 The courtesan’s freedom was also limited by men’s active efforts to contain her potentially dangerous independence through public humiliation and vicious satire. In Rome, courtesans were rounded up and paraded around the city as examples of vice; in Venice, they were mockingly crowned in San Marco.53 Everywhere, the courtesan was satirized in bawdy verse and invectives, condemned for her moral laxity, mercenary nature, and deceptive-

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ness.54 Through verbal defamation, she was overdetermined as a sexual creature, which helped to control her, as well as to preserve the artificial separation of women into types. The courtesan’s most precious freedom was that of speech, which gave her access to cultural discourse. In Cinquecento Venice, an unprecedented number of women from different social classes published their writings. Not all these were cortegiane oneste, yet the courtesan writers were perhaps the most feared, because the least subject to masculine control.55 The most famous was Veronica Franco, an openly feminist writer who took advantage of her public prominence as a courtesan to speak on behalf of women less able to speak for themselves.56 Franco’s analysis of the sexual inequities of Venetian social institutions and her challenge of female stereotypes set a feminist precedent in Venice that was soon followed by the fiery treatises of Lucrezia Marinelli and Moderata Fonte.57 Franco was vilified for her activism, in terms that laid bare the civic symbolism of “good” and “evil” women. In 1575, Maffeo Venier attacked Franco in verse, blaming her for the Serenissima’s decline, and describing the city of Venice—­ besieged for ten years by plagues, natural disasters, war, and destruction—as no longer a lovely nymph, but a horrid monster. He drew upon the Republic’s civic icon, a composite of Venus and the Virgin Mary, to define its calamitous decay as a natural woman who went wrong and became a venal whore.58 The Venetian Republic, courtesans, and nature itself were assigned responsibility for the disasters. Venier described Venice as wicked, corrupt, and morally dissolute, deserving God’s punishment and justly reduced to a leprous state. Franco’s body is similarly characterized as diseased, her sexual organs engorged, her head a sea of pustules, her mouth rotten and polluted slime (an image intended to evoke Venetian canals). In Venier’s casting, both the city and the courtesan are overripe cultural products, decadent and evil in their hypersophistication. Pietro Aretino similarly contrasted the disgraceful artifice of the cortegiana onesta with the natural honesty of a common prostitute (puttana), and the affectations of sycophantic Roman courtiers with his own more spontaneous behavior: “I sit when I am tired, eat when I am hungry, go to sleep when I am sleepy, and every hour is mine to do as I wish.”59 Aretino, now an unencumbered citizen of Venice, has become a natural man. He claims to follow Nature rather than literary models, characterizing himself as the “secretary of her simplicity.”60 Undergirding the texts of Aretino and Venier is a cultural topos prevalent in the sixteenth century, of woman’s art that corrupts man’s nature. It appears in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) in the figure of Alcina, the Circe-like sorceress who se-

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duces and deceives the knight Ruggiero. The theme is memorably expressed in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1575), where Armida and her garden—both masterpieces of artificial unnaturalness that feign the natural (“fatto not nato”)—bring Rinaldo to narcissistic ruin, imprisoning him in false values. 61 In The Faerie Queene (1590s), Spenser expands upon Tasso’s theme, turning Armida’s sinister garden into Acracia’s Bower, where art and nature openly compete. Like Armida, Acracia represents the falsification of nature by magic; she is no longer guileless nature, but pseudo-nature—she is really art. And her male victim has assumed the position of nature.62 titian as nature I have moved ahead in the century to provide a broader context for Titian’s complex and changing relationship with nature, as expressed in his art. Aretino, Tasso, and Spenser present a stunning reversal of the traditional gendering of nature and art. Over Titian’s lifetime, wicked women came to represent a negativized art or artifice, while the noble hero/writer represents a nature moralized as innocent. Consistent, however, is assigning the female role to the inferior category. As art began to be perceived as too artificial, and urban development began to give civilization itself a bad name,63 the natural became ennobled and romanticized. In a “back to nature” movement that predated the more familiar one of the eighteenth century (and was not the first), nature was appropriated by cultural males as their own proper realm, while “art” was identified with feminine duplicity. Titian’s distinctive relationship with nature is a running theme in Renaissance art literature. Lodovico Dolce proclaimed in his Dialogo of 1557 that “Titian walks in step with Nature.” Describing the artist as one of Nature’s special children, whose talents were a gift of birth, Dolce recounts how the boy Titian was driven by Nature to ever-greater heights until he rivaled his mentor, Giorgione, who allegedly commented that “Titian was a painter even in his mother’s womb.”64 Consistent with the image of Titian as Nature’s special son are descriptions of his work and that of Nature as parallel achievements. In a letter to Alessandro Contarini, Dolce exclaimed of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, “every stroke of the brush belongs with those strokes that nature is in the habit of making with its hand [sua mano].”65 The most celebrated example of Titian and Nature’s parallel operations was produced by Aretino. On a May evening in 1544, Aretino observed a spectacular sunset through the eyes of Titian’s art and wrote his friend to describe the experience.

The writer verbally sketched the lights and shades in the language of the painter: I was amazed by the variety of colors revealed in those clouds; those in the foreground were ablaze with the flames of the sun; those farther off, less ignited, glowed with the subdued heat of red-lead. . . . Oh, Titian, where are you now? For I swear that if you had painted the scene I have described, you would have provoked the same astonishment in men that so moved me; in contemplating what I have just depicted for you, one was sorry that the wonder of such a painting could not last longer. 66

Aretino longed for Titian to paint a scene that the artist had taught him to see, providing a perfect example of the precept given later by Bellori, that “nature imitates art.”67 He does not claim that Titian would have painted it better, yet the notion that Titian might have improved on nature by capturing the spec­ tacle in a permanent image is a faintly implied afterthought. When Aretino is writing in this vein, he describes Titian’s images of living humans as continuous with living nature. Of his own portrait by Titian, Aretino wrote: “Truly it breathes, its pulses beat, and it is animated with the same spirit which I am in actual life.” 68 But Aretino also cast Titian’s relationship with nature in competitive terms. Within Titian’s art, he claimed to frequently avow, lay hidden the idea of a “new nature.” Aretino had said exactly the same of Michelangelo’s art, but the idea of Titian as the embodiment of a new nature was picked up by other writers.69 The notion of the artist as a “new nature” left the old nature somewhat in limbo. Aretino took care of that by supplying another conceit in circulation, that of a jealous, displaced Natura.70 Lomazzo would later repeat Aretino’s claim that Titian was loved by the world and hated by Natura for his miraculous imitations of her creatura.71 The theme of their competition appears in other texts. In Speroni’s dialogue of 1537, Tasso alleges that “it is better to be painted by [Titian] than to be engendered by Nature.” Tullia responds that Titian is more creative than Nature, whom she describes as a mere portraitist. In Titian’s colors, she claims by contrast, “God placed the paradise of our bodies; which are not painted, but sanctified and glorified by his hands.” Titian is here positioned between a modestly creative Natura and an all-perfect God, whose powers of generative creativity he approaches.72 Later writers would elevate Titian’s way of handling pigments to a form of divine creation. Boschini wrote that he covered bare bones with living flesh, “until all they lacked was breath itself.” “With a dab of red, like a drop of blood, he would enliven some surface—in this way bringing his animated figures to completion.” And, again: “wishing to imitate

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157.  natur a potentior ars, Titian’s impresa. From Battista Pittoni, Imprese di diversi prencipi (Venice, 1568 edition). Photo courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

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the operation of the Supreme Creator,” Titian used to observe that, in forming the human body, he “created it out of earth with his hands.”73 The escalating rhetoric of Titian’s divine creativity echoed the steady expansion of art’s claim to rival nature. Among contemporary Florentines, the topos of the artist surpassing nature was commonplace. Vasari employed the rhetoric of transcendence in the 1550 edition of the Lives. Of Michelangelo’s Notte, for example, he wrote that if the artist had completed the sculpture, “Art would have shown Nature how she greatly surpassed her in every respect.”74 Benedetto Varchi claimed that architecture “defeats” nature, “because it does those things that cannot be done by nature,” and he placed architecture and medicine above all the arts, because they included forms not found in nature.75 Dolce, too, looking anxiously over his shoulder at his Tuscan contemporaries, articulated a principle that echoed the prevailing rhetoric of competition and conquest: “the painter should try not only to imitate but to surpass Nature.”76 titian’s motto: the art of the licking tongue From Titian himself we have not a word about his alleged competition with nature, except for one provocative construction. He is said to have taken as his personal motto the phrase “Natura potentior ars,” which he illustrated with the image of a mother bear licking her newborn cub into shape. The evidence is an engraving in Battista Pittoni’s Imprese di diversi pren­ cipi of 1562 (Fig. 157), in which the bear and cub appear within an ornamental frame, flanked by figures of Time and Fame in architectural niches.77 Floating over the bears is a scroll inscribed “Natura potentior ars,” usually translated as “Art more powerful than Nature.” On a plaque below, verses written by Dolce extol Titian’s transcendent position in the longstanding competition of art with nature: Many learned painters, in diverse eras continuing to our own time have shown in designs and beautiful colors how art jousts with nature. Gathered at the height of honor they are considered by us to be heavenly prodigies But titian, thanks to high fortune has defeated art, ingegno, and nature.78

The artist’s Latin motto may also have been created by Dolce, who occasionally pushed the topos of Titian’s partner-

ship with nature into the zone of competition, yet it was probably Titian who adopted the bear emblem. A drawing of a mother bear and cub in Stockholm (Fig. 158), though perhaps by another artist’s hand, is likely to record a lost Titian drawing.79 But the combination of the image with the motto is peculiar. The example of the mother bear who perfects her off­ spring with her tongue would seem a perverse way to illustrate the announced theme: why exemplify a maxim that proclaims art’s power over nature with a zoological simile? (The flanking pseudo-sculptures of Time and Fame might represent eternal art, but their marginalized positions hardly signify ascendancy.) Titian’s page differs from the stock imprese in Pittoni’s volume in that it links two concepts that had not been previously connected.80 The figure of the mother bear licking her newborn cub into shape appeared in ancient texts as an example of nature’s sagacity.81 Biographers of Virgil compared the writer’s shaping of his poetry with the bear mother’s practice. 82 In a treatise of 1416, Francesco Barbaro adduced from Plutarch the example of the bear mother licking her cub into shape as a model for mothers rearing their children. 83 Writing in 1537,

158.  By or after Titian, Mother Bear and Cub, c. 1560. Black chalk with white highlights, on bluish paper. The National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm. Image © The National Museum of Fine Arts.

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Sperono Speroni compared the mother bear’s shaping of her cub with the power of reason to shape first love in human souls,84 echoing Barbaro’s discussion of the bear-mother’s artificing ability within an entirely natural sphere. Dolce’s publication of Titian’s impresa appears to be the first connection of the bear metaphor with the motto that has been widely translated in the literature as “art more powerful than nature.”85 This translation is consistent with the competitive spirit of Dolce’s poetic tribute beneath the image, yet together they invoke a rhetoric more characteristically Tuscan than Venetian. Pardo more judiciously translated the motto as “an art more powerful than nature,” and assumed that Titian identified with the mother bear, whose shaping of her formless newborn lump is analogous to the painter’s work upon equally inchoate material. 86 This would make more sense: Titian’s art, or his ability to lick his own creatura into shape, is uniquely more powerful than nature’s. But there is another way to translate the motto, in which “natura” and “ars” are not opposites. Natura potentior ars could also mean “Nature is the more powerful art.”87 This translation provides a better conceptual match for the she-bear simile, and it is consistent with later interpretations of the motto. In an emblem book of 1595, Joachim Camerarius joined an image of the licking mother bear with the legend “Natura potentior ars,” explaining in a couplet that: “Art polishes, it by no means shapes; nature carries out both [functions]/ How much they may differ [art and nature], the offspring shows.”88 Camerarius’s claim that Natura has the more extensive powers obliges us to translate the legend as “Nature is [or practices] the more powerful art.” In the commentary that follows, Camerarius struggles to reconcile this maxim with the alleged meaning of Titian’s motto. Noting that the famous Venetian painter used the mother bear to show that “in certain respects, art is stronger than nature herself,” Camerarius comments that “indeed we concede that in several [respects] this is true.” But, he objects, in many other respects—painting and art included—this is not the case. Camerarius’s resistance of the variant reading suggests that the meaning of Titian’s motto may have been misrepresented in the later sixteenth century. Indeed, it was Camerarius’s understanding that apparently became normative. In a treatise of 1623, Giovanni Ferro discussed emblematic examples of the licking mother bear, noting that Titian combined this image with the motto “Natura potentior ars.”89 Ferro offers the bear mother as model for the perfection of human arts and studies, recommending that the reader take a cue from nature, our comune maestra, to learn how to bring up children, study and live.90 In a text of 1653, Filippo

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Picinelli quotes three variant versions of Titian’s motto,91 then assigns the same meaning to all three sayings: “Those [offspring] to which the bear has given birth unformed and raw, she completes afterwards by the art of the licking tongue.” 92 In other words, nature births, and then practices art to perfect her product. This is consistent with Camerarius’s proclamation that nature carries out both shaping and polishing. Picinelli is quite aware that “nature” and “art” do not form a single continuous operation, but rather are complementary actions, each dependent on what the other supplies. In sixteenth-century Italy, the idea of the reciprocal and complementary powers of nature and art was as firmly grounded as the idea of art’s defeat of nature, and in certain quarters more so. Even a Florentine, Vincenzo Danti, could be heard to recommend that the painter and sculptor, “imitating nature in anything whatsoever . . . ought first to seek out the intention of nature.”93 Danti’s idea that art should follow nature’s directional movement toward specific ends was shaped by Aristotelian teleology, but also by Aristotle’s belief in the complementary operations of nature and art: “art partly completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and partly imitates her.”94 Danti, however, like other mid-Cinquecento Florentines, takes a step beyond Aristotle to state that the artist’s primary goal is improvement upon nature’s model: “order may be more perfect in art than in nature since man, knowing the imperfections in natural things, may through art escape them and correct them, addressing himself to perfection.”95 Imitation in this sense is transcendence; the emphasis shifts from unity of purpose (completing nature’s intentions) to raw competition (correcting and perfecting her forms). In the alchemical tradition, by contrast, nature’s guidance held a more central position. “Let him who investigates this difficult and abstruse matter be not so much the disciple of art as of nature.” Thus spoke Paracelsus, in avowed imitation of Hermes Trismegistus,96 and the principle was codified by his followers, in a catechism of alchemy. The examiners of nature, the catechism claims, should be like nature herself. They should “most carefully ascertain whether their designs are in harmony with nature,” and “if they would accomplish by their own power anything that is usually performed by the power of nature, they must imitate her in every detail.” Even so, says the alchemist, nature operates with the help of art, for the artist finishes what cannot be finished by nature; the philosopher’s goal is “proficiency in the art of perfecting what Nature has left imperfect in the mineral kingdom, and the attainment of the treasure of the Philosophical Stone.”97 The alchemists, too, sought a form of transcendence in their

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art, yet they saw themselves as nature’s agents in the extension of her aims. The process of perfecting is modeled on nature’s operations; the alchemist must carefully imitate creative nature, natura naturans, and in so doing he may extend the scope and extent of her activity, but always in harmony with the example she has given. This way of thinking was shared by writers such as Camerarius and Picinelli, and I believe that it was likely shared by Titian. Both the mother bear exemplum and the motto, if translated as “Nature practices the more powerful art,” are consistent with the concept of a nature that depends upon art to complete her intentions, and the concept of an art that is derived from nature’s model. The concept of an interdependent nature and art hovers over a text in which Titian appeared for the first time as a character in a dialogue. In the Dialoghi of Antonio Brucioli, published in Venice in 1537–38, a conversation takes place between Titian, the architect Sebastiano Serlio, and a certain Mario Viscanto who brings visitors to Titian’s house: “Here is the house of Titian, gentlemen, that noted painter whom you wish to see, whose art makes nature appear more beautiful; and just as he surpasses her in the proportions and colors of figures, so nature surpasses him in giving to them life and spirit. The person with whom [Titian] discusses [these things] is . . . Sebastiano Serlio.”98 Literary dialogues cannot be taken to represent reality, of course, yet considering that Titian and Serlio were probably in contact in the late 1530s,99 and that a rhetorical context existed for this sketch of nature and art’s complementary roles, the passage may give us a whiff of Titian’s thinking on the matter. I suggest that Titian also exemplified these principles in his art. A little-discussed picture, the Boy with Dogs in Rotterdam (Fig. 159), has perplexed scholars. The image consists of a young boy standing next to a large retriever, his arm over the dog’s back, and a reclining mother dog who nurses two puppies.100 Erwin Panofsky’s proposal that the subject might be “Cupid mastering two dogs of different temper” was rejected by Harold Wethey, who claimed that the hound has fathered the newborn puppies and, with the boy, is guarding the mother dog.101 This alleged paternity is equally doubtful, considering that the “father” is white, the mother is black with white markings, while the puppies are brown and black. Although this painting may have belonged to a larger composition, it makes perfect sense on its own. A contrast of nature and culture is established between the nursing mother’s relation to her pups and the boy’s relation to his dog. As in the aphorisms discussed above, nature brings forth, while art polishes—or, in this instance, trains. Like the bear cub, the

pups are produced and nurtured by nature; the adult dog is a pet whose well-being is monitored by humans. The boy’s upright stance in contrapposto subtly connotes that he belongs to the realm of art, by contrast with the earth-hugging animal mother. Yet, as a child, he too is in the process of naturalcultural development, a product of both nature and art. The boy’s relationship to the dog, expressed through a gesture midway between control and dependence, might also allude to the contingency of art and nature. Thus interpreted, the painting would match the commentaries in emphasizing the interdependence of their operations. Revising the meaning of Titian’s motto “Natura potentior ars” also permits us to reinterpret a curious woodcut Titian is thought to have designed (Fig. 160). The Caricature of the Laocoön has been linked to various hot issues of the Cinquecento and interpreted as a spoof, perhaps of the hegemony of classicism or of Galen’s anatomical mistakes. More credibly, David Rosand has argued that the woodcut belongs to the art-nature paragone.102 He observed that it reverses the Boccaccian concept of “ars simia naturae” (art the ape of nature), since in this image the apes assume the poses of the famous antique Laocoön group. Connecting it with Titian’s motto, Rosand argues that the caricature expresses, in humorous terms, the “power of art itself to determine the forms of nature,” in other words, that nature imitates art. Since this image is a caricature, however, we may presume that someone is being lampooned. The butt of the joke would seem to be those promoters of art’s priority who insist that nature follows art when in fact, nature follows nature. The correction is subtly put forth in the middle distance, where a mother lion is trailed by her cubs (Pliny tells us that lion cubs were also born without form),103 a detail surely included to exemplify the natural order that is comically inverted in the foreground. The preceding examples suggest that Titian believed in natura naturans as the artist’s guide. He may have imagined himself, in the metaphor of the licking mother bear, as both mother and cub: artificer and shaper of inchoate pigments, and Mother Nature’s special child whom she has shaped. Such a self-conception would be consistent with Dolce’s pronouncement that Titian “walked in step with Nature.” But this would imply that Dolce understood Titian’s position. Dolce’s explication of Titian’s motto, though seemingly consistent with the motto’s usual translation, now opens up to a different reading. He sets Titian above other painters whose works reveal art’s competition with nature, yet in the concluding lines of the epigram he describes Titian as having conquered art, ingegno and nature—a difference of kind and not degree. This could

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159.  Titian, Boy with Dogs, 1570s. Oil on canvas. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. 160.  Boldrini, after Titian, Caricature of the Laocoön, c. 1540– 45 or later. Woodcut. Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Photo: Davison Art Center.

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mean that Titian’s triumph is to establish himself above the competing factions of nature and art, and to combine all their functions in his person, like the mother bear. Such a reading of the epigram would be consistent with Venetian conceptions of the relationship of nature and art. venetian and tuscan: geography, gender, and the paragone The unique spatial configuration of Venice has gender implications. Most cities have an urban center, surrounded by rings of suburbs. As the most important public space, the centro is usually a masculinized site—the Florentine Piazza Signoria, guarded by statues of powerful males, amply demonstrates this point. Most cities situated on rivers have a dominant and a subordinate side: Trastevere and Oltrarno are Otherized by name to the proper and right main side. In Venice, however, one is never on the periphery. The city curls around the sinuous Grand Canal in a pair of interlocking curves, producing sestieri that exchange dominant and subordinate roles (Fig. 161). As one leaves the train station, Cannaregio on the left is dominant, and Santa Croce on the right is recessive. But at the next curve, San Polo emerges as the protuberant sestiere, while Cannaregio thins and recedes. When the curve reverses again, San Marco advances into the retreating Dorsoduro, but as the Grand Canal opens into the lagoon, Dorsoduro moves forward as the dominant flank. The labeling of projecting forms as masculine and receding forms as feminine lingers today in the terminology of electricians. Yet the thrusting push-pull of the Venetian city plan is like nothing so much as the Chinese YinYang symbol, in which masculine and feminine roles are in a state of dynamic balance and interchange. A drawing by Titian (Fig. 162) virtually replicates the schematic structure of Venice. A man and woman embrace, their bodies interlocked as complementary curved shapes. This drawing may have served Rubens for his composition of the Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus,104 yet the encounter of Titian’s figures does not look like rape, for the woman reaches to embrace her lover, turning her face to his. Energetic lines connect the interdependent masses of their bodies, and where the bodies meet, a heavy S-shaped line is inscribed, like the S-curve of the Grand Canal. The drawing indirectly suggests that the city’s gestalt—well known from the many city maps produced in his lifetime—was imprinted on Titian’s consciousness, a formal template for the principle of reciprocal balance of masculine and feminine that informs his art. In part because of their geographically distinctive situation,

Venetians understood the art-nature relationship very differently from Florentines. Venetians maintained a more reverential view of nature, and they defined its relationship with art in terms of interdependence rather than opposition. A simile constructed by Aretino (Venetian by adoption) is representative: “Nature is like a vine laden with grapes, and art, her byproduct, is the trellis which supports it.”105 In this metaphor from the natural realm, nature’s role is primary and art’s is auxiliary. Paolo Pino claimed that artists are works of nature and since nature imitates herself, they are enamored of all her works, including their own.106 Whereas Leo­nardo had alleged that the artist was a child of nature, Pino took this not only for granted, but a step farther. This extraordinary vision of artistnature symbiosis diverged radically from mid-Cinquecento art theory in central Italy and indeed seems an extension of the thought of St. Francis, who extolled the unity of all life in nature. The Venetians’ favoring of the natural framed their appreciation for the lifelike in visual imagery. Dolce’s highest praise for Titian was that “every one of his figures is alive, moves, its flesh quivers.”107 Vasari also used this trope to praise Titian. Ever the Tuscan, however, Vasari adds that the imitation of nature is not enough in itself, but must be distilled through the discipline of drawing. Dolce implicitly responds to this: “nothing offends the gaze such as contour lines, which should be avoided (since nature does not produce them).”108 For the Venetian, a successful evocation of the natural—not merely nature’s objectified details, but its living and breathing essence—was a superior achievement, since nature was a higher order of being than art. Although Dolce was sometimes equivocal on this point, he allows the textual Aretino to state the position clearly: “painting is nothing other than the imitation of nature; and the closer to nature a man comes in his works, the more perfect a master he is.”109 Titian’s commitment to nature acquired polemical significance when it was drawn into the discourse of disegno and colo­rito, the competition between design and color, which would become the longest-running paragone in Western art history. The competition was launched when Michelangelo visited Ti­ tian’s studio in Rome in 1546, to see the recently completed Danaë (Fig. 163). Vasari reports that Michelangelo gave hedging praise to Titian’s coloring and style, observing that the Venetian painter would be unsurpassable if he were aided as much by art and design as he was by nature.110 Elsewhere, Vasari has Michelangelo voice a description of oil painting as a “woman’s art,” less virile and easier to practice than fresco.111 Both Patricia Reilly and Rona Goffen have expounded the

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161.  Jacopo de’ Barbari, View of Venice, 1500. Engraving. Museo Civico Correr, Venice. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 162.  Titian, Couple in an Embrace, c. 1560. Charcoal and black chalk on blue paper. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge/The Bridgeman Art Library.

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hierarchy of gender implied in this privileging of masculine Tuscan design over feminine Venetian color. The Florentines disapproved of color unbounded by line, for it evoked the dangerous domination of the mind by emotions and senses—a danger because it implied the dominance of the feminine.112 As Reilly observed, it was not so much disegno itself as disegno’s control of colorito that the central Italians celebrated.113 It has not been noted, however, that the design vs. color paragone grew out of the longstanding gendered discourse of art vs. nature, and that the binary model was essential to both. Art and design are essentially the same, each drawing virility from its opposition to a feminine principle. But color and nature share only their feminized status, their otherness to art/ design. Inevitably, these two structurally identical discourses interpenetrated and reinforced each other. Disegno could be deemed superior by the Florentines because in the larger paradigm, it was equated with art itself, while in Venice the position of colorito was subtly strengthened by its conceptual parity with great Nature. Behind the strangely heated controversy over design and color stood larger issues that were social insofar as the relations and powers of men and women were concerned, and philosophical insofar as the relative creative powers of art and nature were involved. Titian’s Naples Danaë demonstrates the larger competitive issues at stake. The Danaë is often said to exemplify Titian’s formal competition with his rival Michelangelo, conducted through the reworking of borrowed figures, such as Michelangelo’s Leda drawing or the Medici Chapel sculptural Notte. Yet surely the most potent comparative figure is the painted Adam in the Sistine Ceiling (Fig. 164), which, when juxtaposed to the Danaë, puts the paragone into play.114 In Danaë’s echo of Adam’s pose, Venetian preferences are revealed: female not male, oil not fresco, painterly not stonelike, soft not hard, color not line. Titian’s transformation of Michelangelo’s prototype, in a picture shown to the relevant Tuscan visitors, constituted a clear rebuttal of their values, and Goffen aptly suggested that Michelangelo and Vasari must have known this. Goffen describes Titian as deliberately opposing the “paternal paradigm” of the male, godlike creator with a “feminine and maternal image.”115 In fact, this is not a maternal Danaë, for she is not shown as the mother of Perseus, but in the moment of receiving her divine lover. Yet, perhaps under competitive pressure, Titian endowed this woman with metaphysical significance. Revising Michelangelo’s visual paradigm of patriarchal generation, male creating male in his own image, Titian presents an alternative metaphor for the union of heaven and earth: neither father-

hood nor motherhood, but heterosexual intercourse, in a highly sensuous form. Far from toning down the seductive dangers ascribed to color and women, Titian exploits and ­augments their loaded combination. Unlike the heroic Adam, whose outstretched hand underlines his dependence upon his maker, Danaë is not the product of any external creative power. Indeed, it might better be said that she has summoned the god to precipitate himself upon her in a shower of gold, by sheer force of imagination and desire. Titian’s opposing of Michelangelo was spurred not by theology but by a different concept of gendered artistic creativity. In a doubly iterated form, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam structurally encoded the art theory that its creator shared with fellow Tuscans: Adam could be read either as the awakening artist, recipient of divine inspiration, or as the work of art given life by the artist’s divine hand. Although both participants are male, masculine and feminine roles are implied, for the energy runs from an active God to passive Adam. The theoretical primacy of design over color, supported by the philosophical primacy of form over matter, was applied to art as masculine form giving shape to feminine pigments (mere matter).116 Because of the continuing hegemony of the Aristotelian formula, there was no adequate theoretical defense for the partisans of color, and, beyond a generalized appeal to the lifelike, Venetian writers did not even try. Given that nature and color were paradigmatically connected, however, the most effective defense would have been to express nature’s superiority to art by drawing creatively upon nature’s implied identity with color— in other words, to give nature/color the upper hand, or at least an equal role, in the metaphoric discourse. This, I suggest, is exactly what Titian did. He embodied in his own style a discourse of form and matter in which Aristotelian dogma is challenged in visual terms, and a new principle emerges. As Titian’s style becomes increasingly painterly (Plate 9), as contours dissolve and brushstrokes become more aggressive, the form-space relationship changes. Space advances as a protagonist, competing with form for the dominant role. We cannot even continue to call it “space,” for by its very tangibility, its physical inseparability from the thick pigment that constitutes it, space has become material substance. This holds a certain philosophical logic, for if form is the constant in the two polarities—form-matter and form-space—then, according to the parallel paradigms that governed the art-nature and design-color relationships, matter and space occupy comparable positions. In Titian’s art, beginning in paintings of the 1550s, the question is no longer the priority of form or matter/ space, but of their dialectic engagement. Space has become as

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163.  Titian, Danaë, 1544–45. Oil on canvas. Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

palpable and real as form; both are constituted out of gestural strokes that create a formal and textural continuum.117 Titian still makes form act on matter (in that he moves the paint according to concepts in his mind), yet the interaction is more intimate—more like licking and shaping. The artist’s working method reveals his values. In the Naples Danaë, as in other instances, Titian began with a design used in a previous composition, then changed it completely as the painting evolved.118 The creative dimension of picture-making occurred in the working of pigments, not the initial invention. Materials are allowed to speak and forms to respond, and from their interchange the final image emerges. The Aristotelian metaphor had been structurally pristine: the artist injected virile form into passive material, and creativity was explained through the mechanics of ideal procreative sex. In Titian’s model, creativity draws metaphoric energy from the dynamic of real-life sexual intercourse (did willing women ever lie perfectly still?), female “matter” giving warmth, physi-

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cality, and grounding to the cold, sterile pattern that is mere design. In the Madrid Danaë, roles are involuted once again. Contrarily, the relaxed woman stands for receptive form, her intact shape compromised by melting boundaries, while the male god arrives as active matter, his inchoateness charged with plastic and coloristic energy. Each element vitalizes the other, like perfectly matched sexual partners who take turns playing active and passive roles. Art and nature are similarly formulated by Titian as partners whose interchange is enriched by contradictions, inversions, and reversible metaphors. Titian-as-art approaches Danaë, female nature, as an amorphous lover who seeks embodiment in their union. Alternatively, Titian-as-nature arrives in the form of sexual energy, revitalizing an overly artificed model of female beauty. The reversibility is consistent with Cinquecento Venetian attitudes about art and nature, men and women; Speroni, for example, proposed that love may produce an in­ version of masculine and feminine roles.119 The sexuality in

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164.  Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (detail of Adam), Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508–12. Fresco. Vatican, Rome. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Titian’s pictures is often explained in terms of imagined erotic possession.120 Yet, within a genre created for such tastes, Titian presents a model of gender interchange that is critically important for the dialectic relationship of art and nature. Gendered preconceptions have distorted our understanding of both Titian’s art and his motto. Its common translation as “art more powerful than nature” has not been questioned, probably for the same reason that disegno is said to have won the contest with colorito—that is, because of the continuing hegemony of Tuscan masculinist values. Similarly, Titian’s images of women have been seen far too steadily from a masculinist perspective, interpreted as sexual objects rather than as interactive partners with the invisible painter. I do not discount the substantial role Titian played in the artistic eroticization of the female body. Yet we must also consider that, as spokesman for Venetian values, Titian looked at the wider Italian art world from the viewpoint of the Other. From his secure position within the Venetian school of painting, theo-

retically gendered as feminine by the central Italians, Titian gave voice to the alternative values of his city. Would Titian have accepted an identification with the feminine?121 There are a number of ways to understand his risky adoption of a female role, but within the increasingly charged framework of gendered-style politics, this might have been a disguised power play. Significantly, a discourse of power frames the artist’s motto, however we translate it. As positions hardened in Venice and Florence following the publication of Vasari’s Lives in 1550 and Dolce’s rejoinder in 1557,122 Titian is most unlikely to have chosen a personal motto whose meaning precisely echoed the Tuscan viewpoint. Indeed, it is suggestive that Titian adopted the bear emblem and motto in response to the contemporary debate, as a way of putting distance between Venetian and Tuscan attitudes, and even to rise above the dichotomy. For, in choosing for his emblem the mother bear who both births and shapes, Titian could claim the creative powers of both nature and art. Insofar as he enjoyed

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165.  Titian, Venus with an Organist, c. 1545–48. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Prado.

a reputation predicated on an intimate relationship with nature that ranged from near-identity to surpassing her, pro­ voking her envy and replacing her, he was clearly able to have it both ways. from artifice to pastoral As Titian aged, his personal dialogue with Natura became steadily more philosophical. In the late 1550s, after a period of public visibility and high-level patronage, with honors and extravagant rhetoric lavished upon his achievements, the new Apelles, friend of princes, Knight of the Golden Spur, and honorary citizen of Rome withdrew from the art-world stage as younger artists came onto it. During his later years, when he worked almost exclusively for Philip II of Spain, Titian began to address more private concerns in his art and to probe the relation between art and nature in more diverse metaphoric terms.

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Titian’s change of temperament is registered in a group of paintings that represent a musician and Venus before a landscape. There are five in all, variations on a picture that must have invited replicas by desiring princes. The paintings were produced in two types, one in the 1540s, the other in the 1560s.123 In each, a male musician—in the first set he is an organist; in the second, a lutenist—twists to stare at the re­ clining, frontally displayed body of Venus, who ignores him, turning instead to Cupid or a dog. She is always adorned with jewelry and an elaborate coiffure. In the earlier type (Fig. 165), the landscape vista is a highly contrived park, with two formal rows of trees, a satyr fountain, an amorous couple, and various animals. In the later versions (Fig. 166), the landscape has become more rugged and natural; the musician raises his eyes to the woman’s face, while Venus now holds a flute, accompanied by a viola da gamba and books of part-music. The earlier type foregrounds the erotic overtones of musicmaking: the musician, playing an organ with conspicuously

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166.  Titian and Workshop, Venus with a Lutenist (Holkham Venus), c. 1565–67. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Munsey Fund, 1936 (36.29). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

phallic pipes, stares directly at the woman’s genitals. The organist’s fixed stare at the female body on display has led some scholars to interpret the picture as an eroticized allegory in which the organ and female body are the metaphoric site of the male’s (sexual) performance.124 In his reconceived second version of the theme, Titian changes the expressive emphasis. A boy musician now serenades the woman with a lute, in a spirit more adoring than possessive; no longer dominated but extolled, she has gained dignity. Cupid crowns her with a floral wreath, and her lap dog is replaced by a second musical instrument. Elise Goodman interpreted these pictures in a Petrarchan vein, observing that the combination of recorder, viola da gamba, and part-music evokes the madrigal, the musical genre in which a lover expresses passion for his lady. The remote

woman is the aloof idealized mistress adored by a courtier, whose beauty approaches that of Venus, the love goddess, and extends into the landscape through horticultural metaphor.125 In these pictures, Titian appears to join the Petrarchan poets in transforming Natura’s body into an overtended garden of erotic delight. It is surely no coincidence that both groups of paintings spin out fantasies of kept women, pampered like their lapdogs, at the very time that militant courtesans like Veronica Franco took up their pens to protest that debasing stereotype. Yet Titian’s Venus and Musician paintings also join other discourses. His juxtaposition of feminine and natural beauty recalls Bellini’s Woman with Mirror, suggesting that here, too, the combination proclaims the triumph of art, with the artist now metaphorically present as a musician. In the Cambridge

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version, Titian’s signature appears on the part-book, which is likely to be a sign, mutatis mutandis, of the artist’s proficiency on his chosen instrument.126 Music is a metaphor for painting in Veronese’s Marriage at Cana of 1563, where a quartet is made up of four well-known Venetian painters, with Titian playing the bass viol.127 In Titian’s earlier versions of the Venus and Musician theme, the organist gazes without impediment at the goddess’s body. He desires no more than to look at her, which she indifferently permits, his passion reduced to a shrunken, frozen satyric emblem on a distant fountain. The first version of the theme presents the dialogue of courtly lover and beloved in terms that privilege the artificial over the natural, elegance over passion. This is not surprising in a period when court culture was dominated by the stylistic affectations of Mannerism, whose devices Titian sometimes adopted. In the two Venus and Musician pictures of the 1560s, however, the balance subtly changes: artifice dissipates and rustic figures populate the landscape. New motifs, such as the flute held by the lady, imply a resumed dialogue with Giorgione. Is the lady’s flute the pastoral reedpipe awarded by the tutelary Venus to the proficient artist? If so, it surely matters that she now withholds it. Goffen would bring the viewer into the picture through the viola da gamba in the right corner, an instrument, she suggests, that is offered him as a potential participant.128 Yet if the viol is meant as an invitation—to the invisible beholder, or to the artist/musician—it is strange that its backside is turned to us. Like the woman, the instrument presents an inaccessible face. In the succession of Natura surrogates we have followed, the Dresden Venus is unaware of the quester; in the Tempesta she acknowledges him; and the Venus of Urbino seduces him. This Venus denies the quester access to her world. Titian has created a luscious landscape in her honor, where nymphs dance to a satyr’s music, but it is not enough. Like Polia, she is gone. Titian’s effort to find her again would constitute the agenda of his late works. satyrs and goats In the 1550s, Titian began to create paintings for Philip II of Spain, not to meet his patron’s specifications, but from his own imagination. In calling them poesie, he may have meant to invoke the concept of ut pictura poesis and the freedom of invention that art’s advocates claimed art shared with poetry.129 Yet by the mid-sixteenth century, the idea of pictorial invention had assumed a rather academic cast. For Dolce, it meant little more than creating ideally beautiful bodies, and when Titian described his Danaë as a poesia, he too equated pictorial invention

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with presenting the nude female body from two directions.130 In choosing the word poesia, Titian effectively announced, and may already have envisioned, the much larger expressive register of his late paintings and drawings: complete thematic inventions, which combine motifs from mythology and art, yet have no single literary source. In these highly imaginative constructions, Titian embodied ideas that were on his own mind. Representative of the new direction is a drawing of Nymph and Satyrs in a Forest (Fig. 167), a free invention in an Arcadian spirit.131 Following Dolce, scholars have interpreted the satyric landscape as a “land of lasciviousness,” and indeed the satyr is generally an archetype of male fertility and sexuality.132 Not much lust is displayed here, however. On the right, a satyr approaches a woman who gazes indifferently into the distance. In the middle, a naked woman reclines under a tree—a reprise of Giorgione’s sleeping Venus—but draws no particular attention. Instead, the satyrs industriously keep goats and gather nuts, in the hard pastoral spirit of Virgil’s Georgics, where farmers must work to reap and enjoy the fruits of their labor.133 It is a domesticated Arcadia, whose resident deity sleeps inconspicuously in the distance. In Italy, and particularly Venice, the satyr was identified with cultural man. Here, as in Dürer’s print discussed earlier (Fig. 146), satyrs consort with human women, implying a com­munity of the human and natural worlds. In Lynn Kaufmann’s interpretation, satyr families imply a “virtuous state of family life” comparable to Adam and Eve or the Holy Family, their forest setting conveying their proximity to nature and primitive innocence.134 The idea of the forest as the antithesis of civilization was largely a Northern European concept. As presented by artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer, the satyr and his counterpart, the Wild Man, were both set in opposition to civilized restraint.135 By contrast, Italian satyr families inhabited a spacious pastoral world that often included distant houses or towns, suggesting a continuum of town and country, culture and nature. In Renaissance Italy, as in antiquity, satyrs were also double agents who operated in the liminal zone between natural and cultural knowledge. It was in this spirit that Aretino assumed the identity of the satyr in his impresa. On medals, Aretino appears as a satyr crouching before naked Truth, or as a satyr head composed of phalluses. As Raymond Waddington explains, Aretino’s selection of alter-ego was linked to his role as satirist, and based on a false etymological connection between satyr and satire that was widespread in the sixteenth century.136 As a self-defined seeker of truth, Aretino identified with the

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167.  Titian, Nymph and Satyrs in a Forest, c. 1565. Pen and brown ink on cream-colored paper. Musée Bonnat, Bayonne. Photo: Musée Bonnat.

satyr on the basis of a “natural sexuality [that] attests to his innocence,” which distinguished him from fallen men and qualified him to expose them through satire.137 For Aretino at least, the satyr’s sexuality was not primarily erotic but a sign of an ingenuous state from which insight was accessible. Though not a satirist, Titian also assumed the identity of the satyr, modern man as natural man, qualified to uncover nature’s secrets. A philosophical satyr would seem to be a con­ tradiction in terms. Yet as Octavio Paz has observed, things apparently contradictory are always two faces of a single issue troubling the human psyche—a dichotomy constructed for the purpose of coping. The satyr is a perfect example. On the one hand, he is a symbol of man’s “bestial” aspects—lust, fertility, Dionysian excess—those things that connect him to the “lower” animals, which rational man has transcended. On the other hand, the satyr is also half-man and, as such, a reflective being. As a composite, the satyr represents man’s awareness of his connection with nature—not as a lower order of being but as the unknown other, the mysterious dark force that keeps life going. In Titian’s variations on this theme, man relies

upon his satyric half to ponder the natural universe or to approach Natura. If the Northern European Wild Man is the “primitive, uncontrolled id force contrasted against the civilized, restrained superego,” as one writer put it,138 the Italian satyr might correspond to the Freudian ego: a channel of communication between the id and the repressive superego. Both the satyr and Wild Man are fantasy figures who express man’s desire for connection with nature, under the pressure of separation by civilization.139 In these terms, Titian’s satyr represents a nostalgic effort to regain an imagined lost world of human-natural unity. Even Titian’s goats are double agents. In the Bayonne drawing, a satyr tugs a resisting goat, which has a will of its own. Titian once depicted a highly independent goat as the sole protagonist of a finished drawing (Fig. 168).140 By foregrounding the animal, the artist invites us to recall that goats were regarded in the antique pastoral as comrades of men and satyrs, extensions of human identity.141 (In the Horapollo, a goat is used to represent a man with sharp hearing.)142 In another

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drawing, an alert and determined goat chews at a leafy branch and holds center stage among other animals.143 The goat is again the chief protagonist in a drawing at Chatsworth (Fig. 169). In the foreground, a wild pig gazes at a reclining half-nude woman whose head is covered with drapery, while the goat stands apart from the flock and looks back toward the sleeping shepherds, a surrogate for human consciousness. This drawing has puzzled both early copyists and modern scholars, who have been unable to identify the strange woman.144 When Claude Lefebre made an engraving after the drawing, he changed her to a sleeping shepherd, presumably to fit in better with the adjacent flock and distant shepherds. Titian here presents a paradigm for unknowable nature, in thoroughly familiar codes. The woman’s body is a symbol for Nature’s body, in a form that implies its mysterious inaccessibility. Like the satyr, this half-covered, half-exposed woman appears in two aspects. The part covered is her head, the rational or operational aspect, implying that her most secret operations are concealed from us, while her mundane or generative parts are openly revealed. Next to her, a flowing mass of animal forms leads our eye from the boar below to the human figures above—a natural great chain of being. The humans sleep in an ambient they share with animals, connected through dream/sleep to the other side of consciousness. The sleeping woman symbolizes what the sentient goat observes: the continuum of nature, in both its exposed and mysterious workings. By the testimony of these works, Titian considered nature unfathomable throughout his life. Yet, ironically, he was acclaimed as the “only one to whom Nature revealed her mysteries.”145 On the strength of the standard reading (I would say, misreading) of Titian’s motto, the topos of the painter’s defeat of nature was sustained by the next generation of writers. Carlo Ridolfi claimed that “Nature, who had before considered herself insuperable, now conquered, gave in to this man,” while Giambattista Marino repeated the trope of a jealous Nature who feared being vanquished by Titian’s art.146 The theme of Titian victorious over a compliant Nature came to dominate the literature, and when, in the nineteenth century, his triumphal tomb was built in the Frari, the artist was presented as a thundering patriarch who unveils the figure of Nature in the form of a many-breasted Diana of Ephesus.147 In designing Titian’s tomb, Luigi and Pietro Zandomenighi took the image of Natura as Diana of Ephesus straight from Renaissance emblem books. Yet the monument violates Titian’s memory in a fundamental respect, by visualizing his relationship with Natura as one of dominance.

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venus and adonis In the Pardo Venus (Fig. 170), Titian gave firmer visual structure to his thoughts about man and nature. He worked on this large painting intermittently over the years, beginning it perhaps as early as 1515, resuming (or initiating) work in the 1530s or 1540s, and sending the completed work to Philip II later still.148 In a letter of 1574, Titian called the picture simply “the nude with landscape and a satyr.”149 Lomazzo described a similar painting, in Titian’s house when he died, as “a sleeping Venus, with satyrs who discover her most hidden parts (le parti più occulte), and other satyrs eating grapes and laughing drunkenly, and in the distance Adonis hunting in a landscape.”150 In both the Pardo Venus and the picture Lomazzo described, the theme of Adonis the hunter was combined with that of satyr(s) uncovering a sleeping Venus. Panofsky interpreted this combination in narrative terms—Adonis is incited to the hunt, leaving Venus to be raped by the satyr—but Lomazzo understood it metaphorically, stating that the satyr uncovers Venus’s occult secrets. The Pardo Venus is conceptually grounded in earlier Venetian pastorals. The woman sleeping in a landscape evokes Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus and her progeny, while the composition’s axial bisection by a tree, with the right half assigned to satyrs, recalls the Venetian Allegories discussed earlier (Fig. 133 and Fig. 134). The satyr uncovering the sleeping woman appears in the latter composition, while the drunken satyr in the picture described by Lomazzo appears in Lotto’s painting. The components on the left side differ slightly, for the Allegories present a child among emblems of the liberal arts, while Titian depicts Adonis’s hunt. Nevertheless, the left side of the Pardo Venus retains intellectual associations. For Panofsky, this “calm and thoughtful group” represented the vita contemplativa and balanced the vita activa of the huntsman and the vita voluptaria of the lusty satyr. A drawing that may be an early version of the “thoughtful” group shows a pair of satyrs in a landscape and a disk with astrological markings (Fig. 171). Panofsky identified these figures as Pan and his companion Silvanus.151 The astrological imagery, a sun and moon combined with concentric circles, further connects the drawing with Giorgione’s Liberal Arts frieze at Castelfranco and with the Three Philosophers, suggesting that Titian may have meant to evoke the ambient of philosophical inquiry that was pursued in the countryside in the early Cinquecento by astrologers or a satyr who might be Pan. Titian revised this concept in the painting, converting the disk into a female figure. Yet the satyr’s pose continues to telegraph

168.  Titian, Alpine Farm with Goat, c. 1512–15. Pen and brown ink. Cabinet des Dessins, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. 169.  Titian, Sleeping Nude Woman and Flock in Pastoral Landscape, c. 1565. Pen with brown ink on cream-colored paper; added wash. © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

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170.  Titian, Pardo Venus, begun c. 1515 or later; compl. by 1564. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. 171.  Titian (?), Two Satyrs in a Landscape, with Astrological Disk, c. 1510. Pen and brown ink on paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1999. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

the idea of philosophical quest, as he looks upward and beyond the woman next to him; it is almost as if she were included to be ignored, to show that the satyr has his mind on higher things.152 On the left side of the picture, woman is mere woman, disregarded by the thinking man and about to be run over by the advancing huntsman. On the right, however, woman is the focus, as object of masculine desire. The man who marches forward, stirred by the hunting horn, must be Adonis, the beautiful youth loved by Venus who was slain by a wild boar while hunting. Titian amplified their story in a composition he painted in several variants (Fig. 172).153 The Venus and Adonis shares with the Pardo Venus the figuration of Adonis advancing rightward, dogs by his side, toward the fate that Venus predicted. Logically, the right background of the Pardo Venus should contain the fatal aftermath of the huntsman’s rejection of Venus’s entreaty to stay. Yet the vignette we see instead seems to involve not Adonis but Actaeon, another hunter whose disobedience of a goddess led to his

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172.  Titian, Venus and Adonis, 1553–54. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

destruction. To punish Actaeon for intruding into the private realm of the goddess and her nymphs, Diana turned him into a stag who would be torn to pieces by his own dogs. In the background of the Pardo Venus, we see this as continuous narrative: Actaeon restraining his dogs, and then as the stag attacked by the dogs. This theme, too, was later depicted by Titian (see Fig. 173). In the Pardo Venus, Titian apparently conjoined Adonis and Actaeon as related figures, linked as huntsmen with cognate names ( Adone, Atteone), and as victims of bestial assault who are violently reclaimed to nature. Both are destroyed in what has been called a “reverse hunt,” in which the hunter becomes the prey.154 Venus and Diana are not so obviously linked, for Venus did not personally destroy the hunter (though Adonis’s transformation into a flower parallels Actaeon’s transformation into a stag). But as Titian developed the separate narra-

tives of Adonis and Actaeon, he preserved a parallel between these two prime mythological exponents of nature in her generative and destructive aspects. The reference to the Actaeon story within the Pardo Venus might function as the symbolic sequel to the satyr uncovering Venus: the potential price that man pays for violating the goddess’s secrets is death. But what of Adonis, who only wants to hunt? Since this figure appears on the “philosophical” side, one is led to ask: does Adonis’s hunt express man’s foolish challenge of dangerous nature, or does it symbolize a quest for transcendental knowledge? William Shakespeare might have replied, “both.” The relationship of Titian’s Venus and Adonis to Shakespeare’s poem of the same name (published 1593) is intriguing, for both present an Adonis who, contrary to Ovid’s account, resists Venus’s sexual entreaties. Panofsky proposed that Shakespeare drew on Titian’s painting for his atypical

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hero, and although the influence of painter on poet has been questioned,155 their shared expressive emphasis nevertheless points to a symbolic understanding of the Venus-Adonis relationship that may have been current in Renaissance thought. Coppélia Kahn has argued that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis presents the protagonists as archetypal opposites. Venus is Nature, in the sense of her rule over procreation, death, and mortality. She invites Adonis to join her in love to fulfill his obligation to the law of generation: “thou wast begot, to get it is thy duty.”156 Though attracted to the beautiful goddess, Adonis is caught between the poles of intimacy and separation, or, in Freudian terms, between love and death, eros and thanatos. His rejection of the goddess for the hunt represents, in Kahn’s reading, the hero’s defense against eros. Both Venus and the boar threaten his masculinity—she is “the devouring mother whose oral demands constitute a threat to Adonis’s very identity,” while the boar is a projection of his fear of Venus, who threatens castration. The alternative he chooses, which leads to death, is pitted against the norm of femaleruled nature.157 Titian’s depiction of Adonis as a reluctant lover has baffled writers. Raffaello Borghini faulted Titian for his unorthodoxy, “showing Adonis flee from Venus while she is embracing him, whereas he much desired her embraces.”158 Modern scholars, trying to explain the anomaly, have suggested that Titian’s Venus was, unusually, shown as a woman vulnerable to love.159 Perhaps so, yet in this composition, Venus is ancillary to Adonis. As hero, only he is allowed the complexity of contradictory emotions. Using the pose of a classical model,160 Titian heightened the goddess’s formal dependency upon her consort, presenting her as a grasping, desperate figure. She is literally destabilized, for the pair is anchored as a unit by Adonis’s supporting right leg. Adonis is the pivotal figure, both compositionally and psychologically: he turns away yet looks back, in a sturdy contrapposto that reveals his divided state of mind. (His “two minds” are restated in the contrasting positions of the dogs.) Like Hercules at the crossroads, Adonis is torn between sensuous love and the upward path of virtue. Tellingly, the horizon rises steeply on the right in all versions of the composition. Titian here departs from the prevailing Venetian conception of Adonis as the dying god, symbol of nature’s cyclical return. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili features the hero’s ritual annual mourning at his tomb and his revival by Venus, which is symbolized in the continual growth of fresh roses at the grave.161 Dolce similarly characterized Adonis as a metaphor for the seasonal cycle.162 In these renditions, the young man is a

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s­ ymbol of mortal beauty, a relatively passive object of sexual ­desire—that is, he is feminized. When Dolce wrote an extended commentary on Titian’s Venus and Adonis, he found a way to reconcile his friend’s eccentric interpretation with his own, by praising Titian’s combination of masculine and feminine qualities in Adonis.163 Yet Dolce underestimated the virility of Titian’s Adonis. Like Shakespeare, Titian gives us a mature man who chooses between Venus and the hunt. Because the hero’s will is at play, his choice to hunt assumes metaphysical significance. For medieval allegorists, the hunt was a philosophical quest. According to Marcelle Thiébaux, the chase was “metaphorically and symbolically . . . an imperative Journey by which a mortal is transported to . . . a preternatural region where he may be tested or placed under an enchantment; a transcendent universe; or the menacing reaches of the self.”164 In his Heroic Furors of 1585, Giordano Bruno described the hunt in similar terms, explaining its violent outcome, the hunter hunted to his death, as a metaphoric conversion of the intellect.165 Bruno’s sonnet and commentary describe the story of Actaeon, not Adonis, yet it applies to both. The goddess Diana, both the object of the hunter’s desire and the agent of his destruction, represents ultimate knowledge in the form of “the world, the universe, the nature which is in things.”166 Titian did not partake of Bruno’s allegorical density, yet the painter and the writer appear to have shared certain concepts. For Bruno, the hunt represents philosophical man, who seeks to know ultimate things—or nature’s secrets—and is driven by this quest over a fatal precipice of transgression. He embodied this idea in vivid visual imagery. In Bruno’s sonnet, the hunter’s dogs symbolize dimensions of his mind: the mastiffs stand for his will; the greyhounds, discursive intellect. Diana emerges from the water with only her upper body visible; her visible and hidden parts represent the sensory and intelligential worlds, respectively.167 One could speculate that Titian’s Venus and Adonis or Diana pictures suggested the images to Bruno, especially the dogs as extensions of the hunter’s will. But it is simpler to understand the relationship as analogous thinking. Titian and Bruno both combine two themes—the hunter’s quest for transcendent knowledge of nature and the hunter’s sensual attraction to the goddess—to express his transformation into an excited and heightened state that leads him to direct apprehension of the divine, and to his own destruction. In Titian’s Venus and Adonis, the benign goddess draws on the power of eros to help prevent the hunter’s self-destruction. The Pardo Venus expands on this concept. The Actaeon allusion

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underlines the danger of the hunt, while Cupid incites the satyr’s ardor to help Venus persuade Adonis to follow the vita sensualis. Such a reading would be consistent with literary texts that point to the greater wisdom of following Venus than following Diana. In The Lusiads (1572) of the Portuguese writer Luis de Camoëns, the young king Sebastian has refused to marry, pouring his passion instead into the hunt. He is counseled to turn from the hunt to love and marriage, and is compared with Actaeon, who might better have gazed upon the beautiful Venus.168 In both of Titian’s Venus and Adonis compositions, Cupid represents an aspect of masculine will that has been called “truant male desire.”169 In the Madrid Venus and Adonis (Fig. 172), Cupid is sleeping, resistant and cold; he surely figures Adonis’s closed heart, which, as in Shakespeare, “sleeps alone.”170 In the New York version, an animated Cupid pulls to the left, countering Adonis’s rightward march. Protectively holding the dove of Venus, he sides with the comforts of nurturing love. Cupid’s actions subtly tilt the expressive emphasis in these compositions of opposing and nearly equal wills: in the Madrid version, Adonis’s departure seems inevitable, while in the New York version, Venus may yet hold him back. The boy’s alternative responses to the action convey the ambivalence of the mythic Adonis, and perhaps that of the real Titian. The artist was similarly faced with the choice to flee from or join a Venus/Natura who threatened his independent masculinity. Titian produced replicas of both versions over time, but in his later conception of the composition, he appears to side with comfort over adventure. Can we detect in this a form of separation anxiety? Is the painter unwilling to assert his will against that of Natura? Does he hesitate to go beyond nature’s sensory aspects, her naturata, to confront the more awesome natura naturans? Diana was more dangerous than Venus, as the young Portuguese king was counseled, and Titian will give visual form to that danger. diana and actaeon In the Diana and Actaeon pictures, Titian takes up a new figure of nature: the powerful Artemis/Diana who punishes the male quester for violating her boundaries. In Titian’s two versions of the Actaeon theme, the goddess’s agency and the huntsman’s violent end are dramatized beyond contemporary precedent, and the dynamic opposition of the protagonists dominates the narrative. The earlier and better-known version (Plate 10), painted for Philip II in 1556–59,171 presents the moment of Actaeon’s fatal intrusion into Diana’s grotto, forbidden to

masculine eyes, where she bathes naked with her band of nymphs. Contemporary images of the theme present Actaeon as already half-stag, transformed by a goddess who is indistinguishable from her cohort.172 In Titian’s picture, a fully human Actaeon confronts his prominent adversary across an agitated field of moving bodies—two figures joined by their locked gazes and antiphonal gestures. In a brilliant reading of this picture, Marie Tanner emphasized Titian’s compositional originality and his presentation of Diana/Artemis as a regal figure with multiple dimensions.173 Crowned with a crescent lunar diadem, she is shown in her merged identity with the Greek moon goddess Luna (or Selene), as Correggio had earlier depicted her.174 The adjacent dark-skinned attendant represents the goddess’s nocturnal aspect, evoking the black Diana, as Diana of Ephesus was sometimes figured in antiquity and the Renaissance, an aspect reinforced by the crescent curves of the attendant’s arms and yoke of her chemise.175 In her aspects of light and dark, hidden and known, the moon goddess also embraced the identity of Fortuna, who was depicted in Renaissance images as black, or as half-white and half-black.176 Since Fortune rules Fate, Actaeon’s transgression results in his demise at the hands of the nature goddess who dispenses man’s fate within the natural order that he tests.177 Ovid set up this story as an encounter between art and nature when he described Diana’s grotto as “not produced by any art,” but instead by nature herself, whose “own Genius had imitated art; she had erected a natural arch of live pumice stone and soft tufa.”178 Nature’s architecture is shown by Titian as a combination of Gothic vaulting and rusticated piers, a referent that would have been recognized by Renaissance Italians, who perceived the Gothic as an artless, ill-proportioned style that looked like trees and branches, and understood rustication to connote nature. Panofsky somewhat whimsically concluded that the structure’s ruined state, combined with the tilted basin, “gives the impression that nature is reclaiming her own.”179 This is an important insight, and it explains the real action of the painting. The shifting architectural fragments suggest that this is a natural bower concealed as art, which turns out to be the dissolving house of Actaeon’s fate.180 His transgressive intrusion has set the wheel of Fortune in motion, momentarily destabilizing the goddess and her nymphs, and activating Diana’s destructive powers. This metamorphosis of setting precedes that of the hero, offering him a brief vision of his fate. Suddenly, things are not what they had seemed: the vaulted structure reassumes arboreal form, the basin slides into the

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stream, and Actaeon watches a simple pier become his cenotaph. As a female archetype whose garden/grotto proves fatal to the male who enters it, Titian’s Diana is marked by the same sinister stripe that defines Ariosto’s Alcina, Tasso’s Armida, and Spenser’s Acrasia. Those antiheroines of poetry are not goddesses, of course, only magical impersonators who (reversing Titian) practice their dark arts in a bower of artifice concealed as a natural garden. Still, a core dynamic is preserved in the recurrent features: the secret grotto whose violation spells disaster, and the woman’s exercise of magical powers in the name of nature. Spenser is said to have modeled the Bower of Bliss on Ovid’s description of the grotto of Diana.181 The nearconflation of the goddess with her impersonators, who wield increasingly dangerous powers, points to a parallel change in Diana’s own identity and by extension that of nature as well. When Diana of Ephesus appeared in Cartari’s Imagini as Natura, Venus was supplanted as the primary symbol of nature.182 Diana, identified in antiquity with the triple goddess, was simplified in the Renaissance into a goddess of double natures like Venus. Yet Diana’s duality was more ominous, signaled in the metaphor of the moon’s two faces.183 Her lighted side rules physical, visible nature, comparable to Venus’s natural realm, but her dark side includes all the negative nuances that accrue to feminine-gendered night and darkness: occult, secret, mysterious, treacherous. Diana’s alleged “duplicity” referred not only to her twofoldness but also to the capricious behavior she shared with Fortuna. She was shaded as well by Hecate, one of the oldest forms of the triple goddess, whom early Christians called the “queen of witches.” Finally, Diana differed from Venus in her inviolability and dangerous agency. In antiquity, she was said to declare, “no one has lifted my veil”—unlike the passive sleeping Venus—and in the Renaissance, she was defined as an active protector of nature’s secrets.184 The Actaeon story is a powerful metaphor for the risk involved in the artist’s quest to acquire Nature’s creative powers: he who would hunt Nature down to her secret hiding place might find the tables turned. Ovid recounts that when Actaeon intrudes, the goddess’s comrades hasten to cover her exposed body. She retaliates, sealing the hunter’s doom with a sprinkling of water. Titian’s Diana accomplishes this with a fiery gaze that signals Ovid’s portentous words: “Now you can tell that you have seen me unveiled—that is, if you can tell.”185 By an irony of Dianian fate, the artist/hunter who dares take on Natura’s identity is indeed absorbed into nature, but now as game—mute naturata, whose final form will be the animal-skin

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trophies that the victorious Diana naturans hangs on branches. (You don’t see the skins at first; their concealment renders them more ominous.) Actaeon has brought this on himself. By challenging the goddess, or desiring her, he makes her his prey. The goddess who cannot tolerate such objectification imposes a punishment that fits the crime, setting fate in motion by reversing the operations of the hunt. The horror of being transformed into a voiceless animal while retaining human consciousness is dramatized in Titian’s rendering of the story’s brutal sequel. The Death of Actaeon (Fig. 173), perhaps planned as early as 1559, was not painted until the 1560s or ’70s.186 Diana dominates this picture, holding the foreground plane as Actaeon had done in the earlier work. Tall, powerful, and aggressive, she strides forward, having let fly an arrow from a long, double-arced bow, which has implicitly struck its target (though neither bowstring nor arrows are visible). Titian diverges in minor ways from Ovid’s account, but he is faithful to its expressive core.187 In Ovid, the metamorphosis is chillingly described by degrees: “She lengthened his neck, brought the tips of his ears to a point, changed his hands to feet, his arms to long legs, and covered his body with a dappled skin. Then she put panic fear in his heart as well.” As the hero tries to escape, he sees his new reflection in the water, and horrified, tries to exclaim, but no words come. Titian’s wildly gesticulating Actaeon is an ideogram of panic fear. He loses human identity in stages, acquiring a cervine head and flattened, inorganic legs, his fleeting consciousness screaming from the muscled torso. Most sixteenth-century images of Actaeon show him as a man with the head of a stag who continues to behave like a human. The hero’s appearance here in a state of dwindling capacity offers a far more threatening image to the male viewer, for in every critical respect, the image reverses the elements of masculine dominance. Part deer and part man, Actaeon is the dystopic counterpart of the satyr, with the bestial part where the brain should be. When Jupiter as satyr advanced on the sleeping woman, he chose a moyenbestial form as an enabling disguise. Actaeon’s animality was decreed by the goddess, his punishment for trying to steal nature’s secrets. In this reversal of the gender dynamic, he is immobilized, and she is empowered to act. Diana is triumphantly reclothed with an Amazonian breast bared, while Actaeon is stripped of clothing, rationality, and power. He will know nature, but from the wrong end of the chain of being. The pictorial energies of the Death of Actaeon express the goddess’s unqualified powers and the man’s humiliated impotence. Surrounded by an expanding spatial envelope, she releases the canine energies upon the contracting, shrinking

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173.  Titian, The Death of Actaeon, 1560s or ’70s. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London. Photo © The National Gallery, London.

Actaeon. Titian gives form to the unthinkable: the punishment of man-as-quester by an all-powerful female divinity, a morally indifferent Nature who is blind to his suffering.188 Titian’s debased masculine position is the more extraordinary for its difference from other readings of the myth, particularly that of Giordano Bruno. For Bruno, the dogs’ devouring of Actaeon was a rite of passage that led to the hero’s transcendent vision of divine Nature. The dogs free Actaeon “from the snares of the perturbing senses and the fleshly prison of matter,” so that he now sees the goddess with a unified perspective.189 Through

a metamorphosis that is virtually apotheosis, Actaeon has gained access to this divinity; he walks the earth as Diana’s familiar companion.190 Thus would Bruno redeem the dan­ gerously disempowered hero. Titian’s Actaeon, by contrast, dies an ignominious death, unredeemed by transcendence. Yet, although Titian dramatizes the hunter’s punishment rather than his ascent to divinity, his visual language hints at the kind of transcendental unity Bruno describes. Indeed, the contrasting mythographies of Actaeon presented by Titian and Bruno share one important

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philosophical formulation, so distinctive that the painter’s influence upon the writer has been suggested.191 Bruno’s Diana was the manifestation of God (in his term, Amphitrite) in the physical world; through the “mirror of similitudes,” she reflects the perfection of invisible, superior divinity. Bruno sees this Dianian world as infused with qualities of the supreme being, in keeping with his belief in the unity of all matter and form in the universe. Like Lucretius, who strongly influenced his philosophy, Bruno imagined a universe in which “that which is generated” is permeated by “that which generates.”192 He described this world in vivid sensory imagery: “It is impossible for anyone to see the sun, the universal Apollo and absolute light . . . but very possible to see its shadow, its Diana, the world, the universe, the nature which is in things, the light shining through the obscurity of matter and so resplendent in the darkness.” As we will see, Titian’s late paintings similarly offered a visual metaphor for a Lucretian atomistic universe in which naturata is impregnated and energized by naturans. The Diana and Actaeon accomplishes this largely in narrative terms, presenting a dramatic confrontation of art and nature at the instant when the hunter is granted a revelatory vision. Indeed, the great rose curtain that is lifted behind him dramatizes the theme of unveiling. Titian’s Actaeon, like Bruno’s, experiences an epiphany, the revelation of divinity, and he sees his own place—art’s place—as a part of the great natural order. In the goddess’s grotto, as vegetation overtakes the vault and the death-skull horns intertwine with branches, architectural art yields to nature’s greater art, which makes things change their form and drives the motions of the universe. In this moment between two worlds, Titian’s dissolving brushstroke tells us, Actaeon recognizes both the limits of art’s power and the illusory nature of the distinction between naturans and naturata, which he now sees bound together, unified in flux. Actaeon sees that, as Shakespeare’s Polixenes described it, “art itself is nature.”193 the Flaying of Marsyas They found me dangling where his golden wind Inflicted so much music on the lyre That no one could have told you what he sang. James Merrill, “Marsyas”

The transgressive satyr, the rebellious Adonis, the hubristic Actaeon and his horrible punishment: because Titian depicted these figures by choice, it is difficult to deny that they held

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metaphoric relevance for his own artistic odyssey. This is not to interpret the pictures in simple autobiographical terms. The painter’s constructed masculine self undoubtedly overlapped with the historical Titian, but my interest here is in the artistic identity he created through metaphoric stand-ins: the ideated figure of the male artist, the shaman in skins, who tests Nature’s limits. Through sequential narratives of gendered encounters, he tries to learn her secrets, resists her, challenges her, and is profoundly punished. What were the real risks for which these themes were metaphors? The biographical fallacy notwithstanding, Titian’s art-contextual position suggests an answer. The construct of art triumphant over nature, though imposed on Titian, was probably not his own. The evidence of the paintings indicates that Titian resisted joining the partisans of art over nature. Yet, in the Cinquecento, this was the losing position. Vasari’s relative neglect of the Venetians in his first edition of the Lives (1550) prompted Dolce to defend the Venetian school. Vasari, in turn, heightened his critique of Titian and the Venetians in his 1568 edition, revealing both contempt for and profound misunderstanding of Titian’s later work.194 By then, the polarization of disegno and colorito was complete. If power lay with the pen, the Tuscans were ascendant, for while disegno-promoting treatises steadily multiplied in the 1580s (Lomazzo, Armenini, Borghini), there would be no new defense of Venetian colorito until Marco Boschini took up the cause in 1660. Even Boschini’s defense of Venetian colorito and naturalism was only an interlude. By the eighteenth century, Sir Joshua Reynolds reasserted the academic Tuscan bias, faulting Titian for “too much nature and not enough art.”195 As Titian sounded the theme of Nature’s great and dangerous powers, he faced another risk. In a culture that was becoming increasingly secular, nature’s avatars began to be perceived as illusory. Dolce, for example, said of one of Titian’s Venuses that she looked “the way one must believe that Venus would have looked if she ever existed [italics mine].” By the later sixteenth century, Venus had become reduced for many literati, in Harry Berger’s words, to “a kind of intertextual allusion.”196 When her formerly awesome cosmic powers were not dismissed out of hand, they were scorned (or, as we see in chapter 8, carefully contained) in a social world that was increasingly dominated by advocates of art’s superiority. For all his worldly fame, Titian must have felt somewhat out of fashion in his late years, as the advocate of naturalism in the age of maniera. The Flaying of Marsyas (Fig. 174) would seem to embody such feelings. The Marsyas and the Nymph and Shepherd (Plate 11)

174.  Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, 1570–76. Oil on canvas. Archbishop’s Palace, Kromeríz, Czech Republic. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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were among the pictures that Titian was working on at the end of his life, painted for himself alone.197 Both pictures have resisted interpretation. The Flaying of Marsyas presents a familiar narrative, yet Titian’s depiction of King Midas with his own features—a transparent signal that theme and self were connected—has found no convincing interpretative context.198 The Nymph and Shepherd is not obviously autobiographical, yet it is thematically obscure. Interpretation has failed in part, I believe, because scholars have treated these and other late Titian paintings as separate, unconnected narratives or allegories. I propose that if they are considered as thematic vari­ ations within the discourse of art and nature, as with Gior­ gione’s enigmatic paintings, these pictures speak to us clearly and specifically. Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas dramatizes the story’s final episode, when Apollo strips Marsyas of his skin, having defeated him in the musical contest. Many commentators have been repelled by the image of the bleeding and humiliated Marsyas, flayed and splayed. Titian’s emphasis upon the violence of Apollo’s punishment was not unusual, however, in Marsyas pictures of the Cinquecento.199 More distinctive was his depiction of the victim as a satyr, in a period when he was typically shown as a human male. For the concept of a satyric Marsyas hanging upside down, Titian drew on Giulio Romano’s design for a fresco in Mantua.200 Other figures taken from Giulio’s drawing include the musician Apollo, the two executioners, the satyr with water bucket, and the figure of Midas, whom Apollo gave ass’s ears for having erroneously voted for Marsyas in the contest. In Titian’s departures from his Mantuan source, we can detect his own position. Whereas Giulio’s Midas covers his eyes in horror or shame, Titian’s Midas is a pensive, brooding observer whose emotions are not revealed. He meditates, not on his own punishment (the ears are scarcely visible), but on that of Marsyas. The viewer, too, is asked to meditate on this theme, by two figures within. Marsyas stares at us with a cold and frightened eye, as does the boy on the right, a newcomer to the composition. What, they ask, do we think of this gruesome ritual? Marsyas’s challenge was normatively interpreted as a wrongful act justly punished by Apollo.201 In the Renaissance as in antiquity, Apollo’s lyre was the Pythagorean symbol of the harmony of the spheres, ruled and tempered by the sun god. The arrogant Marsyas upset this order with his rude flute, a wind instrument associated with the rustic world and inflamed emotions. As regulator of universal harmony and welltuned bodies, Apollo was associated with the mind, elevated

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concepts and ineffable truths. Marsyas represented sensuality and primitive passions; in his sin of pride, he stood for the hubris of the vulgar that must be expiated. Their opposition was interpreted allegorically as wisdom vs. ignorance, or, Apollonian clarity vs. Dionysiac darkness. Florentine Neoplatonists interpreted Apollo’s flaying of the satyr as a stripping away of outer earthly self to liberate spiritual essence.202 Following Dante’s prayer to Apollo (“Enter my breast, and so infuse me with your spirit as you did Marsyas when you tore him from the cover of his limbs”), Pico della Mirandola stressed Marsyas’s redemption through his agony.203 Pico conceived Marsyas as a Socratic silene (as did Raphael in the Stanza della Segnatura ceiling), following Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates is identified with Marsyas, whose rough silenic exterior concealed inner virtues and who similarly moved his listeners to “sacred rage.”204 In the continuing Platonist reading, the silenic Marsyas was honored solely for his spiritual transformation. With all the virtues of the universe piled up on Apollo’s side, one wonders about the overkill of ignominy that is a consistent feature of the Marsyas legend and its interpretations. Why does the victor exact so savage a punishment?205 Not only is winning not enough, but a man on the losing side of the vote, Midas, must be ridiculed for his wrong judgment. One senses a displacement into the Apollo-Marsyas story of passions born elsewhere. And, indeed, Edith Wyss has identified a current of thought that associated Marsyas and his supporters with crude natura, and offered Apollo and Minerva as paradigms for accomplished ars. A harpsichord cover painted by Bronzino pre­ sents Apollo “dissecting” Marsyas, a virtual cadaver lying flat on the ground, as if to emphasize that the perfection of art is based on scientific study. Marsyas is associated with nature by a plant that grows at his crotch. In Wyss’s reading, the punishment of Marsyas is presented as scientific surgery performed by Apollo medicus upon an inept, rustic artist; the punishment of Midas represents justifiable revenge taken upon a wrongminded critic.206 When Bronzino’s panel was reproduced in a Venetian engraving of 1562, the engraver’s dedication explained that “the major lesson to be learned from the favola of Marsyas was a warning against overbearing judgment.” By this time, the theme must have been widely understood as primarily about artistic judgment. Tintoretto’s Contest of Apollo and Marsyas, painted for Aretino in 1544–45, stresses the deliberation before the verdict, delivered by, not Midas, but three judges, one of whom resembles Aretino himself.207 This is a clear nod to Aretino as arbiter of Venetian taste and, as Wyss interprets

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it, he has replaced the inept Midas, who would have taken the side of vulgar and uninformed taste. But as Raymond Wadding­ ton more convincingly suggests, it would have pleased Aretino more for Tintoretto to connect his patron with Midas’s support of Marsyas, in the light of Aretino’s scornful descriptions of Apollo (an “appetizing charmer”), and his self-identification with satyrs and “crude truthfulness.”208 As with Aretino, so with Titian? Contrary to prevailing critical opinion,209 it is by no means certain that Titian meant to align himself with the forces of Apollo. In its structural lan­ guage, Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas seems instead to question the conventional positions while providing an enlarged range of application. First, Titian rearranges Giulio’s composition, rectifying the formerly diagonal torture tree to create a strong central axis marked by the satyr’s body.210 This heightens the antithetical relationship of executioners and witnesses: the champions of Apollo are on the left side, Marsyas’s rustic entourage is on the right. Simultaneously, Midas is drawn into an oppositional relationship with the figure on the far left, who may be a second image of Apollo.211 Whereas Midas looks down, in a pose that echoes Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Jeremiah to express melancholic despondency, Apollo is positioned higher and looks to heaven, like Raphael’s St. Cecilia, his ecstasy instilled by celestial music.212 Surprisingly, most commentators have assumed that Titian’s Midas has recanted his mistaken support of Marsyas and now meditates upon his error.213 We must beware of an uncritical perpetuation of the Tuscans’ bias. Considering Titian’s lifelong pictorial involvement with satyrs, I suggest that we here see Titian/Midas meditating not on his own failed abilities, but on the lamentable punishment of a natural, Dionysiac art by an increasingly authoritative Apollonian faction. The satyr is now punished, not for challenging the natural order but for challenging art. Titian’s personal identification with the flayed Marsyas can also be inferred from an already famous analogy: Michelangelo’s self-image in the flayed skin held by St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Last Judgment. This image of self-abasement has reminded many scholars of the Apollo-Marsyas myth, especially in its proximity to the judging Christ, who carries Apollonian associations.214 For Michelangelo, the Marsyan identity could have embraced a complex mixture of attitudes, from god-challenging artistic ambition to self-punishment for arrogance and earthly desires: Apollo/Christ was his personal judge, the skin his carcere terreno, shed willingly for divine salvation. These are not Titian’s terms, yet his celebrated rival’s identification with the flayed Marsyas would have been a point

of reference, and perhaps a point of departure.215 Spiked as the Flaying of Marsyas is with allusions to the paragone of the titans, it is likely that the Apollonian faction that deals Titian/Marsyas his fate represent the partisans of Michelangelo, who were ascendant in the 1570s. Unlike the Last Judgment, Titian’s Marsyas doesn’t take sides; rather, it juxtaposes values. Titian is punished twice: as Marsyas for being his natural and rustic self, and as Midas for affirming the “wrong” values of the colorists. Apollo also appears twice in the picture, as the agent of Marsyas’s punishment and the celebrant of Apollonian values. At best, Titian/ Midas’s dejected silence represents his disbelief in the values of the dominant power position; at worst, he may question the worth of his own position. One senses his predicament in the baleful cry of Ovid’s Marsyas: “Why do you tear me from myself?” 216 That question was solidly grounded, for modern psychology has taught us that artistic creativity is not merely a rational process, but draws vitally upon intuitive and libidinal energies.217 (Art, indeed, is generated in the unconscious, where the rational intellect may truly be said to receive the collaborative assistance of creative nature.) As the artist who had drawn nature into his very identity, Titian would need to recant his own identification with the instinctual and untheoretical—that is, divest an essential part of himself—in order to succeed in the new terms. As he reworked Giulio’s design, however, Titian may have approached the theme with increasing self-confidence, for his addition of the satyr child and two dogs effectively strengthened his own position vis-à-vis the Apollonians. In the Marsyas, as in the Rotterdam picture (Fig. 159), the boy holding a large dog may stand for the artist’s symbiotic collaboration with nature. The addition of these figures increased the partisans of Marsyas to five (if we include the dogs), more than their number of opponents. Their presence would not constitute a victory in Apollonian terms, but it suggests that nature’s allies inhabit a larger universe. The small dog who laps up Marsyas’s blood, a detail that has seemed grotesque to many, is a significant touch. Indifferent to moralities, the little dog helps reclaim the satyr to nature, just as the blood and the tears of his supporters were said by mythographers to have formed the river Marsyas. The identification with nature that Titian reasserted in the Marsyas persisted to the end. In the Pietà of 1576 (Fig. 175), a painting intended for his own tomb, the artist again included a self-portrait, now as a devoted follower of Christ, probably St. Jerome, who penitently approaches the Savior and Virgin positioned in a large architectural niche.218 It is remarkable that

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175.  Titian, Pietà, 1576. Oil on canvas. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

writers have seen Titian’s signature presence only in the figure of St. Jerome. For why has Titian created an architectural setting of the rusticated type, if not to signal that his devotional homage to Christ occurs within an imaginary house that represents himself, the artist’s own hope for resurrection played against the emblem of his artistic affiliation and identity? This architectural metaphor would be an appropriate variation on Titian’s identification with satyrs and the natural realm in general. In Serlio’s influential architectural theory, Satiric stage scenery was to be used for satires, to accompany “characters who spoke their mind, that is to say, rustic folk.”219

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Following Vitruvius, Serlio connected the architectural orders with different levels of refinement, identifying the Rustic with nature, and Doric or Corinthian with human art. He recommended the mixture of nature and art in the combination of Rustic with Doric, approvingly describing a Tuscan gate, in which columns banded by Rustic stones and the architrave interrupted by voussoirs revealed “the work of nature,” while the capitals, cornice, and pediment represented “the work of the hand.”220 In Titian’s invented niche, we see just such a mixture: through the metaphor of architecture, as in that of the mother bear, the painter identifies himself as the agent of both nature and art.

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finale The Flaying of Marsyas is considered by some writers to have been unfinished at Titian’s death. Other scholars disagree, noting that the picture is signed.221 However, like the aged Michelangelo, Titian continuously changed his late works, and “finish” was not their purpose. In their ninth decades, the two Renaissance giants tested the limits of formal possibility, producing artistic breakthroughs that held both aesthetic and philosophical consequences. The atomic unit of Titian’s new pictorial universe is the brushstroke or macchia, whose varied repetition across the surface dissolves objects and unites form and space as a continuum. 222 As in twentieth-century quantum mechanics, there are no such things as solids and voids, only a continuum of molecular structures constantly in motion. Titian dramatized what he could not literally have known, endowing form and space with an energy that produced a vision of instability and change—of forces, not things, in continuous motion. Although this understanding anticipated modern physics, Titian could have gained such a vision of the universe from Lucretius or Ovid, as had Leo­nardo. Yet Titian went beyond Leo­nardo in the formal discourse. Leo­nardo dissolved contours, initiating the merging of form with space, but he did not set form-space in motion; his three-dimensional objects remain relatively stable and static. Titian’s brush instaurates movement as the driving force of the universe, and it is his depiction of forms in motion that connects him—as is commonly recognized—with the Baroque style soon to come. Titian may have lost the battle of colorito-disegno, but he won the larger war of style. The ascendancy of space-matter in Titian’s late work established a visual paradigm for the transformation of the artnature dyad. Against the Aristotelian masculinist norm, Titian claims pictorially that space and matter now matter more than form, for the shifting brushstroke is all we see, and form constantly dissolves under the aggressive action of the surrounding materio-spatial continuum. In this metaphoric expression of the creative action of nature upon art, natura naturans emerges as the prime operative agent. A painting such as the Nymph and Shepherd (Plate 11) provides a precise counterpart to Giordano Bruno’s description (cited earlier) of a world in which nature “is in things,” where matter is infused with light, air is thick with substance, and darkness glows resplendently. In the so-called Nymph and Shepherd, a man and a woman are together in a murky pastoral realm. This picture’s subject, if there is one, has baffled everyone; no single identification of the characters has been accepted. Perhaps most plausible is

Gentili’s suggestion that the figures are Bacchus and Ariadne, on account of their panther skins and his ivy crown, though not in a known narrative relationship.223 In my metanarrative reading, the painter has returned to the discourse of art and nature, recapitulating earlier formulations of his own and Giorgione’s. The man who approaches the reclining woman reenacts the satyr’s advance upon sleeping Natura. With his instrument in hand and his eyes on the reclining woman, he evokes the organist’s surveillance of the body of Venus. However, he no longer controls the woman, for she holds the center and wields the power of the gaze. The woman’s backturned pose and hand between her thighs connect her to the Giorgionesque model of Campagnola’s Venus in a Landscape (Fig. 126),224 but now she is awake, turning to respond to the flutist and to us. With her right hand, this “nymph” evokes the generative act of self-stimulation that identifies her as Natura. Like the seated woman in Giorgione’s Tempesta, she fixes us with a cold sharp eye. As in the Tempesta, the man and woman meet as near equals. The “shepherd” wears rustic dress covered by a panther skin, as if to feign a Bacchic identity through a cloak that is not his own. Yet his collective attributes identify him as the artist-quester created by Giorgione and developed by Titian, whose pursuit of Natura’s rewards was expressed metaphorically through the changing identities of musician, shepherd, pilgrim, and satyr. The Nymph and Shepherd revives both a Giorgionesque theme and the ideal of gender parity, which by 1570 were distinct anachronisms. But this return must be seen as part of a larger recapitulation, in which Titian reenacted the progression of the masculine quest that Poliphilo and Giorgione had followed. In chapter 6, we traced the artist’s changing relationship with nature through four stages: from inquiry (Sleeping Venus), to rebellion (Three Philosophers), to dramatic encounter (Tempesta), to union (Concert champêtre). This course is repeated in the probable sequence of Titian’s mature pictures. The Pardo Venus parallels the Sleeping Venus as a philosophical speculation about a remote Natura, now in amplified form. The Venus and Adonis reframes the masculine challenge to Natura’s powers presented in the Three Philosophers. The explosive climax of the protagonists’ encounter comes for Giorgione in the Tempesta, and for Titian in the Diana and Actaeon. This was followed by the harmonious resolution of the Concert champêtre, a joint creation of Giorgione and Titian. The Nymph and Shepherd corresponds to the Concert. Like its forerunner, the Nymph and Shepherd hints at union between the now-solitary man and woman, but in more complex and poignant terms. There passes between them, as

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Gentili beautifully describes, a glance of melancholic regret, of impotent consciousness.225 We see the pair as through a veil— vibrating, shimmering, insubstantial forms—as if existence itself were conditional. Like the Marsyas, this picture was painted in large and bold strokes of paint, some slashing and some trembling and delicate, that establish an ambient of instability and change. Sky and horizon merge in a turbulent whirl, as if the sunset had caused the earth to burst into flames and dissolve. As Fritz Saxl put it, “nature is in an uproar.”226 In this uncertain, darkening world, two figures—the last left on earth?—are in intimate yet still tentative communion. They are nearer to each other than we have ever seen them before, but their union is still only a prospect. He hesitates, as if awaiting her response; she has turned away, seemingly inaccessible, yet she pauses to look back as if she expects something from him, or us. On a crest beyond the figures, silhouetted against the flaming sky, a goat mounts a tree stump to gnaw at its last remaining branch (Fig. 176). This secondary protagonist, ignored by most commentators, was identified by André Chastel as the ardita capra, the daring goat who appeared on antique sarcophagi as companion of the earth goddess, Terra, and on antique gems in the company of shepherds.227 This combination distantly echoed ancient Mesopotamian myth and imagery (Fig. 177), in which the upright, grazing goat flanked the Tree of Life as archetypal signifier of the nature goddess.228 The daring goat survived in Greco-Roman art primarily as an emblem of the pastoral world, an association that continued in the Middle Ages, with altered signification.229 Because of its pastoral connotations, Titian’s goat has been taken by some scholars merely to signify the bucolic realm.230 But Titian here combines the motif of the daring goat with another image—the living shoot growing from a dead tree, which carries its own symbolic history. As we have seen, this figure was used to symbolize regeneration, whether of family lines such as the Medici, or of masculine virtù, particularly through the arts. Leo­nardo sketched a regenerating tree stump, with the note: “Albero tagliato che rimette—ancora spero.” 231 As an all-purpose metaphor, the spontaneously regenerating stump presented a generally optimistic vision of miraculous return or survival, by way of an example from nature. Titian fuses two natural metaphors to create a new one, whose meaning is more difficult to specify. Does the theme of vegetal renewal represent the spontaneous regeneration that is part of nature’s cycle, or the self-renewing endurance of art? Is the daring goat a sign of Nature, or a figure of the artist who dares to challenge her? We must be guided by Titian’s earlier

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use of related imagery. In the Sleeping Woman drawing at Chatsworth (Fig. 169), the goat thoughtfully contemplates the mysterious Terra; he is a quasi-human protagonist, and the reclining woman is Nature. The analogy suggests that, here too, the goat is a stand-in for the voracious and inquisitive artist. In his goat guise, the artist continually ruts at nature, which keeps on regenerating. This would complement the relationship of the human figures. The sturdy goat’s determination to have the fruit of regenerating nature is contrasted with the shepherd’s hesitant approach to the goddess.232 The goat and tree motif would thus provide a note of optimism that is implied by the reflourishing branch, offering the tentative quester a natural example in which nature’s endurance is guaranteed and (artistic) tenacity is rewarded. But there are signs that this image may not be so optimistic. If, in Giorgione’s Three Philosophers, the desiccating cave and its living shoots of ivy and fig referred to female Nature’s withdrawal and masculine art’s ascent, then perhaps the dead stump in the Nymph and Shepherd represents a departing Natura, whom the goat vainly attempts to keep alive. Might the picture be a metaphor for the death of nature, rather than its endurance? The formal instability and questioning mood of the painting would support such an interpretation, as would its dark setting, which has been interpreted by many writers as an ominous sign of tragedy and foreboding.233 The idea that Nature is departing draws support from an encoded reference. It has been noted that the shepherd’s pose recalls that of Polyphemus in the Villa Farnesina fresco by Sebastiano del Piombo (Fig. 178).234 This quotation of a familiar figure must have been purposeful, for Titian surely didn’t need a model. Perhaps he meant to evoke the emotional state of Polyphemus, who sits alone on a promontory, watching the departure of his beloved Galatea and lamenting his loss. In recalling Sebastiano’s Polyphemus, Titian signals his own thematic shift: it’s no longer that Nature is rendered obsolete, as Giorgione briefly boasted, but that she is leaving him. Like Polia in the Hypnerotomachia, Titian’s Natura, his anima, is departing, returning to her sleep. The idea that he is losing contact with her may have been prompted by cultural changes such as urbanization or emergent science, yet Titian’s Nymph and Shepherd effectively expresses the extent to which the artist saw nature dying in his time. A nineteenth-century American art critic wrote of a Dying Centaur sculpture that the centaur was dying because no one believed in him anymore. Titian’s own idea of nature, similarly, no longer matched general cultural belief, and must have seemed increasingly alien to those artists and scientists who shared a commitment to dominate

176.  Titian, Nymph and Shepherd (detail of goat and tree stump), 1570s. Oil on canvas. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. 177.  Goat and Tree. Sumerian offering stand from the royal tombs of Ur, c. 2600 bce. Wood, gold, and lapis lazuli. University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia (Pennsylvania Museum object 30-12-702, image no. 152054). 178.  Sebastiano del Piombo, Polyphemus, 1511. Fresco. Sala di Galatea, Villa Farnesina, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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a nature deemed not to be alive. The Nymph and Shepherd carries this understanding of the pass that nature and art have come to. I know no theme as worthy of the tragic expression this picture has been said to project. A world is coming to an end, and the last Renaissance figuration of a living Natura pays tribute to her departure. But where, we might ask, can she go? Indeed, she only exists in the artist’s formulation of her. Nature thus conceived will surely die when she is no longer depicted in art. In this sense, it is the old goat’s rutting that keeps her going. And now we notice that the prominent stump is surprisingly vigorous (for a dead tree), rising into the air in an exultant curve that matches the thrust of the goat’s body. It seems subtly responsive to the goat’s repeated strokes, just as the woman awakens to the shepherd’s voice. The suggestion is that they are implicated with each other, man and woman, goat and tree, art and nature. Titian’s form language bears this out. Although the late paintings present a continuum in which form is implicated with matter, this is not a steady state of equalized surface tension, as in a late Impressionist painting (with which late Titian is

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often compared). Rather, it is an image of dynamic process, in which form and matter work to separate, and work to join. Human and natural forms hold an unstable, precarious presence in a dissolving universe. The figures are becoming insubstantial, like their surrounding ambient, yet the slightly greater substance they still hold is a marker of sentient resistance. The state of dissolving—which expressively incorporates both loss and change—is the keynote of the painting. Its style and imagery speak of a world that is vanishing and re-forming, undergoing a sea change into something new and strange. She is listening to him, and though fleetingly, she’s heard his flute. But it’s understood to be in parting. For one brief moment, as he pauses to take in that she has heard him and she acknowledges his voice, they are in a final harmonious communion, a mutual crediting of each other’s powers. The finale is a truce. He remains her petitioner, she responds to his music. And in the distance, the old goat goes on battering at the self-regenerating tree stump, as he will continue to do throughout human time.

The divine Michelangelo Buonarroti . . . surpasses and excels not only all those moderns who have almost vanquished nature, but even those most famous ancients who without a doubt did so gloriously surpass her; and he alone triumphs over moderns, ancients, and nature.  —giorgio vasari, Le Vite, preface to part 3 Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.  —shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2

Chapter Eight 

Art against Nature

Raphael, the Early Mannerists, and Late Michelangelo classical art and the rhetorical defeat of nature In central Italy, by contrast to Venice, art became nature’s openly announced adversary early in the sixteenth century. Leo­nardo da Vinci had broken the ice in asserting that the artist disputes and competes with nature, and in celebrating the artist’s divine powers and art’s superior endurance. Italian court humanists played on Leo­nardo’s name to sound the theme of the painter who conquers nature (vince la natura).1 Yet Leo­nardo’s own language was not that of conquest, and, as we have seen, he regarded nature as far more than a mere adversary, respecting both her authority and her awesome destructive capability. Although Leo­nardo proudly claimed the creative powers of the artist to be comparable to those of Natura—and in limited ways, greater, for he is capable of perfecting her creations—he never positioned the artist as nature’s superior. The theme of art’s conquest of nature may have first been given visual expression in Michelangelo’s 1505 design for the tomb of Julius II. As discussed in chapter 5, Michelangelo presented the concept of art defeating time on the tomb’s lower level, where female personifications of the liberal arts subjugate male figures who represent ever-flowing time. In Michelangelo’s adaptation of the psychomachia, art defeats time and death, the negative dimensions of Natura’s realm. This concept recurred in the Medici Chapel tombs, structured by a hierarchy that ascended from time-bound nature to eternal art. Yet for Leo­nardo and the young Michelangelo, as we saw in chapter

5, the artist is to follow Nature’s creative lead, imitating her methods in his art, and in this sense, the artist and Nature are complementary partners. By 1520, we see the beginnings of a steeper rhetoric. An indisputable claim for art’s superiority over nature appears in Raphael’s epitaph in the Pantheon, ascribed to Pietro Bembo and probably composed shortly after the artist’s death in 1520: “Here lies Raphael; while he lived, Great Mother [Nature] feared that she would be conquered, and when he died, feared that she would die.”2 Here now is language of victory and defeat, as in the Julius tomb. Nature, though bearing the old reverential name “Great Mother,” is now personified as a fearful competitor of the artist, a weaker entity whose very existence depends upon her preservation in his art. The theme of art conquering nature was also sounded in the poetic tributes to Raphael that poured out following the unexpected early death of the celebrated artist. In a sonnet of 1525, for example, Girolamo Casio described him as “that singular painter who, with his every work, strikes down every work of Nature.” Casio sets Raphael’s art against the powers of death and nature, proclaiming that art, not nature, renders bodies eternal and souls divine.3 Another writer claims that the very name of the divine Raphael, Nature’s great rival, would wage eternal war on all-devouring time and oblivion.4 Familiar rhetorical formulas are evoked in these tributes: the notion that art “defeats” nature by preserving unchanged

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the living human beauty that must fade and die; that art “wins” by offering a more perfect beauty than is found in nature; or that one entity is bereft or threatened by the death of the other.5 Considered as poetic conceits, the tributes simply offer a slightly hyperbolic compliment to art and artists. Yet in the repeated formula of naturam vincere,6 there emerged a heightened opposition between the two entities, which began to replace the model of the complementary roles of art and nature. The new mood is apparent in the language of another epitaph. On the death of the famous elephant Hanno, given to Leo X by the king of Portugal in 1514, Raphael was commissioned to paint a posthumous portrait and design a tomb. In 1516, the tomb in fresco was complete, with an inscription praising the beloved elephant that ended in these lines: “Raphael Urbinas Quod Natura Abstulerat/Arte Restituit” (“What nature took away, Raphael of Urbino with his art restored”).7 Art no longer completes what nature intended but reverses her mortal blows. In another epitaph composed for Raphael, Antonio Tebaldeo maintained that Christ “was the God of nature, you the God of art.”8 Comparing Raphael to Christ has seemed blasphemous to some, but Tebaldeo probably meant the analogy to celebrate the artist’s divine powers and to heroize his early and untimely death. In a letter informing Isabella d’Este of Raphael’s death, Pandolfo Pico similarly elevated the artist to biblical status, comparing the pope’s exceptional decision to open the Stanze to public view with the splitting of the rocks on the death of Christ. Warming to the comparison, Pico says (erroneously) that Raphael, like Christ, died at the age of thirtythree, and asserts that the artist’s fame will not be subjected to time or death, but will endure.9 The bravado of this claim betrays the anxiety of an unasked question: if Raphael held godlike power and Nature cowered in his shadow, why had she taken him so young? The celebrated artist’s early death must surely have seemed a setback to the cause of enduring art—at least insofar as living artists were needed to produce it. In an epitaph composed by the poet Niccolò d’Arco, Raphael himself is made to voice this anxiety: “I, who was the only painter able to overcome Nature, am forced to yield to the Fates through the force of Nature.”10 Ironically, though in 1520 few could have seen it, it was death and time, vita brevis, that would convert Raphael into golden myth, ars longa. Hanno’s epitaph might more realistically have been his: art, in the form of the artist’s legend, would restore what nature had taken away, his life. In the moment of the demise of the perfect painter, however, an unguarded flank needed defense. The majestic authoritative claim of Raphael’s

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epitaph, that the artist had defeated a weak and dependent Nature who would not survive him, is surely in part a parry following a thrust, a public relations move to proclaim art’s conquest of Nature at precisely the moment that she might be said to have won a major battle. Raphael himself had contributed to the upping of art’s ante. In a letter purportedly written in 1516 to Baldassare Castiglione, the artist explains how he painted his Galatea (Fig. 179), which had drawn high praise from Castiglione: “In order to paint a beautiful woman, I should have to see many beautiful women, and this under the condition that you were to help me with making a choice; but since there are so few beautiful women and so few sound judges, I make use of a certain idea that comes into my head. Whether it has any artistic value I am unable to say; I try very hard just to have it [the idea].” This letter is now thought to have been written, not by Raphael, but by its purported recipient, a year or two after the artist’s death.11 Yet, whether by Raphael or Castiglione, the letter marks a new stage in art’s relationship to nature, for the artist is now said to create perfect beauty from a concept in his head, and not from particular living models as Quattrocento artists had done. Although Neoplatonic theory would have backed up this privileging of the ideal over the real, “Raphael” offers no theoretical justification, humbly explaining it as his own method. This must have been said tongue in cheek, for the author surely had in mind the Zeuxis topos, which offered both a reason and a method for transcending nature’s examples of feminine beauty. (The ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, believing that beauty is not given to a single body by nature, constructed his image of the divine Helen by drawing from the five most beautiful girls in Croton to create a superior composite model.) Both Zeuxis and “Raphael” advocate the artist’s selective perfection of nature’s models, since the “certain idea” that comes into Raphael’s head would have resulted from a fusion of mental images of “scattered beauty” such as Zeuxis found in a predetermined set.12 This celebration of perfected synthesis ratcheted up the competition between art and nature beyond what had previously been claimed. When Alberti recounted the Zeuxis story, he doubted the notion of a supranatural beauty, advising the artist to combine examples of beauty only when he finds no suitable model in nature and cautioning that those who follow Zeuxis’s method might come up empty.13 When Quattrocento artists spoke of the imitation of nature, they largely meant copying natura naturata, things that could be observed. By the mid-Cinquecento, however, the word ritrarre was used to describe direct copying, contrasted with imitare, which referred

179.  Raphael, The Triumph of Galatea, 1512–14. Fresco. Sala di Galatea, Villa Farnesina, Rome. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

Art against Nature

to the Aristotelian doctrine that art aimed to imitate human nature, not as it is but as it ought to be.14 Vasari announced in the technical introduction to the Lives that “design, father of our three arts,” proceeds from the artist’s realization of an inner concept purged of the accidents of nature.15 The Zeuxis model of correcting nature was soon surpassed by a more ambitious notion—that of grazia, which became a pivotal concept in aesthetic theory at least as early as Castiglione’s Corteggiano. Grazia might be given either by heaven or nature but it accorded with the divine order, not the natural order, and its standard of measurement was no longer natural appearances but the ideal.16 The idea of artistic grace originated, however, as the seemingly natural. Although Raphael/Castiglione rhetorically invoked Zeuxis, Raphael’s real goal, to judge from his art, was not so much to perfect nature as to counterfeit the natural. An art audience accustomed to the static, flat images of the Quattrocento would have been as impressed by the flowing movement and lifelike vitality of Raphael’s figures as by their smooth elegance. Raphael simulated natural movement, not by selective imitation, but by an informed application of artistic devices such as contrapposto. The concept of an art that disguises itself as nature, ars est celare artem, was known in antiquity and thereafter; it was especially valued by English poets. In the Renaissance art-nature discourse, it was Raphael who critically shaped the idea of sprezzatura, defined by one writer as the “ability to present the artificial as the natural.”17 Raphael’s Galatea is actually a composite of many sculptural prototypes (Michelangelo’s St. Matthew, to name but one); to connoisseurs, she might have seemed a statue to whom Raphael gave life. She is a different Galatea from that of Pygmalion, yet it is not far-fetched to suggest that the two Galateas may have merged for Raphael and his audience. Like Pygmalion, Raphael did better than to create art from nature; he brought cold art to apparent life. Raphael was regarded by his literary contemporaries, especially Castiglione and Ariosto, as “the prototype of the painter,” a model for the concept of artistic invention and their own verbal art.18 Clark Hulse situates Raphael, along with Pietro Bembo and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, at the pivotal moment in the development of the notion of “masculine artistic supremacy” over Natura.19 Without fully engaging Hulse’s literary arguments, I would concur that the Galatea marks a pivotal moment in the male artist’s battle for ascendancy over Natura. Galatea is Raphael’s own creation, Hulse observes, because he has mystified the creative process to emphasize his origination of this new image not to be seen in nature, and in

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a sense, his ownership of her.20 A few years later, Raphael would stamp another creatura, the Fornarina, with a sign of both creation and possession: the band on the woman’s arm that bears his name (see chapter 7). In the Galatea, we may see a similar signature of the creator, for—quite outside the parameters of the story21—three flying putti shoot arrows at Galatea, while a fourth perched in a cloud holds a small arsenal of arrows. The figure of Galatea is triply inscribed as beauty on display by this trio of winged putti who focus our attention with their pointing arrows. The notion of the archer as metaphoric stand-in for the artist, already implied in the Cupid-arciere of Botticelli’s Primavera, became explicit in the early Cinquecento. As Irving Lavin has shown, it was with the understanding that the archer’s bow connoted the artist’s ingenuity that Michelangelo wrote on a drawing for the marble David, “David with the sling and I with the bow [will slay the Giant]”; that Dürer depicted himself as Hercules-the-archer killing the Stymphalian Birds; and that the bow became the attribute of the winged Ingegno in Ripa’s Iconologia (Fig. 180).22 The near-quotation of the Primavera Cupid at the apex of the Galatea, tripled to invoke the Primavera’s Three Graces as well (their Neoplatonic harmony through opposition is repeated in the putti’s poses), suggests that Raphael built on Botticelli’s metaphor, in which Cupid-artista instigates beauty by shooting the arrow that converts nature into art.23 As an example of artistic perfection, Galatea ignores Sebastiano del Piombo’s adjacent image of the bereft Polyphemus (Fig. 178), which was already in place when the Galatea was painted. Instead, she poses for our eyes and those of the cupids who stand in for the painting’s missing subject, the transcendent male artist.24 On Raphael’s death, Castiglione wrote a poem characterizing the lost cultural hero as healer, an Asclepius empowered to restore to life the corpse of ancient Rome, which had been reduced to a cadaver, “mangled by the sword, fire, and the years.”25 Castiglione alluded to the artist’s most ambitious uncompleted project, the charge of Pope Leo X to excavate the buildings of the ancient city and reconstruct and publish their plans. Raphael’s passionate enthusiasm for the project is revealed in a letter to the pope (written in collaboration with Castiglione, or substantively by Castiglione in the voice of Raphael), in which he bitterly laments Rome’s poor, lacerated body, subjected to destruction by the iron and fire of the Goths and other barbarians.26 “Raphael” taps into familiar rhetoric to account for this destruction. Rome, he says, was powerful for so long that men began to believe the city would last in perpetuity, exempt from death. But Time, envious of this enduring fame, made an

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agreement with Fortune to have barbarians unleash destruction upon the city, stripping its beautiful ornament to leave it a skeleton. Raphael’s greatest scorn is reserved for the moderns who had ruined ancient buildings during his brief twelve years in Rome. Why should we lament the Goths and Vandals, he declaims, when we guardians who should protect poor Rome have instead made every effort to destroy and waste her? The offenders include popes (excluding Leo X), who permitted the defacing of the ancient temples and statues, and plundered the ancient marbles to make mortar for new palaces and churches. Raphael was doubtless aware that Leo X himself wanted to plunder the excavated ruins to obtain marble for the building of St. Peter’s.27 He implores the pope to protect what remains of “questa antica madre della gloria et nome Italiano.” An odd partnership was formed by the ecclesiastical developer and the preservationist, yet they shared a totalizing vision. Unlike the Quattrocento copyists of individual antiquities, Raphael wanted to reconstruct the whole city of Rome, as well as to preserve what was left of it. From this letter, a collaboration designed to be published,28 a key principle emerges that is broadly applicable to the classical revival of the first two decades of the sixteenth century: Renaissance Italians, descendants and heirs of ancient Romans, owe familial piety to their mother country to protect and restore whole the antique city, destroyed by barbarian Others in collusion with Time and Fortune. In their ruined and overgrown state, ancient buildings presented a dismal sign of mutability’s victory. The mandate of modern Italians was to reclaim the city from the realm of nature for the realm of culture. In this sense, the restoration of the ancient monuments was an act of competition with nature. Yet for Renaissance Romans in particular, nature was not opposed to, but continuous with cultural antiquity. The revival— re-membering—of the ancient city and its buildings and art was seen as restoring life to a culture that, but for a long, alien interruption, was continuous with their own. Renaissance Italians regarded their relationship to Rome in familial terms: ancient Rome was mother, “questa antica madre,” as Raphael called her. Yet nature, too, is mother, biological and tutelary. Paradoxically, nature and antiquity represented for Renaissance man nearly the same thing: his genitrix, nurturer, and teacher. Out of this contradiction grew the idea of antiquity as “second nature,”29 an instrument for dealing with ur-nature. In the ruins of ancient Rome, its beautiful art reduced to fragments by human and natural destruction, lay the key to nature’s

180.  Personification of Ingegno, from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1603.

creative operations and a model for surpassing her. Antique art reproduced nature’s forms with greater naturalism than had the art of intervening centuries, and in this sense it successfully mimicked nature’s life-creating operations. At the same time, ancient art showed, even in fragmentary form, or perhaps especially so,30 how second nature could transcend prime nature by idealizing and perfecting its creatura, and so displace her by offering a new norm. At the turn of the Cinquecento, artists such as Andrea Sansovino treated antiquity as a second nature by selecting out of all known antique art its most idealizing, classicizing phase. Raphael’s own style became firmly rooted in the antique when he came to Rome, as the antiquarian aspects of the School of Athens demonstrate, and it was equally selective.31 Raphael proved a discerning judge of the right kind of classical style, when, in his letter to Leo X, he carefully distinguished good and bad antique art on the Arch of Constantine.32 We may infer that what Raphael liked about the Hadrianic example (Fig. 181)

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181.  Sacrifice to Diana after boar hunt, Hadrianic tondo, 130–38 ce. Arch of Constantine, Rome. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

was what he extracted from it: the natural proportions of the figures, their relaxed movement in space. The classicizing antique would have seemed closer to nature’s own models than the grotesquely proportioned and stiff little figures of the later period on the Arch of Constantine. Raphael manifestly also responded to Roman gravitas, which signifies importance, seriousness, authority (as everyone knows today, thanks to the word’s popularity in political discourse). Gravitas literally means “weight,” and it is this meaning that shapes the others. The laws of gravity are literally those of nature, in a state of dignity. Obeying gravity, the hanging pleats of Roman togas reiterate the vertical, establishing through repeated juxtaposition with the horizontal ground plane a graphic illustration of rectitude. The figures’ gentle contrapposto softens this angle, while contributing to the overall impression of profound significance. In formal language alone, these heavy, dignified figures proclaim their noble humanity, gracefully acknowledging the law of the earth’s gravity, yet rising against that force in a firm, ponderated vertical.

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Classical style is said to exemplify the natural raised to a level of perfection, a calibrated balance of nature and the ideal.33 It offers a flawless model for humanity, a generic physiognomy from which the individual and idiosyncratic are ­excluded. Classicism is thus normative, a model of not only human perfection, but cultural perfection—orthodoxy purged of deviancy. What is called “nature” in this context actually means culture, in that culture determines what is natural and privileges it as normative. The notion of the “natural” is frequently invoked in terms that are both descriptive and prescriptive: what is mostly the case becomes what should be. To see this, we need only think of how Natura, through her long history, was always the goddess of heterosexual procreation and the orthodox patriarchal family.34 Many of the Roman monuments known in the Renaissance advanced ideals of cultural duty: scenes of sacrifice, emperors and their subjects performing social pieties, marriage scenes. Through the powerful symbiosis of naturalism and classicism, the actions depicted acquire social authority: visibly natural behavior is elevated to represent an ideal society. The power and tenacity of the classical style—any classical style—is attributable not only to its formal stability, but to the way that its formal authority is unusually equipped to support a social norm. When a classical style is revived, it carries the dual authority of apparent truth to nature and of a revered past civilization. Indeed, classical style has a built-in significance elevator, worked out in antiquity. The human effort to cope with nature was heroized by visually dramatizing the laws of gravity. Through entasis, a Doric column expresses its genial responsiveness to nature’s laws—as weighty, but not too much so. (Architectural refinement, over time, expressed this burden as lighter and lighter.) Whether through entasis or the contrapposto of a standing figure, the mere act of bearing up results in a comely beauty that expresses, quite literally, the idea of grace under pressure. Art’s second strategy might be called “putting Nature in her place”—relegating natural imagery to a subordinate position as ornament, in a marginalized relationship to images of heroic human activity (to be discussed in chapter 9). This move was conjoined with putting woman in her place. As Natalie Kampen has shown, the friezes of the Basilica Aemilia and the Ara Pacis Augustae (Fig. 182) served Augustus’s program for restoring the ideal Roman family and traditional moral values by lacing myth with gender ideology.35 Thus the Rape of the Sabines became both a founding myth of Rome and a model for correct female behavior under patriarchal rules. The altar of Augustan peace presented the imperial family as model of an ideal uni-

Raphael, Early Mannerists, Late Michelangelo

182.  Friezes from the Ara Pacis Augustae, 13–9 bce. Museum of the Ara Pacis, Rome. Photo: Scala/ Art Resource, NY.

versal order that paralleled nature’s fertility, symbolized by Tellus (Terra Mater; see Fig. 10), with state morality, in the form of Roma—together orbis and urbs,36 but also natura and patria conjoined under a maternal rubric. The floral ornament on the Ara Pacis, large spiraling tendrils and acanthus leaves, is a motif historically associated with fertility goddesses and the abundant earth.37 This ornament is unusually prominent and vital on the Ara Pacis; indeed, the zone it occupies is taller than the historical and allegorical panels. Yet it is positioned beneath them (a subordination that carries overtones of conquest), contextualized within an Augustan peace whose hallmark is stable Roman family life, so that the monument expresses in abstract form “the theme of the tamed female in the service of the healthy state,” as Kampen described the program. The Ara Pacis was not known intact in the Renaissance (systematic excavations began in 1903), but numerous other monuments provided examples of patriarchal orthodoxy.

Just as Renaissance writers adopted Roman writers as models for ideal social formation and private life—for example, Plutarch and Xenophon were models for Alberti’s De familia— so the imagery of classical art presented a patriarchal paradigm for the Italian state and family. Moralizing classical themes, such as those depicted on Quattrocento cassoni, played an important role in socializing young women and men into the patriarchal order.38 I want to emphasize here, however, the new authority that was given in the early Cinquecento by style. Through the insistent selection of classicizing antique models, High Renaissance artists created a new paradigm for art, in which idealization, monumentality, and gravity gave a sense of institutional legitimacy to visual images. Simultaneously, the idea of father-rule was freshly renewed through new themes.

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neo-patriarchalism in high renaissance art High Renaissance art is filled with neo-patriarchalism. In the first and second decades of the sixteenth century, the nuclear family was culturally celebrated in imagery that now conceives it as husband-wife-children, rather than mother-child. This corporate family model, which had been operative socially since the beginning of the fifteenth century, conspicuously rules in early sixteenth-century Florentine art. Satyrs settle down to build families and have children (Fig. 146),39 and our first parents revel in domestic life. Two representative paintings in Philadelphia depict Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel, one by Fra Bartolommeo (c. 1512; Fig. 183) and one by Bacchiacca (c. 1516–18).40 The Christ Child’s extended family also became prominent in art, enlarged to include not only the Virgin and infant St. John but also St. Elizabeth and, especially, Joseph. In Raphael’s Canigiani Holy Family of 1507 (Fig. 184), all these characters are present; Joseph towers over the group, displacing the Virgin as

183.  Fra Bartolommeo, Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel, by 1512. Oil on panel. Philadelphia Museum of Art; John G. Johnson Collection, 1917. Photo: Philadephia Museum of Art.

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the apex of the pyramid. As Carolyn Wilson has shown, the cult of St. Joseph grew exponentially at the turn of the sixteenth century, launched by Pope Sixtus IV’s inclusion of Joseph’s feast day in the Roman calendar in 1479. Following the theology of Bernard of Clairvaux, Joseph was inserted into the ancestry of Christ, now said to descend from the house of David (like Mary), and he emerged as patriarchal protector both of the Virgin’s purity and of the Church Militant. His fatherhood newly legitimized, Joseph rounded out many family groups in early Cinquecento imagery.41 Joseph anchors the nuclear family group in Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo (Fig. 185), his patriarchal legitimacy further secured by conflation with Noah. Andrée Hayum proposed that Agnolo Doni, patron of this tondo (and of Raphael’s portraits of Doni and his wife Maddalena), requested that the paintings emphasize his patriarchal lineage through themes of the earth’s repopulation after a universal deluge. 42 Hayum interprets the mysterious nudes in the background of Michelangelo’s painting as Noah’s sons who sustain his line after the Flood, and she suggests that the foreground figure of Joseph may allusively also represent Noah, “father of all fathers,” as Pietro Aretino called him. If Michelangelo’s tondo was indeed connected with Doni’s hope for a son, the earth’s repopulation through Noah’s sons “could be claimed as a global precedent for the patrilineal primacy that became central to Renaissance social ­organization.”43 Hayum’s reading of the Doni Tondo as an exemplum of Florentine concern for patriarchal generation fits well with the more universal patrilineal iconography of the Sistine Ceiling, as outlined in chapter 3 above. In the Ceiling, the celebration of the male element in human generation (the ignudi) and the privileging of the patriarchal family (the Deluge) constitute an important though previously unnoticed theme of the Ceiling as a whole. The motif of the biblical flood in these contemporaneous works seems to have served as potent metaphor for the ancient idea, traceable to Bernard Silvestris, that the phallus battles the calamities brought by nature and heroically sustains the human race. What natural or human circumstances can account for the strong patriarchalism of the Italian High Renaissance?44 That subject could be a book in itself, but some explanations can be advanced. Steven Ozment ascribed the rise of the patriarchal nuclear family in early sixteenth-century Northern Europe to humanist and Protestant reformers’ efforts to counteract the monastic celibate ideal, which discouraged population growth, in the face of the Turkish threat to the West. 45 In papal Italy, the campaign of Sixtus IV against the Turks was extended by

Raphael, Early Mannerists, Late Michelangelo

184.  Raphael, Canigiani Holy Family, 1507. Oil on panel. Alte Pinacothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

his nephew Julius II into a campaign to recover the Holy Land,46 and it is possible that a desire for population parity with the infidel drove the iconographic injunction in the Sistine Ceiling to go forth and multiply. Structurally related to the desire for procreative fertility is the blame of women for its lack: the rise of misogyny was a distinct feature of the era of the Italian High Renaissance and Protestant Reformation, evidenced most dramatically by the witch craze that swelled in that period (discussed in chapter 3).47 The perception of witches

as causing impotence and infertility, thereby undermining family life, clearly has a bearing on the idealization of the patriarchal family in the period when the Malleus Maleficarum gained influence. Another perspective is offered by a development that occurred over the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, in which the “religion of immanence” was replaced by the “religion of transcendence.” Donna Spivey Ellington traced the conceptualization of the Virgin in sermons to discover a shift

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185.  Michelangelo, Holy Family (Doni Tondo), 1503–4. Oil and tempera on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

from the late medieval emphasis upon Mary’s active emotional involvement in the Passion, including the sharing of her son’s pain, to Counter-Reformation descriptions that restrict her redemptive role to passive and silent submission.48 The change from body-focused thought to intellectual abstraction occurred across the board in the transition from medieval to early modern culture, yet since physicality was generally associated with the female, women were especially implicated in the transition.49 The purging of the Virgin’s corporeality in sermons was paralleled by her purging from sexual pollution in the Immaculate Conception doctrine, initiated in the 1470s by Pope Sixtus IV, around the time he made Joseph a Catholic

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saint; (see chapter 5). Mary herself, now conceived without original sin, was separated more than ever from natural humanity, purer and freer from the taint of the carnal. The Immaculate Conception doctrine, the renewed emphasis on the patriarchal family, and the witch hunts—all strongly promoted during the papacies of Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, and Julius II—converge on one point: the heightened dichotomizing of woman into an ever-more-perfect Mary, now two steps removed from sexual sin, and a more-evil Eve, whose human daughters are hysterically blamed as agents of evil and unnatural perversion. In art, idealizing classicism served to strengthen father-law by presenting an elevated—as well as sterilized and

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purified—image of the perfect Mother and her family. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was also buttressed by art, since the idea of a nonphysical, nonsexual Virgin is effectively conveyed by idealization. In Florence, a new image of the Virgin as a mature Roman matron, austere and distant, replaced the previously intimate biological mother who nursed her child,50 as well as the Quattrocento image of Mary as an adolescent bride. The Virgin’s steady maturing can effectively be traced in a small sample: the Madonnas painted by Raphael in Florence between 1504 and 1508 begin as graceful, tender teenage mothers and culminate in the monumental Alba Madonna, who has acquired distinct gravitas. The Virgin is “elevated” to masculinity, as were sibyls and female saints of the period—but with greater consequence, for in gaining virility, Mary loses maternity, her primary identity as birth-giving mother that was her distinctive and essential attribute. Michelangelo’s Virgin Mary in the Doni Tondo projects this honorary masculinity in her muscular anatomy, now axially aligned beneath both husband and son, harnessed to responsibility within a nuclear family that she no longer controls.51 The patriarchalism of the Doni Tondo was reinforced by Michelangelo’s heroic and virile style. His hard contours, overdeveloped musculature, and vigorous torsion dramatically oppose Leo­nardo’s model of matrifocal imagery and graceful sfumato. The competition between Leo­nardo and Michelangelo at the beginning of the new century is legendary, dramatized by their simultaneous battle paintings for the Palazzo Vecchio, and grounded in the paragone of the relative merits of sculpture vs. painting, of which the two artists were the chief protagonists. Although the gender dimension of their opposition has attracted little notice,52 it is a critical aspect of the contest, for the matrilineal ideal presented by Leo­nardo, in which Christ emerges from a strong female line, was becoming anachronistic, replaced by a new ideal family, headed by a father figure and a nonmaternal mother. The heroic virility of the Doni Madonna echoed a masculine model seen in civic art. In Florence, the High Renaissance coincided with the establishment of the Republic (1502) and a new taste for heroic civic imagery, following the political and social chaos of the Savonarola period. Civic virility was demanded and supplied in the most potent exemplum ever produced: Michelangelo’s David, which was intended to be, in Charles Seymour’s words, “an inspiration for a new and heroic generation of citizens.”53 The relocation of the David from the cathedral to the Piazza Signoria signaled the new government’s concern for the res publica, expressed through state-commis-

sioned civic imagery that included Michelangelo and Leo­ nardo’s frescoes in the Hall of the Great Council of the Signoria, which celebrated legendary Florentine battles. The idealization of combat in the Battle of Anghiari and Battle of Cascina served to heroize and virilize political contests of the period—the Florentines against the French and Milanese, or the Medicean exiles against the republicans who currently held power. Under the leadership of Pietro Soderini, moreover, the new elevated civic humanism was conjoined with standards of dignity, modesty, patriotism, and “solid bourgeois morality”54—­ producing patriarchalism on both social and political fronts. patriarchal parodies All this orthodoxy was too much for some artists to take. The rebellion of the so-called first-generation Mannerists is usually described as anticlassical, but it was, in a perhaps more deeply motivated sense, also antipatriarchal. A good introduction to a body of work that thumbs its nose at normative Christian family values is the Marriage of the Virgin by Rosso Fiorentino (Plate 12). Painted for a chapel dedicated to both the Virgin and St. Joseph, Rosso’s Marriage nominally participates in the period’s elevation of Joseph to a prominence equal to that of the Virgin.55 But Rosso has subverted the theme, presenting the theologically iffy Joseph just as he should not have been seen: as a young, sexy suitor, with golden curls and a flushed face, wearing a flamboyant yellow cloak, stylish bright red boots, and a short, open-necked tunic that exposes his chest, arms, and knees. Rosso’s depiction of Joseph as a modishly dressed young man, rather than as the familiar bearded elder of scripture and art, was a departure from tradition serious enough to draw criticism.56 Moreover, while the biblical Joseph was a determined competitor for Mary’s hand, Rosso’s young groom appears reluctant. He holds the ring just short of the Virgin’s extended fingers, and the high priest seems to implore him to get on with it.57 Other details suggest that Joseph’s hesitation is due more to a lack of will than of virility. As in other versions of this theme, he is accompanied by the blooming rod that refers both to his divine selection from among Mary’s suitors to be her husband and to her flowering without being fertilized. Yet Rosso accentuates this attribute, placing it firmly in Joseph’s own hand, so that it seems to allude semiotically to his fertility—his own virile blooming, mutatis mutandis.58 Lest we miss the point, there is another cue: from the right, St. Vincent Ferrer extends a hand over Joseph’s body, one finger positioned to take the place of an imagined erect penis.59 This playful affirmation of

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186.  Jacopo Pontormo, Madonna and Child with Saints (Pucci Altarpiece), 1518. Oil on panel. Florence, San Michele Visdomini. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Joseph’s independent (and irrelevant) virility threatens to unravel his theologically sanctioned role as the nonpaternal patriarch, while giving him a disturbing new potential identity. For, if Mary can flower without being fertilized, and Joseph has no responsibility to fertilize her, then he too can “flower” on his own—which could be why, in Rosso’s redaction, he seems to resist marriage. Jacopo Pontormo, Rosso’s artistic twin in these years, also took a parodic swipe at the new Joseph in the Pucci Altar in San Michele Visdomini (Fig. 186). As Walter Friedländer

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pointed out, Pontormo has shifted the High Renaissance triangular composition off-axis, so that the whole thing tilts to the right, a pyramid whose base is a leaning diagonal.60 For Friedländer, this move was a prankish rebellion against the boring formal symmetries of the classical style. Yet it is surely more than that, for the Holy Family itself is destabilized in this painting. Though placed off-axis in the design, Joseph is the focus of attention. It is he who bounces the Child on his knee, he to whom the Virgin and Giovannino point, and St. Francis seems to pray to him rather than the Virgin. As if in response

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to the odd role-switching, Mother, Son, and Baptist, as well as the two putti above, are laughing. This adaptation of the Leonardesque smile forecasts the ecstatic anxiety that will become Pontormo’s hallmark expression, yet it is possible to distinguish the laughter of the Mother and her brood from the apparent anguish of Joseph himself. 61 Only St. John the Evangelist and St. James are not in on the joke. Can the joke be Joseph’s extraordinary new theological prominence, given his comically deficient role in the family romance?62 Soon after Pontormo’s Visitation (see Fig. 197) and Rosso’s Marriage were painted, both artists went to Rome and saw the Sistine Ceiling. This already famous monument became the detonative fuse for the early Mannerists’ new creative freedom—in particular, their departure from normative proportions and color. Rosso and Pontormo each built upon Michelangelo’s example of personal independence and godlike creative powers to enlarge significantly the new concept of the artist’s divine right to separate art from its natural roots.63 From the rising rhetoric of the artist’s power to perfect or challenge nature, they took as both license and mandate the possibility of challenging nature’s normativity.64 Thus, Pontormo took a cue from Michelangelo’s bold colors and arbitrary cangiante sequences to create the capricious display of brilliant sherbet colors in the Santa Felicità Deposition of 1525–28 (Plate 13), shockingly discordant hues that would be deplored by Lomazzo as suitable for nymphs and harlots, and more perceptively praised by Vasari as the result of a brain always “investigating new concepts and strange ways of working.”65 As Patricia Rubin observed, in its detachment from the material and corporeal, Pontormo’s unnatural color was given an intellectual dimension and the potential to be understood in more respectable theoretical terms than color normally enjoyed. 66 Rosso was prompted by a few comically exaggerated figures in Michelangelo’s lunettes to develop a farcical set of characters in his own Deposition of 1521, whose histrionic interactions subtly parodied the gestural drama of the Ceiling. The Sistine figures offered the promise of rebellion through caricature, yet more may have been at stake. Beyond presenting a liberating model for the creative artist, the Sistine Ceiling also conspicuously celebrated the nuclear family and the ideal of human generation (see chapter 3). Rosso’s Marriage of the Virgin, though not formally related to the Ceiling, nevertheless mocks the Christian family ideal that orthodox Joseph imagery supports, and thus takes issue with a central message embodied in the Sistina: the theological instruction to procreate. This message, beamed at Catholic Christianity at a time when its social reinforcement was desirable, was presumably welcome to the clergy

and to most Catholic families. Yet it did not apply to Pontormo and Rosso, who were lifelong bachelors, and each is at pains to tell us so in his art. Pontormo’s lunette at the Medici villa of Poggio a Caiano, painted 1520–21 (Fig. 187), is another case in point. Michelangelo’s Sistine Jonah is quoted in the back-leaning figure of Bacchus on the left side and, as the artist’s preliminary drawings show, the first drafts for this energetic seated figure reflect the twisting and spread-legged poses of Michelangelo’s seated ignudi.67 The Sistina garland-holding motif, intentionally connected with the masculine burden of sustaining life, as I argue above, was transferred by Pontormo to two putti who frame the oculus in the fresco (Fig. 188). These children hold a garland that sustains the horticultural theme of Vertumnus and Pomona, yet with a much lighter touch and in a more playful spirit, their difference from the Sistine ignudi (Fig. 59 and Fig. 61) emphasized in the very echo of them. As in the Sistina, the genitals of these youths are prominent (in both fresco and drawings), yet Pontormo liberates these ignudi from the procreative burden given them by Michelangelo, and from the heavy chain of oak garlands they had to lift. Pontormo floats a new possibility: the freedom of the male not to support the patriarchal project. To borrow the language of the Quattrocento homosexual subculture, we see in these ornamental figures an expression of the specialized, not the dedicated, phallus (see chapter 4). Just as the “specialized” use of the phallus for sexual pleasure and not procreation was valued by a homosocial elite because it was free of nature’s mandate, an instrument for private rather than social use, so Pontormo seems to take pure aesthetic pleasure in creating functionally unnecessary figures, not only the four frisky putti who play with the branches and garlands but also the overabundant drawings in which he tries out poses for them. 68 In these drawings, there are many boys whose genitals are emphasized, who twist and turn acrobatically, striking poses of explosive exuberance (Fig. 189). Their weightless exhilaration, by contrast with Michelangelo’s ponderous Sistine ignudi, dramatizes their liberation from procreative responsibility. Metaphorically, the images represent the artist in a state of creative independence, detached from obligation to patron or family, free to move and act autonomously, to float and to play. Whereas Pontormo subverts classical and traditional values subtly, through nuanced modifications of style and expression, Rosso parodies them openly. Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro of 1523–24 (Fig. 190) is an irreverent parody of the heroic virility seen in Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, and it effectively critiques traditional gender roles. In this story

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187.  Jacopo Pontormo, Vertumnus and Pomona (lunette), 1520–21. Fresco. Villa Medici, Poggio a Caiano. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY. 188.  Jacopo Pontormo, Vertumnus and Pomona (detail of Fig. 187: putto holding a garland), 1520–21. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/ Art Resource, NY.

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from the early life of Moses, the young hero rescues the seven daughters of Jethro, priest of Midian, from harassment by some shepherds. Rosso here spoofs classical precepts: the nude fighting men are inappropriately assembled as a pyra­ mid, a form used to stabilize Madonna groups, and far less apt for a fighting group than the antique battle sarcophagi evoked in Michelangelo’s design. He caricatures the heroic male nude in action. The caped figure rushing in from the left and the grimacing fallen shepherd are not noble but childlike, little boys ferociously playing war, while the heroine waiting to be saved exaggerates her feminine despair, a kewpie doll whose body language says (in modern parlance), “ooh, you’re so strong.” Hyping both masculine and feminine roles, Rosso recasts the biblical theme in a comic vein, as if to critique the somber virility of High Renaissance art.69 The currency of parody is style. Speaking the recognizable language of the model, the parodist exaggerates and shifts, so that the original is left standing in all its naiveté and excess. (Paradoxically, to parody is to render the original extreme in some way, while presenting yourself as normal.) Parody can aim low, at an individual quirk, or it can indict an entire cultural norm, threatening a power position by rendering it absurd. Paul Barolsky noted Rosso’s parodic spirit in the Moses, and suggested that its comical furia was meant to poke fun at Michelangelo’s terribilità.70 Yet, intentionally or not, Rosso has

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struck higher. He seems, rather, to parody prevailing concepts of masculinity, of which Michelangelo’s example, though prime, was only one of many. Once Rosso had undermined heroic virility, it would not stand securely again for the rest of the century.71 Pontormo and Rosso offer a different kind of masculinity altogether—an escapist one. What is to be escaped is nature itself, or rather, those cultural proclivities that have become naturalized as normative: in the decade when the young Mannerists were growing up, these included the hypervirilization of the procreative and civic responsibilities of the Florentine male. The male hero, as Pontormo and Rosso redefine him, is not the stern savior of the woman or the patria, but a passive androgynous beauty with a dubious relationship to responsibility. In different ways, each painter’s art was full of gender ambiguity. Rosso’s Joseph, reformulated as an androgynous curly-locked blond in fancy dress, reappears as an angel in the Dead Christ with Four Angels (Fig. 191), where Christ is equally androgynous, shockingly presented as a soft and languid frontal nude, whose hidden genitals, marked by a hint of pubic hair, introduce a disturbingly erotic physicality.72 Pontormo created male characters of exquisite sensuous beauty such as the Halberdier (Fig. 192), who is attentive only to the selfconscious display of his own bella figura, and more stylish than most male portraits of the early Cinquecento (see discussion below, p. 263). His elegant urn-shaped silhouette frames a body that has little interior substance, consisting primarily of a ballooning blouse, codpiece, and straps. Taking up the possibility of distortion offered by Michelangelo, Pontormo turned it on its head, rejecting Michelangelo’s model of hypervirilization to imbue figures of both sexes with a feminine grace that draws on Leo­nardo and points the way to maniera grazia. In Pontormo and Rosso, we glimpse the formation of a homosexual sensibility. Without attempting to define either artist as homosexual—an anachronistic label in any case, since homosexuality was not a distinct category of identity in the Renaissance73—and without evidence of either artist’s sexual practices, I would nevertheless adduce a category largely missing in the art-historical literature. Writers who have connected Pontormo’s eccentric personality with that of Piero di Cosimo or Leo­nardo da Vinci74 neglect what else is shared by Leo­nardo, Piero di Cosimo, Pontormo, and Rosso, and also Botticelli, Michelangelo, Bronzino, Cellini, and others: their bachelor status. Some of these were known for their homoerotic proclivities,75 but more important, none of them participated fully in heterosexual patriarchal society; they did not marry and produce children. This is perhaps a more significant divide

189.  Jacopo Pontormo, figure study for Vertumnus and Pomona fresco, 1520–21. Pen and wash over black chalk. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (6511Fr). Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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190.  Rosso Fiorentino, Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro, 1523–24. Oil on canvas. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

than their choice of sexual partners, for it sets them in living opposition to the mores and values of procreative family life, and against the “way of nature.” The parenting divide had consequences for art, for although artists who were married family men spent much of their time with fellow artists (and married men, too, were cited for sodomy), those who did not marry lived primarily within a homosocial structure—in effect, an alternative family structure—that overlapped significantly with, and came largely to characterize, the art world itself.76 Rosso, a solitary wanderer who moved after the Sack of Rome to various Italian cities before emigrating to France,

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where he likely died by suicide, had virtually no personal ties except with other artists; his early closeness to Pontormo, fellow pupil of Andrea del Sarto, is legendary.77 Pontormo’s artistic family included his pupil Agnolo Bronzino, just as Bronzino’s family included his pupil Alessandro Allori. The bonds among the men in this “lineage” were so strong that Bronzino, supported by Allori, contested the awarding of Pontormo’s estate to a distant relative.78 Similar bonds existed between Leo­nardo and his Milanese disciple Francesco Melzi, and between Michelangelo and Antonio Mini, whom the master treated as an adopted son.

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Not all of these male-artist relationships necessarily involved homosexual practice. Although the dyad of older man and youth as homosexual lovers had time-honored status in ancient Greece and Renaissance Florence, it could also represent a father-son relationship, and in cases such as Raphael’s embracing of Giulio Romano, that may have been the model.79 But whatever the terms, the intimacy between master and pupil had a dimension both generational, in that the elder “begat” the younger, and quasi-legal, in that the younger artist often became the elder’s artistic heir, particularly when there were no blood relatives. Leo­nardo left his drawings and manuscripts to Melzi; Michelangelo gave drawings, modelli, and his Leda to Mini; Bronzino bequeathed to Alessandro Allori his paintings and supplies. Beyond the practical advantages of such arrangements, these masculine artistic legacies may have been understood as a specialized form of generation, in which

the divine essence of artistic knowledge is transferred from elder to younger. It would be a speculative leap to posit that for Rosso and Pontormo, the heterosexual familias that dominated the world they lived in constituted a repressive social order. There are signs that it did, however, for Botticelli, who was terrified of marriage, and Piero di Cosimo, who hated crying babies. Bronzino complained in a poem about the disturbance of his peace by noisy children and barking dogs in his household and neighborhood.80 Pontormo shared Piero di Cosimo’s extreme aversion to human society. Vasari describes the young Pontormo as “melancholy and lonely” and emphasizes his solitary nature throughout the biography. Like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Pontormo chose to work in secrecy both in Santa Felicità and San Lorenzo, barring all visitors.81 Although Vasari tended to fit artists to biographical stereotypes, at least

191.  Rosso Fiorentino, Dead Christ with Four Angels, c. 1524–27. Oil on panel. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Charles Potter King Fund, 58.527. Photo © 2010 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 192.  Jacopo Pontormo, Portrait of a Halberdier (Francesco Guardi), 1529–30. Oil on panel transferred to canvas. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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some of Pontormo’s eccentricities are documented. 82 Living at a time when many artists feigned the Saturnine temperament,83 Pontormo may have been genuinely neurotic. Even so, both the pose and reality set the melancholic artist, as a type, against a nature conceived as social normality. “Eccentric” is a word used to police behavior, by setting rules for what is normative, but the entire lifestyle of the eccentric is a social critique of what is deemed to be normal. The “eccentricity” shared by Pontormo and Rosso and Piero di Cosimo might be redefined as an inability to stomach orthodoxy of any kind. Pontormo moved quickly out of the modified classicism taught by Sarto; Rosso never even managed to replicate it, and Piero di Cosimo apparently lived through the High Renaissance without knowing it existed. The rebellions of Pontormo and Rosso were first gathered under the rubric of “anticlassicism” and interpreted as crises of style and of artistic identity.84 More recent writers have argued against labeling these artists as either eccentric or Mannerist. 85 I suggest instead that both the eccentricities and mannerisms of these artists constituted a critique of dominant values, symbolized in a particular model of masculinity. Their creative achievement was to forge an entirely new sensibility. early mannerism as camp In her classic essay on the sensibility of Camp, Susan Sontag asserted that “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric—something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.”86 Camp is a “way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. . . . a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.” “Nothing in nature can be campy. . . . Life is not stylish. Neither is nature.” Sontag is not talking about the early Mannerist painters (though she mentions their names in a brief list of Camp’s antecedents), but she might well have written the essay about them. The Camp sensibility includes androgyny (“Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness . . . consists in going against the grain of one’s sex”); theatricality (“To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-asPlaying-a-Role”); double-meaning and coding (“To camp is a mode of seduction—one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders”); playfulness (“The whole point

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of Camp is to dethrone the serious. . . . It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy”); and homosexuality (“not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard—and the most articulate audience—of Camp”). 87 The ahistorical perspective of Camp permits us to see many of Mannerism’s separate features as linked to a consistent sensibility and purpose: the vaunting of art and an ironized aesthetic vision over nature, morality, and seriousness. It permits us to understand the personages of Pontormo’s Pucci Holy Family as playacting their roles, feigning amusement at their rearrangement, as if to say, “look who’s head of the household now.” Pontormo’s Joseph in Egypt is high Camp, with its statues posing theatrically on pedestals, its coded references to the art of Michelangelo, Lucas van Leyden, and others, its playfully illogical architecture, and its stylish presentation of the narrative.88 Rosso’s combination of fastidious ornamentality with overwrought gestures, seen in the heroine of the Moses and the women in the Marriage of the Virgin and Deposition, mocks conventional female types through exaggeration and a played-for-laughs theatricality. Theatricality and role-playing also turn up in Pontormo’s drawings. Sometimes the artist presents himself as specularized object, posing at the mirror, or trying out the role of a figure destined for a painting (Fig. 193 and Fig. 194). 89 Other figures look out at us, vamping for the viewer as if on stage, striking stylish poses. The self-conscious theatricality of Pontormo’s figure drawings invites comparison with modern fashion photographs, such as the “Pretty Boys” of a magazine advertisement (Fig. 195). Pontormo’s pretty boys and their modern counterparts affect surprisingly similar poses, casting the same coquettish upward or sidelong gaze at us—icons of seductive petulance or sullen cool. Our own world of style and fashion is pervaded by an androgynous ideal whose seductive beauty can appeal to both sexes; it is an ideal often created by homosexual males and promoted to those who find the sensibility attractive. Pontormo manifestly partook of that sensibility, and contributed significantly to the creation of an androgynous figure type who permeates the art of maniera.90 Hovering around the edges of such tastes is the dream of escape from the fixed gender roles of husband or father and their behavioral responsibilities. Yet Pontormo and Rosso’s rebellion against nature’s normativity was equally fueled by a new notion of artistic creativity that prompted them to exercise the right to deviate from visible nature. The superiority of human art over nature is expressed in a drawing that may be a study for the Vertumnus and Pomona fresco (Fig. 196),91 which

193.  Jacopo Pontormo, Study of a Male Model, Pointing, c. 1525. Red chalk. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum. 194.  Jacopo Pontormo, Study for a St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness, c. 1519–21. Red chalk. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (6597F). Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY. 195.  Double photo, “Pretty Boys” advertisement. From New York Times Magazine, July 2, 2000. Photo by author.

Art against Nature

196.  Jacopo Pontormo, compositional study for fresco at Poggio a Caiano (Vertumnus and Pomona?), c. 1520. Pen and wash over faint black chalk. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (454F). Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

shows men and women bending semi-anthropomorphic tree branches into a circular design around the oculus, their own bodies twisted to match its contorted rhythms. Pontormo’s image is a vivid visual metaphor for artists who bend or force nature into art, one that might serve as icon of the new sensibility, which now prizes the artificial or unnatural—contra naturam—for its outlandish deviation from what is deemed normal or natural. mannerism and the aesthetic of unnaturalism The idea of Mannerism as a style has been problematic ever since Walter Friedländer first defined it as a reaction to High Renaissance classicism. The revisionists of the 1960s took on Friedländer’s construct in formalist terms, quarreling about the relationship of the “first-generation Mannerism” of Pontormo, Rosso, Beccafumi, and Giulio Romano, first to its antecedents (John Shearman saw it as not a rebellion against but extension of the High Renaissance), and then to its successor, the maniera of Salviati and the Zuccari (Craig Smyth defined the properties of maniera with particular precision).92 The debate embraced extraformal considerations only in pon-

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dering whether Mannerism was “caused” by external social events and factors such as the political and religious upheavals that brought the Protestant Reformation and the Sack of Rome, as had been argued earlier by Max Dvorák and Arnold Hauser. A consensus emerged that the anticlassical style of the 1520s was due more to a desire for personal artistic experimentation than to a European spiritual crisis.93 In these terms, the debate remained too narrow, for it postulated a strict dichotomy between artistic subjectivity and sociocultural factors that has scarcely been questioned. A few writers have hinted at an interplay of the formal and social. Sydney Freedberg emphasized the early Mannerists’ rebellion against their oppressive Florentine artistic genealogy; James Mirollo stressed their subjective deviation from a public norm; while Henri Zerner argued that Pontormo gave visual expression to the subconscious of a particular (though undefined) social community.94 Following the lead of these writers but adding the social perspective of gender, I would argue that Mannerism originated as neither a universal spiritual crisis nor separate personal artistic crises, but the specific rebellion of certain artists against an orthodoxy both formal and social, which had during their adolescence conjoined to celebrate the patriarchal family in heroic terms. The fact that heroic virility

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simply left them cold is the critical context for understanding Pontormo and Rosso’s conspicuous testing of normative gender roles and their exploration of alternative masculinities. But if we demand a definition of Mannerism that accounts for the interaction of formal and social components, we must also challenge the hegemony of classicism as Mannerism’s reference point. The modern literature on Mannerism has focused almost entirely on its anticlassicism, and even when the emphasis upon personal rebellion was questioned, or when maniera was said to be not really anticlassical, the relationship between Mannerism and classicism remained the critical nexus.95 By and large, scholars have accepted the classical style of the High Renaissance as the norm, from which stylized deviations are measured by their degree of distance—how mannered is it?—to determine their position on the continuum from “early Mannerism” to maniera. One might challenge classicism’s normativity by pointing to the discrepancy between modern and Cinquecento discourses. In sixteenth-century art literature, the standard against which artists are consistently measured is not the “classical” (a term foreign to that period), but the “natural.” Vasari’s high praise of Leo­nardo’s Mona Lisa is grounded in its naturalism; his critique of Pontormo is based on that artist’s deviation from the naturalist standard. (The discrepancy between Vasari’s insistence upon nature as the gold standard and the unnaturalism of his own art will be addressed in the next chapter.) Dismayed by the unnatural proportions and colors of Pontormo’s late San Lorenzo frescoes, Vasari complained that the artist had “forced nature.”96 Inasmuch as this complaint is intertwined with other disapproving passages, in which Vasari lambastes Pontormo for his “strange,” “capricious,” “extravagant” behavior,97 we begin to suspect that for Vasari, as for the Roman revivalists, “nature” is something closer to the socially normative than to the lifelike. But if what Vasari considered Pontormo’s antinaturalism and what Walter Friedländer called his anticlassicism both amount to a rebellion against patriarchal values, is this a distinction without a difference? Not if we consider the gender implications of each binary pair. The rebellion of “bad boy” Mannerists against their classical patriarchal predecessors is an all-masculine dynamic, which we moderns know as the “killing the father” syndrome. But the model of antinaturalism advanced by stylish and creative Mannerist artists, rebelling with their phallic wit against their stodgy, unimaginative, and relentlessly procreative Mother, partakes of the broader discourse we have followed: the gendered opposition of art and nature. As discussed below, the psychological model of

the son’s separation from his mother may better explain the progression of Cinquecento art than a patriarchalist discourse that privileges classicism, pro and con. From the viewpoint of its unnaturalism, Mannerism’s origins predate the classical style. There are continuities between the so-called late Quattrocento mannerists and the firstgeneration Mannerists, who shared a devotion to fan­tasia and an aversion to socially normative nature. We could trace eccentric individualism through a sequence of artists—e. g., from Piero di Cosimo to Filippino Lippi to Rosso Fiorentino— that bypasses High Renaissance classicism altogether. The concept of fantasia is of course closely related to the artists’ rising claim for creative freedom, which shades into the concept of artistic genius that we attach to the High Renaissance moment of Leo­nardo and Michelangelo. Yet if we focus on that aspect of fantasia that designates nature as the norm from which creative departure is desirable, we can detect a trend that began in the late Quattrocento as antinaturalism and was later perceived as anticlassicism. From this perspective, the High Renaissance was an intervention in a continuum in which Pontormo was heir to the late Botticelli in his unnatural proportions, stylization, and expressive intensity, while Rosso sustained the formal eccentricity of Piero and Filippino.98 The celebration of the artist’s inventive creativity became a hallmark of Cinquecento art theory. Although Leo­nardo da Vinci was the most influential advocate of the artist’s divine creative powers, Ficino and Pico had earlier articulated this concept, and Filippino Lippi and Piero di Cosimo demonstrated through their pictorial deviations from nature that the artist could make fantasia his badge of creative freedom. Vasari singled out Piero di Cosimo for his tendency to fantasticare, or to produce forms not seen in nature.99 Although Vasari thought the “bizarre” Piero indulged his imagination too freely, he nonetheless praised certain works for having such fantastic and extravagant qualities, that “one cannot possibly imagine nature herself using such deformity and such strangeness.”100 Vasari’s idea that Piero had bested nature in strangeness marked a distinct aesthetic turn away from the Aristotelian position that had earlier prevailed. In Aristotle’s influential description, the forms of nature are substantial and necessary, and the forms of art are contingent.101 Yet by the mid-sixteenth century, contingency—understood as the arbitrary or optional, the extravagant or inessential—had come to be valued as the unique contribution of the artist, a supplement to nature’s realm of the necessary. Benedetto Varchi valued the contingent over the necessary, contingency now understood as a creative option: “art is a factive habit . . . of those things that are not

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necessary, the origin of which is not in the things that are made, but in him who makes them.”102 As we saw in chapter 7, the theme of art’s defeat of nature rang in the rhetorical air of mid-Cinquecento Florence. Varchi helped accelerate the discourse when, on his return to Florence from Venice in 1547, he invited contemporary artists to comment on the paragone of painting and sculpture, a project Panofsky described as “the first public opinion poll on art.”103 The peculiar intensity that surfaced in Florence at this time over the relative merits of painting and sculpture was undoubtedly related to the Venetian-Florentine competition, which, as we have seen, was as much about nature and art as about color and design.104 It would be difficult to establish which of these paragoni was primary for the Florentines, yet they shared a dialectical framework that increasingly cast the dialogue of opposites in terms of conquest and transcendence.105 In his Due Lezzioni published in 1550, Varchi affirmed man’s ability, through his creativity, to “rise above nature.”106 Attesting to the ever-rising status of the artist’s creative intelligence, Varchi claims that the artist’s fantasia gives us images of pure beauty not seen in this world, which lift us out of it.107 Pontormo’s championing of the new values he had helped create is seen in his response to Varchi’s request. In a letter, Pontormo claims that the painter is more daring than the sculptor, “too daring,” for he can not only improve nature’s forms and colors, but introduce into art things nature never made.108 The painter’s art is better than sculpture and nature herself, on account of its very artifice: “What I called too daring,” he says, “is that importance placed on outdoing nature in wanting to give life to a figure, to make it seem alive and yet to place it on a flat surface.” Because it is actually easier, he suggests (perhaps tongue in cheek), to give life to a figure in the round, as God did in creating man, the painter excelled in taking up “a discipline so full of artifice, so miraculous and divine.” In linking art’s divinity with the magic of illusion, Pontormo gives voice to an idea we explored in chapter 3: that the artist competes with nature by negating three-dimensional materiality, sublimating matter by rendering it virtual. Not only sculpture’s substance but its vaunted durability is deemed a disadvantage. Pontormo observes that painting lasts only a short time, because “once it has lost its first freshness, no one values it.” Art is now rated for its freshness, like bread; because it can be produced and consumed more quickly and spontaneously than sculpture, painting has a particular modernity. The artist adds that he would have more to say on this, but has run out of energy and does not want to bore Varchi. Yet suddenly, as he ends the letter, Pontormo exclaims, “my

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pen has gained strength”; it could go on for pages, because “my pen is now in its own element.” This is not mere whimsy; there is a point. As Bronzino’s poem “Del pennello” makes clear, the pennello is both pen (or paintbrush) and penis—the penis as emblem of masculine creativity.109 In his letter to Varchi, Pontormo suggests that his penna—i.e., his artistic will and creative genius—is capable of a spontaneous vitality, overflowing and abundant by contrast with the tiredness and boredom that afflict mere bodies. Pontormo’s pen takes up where (the rest of) his physical body leaves off, anxious to go on tracing the movements of his protean brain. The daring leaps available to the painter’s creative pennello are only hinted by Pontormo. He mentions the possibility of depicting natural splendors—nights with fires, clouds, distant landscapes, and animals—elements that sound like a reprise of Piero di Cosimo’s art, but hardly appear in Pontormo’s own. Coming closer to home, he boasts that the painter can introduce things that nature never made, products of his creative imagination. By this time, the artist’s right to exercise his fan­ tasia has received firm theoretical sanction, and Pontormo’s claim is made interesting only by the evidence of his own provocative and emotionally charged images. A more probing inquiry should now turn from theory to practice: what sort of images result from the artist’s fantastication? stealing beauty The appeal of fantasia to Mannerist artists could be explained by the Freudian psychoanalytic theory of creativity, which holds that the fantasies of the child or the artist are not arbitrary but motivated, the expression of subconscious desires. In this way of thinking, the artist’s imaginative inventions and deviations from tradition or nature serve, like daydreams, to fulfill his private wishes and to “correct” the undesirable aspects of the reality he knows.110 It is useful to employ this psychological instrument, combined with the feminist insight that the personal is also (socio)political, to interrogate representations of the feminine in Cinquecento art. For if we consider pictorial fantasie as manifestations of specific social desires, precipitated through the creative imaginations of key artists, we begin to understand an extraordinary development in Italian Renaissance art produced by men. In the second quarter of the sixteenth century, as negativized aspects of the feminine became emphasized and exaggerated, female Nature was transformed in imagery from an ideal consort into a crone or a whore. Simultaneously, male artists appropriated beauty, femininity’s most precious asset, for themselves.

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This change marks a new stage in the artist’s relationship with Nature, first detectable in new formulations of the motherson relationship. For those artists who participated in the family romance only as son, never as father, the mother might be expected to hold a special position. Taking this psychological axiom at the level of metaphorical rather than autobiographical truth, I proposed in chapter 5 that Leo­nardo and Michelangelo, both intricately androgynous men, identified themselves, both in their writings and in their images of the Virgin and her son, as Nature’s special children, whose creativity she favored and nurtured. Another model, anticipated in the fledgling rebellions of Brunelleschi and Alberti, is that of the son’s overt rejection of his mother’s power and self-alienation from her sphere. Pontormo introduces the theme of separation from the mother in his images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, which can be connected with the artist’s growing creative independence and deviation from nature’s guidance. In the Pucci Madonna (Fig. 186), the Christ Child wriggles away from his mother, exulting in his freedom with a kick. The Santa Felicità Deposition (Plate 13) is a great drama of mother-son separation. As Leo Steinberg described it, the “voided middle” at the center of this composition, produced as the dead Christ is drawn away from the Virgin’s lap, evokes Michelangelo’s sculptural Pietà, but now as a dissolving unit.111 This image of a formal icon in dissolution is, effectively, also a new icon for the changing relationship of art and nature. The grieving mother and her departing dead son together visually reiterate the formula composed for Raphael’s epitaph: on the artist’s death, Nature herself fears to die. Pontormo’s own image has been identified in this composition, as the nonbiblical character in the right background next to the Virgin, a figure added after the initial compositional design.112 But he may have initially identified with the Son in this composition, for an early study for Christ’s figure distinctly bears the artist’s features.113 Whether allegorized as the dying Christlike artist-hero (on Raphael’s model), or included as distanced witness, Pontormo appears to have identified personally with this dreamlike enactment of an emotionally wrenching disconnection. We are entitled to read it, I believe, as an artist myth within the Christian theme. The artist’s separation from nature becomes a covert theme of Pontormo’s painting, a theme that invites comparison with Titian’s later dramatization of nature’s abandonment of the artist (Plate 11). Neither artist takes this parting of ways lightly. Through entirely different expressive methods, they convey the anguish that accompanies the divorcing of art from nature and the birth of a new world order.

In Pontormo’s formulation, as the artist departs from creative nature, she is imagined as a woman who lacks and is diminished by loss, or, alternatively, as one who exercises dangerous powers. In the extraordinary painting of the Visitation at Carmignano (Fig. 197),114 Mary and Elizabeth meet as usual, yet their traditionally joyous recognition of one another’s pregnancy has been replaced by a new idea: the detachment of the mothers from their motherhood. The maternal pair is doubled by the addition of two “attendants,” ghostly mirror images of their counterparts in color reversal, who stare out at us, complicating the ostensible theme of this painting and inviting us to question it. The dramatic moment has been converted into a strange four-person dance, the nar­ rative stylized into rhythmic patterns of fluttering and swelling drapery. We can follow Pontormo’s “bending of nature” as he developed the design of the Visitation, for, in a preliminary drawing in the Uffizi,115 Mary and Elizabeth interact in a more spontaneous and colloquial manner. Their doppelgangers take a more logical part in the action, one glancing at the Virgin and the other casually drawing in the viewer. As Pontormo reworked his composition, the women became more aloof and otherworldly; originally massive and grounded, they float in the painting almost weightlessly, evoking the ambient of a dream. Their setting is not the traditional domestic interior of Quattrocento Visitations, but an outdoor urban space that oddly anticipates the world of de Chirico—dark and empty streets, strangely lighted and touched with the sinister. This femaledominated world recalls Leo­nardo’s St. Anne compositions, but now in a hallucinatory, ominous key. The influence of Dürer’s Four Witches engraving (Fig. 198) has been detected in Pontormo’s composition. In each work, a four-woman group projects a conspiratorial intimacy, a sense of shared secret knowledge. Linda Hults has connected Dürer’s print with the rising witch-hunts of the period, showing how its allusions to the diabolical are rooted in the misogynist rhetoric of the Malleus, which demonized women as agents of carnal lust.116 Pontormo’s crones are easily assimilated to Dürer’s witches, guilty by association, and indeed the four women in the Carmignano painting have been connected with specific witch trials in Tuscany.117 Crones, like witches, were believed to be capable of prognostication or divining,118 a power suggested in the trancelike outward stare of the doubles. Freed of their nominal maternal roles, these women seem to invent themselves anew, as a coven of omniscient females with mysterious powers that might affect the artist/viewer. Sinister female power is allowed to take full form, restrained by the

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197.  Jacopo Pontormo, The Visitation, 1528–30. Oil on panel. San Michele, Carmignano. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

barest aesthetic device: “it’s only a dream.” Pontormo maintains control over these dangerous women (aberrant nature?) by absorbing their powers into his art. Analogous is Rosso’s painting The Virgin and Christ with Sts. Elizabeth and John the Baptist (Fig. 199), an apparently unfinished work of uncertain date.119 Here, St. Elizabeth (or possibly St. Anne) is presented as a withered crone, with pointed nose and chin and bony arms. With a bound book propped under her forearm and a heavy mantle covering her head and thighs, this seated figure has origins in the Sistine sibyls, specifically

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Cumaea and Persica (Fig. 66). Rosso affirms and sharpens the witchiness of those crones, down to the exaggeration of Cu­ maea’s sagging breasts. The artist’s intentions are unclear; he may simply be playing inventively on known masterpieces.120 Yet Rosso repeated the figure of the hag in drawings of diverse subjects, for example, Judith and Holofernes (Fig. 200). Here, the unusual depiction of Judith as nude misogynistically emphasizes the biblical heroine’s role as seductress.121 The naked, aged body of Abra is more overtly and gratuitously misogynous, and the satirizing of female aging is simply cruel.122

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198.  Albrecht Dürer, Four Witches (B. 75), 1497. Engraving. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum. 199.  Rosso Fiorentino, The Virgin and Christ with Sts. Elizabeth (Anne?) and John the Baptist, c. 1521? Oil on panel. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Herbert T. Kalmus (54.6). Photo © 2010 Museum Associates/LACMA.

Emboldened by his growing independence from the mother, the artist mocks her kind. On the Sistine Ceiling, sibylline powers were debased by a hinted association with witchcraft; now the sibyl-crone-witch is merely a ludicrous old woman. Younger women do not fare much better at the hands of Rosso and Pontormo: they are allowed neither conventional female beauty nor the attributes of maternal fertility. The female nude, seen in occasional drawings such as Pontormo’s Three Graces (Fig. 201), is nearly flat-chested or has small, sagging breasts. These might be interpreted as naturalistic studies, were it not for their resemblance to Dürer’s conspicuously negativized woman in Nemesis, Fortuna, and the Four Witches.123 In an age when the female body was normatively a paragon of ideal

beauty, the depiction of these women must be understood as intentionally unflattering. They are images of abjection, women who lack both masculine grace of movement and feminine fecundity. Pontormo’s imaging of the Graces as clumsy and awkward is clearly parodic, for its reference to their counterparts in the Primavera is unmistakable.124 Botticelli’s androgyny was entirely coded. He created an exquisite and pure feminine beauty, attainable for the homosexual male through imaginative identification. Pontormo seems to play on, and indirectly to confirm, the idea of covert masculine participation in the Prima­ vera. He suggests, moreover, that the women have acquired adolescent masculine awkwardness as a consequence of losing

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200.  Rosso Fiorentino, Judith and Holofernes, c. 1520? Red chalk over black chalk traces on gray buff paper. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dalzell Hatfield Memorial Fund. Photo © 2010 Museum Associates/LACMA. 201.  Jacopo Pontormo, Study for a Three Graces, c. 1535–36. Red chalk. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (6748F). Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

a femininity that was all poetic construction. The object of his parody is not Botticelli per se, but the elevated ideal of feminine beauty represented in the Primavera. The abject woman appears again in Bronzino’s Pygmalion and Galatea of c. 1530–32 (Fig. 202). Bronzino’s use of an awk­ ward androgyne to represent Galatea, a statue-turned-human whose legendary beauty inspired the passion of Pygmalion, can only have been intended as high satire of concepts of ideal beauty, using a ridiculous female to make the point. Again, the joke depends upon its divergence from an implied model— in this case, perhaps Botticelli’s seaborne Venus (Plate 3b), or Raphael’s cognate Galatea (Fig. 179). Their Venus pudica poses, gentle and dynamic respectively, are campingly mocked in Galatea’s slouch, her burlesque lifting of a rather virile thigh, muscular shoulder and forearm, and her intensely self-conscious gaze leveled straight at the viewer. It is a down-to-earth performance of a role that derides the role itself.

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Bronzino’s spoofing strategy precisely echoes his own burlesque poems that make fun of heterosexual courtly love and Petrarchan conventions. Representative is the capitolo called “in lode della galea,”125 in which Bronzino celebrates the joys available to like-minded young men on the galley ships to which Florentine errants or criminals were sentenced. Through coded homosexual slang, consistent with that employed in the Quattrocento (see chapter 4), the all-male setting is defined as a place where boiled food (vaginal intercourse) and roasted food (anal intercourse) won’t be found together. Here, where love comes and cures quickly, by contrast to the tortuous sufferings of lovesick Petrarchans, sodomy is the joyous reward: “un guarische in un tratto/con un po’ po’ di dondol corto corto.”126 Another poem, “La cipolla,” parodies idealizing airiness by applying Petrarchan conceits to homely objects: “Love makes one become the beloved; and anyone who eats onions is turned into onions so that everyone can smell him.”127

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202.  Bronzino, Pygmalion and Galatea, c. 1530–32. Oil on panel. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

References to sodomy and homosexual intercourse pervade Bronzino’s poems, a choice on his part that invites us to consider the Galatea from the same perspective. Elizabeth Cropper has identified this picture with the Pygmalion and Galatea Bronzino painted as a cover for Pontormo’s portrait of Francesco Guardi as a halberdier (Fig. 192).128 Cropper connected Bronzino’s painting and the Guardi portrait with the defense of Florence in the siege of 1530, through an argument that depends heavily on the depiction of Venus and Mars in relief on the altar behind the figures.129 Yet her proposal does not fully account for the Pygmalion theme that is the painting’s primary subject. As Cropper gamely tries to explain it, Pygmalion sacrifices to Venus, who produces both the devastation of war and the beauty of Galatea. Galatea’s beauty

and that of Guardi are associated with the arts that accompany the desired peace. But can the painting be taken so straight? How can this gawky Galatea represent Pygmalion’s magnificent creation, described by Ovid as a “snowy ivory statue lovelier than any woman born”?130 Pygmalion was the paragon of artistic virtuosity in later Cinquecento and Seicento theory, emblem of art’s power to give life and create a beauty that surpassed nature.131 Yet the story could be glossed another way: Ovid tells us that Pygmalion, the bachelor artist who was “disgusted with the faults which in such full measure nature had given the female mind,” implores Venus to give him a real woman like the statue that he created, fell in love with, then employed for some rather kinky fetishistic acts. Venus obliges but, in Bronzino’s redac-

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tion, with an image of feminine beauty that is neither feminine nor beautiful, but instead parodies courtly ideals of feminine beauty as effectively as Bronzino’s poems poke fun at Petrarchan love conventions. If the Pygmalion served as cover for the Guardi portrait, Bronzino may have chosen the theme for its witty relevance, since this cover could be thought of as a “cover” for the true beauty that lay beneath. Ovid declared that the lovely ivory statue created by Pygmalion seemed lifelike, thanks to the sculptor’s clever art that concealed art, disguising itself as nature, ars est celare artem. Bronzino’s joke is that Venus gave him more life than he bargained for; he would have been better to stick with the art. Thus the inelegant and unartful Galatea in the painting comes as a surprise and even disappointment, until we realize that she conceals Pontormo’s more artful creation—a tease that thwarts our expectations until the real thing is delivered. The gender humiliation implied in this image of an abject female is dramatically reversed in the revelation of a triumphantly stylish and beautiful male behind her. As in mid-sixteenth-century Venice, the gender roles of nature and art have been reversed. The transferable element is the feminine, for Galatea’s awkwardness results from the draining of a femininity that only art can construct; lacking style, she seems a mere product of life drawing from the studio model (in normative Renaissance practice, always male). Pontormo’s Guardi is the prize, a male with all of the grazia previously assigned to the female figure. We can trace Pontormo’s addition of feminine stylishness to his portrait merely by comparing studies for the Guardi portrait done from life,132 in one, an intense but rather limp young man, and in another, as mundane and stolid as Bronzino’s Galatea. Enhanced by Bronzino’s playful staging, Francesco Guardi is presented as a new paragon of beauty, and of art’s power to endow either sex with supranatural grace. The masculine appropriation of the feminine qualities of grazia and leggiadria—stealing beauty, as it were—can also be traced in theoretical texts of the period.133 Earlier, Castiglione had maintained the Ciceronian ideal of gender complementarity, in which each sex had its own distinctive quality. Dignity, among many other virtues, was masculine, while beauty was the characteristic and primary feminine asset.134 In deportment manuals such as The Courtier, men and women were encouraged to fulfill gender-distinct roles, expressed in dance and movement; gagliardezza (vigor) was exclusively masculine, while leggiadria (gracefulness) was primarily, but not solely feminine.135 Almost simultaneously, however, an argument was made for the location of beauty in gender indeterminacy. In a

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treatise of 1525, Mario Equicola defined grazia as the union of gendered opposites and proclaimed that “the effeminate male and the manly female, femmina masculo e masculo femmina, are graceful in almost every aspect.”136 As gender-bending acquired theoretical sanction, leggiadria was gradually assigned not only to artistic style (created by men), but also to images of men. Firenzuola, writing in 1541, continued to maintain the principle of appropriate traits for each sex, but he also reflected a preference for what has been called the “feminine” aesthetic that emerged in the 1520s, and could now be applied to male as well as female figures.137 At mid-century, Lodovico Dolce deemed the mixing of masculine and feminine desirable, and he especially admired the hint of femininity in the male protagonist in Titian’s Venus and Adonis (Fig. 172).138 By 1567, Vincenzo Danti could apply Zeuxis’s method of creating beauty to the male body.139 For some, the preferred type of beauty became male; for others, it remained female. As Philip Sohm has pointed out, Michelangelo and Cellini advocated a virile beauty (as against the “feminine” Flemish or Venetian styles), while Vasari, Firenzuola, and others identified perfect beauty as feminine.140 To some extent, the professed delight in gender confusion derived from sophisticated theory about artfulness and artifice. The creation of feminine beauty or gender-mixed beauty in male figures came to signify the power of the artist over nature, because feminine beauty was understood to be artificially created, and therefore superior to the merely natural. For this reason, as we saw in chapter 4, the feminization of style became a covert sign of creative Nature’s colonization by art. But there is another face to this gradual sweetening of male imagery, which was the subtraction of feminine beauty from images of women, and the use of woman as a progressively degraded exemplum of masculinist artistic ideas. No longer an honorary paragon of heroic virility, the masculinized female body had come to represent one of nature’s monstrous, albeit erotically provocative, aberrations. Championing the unnatural as a triumph of art led artists to image an increasingly alien Nature as herself unnatural. A case in point is Michelangelo’s design for a Venus and Cupid. We know Michelangelo’s lost cartoon, meant to be painted by Pontormo, from the version now accepted as Pontormo’s original (Fig. 203).141 Like Bronzino in the Pygmalion and Galatea, Michelangelo presents an androgynous body that flaunts its unnaturalness. A coldly provocative Venus with masculine physique thrusts her breasts forward, twists her legs in erotic display, and accepts her son’s incestuous kiss and suggestive planting of a foot at her pubis. Pietro Aretino loved

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203.  Attributed to Jacopo Pontormo, Venus and Cupid. After Michelangelo’s design of c. 1531–33. Oil on wood. Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

this work, along with Michelangelo’s Leda, for its “elegant vivacity of artifice . . . with the body of the female and the muscles of the male.”142 The Venus and Cupid has also been connected with the type of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, which appealed to writers like Dolce and Aretino for its implication of high-level artistic achievement in the mixing of opposites and for its connection with the Platonic aboriginal third sex that partook of both sexes to express perfect wholeness.143 But, Michelangelo’s Venus is patently not “whole” in these respects, any more than are Pontormo’s hermaphroditic figures who derive from her.144 They are not preternatural, but subnatural—hermaphrodites manqueés whose sexual organs are not only not doubled but very nearly absent altogether, their ostensibly female bodies immobilized by masculine musculature. They seem troubled by their very unnaturalness, which may reflect social tensions around the issue.145 More troubling still is the incestuous relationship between Venus and Cupid: she of all people, progenitor of cosmic love, would

seem a most inappropriate target for his erotic intentions. Why does she consort illicitly with her son? One must ask the same question of Bronzino’s enigmatic Allegory (Plate 14).146 On a primary level, Cupid’s amorous intercourse with his mother, seen in both works, may have a literary explanation. William Keach proposed that Michelangelo’s and Bronzino’s compositions present Ovid’s story of “Venus wounded,” in which Venus is accidentally wounded by a projecting arrow in the quiver of Cupid, who is kissing her at the time, which causes her to fall in love with Adonis.147 Keach addressed the confusion between this subject and the more common theme of Venus disarming Cupid, seen in images that show Cupid aiming his bow at his resisting mother, or the two of them tussling over an arrow.148 These related images may simply intend to express Ovid’s conceit that the powers of the goddess of love are for once turned against her, but they also visually introduce the non-Ovidian theme of competition between the goddess and her son.

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The compositions of Michelangelo and Bronzino preserve the theme of competition while exaggerating an Ovidian detail, Cupid’s filial kiss, that is now given incestuous implications. These compositions join other Cinquecento examples in which the relationship of Venus and Cupid—or their cognates, the Virgin and Christ Child—is injected with a whiff of incestuous love.149 In Bronzino’s Allegory, yet another obscenity is involved, for as Leatrice Mendelsohn has observed, Cupid’s buttocks are twisted for frontal viewing, a coded reference to sodomy that points to the “double duplicity of Mother and Son.” 150 For Mendelsohn, as for many writers who have attempted to penetrate this complex allegory, duplicity is its keynote. In Mendelsohn’s reading, the unseemly seduction at the center has generated the surrounding personifications, each “two-faced” and deceptive, the whole constituting an anti-Medicean satire of the court of Bronzino’s patron, Grandduke Cosimo I.151 The theme of Venus and Cupid’s unnatural love and their mutually treacherous competition is expressed in Michelangelo’s composition as well, however, and cannot be explained simply as Medici court politics at play in one instance, and a meditation on love and suffering in another (to invoke Mendelsohn’s reading of Michelangelo’s design).152 Let us try to tease out other implications of this carefully wrought, even overwrought, new theme. In both the London Allegory and the Michelangelesque Venus and Cupid, we see a process of mutual disarmament, whose outcome remains unclear. Venus has disarmed Cupid by stealing his arrow, while Cupid disarms his mother with his seductive kiss. Will this lead to mutually assured destruction, or will one of them prevail? By now, the reader is prepared to recognize the deeper allegory that has long been couched in the rhetoric of struggle: Venus is nature, Cupid is the artist, and the arrow is the phallic pennello of artistic creativity, with which she toys possessively. It is almost as if it had been her pennello—for in Michelangelo’s design her son’s foot marks the place of removal (or site of creative genesis).153 Thus the relative creative powers of the artist and Nature are put in play: Venus/Nature seems distracted by the artist/Cupid’s seductive beauty; while his love for her seems to have changed from filial to carnal. But the masks that are conspicuous in both designs, symbols of insincerity and deceit, warn us that all is not as it seems. Bronzino’s Cupid only pretends to make love to his mother, for his posture signals that he awaits a male lover. Through seduction, he aims to deprive his mother of her transcendent position—he apparently intends to steal her jeweled crown154— reducing her to a mere participant in the world of love and

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mortality she governs. Venus intends to prevent this by stealing the pennello that represents his power to create beauty and thus to reclaim her former centrality in that realm; her waning control of it is suggested by her loosening grip on the golden apple of discord that symbolizes her once-victorious beauty. Another sign that Venus will lose this battle is the movement of the putto who represents Pleasure or Jest. Although he is sometimes described as scattering roses, this robust boy grips the Venerean roses in a tight clump, pulling them away from their owner, in a gesture that might better be read as his having snatched from her the sign of her beauty and fecundity. All this is in the picture, I suggest, though perhaps not at the level of primary intention. Instead, we might consider it as a guilty fantasy of the Artist, whose uneasy head now wears the crown. As he moves steadily and deliberately away from nature, claiming her defeat through his daring and dangerously profane unnatural art, the Artist’s fantasia enters to mediate the nightmarish dark powers wielded by a Natura who, banished as a source of nurture, has become a monster in his imagination, a chimera.155 One strategy of subconscious fantastication, as we will see in the next chapter, is to image the chimera. But in these two pictures, which might more accurately be called “the contest of Venus and Cupid,” the danger is tamed through the visual deployment of nameable virtues and vices: love, seduction, deception, jealousy, time, truth, pleasure. The chimera of monstrous nature makes only cameo appearances in Bronzino’s Allegory: as the screaming, haglike Jealousy (or Trickery) behind Cupid, and as the seemingly innocent maiden behind the putto, whose duplicitously crossed hands, lion’s feet, and serpent’s tail mark her as Deceit,156 and as a perverted reflection of Venus’s love-struck descent into the natural world. the exceptional michelangelo By the mid-sixteenth century, as central Italian artists and theorists placed a growing value on style and escalated the claim of art’s defeat of nature, the stance of liberation threatened to become a new orthodoxy. Although Michelangelo had been the key figure in the critical ascendance of art, in his later works the sculptor presented an exception to the trend he had helped initiate. Michelangelo’s idea of art’s relationship to nature is extremely complex. Nature was neither his preoccupation nor his central binary opposite, which was more frequently cast as God, Christ, Tommaso Cavalieri, or Vittoria Colonna. Even so, the theme of art pitted against nature permeates Michel-

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angelo’s art and writing, presented from a variety of perspectives. “Nature” is more often identified with mortality than with a cosmic creative power, yet Natura as Great Mother inhabits Michelangelo’s Virgin Mary, who is accorded a neoTrecentesque archetypal importance. Although this study cannot do justice to the subtlety and ambiguity of Michelangelo’s thoughts about art and nature, in the section that follows I isolate certain recurrent positions that he held, which overlap but are distinguishable, and offer a reinterpretation of certain poems and the unfinished sculptures, in which his highly original contribution to the art-nature discourse can be discerned. First is Michelangelo’s profound ambivalence about which was the superior power, nature or art—an uncertainty that set him apart from most contemporaries. The position he advanced in the Julius tomb, that art triumphs over a nature construed as mortality and time, may have coincided with personal belief. He repeated it in a poem addressed to Vittoria Colonna, of around 1538–46, which asserts that art defeats nature, in that art is an effect or product of nature, and effect defeats cause.157 In another of the Colonna poems, Michelangelo expresses the transcendence of art differently: the art created by nature’s children will outlive her own mortal creations, who are carried away by time.158 Still another poem offers a cautionary embellishment of the art-defeats-nature topos: “There’s an art of beauty, which, if everyone brings it with him from heaven, conquers nature, even though nature imprints itself everywhere.” Though opposed by art, nature here is insidiously powerful, embracing not only corruptible matter but the attractions of the physical world, what Glauco Cambon has called “the agents of moral defeat”: “the sulphurous heart, the susceptible flesh,” which constitute “man’s vulnerable self.” 159 Earthly beauty is seductive; Eros uses all his powers to keep the artist bound by carnal passions.160 Yet nature is not always art’s enemy for Michelangelo. In a madrigal of around 1542–44, he envisions nature dying along with the sculptor when, like himself, she has finally through trial and error achieved the creation of perfect beauty.161 It is a more somber and pacific version of Raphael’s epitaph, in which nature and the artist advance together toward perfection, both bound by mortality. In Michelangelo, art and nature are usually gendered but their gender identifications are neither fixed nor stable. Convention governs some formulations. In the Julius tomb, for example, art is feminine because it is represented by female allegories, and nature is represented by male river gods. In the poetry, similarly, art is feminine by virtue of grammar. And

Michelangelo sometimes articulated conventional gender attitudes. In certain poems addressed to Vittoria Colonna, he adopts the traditional guise of male lover/artist addressing his beloved, a paragon of beauty and perfection. In a poem addressed to Tommaso Cavalieri, like the drawing that is its counterpart, he identifies his platonic beloved with active Zeus and himself with passive Ganymede (“I fly, though lacking feathers, with your wings;/with your mind I’m constantly impelled toward heaven”).162 This love that “aspires to the heights,” he declaims in another poem, is to be contrasted with love of woman, which is “not worthy of a wise and manly heart.” “One love draws toward heaven, the other draws down to earth/One dwells in the soul, the other in the senses/And draws its bow at base and vile things.”163 Love for men carries him heavenward to God, while woman draws him down; the former is spiritual, the latter degraded. In his art, Michelangelo thematized the conflict of up and down, rising and falling, as if father and mother principles were battling for his soul. The rising and falling movements of the Last Judgment are intrinsic to the theme, yet they are echoed in personal iconography—the rising Ganymede and the falling Phaeton, the triumphant Resurrected Christ and the leaden and despondent turbaned self-image in the Paoline frescoes. By contrast with Raphael, whose figures bear the light weight of atmosphere with comely grace, gravity for Michelangelo is a force overcome with difficulty or accepted as an overwhelming pressure. His insistence on materiality, even in flying figures, might be seen as a deliberate counterweight to the floating ethereality, matter-denying art of the Mannerists. Michelangelo’s energies are always grounded; his figures, “clogged with mortality” (in John Addington Symonds’s memorable trans­ lation),164 struggle against gravity, the curse of life itself. Michelangelo talks little about nature, but his is a nature-bound universe, from which his intense spiritual forays provide imaginative release. But although he might identify with misogynist or static gender positions, consistent with masculinist culture, both hetero- and homosexual, Michelangelo also imagined himself as moving freely between positions, as we shall see. And he conceived of procreative Nature not only as the goddess of mortality and ruin, but also as a great cosmic power with particular relevance to artistic creativity. Like Leo­nardo, Michelangelo considered himself a favored son of Nature. He believed that he had special insight into beauty: “as a trustworthy model for my vocation,/at birth I was given the ideal of beauty, which is the lamp and mirror of both my arts.”165 Here, he invokes the Platonic ideal beauty that only

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204.  Michelangelo, Madonna Nursing the Christ Child, mid-1520s? Black and red chalk, white lead, ink. Casa Buonarroti, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

those endowed with intelletto are able to perceive, and he follows Ficino in asserting that this power is facilitated through love. Sensual beauty may rise to the level of true beauty “if through the mortal eyes it reaches the heart.”166 Michelangelo also believed he was specially endowed by nature in the judgment of his own eye, the giudizio dell’occhio. He liked to say, according to Lomazzo, that geometry and rules of perspective were useless without the eye that was trained to see, and he considered the sense of proportion to be innate, a matter of having “compasses in the eyes.”167 Michelangelo did not think everybody had compasses in their eyes; indeed, he thought most people were blind.168 Although the sculptor clearly believed his own ingegno was a gift of God, he may have regarded his natural judging eye as a gift of nature, in the sense that one had to be born with it, like a musician with perfect pitch.169

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Michelangelo’s idea of himself as Nature’s favored child may be seen in the image of the nursing Christ Child, a recurrent theme in his art. Like Leo­nardo, Michelangelo expressed a personal connection with the nurturing mother in his earliest works. As discussed in chapter 5, the Madonna della Scala is a visual correlative for his claim that he imbibed a love for the stonecutters’ tools with his wet nurse’s milk. The nursing Child appears again in the Madonna and Child group in the Medici Chapel and its many related studies (Fig. 204); the motif recurs in unrelated drawings a decade later.170 Michelangelo’s tenacious attachment to this theme, combined with the austere remoteness of his Madonnas, has been explained psychobiographically as an expression of his early separation from his biological mother, who died when he was six—a reading that has not garnered support.171 We might better interpret Michelangelo’s Virgin and Child images in archetypal terms, as Mother Nature and her Son the Artist: an impersonal mother keeps her secrets to herself, while allowing an ingenious son to draw nurture and insight from her breast by dint of his own effort. In another self-conception, Michelangelo identified his creative activity with that of Nature. This is somewhat overshadowed by his dominant position and that of the philosophical tradition that shaped his thinking, that the highest level of creativity was exercised by God, not Nature, who stood beneath God, assigned to reproduce His designs in the physical world.172 In a dialogue by Francisco de Hollanda of 1538, Michelangelo is said to describe the art of painting as an imitation of creatures invented and painted by God.173 Yet despite his affinity with patriarchal invention, Michelangelo may have identified with the reproductive work of Natura. Responding to a priest who asked why he hadn’t married and produced offspring, the artist responded, “I have too much of a wife in this art that always torments me, and my children are the works I will leave behind.”174 Michelangelo is not speaking as the father who replicates himself in his work; rather, he inverts the formula: he himself is nature, now cast as masculine; his “wife” is female art, the vehicle through which he produces the works of art that are his children. In many verbal formulations, as David Summers observed, Michelangelo explained his own artistic creativity as a process of generation. He consistently described his works and ideas as concetti rather than as “ideas,” which was more usual. Concetti, from concipire, literally means things that are conceived like children, “as if the imagination were a matrix or womb.”175 Imagination and fantasy generally held lower positions than intelletto in Cinquecento theory, and they were

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feminized by comparison to the masculine intellect.176 Michelangelo embraced this feminine-gendered position, nevertheless, by associating himself with fecund night, whose creativity in potentia awaits fertilization by divine masculine seed. In one of a set of poems on the theme of night, he writes: “I was assigned [by the creator] to the dominion of night, even at birth and in the cradle. And so, imitating my very self, I am as the night, which is all the darker as it grows.”177 As if the world knew him by this self-characterization that embraces both nocturnal creativity and Saturnine melancholy, Michelangelo is shown in a mid-sixteenth-century print as his own fantasia, passive and waiting for inspiration, in a closed, semireclining pose that echoes his Medici Chapel Notte and the Leda.178 Michelangelo associated night with procreation (“only shade will do for sowing mankind/Therefore nights are more sacred than days”), with dreams, which carry the dreamer’s soul “from the lowest to the highest sphere,” and with creativity, as the matrix of imagination.179 He himself is night and moon, as polar opposite to the blinding beauty of his beloved Tommaso Cavalieri, signified by day and sun.180 This image could be taken as a mere conceit of love poetry did it not correspond to a deeper unorthodoxy that is revealed in Michelangelo’s poetry and art. Michelangelo could even identify with feminized matter itself. In a sonnet for Vittoria Colonna, he compares himself to the empty mold waiting to be filled by the lady’s “fired silver or gold.” In other Colonna poems, he is a stone or a blank sheet, passively awaiting spiritual shaping by her “sacred ink.”181 In these formulations, he is not the guiding ingegno but its facilitating medium, the hand that obeys the intellect. Gender reversal also underlies the themes of skins and masks, which run through Michelangelo’s art and poetry. In one of the sonnets addressed to Cavalieri,182 he expresses the desire to “clothe my lord’s live body with my dead hide.” In these instances, Michelangelo assumes a debased feminized position; as one who is empty and lacks inner worth, he is nothing but a dead and vacant skin. In the Last Judgment, he casts himself as the hanging limp skin of St. Bartholomew (Fig. 205), an image inspired by his metaphoric flaying by the critic Aretino, whose features are grafted onto the saint, yet once more Michelangelo defines himself as the soft and abject entity in the equation. His selfpresentation as flayed skin in the Last Judgment has reminded many writers of Marsyas, an allusion perhaps intentional,183 which leads us to recall Titian’s identification with Marsyas. Unlike Titian, however, Michelangelo did not identify with the rustic satyr as emblem of a rough but creative nature. Rather,

in this self-image, the flaying is a shedding of dead skin, perhaps of false pride, a necessary step to spiritual redemption. The flayed self is shown as dishonored, defeated by an Apollonian Christ and Aretino’s art.184 Although Michelangelo ultimately bested his rival by depicting his resurrected self in heaven,185 his triumph was on spiritual rather than artistic terms. Michelangelo amplified his unusual vision of artistic conception identified with night and the feminine in his bestknown poem, “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto.” The first four lines of this much-analyzed sonnet read: Not even the best of artists has any conception that a single marble block does not contain within its excess (superchio), and that (i.e., the conception) is only attained by the hand that obeys the intellect.186

Benedetto Varchi read a learned commentary on this poem to the Florentine Academy in 1547, explaining that the poet addresses the lover’s dilemma by way of an art analogy. A

205.  Michelangelo, The Last Judgment (detail of St. Bartholomew holding skin, with self-portrait of Michelangelo), Sistine Chapel, 1534–41. Fresco. Vatican, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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marble block is anything in potenza, containing all possibilities the artist can think of. Similarly, a beautiful face can inspire all possible pleasures to a lover who is able to realize what he has “perfectly imagined with his mind.”187 For Varchi, the first four lines equate art with a model in the artist’s imagination, which permits him to give form to matter. Concetto here means the artist’s intention, which may include fantasy or impressions, but with the understanding that the imagination always serves and imitates the intellect. In Varchi’s Aristotelian—and masculinist—reading of the sonnet, the union of form and matter produce a new composto, or compound, guided by the creative male intellect.188 Michelangelo was evidently flattered by Varchi’s learned interpretation,189 yet his own ideas may have been different. As Varchi discerned, the poet sets up a relationship between the artist’s relation to his block, which contains all potential for the creation of art, and the lover’s relation to his lady, whose range of possible responses governs his emotional life. But insufficient attention has been paid to the way the comparatives function. If the lady has power, then so does the marble, for, like her, it will yield its hidden conception only to the artist who proceeds correctly. The lady’s will is equated with a single marble block that is not merely intractable matter, but an active entity in the creative process, whose resistance or cooperation plays a significant part in the sculptor/lover’s ability to realize his goals. In his article of 1993, Summers opened the way to a different reading of the poem when he noted the sculptor’s special use of the word concetto and his ability to assume a feminine metaphoric identity, though he did not reassess Varchi’s interpretation, nor the poem itself, from this viewpoint.190 We are surely entitled, however, to apply Michelangelo’s very rare positive assessment of night to matter itself, similarly gendered female, and to propose that he assigned each an active role in the creative process, particularly when we look at the wider range of evidence within the sculptor’s art and thought. When Michelangelo says that the artist has no idea the stone does not already contain, he may be saying, quite radically, that artistic conception is not simply the action of male form on female matter, but that the matter has within itself the generative capacity to participate in the creative act. For such unorthodox thinking, Michelangelo could have drawn on both Platonic and Aristotelian formulas, yet he offered an original variation by giving matter a creative role.191 In court poetry and theoretical treatises, Aristotelian formmatter constructs were often illustrated by analogies from the crafts. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, for example, described “the mass

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of the subject matter, like a lump of wax, [as] at first resistant to handling; but if diligent application kindles the intellect, suddenly the material softens under this fire of the intellect and follows our hand wherever it leads, docile to anything.”192 The Aristotelian metaphor, imprinting passive feminine matter by active masculine form, was especially apt for bronze casting, which involves pouring hot liquid bronze into a negative mold. But it does not work for marble statues, which are created by removing excess stone from a block until the stone core gradually becomes the sculpture. The difference of process was significant to Michelangelo, who reminded Varchi in his response that, for him, proper sculpture was in marble: “by sculpture I mean the sort that is executed by cutting away from the block: the sort that is executed by adding resembles painting.”193 Michelangelo’s attachment to marble had entirely different philosophical dimensions, which he articulates clearly in the non ha l’ottimo artista sonnet and the one that follows it. In si come per levar, donna, he speaks of taking away stone to release “a living figure in alpine and hard stone, which there grows the more as the stone is chipped away.”194 The many variations on this expression found in Michelangelo’s poetry—“alpine and living stone,” “the living figure in alpine and hard rock”195— suggest that he believed there was some kind of living essence within the block, waiting to be discovered by the artist. This was not necessarily mystical, nor especially Neoplatonic. In De statua, Alberti had described the sculptor as removing the superfluous to reveal the figure of a man that “was hidden within a block of marble.”196 Michelangelo was known to have had a good eye for seeing possibilities in blocks of marble, an exercise of imagination born in practice, similar to Cicero and Pliny’s descriptions of workers in marble quarries at Chios and Paros cutting open blocks to discover already formed images of Paniscus and Silenus. As Clements reminds us, for Michelangelo (indeed, for Renaissance artists in general), the term “invention” carried its original meaning of “finding.” Thus, as Clements puts it, Michelangelo thought of art forms as “sealed in the hyle.”197 In Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures (Fig. 206), the inner form seems to “grow” as the superfluous marble is chipped away. It would be easy to slip this idea inside a more familiar one: the statue that comes to life (Pygmalion), or the statue that speaks.198 Yet we must resist that temptation, for the unfinished sculptures—to the extent that we read them, intentions apart, as aesthetically significant images—are not statues-come-to-life, nor figures struggling to free themselves from the encasing stone. Such readings, like Varchi’s, posit that

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the superchio to be cut away is neutral, nothing more than superfluous matter. Michelangelo’s idea of “living stone” pre­ sents instead the philosophical proposition that matter is not dead but generative, a concept aesthetically expressed in the uncompleted statues, for these images hold in suspension the moment of becoming, both aesthetic and existential, when stone is transformed into virtual flesh and matter turns itself into form. Michelangelo’s conception of matter as animate inverts the dominant Aristotelian construct, even as it invokes another Aristotelian idea known in the period: that nature shapes its works from the interior, while art does so from the exterior or from the surface.199 Literally, of course, Michelangelo worked as stone carvers must, from the outside in. Metaphorically, however, the statues (in the state that he left them) express the opposite idea, that shaping comes from inside, like birth itself. They speak of a spirit not trapped by flesh but swaddled in it, not struggling to escape but struggling to be born, wearing the surround that protects it as the newborn wears its placenta.200 The Italian word materia, matter, is probably not etymologically related to mater, mother, but Ficino thought it was,201 and Michelangelo may have thought so too. New life is cradled by its mother, nurtured by the birth-giving matrix that is consubstantial with the form until it is expelled. In this sense, mater/ matter creates form, not vice versa.202 To remove the surrounding matter, the soperchio, is to take away the mother. Every com­ pleted statue stands independent of his mater/matter, proudly self-sufficient. The David, who has been seen as a newborn Adam, archetypally represents the statue heroically liberated from the block.203 But if self-sufficiency is a Renaissance sculpture’s highest virtue, why did Michelangelo leave so many statues unfinished, some three-fifths of his sculptural oeuvre? In considering the much-debated problem of the non finito, scholars have either accepted Vasari’s explanation that Michelangelo abandoned the works because he was dissatisfied with his achievement, embellished this theory with the notion of a paralyzing conflict in Michelangelo’s mind, or explained pragmatically that there were as many reasons as patrons. Juergen Schulz combined practical and aesthetic considerations in arguing that, although Michelangelo believed that finished statues were preferable, he liked to leave a reserve of stone to allow for changes up to the last minute, because of his habit of constant revision.204 We could put this another way: Michelangelo leaves some of the “mother” that is still pure potential, a bit of the creative matrix itself. (In baking, the piece of yeast saved to start the next dough is called “the mother.”) He may have regarded the

206.  Michelangelo, “The Awakening Slave,” 1525–30. Marble. Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

unfinished statue as finished in a philosophical sense, in that its appearance preserves its identity as a concetto in the process of realization. In this larger respect, the statue seems more complete when surrounded by a nebula of creative indeterminacy. The unworked stone represents the artist’s own creative potential, not yet limited by specificity. As a work nears completion, the promise of grasping the ineffable shrinks, threatened by the growing presence of the all-too effable. Unwilling to let go of this visible vestige of his own artistic imagination, the sculptor keeps the mater/matter in the work, preserving her intimate contact with the form she has generated. A dominant theme of Michelangelo’s later drawings and

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207.  Michelangelo, Standing Madonna, after 1560. Black chalk. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum. 208.  Michelangelo and Tiberio Calcagni, The Deposition of Christ, c. 1547– 55. Marble. Florence Cathedral. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

sculptures is that of Christ reunited through love with his newly responsive Mother. In a series of drawings that begins in the 1530s, the Virgin, who had earlier been remote and cold, begins to embrace and kiss her son (Fig. 207). 205 The Florentine Pietà (Fig. 208) presents the Virgin as lovingly attentive, helping to support her dead son with a tender and intimate gesture. In their rough and unfinished state, the two heads seem to merge, as if their very souls were joined. The figure of Nicodemus bears Michelangelo’s own features, a private 272

expression of religious devotion and perhaps of theological alignment.206 Yet Michelangelo is surely also present below, as Christ/the artist in his relationship with the Virgin /Mother Nature.207 In this image of mother and son symbiotically joined in death and grief, we glimpse once more the theme of Raphael’s epitaph: when the artist dies, Great Nature also fears to die.208 Leo Steinberg’s interpretation of this intimate mother-son grouping as a mystic marriage, originally conveyed through

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the erotic motif of the now-missing leg of Christ slung across his mother’s thigh, though much disputed, is nevertheless supported by a long tradition of Catholic imagery that draws on the Song of Songs to express the mystic union of bride (Virgin/Church) and bridegroom (Christ).209 Yet Steinberg never offered a reason for Michelangelo’s obsessive and apparently against-the-grain interest in conveying points of Catholic doctrine through graphic sensual imagery. Robert Liebert’s psychoanalytic explanation of both the carnal intimacy of Virgin and Son and the sculptor’s mutilation of the Florentine Pietà as resulting from Michelangelo’s repressed anger over inadequate mothering has similarly met with skepticism.210 Liebert rightly recognized, however, that Michel­ angelo’s intensely sensual presentation of the mother-son relationship probably signified something beyond theological metaphor. My interpretation of this relationship as figuring nature and art would have the advantage of substituting a metaphor with greater personal resonance for the artist than abstract Church doctrine, while offering one of broader significance than private family romance. Michelangelo’s conflicting ideas about the artist’s relationship with nature are recapitulated in the Virgin-Son images. He is her intimate, privy to her secrets; he knows and uses her creative powers, generating art as she does life, by night. She is the greater power, he her passive echo; she is the Man, and he is the Woman. But he is also the generating husband whose wife is art. Based as they are on fluid or inverted gender identifications, the intense love of these mystic partners smacks of the illicit, of incest and guilt. This was overtly expressed in the Venus and Cupid design (Fig. 203), where the aura of guilty pleasure sets up the idea of the artist as the illegitimate son of nature (because he is her competitor), or of a dysfunctional beauty and the artist’s unseemly relationship with it. The theme of a near-incestuous intimacy is also hinted in the later Pietà and Crucifixion drawings and in the late sculptural Pietàs, yet with an enlarged context for its meaning. The Rondanini Pietà (Fig. 209) seems to dramatize the theme of embracing mother-stone protecting her creatura. Michelangelo worked on the statue intermittently for a decade, and intensively in the weeks before his death in 1564. Reconstructions have shown that as he stripped it relentlessly down to a thin and compact group, he drew mother and son closer and closer together, refashioning the parts of each figure from reserves of the other.211 In its final though in no sense finished state, the two figures are fused, her head inclined toward his. Paula Carabell has interpreted Michelangelo’s obsessive reduction of the statue as the artist’s effort to unite with the object

209.  Michelangelo, Rondanini Pietà, 1555–64. Marble. Castello Sforzesco, Milan. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

of his desire, the alien Other of his own ego in formation.212 Carabell effectively explains Michelangelo’s need to stay in close physical contact with the material stone and to keep it unfinished as an effort to sustain dialectical engagement (in her view, because his love object is “inside” it). Yet in defining the sculptor’s interventions in terms of Self

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and Other, Carabell echoes the interpretive bias of other critics who have regarded Michelangelo’s reduction of the statue as an attack on the marble, in the misguided assumption that the artist and his material were at odds. Hibbard called the stone Michelangelo’s “beloved enemy”; Barolsky calls his unworked marble the “old skin,” left to show by contrast the artist’s magical refinement of “mere marble.” 213 Another path is suggested in what a student of mine once wrote of the Rondanini Pietà: “he chiseled away at this block over and over again, as if he were searching for something in himself.” 214 In this quite persuasive insight, Michelangelo perceived the stone as part of himself, his unlimited creative imagination. He is the medium through which the intelletto speaks—perhaps not his own but God’s (for, surely, the last thing the sculptor’s hand was obeying in that last frantic campaign of carving was his rational intellect). The stone is the artist’s creative unconscious, nature to his rational art; it is in this metaphoric sense also female and mother. And thus art and nature are not only interdependent, but consubstantial, like soul and matter. In the Rondanini Pietà, Michelangelo expresses the interdependence of the artist and the nurturing mother whom he rejoins in death. Originally, the figure of Christ sagged heavily and to one side, but in the sculptor’s progressive redactions of the statue, Christ assumed a more vertical position.215 He is still assisted by the Virgin in the group’s present form, though she does not so much support as suspend his seemingly weightless body. Yet she has no real existence apart from him— they float upward together—and their interaction changes depending on how the statue is viewed. From one side, the group resolves into a sweeping arc in which the Virgin seems to frame and contain Christ’s body; in another view we see her strangely shortened legs, and she seems propped on his shoulder, like Anchises carried by Aeneas. Art and nature form a single binary construct, each aspect dependent for its identity upon the other.

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It is important to realize that Michelangelo did not leave the Rondanini Pietà unfinished; he made it unfinished, returning a nearly complete statue to a state of uncompletion. Not non finito, but disfinito, as it were; or, to use a real Italian word with appropriate connotations, sciolto—undone, released, melted, dissolved. By unfinishing the sculpture, he released the form, restoring it to its embryonic material origin—perhaps, in the spirit of a Neoplatonic reverse ascensio, to bring it nearer to God. Or, like Penelope, he unraveled his own creation to preserve a penultimate state, in order to postpone the unde­ sirable ending, to keep the story alive. If we think of finish as the artist’s enemy, it is possible that the blurred, indistinct or redoubled contours in some of the late drawings (Fig. 207) might result, not from the faltering hand of an old man, but, as in the Rondanini Pietà, Michelangelo’s effort to preserve a state of creative indeterminacy. Continuing to work, he continued to live. For Michelangelo, especially, art was a means of staving off death; he proclaimed art’s triumph over mortality in his tomb of Julius II, and again and again thereafter. But at the very end, when one’s own life is at stake, art cannot win. Or rather, it can only win by accepting nature’s will, as the Christian soul must accept that of God. In the Rondanini Pietà, we see Christ at his most mortal moment; he is not yet the resurrected god, but subject to nature’s laws for three more days. Working on this statue as he contemplated his own death, Michelangelo humanized the discourse of art’s battle with mortality, leaving an image of the artist released from godlike status, succumbing to nature’s necessities in his mother’s arms. As he uncarved the Rondanini Pietà, Michelangelo kept the discourse going until almost the end—and it may be significant that he stopped work on it six days before he died. The sculptural group is no longer art at all, but a natural relic of the artist’s dialogue with nature, and his surrender to her.

Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.  —oscar wilde, The Decay of Lying Manner is the opposite of matter.  —claude-gilbert dubois, Le Maniérisme

Chapter Nine 

Natura Bound

The Later Tuscan Mannerists

By the time of Michelangelo’s funeral in 1564, the theme of art defeating nature had become an academic topos. Michelangelo was cast as the heroic victor, in verses affixed to his bier: “Astonished Nature found that through his genius, Art is now her equal” (Fabio Segni); “the first whose genius led Art to rival Nature” (Vincenzo Buonanni); “with his admirable art [Michelangelo] rivaled on earth the very art of nature” (Laura Battiferri).1 The litterati were, if anything, conservative in their claims, for by that time the rhetoric had advanced from rivalry to victory. For Vasari, Michelangelo surpassed not only all those who have surpassed Nature, but the ancients who also surpassed her. And in his Trattato of 1567, Vincenzo Danti claimed that architecture was superior to other arts because it defeated nature.2 These variations on the power balance do not fully reveal the gradual change that occurred over the sixteenth century, particularly in Florence, in the conceptualization of art’s relationship to nature. A more subtle measure may be found in genres of imaging Natura that matured during the Cinquecento: grottesche, harpies, sphinxes, Diana of Ephesus, and elements in gardens. The new forms of visualizing nature express the transcendence of art, and the subjection of nature to control within art, in increasingly debasing terms. It is a progression that corresponded broadly to the ending of the Renaissance worldview and its replacement by the new scientific perspective. Yet art was a bellwether of change, for the imaging of a

captive and defeated nature, moribund or corruptive, anticipated her later verbal degradation in similar terms by Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. grotesque ornament In a passage perhaps inspired by Bronzino’s Allegory (Plate 14), Lodovico Dolce described a hypothetical painting of a creature compounded of feathers, fish tail, and virginal face as a playful caprice that demonstrated the painter’s “flourishing imagination.”3 Against the advice of Horace, who cautioned Roman poets and painters not to create fantastic beastly hybrids, which he described as “a sick man’s dreams,” Cinquecento artists and writers relished them as a sign of creative artistic license. Even Michelangelo is said to have joined in. As represented in the Dialogos of Francisco de Hollanda, Michelangelo responded to the discovery of ancient Roman grottesche in the newly excavated Domus Aurea with praise for the hybrids imaged there. These painted monstrosities, he argued, were admirable in their own terms, for if the “abnormality” depicted was well proportioned, then the painter has made “men wish that such things actually did exist. . . . It would be harder to discover among the works of Nature anything more perfect than a beautiful woman with wings or the tail of a fish.”4 Though it is doubtful that Michelangelo uttered these words, they reflect a widespread view among artists and theorists:

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grottesche represent creative originality, the artist’s ability to create a rare beauty that transcends the normative examples produced by nature in the biological world.5 In the Cinquecento, as in antiquity, some people objected to grottesche because they were not true to nature, not “taken from reality,” as Vitruvius had put it.6 The ecclesiastic Gabriele Paleotti protested grottesche as violations of nature’s order: “to give candelabra the shape of faces of men with flames issuing from their heads, or shells that spout rivers of water, or trees emerging from serpents . . . is repugnant not only to the profession of the painter, but also to nature [and] to reason.”7 This is a curious reaction in one sense, since grottesche are based on natural imagery. Vines, tendrils, and endless variations on the acanthus leaf burst out of scrolls, forming themselves into spirals; vegetation begets half-humans and animals, mimicking both the appearance of nature’s forms and their constant metamorphosis in her organic cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration. Indeed, Pirro Ligorio linked grottesche with nature’s transformative powers in Ovidian terms.8 In their very origin, grottesche carried associations with feminine nature, but negative ones. The Domus Aurea, or Golden House of Nero, was literally a “grotto,” or cave in the earth, which Renaissance visitors entered by descending underground. Ancient natural grottoes were thought to be dwellings of nymphs of springs, an identity preserved in the nymphaea constructed on their sites. “Because of the association with the womb and the cave,” writes Ewa Kuryluk, “all closed spaces tend to be perceived as female and are associated with both protection and threat.”9 The extended associations of grottoes with the underworld, the (female) earth, and pagan goddesses resulted in early Christian churches being built directly over those “heathen” sites.10 One of the attractions of the Domus Aurea was that it contained what would be named grottesche11—ancient paintings showing images of Nature in captivity by art—for these motifs derived from the Golden House were imaged repeatedly in Italian art, from late Quattrocento paintings through late Cinquecento gardens. Ghirlandaio, Pinturicchio, Perugino, and Filippino Lippi incorporated the new imagery in frescoed ornamental panels that flanked narrative scenes, grafting onto an older, “candelabra” type of all’antica design new motifs such as horned male figures, female-animal hybrids, satyr heads, goats, trophies, lion skins, or griffins (Fig. 210).12 The plant and animal imagery of the grottesche marked them conspicuously as the realm of nature, while their marginalized placement on the borders of narrative scenes sustained their hierarchic inferiority to the men whose deeds and histories fill the main spaces. As mar-

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ginalized ornament, the grottesche were feminized by category, contextualized as supplemental rather than necessary.13 Their light and fanciful world formed an irrational contrast to the serious narrative scenes they flanked and adorned. As Vasari observed dismissively, grottesche are capricious and have no rules—i.e., they are outside the realm of reason.14 Yet as Michael Camille has shown, the supplement is actually essential, because it gives the necessary its power. Anxi­ eties about the scriptural authority of medieval Christian manuscripts “made it all the more crucial that [the sacred words] be fixed in the centre and their shaky status be counterposed with something even less stable, more base and, in semiotic terms, even more illusory—the image on the edge.”15 Putting something in the margins is a way to proclaim its comparative unimportance, yet it is also a way to control a potentially dangerous entity. In the medieval marginalia discussed by Camille, subconscious anxieties about suppressed social groups are allowed open and often bawdy expression, which plays at subversion through gloss and parody. Because this marginal gloss never undermines the center, offering no alternatives, it winds up supporting the authority of the text that is always visually dominant.16 Even so, though under firm control, the images on the edges remain to provoke questions and raise doubts. As Sharon Fermor observed, Vasari considered monstrous and grotesque elements to be fit decoration in the right context, such as the garden of a villa, but to breach decorum if they moved beyond their subordinate position to distract attention from the figures in an altarpiece.17 It is a telling comment on the power roles of dominant and subordinate, one that hints at a fear of insubordination by the suppressed entity. Gripped by such anxieties, one might imagine that the figures in the grottesche are whispering among themselves, murmuring their difference in another tongue, too low to be understood, too audible to be ignored. The anxieties were real enough, to judge from the fruits of the unconsciously directed imaginations of Renaissance grottesche artists. In Filippino’s Carafa Chapel, as in other examples, grotesque imagery introduces themes of struggle and martial conquest: military cuirasses and trophies, triumphal hornblowing, and bound captives. This iconography of domination and control was given a new application by Renaissance artists, for there are few images of victory and defeat in the surviving Domus Aurea paintings. Roman triumphal arches and victory columns are full of such imagery, but that of the Golden House of Nero presented mythological themes of a gentler, lyrical sort.18 The juxtaposition of triumphant and constrained figures in Renaissance grottesche injected an agonistic note that

Later Tuscan Mannerists

210.  Filippino Lippi, The Assumption of the Virgin (detail of lower right, with grottesche), 1488–90. Fresco. Carafa Chapel, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome. Photo: Antonio Quattrone, Florence.

was only vaguely justified by the moralized Christian themes adjacent and more clearly related to the gendered discourse of art/culture’s combat with nature. In Signorelli’s frescoes in the Cappella Nuova of Orvieto Cathedral (1499–1504), for example, the wainscoting zone is devoted to portraits of poets set in squares or roundels and surrounded by grottesche (Fig. 211). The grotesque imagery that surrounds the geometrically framed portraits of heroic men contrasts with them in its playful frivolity and ornamental richness, as well as in its looser

style and wildly chaotic and spatially active patterns—all signifiers of pagan unruliness contained by the structures of cultural order.19 Within this “free play” zone, another hierarchy emerges: male figures, whether putti or satyrs, have arms, legs, and agency—they ride seahorses, hold weapons and drinking vessels—while disabled, armless females are trapped in animal bodies, encased by surrounding ornament or pressed into service as architectural components. The woman-bird figures

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211.  Luca Signorelli, onlooker in roundel, surrounded by grottesche, 1499–1504. Fresco. Cappella Nuova (wainscoting), Orvieto Cathedral. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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212.  Filippino Lippi, The Awakening of Drusiana, 1487–1502. Fresco. Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

are stigmatized by their ancestry: this is the harpy, fabled monster of Greek myth and the most prevalent female image in Renaissance grottesche, a winged creature with breasts and the body and claws of a bird. Originally wind spirits who carried the souls of the dead to Hades, harpies turned into fierce and ugly ravager goddesses who stole and contaminated every­thing they touched with a noxious stench; they met their end when vanquished by the Argonauts. As in other Hellenized myths, monstrous female hybrids—sirens, gorgons, the ­chimera—​symbolize man’s enemies in the natural world.

Filippino Lippi’s Strozzi Chapel frescoes at Santa Maria Novella are filled with harpies and their kin. In The Awakening of Drusiana (Fig. 212), harpies perch as ominous acroteria on one temple; they are splayed in apotropaic relief on another; and on Drusiana’s bier, site of St. John’s vivifying intervention, they recur as gorgon heads under the sign of death.20 The evil connotations of this female monster all’antica extend to nefarious pagan doings of all sorts. The round temple is connected with Bacchic depravity by the word “Orgia” conspicuously inscribed on the altar inside—a word Virgil used to describe

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213.  Filippino Lippi, Exorcism of the Demon in the Temple of Mars, 1487–1502. Fresco. Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

nocturnal Dionysiac festivals, and Juvenal extended to signify secret festivals and orgies.21 In the complementary scene of the opposite wall (Fig. 213), St. Philip exorcises a horrible dragon before an architectural structure cluttered with fantastic military trophies, statues, herms, and excessive paraphernalia—it seems both a triumph and nightmare of the creative imagination. No harpies are visible here, but their legendary power to contaminate is evoked in this Golden Legend story of a dragon that infected the crowd with its noxious breath. Again, evil’s dangerous power is feminized: the ornamental base of the

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statue of Mars is adorned by a pair of sphinxes and a female fountain figure who holds a pair of animals, echoing ancient images of Artemis as “Mistress of Wild Beasts.”22 The Strozzi Chapel exemplifies the potential subversion of the center by the periphery, and its mediation. The feared Other is imaged as visibly contained, but its repeated presence speaks of the artist’s fascination and uncertainty. Meanwhile, the controlled and subordinated ornament in the margins and the main scenes becomes aggressive, as if trying to assert its own importance and challenge the masters.23 Through such

Later Tuscan Mannerists

figurated fantasies, Filippino constructs a psychological reenactment of that which authority most fears: the rebellion of the suppressed Other. The Renaissance discourse on ornament, which had been linked with femininity by Vitruvius and other Roman writers (see chapter 3, p. 73), stressed its dangerous, corruptive potential. The originally positive relationship specified by Quintilian between ornament and decorum (they are linked etymologically) came to imply the limits on ornament set by decorum. Vitruvius, for example, objected to the ornamental excesses of grottesche on the grounds of decorum.24 Alberti similarly claimed that painted narratives were enhanced by variety and abundance (copia) yet disapproved of artists who left no spaces empty, producing random confusion and “an abundance that lacks dignity.”25 Erasmus praised copia in rhetoric yet cautioned that it was dangerous, not to be used by everyone.26 The underlying fear was that copia, as irrational and unmeasured excess, had the subversive potential to escape its proper role as the weaker entity that “decorates” the stronger and disrupt the rational order so carefully constructed. Hence even ornament should play by the rules. Vasari says that after Signorelli’s example at Orvieto, grottesche were regulated, as they had been in antiquity, and he preferred the regulated kind to those that had been done “according to the artist’s whim” and “without any rule.”27 The regulated kind was sustained, predictably, by Raphael, around whom ideas of “correctness” and “authority” seem to circulate.28 In the Stufetta in Cardinal Bibbiena’s Vatican apartments (1513–15), which has been called the most archaeologically correct example of Renaissance grottesche,29 and the Vatican Loggie (completed 1519), Raphael and his workshop decorated the walls with designs that restored the “proper” relationship between dominant scene and ornament by confining the grotesque imagery, now benign and sunny, to pilasters and margins. Grottesche are disciplined by subordination and by the downplaying of fantasy in details that resemble recognizable natural forms.30 Such talk about the discipline and rule of fantastic ornament, implicitly a policing of the sign of nature, bespeaks the uneasiness of the controllers while providing a means of relief. On the one hand, the fantastic imagery permitted a playful expression of hostile subconscious attitudes toward woman/ nature. Much could be said indirectly that might otherwise have been unacceptable: presenting a woman as both animalized and bound renders her simultaneously dangerous and powerless. At the same time, fantasies of domination eased anxieties: in Pinturicchio’s ceiling spandrels in the Sala delle

214.  Attributed to Niccolò Tribolo, Harpy, c. 1530–40. Sandstone. Private collection, Milan. Photo from L’Officina della maniera: Varietà e fierezza nell’arte fiorentina del Cinquecento fra le du repubbliche 1494–1530 (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1996).

Sibille of the Borgia Apartments (1492–95), winged boys ride fantastic dragons, their control of dangerous nature signaled in their firm grip on the reins. This motif is paired with its opposite: female-headed serpents are attacked by animals, as if to remand Nature to her lowest realm, conquered by her creatura.31 The fantasized interplay of rebellion and control is played out in the harpy imagery that was ubiquitous in the Cinquecento. A statue of around 1530–40, ascribed to Tribolo (Fig. 214), probably conceived as a garden fountain ornament for the Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa, presents a full-breasted, quite independent harpy riding the back of a toad. Claudio Pizzorusso observed that this three-foot-tall harpy is more “terrible”

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215.  Andrea del Sarto, Madonna of the Harpies, 1517. Oil on wood. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. 216.  Francesco Salviati, Design for a Ewer, with Three Graces, c. 1545. Pen and brown ink. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Photo: Ashmolean Museum.

than grotesque, thanks to its liberation from the confines of decorative borders.32 The harpy might have seemed less terrible when confined to its fountain, yet standing free of control, it projects an expressive excess, a neo-Scopan frenzy, in its upturned screaming head and its ugly thrusting breasts that is indeed rather frightening, a menace accidentally released in the world, like Hannibal Lector uncaged. Much more common were images that set the terrifying creature safely under the thumb of virtue. A prime example is Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna of the Harpies of 1517 (Fig. 215), where, on the base of a statuelike Virgin and Child, two sculptural harpies are bound to the block. Vasari called these winged figures harpies, but as they have animal bodies and cloven hoofs, they are yet another kind of female-animal hybrid. Antonio Natali connects them with the locusts and scorpions

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of the Apocalypse, who rose in smoke from Hell to torment mankind, and he interprets them as a sign of Satan’s power, conquered by the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.33 However we name them, the female monsters manifestly represent a form of diabolical power—quite possibly influenced by theologically driven contemporary witch hunts(see chapter 3)—bound and conquered by the female embodiment of the Church’s power, the Virgin Mary who was their diametric opposite. diana of ephesus The winged female-animal hybrid appears again in a design for a water jug by Francesco Salviati (Fig. 216).34 More overtly than in the grottesche, this female hybrid stands for nature. Her

Later Tuscan Mannerists

lionlike lower body is embedded in spiraling tendrils, acanthus leaves, and the bucrania and fruit garlands that allude to nature’s cycles of fertility and death,35 while her human upper body leads the eye to the lid of the vessel, designated as the zone of the imaginative powers of art by figures of the Graces and a huge grotesque mask. Perversely, the icon of all-powerful nature is immobilized; she is splayed, wings pinned, and affixed to the curved surface of the water jug (a vessel with ancient female associations), a prisoner of her own domain. Salviati’s harpylike hybrid, her prominent breasts thrust forward, resembles a larger avatar of nature, the multibreasted Diana of Ephesus, or Diana Polymastes, particularly the contemporary example on the base of Cellini’s Perseus (1545–54; see Fig. 222), where multibreasted half-figures are similarly affixed to a grotesque-encrusted structure. Replications and echoes of the famous antique cult statue of Diana of Ephesus, known in the Renaissance from an example now in the Capitoline Museum (Fig. 217), appeared with increasing frequency in Cinque­ cento art, and the figure became the prime signifier for nature in paintings, sculptures, emblem books, and other designs. The influential starting point for the Cinquecento Diana of Ephesus, though not the first Renaissance example, was Raphael’s roundel of Philosophy in the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura (Fig. 218). The personification of philosophy sits on a throne supported by statues of Ephesian Diana, which reflect key features of the Capitoline example: the figurated architectural crown, multiple breasts hanging beneath a wreath around her neck, lions sitting at the elbows of her extended arms, and the cylindrical gown inscribed with zodiacal and fertility symbols and terminating in a flared hem.36 Like grottesche, this pair of Dianas on the Segnatura ceiling is contextualized as secondary and supplemental, subordinated to the large figure of Philosophy. Yet as the key iconographic signifiers of the roundel, the Dianas support an important philosophical principle. Philosophy’s universal scope is indicated by the personification’s dress, adorned by stars, animal life, and plant life (an echo of the philosophically marked garment of the medieval Natura). Philosophy’s goal, causarum cognitio (knowl­ edge of causes), is proclaimed on plaques supported by putti, while the two spheres of her quest—moral and natural—are designated on the books she holds. It is often presumed that the Diana figures in the roundel refer exclusively to the natural sphere,37 but such overweighting of only one of philosop